Punk is dead and so are we
bananapeel.substack.com
bananapeel.substack.com
> the only visible instantiation of a subcultural franchise putting on against-the-grain airs similar to those of the punks and goths of the 1990s (who had all been thoroughly domesticated by that point)[…]
Anyway, I’m not sure who the “blue hair & pronouns” (as the author puts it) crowd is. If it is actually queer and trans people, I don’t think their motivation was ever to be counter-culture really: they are just intrinsically attracted to or identifying with the opposite gender, and would like to be mistreated less frequently for it. It isn’t a punk movement, it is one trying to get social acceptance.
If it is straight or cis people who are sort of associating with that culture, I suppose there might be some counter-culture aspect to it. But there’s also a strong element of just, like, authentic human empathy and allyship. I think that’s more important.
To a gay man or transvestite (as they often called themselves, nothing derogatory meant by it) of yore, surely that movement represented freedom from repression. Today, when bigotry towards homosexuals is socially taboo, what does it mean to the allies, warriors and fluid genders? To the stereotypical tumblrites creating new gender symbols and ever increasingly colorful flags in Photoshop? To me it looks exactly like what the author says: mainstream, corporate captured product marketing, in group signalling, an aesthetic subculture feigning angst and struggle.
To me it looks exactly like what the author says: mainstream,
corporate captured product marketing, in group signalling, an
aesthetic subculture...
however, you're missing (at least!) a few major pillars of what's happening with the LGBT+ community.
1. for those who have (and still do) have to spend much of their lives hiding their true identities, just getting to express themselves openly and with pride is a joy. something that's hard to imagine if you've never had to hide.
2. being gay/trans/etc is a pretty material and fundamental part of one's identity. it's orders of magnitude different from "liking grunge music in 1993" or whatever.
3. it is not necessarily acceptable, or even safe, to be LGBT+ in many places or around many people. in that sense these shared and "stereotypical" aesthetics serve actual functional purposes - they allow LGBT folks to identify others who are not likely to negatively judge or persecute them.
...feigning angst and struggle
I'm not commenting on the politics of sexuality in Nigeria, I'm talking about western societies. I've been around a lot of gay people and transgender individuals, and never have I once seen them in danger in public. Now, I wasn't around in the 80s or 90s, with the gay bashing and what not, and I understand the plight. But they've won as far as I can tell, at least in our society, they've achieved their goals. Coca Cola loves them, they're represented in the executive branch of the US government. And to speak of the recent rise of the fluidgender non binary other gender crowd, I fail to see how that's anything other than subculture signaling.
I fail to see
Well, the 90s "punk" revival was just diggist up the corpse of 1976 punk and taking to the bank. Even dead, if that's possible.
And in line, as you note, with the author's own comments about re-purposing and re-hashing culture in a tamer and more commercial way.
>Anyway, I’m not sure who the “blue hair & pronouns” (as the author puts it) crowd is. If it is actually queer and trans people, I don’t think their motivation was ever to be counter-culture really: they are just intrinsically attracted to or identifying with the opposite gender, and would like to be mistreated less frequently for it.
It is the millions of "I'm not like the other girls" boys and girls knee-deep in whatever this era's mass produced youth culture (and "counter-culture") is. They kind of peopl who in 1990 would be into Vanilla Ice and in 1992 into Gangsta Rap. Actual LGBTQ people are a tiny percentage of those groups (though many more just claim to be non-binary or some such, they way hipsters claimed to love vinyl and fair trade).
Given how much of the mainstream is organized around overwrought advertising, influencering, guruing, and being terminally online... it seems like the modern punks would be the counter-culture that prioritizes being offline, being private, and being whatever the opposite of "fake it 'til you make it" would be called. Genuine and modest?
Punk's not dead; it's just camera-shy?
Nothing says “Fuck the System!” like solar panels and a wood burning stove I guess?
Edit: I see I'm getting a couple downvotes which is fine; I get that the joke isn't in such good taste. The thing is that Kaczynski had a lot of the same critiques of modernity. Perhaps if he had not been a murderer/terrorist, his writing would be a bit more respected, but of course it is more likely he would just be an unknown weirdo living in the woods.
Pithily put. I can definitely attest that this is my plan and the plans of a few others I know. Home baked bread and sour dough starter feel pretty anti-corporate to me.
That said, I do recognise that going off grid requires heavy machinery and tools that are produced by the biggest of corporations... but somehow Milwaukee tools seems less evil than Nike, because Milwaukee is selling you just tools, versus an identity, a brand, a value system etc.
To me, true punking is equally material and social/emotional.
No one can be an island, especially without being reliant on corporate largess, but you can do your part... and form bonds with those of similar mind and help them.
