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

> "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.

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?

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.

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…

> in the 1960's it was ... a simpler time and the outcasts looked like normal kids having fun compared to today

Seems like some sort of gatekeeping and old-man shaking his fist at youth to me. The overwhelming majority of people skateboarding today are regular kids and young adults who are just in it to have fun. If their techniques are more advanced, its probably because technology has improved and also because they're emulating the things they see professional or otherwise experienced skaters do, but what's the problem with that? They're still having fun, aren't they? That's the point of it all, isn't it?

And buying a shirt means you don't have personality? Is personality all about happening to know a guy who does custom T-shirt printing? What makes one more authentic than the other? Seems like nonsense.

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.

You ready for a 2020s rehash of 1990s bro punk?

If anyone is interested, that song is called Chickenshit Conformist. It’s on Bedtime for Democracy.

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.

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.

> 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.

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.

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.

Even with the now common sci-fi themes I still thought Neuromsncer was a fun read. It's basically the Italian Job or Ocean's 11 and the action of the heist pays off.

Almost all space opera is positive, not depressing. In case you are into that.

+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?

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.

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.

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.

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

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.

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?

I have yet to see cooperations integrating radical islam.

Wouldn’tve even noticed otherwise

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.

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.

I think this is the crux of the matter. We lack a baseline cultural context. Turns out you miss it when it's gone.

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/

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."

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.

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.

Hardly exclusive to fascism, unless that's your blanket term for "bad thing".

What does fascism have to do with anything?

That's true of literally every single political movement in existence.