Against American Diner Gothic
is america "weirding" or did we just come up with a new name for an old type?
The discourse around “American Diner Gothic” has mostly been personal observations about the author, his dating life, his class position, his motivations. None of that is very interesting or productive. What is interesting is the subcultural argument, because that’s where the essay makes its strongest claims—and where it gets something important wrong about the history of alternative culture in America.
“American Diner Gothic,” published in The New Atlantis and newly viral on X, coins a term for what author Robert Mariani sees as a new American archetype: the “dinergoth.”
Diner for provincialism, goth as (his word) “lazy shorthand” for alternative aesthetics. Mariani — as always — has a way with words. I remember, with fondness, when he shared with me the name of his podcast, “The Joe Rogan Experience 2.”
Anyway, argument is that economic stagnation killed upward mobility for an entire generation, regional culture died at the same time, and internet-native subculture flooded into the void. The result is a new type: the pierced-up, anime-watching, gender-fluid, neurodivergent, downwardly mobile young person in middle America, someone he says is “as distinctive as the organization man or the valley girl once were.”
He backs this up with real stats: half of 18-to-29-year-olds are living with their parents. Gen Z homeownership at 27 is 33 percent, compared to 41 percent for Boomers at the same age. Forty-two percent of Gen Z watches anime weekly; only 25 percent follows the NFL. Regional accents are dying. Geographic mobility is at its lowest rate since the Census started tracking it. What was once a bunch of separate subcultures — goth, anime fan, queer, gamer, neurodivergent — has collapsed into a more ambient cultural register. On that point, he’s mostly right.
He’s also right the Internet has played a significant role in re-shaping some of these subcultures. But what isn’t real is the novelty.
There is an unstated assumption running through the essay — or at least through the conversation around it — that these interests and identities originated somewhere cosmopolitan and migrated outward into the provinces as regional culture died. This is wrong, or at least badly overstated. Anime fandom, goth, queerness, neopaganism, “neurodivergent” identities: these were never exclusively coastal phenomena, and their mass base was always suburban and exurban. They did not arrive in the same places Mariani describes; they grew up there.
But I want to be fair to what Mariani is doing, because it’s more ambitious than the backlash gives him credit for. There’s real insight here. The data is solid. The observation that formerly separate subcultures have blended into something more ambient and less defined is mostly right. It’s also true, and important, that the internet helped kids give names to how they were feeling without the vital information that how they were feeling was fleeting because they were 13. The easy aestheticization of angst, above and beyond what you might get from TV or zines, made it even more attractive. How many of us modeled our angst after stuff we saw online?
What Mariani is describing is not the emergence of a new type, but a change in scale and visibility. Platforms collapsed distinct subcultures into a single feed, flattening boundaries that once mattered. What looks like a new archetype is, in many cases, an old one made ambient.
I grew up in South Florida. I came of age in the sprawl of Broward and Palm Beach County, along six-lane roads lined with identical shopping plazas, each one anchored by a Publix. The neighborhoods have names like The Hamptons or Broken Sound, names that gesture at leisure and arrival, and what they contain is either McMansions so far out of your price range as to be dizzying, or, more likely, concrete-block houses, a lanai facing a canal, and a school your realtor assured your parents was excellent. Everything was built fast and all at once, whole zip codes raised out of nothing in a few years during the ‘80s boom, and by the time I got there in 1996 the gulf between the haves and have-nots was miserably, uncomfortably obvious.
South Florida is one of those places where extreme wealth and poverty exist on the same street, albeit separated by a gate and a guardhouse and alligators who won’t hesitate to eat your toddler.
On one side, the gated enclaves with country clubs and artificial lakes and landscaping that costs more per month than some people’s rent. On the other, the older subdivisions where families double up in two-bedroom apartments and the elementary school has a cop in the hallway. My mother spent my whole childhood trying to shield me from the latter. But the thing about South Florida is that the poor kids and the rich kids shared the same geography of decline — the “place without places” — and the decline was already well underway before the internet had anything to do with it.
South Florida always had the ambience of downward mobility, and it looked the same whether you wore a Korn shirt or Lacoste.
In Florida, there was always the “alt” kid from a rough home — white, Latino, Jewish, whatever. You could identify them by kindergarten. In my generation, the weird one whose mom let them listen to Eminem, at the time genuinely scandalous, or watch Freddy Krueger movies or Jerry Springer, at the time genuinely taboo-breaking. Or maybe their mom wasn’t around enough to stop them. The kid with the anime shirt when anime in 2004 was rare enough that owning a Naruto figurine was a social statement. The girl with the cat ears. You always knew these kids. If you went to a prep school like Pine Crest or St. Andrews, or even one of the better public schools, your parents didn’t want you hanging out with them.
