But it does happen in Brooklyn. I know because I lived there for years. There are 3 million people there including some “diner goths.”
A lot of middle Americans end up in Brooklyn to not be a hick. I mean why else would you live there?
The blending together of various alt subcultures is I think tied to the economic dilapidation of America. It’s the pop fashion equivalent of the Super Wal-Mart boom of the 90s being replaced by the Dollar General boom of the 10s. Lower budgets all around.
This is such a fascinating piece (and I'm going to check out the New Atlantis piece soon, too). I've had a front-row seat to these cultural shifts for almost 20 years as an adjunct college instructor at a media arts college in downtown Chicago. (Not the School of the Art Institute, whose students are wealthier; my school draws from across the Midwestern middle- and lower-middle classes.) The school has always been very "hip," and when I started in 2008, it was peak indie sleaze, with lots of students dropping out to join bands or make money in creative industries. And then came the social justice years (2014-2022), which were supremely disorienting and annoying. And slowly, over the past, I don't know, 4 years, the dominant aesthetic on campus is: anime-watching, amorphous-bodied, transhuman, skittish, socially-awkward (almost as an affect?), pajama-wearing, k-pop listening, stuffed animals hooked onto backpacks, etc., etc I'm guessing 50% of the student body is like this. In the past, there were distinct subcultures that were holdovers from the 90s. But the idea of a "subculture" is totally gone, a foreign concept to young people (and I think they kind of need something to belong to, sadly). I'm a Xillennial, and the Xer in me sees them as pathetic in their helplessness and constant demand for accommodation from bureaucratic structures. I stay somewhat up to date, but it's been hard to see where these kids are coming from--your piece helps! Give me a more empathetic perspective. We still get a few international students, and they are very confused by the Americans, so from my perspective, this seems to be a very American phenomenon. For example, last semester I had a Turkish woman and a Dutch guy (film majors) in a class, and they were both very, very confused (and annoyed) by their American peers.
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?
i'm not really sure, bc it's like, what about "cookie monster pajama pants" wiggers? for lack of a better term, i think that one might be offensive(?). i think there's always been a sort of "alt" expression in these circles and it just kind of changes as the trends change. another thing i neglected to mention was my first exposure to kink certainly was not wealthy people. the underground is not really PMC. showing my age here...
you’re definitely right about that, but i do see a change when i go back home in the way “alt” people are treated by the (i hate this term) “normies.” it does seem in someway more comprehensible, at least, if not necessarily more accepted. but that could just be me being older and seeing things more clearly and not having a chip on my shoulder about it anymore
Your response to Mariani deserves to go very far indeed (I believe Jo Westerman, Scott Litts, or someone else adjacent had a role in popularising the dinergoth term also although I could be wildly off-base. It's a decent and well-coined neologism). Part of the original essay I probably agreed with more than you centred is the importance of economics (I'd still center the Great Recession as a vector for reshuffling the subcultural deck), but Mariani doesn't hone in on a particular event beyond stagnation and post-coronavirus malaise. Your piece's argument certainly lines up with the flat-for-15 years Hot Topic store numbers (interest in these originated in a bad attempt by me to find a proxy for the decline of emo rock and to a larger extent guitar music generally around the recession partially in response to the Billy Corgan remarks but for deeper reasons also......)
The choice of Portland as a hotspot for the essay was sort of jarring. Obviously it's based on his personal experience, but it's not anywhere close to the places he is evoking spiritually elsewhere, a Weird geographical description slight. If a place can be a character, a sort of almost accidental miscasting that then has to be corrected in order to work, in the same way Hamlets are almost always aged younger because he behaves more adolescent-coded than Shakespeare's original age for him. I also think the boundaries of alt/mainstream in the original article are rather sloppy. Everyone can agree the NFL is mainstream, but most "gamer type" fandom is also the same. I could sniff the reek of a general fear of androgyny as supposedly a priori deviant behind much of the article. The "online lottery" stuff has been cited as a much more widespread national phenomenon by Kyla Scanlon as certainly encompassing crypto and the like (not just the creator economy), but that and generally stereotypically gym bro-coded stuff was excluded from this macabre tale of a new "soulless" landscape. Perhaps the writer actually believes in some of the moral distinctions he alleges used to exist, but maybe this is leading to some of the blindness/faux sense of this as novel you describe.