And honestly, I get a perverse sense of satisfaction in being friends and nice to people with whom I may have many disagreements.
To me, punk strong feels like (a) giving people shit whenever you feel they deserve it, (b) being introspective enough to take shit when it's directed at you, & (c) helping the oddballs, weirdos, enemies-of-the-system when you can, even if you disagree with part of their beliefs.
When you unplug from mass culture, you lose the central touchstone that person-to-person relationships normally have, so have to be okay with an expanded definition of what "friend" looks like.
Or be a hermit, but that feels like passive punking.
MAKITA!!1!
I am a member of House Ryobi, but only out of accidental convenience not generational loyalty or studied disdain.
It's funny you bring this up, considering Milwaukee's multi-national parent company got questioned by the same congressional committee over the summer as Nike for using forced labor in their products.
You're also lucky to not have to hear people argue about DeWalt vs Milwaukee (vs Makita, vs Ryobi, it goes on and on)...
It's all about recognizing there's a spectrum of participating within the mainstream, and pushing to get as far from the center out to the edges. Actually getting out of the stream and up on the shore is impossible for we fish.
Punk isn't sitting over a xerox machine for a few hours printing flyers. It is actually putting a (music, performance art, benefit, whatever) event together at an all ages venue in a town where live nation owns all the venues and keeps shows 21+ so they can make money on booze. Doing stuff yourself is easier with the Internet.
Some platforms are less aggressive about it, some more, but they all control their own levers of power and to some degree abuse them.
E.g. Facebook Marketplace being locked into an identity in the rest of their ecosystem
So absolutely, use efficient tools to do more, but also be aware of the opinions and intent of those tools, and what they're trying to do to you.
The problem is, there's a lot more AOL-like platforms these days, to some degree or other. IRC has turned mostly vacant. Perhaps there's greener pastures in the Matrix space, because Discord is pretty hit or miss, always with the understanding that the great eye in the sky might smite the server at any moment.
There have always been those who neglect to adopt the technology of the day or buy heavily into the culture, without also buying into some sort of counter-cultural movement. Today it might be those who eschew social media and being terminally online. In the 90s perhaps it was those who limited their TV time.
In my view, it would be inaccurate to describe this group as "subcultural franchise[s] putting on against-the-grain airs" in the way of the punks and the goths and the "blue-haired pronoun bearers."
If anything, these are more likely to be people who've spent some time adopting and evaluating what the dominant culture has to offer, then wisely adjusting their participation to healthy levels (which may mean zero), despite societal pressure.
They're more "opt-outs" than "opt-againsts".
Like maybe we don’t even need to contrast against the imaginary version of them because the imaginary Luddites are silly in a way that no real movement is.
Xerox machines were prominently used to create flyers for shows and distribute zines. Cassette tapes were copied and passed around to anyone who wanted one. VHS was used to record shows and distribute other media. Lowered cost for TV transmission meant not only punk was a topic that could be seen on TV but that local access shows could be used to disseminate media further.
"Punk" is tied to the aesthetics of brightly colored hair, Mohawks, patches on jackets, jack boots etc. which coerces anyone who makes claims of being punk in the modern era into a anachronistic pastiche of what punk was in the late 1970s or early 1980s, with washed out "xerox effect" flyers or physical zines. Aesthetics aside, punk was primarily about a DIY ethos of using whatever tools were available to create art, discuss politics or create a scene.
The modern day equivalent exists, we just don't call it "punk" because it doesn't have the aesthetics attached. You want to know what modern day punk-rock looks like? It's not emulating some juvenile interpretation of Meditations, it's standing up Mastodon social networks, using Nostr, advocating for the freedom of Julian Assange, creating custom AI models that diagnose breast cancer, pushing libre/free/open source, creating art installations with custom electronics, and on and on.
There's one aspect of punk, not the whole aspect but one splinter faction, that was defeatist and pretty much dead on arrival. I only skimmed the article but that's the vein of punk rock the article seems to be channeling. Any movement that positions itself as a rejection of culture is doomed to fail, either because it fizzles out or because it becomes incorporated. The measure shouldn't be how contrary a movement is, it should be how it's trying to shape culture for the better.
At least the DIY spirit it's there.
Xerox was not some fancy new technology, it as 15+ year old staple at the time.
Cassetes were not a thing in the punk scene at the time. They were insignificant in sales in the UK, and no mixtapes, they caught on in the tail end of the 70s, several years after the original punk movement commercialized and died "Punk is dead" came to be.
Same, of course, for VHS.
So you're both somewhat correct. The birth of punk was not about tech, but about self-reliance: doing your own thing, no matter how ugly or discordant (see early punk bands and their notoriously bad vocalists), fuck everyone else. It was the application of flower-power principles to urban energy-crisis nihilism. As punk grew, a generation of democratized technology appeared that could support and supercharge such ethos, to the point that (if you were not part of the original hardcore nucleus) you could easily assume the tech was indivisible from the ethos and necessary to its survival.