Your parents worried because these kids had the problems of downward mobility. The parent who was never there or a sketchy stepdad with tattoos and a blue-collar job. The house that smelled like cigarettes, or like nothing, because nobody cooked and Burger King was the law of the land. And you were drawn to them anyway, because they were interesting, because they liked the things you liked, because they were free, and that freedom was magnetic. Maybe you’d end up at their house after school and something about the place would feel both thrilling and wrong: you got to drink Smirnoff Ice or smoke weed, the rooms were empty, the ever-present hum of a ceiling fan pushing around air that was too dry.
Your curiosities, because you were 8 or 14 or 16 or even 21, visiting home from college, were things like: where are these kids buying the cat ears? Where did they find that choker? How do they know about Inuyasha? It turned out they were going to the Hot Topic at the far-away mall, the one that was considered the “trashy” one. Hot Topic opened in 1989. The founder was from Alton, Iowa, and his whole business model was to bring downtown alternative culture to suburban mall kids who would never see downtown. By 2005, Hot Topic was making almost a billion dollars a year. This was only briefly an urban thing, and it was an urban thing before Rob and I were born. What was ultimately mainstreamed was specifically suburban and exurban. The infrastructure for distributing alt identity to provincial America predates the commercial internet. It’s a chain store that opened when the Berlin Wall fell.
This type has been recognizable for almost thirty years, probably longer. The Craft came out in 1996. Its characters are outcast girls at a suburban school; one lives in a trailer park with an abusive stepfather and an alcoholic mother. They find power through fringe culture because legitimate paths are closed. That movie didn’t invent something new. It worked because it depicted something audiences already recognized.
John Robb’s The Art of Darkness, the most thorough history of goth as a subculture, traces how goth emerged from suburbs and satellite towns, places that were, as he puts it, “on the edge, on the outside looking in.” Many of the original goths weren’t kids in big cities — they were kids in forgotten places, finding each other through record stores and shows and word of mouth. (I’d be remiss if I didn’t also say that the ones in big cities were also, well, forgotten kids.)
The West Memphis Three is an extreme case, but it makes the pattern visible. Damien Echols was eighteen, living in a trailer park in Marion, Arkansas, one of the poorest areas in the country. He wore all black, read Anne Rice and Stephen King, identified as a Wiccan. Local authorities read that as evidence of danger. When three boys were murdered in 1993, Echols became the primary suspect. There was no physical evidence. His taste, his affect, his interests were treated as proof. He was sentenced to death and spent eighteen years on death row before DNA evidence excluded all three defendants.
The point is not that Mariani is doing this. It should go without saying! But this type has long been in exactly the places he treats as newly encountering it.
Alt kids are the social fabric of the most economically depressed, culturally conservative corners of America and have been for a very long time.
Even the internet part of this story is older than Mariani suggests. Before Discord there was Tumblr and before Tumblr there was LiveJournal. As far back as the late 1980s, Usenet newsgroups like alt.goth were already gathering the same kind of person: the misfit in a rural town, looking for someone else like them. Earlier still, BBSes and zines served the same function.
I’m repeating myself here, but the internet didn’t create this type. It gave it continuity.
I wrote about one aspect of the online dimension in my piece “Adam Lanza Fan Art” for Tablet, which traced how small, insular communities migrated across platforms over time. The shift to Discord matters, Mariani’s not wrong—private, persistent, role-based, pseudonymous spaces create different social dynamics than forums or subreddits or even locked LiveJournal groups.
This is what’s new about the 2020s: the ecosystem and the volume, not the people.
Forty-two percent of Gen Z watching anime weekly is a genuinely different scale from the handful of kids at my school who knew what Cowboy Bebop was in 2003. The convergence of formerly separate subcultures into a single ambient register, facilitated by feeds that don’t respect genre boundaries, is real and worth analyzing. But that’s a change in environment, not in kind.
And the wheels have been in motion for a long time, even with this concession in mind. The very kids Mariani describes are the descendants of emo kids, and emo kids were the descendants of mall goths, and mall goths were the descendants of the kids in black in forgotten towns. I’m simplifying here — of course — but you grok what I mean.
What’s significant about emo is that it already crystallized much of what we now associate with the 2020s: gender fluidity, medicalized identity, fandom as organizing principle, confessional performance, the commercialization of subcultural pain. All of it was present in the malls and suburbs of America by the early 2000s.
The same is true of the occultism, which as I’ve written before, is not exactly an elite phenomenon. There are exceptions, sure. But it’s kind of like saying heroin is an elite phenomenon.
I have spent a lot of time around Walmart Wiccans. This is not a term I’m using to be cruel or dismissive. It’s how many of them describe themselves.