Mariani's closure with what can only be described as a "Nick Land guitar riff" ("desacralizes local America through the homogeneous efficiency-machine of national private equity, and everything flattens. Gen Z is disinherited by Boomer policy that culminates but never crests, rationing the good life in generational warfare. Regional accents and identities and cultures are vanishing. Liquid Internet flows.....), all inspiration uncredited, of course, is enjoyable in the same way new bands in my favourite genres can be appreciated even if they are basically expies or tribute acts. This does not, however, make them original or objectively high-quality
Francis Fukuyama predicted the Ritalin-class resentment in his book on treanshumanism I've been closely reading since January as part of a general analysis of his output.
Much more to say here but I'll leave it at that for now.......
agree there's an economic dimension (and admittedly, was thinking of '08 through much of this) i didn't touch on much. honestly, it could be a book, maybe written by someone like w. david marx. maybe written by mariani! there's so much here. and there's also con culture, too, which i only hint at with a pic from pantheacon. my best guess is this is a story that really starts in the 1970s, which is when you see the proliferation of identities like otherkin begin, and again, worth noting, none of these things are rich kid quirks. i was and am a rich kid-- i wasn't ALLOWED to be queer or alt. like, it was the done thing until the 2010s.
agree re: portland, i cut something i wrote about that bc it was too snarky, and i wondered if it counted the way austin counts- like, you come to austin from georgetown or cedar park. you come to portland from an exurb.
Strongly disagree rich kids are not allowed to be queer or alt. I know plenty of ppl who attended private schools in NYC and went on to dual Ivy education who are both.
1960s “Counterculture” from the start was an expression of privilege since they were too rich/educated to be drafted.
it does seem like a "Target not Walmart" thing though, which itself is meaningless vs the real wealth chasms in US society but does (per linked tweet on Tumblr anglophilia) mean these are kids of parents who vote D not R and take perhaps too self-flatteringly the superiority of Yookay box sets vs network reality TV https://x.com/bing_guan/status/2034771912979615900
what seems like a target not walmart? good distinction, btw. i would be curious for like a real sociology of "alt" kids from D households vs. R vs. multi-genreational alt (anarchists, etc, like madeline pendleton)
"Tumblr users" circa 2013, although maybe to break this out further, one might since have taken the "up-escalator" (platform gentrification) via the Britbox people who seem to blend into BookTok literary/Wuthering Heights-core fiction in more contemporary parlance and stayed at Target or the down-escalator which leads to genre fiction (and manga). Do think both end up D, party is a broad church (radicals are a separate matter; actual multigenerational anarchists seem like a west coast thing, actual multigenerational communists and east coast thing, and the latter especially would be legitimately upper-class in milieu if not income (Columbia professors, think even of Mamdani but beyond that Red Diaper babies))
Fascinating piece; your observations intersect with my own. Specifically, how much of the impulse and the aesthetic are a proletarian reaction against bourgeois/low-church Protestant morality that once defined middle-America.
When did the lower-middle class become high-prole? When his parents divorced and they became persona non-grata at the local Baptist church?
In these rural towns, churches are often the third spaces available. If one doesn't fit in there, be it owing to sexuality or coming from a broken home, or just being off socially, of course one is going to define themself into opposition to it; even unknowingly...
there is definitely an element of only someone who is not evolved *above* low church (by circumstances of birth/upbringing) needing to directly *oppose* it that explains suburban satanism, of course there is a negative theology aspect where the mutual existence both reaffirm each other
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.
if you ever have questions lemme know! my first convention was in 1996, changed my world. there's a huge difference between fan run conventions and the comic con monstrosities tho. fan run cons are the ones who fostered the environments that made the proliferation of anime possible.
they weren't responsible for anime in the states tho, that honor goes to 80s breakdancers.
