[HN Gopher] Anything threatening to be a subculture is commodifi...
___________________________________________________________________
Anything threatening to be a subculture is commodified before it
can walk (2014)
Author : delaugust
Score : 142 points
Date : 2025-02-03 12:50 UTC (10 hours ago)
(HTM) web link (www.dezeen.com)
(TXT) w3m dump (www.dezeen.com)
| unwind wrote:
| Meta: this needs a "(2014)" label in the title.
| DiscourseFan wrote:
| Wouldn'tve even noticed otherwise
| grey-area wrote:
| 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.
| hluska wrote:
| If anyone is interested, that song is called Chickenshit
| Conformist. It's on Bedtime for Democracy.
| sporkydistance wrote:
| Yo rocky, watch me pull a massacre outta my pants...
|
| aaaaa-gaaaain????
| 01100011 wrote:
| 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.
| _DeadFred_ wrote:
| You ready for a 2020s rehash of 1990s bro punk?
| Palomides wrote:
| 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 wrote:
| 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.
| s1artibartfast wrote:
| 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.
| selimthegrim wrote:
| Carnival.
| TeMPOraL wrote:
| You mean the traditional Month of Partying? Nah, that's
| been thoroughly commercialized already.
| technofiend wrote:
| 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.
| idle_zealot wrote:
| I... assume this is a joke?
|
| https://cereal.fandom.com/wiki/Chip_the_Wolf
| anal_reactor wrote:
| I thought of furries too
| torginus wrote:
| 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.
| s1artibartfast wrote:
| I think it's important to distinguish between an act and
| a culture. I wholeheartedly agree that individuals can
| act in ways that aren't commodified.
|
| If people like it, there's almost always someone
| packaging it and selling it. Now, I don't think that
| means you can't enjoy playing or listening to music. If
| someone stops listening or playing a genre of music
| because someone is commodifying it, that just means a big
| part of what they enjoyed was the idea of being
| underground, transgressive, or counter cultural for its
| own sake.
|
| Also, some things can be more easily commodified without
| losing authenticity. Gutter punk music doesn't have the
| same impact when sung by a sold-out multi-millionaire.
| Inversely, it doesn't much matter how much money Yo-Yo ma
| has in the bank and that he's a guest at davos.
| bakuninsbart wrote:
| 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.
| bluefirebrand wrote:
| I would argue that Big Tech has successfully
| commercialized FOSS culture simply by using FOSS output
| to build commercial software
|
| Cloud Services like AWS probably would not exist without
| the foundation that FOSS provided
| tsumnia wrote:
| I sort of disagree, as we've seen a significant increase
| in small scope tools like the FlipperZero, Arduinos, and
| Raspberry Pis. Each one has a slew of
| shields/extensions/whatever that subculture calls their
| plug and play option.
|
| That isn't to say the groups are mindless sheep or
| naturally resistant; just pointing out that the space
| does have some commercialization happening.
| finnthehuman wrote:
| The DIY-spirited software scenes were so thoroughly
| commercialized that appealing to their aesthetics is now
| in the past.
|
| FFS, the "Hacker" in "Hacker News" is based on a venture
| capitalist co-opting a rebellious term to convince a
| bunch of impressionable youths that they can have this
| alluring label and that the cool kids software club is
| actually working for his vc firm.
|
| All the subculture has been thoroughly power-washed out
| of any commercial useful corner of their online
| communities. You can encounter more pressure to be a
| milquetoast office-job persona in the open source space
| than your actual office job.
|
| We're in so deep you can't even see how deep we're in.
| bakuninsbart wrote:
| > FFS, the "Hacker" in "Hacker News" is based on a
| venture capitalist co-opting a rebellious term to
| convince a bunch of impressionable youths that they can
| have this alluring label and that the cool kids software
| club is actually working for his vc firm.
|
| Ok, I didn't see the forest for the trees there, which is
| quite funny. But I still get together with friends to
| build stuff for the sake of it, without any intention of
| commercializing the things we build, and there is still a
| very large corpus of FOSS software being maintained by
| people simply because they think it is cool, or because
| they are idealists who want free software to be free.
| finnthehuman wrote:
| I don't see why it would be mutually exclusive. It can be
| the case that a subculture was commoditized AND people
| still enjoy doing the stuff the subculture formed around.
