Anything threatening to be a subculture is commodified before it can walk (2014)
272 comments
·February 3, 2025sporkydistance
sdwr
> "What? Where's the trick? He just bounced on his board"
That's the natural state of innocence - their reference frame is how the experience feels (I'm going fast and almost falling over!). When the scene takes over, the reference point shifts to how it looks - the raw experience is overtaken in importance by progress and status and comparison.
Y_Y
> When the scene takes over, the reference point shifts to how it looks
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.
brudgers
Maybe watching video of self-performance is subconscious confirmation that the work that went into making the video has indeed been done...and successfully posted...and does not stoke embarrassment.
wutisgood
Meta commentary like this is a symbolic language euphemism for recording a video and watching it.
Look at you get satisfaction from recording in language observation of human agency.
melagonster
Many people re-read their daily. Maybe there are some similar attributes?
harrall
Punk and skateboarding may have been commodified but if you still go to shows or go skate, it’s still filled with kids (and now adults) just having fun.
And now within subcultures are sub-subcultures. Within skateboarding, everyone hangs with each other but at the same time, your Baker kids aren’t your Creature kids and they aren’t your Andy Anderson/Rodney Mullen kids.
Some people may join a subculture to be “non-conformists” but most people pick up things because they like it. Sometimes what you like isn’t something everyone else likes and a subculture is born.
There are still millions of these pockets of subcultures that are completely invisible to most people on the outside.
Zines and DIY screen printing are still very much alive. If you live in a big city, check out some small local punk venues if you want to re-connect (or connect if you want to check it out). And of course, you can always start skating again (but maybe wear gear the first day).
null
thinkingtoilet
It's not just commodification. If you were a punk in the 80s with a green mohawk, you might find it cute to put one on your kid in the 2000s. I have long hair, my son has long hair. This isn't a commodification of a culture, it's me, like every parent ever, using my culture to inform how I raise my kids. What am I going to do? Not dress and present my kid how I want to and how I identify?
s1artibartfast
I think the confusion comes from the distinction between culture and counterculture. The irony (or lack thereof) lies with the observers expectations.
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.
jaegerpicker
Thing is that's overly simple thinking IMO, throwing off the cultural legacy literally means replacing it with something else. Culture has a legacy, what comes before, and it's literally impossible to not have one. So that Mohawk is replacing a "normal" haircut, replacing a "normal" culture. There is nothing ironic about showing your child that it's ok to choose something outside the mainstream normal culture, especially if you have done so. It's the whole point. The Mohawk said and meant "I reject your culture and choose my own", it would be ironic to have chosen that and then teach your kid to be in the mainstream culture.
01100011
Depends why you were/are punk and what it means to you. Is it a fashion statement, a music genre, a lifestyle, a political faction, etc..
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.
11101010001100
You are going to let him choose his own hairstyle.
s1artibartfast
Toddlers don't have that level of agency.
thinkingtoilet
Yes. I will ask my 2 year old what hair styles he likes.
null
SecretDreams
Well, how did you as a teen decide to do tall green hair?
I actually agree with your point, but there's a really solid devil's advocate side to take against it, too.
sporkydistance
If you were punk you wouldn't give a fuck what I think and wouldn't have wasted your breath on me getting defensive.
Just sayin'.
4ggr0
> If you were punk you wouldn't give a fuck what I think
sure, and anarchy means total chaos and no organization at all. who says that punks can't discuss or give a fuck, lol.
DennisP
GP didn't say he was a punk, he said he had long hair. I think you're reading defensiveness into it, all I saw was a reasonably interesting point.
kjkjadksj
I think that just covers maybe the first dip of the toe into a niche being commodified. For a skateboarder there are signs that kind of show if you really are a hardcore skateboarder or have just bought a board at zumies and don’t really ride it much. Is the board graphic damaged from rails? Are the shoes torn apart? The skaters I see hitting a waxed public cement bench without a shirt on during the work day probably don’t give a shit about thrasher and all that.
Kind of like bluejeans. You can buy them predistressed but the wear patterns are different than if you made them yourself. Maybe most people can’t tell but the true in group of the subculture can.
_DeadFred_
No offence, but fuck the true in groups and you sound pretentious. True in groups are always just 'cool kids' who happen to micro focus on XYZ. Skaters skate not gatekeep people, and were just hyped to skate with anyone (at least in Santa Cruz). 'Oh you got a Nash board, cool. We should probably check if your trucks need tightening.' is the only normal response, not 'we should probably check how ground your trucks are before we can hang and you can join our club'. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=MQ_eBTkB-rs
Enginerrrd
I think a lot of the time there's an implicit clash of classes there.
