Punk is dead and so are we

Pithily put. I can definitely attest that this is my plan and the plans of a few others I know. Home baked bread and sour dough starter feel pretty anti-corporate to me.

That said, I do recognise that going off grid requires heavy machinery and tools that are produced by the biggest of corporations... but somehow Milwaukee tools seems less evil than Nike, because Milwaukee is selling you just tools, versus an identity, a brand, a value system etc.

Xerox machines were prominently used to create flyers for shows and distribute zines. Cassette tapes were copied and passed around to anyone who wanted one. VHS was used to record shows and distribute other media. Lowered cost for TV transmission meant not only punk was a topic that could be seen on TV but that local access shows could be used to disseminate media further.

"Punk" is tied to the aesthetics of brightly colored hair, Mohawks, patches on jackets, jack boots etc. which coerces anyone who makes claims of being punk in the modern era into a anachronistic pastiche of what punk was in the late 1970s or early 1980s, with washed out "xerox effect" flyers or physical zines. Aesthetics aside, punk was primarily about a DIY ethos of using whatever tools were available to create art, discuss politics or create a scene.

The modern day equivalent exists, we just don't call it "punk" because it doesn't have the aesthetics attached. You want to know what modern day punk-rock looks like? It's not emulating some juvenile interpretation of Meditations, it's standing up Mastodon social networks, using Nostr, advocating for the freedom of Julian Assange, creating custom AI models that diagnose breast cancer, pushing libre/free/open source, creating art installations with custom electronics, and on and on.

There's one aspect of punk, not the whole aspect but one splinter faction, that was defeatist and pretty much dead on arrival. I only skimmed the article but that's the vein of punk rock the article seems to be channeling. Any movement that positions itself as a rejection of culture is doomed to fail, either because it fizzles out or because it becomes incorporated. The measure shouldn't be how contrary a movement is, it should be how it's trying to shape culture for the better.

By definition, you cannot have popular counterculture, as it just becomes "the culture."

However, most of the capital assets of culture promotion are also tied to popularity (e.g. mass-market media publishing, advertising). Denied access, counterculture exists in the woods, but most people don't know.

Which is why you see truer counterculture move closer to popular culture when those assets are (usually temporarily) democratized during technological shifts (e.g. the 1960s and 1990s).

But hey, maybe I just miss zines...

Even approaching 60 years old I am still doing the same kind of searching. It's not a fashion for me, I don't wear it on my sleeve. But perhaps even because I am older, I am increasingly unhappy with the bed that was already made for me when I was born.

So often I find myself wondering (sometimes aloud), "How did the world get to the way it is now? If you were to design, plan a society you would never have made it as complicated as this."

It's as though we begrudgingly go along with it because what else can you do? I think when you're young you try to fight it, and therein lies the punk spirit. But you eventually muster out of the revolution and, tired of tilting against windmills, you instead try to make it work for you.

Regardless, I still don't like it and still try to envision what changes would make the world a better place.