The Culture You Keep Mourning Is Very Much Alive
It just lives in parallel with the culture you hate
There is this one thing that’s increasingly unclear to me. When we wallow in nostalgia over the “real culture” and “real subcultures,” like the counterculture of the 60s and the skater culture of the 90s, we reminisce about the distinct aesthetics with a decade-long staying power and the community that came with it. We say — this is what’s missing in today’s culture that’s largely defined by social media and microtrends. But did the culture we’ve been mourning for the last ten years really disappear?
For better or for worse, everyone I know has got a political issue they care deeply about, and some sort of nerdy obsession that helps them stay sane and enjoy life even though it feels like things will only get worse. People are running, going to pilates and yoga, joining tennis and picketball clubs, rock climbing and hiking. Some of us wake up early on a Saturday morning to pick up the good tomatoes from the farmers market for a home-cooked dinner with friends. So many people are reading, and yes, many of them got into it through smutty novels that went viral on TikTok, but how many have stayed and ventured into something else? In a sense, fashion has gone mainstream and exhausting, but if you want to nerd out about the history and the technique, there are plenty of people to share that passion with.
There are so many things and communities I want to dive into that sometimes it feels like my brain is going to explode. And yet, my culture and my generation is largely defined by the fast-paced internet culture and social media trends and described as “flat” and “commercial” both by older people and my peers. Why is that?
I tired following the money — my theory is that Big Money and institutional recognition is what makes fringe culture and art go mainstream. Take skating for example. By the time I really got into in 2010s, it was far from the quirky activity it was in the 60s and the fringy subculture it was the 90s. Going to school in SoCal, I sort of had no choice but to get into it. It wasn’t because I watched skating videos on YouTube or hung out in the streets, it was because every kid I knew in college rocked a pair of Vans, Zumiez and PacSun ruled the mall, and carpenter pants and graphic tees were the unofficial uniform of my school. Skating was pop, skating was commercial, but you could also nerd out about it and find a place in the real community that was at the center of it.
Skating declined in the 90s as sales and brand money ran low, the mainstream hype died down, and skating spilled from skateparks into the streets. I wouldn’t be skating in 2016 if the OG pro skaters didn’t stick with it then. But I also wouldn’t be skating without the Pepsi and Red Bull pro skater sponsorships, Nike and Adidas shoe collabs, and Tony Hawk’s Pro Skater video game. Commerce created so many touch points for the normies, like me, to bump into the skating subculture — at the mall, on the internet, and on TV. The youth was building culture, and the commerce took it mainstream.
I speculated that the reason why my generation is so unfairly defined as cultureless is because commerce isn’t intertwined with culture as deeply as it used to be, but I don’t know if that’s true. We’ve got menswear brands emerging out of running clubs, up-and-coming food bloggers flown out to Paris by luxury brands, and music artists plucked out and signed by labels out of grimy bars and clubs. There are smart, hardworking people building brands out of niche communities, and there are smart, curious people working at big brands.
My running theory is that it’s because the mainstream pop culture and the culture we say is missing run in parallel. Pop culture is supposed to be a watered down version of what the cool kids are up to, but it feels like a large subset of the popular culture doesn’t have fringe roots. It starts with the normies and brands who have no idea what’s going on at the edges of youth culture because they can harvest money and attention without it. You can spin up makeup and fashion trends out of thin air and get clicks on it. You can pay pretty young girls with a social media following to get instant eyes on your brand. You can wrap Alfred coffee cups in paper sleeves decked out in your brand name.
All these things aren’t a watered down version of the culture, they are their own culture that exists in the world we escape to. Seeing Vans on every single kid I knew in college signaled the peak of skater culture and its prominence in the mainstream. Seeing every other person in Soho rock Sambas doesn’t say much more about people than “they probably have TikTok on their phone.” It’s a good everyday shoe but it’s not correlated with the rise of skating or soccer (it looks like racker sports and running are on the rise instead), and it sure doesn’t reflect what the fringe kids are into.
Two things can be true at once — we could be putting bows in our hair and ballet flats on our feet because we saw them on TikTok but also nerding out about fashion history and hunting down rare pieces on eBay. And just because one of these things is more visible and easier to understand the origin of than the other, doesn’t mean the other seized to exist.
IN THE MARGINS
I came across this comment about Diaspora Co making a public IG call for angel investors on Feed Me which I think encapsulates the problem a lot of the brands with a social-first marketing strategy are about to run into. You can sneak a video about your product on my feed, you can even convince me to get it, but can you get me to connect with it/come back for more without doing much more than pumping ads and videos?
Watched this Vox video essay about the 60s “psychedelic” look. Reminds me of brands leaning way too heavily into internet speak and memes to “appeal to Gen Z.”
Chuckled at this tweet exchange but also had no idea Wired brought hacker and cypherpunk to the mainstream. Sick!
I finished Filterworld by Kyle Chayka. Incredibly well-written, well-articulated and researched book. If you’re tired of the “algorithm ruined taste” pieces on here, it will likely sound receptive to you, but to be fair, Kyle was years ahead on the whole algorithmic taste thing (or however long it takes to write and publish a book). Everyone is campaigning for Substack to allow some sort of bundle subscriptions but I actually think that maybe it’s good that we have to put a limit on how many newsletters we pay for after reading this book. I watch the movies I have to rent on Apple TV much closer than the ones I watch on streaming platforms. I read the Substacks I pay for cover to cover. I doubt I’d be doing the same if I got five of them for the price of two.
Revisiting the K-HOLE Normcore Report.
Tyshawn jumped over the subway tracks (after jumping over a Ferrari last summer). Culture is alive and well babe!
It used to be that a subculture had to build up a certain attraction "lore" around itself, translated in ever-more elaborate pieces through the eyes of photographers and freelance writers and student filmmakers, before Commerce would look up from its newspaper and see what pieces it could turn into quarterly profits. That took time, usually 3-5 years.
These days, Commerce is much more invasive; it doesn't wait for a culture to grow before it snatches the sapling from the ground and chews it for juice; then casts the husk aside when its few drops are exhausted. The attempts by commercial brands to "steer" an ersatz aesthetic or culture into wide acceptance without that natural accrual of lore are exhausting from the jump; one can almost feel the pitch-deck presentation behind them, and their febrile insistence upon themselves has a de-sensitizing effect upon the targeted "audience".
That's kind of why the mainstream feels so flat; so many conflicting, half-baked "signals" so loud that the sum total is nearly impenetrable "noise".
Even the realest signals can no longer get through, bc you never can know what's organic and what's designed.
It's such an interesting piece; Amartya Sen used to say about London that "cultures cross like ships in the nights". I think this argument is even more true with social networks; what seems to fade is actually very much alive somewhere, but not in your feed.