This goes for other industries too. While someone is bellyaching that amazon owns publishing, a "punk" is self publishing, and using their lessons learned to help their friends. In that way, it's like the hacker community...
I'm reminded by posts here complaining about ubereats, even in dense cities like LA, SF or NY. Why does it never occur to these people to call the restaurants directly to cut uber eats out of the equation? Yeah, it's like 5% less convenient, but it allays a ton of concerns on both ends of the transaction. It's things like this, regular people helping regular people, not rent seekers...
https://www.ecosophia.net/writing-as-microcosm-part-one-publ...
I love doing this. I don't understand why people bother with the apps, it's just psychic torture knowing some MBA is getting my hard earned money just for making some radio boxes to middle-man it.
> seeing the rat race coming and stepping aside
it was a response to several different elements occuring alongside and simultaneously:
* the bleakness of 1970s Britain
* the perception of significant barriers to entry into the world of artistic creation (i.e. you needed to be "very good" or even "virtuosic" to participate)
* racial dynamics unfolding as the children of the Windrush generation began to come of age, and new waves of immigrants from the "Commonwealth" were more visibly present.
* boredom with the latest Yes album
Now, punk in NYC at about the same time might have been very different, and I'm certain that punk in other places and later times has almost certainly been very different. But that original incarnation was not an attempt to avoid the rat race, it was a desperate reaching for something of one's own (even if that was just a white riot), because society wasn't going to give you anything worth having.
Yes, they all stepped aside to make their own England, their own galleries or music halls, which gave people like Don Letts a place to thrive, etc.
it was a desperate reaching for something of one's own
It sounds like you don't disagree...
The genuine ones - outside all media attention yes.
Because otherwise even that has been packaged and sold by "minimalist" and "slow living" influencers.
I've often wondered how the leaders of the hippie, punk, and more modern movements would compare to classical and romantic leaders of counterculture, like Thoreau or Voltaire, or even music like Chopin or Palestrina. We do have writers today like David Graeber that do seem against the grain. I suppose a major difference is that infuential people back then didn't seem as concerned with being famous and viral (which makes them more punk than punk), and there were less people that tried to follow them. On the other hand, when you look closer, maybe the difference can be explained by how media and money flows today.
At the extremes, it can seem like the only 'genuine' counterculture is self-sacrificing civil disobedience (e.g. self-immolation, not blocking traffic) or truly destructive (terrorism), because these are not scalable within mainstream culture. There should be a middle ground, but somehow I'm having trouble recognizing it. Perhaps this is because having a sustainable counterculture requires tacitly playing within the rules of the mainstream culture.
They started caring a lot about this as soon as they had the printing press, take a look at the career of Erasmus for example.
There is nother more counter to the cultural moment then being a traditionally moral, upright citizen who doesnt do drugs, doesnt lie, cheat, steal, has their libido under control, is reliable, whose existence is profitable to the rest of the world (not neccessarily economically, just mean someone who contributes more than they take : financially, emotionally, etc)
Thats about as counterculture as you can get.
I'm sure some exist, just by dint of probability, but plenty more are made of regular stock humans like you or me, or worse.
You're there to get well.
Each church has a board of elders who will hire/fire/correct/counsel the pastors. At most protestant churches at least. I can't speak for all churches.
I've seen a board of elders remove a megachurch founding pastor. They take their positions seriously.
There's plenty of darkness within the strictures of conservative religious communities -- mostly resultant from the evil that corrupt people perpetrate when given (by God) power in hierarchical structures.
Having traditional morals isn't the same as being moral.
Source: Hm... 6, maybe more, different friends who grew up in different versions of these communities, each of whom describes them as "dangerous cults".
If you are accepted by the mainstream, you aren't counter culture, just a flavor.
Counterculture isn't necessarily cool or good or safe.
Perhaps the Amish or something like that? And of course, they have their practices that we would consider unsavory anyway.
The drug use is going down, alcoholism is going down, violent crime is going down, there was mini-panique just yesterday on HN over young people having less sex ...
BTW the "conservative" part is not, strictly speaking, required but if you object to that I don't think you would like the "e/acc" variety of spirituality either. This is powerful stuff, and it makes 100% sense to have some "traditional" safeguards within it.
> Conservative religious communities offer a way out of that predicament.
They play video games. Also, per all available stats they do use porn.
This rings very true, look at kids not driving.
Jihad vs. McWorld is essentially about this point.
By definition, you cannot have popular counterculture, as it just becomes "the culture."