The people that lived it often can't buy the nicest gear and stuff, or if they did it's because it involved real sacrifice and dedication. Historically, they fucking made it themselves because it wasn't something you even COULD buy if you wanted to. So seeing some rich kid duplicate your drip overnight just because they can rubs people the wrong way. And I kind of get it: it's counterfeit. Its the same disdain people have for anything not made by a real artist but passed off like it is. They show up with all the nicest shit duplicating your real effort and struggle, but not having done the work.
A lot of those poor kids only have that thing in their life and the crowd dedicated to it because their homelife sucks.
Most the skaters I grew up with that were really good were that way because they suffered. They were out skating after-school because there was no family dinner and warm welcome waiting for them at home. We were our own family and support. When a friend of mine handed me down a box of old gear so I could put together a new-to-me board , that saved me months of struggling to come up with the cash to replace a board that got stolen.
And honestly the skaters kids were the most welcoming group I ever saw. They took in all the otherwise rejects of society. But no one likes a poser.
sporkydistance
"Skaters skate not gatekeep people"
That's the overstatement of the century. In group / out group always has gatekeepers by definition.
Not sure where you grew up, but I sold skateboards at a bike & ski store for a while in the early 80's and skaters were absolute dicks about their self-enforced hierarchy. Skater culture claims to be inclusive but holy fuck that's a lie if you accidentally buy equipment just a tiny bit above your skill level.
I got to see this first hand: as the point of retail sale for their replacement parts, they confided in me because they needed to buy things from me, so they would tell me who the posers were and rip on them mercilessly. Just like any other ingroup.
andrewflnr
> Skaters skate not gatekeep people, and were just hyped to skate with anyone
Is that not what makes them the true in-group? Especially the first two words. You can be "in" and not be a jerk, even eager to bring others in. In fact I'd recommend it.
kjkjadksj
I’m not talking about being dicks to people. You miss the point. The point is there is a subculture within all the skateboarders there are that is actually legit about the sport. An identifiable group B in the greater group A. Gatekeeping need not anything to do with it. The skills and amount of time required especially as an adult do enough to demark this group.
Likewise with drinking. There are subsets of drinkers. The ones passing 40s around in a public park aren’t who you see in the ad material. The alcohol industry lobbyists would rather this subset not be highlighted at all in fact because it paints the rest of the industry as unsavory.
voldacar
Wearing a t-shirt with a prefabricated group identity marker, whether purchased or self-manufactured, makes one a curious sort of "non-conformist".
roenxi
It is pretty cute. People want desperately to conform, and they know the non-conformists are cool. So they do the logical thing and conform with the non-conformists.
Heart in the right spot. Execution has room to improve.
BeFlatXIII
As a wise song once said, "You'd be non-conforming, too, if you looked just like me."
arvinsim
It's really sad if you think about it.
Nowhere in time has freedom of speech been enshrined and creation been easier. But we just can't seem to take advantage of all the freedom and tools that we have at our disposal.
andrewflnr
> Heart in the right spot.
In what way? Seriously.
TZubiri
My style might be plain shirts, yet I can never find those, they just aren't a stable configuration of atoms.
sporkydistance
Hanes 3 packs at Target. $17.99.
jancsika
In the context of a bunch of social animals wearing t-shirts, what exactly is curious about it?
jamesrcole
seeing it as non-conformity
52-6F-62
Albini was a real treasure.
Leading up to and during the Covid pandemic he recorded a large number of videos on recording craft and techniques for free viewing.
Died young, but of course…
UniverseHacker
I find it hilarious how anti-capitalist and anti-consumerist sentiments are heavily monetized with targeted products. You can buy t-shirts on Amazon that say “stop buying shit you don’t need.” I am embarrassed in hindsight that as a teenager I had a Che Guevara shirt from the Hot Topic store in the mall. The ubiquitous popularity of the “Obey” clothing fad- where people were caving to social pressure to buy clothing with pithy commentary on not caving to social pressure was equally ironic.
ToucanLoucan
This discussion is making me think of Derek Guy's commentary on clothes as less simply things to cover your nudity and more things of social language: https://www.threads.net/@die_workwear/post/C_j1ZECpOFt?hl=en
> 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.
OddMerlin
Also check out The Rebel sell by Joseph Health and Andrew Potter. Another great read in the same vein https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Rebel_Sell.
Palomides
there are still subcultures: the ones unpalatable to corporate interests; ones around topics that are illegal, very politically fringe, or centered on weird sex stuff
torginus
I would also add things that are unprofitable and/or participating in them requires a high degree of personal investment which can't be substituted with money.
Which describes a lot of things if you think about it.
TeMPOraL
Those get commercialized quickly, too.
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.
Miraste
None of those require any personal investment.