| sneak wrote:
| From Thinkgeek to the BSL to megacorps from the military-
| industrial complex cosplaying rms (Microsoft shipping
| VSCode) while ignoring software freedoms, this seems to
| me to be plainly false.
| torginus wrote:
| Hard disagree - even before the domination of Big Tech,
| the reason open source became the way it is - the
| domination of GNU/Linux - was because of the commercial
| interests of server vendors pushing Linux (a server OS)
| as a product.
|
| It's the same reason Linux has had a limited success in
| other spaces (embedded, mobile, desktop) - as opposed to
| something like Windows, it's poorly engineered for the
| needs of these domains (lack of realtime, good IPC,
| binary compatibility, native audio, graphics capabilities
| etc.). If you think of early 2000s mobile hardware, which
| used to run a variety of mobile OSes, yet Linux was
| incapable of properly supporting this domain. All
| attempts to rally around Linux as a consumer OS in these
| domains failed, because it just wasn't really built for
| that. Yet Linux was powerful enough to suck the air out
| of the room and prevent the emergence of competitors.
|
| (I don't really consider Android Linux.)
| snapcaster wrote:
| Are you kidding me? who owns the site you posted this on?
| boerseth wrote:
| 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.
| s1artibartfast wrote:
| I think it's important to distinguish Acts which
| individuals perform from the culture around those Acts.
|
| Commodification of a subculture is spoken about as if it
| is a binary a purity test but that isn't reflective of
| reality. You can pay $500 to watch some aged punk rockers
| perform in an arena, but that doesn't mean that there
| isn't an illegal Warehouse show going on at the same time
| in the same city.
| kjkjadksj wrote:
| 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 wrote:
| Wildness Survival?
| TeMPOraL wrote:
| 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.
| ndileas wrote:
| 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.
| ajsnigrutin wrote:
| You mean the ones banned by most social media, hard to find on
| google and even harder to find in real-life?
| kjkjadksj wrote:
| Some non commodifiable sub cultures are easy to find in real
| life. E.g. drinking or doing drugs in public.
| spencerflem wrote:
| Oh man, drinking is not the example I'd use
|
| That's big industry
| tsumnia wrote:
| 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.
| notnaut wrote:
| 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.
| robertlagrant wrote:
| How would you define corporatism?
| _DeadFred_ wrote:
| I mean old boy's super racist so that acts like kryptonite to
| repel normies.
| detourdog wrote:
| 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.
| RiverCrochet wrote:
| 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."
| heavenlyblue wrote:
| 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.
| andyjohnson0 wrote:
| Just needs miniature dumpster diver figures and the
| commoditisation is complete
| lupusreal wrote:
| 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.
| moomin wrote:
| 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 wrote:
| They are still consuming less natural resources and someone
| is sharing in their wealth. I don't see the problem here.
| namaria wrote:
| Any demand pull will ultimately increase consumption of
| resources at the end. There's no ethical consumption
| under capitalism. The only thing that works is consuming
| less. Pretending like there is a way to do it only opens
| up avenues for guilty-free consuming.
| bluefirebrand wrote:
| > There's no ethical consumption under capitalism
|
| I've seen this catchphrase thrown around a lot online,
| but I've never seen anyone explain how consumption
| becomes any more ethical under any other system without
| leading to other systemic problems
|
| "Consume less" seems to imply that any consumption is
| unethical by default. If that's the case, then the only
| way to consume ethically is by minimizing consumption
|
| This seems like a reasonable stance, but it leads to
| other problems. Who gets to decide how much is enough?
|
| If each individual decides for themselves, then we
| clearly have a problem because some people will never be
| satisfied. If everyone lets them continue, then they will
| hoard resources for themselves. This is sort of the
| situation we're already in
|
| However, if we have the group (community, society,
| country, whatever) decide "how much is enough", then we
| have to have a group mechanism for making that decision,
| like a council, or government department
|
| Then we need another group mechanism to enforce it,
| police, courts, etc. "Ethical consumption" becomes very
| authoritarian very quickly
|
| If the idea is "We could have ethical consumption if
| people would just consume less" then you don't even have
| a starting point because "people will never just
|
| So feel free to consume less if you think that's more
| ethical. That's what I try and do, myself. But I know
| that I cannot simply expect others to do the same, and I
| also don't really have any interest in policing how much
| others are allowed to have
| namaria wrote:
| Runaway consumption is bad. But it increases profits
| quarter after quarter. You're right, people will not give
| it up. Neither those who want to consume more and more,
| nor those who profit from and foment that cycle.