However, most of the capital assets of culture promotion are also tied to popularity (e.g. mass-market media publishing, advertising). Denied access, counterculture exists in the woods, but most people don't know.
Which is why you see truer counterculture move closer to popular culture when those assets are (usually temporarily) democratized during technological shifts (e.g. the 1960s and 1990s).
But hey, maybe I just miss zines...
F.ex. Motown Records was literally founded in the back of a house. [0]
It's more difficult to say "There's no market for African American music, so we're not going to make any" when someone is technically able to demonstrate otherwise on their own.
Without technical disruption (mostly, in the falling cost and footprint of capable equipment), it could have been business as usual and a lot of ideas would have remained uncirculated.
[0] https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Motown#West_Grand_Boulevard
The left moves society forward, the right holds society back. I don’t like everything the young kids are doing but I know I will eventually be wrong, so I try to understand them and learn to embrace the change they bring. The young left will always, eventually, move society forward. Whether we like it or not. What you’re witnessing is people beginning to understand the paradox of tolerance. Complete tolerance towards all views will always fail because the intolerant will exploit the tolerant. Now that people understand that things are always, or even often, that simple. In order to maintain tolerance, you must also practice intolerance of intolerance. I see the whole “calling people a Nazi bigot” for saying things like “go woke or go broke” or things in that vein, is a part of that realization.
I’ve always of the mind of “free speech absolutism” as Elon calls it. Then I read about how Germany handled things post ww2 and concluded that they could no longer allow fully free speech if they were going to stop another Hitler from rising to power. They had to be intolerant to intolerance. It’s a dangerous precedent that requires great care to avoid a more dangerous outcome.
In general, being an angry hateful bigot of any kind has progressively been moved to the fringe of the right, instead of being smack dab in the middle of the mainstream.
Interracial marriage.
Slavery.
Voting rights for minorities and women.
Jim Crow.
Civil Rights.
Protection of Voting rights
Self ownership / Reproductive rights
Acceptance of LGBT+/GSRM communities.
Acceptance of minorities.
Same sex marriage.
Healthcare for all.
The right has met all of these with protest and violence. They eventually always lose, but not before killing a bunch of people on the left in the process.
You’re on the wrong side of history. I’ve been there. Figure out why you’re so resistant to change/progress. Figure out why you’re so angry all the time. Figure out why you’re so filled with hate.
If you’re surrounded by hateful people, figure out how to leave those people behind. Don’t announce your intentions. Don’t evangelize your views. Just start your path to change. The people in your orbit will either move towards you or move away from you. Expect this. Most will move away, but some will see your example and follow it.
That’s the approach a friend of mine took when he decided he didn’t want to be a violent alcoholic anymore. He just decided to change. He didn’t ask me to change with him. He just did it. He never left my side so I never left his. Eventually, I followed in his example. Eventually, so did a couple of his other friends.
His approach helped me become a much happier person.
I hope it helps you.
There's good conservatism and bad conservatism, just like there's good progressivism and bad progressivism. The latter consists mostly of change for change's sake, while bad conservatism consists of resisting change for no reason. But the good kind of conservatism is an important force in a society that has any sort of progressive energy (read: almost all of them) - it serves as a reminder of Chesterton's fence (that there is a reason (or reasons) why things are as they are, and you should understand those reasons before you change things).
I would not consider myself a conservative (though my kids perhaps would), but I consider that kind of conservatism important even if ultimately the change I want to see overrides it.
I have never, even once, encountered good conservatism.
There is good progressivism, and there is fake progressivism. It isn't too hard to tell them apart.
And conservative counter culture is not exactly going back to X era. You can't step into the same river twice. It's a different path of progress instead with some reflect on history.
We could also say gay rights were conservative, because they were bringing back something somewhat similar to ancient Greece. A lot of progress is reinventing the wheel, with some changes.
Previous generations had a substantial number of people who thought that either their jobs could be their passions, or at the very least that doing well at their jobs could lead to a better life. I think Gen-z and below have internalized that trying at your job doesn’t lead to better outcomes, and that’s the real thing that will lead to change.
In my opinion (dont take this personally), I think it is a victim mentality, that if someone self sabotages enough, someone else will fix things or improve their situation.
I think a closer model of reality is that most people are disposable. I dont think that people becoming more disposable less important increases leverage.
A lot of historic change has come from organized striking, but only when the strikers have coherent demands and productivity to leverage.
Chances are the future generation Punks are either that itch we can't quite name or out of our generational perception altogether.
The middle ground is productive disengagement. It is deciding to abandon the system and build real alternatives outside of it. You see this with hippy communes, some punk scenes, and homesteaders, ect.
It isnt as common because it takes a lot more work and hardship than simply "laying flat", and doesnt provide much social currency in the mainstream culture. There are also barriers in the mainstream that provide headwinds, but I think these are less of a challenge.