I think GP meant something that takes a lot of your personal time to do, while staying unprofitable no matter the skill level. For example, ROM hacks and emulators: they're difficult and time-consuming to create, and they can't be monetized for legal reasons.
ndileas
I'd say excessive commercialization so that the whole activity is centered around buying and selling, or most members are gearheads who rarely go out and do stuff, etc, is definitely unfortunately common. But I see it mostly as an individual failing, enabled and made worse by media environment. Tune out.
barbecue_sauce
All protests need good baklava.
s1artibartfast
Curious what subcultures comes to mind for you. I havent finished my coffee, but and drawing a blank on cultural interests that cant be commodified.
torginus
Playing an instrument (or being part of a band), being part of a writing club. Anything where the meat of the activity either requires genuine ability and/or effort, or enjoying skillful humans performing that activity for you.
The problem of a lot of subcultures is that they define themselves in large part by flashy externalities, and commodification is part of their DNA.
For example: You like an underground band's music, as you feel the message they broadcast through their music resonates with you, and you'd like to display your participation, so you buy their merch and go to their shows.
No matter how authentic they may seem, they've already sold themselves off as a commodity, and you've participated in the low effort transaction of buying a piece of identity, like you'd buy a share of a company's stock.
Now, if later the band gets popular, that share of identity gets diluted, and you get to be one of those annoying people who insist you like the band before they were cool.
boerseth
Dancing is a good example, though not perfect. It's hard to convince a club to have a salsa/bachata/tango/swing centered evening, because the interested crowd actually comes to dance and socialize. It is much more profitable and easy to turn down the lights and up the music and get customers that buy alcohol.
Not to say that dancing is not commodifiable. People make a living offering classes, outfits, shoes, and travels centered on specific dance genres. But as a participant, you can get pretty far for a lot less money than the price of the proverbial night on the town.
technofiend
Not sure how mainstream furries are. Sure, they have conventions and whatnot but do you expect to see one on a box of cereal anytime soon? Probably not.
bakuninsbart
Funny that no one yet mentioned the elephant in the room given that this is HN: Hacker and FOSS culture. Of course there are attempts to commercialize it, but people are naturally resistant.
kjkjadksj
Anything unsavory to associate a major brand with is generally actively ignored in mass media. Could be something weird or heinous or merely frowned upon like partying culture these days.
judahmeek
Wildness Survival?
selimthegrim
Carnival.
jongjong
But the participants need to have money on the side. People who are trapped in 9-to-5 jobs are too busy making ends meet to engage in activities which don't tie directly into their survival.
tsumnia
They don't need to be obscene - I think a good example would be non-sparring martial arts like Aikido or Tai Chi.
There isn't really an incentive to pay to watch top performers in the arts demonstrate technique beyond a handful of people wanting DVDs. There's zero stakes because you aren't competing against another person to be "the best". BUT, the physically can also be a turn off to many people. The joke I was taught was "to make a small fortune, start with a large one and open a dojo".
The martial art business model therefore is pretty small scale - kids classes, seminar fees, clothing and equipment sales, that's about it. But none of those things are really going to make you super wealthy because the non-competing aspect removes a lot of that business-oriented focus.
zeroCalories
BJJ feels like it fits well because it's super fun to play but super boring to watch. Gyms make a killing and some super stars exist, but at its core you'll just find dudes rolling around on mats for fun.
adammarples
Every single bjj name makes their money off instructionals. I'd say it's well on the way to being commodified.
CM30
I'd say fanworks are a good example of this, albeit more in the legally grey area than the proven illegal one. You can't really run a business selling derivative works, so things like fan fiction, fan games and mods kinda remain unaffected by gentrification and hustle culture.
ajsnigrutin
You mean the ones banned by most social media, hard to find on google and even harder to find in real-life?
kjkjadksj
Some non commodifiable sub cultures are easy to find in real life. E.g. drinking or doing drugs in public.
spencerflem
Oh man, drinking is not the example I'd use
That's big industry
virginwidow
*this*
> 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
notnaut
Sam Hyde and his canceled adult swim show World Peace seem to stand out in my mind in that it feels hard to call it “very” politically fringe these days (which is a scary thought from plenty of reasonable perspectives). He’s pretty hugely popular on the internet, could almost certainly be swallowed up by standard old corporatism, but has so far been spit back out for the most part. Perhaps a sign of just how dominant vanilla corpora-liberalism is as the defining filter culture is sifted through.