|
| Consumption under capitalism is therefore a problem,
| because it creates and reinforces rampant consumerism,
| which is destroying the habitat.
|
| We will drive society all the way into the ground before
| we give that up. I understand that. But I will not
| contort my mind into convincing myself it is either
| natural or ok.
| bluefirebrand wrote:
| > Runaway consumption is bad
|
| Right, no disagreement there
|
| I am just not sure I agree that runaway consumption is a
| unique feature of capitalism in particular
|
| I tend to think it's a function of population size and
| average standard of living expectations tending to
| increase over time
| strogonoff wrote:
| Consumption has a bit of a bad rap. In my view,
| perceiving consumption as automatically unethical
| requires some particular interpretation of ethics that
| might not be taking into account human flourishing. Human
| flourishing is generally accompanied by reducing local
| entropy through consumption of energy and resources--
| capitalism or not. It _does_ matter if that is ethical or
| not--whether it causes suffering of living beings,
| whether it is sustainable, etc.--but that is separate
| matter.
|
| In that sense, capitalism is a decent system that does
| not inherently dictate whether consumption is ethical or
| not. You are free to (and should) make ethics part of the
| value. If you like what your neighbourhood bakery makes
| freshly, you buy from them and thus encourage and enable
| them to make more. You benefit, they benefit. They give
| you a good price, but you do not buy more than you need
| (how much bread would a healthy person eat anyway?)
| because your neighbours also enjoy it. If you determine
| that a company is unethical, you vote with your wallet
| and buy from another (and tell your friends). You do your
| best.
|
| What breaks this overall pretty sound logic of "give
| value to people who create value to help them create more
| value" in practice is a bunch of not unrelared to each
| other things like bad actors, information asymmetry
| (usually in favour if producers; in extreme: lying), or
| poor mental well-being. These imperfections lead to
| regulation (not without its own can of worms) and open up
| avenues for, indeed, unethical consumption.
| brendoelfrendo wrote:
| 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.
| sitkack wrote:
| 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 coopts our very
| reality. It is an amazingly persistent mind virus.
| MacsHeadroom wrote:
| 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/
| detourdog wrote:
| I guess I was wrong. What a world .
| bradstewart wrote:
| 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.
| DanielHB wrote:
| There is a whole subculture about being anti social-media
| influencers, with social media influencers and everything.
| agieocean wrote:
| Fascism is only concerned with aesthetic, the substance of a
| culture doesnt matter to them
| PhilipRoman wrote:
| Hardly exclusive to fascism, unless that's your blanket term
| for "bad thing".
| pc86 wrote:
| What does fascism have to do with anything?
| holsta wrote:
| Fascists chase ideals / purity, so put a lot of effort into
| their uniforms, for one.
|
| 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
| pc86 wrote:
| What does any of that have to do with the article?
| p3rls wrote:
| Comrade, such "me no frego" apathy is fascistic.
| pc86 wrote:
| I can't tell if this is a meme or not at this point.
| lardo wrote:
| Mensur scars predate Nazis by a century.
| some_random wrote:
| That's true of literally every single political movement in
| existence.
| agieocean wrote:
| Source?
| some_random wrote:
| Logging off and going outside.
| FrustratedMonky wrote:
| The Peripheral
|
| The biggest problem for me, is after the catastrophe, and
| collapse of everything, the survivors have "won the lottery". But
| the book never really explains how this future turned out 'good'
| for the survivors and not a 'mad max' like dystopia like every
| other post apocalypse story. If there was massive population
| decline, then how are they making all that technology? Is it all
| robots? Who built the robots?.
|
| It was just a big leap from "huge global collapse and there are
| no people left" to "those that are left are really living it up
| in the abundance that is leftover".
| s1artibartfast wrote:
| I think that you can make a pretty good case that global scale
| isnt necessary for modern quality of life, and the world would
| be more efficient with 10 or 1% of the current population.
| Innovation would suffer, but 80 million is sufficient for a
| diversified modern economy.
