Teen Subcultures Are Fading. Pity the Poor Kids

> It seems as though they are looking, hard, for identity, for validation…

I think the word the author is searching for is anomie. Kids used to develop their personalities via the strictures of a dominant culture, or in opposition to one. Now, there’s no dominant culture. There are a thousand, or a million, little cultures. There’s no big overarching societal goal/narrative to hook yourself to (or to oppose).

A sibling comment quotes Abe Simpson on being with it. I prefer a different Simpsons quote, from the ants on the space shuttle:

“Freedom! Horrible, horrible freedom!”

Homer: You wouldn't understand, Dad, you're not with it!

Grampa: I was with it once! And then they changed what it was! And now what I'm with isn't it and what's it seems weird and scary to me! And it'll happen to you!

One argument I've enjoyed has been Elliot Sang on "The Loss of Third Places" and how that impacts teenagers: https://youtu.be/9Ku9csXhvJY

I would argue during these times we need those with wealth to fund third spaces and possible 'learning centers' embedded in nature, to help to "hold the complexity of rapid social change without freaking out.". (See https://youtu.be/TJa_6AHjLw0?t=3719 )

This article demonstrates a fundamental misunderstanding of what teenagers are—language like "what teenagers today are offered instead", and "kids ... need more, deserve more"—this is a mom who thinks that teenagers live in a world created for them by the adults and that the adults have failed them.

This is the opposite of my memory of being a teenager. Teenagers, as a rule, are actively seeking to define their identity independent of the adults around them. The subcultures of our teenagehood weren't carefully constructed extracurriculars that our parents prepared for us, they were formed organically by the kids themselves, and they were subcultures intentionally crafted to exclude the adults in our lives. My dad was big into football, so my brother and I went all-in on the nerd culture. My dad didn't get D&D and MTG and fantasy novels any more than this mom gets what her daughter is participating in, and that was part of the point.

Teenagers are kids who have hit the age where the modern, hovering parenting style completely falls apart. They're not living in your world anymore because their hormones are telling them it's time to forge their own path. It's time to begin to let go, not attempt to craft a better subculture scene for them.

The chance of a 50-year old (and I say that as someone not too far off that) being correct about youth (non-?)subcultures is so low, I really wonder why people bother. I guess there was an article to write. The "aesthetic" proliferation sounds fun and harmless. I wish adults would write about younger people (if they really have anything to say at all) with a respectful interest and open-mindedness rather than whatever this is.

The author is lamenting the increasing effectiveness of advertising and propaganda on children, but the advertisers sign his checks, so he doesn't realize it.

As an adult, teen subcultures are fundamentally obscure. It's hard as adults to say whether they're truly "fading" or whether they're simply inaccessible, which is what they're meant to be. Or both.

I tend to think it's both, and that these kinds of articles miss a critical piece of the puzzle: you cannot have a youth culture if the surrounding culture is hostile towards public spaces, third spaces, &c. One consequence of American suburbanization and car dependence has been the development of a fundamental apathy towards those kinds of third spaces.

Subcultures continue to exist, but they have become smaller and more focused on online communities such as Subreddits and Discord servers. Subcultures were identified by people expressing similar aesthetic values through visible means like clothing. Now there is a greater emphasis on shared internal belief systems rather than external social performances. Newer subcultures position themselves as cultural-memetic innovators within the mainstream, which proves to be more subversive than the LARP-like performances in previous visually-oriented subcultures.

Subcultures directly prior to the iPhone felt entirely mediated by movies, tv and advertisement. The boundaries they provided didn't match reality, they were flavors that people found themselves fit into, willing or not. But they were more consistently defined.

It only makes sense that internet influencers - who are even less aware of their role in media than Hollywood writers and massively outnumber them - have lead to faster shifting and looser definitions of subcultures.

What an amazingly shallow way to look at the half-connected, sedentary nature the internet has wrought upon The Youth. "We've shifted from one way of splitting hairs to a different hair splitting method, and this more casual, less committed hair-slitting approach is a failure"? Riveting.