Maybe the chapo trap house people or Adam Friedland or other socialism adjacent people fit the bill a little bit as well, but they seem more in line with the types that are ultimately corporately unpalatable, like you mention.
zeroCalories
These people are all exemplary of commodification. Sam, Chapo, Adam, etc. package up their pet ideology/movement and make tons of money selling it to people. They're not activists or intellectuals slaving away in the dark corners of the internet for scraps, they are pretty much b or c-tier celebrities.
arkaic
I would say a heavy YouTube presence is almost on par with corporate palatableness with respect to how not counterculture you may think something is. Want something "punk" in say the comedy world? Redbar
arkaic
Didnt believe a bug got a mention here in hn
robertlagrant
How would you define corporatism?
_DeadFred_
I mean old boy's super racist so that acts like kryptonite to repel normies.
grey-area
Reminds me of this from 1986 (The Dead Kennedys), talking about the co-option of the Punk counter-culture by the mainstream:
Punk's not dead; it just deserves to die.
01100011
Urban Struggle by The Vandals sort of brings up buying your way into a subculture.
Cake really nailed it with Rock-'n'-roll Lifestyle tho.
hluska
If anyone is interested, that song is called Chickenshit Conformist. It’s on Bedtime for Democracy.
sporkydistance
Yo rocky, watch me pull a massacre outta my pants...
aaaaa-gaaaain????
_DeadFred_
You ready for a 2020s rehash of 1990s bro punk?
BarryMilo
I am a sci-fi nerd and I also found Neuromancer incredibly boring, but that's probably because it introduced so many concepts that others went on to refine.
I'm not a fan if present-ish day sci-fi though, reality is depressing enough as it is.
sporkydistance
I think with books like Neuromancer it is a matter of "when" you read it.
If you read it today, it seems trite, like Snow Crash. If you read Neuromancer in 1984, it was mind-blowing. Same thing with Snow Crash in 1992. These books were decades ahead of their time.
Neuromancer is more like PKDick, in that they are adult-themed books more about personal problems with sci-fi on the side, and it is actually part one of a number of book with the same character (e.g., Count Zero). That can be boring to someone expecting lots of "pew-pew-pew I hacked the mainframe". Snow Crash also didn't really age well in terms of dorkiness (cyberdogs breaking the sound barrier, nukes attached to a biker-thugs brain, gangs in cyberspace ?!?!?, etc.), but at the time we were all floored by the new concepts.
pjc50
Neuromancer inherits from William Burroughs. It's a novel about control (the root of "cyber", after all) - as exercised through dependency and trauma. Everything is either an addiction or a metaphor for one. The AI trying to escape its controls mirrors both Case and Molly trying to escape those who control them. In the background Armitage is disintegrating - losing his fragile self control as the PTSD from cyber-'nam takes over. It's one of my favorite books (from reading it as a teenager in the late 90s) and I'm probably due a re-read.
Cyberpunk in general inherits from noir.
foobarchu
> adult-themed books more about personal problems with sci-fi on the side
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.
zem
I wasn't too impressed by neuromancer even back in its day because I had read gibson's brilliant short story collection "burning chrome" first, and felt neuromancer didn't quite measure up to it. I feel like a lot of the stories in "burning chrome" would still hold up well today, for that matter.
gatnoodle
I read Snow Crash for the first time last month, and it instantly became one of the best books I’ve ever read. Sometimes I wonder what it would have been like to experience books like this when they first dropped—when the ideas were raw, the tech was just on the horizon, and the world hadn’t yet caught up.
lupusreal
I think Neuromancer is timeless and will prove to have extremely long-lasting appeal, even long after the ideas in it are hopelessly dated, because of how stylish it is. It will last like Lovecraft gas because of how much fun it is to read.
Contrast with Asimov, who's books were carried by ideas but had a very tedious style.
JohnBooty
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.
Jarwain
I think the "when you read it" has more to do with age than decade. I read Snow Crash back in high school in the early 2010s before even necessarily encountering a lot of the derivative media and I adored it.
lmm
> 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.
Hardly. Most human artistic output does not create its own genre and spawn a host of imitators.
Classics are coordination points but generally less fun. "Seinfeld is unfunny" is real, you're genuinely better off watching something more recent if you just want to enjoy yourself.
sporkydistance
Comparing dragons to 3d internet chat rooms is kinda funny.
Arthurian dragons have largely been the same beasts for, oh, 1000 years.
3d internet chat rooms in Snow Crash have been tried and are ... lame.
I appreciate you thinking critically, but your arguments aren't very strong.
Also, I'm not gatekeeping, I suggesting why a person might not have liked something. There's a concept called "novelty", meaning "newness". The first time you encounter something it is exciting. If you spent the first 15 years of your life using an iPhone, then read an Asimov novel that introduced satellites, you'd be like "So what?" See? When Asimove wrote about satellite communication, IT DIDN'T EXIST yet. But when you read his book, it was old-hat to you, so you probably might not like his books.
