Anything threatening to be a subculture is commodified before it can walk (2014)

I accept this valid criticism of "posers" but I'd like to add that there's a strange loop here. It feels alien to me, but lots of people I know like to watch videos of themselves doing things (e.g. choreographed dances). It certainly does help to see how to improve, but also they get satisfaction from seeing themselves do the thing.

I actually agree with your point, but there's a really solid devil's advocate side to take against it, too.

No one agrees, of course. In any case, for me, it's not something I'd force on my kid. Sort of goes against the spirit.

If someone's expectation is that a green Mohawk means someone is throwing off the cultural legacy and expectations handed down to them, then yeah, a toddler with a Mohawk is pretty ironic. If someone just thinks is a haircut that looks cool, obviously not.

If someone thinks or remembers when Mohawk had that meaning, they might read into the fact of it being changing to a simple mainstream aesthetic cosmetic option.

Just sayin'.

Heart in the right spot. Execution has room to improve.

> So my only strong belief is that you should think of style first and foremost as social language, not purely as artistic expression. Aesthetics are rooted in culture—punk, skate, prep, workwear, etc. Identify a cultural language that resonates with you.

So yes, to borrow the example of the GP, you had to know someone with the proper equipment to silk-screen an anarchist shirt, which necessarily meant the only way you could really get one was that way. Now, you can have dozens of them, in innumerable colors, styles, and designs. And I mean, I think it's fair to say that the old folks back in the day would've happily bought that shirt too rather than going into a buddy's workplace after hours and doing it themselves.

I don't think the criticism "you aren't a real X you just bought it" really holds water. I'm sure the wide availability of these things necessarily makes things easier for that no-doubt real slice of owners who have no idea what that A means or why it matters to a community of people, but at the same time, it also makes it tremendously easier for all those in that community to dress how they want to dress, to perform their identity in social spaces, which in turn allows them to find one another more easily.

Like I say this as a brain-rotted boy from the suburbs of the cultural wasteland of the early 2,000's: I had no identity in school, and that is a problem people. I have experienced firsthand the broad rejection you feel when you do not fit into any given social group, and don't know how to join one. Would a fashion sense have spared me that? I don't know, I had a myriad of other issues going on. But when I read Derek's writing about how clothes function as a language that we can communicate with one another without words, and form communities based on shared values? I hurt for my former self. I wish someone had helped me back then so I could fit in more. Maybe my loner, extremely contrarian self would've found companionship and not have had such a rough go until I was in my mid-twenties and started actually figuring out who the hell I was.

You'd think that e.g. dumpster-diving for food would be "unprofitable" and require "high degree of personal investment which can't be substituted with money", but freeganism already turned into aspirational hobby for many, and has its own little ecosystem of influencers selling books. It fits in nicely among its even more commercial cousins, like "minimalism", "healthy eating", "organic food", "zero waste", "frugal lifestyle", etc.; together, they form a larger "anti-consumerist"/"degrowth" market segment, which is happily growing as more people buy merch.

The irony. But as the old adage goes, the market can merchandise everything; it'll happily sell you a hi-vis vest, baclava, baseball bat and a chain you can use to cuff yourself to an utility pole as you camp in front of the supermarket to protest capitalism ruining the world.

> You mean the ones banned by most social media, hard to find on google and even harder to find in real-life?

Yup. This dire dialogue (THANKS!) invoked a forgotten childhood "recording": Grandpa <3 ... Lowland Scot. Stingy with words. Mostly expletive's aimed at "Pink Pawed Eed-Jits". The rare exceptions were so routine I forgot.

So like it's now I hear Grandpa's forthright & shameless bellow:

A Jock Tamson's Bairns

Ah!

110+ minutes after shoving "A Jock Tamson's Bairns" up the tailpipe of several major 'SERP'

Results *DID* happen. Kindly forbear, posting those to the original submission may generate more curiosity

*A Jock Tamson's Bairns*

Run, Forrest RUN

aaaaa-gaaaain????

Scariest shit I've ever read, worse than any horror novel. Thankfully it's just a dumb story and the science of it is really dubious.

I have read a lot of blogs and articles from authors and agents about thematic checklists for publishing.

On the flip side, immigration makes up the vast majority of content creation, and the leading edge were using these premises 20-30 years ago when they were more novel

In terms of influence I suppose I'm mostly thinking of movies and shows such as the Matrix, but I also read so many short stories involving VR and techno-dystopias it's hard to pinpoint. Snowcrash is certainly up there (yes I tried to read Snowcrash first, having done no research, and liked it even less). Having played every Shadowrun game doesn't help (the universe is in a lot of ways "just" fantasy Neuromancer).

All that being said, Neuromancer doesn't read like a cheap copy either. More like I've been riding bicycles all my life and someone presented me with a penny farthing. I appreciate the innovation, it's just not particularly mind-blowing anymore.

And you can't tell me you don't shiver if someone says "I'm sure he'll listen to reason.."