|
| Natural resources are still the primary constraint on human
| prosperity: food, energy, land, metals, ect. In a depopulated
| world, the average persons labor is the same, but they are
| working with only the best inputs. You might have the same
| number of fishermen per capita, but they are fishing the best
| 1% of fishing grounds without competition. If you drill for
| oil, it is now in the top 1% in terms of ease of extraction. If
| you build a dam for power, you have more site capacity per
| capita. If China had 1% the population, the three gorges dam
| would supply enough power for entire country two times over.
|
| People learn about economies of scale and high school econ, but
| there are also ineconomies of scale. At some point there is no
| more efficiency and gain from increasing the size of your
| widget factory. However, it might be more expensive to import
| power and metal from further and further away
| NoMoreNicksLeft wrote:
| >Innovation would suffer, but 80 million is sufficient for a
| diversified modern economy.
|
| 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.
| s1artibartfast wrote:
| I never said hundreds of percent, that's all your
| imagination. If I were to guess, I would ballpark 25% more
| efficiency if population were 1% and no growth.
|
| I think we are well into the linear and decreasing scale
| for most industries.
|
| How many parallel factories do you think there are around
| the world building tractors. How many independent factories
| making cars and trucks?
|
| Also, consider how much labor is spent on R&D, investment,
| and growth.
|
| I think you are drifting back into innovation when you are
| talking about geniuses.
| FrustratedMonky wrote:
| There are a lot more single threaded supply chain
| factories that you'd think.
|
| When they start falling apart, it all starts falling
| apart. We got a dry run of this in covid with chips. One
| small part of chip making, think some substrate, was in
| short supply, and shut down the automakers
|
| And even the Hurricane that hit NC, took out one of the
| single factories making high end quartz for chips.
| s1artibartfast wrote:
| Chip making is one of the most concentrated industries in
| the world, and in no way representative the whole. Even
| then, a huge amount of the chipmaking industry aside from
| the bleeding edge is parallelized.
|
| Let me ask you a question. How much efficiency do you
| think would be saved with zero population growth and zero
| innovation?
|
| What percent of the world do you think works in Chip
| making? It is tiny.
| FrustratedMonky wrote:
| I think I'm biased from being in manufacturing.
|
| During Covid the lack of even a few types of parts,
| derailed huge projects.
|
| So you could have a project going in worth millions, with
| thousands of parts. But the whole thing gets delayed
| because of a single 100$ part that could not be sourced.
|
| It really seemed stark how the global supply chain could
| just start crumbling. And I was extrapolating to people,
| if we aren't staffing, and those parts aren't being made,
| then the whole thing starts to collapse.
| s1artibartfast wrote:
| That is an entirely separate problem. You are mistaking
| the topic and risks of globalization and supply
| concentration with scale.
|
| Needing a widget from China doesn't mean that it needs to
| come from a mega factory in China and can't be produced
| in a smaller one. All of China shutting down doesn't
| prove it can't be done smaller
| FrustratedMonky wrote:
| Ok.
|
| Guess that is valid differentiation.
|
| Then the only problem is time frame, rate of change.
|
| Can the global supply chain, re-configure itself to only
| run factories where there is still enough population to
| staff.
|
| It would take years to move factories to concentrate
| where there is still people.
|
| And I'd say most disaster scenarios happen a lot faster.
| Then it's Mad Max again. But guess, even in Mad Max there
| was an oil refinery, they had a factory, and some cars
| running. But didn't look sustainable.
| s1artibartfast wrote:
| Sure, transition is a very real problem. If 90% of people
| died overnight, there would mayhem and most of the
| remainder would starve.
|
| The fact that 10% could word doesn't mean all paths from
| A to B are valid. Some are catastrophic. That's the
| current challenge with birthrates. Even slow decreases
| over decades is a huge financial and productive problem.
|
| Like falling out of an airplane. Ground level is
| perfectly safe. It is the transition that kills you.
| FrustratedMonky wrote:
| This was more my understanding. That even with todays
| population slowdown/shrinking, there is already worry that
| we wont be able to staff the jobs to keep society
| functioning. Suddenly you have a factory that makes pumps,
| it can't meet demand, so the factory that makes tractors
| doesn't meet demand, so farmers can't plant. We end up back
| with Oxen pulled plows. It seems that "The Peripheral" kind
| of skipped how they got to the automated economy that
| didn't need humans. Especially after the catastrophes that
| occurred that wiped out the population.
| s1artibartfast wrote:
| If the world lost half it's people, it would be 1970s
| level population with modern technology. I think you and
| the parent poster are underestimating the amount of
| redundancy that exists in most every industry.