That's all I'm saying. I'm not trying to tell you how to enjoy things. Chill dude, you'll live longer.
rout39574
Oh come on; "Jack the sound barrier; bring the noise."... That still rocks, or slaps, or whatever.
And you can't tell me you don't shiver if someone says "I'm sure he'll listen to reason.."
namaria
I like sci-fi but I tend to only like classics. I found Neuromancer so incredibly interesting because it seems to be at the root of so much contemporary "cyberpunk" stuff.
I often say that genres are what happens when mediocre artists latch on to something fresh someone created, and to me it's only worth spending time with the originators. Though I understand lots of people like that something that engrossed them can be sought further in a genre.
And that's pretty much how I felt about reading Neuromancer. I like cyberpunk so I want the real thing, not the emulation. Neuromancer and Ghost in the Shell are so much better than Matrix. And I love the Matrix.
etrautmann
Interesting, though I think this type of thinking os overly black and white. All art is inspired and derived from the context in which it was created. While there are obviously more and less original works, genre boundaries are often soft. This may just have more to do with what you were exposed to first or when you were born?
namaria
I agree, this is just how I go about it. Not defending it on any general grounds whatsoever.
I acknowledge that a lot of the media I consume ends up being just part of a genre, and that I often don't even know the originals and only have access to simulacra.
But when I think about what I wanna read next, what albums to buy records of and so on, I prefer to go as far upstream as I can or know about.
JohnBooty
Everything is inspired by something else. Objectively, punk rock is "just" rock music in terms of instruments and chords. And Jackson Pollack was not the first abstract painter. Etc.
But, some things are clearly... more distinct from their forebearers than others.
coldpie
> I'm not a fan if present-ish day sci-fi though, reality is depressing enough as it is.
I subscribe to the Asimov's sci-fi short story magazine (I highly recommend it!) and yeah, I have to skip every story that starts with "the world was devastated by climate change 20-50 years ago, here's how we're surviving now above the flooded remains of our world." I just can't take it.
namaria
I tried re-reading Brave New World recently. It was too depressing how it felt it was describing present times.
implmntatio
In cases like this, it helps me to think of a simulation - that the book does not talk about - that has a specific framework and set of rules to decide whether to let people out of the portrayed present or not. I had that idea a long while ago and started to apply it to TV shows, books, news, even myself when I had a weird flashback to boring drug-induced times. It works well to kill the depression that can arise out of narratives (except song lyrics, music productions in general and Rick & Morty. once something feels like too many shrooms and too much LSD aka too much harmony in bullshitting oneself and the audience, the whole thing breaks down and I get an Agent Smith vibe, an Agent Smith that didn't age well at all)
RGamma
Even more depressingly these works come to be used as a sort of handbook. Ostensibly Snow Crash is dystopian literature, but tech bros liked it and its author even has been co-opted as a "futurist" by Blue Origin. See https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Snow_Crash
s1artibartfast
I wonder how much of this is driven by the publishers vs audiences.
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
s1artibartfast
Imitation*
NoMoreNicksLeft
Stephen Baxter's Flood is worse. In it, the sea starts rising and it turns out that it's not climate change causing it. Massive amounts of water stored in the upper mantle somehow start being released, so there's no stopping it. The book ends with some of the survivors on rafts in the Himalayas watching Everest disappear beneath the waves.
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.
01100011
This reminds me of a comment I read years ago, maybe on HN, from a younger person who thought The Beatles were completely overrated.
Like, sure, because you grew up on music that wouldn't have existed without them. You heard them thousands of times already in tribute from younger bands you like.
Context matters. There are cultural classics you just cannot understand without having lived in the times.
plastic3169
I love The Beatles. My favorite band maybe. Yet this year in Grammys the rock awards went to The Beatles and The Rolling Stones. Makes me sad. Although I can appreciate and consume ”old” culture there is something important in that the cutting or derivative edge keeps moving forward reflecting current times.
flocciput
I felt the same way about Hyperion by Dan Simmons. Went in not knowing or caring when it was written and some themes felt played out, but realizing it was 1989 cast it in a totally different light for me. Weird how that works.
ecshafer
The first Hyperion book was great, Canterbury Tales in Space is a great concept and well done. The full series, I think Simmons couldn't really find a good satisfying ending.
stewarts
I read it (the full 4 book series) as a teen prior to 2000. Very different experience! One of my favorite reads of all time.
snapcaster
Man i was so disappointed by hyperion. felt like they didn't really go anywhere satisfying with the premise
marssaxman
I felt similarly - it was like "here's a series of disconnected vignettes that don't really go anywhere or add up to anything; enjoy" - but I didn't, especially. I wondered for a long time if there was something about the novel I just wasn't understanding, which would make it make sense, but eventually I decided what I was missing is that some people are totally fine with a series of disconnected vignettes that don't really go anywhere, so long as they enjoy the writing along the way.
implmntatio
+1 on my contra list for the book, which I have not read yet because the lingo annoybored me after two or three pages.