Neopagans and Satanists in America tend to be low-income, often from rural or exurban areas, and many come out of evangelical households. There have been studies about this, but the tl;dr is that charismatic belief doesn’t disappear when the doctrine does; it gets redirected. (Chris Partridge’s work on “occulture” is a good, though incomplete, starting point.) The girl who spoke in tongues at youth group is now reading tarot at Elysium. The boy who was slain in the spirit invoked the Horned God at PantheaCon (PBUH).
This doesn’t happen in Brooklyn. It happens in strip malls, suburbs, rural towns. It happens in San Jose.
Here comes the interesting part — neurodivergence and queerness.
Before ADHD — to name just one label — was an identity it was a diagnosis, and before it was a meaningful diagnostic category, it was a note sent home from school. The kids who got put on Ritalin in the ‘90s were disproportionately working-class boys at “bad” schools where the fastest way to deal with a kid who couldn’t sit still was to medicate him. This was not happening at Dalton, at least not at first. It was happening in places where class sizes were too large, counselors were shared between three schools, and the parents didn’t have the resources or the knowledge to push back on a teacher who said their kid needed to be on something. What’s interesting is that CDC data still shows that children below the federal poverty line are significantly more likely to be diagnosed with ADHD than kids above it. What changed is that those kids grew up, found each other online, and reframed the diagnosis as an identity. There’s a story here, and I think an interesting one, but not one I have the time to tell right now.
The gender stuff has a similar history, though it’s harder to talk about because the current conversation is so polarized. But if you spent time in working-class or poor communities in the ‘90s and 2000s, you saw gender nonconformity everywhere. The butch girl, the effeminate boy, the kid who didn’t fit and got beaten up for it at the bus stop: these were working-class realities long before anyone had a pronoun pin. Again, I’m simplifying, condensing, so and so forth — there’s a long, colorful, important, complex history here, but these are the highlights. (Part of the reason I know this is because I’ve always had an affinity for lesbian aesthetics, and it is fucking hard to find in wealthy areas.)
The part I want to get across is that the direction of cultural flow is the opposite of what people assume. These identities didn’t trickle down from liberal arts colleges into the provinces. They were taken up from below. This is capitalism’s never-ending search for authenticity. Please excuse the undergrad essay quality of what I just wrote, and what I’m continuing to write.
Once the professional class shifted its governing value from conformity to self-expression — a shift that took roughly forty years — it created an inexhaustible demand for cultural materials perceived as genuine and outside the mainstream.1 Working-class subcultures are the primary source of those materials, because their cultural forms arise from experience rather than affinity (consumer choice).
What makes Mariani’s essay frustrating is how close it gets to getting it. He acknowledges that “mallgoth aesthetics become Walmart defaults.” He knows Hot Topic scaled this culture. But he treats a change in scale as a change in kind, as though moving from niche to mainstream produces a new species of person. It doesn’t!
This is where the essay reveals more about the observer than the observed. The dinergoth becomes interesting because of her distance from his world. He writes about simplicity, lack of guile, a low-stakes way of being. This is a familiar move in writing about class: mistaking distance for innocence, reading someone else’s constraints as freedom.
Anyway, here’s my opinion on the TNA piece (a publication I should say I support and love and have indeed even written for myself).
The dinergoth is not a new American type. She’s as old as the trailer park, the mall food court, the occult listserv, the kid who dressed weird in a town that didn’t have room for it. I wonder if we even have room for it now — not everyone is a “dinergoth,” after all, and there are other axes about the type to write about… Roblox, 764, politics, how this is or isn’t in dialogue with the diffuse “wigger” aesthetic of the early 00s…
My son is now jumping on me, literally, so until next time, Deeists.
On X, people have been bringing up Insane Clown Posse. The comparison is tempting, but it misses the point. Juggalos built a distinct, cohesive subculture with its own institutions and identity. The people Mariani describe are not cohesive in that way.
love everything about this. there's a whole 'nother arc to the anime side and how it appeared in the states (spoiler alert: more class disparity!)
sci-fi conventions of the 80s and 90s were hugely influential in ways that aren't readily apparent because they were so niche, but the cat ears and devil horns didn't start at Hot Topic or in the suburbs. they started at con.
there is also a lot to be said about the massive toll for undiagnosed CPTSD/neurodivergent boomer parents of the 90s who had their worlds turned inside out by predatory credit cards and meeting the internet after their brains lost significant plasticity. My father made six figures a year in the nineties but I was an outcast from day one due to the psychological instability at home despite having a "nice" home and family. he lives in poverty now having never recovered from the psychology of debtors hell.
Bravo, and thank you. saving to read again.
wonderful! i grew up in the South, and myself and many of my friends would have fallen into these categories. we also got the hell beaten out of us quite regularly. do you think, maybe, the essay might be pointing towards what seems like a larger acceptance, facilitated by the ubiquity of the internet, as these being somewhat culturally legitimized ways of being?