|
| Another way to think about it is the USA population is
| 3.5% of the world population and trade (both ways) makes
| up 20% of the USA GDP. If the rest of the world were
| walled off, we wouldn't go back to the stone age.
|
| If everyone else in the world fell over dead and the
| resources were available, the US would be massively
| better off than now.
| NoMoreNicksLeft wrote:
| >If the world lost half it's people, it would be 1970s
| level population with modern technology.
|
| Sure, but with modern technology that they can't easily
| replace or repair. How long does the technology last? Is
| anything we make today made for longevity?
|
| >I think you and the parent poster are underestimating
| the amount of redundancy
|
| Redundancy is inefficient and costs money. We live in a
| world without warehouses, because just-in-time shipping
| is cheaper. We live in a world where every 6 months the
| soda can you get out of the vending machine has a little
| less aluminum in it than half a year ago because someone
| figured out how to shave a bit more off of that without
| it rupturing in transit. There's less redundancy in this
| world than you imagine, because reducing the redundancy
| cut costs and the stock price got a boost a few years
| ago. Why have spare parts on hand, when there will be
| even better parts manufactured next year?
|
| >If the rest of the world were walled off, we wouldn't go
| back to the stone age.
|
| Yeh, we would. It wouldn't happen instantly, but it would
| happen within decades. That would be true even if the
| population reduction were the _only_ problem.
|
| >If everyone else in the world fell over dead and the
| resources were available, the US would be massively
| better off than now.
|
| People *are the resource*. Everything else is just rocks
| in the ground. You can have a million square miles of old
| growth forest, but it's not timber unless there are
| people who can do the lumberjack thing. You can have a
| trillion barrels of oil in the ground 200ft down, but
| it's not fuel and plastic unless there are people to pump
| it out and refine it. So on and so on. People were always
| the resource, and while not all people are effectively
| utilized all the time, the more you have the more
| resources you have. And there's this absurd network
| effect where two people are more than twice as useful as
| one person, and so on, so that when you have truly large
| numbers of people you have absurd amounts of resources.
|
| Quite possibly, the only thing for which this effect
| isn't true is real estate. That's sort of a fixed supply.
| s1artibartfast wrote:
| I couldn't disagree more. We will have to agree to
| disagree.
|
| The logs per person of one team with a million square
| miles to work with is more than 1000 teams working the
| same land.
|
| They get to pick the very best.
| BarryMilo wrote:
| 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.
| namaria wrote:
| 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 wrote:
| 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 wrote:
| 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 wrote:
| 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 wrote:
| > 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 wrote:
| I tried re-reading Brave New World recently. It was too
| depressing how it felt it was describing present times.
| implmntatio wrote:
| 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 wrote:
| 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
| lupusreal wrote:
| Stephenson was one of the first people to work at Blue
| Origin, back when it was more of a "talk about cool space
| shit" club. He left long ago though, around the time it
| started to become a serious rocket company.
| NoMoreNicksLeft wrote:
| 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.
| s1artibartfast wrote:
| 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 wrote:
| Imitation*
| implmntatio wrote:
| +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?
| 01100011 wrote:
| Bruce Sterling?
| zem wrote:
| "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.)
| mindcrime wrote:
| _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.
| BarryMilo wrote:
| 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.
| 01100011 wrote:
| 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).
| flocciput wrote:
| 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.
| snapcaster wrote:
| Man i was so disappointed by hyperion. felt like they didn't
| really go anywhere satisfying with the premise
| marssaxman wrote:
| 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.
| snapcaster wrote:
| You described my journey with the book exactly! glad to
| know i wasn't the only one
| ecshafer wrote:
| 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 wrote:
| 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.
| sporkydistance wrote:
| 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.
| rout39574 wrote:
| 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.."
| foobarchu wrote:
| > 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.
| lupusreal wrote:
| 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.
| zem wrote:
| 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.
| JohnBooty wrote:
| If you read Neuromancer in 1984, it was mind-blowing.
| Same thing with Snow Crash in 1992
|
| So do you like, only enjoy art produced in the last N years?
|
| 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.
| Semaphor wrote:
| Almost all space opera is positive, not depressing. In case you
| are into that.
| pfdietz wrote:
| Well, until you realize how unbelievable the entire genre is.
| Then it's just aggravating. Old man yelling at book "don't
| you realize your tropes are completely stale??"