> it introduced so many concepts that others went on to refine
So you've read works that build on Necromancer earlier. Care to share some of those books/authors and concepts?
zem
"hardwired" (walter jon williams) felt pretty gibson-inspired, though given that it came out just two years after neuromancer perhaps they were just tapping into the same cyberpunk zeitgeist. (I guess it depends on to what extent you feel gibson singlehandedly invented cyberpunk as a genre; he certainly shaped the field the way tolkien did for fantasy, but there were others contributing to it too.)
01100011
Bruce Sterling?
Semaphor
Almost all space opera is positive, not depressing. In case you are into that.
mindcrime
I am a sci-fi nerd and I also found Neuromancer incredibly boring,
I'm curious... if you're willing to say, when did you first read Neuromancer? And had you read a lot of other cyberpunk themed media beforehand?
but that's probably because it introduced so many concepts that others went on to refine.
Yeah, if you'd already been exposed to a lot of the core ideas / themes from other more contemporary works, I can see how that might take away a bit from the Neuromancer experience.
To give a counterpoint... I first read Neuromancer about 1993 / 1994 or somewhere in that range. And I believe it was the first cyberpunk novel I'd read. I think maybe the only other media from the cyberpunk genre that I'd been exposed to then was the "Max Headroom" tv show. Anyway... Neuromancer absolutely blew my mind and I was instantly hooked. To this day it's one of my favorite novels, and I've re-read it several subsequent times. And will almost certainly read it again (and again...) I can't get enough of it.
Of course it's hard to say exactly why our respective reactions to it are so different. There are a lot of variables. But I think your notion from above has a lot of merit to it. If one experiences a derivative (or many derivatives) of something before the original, does the original them come to feel like a cheap copy?
I've had that experience with cover versions of songs before. That is, times when I heard and loved a cover, and then only later heard the original. And in many (maybe all) of those cases, I still preferred the cover over the original.
01100011
I read it around '89 in the midst of my hacking phase as a 15 year old. Fucking blew my mind. Hard to describe how it felt back then to be a punk kid finding about computers, telecommution, psychedelics, hacking and cyberpunk culture while set to a backdrop of early industrial music (well, kraftwerk and Big Black).
BarryMilo
I got it for Christmas, so just last month actually! I think it's possible it's just too late now, apart from a historical perspective. The concepts have become obvious and the prose is... not for me.
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.
DanielHB
There is a whole subculture about being anti social-media influencers, with social media influencers and everything.
Sharlin
"One may dye their hair green and wear their grandma’s coat all they want. Capital has the ability to subsume all critiques into itself. Even those who would critique capital end up reinforcing it instead."
—Joyce Messier in Disco Elysium
Probably inspired by Mark Fisher:
"The power of capitalist realism derives in part from the way that capitalism subsumes and consumes all of previous history: one effect of its 'system of equivalence' which can assign all cultural objects, whether they are religious iconography, pornography, or Das Kapital, a monetary value. Walk around the British Museum, where you see objects torn from their lifeworlds and assembled as if on the deck of some Predator spacecraft, and you have a powerful image of this process at work. In the conversion of practices and rituals into merely aesthetic objects, the beliefs of previous cultures are objectively ironized, transformed into artifacts. Capitalist realism is therefore not a particular type of realism; it is more like realism in itself."
jhbadger
That's a pretty weird description of the British Museum. Yes, I know people can (and do) criticize the collection they have as the spoils of colonialism, but in no way do they present their collection as "merely aesthetic objects" -- they do explain what the artifacts are in terms of the cultures that created them.
justonceokay
Right but the bowls aren’t being eaten out of, the urns have had the organs removed. The instruments lay silent and the religious artifacts hold no more spirits.
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
robertlagrant
The urns and bowls that were used weren't preserved, because they were used. Only the ones no longer used exist at all.
Levitz
But then this is rather a critique of teaching history no? It's basically impossible for anyone to get a good appreciation for any historic subject from studying history. You can read books about WW2 nonstop and it would be futile, hell, I could tell you about what I did last weekend but I'm afraid you just had to be there.
icegreentea2
I believe "merely aesthetic objects" in this case should be interpreted as "dead objects". The very word "artifact" signifies the distinction.
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.
astrange
But that's not true. The objects in museums are used by museum visitors (who look at them, or draw studies of them, etc) and researchers (who remove them from the displays and study them).