A couple years back I was walking through a very affluent public high school. Nearly every kid had the same school hoodie on. Boys in shorts, girls in matching warmup pants.

There was no real dress code. Very fashion different from my era. Not sure what an advertiser would market to unless Squid Games was a fashion.

Idk, this article seems like it's from the perspective of someone either entirely removed from subculture, or like, just failed to think clearly about the intersection of online spaces and identity.

The main point of the article seems to argue that lacking some cohesive "box" is making it harder for kids to find a community. And even if this _may_ have been a thing before (idk, maybe it was invented by John Hughes movies, it's before my time wtv), I feel like the argument is just pretty weak. It privileges clique-identity over a more diverse, less monolithic identification, and it assumes that community can only found w/in these cliques.

I'm also not sure why the author spends so much time centering on aesthetics as if that's the be-all and end-all of internet culture, and its fragmentation being that which is preventing self-identity. The lack of physical third spaces is indeed a problem, but the kids are still having fun lmfao. The internet has just exposed people to so many more interesting things.

IMO this article in general has a much better understanding and take on the internet as it relates to a older idea of subculture: https://www.documentjournal.com/2021/01/the-internet-didnt-k...

One might have said the same thing about the millenials since the 00's and the 10's were known for being "culturally poor" in comparison to previous decades.

I think there is a huge economic and demographic phenomenon driving these trends. Young people today have less money and less economic perspective than the young people from previous generations in the same age bracket and this reflects in the art and everything else. The continuous deceleration of the econonomic growth in the last five decades together with unprecedent inequality brought the world to the sad times we're living in.

In the past also your parents were expected to die at 60 and something and pass their wealth to their children. The boomer generation broke this trend with force, they are living much more and don't seem slightly interested in ceasing any kind of power to the younger generations.

Oh heck yes, let's get all Baudrillard's Sign Order Stages. Are we here yet?

> Stage 4 is a pure simulacrum, in which the simulacrum has no relationship to any reality whatsoever. Here, signs merely reflect other signs and any claim to reality on the part of images or signs is only of the order of other such claims.

From the article:

> What teenagers today are offered instead is a hyperactive landscape of so-called aesthetics — thousands of them, including everything from the infamous cottagecore to, these days, prep. These are more like cultural atmospheres, performed mainly online, with names and looks and hashtags, an easy visual pablum. They come and go and blend and break apart like clouds in the wind, many within weeks of appearing. They have much content but little context — a lot to look at but a very thin relationship to any "real life" anything, like behaviors or gathering places. On one end, even a distinctly in-the-world subculture (like, say, grunge) can be reduced to a vibe packet of anodyne references (cigarettes, grimy things); on the other, a mere mood tone can be elevated to something offered as lifestyle (there are girls who enjoy the color red and a certain Euro effortlessness, and they are called Tomato Girls, while others who prefer white are called Vanilla Girls). If two dozen things on a Pinterest page feel as if they go together, chances are someone, even just as a lark or experiment, is calling it an aesthetic.

Maybe not Full Stage 4 simulacra/hyperreal but it feels like the meaning is left, the signs are starting to blur & become indistinct, are indeed becoming little more than pointers to other signs. Hyperreal mmay be upon us.

My hackles briefly came up with what seemed a dig at screens; I was afraid it was going to chalk up all the problems of culture to social media. But it avoided that & fell really really close to my feelings, with the hazy lack of resolution that seems due for a weird wild world spinning on:

> It’s the culture available to them that is failing, by no longer being able to connect any of these categories with lived experience or social meaning. Kids, in all their blowzy creativity — the same creativity that invented movements from Romanticism to hippiedom to hip-hop — need more, deserve more.

The local world around us have effervesced into far off high flying supply chains, and we are surrounded by whiz-bang fancy tech we absolutely positively can no longer disassemble & understand & figure out (there's always reams of code and trying to see it is a Felony Anti-Circumvention because the devices terms of service can say that now).

Rebuilding local meaning seems so hard. This is such a challenge.