| Semaphor wrote:
| I highly enjoy it, thank you very much
| pfdietz wrote:
| Sure, that's a state that will persist until it doesn't.
|
| One common barrier to suspension of disbelief is the
| Fermi Problem. A great deal of space opera just ignores
| it, but once you take the argument seriously it ruins
| much of the world building.
|
| If I want to ignore rationality of the world design and
| just read human achievement porn I'll head over to r/HFY.
| philipkglass wrote:
| I thought that you were going to condemn the genre's
| ubiquitous faster-than-light communications/travel. I
| approach space opera as a specialized variant of high
| fantasy, where the usual tropes are as genre-acceptable
| as wizards and ghosts.
| pfdietz wrote:
| That's an external inconsistency, but SF is typically
| allowed one such assumption.
|
| Ignoring the Fermi Argument is an internal inconsistency.
| The world just doesn't work on its own terms.
| 01100011 wrote:
| 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.
| jayd16 wrote:
| 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.
| Sharlin wrote:
| "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 wrote:
| 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.
| icegreentea2 wrote:
| 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.
| bscphil wrote:
| 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 wrote:
| 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)
| _DeadFred_ wrote:
| And lots came from places where the original culture of
| the objects had been replaced and/or was being erased.
| icegreentea2 wrote:
| I don't think the original quote is really a criticism
| (in the sense of "this is bad and must change") of
| museums in itself. It's using museums as an example of
| capitalist realism - the idea that capitalism today is so
| dominant and malleable that it's able to basically
| "corrupt or co-opt" anything, and that we reflexively
| view everything through capitalist lenses.
|
| That even these artifacts that might have once been
| immensely important to the workings of a non-capitalist
| society, now exist dead, entombed within a capitalist
| construct - and as a sibling notes, as literally little
| pieces of capital.
| justonceokay wrote:
| 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 wrote:
| The urns and bowls that were used weren't preserved,
| because they were used. Only the ones no longer used exist
| at all.
| Levitz wrote:
| 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.
| Sharlin wrote:
| 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 wrote:
| 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 wrote:
| 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.
| ashoeafoot wrote:
| I have yet to see cooperations integrating radical islam.
| emchammer wrote:
| Memri TV
| Levitz wrote:
| I can get amazon to deliver a burqa to my door within the
| week, more than 40 colors to choose from.
| drdrek wrote:
| 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.
| brodouevencode wrote:
| 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 wrote:
| I think this is the crux of the matter. We lack a baseline
| cultural context. Turns out you miss it when it's gone.
| forgetfreeman wrote:
| 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.
| klodolph wrote:
| "Capital has the ability to subsume all critiques into itself.
| Even those who would critique capital end up reinforcing it
| instead."
|
| --Joyce Messier, Disco Elysium
|
| Gibson is a concrete example. He fashions critiques of capitalism
| in a book, the book is distilled into the aesthetics of
| cyberpunk, and the cyberpunk aesthetic is repackaged and resold
| to us.
| icegreentea2 wrote:
| Yeah, this is the general effect of "the thing in power", not
| just of capitalism. Capitalism, communism, feudalism/monarchy,
| colonialism. Once something is sufficiently entrenched, even
| resistance to the thing must be done in reference (and in
| context) to the thing being resisted against.
|
| There are many layers to this, but the most "practical" is that
| the very structures and language of the status quo very much
| threatens to infect and limit the scope and form of resistance.
|
| This is literally the idea that NewSpeak took to the logical
| extreme.
|
| Capitalism is perhaps uniquely infectious in how "simple" (and
| therefore flexible) its core tenets are.
| GuinansEyebrows wrote:
| 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)
| sporkydistance wrote:
| 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. :|
| sdwr wrote:
| > "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 wrote:
| > 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 wrote:
| 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.
| thinkingtoilet wrote:
| 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?
| 11101010001100 wrote:
| You are going to let him choose his own hairstyle.
| s1artibartfast wrote:
| Toddlers don't have that level of agency.
| robocat wrote:
| I would say that Toddlers are mostly not given agency.
|
| Toddlers want things and they don't want other things.
| Their parents don't permit much agency, because.
|
| I'm probably agreeing with you but I wasn't sure of your
| implication.