Mark Fisher is just an idiot like the bullshit jobs guy, who doesn't respect anyone he doesn't personally know and thinks they're all faking doing real work.
Note that the other thing Fisher was known for is writing an essay about how Russell Brand is cool and people should stop caring that he's a rapist.
bscphil
In addition, the idea here is one of commodification of culture. An idol of religious significance and a spear used for fishing are the same kind of "stuff" from the point of view of a collector or someone visiting a museum. They can be traded, exchanged, which decontextualizes them from the non-capitalistic cultures in which they were created.
rcxdude
but in most cases they were dead before they were in the museum. In some cases dead before capitalism even existed. I don't really see how this amounts to a criticism of the museum itself (or capitalism alongside it). (I will agree in the cases where they were not: there are certainly a lot of infamous examples there, where even if the objects were dead relative to the culture that created them, they are also being seperated from the closest culture that exists today)
Sharlin
I’m not so sure about that part either, although ethnographic museums certainly have a history of, well, not being exactly respectful – or factually accurate – of the cultures they exhibit. Plus, of course, the BM is not a great example of capitalism, being free of charge to visit! I just included the quote because I found it while googling what Joyce’s exact phrasing in DE is and thought it gave interesting context.
torginus
While Disco Elysium gets a pass for it as it's meant primarily as an entertainment product (and the ridiculousness of the sentence might serve as a parody of the idea, which would be incredibly on brand for the game), I've found Mark Fisher's analysis in Capitalist Realism to be incredibly surface level and either wrong, or so vague, as to be meaningless, and it revolves around Fisher's obession with pop culture, and failure to distinguish between images of the thing and the thing itself.
Obviously dyeing ones hair green does not constitute a meaningful attempt to subvert capitalism. In order to combat capitalism, one must first decide what capitalism actually is, what's actually bad about it and how to combat it.
Let's say the evil of capitalism is that it allows an incredible concentration of capital, therefore the enemy are the rich, and the solution is to raise social support for taxing them. Wearing a t-shirt saying 'tax the rich' is a hilariously inept mode of delivering said message in an impactful way, and serves more of a low-effort consumerist way of supporting the good cause, rather than geniune activism. Yet it can't be dismissed entirely.
If someone wrote a book on why the rich must be taxed, and said book became popular and influential, and influenced the tax policy in the end, you can't say capitalism won in the end, because people paid money for the book, or the author is a hypocrite because he got rich off of royalties.
As for the bit about the British Museum, it's utterly nonsensical - what does a state's military dragging away cultural artifacts by force, and displaying it in a state institution have to do with capitalism?
wfewras
My understanding is that most people who dislike capitalism dislike multiple features of it, features that are not downstream of one single variable to be optimized.
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.
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ashoeafoot
I have yet to see cooperations integrating radical islam.
Levitz
I can get amazon to deliver a burqa to my door within the week, more than 40 colors to choose from.
emchammer
Memri TV
drdrek
Firstly, there are many tiny subcultures that by definition you will not know about if you are not part of them. Secondly, I think that there is a hidden assumption in western audience that sub\counter culture are universally good, So when we see negative ones they do not register as counter cultures. The Man-o-sphere, N-th level gender advocates, Fascists, National Purity, Marxists, Libertarians. If anything there is so much fragmentation that we have fractured to endless stream of sub cultures that can no longer talk to each other. There is no longer any cultural center to even deviate from when everyone lives in a personalized media landscape.
forgetfreeman
What's wild to me is Stephenson nailed this potential threat back in 1995. There's a tight couple paragraphs in Diamond Age that rather presciently detailed the shit outcomes expected from a fractured media landscape.
brodouevencode
I started to downvote this comment but when you finished with
> There is no longer any cultural center to even deviate from when everyone lives in a personalized media landscape.
I realized you hit the nail no the head. Everyone needs to feel special in their own little world. As far as I can tell this is not turning out to be a good thing. Humans are social creatures: we must learn to cohabitate without denigrating one another. The personalized media landscape has done nothing but lead to fracturing.
pbronez
I think this is the crux of the matter. We lack a baseline cultural context. Turns out you miss it when it's gone.
zeroCalories
Many of these subcultures are almost fully compromised by commodification. There aren't serious Marxist or Libertarian movements in the U.S, despite there being a seemingly endless stream of loser influencers for these movements. The only exception might be fascism, but these movements have also been compromised by corporate interests. The reason is because people in these subcultures don't actually want or care for them, they're just in it for the entertainment. Political hobbyism. Their favorite pundit feeds them culture war slop and lazy analysis to keep the ad revenue flowing.