I'm not sure I agree with this. I love the sprawl trilogy, but my feeling has always been that the entire plots are excuses for the big set piece events. The characters exist so that he can write vivid scenes and try to paint a picture, everything between is just so they get to the right places for him to do that.

> it is actually part one of a number of book with the same character (e.g., Count Zero).

I don't think there's were any character overlaps between Neuromancer and Count Zero, are there? Mona Lisa Overdrive certainly does.

Contrast with Asimov, who's books were carried by ideas but had a very tedious style.

    If you read Neuromancer in 1984, it was mind-blowing. 
    Same thing with Snow Crash in 1992

Or art that was produced more than N years ago but didn't produce any imitators that retroactively diminished the original for you?

I guess I'm not enjoying things right. I read Snow Crash in the 2000s (and LOTR in the 90s) and enjoyed the hell out of them even though they were "outdated" and had inspired countless derivative works in the ensuing decades. In fact, I had a good time playing Ms. Pac Man just last weekend.

When I read Snow Crash it definitely felt like the product of an earlier decade but I didn't hold that against it. I like understanding the context in which a piece was made.

If you don't, that's okay and you're certainly not alone. Feels like you're missing out on some good stuff though. Possibly a lot of good stuff. Possibly the vast majority of human artistic output.

Cyberpunk in general inherits from noir.

These objects were once alive - they were parts of active interactions. Now they are dead and ossified.

This is the difference between your album CDs when you actually listened to them, and then when you put them on a display case on the wall.

You might take a collection of dried leaves and put them on display and call it a “tree museum”, but your visitors aren’t going to get a good appreciation for what trees are like just by looking at their dead refuse

So if you break up the wealth concentration effect, you are reducing dissatisfaction overall, but you are also reducing the likelihood of any future alteration to any number of more minor dissatisfactions that seem characteristic of this system — e.g., the way it makes people's lives repetitive, predictable, robotic; the way it often preferentially rewards behaviors that service medium-term goals rather than ultra-short or ultra-long term goals; the way it reduces the dimensionality of the activities that are needed, from the average individual, and the way this reduction of dimensions along which one might be needed can make a person feel less like a person, etc.

I do not myself agree with anti-capitalists that all these patterns are best explained in terms of capital. You see similar tendencies correlated with, for example, most any attempt to scale culture. My point is just that the people who are trying to formulate the grandiose complaint are, deep down, generally not trying to designate as evil some single feature (even if they have latched onto that feature as being strategically their best line of attack); generally, I think, they are not saying, "Man, I see this nose everywhere and am sick of this nose," they are saying, "Why is it that people seem to be looking increasingly similar?" which sentiment (however flawed statistically) we expert statisticians might charitably translate as, "Why is it that there seems increasingly to be a single stable equilibrium for an increasing number of the increasingly divided planes of our diminishing existence?"

And maybe that last formulation is also empirically incorrect — but isn't there a general thrust in it that you recognize? "One default, one optimal path and anything I do to get out of it is either wasteful or imitated until it is the rule." Can you come up with a tax policy that will break up the concentration effect at that level? Maybe you can. Would it really break up the monoculture, or would it strengthen it? I don't know. I suppose reformers and revolutionaries have always diverged at this juncture.

It's not replacing dumpster-diving, nor would I consider myself to be part of dumpster-diving subculture. I don't talk about it to my friends. It's just cheap food.

This is laughably naive. Not only would "innovation suffer", but it's pretty doubtful that current technology could be maintained with a population as small as that. Humans are a (weak) hivemind intelligence, and everything we have now is only capable with a population as high as we have it currently. Sure, there might be some inefficiency going on, but it's tens of percent, not hundreds of percent.

>In a depopulated world, the average persons labor is the same,

In a depopulated world, we don't have double digits of one-in-a-billion geniuses. We don't have 1% of the population doing agriculture work, because they can't spare 500,000 people to build and maintain agricultural mechanization. Because they can't do that, they'll actually need to employ even more people doing it with less automation and more manual labor. These things don't scale linearly. (Even if they somehow caught on that the ag mechanization paid dividends, their version of John Deere can't do the same thing because all of the other industries that make John Deere possible don't exist). Regressing back to lesser forms doesn't work, because back when John Deere was making 50,000 small tractors a year, there was demand for small tractors.

And that's before we even get to the part where if those 80 million have the same demographics that we have now, with an excess of old geezers...

I suspect strongly that if we could somehow go do the Star Trek thing and visit countless alien worlds that show a variety of (human-like) aliens, their technology level strongly correlates with their global population, and that in instances where global population somehow declined, so too did their ability to retain that technology.

Places like Ordensburg Vogelsang, where they trained Nazi officers, explains how they cut themselves to look experienced in battle, among other things. The Wikipedia page doesn't do the place justice. It's terrifying to visit.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ordensburg_Vogelsang

Fascists have strong opinions on "correct" art:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Art_in_Nazi_Germany

I do agree humans are generally obssessed with identity. In many cases this behavior is enabled via brands and fashion but it also happens with cultural and social constructs (eg: religion, ideologies, etc).