For example, it isnt impossible for people to check out and build an eco-friendly socialist commune in the wilderness. However, it is a lot of work and few are willing to sacrifice the comforts of mainstream life, as unhappy as they may be with them.
I think there are real artistic countercultures out there, but they exist on the margins of art and society (as they must, innately). They're hard to discover, and even when they are discovered, they're inaccessible, bizarre, and disquieting (as they must be, innately).
I'm reminded of my record collection, and one record in particular: an autographed copy of The Great Annihilator, by Swans[1]. Besides the music itself, the peculiar thing about this record is the way it's autographed. Michael Gira signed it on the back, tucked away in the bottom corner. I've always wondered why he did it this way. Maybe it's a way of saying "here's my signature you materialistic loser, have fun trying to display this overpriced souvenir." Maybe it's a way of saying "appreciate the art as it was meant to be appreciated, don't use it as a display piece." Maybe I'm reading into it too much, and it means nothing at all.
[1]: They're a bit better known than they once were, but for anyone who doesn't know about them, go listen to some Swans. It's abrasive and uncomfortable, and you'll probably hate it. But it doesn't exist for the purpose of being abrasive and uncomfortable, and that's key. It's an artist's unfiltered creative vision. Incidentally, Cobain was a big Swans fan.
I don't have much to add, I just felt it was interesting hearing them described through someone else's lens very differently than I would.
When I listen to them I hear beauty, and my childhood.
Most the 90s stuff to me sounds more like... gothy post-punky vibes?
The Swans just had a lot of very differing material. Perhaps that's why I don't quite get the description.
Even approaching 60 years old I am still doing the same kind of searching. It's not a fashion for me, I don't wear it on my sleeve. But perhaps even because I am older, I am increasingly unhappy with the bed that was already made for me when I was born.
So often I find myself wondering (sometimes aloud), "How did the world get to the way it is now? If you were to design, plan a society you would never have made it as complicated as this."
It's as though we begrudgingly go along with it because what else can you do? I think when you're young you try to fight it, and therein lies the punk spirit. But you eventually muster out of the revolution and, tired of tilting against windmills, you instead try to make it work for you.
Regardless, I still don't like it and still try to envision what changes would make the world a better place.
How is the world now, in your view?
Even then there was some internal-ish pressure to align the punks with leftist ideology, but most could really care less and wanted to drop out of society, not "fix it", etc.
Things started changing once the styles and sound started influencing mainstream, and it was no longer seen so outlandish. And it's hard to live outside culture esp if drugs are involved. (Though respect to the Straight Edge movement[0])
If there was a "new" punk-like movement today, it'd need to be "exclusive" in that normies would not want to show up to your gigs or parties, due to aesthetics or beliefs. I think you'd need that feeling of making a choice to drop out of society, so you'd need something really different, almost like Amish punks, ha.
To put it simply and honestly, we're so caught up in our own culture bubble that we can't see different subcultures for what they are (as has been the case ALWAYS). Instead, we write them off as deviations and psychological anomalies. If you want to get a real sense of these groups, you should observe which groups are overlooked by mainstream media, which ones are derogated for their beliefs, and considered undesirable.
For example, I really think that because of a bunch of reasons, like the threat of a world war and rapid social transformations, we will witness a significant shift towards military-oriented, ultra-masculine groups in the years ahead.
These groups will embrace a nihilistic outlook (the same "no future" slogan we see so often), they will be labeled as incels and fascists (and they largely will be that), yet they will represent truly alternative subcultures to what the mainstream culture presents.
This is btw. not a praise of such groups, it's merely my attempt at pointing out the authors obvious blind spots.
Im sure there are other countercultures besides Juggalos; US Wahabis, religious polygamists, ect.
There's no reason that this should be taken for granted. Institutions, governments, political parties, and entire cultures rise and fall due to local and global economic circumstances, wars, religious extremism, or even complacency. How odd would it be if young people were entirely immune to these effects?
> Blow up your TV
> Throw away your paper
> Go to the country
> Build you a home
> Plant a little garden
> Eat a lot of peaches
> Try and find Jesus
> On your own
They look a certain way. They listen to certain music. Hang out in certain places. Behave in certain ways (e.g., 80s punks were all about "anarchy" and "damage").
At the end of the day, it's a "kit" or "package" that someone adopts and "wears" as a personality and belief system. They just tell themselves it isn't because they desperately want to feel unique and one-of-a-kind.
The only real punk is the first person to define the look. Like the SLC Punk clip I linked above explains: everybody after them is just a "trendy ass poser."