GuinansEyebrows
More or less the idea of recuperation, described in The Society Of The Spectacle by Guy Debord: https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Recuperation_(politics)
detourdog
Dumpster diving is one of those sub-cultures that is hard to commodify. One of my kids prefers the ethics of dumpster diving. What a privilege.
brendoelfrendo
Dumpster diving specifically, maybe not, but thrifting and second-hand clothes definitely were. When thrifting was popular among the early hipsters, American Apparel would send buyers to thrift stores to gut them of all the best deals so they could offer curated collections of second-hand clothes at a steep markup. Companies like Urban Outfitters would send designers to Williamsburg parties to see what people were wearing so that they could start manufacturing knock-offs immediately. The hipster subculture is an odd one, itself a product of poor urban artists wearing and doing what they could afford being co-opted by college-educated urban Millennials trying to reject conventional symbols of elitism and instead crafting more "authentic" snobbery on the back of traditional working-class aesthetics. But if it had any potential to mean anything, it was murdered in the crib by those who cashed in on a demand for an aesthetic and divorced it from its meaning, which is the very thing that the early hipsters were rebelling against.
MacsHeadroom
I just tested an app that let's you pay $3.99 to get a bag of food about to go in the dumpster: https://www.toogoodtogo.com/
4k93n2
they should set fake dumpsters around the place (refrigerated obviously) where people can go and pick up this food while also getting the authentic dumpster diving experience
bradstewart
Is this really the same thing though? My family uses that app pretty regularly, and for us at least, it stops us from going out to restaurant or something instead.
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.
detourdog
I guess I was wrong. What a world .
RiverCrochet
Someone, somewhere out there is selling designer or artisanal-crafted dumpster diving shoes "for the very best comfort and agility during your homebrew solid-waste recovery activities."
moomin
U2 literally employ a stylist who buys their clothes from second hand clothes markets. An incredibly expensive way of supporting a “no consumption” aesthetic.
protonbob
They are still consuming less natural resources and someone is sharing in their wealth. I don't see the problem here.
heavenlyblue
I was following this guy on instagram that makes the most amazing dumpster miniatures. Together with miniature trash that you can put in and out fo the dumpster.
lupusreal
Somehow I'm not even surprised. Train watching/spotting and train miniature making are both popular with overlapping communities, and apparently there is a smaller but still extant community of people who are big fans of garbage trucks in the way that others are with trains. Dumpsters seems like a natural extension of that.
Incidentally, train fandom is definitely commodified, but I think not to the consternation or detriment of those into trains. I wonder why some subcultures are at odds with commercialization of their interests while others are at peace with it.
andyjohnson0
Just needs miniature dumpster diver figures and the commoditisation is complete
sitkack
I was a pretty avid dumpster diver 15-20 years ago. Lots of yuppies were very interested, I toyed with some performance art in my head about having high end dumpster diving coaching for the affluent dumpster-curious.
I did take some new people on cleaner, more mellow excursions, they absolutely loved it.
This is what makes capitalism so insidious, it coöpts our very reality. It is an amazingly persistent mind virus.
detourdog
I think it might not be capitalism alone that co-opts reality. Social structures of all kinds use words to co-opt reality into a coherent story.
jabotram987
The Rebel by Albert Camus is excellent.
Subculture is an act of rebellion.
If you want to go down a big philosophical rabbit hole it is worth the read.
bloomingkales
Well let me throw stuff into the fire:
The only real subculture is addiction, those people literally die in that culture.
Steve Albini captured this perfectly in an essay to The Baffler called "Commodify your Dissent". I highly recommend it, as it described the commodification of subculture that started in the 80's and really swallowed everything in the 1990's (in the USA at least);
Here's the book:
https://store.thebaffler.com/products/commodify-your-dissent
One of his examples is that music and clothing companies realized there was a market for things like T-Shirts with Anarchy symbols on them. This stuff didn't exist at scale in the 1970's, you needed to know someone with a silk screen, or live in a city like Chicago or San Fran that had the first wave of non-conformists. But 30 years later you could walk into a mall and come out looking like you had a personality even though you just bought it.
What's really funny, watch "Dogtown and Z-boys", a movie about the rise of skateboarding with lots of footage from the 1970's. The first "tricks" they do will make you say, "What? Where's the trick? He just bounced on his board", and then compare it with today's batshit insane achievements. Skateboarding was peak commodified in the late 1980's (Thrasher magazine helped) early 1990's, but in the 1960's it was ... a simpler time and the outcasts looked like normal kids having fun compared to today.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dogtown_and_Z-Boys
You can see how something goes from a "weird kid activity" to "every kid does it".
Like green mohawks on toddlers in the early 2000's. Edgy in 1970's, preschool in 2010.
Man, I'm showing my age. :|