80s breakdancing and anime? Where can I find out more. I remember going to raves in the early 90s and seeing (mostly Asian) kids wearing masks on the dance floor and doing like hybrid popping/breaking/kung fu dance moves. Was fascinating
the lore can be difficult to find online, I was raised with the knowledge because the trans Black woman who was largely responsible for helping popularize Akira in NYC where it took off used to sing during Dead Dog Filk with my father and eventually stepmom (i have a short post with her artwork if you wanna see)
anywho, start with breakdancing and Kung Fu movies. The Last Dragon happened for a reason, breakdancing is heavily based on 70s martial arts films, and anime tagged along for the ride. which makes total sense when you think about it, Dragon Ball was way too bombastic and out the box for white people in the 80s, we needed someone's permission to appreciate that kind of innovation.
Omg no. There were white kids into Dragonball in the 1980s. Their parents were businesspeople who traveled to Asia and sent their kids to international school there. They had huge collections of Dragonball trading cards displaying the power level of the various characters.
There has been a sizable population of Americans in East Asia for a long time. Overrepresented groups include Jews and Mormons. Very few blacks. The idea that blacks were ahead in bringing any of this to America says more about your personal experience than cross-cultural trends in general.
they're the reason we have anime in the states. unfortunately conventions were largely white back the despite the efforts of women like Abby, so it rapidly became a “white people thing”, which feels like a whole ‘nother series of essays 🫠
The Internet people... Ever since I moved to Berlin, I've come to notice just how much more I'm trying to *fit in*. The alienation in the suburbs just makes it feel like there is no point. In cities though, you see more personal growth in 6 months than in 3 years in the suburbs. Frozen in time.
How did I just write such a similar essay and cue it for tomorrow? Is that All Over Me btw? Best soundtrack ever.
But it does happen in Brooklyn. I know because I lived there for years. There are 3 million people there including some “diner goths.”
A lot of middle Americans end up in Brooklyn to not be a hick. I mean why else would you live there?
The blending together of various alt subcultures is I think tied to the economic dilapidation of America. It’s the pop fashion equivalent of the Super Wal-Mart boom of the 90s being replaced by the Dollar General boom of the 10s. Lower budgets all around.
This is such a fascinating piece (and I'm going to check out the New Atlantis piece soon, too). I've had a front-row seat to these cultural shifts for almost 20 years as an adjunct college instructor at a media arts college in downtown Chicago. (Not the School of the Art Institute, whose students are wealthier; my school draws from across the Midwestern middle- and lower-middle classes.) The school has always been very "hip," and when I started in 2008, it was peak indie sleaze, with lots of students dropping out to join bands or make money in creative industries. And then came the social justice years (2014-2022), which were supremely disorienting and annoying. And slowly, over the past, I don't know, 4 years, the dominant aesthetic on campus is: anime-watching, amorphous-bodied, transhuman, skittish, socially-awkward (almost as an affect?), pajama-wearing, k-pop listening, stuffed animals hooked onto backpacks, etc., etc I'm guessing 50% of the student body is like this. In the past, there were distinct subcultures that were holdovers from the 90s. But the idea of a "subculture" is totally gone, a foreign concept to young people (and I think they kind of need something to belong to, sadly). I'm a Xillennial, and the Xer in me sees them as pathetic in their helplessness and constant demand for accommodation from bureaucratic structures. I stay somewhat up to date, but it's been hard to see where these kids are coming from--your piece helps! Give me a more empathetic perspective. We still get a few international students, and they are very confused by the Americans, so from my perspective, this seems to be a very American phenomenon. For example, last semester I had a Turkish woman and a Dutch guy (film majors) in a class, and they were both very, very confused (and annoyed) by their American peers.