A common milestone is typically considered to be when The Clash release (and tour) Sandinista! in 1980, veering towards a pop sound. The punk scene effectively starts to self-disintegrate at that point, increasingly unable to reconcile its minoritarian attitudes with its by-then-undeniable mainstream popularity. By the middle of the decade, in most of the world punk had become the formulaic subculture you describe, losing its experimental streak; but until then it had been a living and evolving organism.
should I know?
right here in the comments for this post are several people explaining how the core of punk is a DIY ethos. i'm neither agreeing nor disagreeing with that, but if that was correct, then (a) it wouldn't matter if i could tell that someone was a punk (b) punk at its core has no connection to a "kit"or "package" or "look" at all. someone even argues that using mastodon to help find cures for cancer (i may be paraphrasing a bit) is an example of punk in 2024.
you seem very attached to the idea that punk is nothing more than a style sub-culture. i don't know if that's true, but there seem to be quite a few people who think it is false.
Especially UK and Germany seems to have a growing punk scene right now in popular music and the 'streets'.
Punk was not noted for musical talent, but that didn't distract too much because of the energy of the performers. There's a Foo Fighter's cover of "Holiday in Cambodia" from about a decade ago that's worth listening to, it does sound better when the musicians can keep time.
As a pithy illustration: If I'm trying to hit a tree with a ball and that tree just happens to be in between some goalposts and someone comes along and moves the goalpost, I can still hit my target even if I don't "make a goal". To a casual observer it might look like I'm playing the game and I am. But the game in my head is not the game in yours.
edit: I didn't have this in mind when starting this comment but maybe that's the deeper desire behind punk and other countercultural movements; the desire to play your own game. And maybe capitalism is the end of history in the sense that it has adapted to make it easy for people to play their own game and keeps pushing the edges of what would have been counter previously. Want to drop off the grid and make everything you use and consume with your own hands? There's a hundred youtube channels about that. If you want to conquer Rome, you're still gonna travel there on roads the Romans built.
Mark Fisher is an interesting philosopher. For those that don't know he was a part of the ""Cybernetic Cultural Research Unit" [1] at Warwick University led by Nick Land. These guys were crazy but from their insanity some extremely interesting observations and ideas came out of it. In particular, "Accelerationism"[2] which has become very popular in the AI world, e/acc, etc. Fisher was more of the left wing side of it and Land from the right wing. In fact, Land is a reactionary today and their ideas are quite interesting as opposed to the mainstream left/liberal Capitalist ideals of today's mainstream.
Nick Land is an interesting fellow.
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cybernetic_Culture_Research_Un...
Coincidentally, Watterson himself was very punk: he started drawing for his own sake, got famous, refused to accept the capitalist growth imperative, and dropped out. He never sported a mohawk or pierced his tongue, but was more punk than several generations of punk-rock wannabes.
In reality, groups with the general back-to-the-land drop-out mentality are a persistent feature of western culture, occuring every 40-80 years for several hundred years. They rarely change the entire face of the culture they emerge in, but they typically shift it a bit, at least for a while.
And as Peter Coyote once observed, while the hippies lost just about every political battle they purported to care about (war, racism, sexism, industrial agriculture, cars, pollution etc.), they won most of the cultural battles.
That's because the upper echelons correctly understood that culture is largely window-dressing, as long as the fundamental economic ballasts remain the same. They will let us dye our hair blue, what matters is that we keep working in their factories/shops/call-centres/banks/etc, making money for them; and if we bootstrap something else, it will inevitably be absorbed back into the system once a little greed creeps in.
What they cared about was killing collectivism, which was the real threat to the economic order, and they largely achieved that.
If you want to learn more about Zapatistas and Rojava you can check those videos:
Going on about vague abstractions like Capitalism (whatever that is) isn’t going to help since these are mental constructs, not evidence.
A culture based on curiosity and amateur reporting, telling stories about things that actually happened, would probably understand itself better. Many of us are the opposite, keeping anything real private (for understandable reasons) and sharing fantasy stuff, which overwhelms what’s real.
Music is just not a cultural carrier like it used to be.
Young people aren't buying music. I don't think music is a cool thing teenagers discover and make it part of themselves anymore in the same way they did in previous generations - there's just too much of it, it's chopped up into too many social bubbles, and no one except established regimes targeting older people can make money off of it. A 13 or 14 year old might obsess over some TikTok artist or band for a minute but it's not going to last a lifetime because the next thing everyone's talking about will replace it quickly.
I think we will soon see an era where young people don't care about music. It's not necessarily a bad thing, I don't really know if having rich popular, punk, whatever bands that try to coast on their fame for decades is worthwhile to society anyway.
It might be true in the future, but there is still just as much obsessing over artists, and bands, that feels like it will last a lifetime.
Basically, I don't disagree with your premise, but my narrow evidence says it isn't true.