| s1artibartfast wrote:
| I guess what I'm saying is that a 3 year old can
| sometimes pick out their clothes (sometimes they will
| hate the consequences). They can't really commit to long
| term decisions about what hairstyle they will want to
| live with for months, or manage the upkeep of the style
| they pick.
| WillPostForFood wrote:
| Toddlers are 1-3 years old. Huge difference in agency
| between a 1 year old and a 3 year old. 1 year old can't
| dress themselves let alone make choices about dress.
| SecretDreams wrote:
| 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.
| 01100011 wrote:
| 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.
| s1artibartfast wrote:
| 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.
| sporkydistance wrote:
| 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'.
| 52-6F-62 wrote:
| 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...
| kjkjadksj wrote:
| 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_ wrote:
| 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
| lupusreal wrote:
| > _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.
| _DeadFred_ wrote:
| You didn't 'happen to know someone who made t-shirts' if you
| were around the scene. If you went to the skate park
| regularly, Bennie was always there, and Bennie hustled
| struggled by doing things like make t-shirts to support the
| scene. Bennie always had decks/trucks/stickers/t-shirts for
| sale out of the back of his car. If people were working on a
| park or a ramp or something Bennie let everyone know when and
| where. So you couldn't not know Bennie if you regularly were
| around. Hence not knowing Bennie meant you weren't regularly
| around.
| lupusreal wrote:
| Sounds like it was a lot more about where you lived and a
| lot less "whether you had a personality". I was never a
| skater kid and never pretended to be one, but I knew plenty
| and they wore shirts from Kmart because in rural PA kids
| aren't going to have access to the whole "authentic punk
| social infrastructure" or whatever it is that supposedly
| grants kids access to "personality".
| finnthehuman wrote:
| >supposedly grants kids access to "personality".
|
| You have it backwards. The shirt is neither necessary nor
| sufficient. sporkydistance was dogging on poseurs.
| deadfread was explaining why a t-shirt was ever an
| indicator (and even when there's someone handmaking
| shirts for _your thing_ they 're taking as many sales as
| possible).
|
| The shirt validating the identity is a wrong
| interpretation of what was written. But it's also a
| normal perspective these days, one core to social
| criticism this conversation is getting at.
| _DeadFred_ wrote:
| Bennie sells discs at the disc golf course. Bennie is the
| guy who arranges timed skiing races up on the mountain.
| Bennie is just the placeholder of 'if you do this a lot
| locally, you know XYZ who is always around' and hence you
| are 'part of the scene' IE you have actually engaged with
| it on some level. Nowadays that might be substituted with
| 'do you watch XYZ streamer'.
|
| The t-shirt didn't represent having a personality. It
| represented than 'I am around this community enough I
| have at least interacted with Bennie'. Someone wearing a
| Kmart t-shirt saying 'ah did you get that from Bennie'
| would be the exact cred/personality as having a Bennie
| shirt.
| pier25 wrote:
| Capitalism absorbs everything.
|
| Just look at the anarchism symbol. It has been turned into a
| fashion element for edgy teenagers. Even a brand.
|
| https://www.acupuncture1993.com/
| dkarl wrote:
| All that's being "ruined" is people's ability to pretend that
| building identity through access to exclusive cultural groups
| and hard-to-get consumer items represents some kind rarified
| social achievement. Commodifying it punctures their illusion of
| specialness and makes it clear that they don't value their
| culture in itself, they value how it sets them apart from
| putatively lesser people. If capitalism ruins that for them,
| then good.
| rightbyte wrote:
| You might want to have some sort of simple effort filter for
| your subculture. Fashion is a simple one.
| dkarl wrote:
| Then you have a subculture defined by fashion, which might
| be fun for the people in it, but it's not something anyone
| else has any stake in preserving. Nothing of value is lost
| if it disappears.
| _DeadFred_ wrote:
| Cultures have identified themselves with visual cues
| since, well, probably before people were humans.
| pier25 wrote:
| I'm not really arguing about whether something is ruined or
| not.
|
| 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).
| bloomingkales wrote:
| Well let me throw stuff into the fire:
|
| The only real subculture is addiction, those people literally die
| in that culture.
| ranger207 wrote:
| Subcultures only stay subcultures by gatekeeping. Otherwise their
| ideas and fashions spread out and it merely becomes culture. The
| internet made it easier than ever to gatecrash, so it's no
| surprise there's no subcultures left. And of course capitalism
| and consumerism responds to what culture wants
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