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?
i'm not really sure, bc it's like, what about "cookie monster pajama pants" wiggers? for lack of a better term, i think that one might be offensive(?). i think there's always been a sort of "alt" expression in these circles and it just kind of changes as the trends change. another thing i neglected to mention was my first exposure to kink certainly was not wealthy people. the underground is not really PMC. showing my age here...
you’re definitely right about that, but i do see a change when i go back home in the way “alt” people are treated by the (i hate this term) “normies.” it does seem in someway more comprehensible, at least, if not necessarily more accepted. but that could just be me being older and seeing things more clearly and not having a chip on my shoulder about it anymore
yes, less scary, maybe. it's a big topic, i almost wish i took more time to think about it.
i mean, i do hope you write about this again, when you have time. you’re kind of the best one to do it
thank you
Your response to Mariani deserves to go very far indeed (I believe Jo Westerman, Scott Litts, or someone else adjacent had a role in popularising the dinergoth term also although I could be wildly off-base. It's a decent and well-coined neologism). Part of the original essay I probably agreed with more than you centred is the importance of economics (I'd still center the Great Recession as a vector for reshuffling the subcultural deck), but Mariani doesn't hone in on a particular event beyond stagnation and post-coronavirus malaise. Your piece's argument certainly lines up with the flat-for-15 years Hot Topic store numbers (interest in these originated in a bad attempt by me to find a proxy for the decline of emo rock and to a larger extent guitar music generally around the recession partially in response to the Billy Corgan remarks but for deeper reasons also......)
The choice of Portland as a hotspot for the essay was sort of jarring. Obviously it's based on his personal experience, but it's not anywhere close to the places he is evoking spiritually elsewhere, a Weird geographical description slight. If a place can be a character, a sort of almost accidental miscasting that then has to be corrected in order to work, in the same way Hamlets are almost always aged younger because he behaves more adolescent-coded than Shakespeare's original age for him. I also think the boundaries of alt/mainstream in the original article are rather sloppy. Everyone can agree the NFL is mainstream, but most "gamer type" fandom is also the same. I could sniff the reek of a general fear of androgyny as supposedly a priori deviant behind much of the article. The "online lottery" stuff has been cited as a much more widespread national phenomenon by Kyla Scanlon as certainly encompassing crypto and the like (not just the creator economy), but that and generally stereotypically gym bro-coded stuff was excluded from this macabre tale of a new "soulless" landscape. Perhaps the writer actually believes in some of the moral distinctions he alleges used to exist, but maybe this is leading to some of the blindness/faux sense of this as novel you describe.
Mariani's closure with what can only be described as a "Nick Land guitar riff" ("desacralizes local America through the homogeneous efficiency-machine of national private equity, and everything flattens. Gen Z is disinherited by Boomer policy that culminates but never crests, rationing the good life in generational warfare. Regional accents and identities and cultures are vanishing. Liquid Internet flows.....), all inspiration uncredited, of course, is enjoyable in the same way new bands in my favourite genres can be appreciated even if they are basically expies or tribute acts. This does not, however, make them original or objectively high-quality
Francis Fukuyama predicted the Ritalin-class resentment in his book on treanshumanism I've been closely reading since January as part of a general analysis of his output.
Much more to say here but I'll leave it at that for now.......
agree there's an economic dimension (and admittedly, was thinking of '08 through much of this) i didn't touch on much. honestly, it could be a book, maybe written by someone like w. david marx. maybe written by mariani! there's so much here. and there's also con culture, too, which i only hint at with a pic from pantheacon. my best guess is this is a story that really starts in the 1970s, which is when you see the proliferation of identities like otherkin begin, and again, worth noting, none of these things are rich kid quirks. i was and am a rich kid-- i wasn't ALLOWED to be queer or alt. like, it was the done thing until the 2010s.
agree re: portland, i cut something i wrote about that bc it was too snarky, and i wondered if it counted the way austin counts- like, you come to austin from georgetown or cedar park. you come to portland from an exurb.
Strongly disagree rich kids are not allowed to be queer or alt. I know plenty of ppl who attended private schools in NYC and went on to dual Ivy education who are both.