An interesting phenemenon is the emergence of the extremely popular game based works across different mediums; LitRPGs for Western Fantasy, Isekai/Narou for Japanese culture, and the "Hunter" manwha for Korea. These works tend to have a infamous reputation for being overly similar to each other, and eschewing much in originality and worldbuilding in favour of pure action and power fantasies. In my discussions with those who consumed it, unique settings, character development, etc were all burdens, and instead by using a easily familiar and simple system of a game-rpg they could instead push to the "meat" of action scenes. The same can be also said about the comparison between the leanness of new "shounen" like Jujutsu Kaisen compared to meandering filler of the Big Three (Naruto, Bleach, One Piece).
As someone who grew up with the previous era, that kind of thinking is almost antithetical to the reasons why I was drawn into fiction; The whole point of an RPG was to realise a fantasy world, the mechanics were just abstractions to make up technical limitations. Beyond that in other mediums, the idea was to get even crazier and fleshed out settings, to have more realistic characters, all to build that vision of a fantasy world that yet felt sincere. Pushing boundaries was the name of the game. And so it's that funnily enough, many older works like The Five Star Stories could almost be construed as innovative if you were to compare them to modern works today.
This is all just about a specific niche culture, so other cultures may be different. But looking at decline in originals and the rise of remakes and endless sequels paints a similar risk-averse outlook for the wider zeitgeist. Well I guess it's a pendulum of reacting ideas; Modernism is the establishment, so Conservative is the anti-establishment. But the current era itself is already running out of steam, so the pendulum may just turn back.
I grew up in the previous era, and clicking through dialog, and ignoring the story was a part of every single RPG I played.
My kind of thinking, the fiction was antithetical to the reasons I was drawn into RPGs.
The exact opposite of you, at the exact same time. But you are arguing the time is what is different.
> And so the goth clubs move the post-punk and coldwave tunes into a side room while the DJs spin EBM and futurepop on the main floor.
He's saying Nitzer Ebb and Front 242 were more packaged and refined than something like Suicide or Throbbing Gristle. And that seems spot on to me.
I've been spending time around young tattoo apprentices recently. What I've found is that there is an aesthetic revivalist movement underway just with new hyper forms of expression that often are /extremely/ jarring to normals. Spend a day listening to musical genres like phonk/hyperpop. Everything the new kids are doing is heavily tinted with accelerationism. Honestly who gives a shit about punk anyway, things come and go. Go read some more theory and cry some more about it I guess.
You think capitalism doesn't do this (too) ?
No, wait. That has absolutely nothing to do with what punk was about, other than some mainstream media story about punk, designed to terrify everybody else.
Punk rockers in 1978 were shilling for politicians in London. They were cynical and honest and clear-eyed about it, but they were still shilling.
ps. on HN I try never to vote comments down, I just try to reply instead. But I had to make an exception here.
In my mind the ideas of socialism and libertarianism are polar opposites.
They aren't necessarily libertarian socialism per se, but there area also lots of variations of socialism that combine social liberalism with economic socialism or which are fine with greater collectivism but reject central planning.
Wikipedia on left-libertarianism isn't too bad (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Left-libertarianism), though notably missing a "Criticism" section.
Note that I don't endorse the views described in that article. I am expressing neither support nor opposition for left-libertarianism as a political philosophy. I have zero interest in debating the merits or demerits here at this time; I'm only trying to answer a question.
However, now I think that like Georgism/LVT, it is outdated due to the focus on Material means of production, and doesnt account for the increasing importance of white collar knowledge work.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pierre-Joseph_Proudhon#Philoso...
The point that I was making is that democracy is still a tool for restricting indidvidual freedoms of all types. You can have a controlling tyranny of the majority in direct democracy just like a representative ones.
A feature of libertarianism is seeking to minimize the scope of state control and authority, irrespective of government mechanism.
That is to say, the purpose of direct democracy is still to tell people what they can, cant, and must do.
I am not an expert on Nirvana but I would guess his suicide was more about his personal struggles than some grandiose statement about politics and capitalism.
IMO it's likely that some or all of his mental health struggles stemmed from a completely dysfunctional digestive system. In any case, blaming his suicide on capitalism seems like rewriting history to fit one's preferred narrative.
For example, no amount of monkeying with the economic system will make it possible to fight global warming simply by cutting off fossil fuel supplies and destroying fossil fuel company profits without huge impacts on the demand side that affect ordinary people - that'd require consuming fuel that was never produced. This effect on ordinary voters would make it horrendously unattractive to politicans even if they didn't have to care what corporations thought at all. Similarly, here in the UK there's huge public anger over sewage in our rivers and seas but no amount of nationalisation can change the fact that rebuilding the sewage system not to do that would take huge amounts of resources from other things that people care about and cause lots of unpopular disruption from the work required.