1960s “Counterculture” from the start was an expression of privilege since they were too rich/educated to be drafted.
it does seem like a "Target not Walmart" thing though, which itself is meaningless vs the real wealth chasms in US society but does (per linked tweet on Tumblr anglophilia) mean these are kids of parents who vote D not R and take perhaps too self-flatteringly the superiority of Yookay box sets vs network reality TV https://x.com/bing_guan/status/2034771912979615900
what seems like a target not walmart? good distinction, btw. i would be curious for like a real sociology of "alt" kids from D households vs. R vs. multi-genreational alt (anarchists, etc, like madeline pendleton)
"Tumblr users" circa 2013, although maybe to break this out further, one might since have taken the "up-escalator" (platform gentrification) via the Britbox people who seem to blend into BookTok literary/Wuthering Heights-core fiction in more contemporary parlance and stayed at Target or the down-escalator which leads to genre fiction (and manga). Do think both end up D, party is a broad church (radicals are a separate matter; actual multigenerational anarchists seem like a west coast thing, actual multigenerational communists and east coast thing, and the latter especially would be legitimately upper-class in milieu if not income (Columbia professors, think even of Mamdani but beyond that Red Diaper babies))
I think Tumblr's a mixed bag, depends on the subtype. Looked up their response to the piece in question btw ..
Fascinating piece; your observations intersect with my own. Specifically, how much of the impulse and the aesthetic are a proletarian reaction against bourgeois/low-church Protestant morality that once defined middle-America.
When did the lower-middle class become high-prole? When his parents divorced and they became persona non-grata at the local Baptist church?
In these rural towns, churches are often the third spaces available. If one doesn't fit in there, be it owing to sexuality or coming from a broken home, or just being off socially, of course one is going to define themself into opposition to it; even unknowingly...
there is definitely an element of only someone who is not evolved *above* low church (by circumstances of birth/upbringing) needing to directly *oppose* it that explains suburban satanism, of course there is a negative theology aspect where the mutual existence both reaffirm each other
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.
yes!! a long time ago I did a thing on furries and learned so much about early con culture/listservs/zines/newsgroups
if you ever have questions lemme know! my first convention was in 1996, changed my world. there's a huge difference between fan run conventions and the comic con monstrosities tho. fan run cons are the ones who fostered the environments that made the proliferation of anime possible.
they weren't responsible for anime in the states tho, that honor goes to 80s breakdancers.
80s breakdancing and anime? Where can I find out more. I remember going to raves in the early 90s and seeing (mostly Asian) kids wearing masks on the dance floor and doing like hybrid popping/breaking/kung fu dance moves. Was fascinating
the lore can be difficult to find online, I was raised with the knowledge because the trans Black woman who was largely responsible for helping popularize Akira in NYC where it took off used to sing during Dead Dog Filk with my father and eventually stepmom (i have a short post with her artwork if you wanna see)
anywho, start with breakdancing and Kung Fu movies. The Last Dragon happened for a reason, breakdancing is heavily based on 70s martial arts films, and anime tagged along for the ride. which makes total sense when you think about it, Dragon Ball was way too bombastic and out the box for white people in the 80s, we needed someone's permission to appreciate that kind of innovation.
Omg no. There were white kids into Dragonball in the 1980s. Their parents were businesspeople who traveled to Asia and sent their kids to international school there. They had huge collections of Dragonball trading cards displaying the power level of the various characters.
There has been a sizable population of Americans in East Asia for a long time. Overrepresented groups include Jews and Mormons. Very few blacks. The idea that blacks were ahead in bringing any of this to America says more about your personal experience than cross-cultural trends in general.
I dont debate in other people's spaces but you are correct, I am speaking about my experience.
thanks for engaging 😊
i actually have another reader who might know more about this. kind of like people thinking black anime fans are a nascent thing.
they're the reason we have anime in the states. unfortunately conventions were largely white back the despite the efforts of women like Abby, so it rapidly became a “white people thing”, which feels like a whole ‘nother series of essays 🫠
I think you're spot on with all of this, well done.
The Internet people... Ever since I moved to Berlin, I've come to notice just how much more I'm trying to *fit in*. The alienation in the suburbs just makes it feel like there is no point. In cities though, you see more personal growth in 6 months than in 3 years in the suburbs. Frozen in time.