Because the things that people care about and want fixed aren't actually caused by capitalism, the most politically effective anti-capitalist ideas are populist lies that promise false solutions to those problems which cannot actually work. This also means that any leader or would-be leader with any sense isn't willing to go along with those ideas because they're creating a whip for their own back when they fail to live up to that. Any concrete, achievable anti-capitalism also has to fall so short of the populist version to be entirely unattractive.
You have to be in it for the love of the game.
Reminds me of a recent podcast featuring Will Storr, author of "The Status Game: On Human Life and How to Play it", where, to paraphrase, he discusses how those who claim that social hierarchies are unethical... don't actually want to do away with hierarchies but rather simply want to destroy/disrupt the current hierarchy and place themselves at the top of the next one.
I really appreciate this section of the article:
>"the only visible instantiation of a subcultural franchise putting on against-the-grain airs similar to those of the punks and goths of the 1990s (who had all been thoroughly domesticated by that point) has lately been...
>"the “blue hair & pronouns” crowd...
>"Where their presence in affluent suburbs or in gentrified or gentrifying urban neighborhoods is concerned,
>"...only the most myopic and self-satisfied of the “blue hair & pronouns” set can possibly believe that they’re swimming against the mainstream at this point."
.... In terms of alternatives to capitalism discussed at the start of the article-- I think we are seeing pseudo-socialism-mixed-with-capitalism on small scales in cases of sharing economy related companies, some tiny-house communities which involve resource & workshop sharing, and the decentralized finance/media/social networks/ movement.
Fascism, traditionalism, neo-monarchism, authoritarian forms of socialism, and theocracy are all very real and have both adherents at home and entire societies abroad that attempt to live by their rules. Unfortunately all of them yield a society that is worse in many important respects than Western liberal capitalism. They are stifling, repressive, or lead to poverty. The domestic adherents of these ideas tend to be either angry nihilists and edgelords who hate their own lives and just want any kind of change, or fanatics (e.g. religious zealots) who are obsessed with controlling and restricting the personal choices of others.
There are also lots of pure fantasies that are pushed as alternatives to capitalism: neo-primitivism, hand-wavey futurist utopias, new age woo, etc. While these may or may not be better, the point is moot because they are not achievable. There is no path from here to there, or in many cases there isn't even a "there." There's just a vague idea that if we all abandon what we have now and love each other or something magic will happen and we'll get utopia. History shows us that without a real serious workable plan we're more likely to get a slum run by warlords or a new boss that's worse than the old boss.
If someone thinks of a serious alternative to Western liberal capitalism that is both better and achievable (there is a path from here to there, and an actual "there"), I think they'll get plenty of attention. There is no invisible conspiracy that will somehow stop people from thinking of this or discussing it. It's just that nobody's done it yet.
The Chinese model appears to promise greater, superior, and swifter results, with the price tag for the average individual not being particularly steep—it's merely a bit more of your privacy (which has already been bartered and commercialized in the West) and a few liberties ("people are tired of liberty" was probably the most true quote by mussolini).
And boy, can China deliver.
There's an equally plausible narrative that China is coasting on the momentum of its liberalization, and that Xi Xinpeng's clampdown is slowly but surely strangling it. That combined with China's impending demographic cliff (self-inflicted via authoritarian one child policies) could lead China to start fading fairly soon.
We'll see.
In any case I don't think the Chinese model is that different from Western capitalism. At the street level it's fairly similar including hustle culture, long hours, and plenty of cultural commodification. Seems more like a variation on the theme than an alternative.
The most obvious area where they "deliver" is competent public works, which is something we seem to have forgotten how to do.
China is the Antichrist in as much as it needs a Christ for it to exist. Without Western capitalism it is nothing, because it doesn't consume nearly as much as it produces. The profits from its production are the result of its wealth. In fact, it is profitable in spite of its government policies.
Interestingly, Putin is still there, Islamism, China too... One could always argue they're a form of capitalism but I'm sure history is full of "our system is the only one" claim.
So no, no and no.
I had the same feelings when I was younger but, having seen the pattern a couple more times than once, I think most people come to the same realization that this is just the way it is and why parents are usually nonchalant and a bit dismissive of their children's "rebellious counterculture".
I think they author misattributes the mainstream takeover of counterculture to "capitalism finally got them" when, it seem obvious to me, that what's really happened is that the counterculture just got older and are now the ones shaping the mainstream.
They say they were in their teens in the late 90's.
Indeed [1]. It seems to be a condition of youth, to a degree.
[1] https://historyhustle.com/2500-years-of-people-complaining-a...
Why am I trying to explain this to someone whose handle is "parineum?"