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Anything threatening to be a subculture is commodified before it can walk (2014)

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Re: Anything threatening to be a subculture is commodified before it can walk (2014)

#81
post #24

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 i…

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.

Re: Anything threatening to be a subculture is commodified before it can walk (2014)

#82

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.

Almost all space opera is positive, not depressing. In case you are into that.

Re: Anything threatening to be a subculture is commodified before it can walk (2014)

#83

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

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.

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.

Re: Anything threatening to be a subculture is commodified before it can walk (2014)

#84
post #50

Earlier quoted context omitted.

They are still consuming less natural resources and someone is sharing in their wealth. I don't see the problem here.

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.

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.

Re: Anything threatening to be a subculture is commodified before it can walk (2014)

#85

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.

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.

Re: Anything threatening to be a subculture is commodified before it can walk (2014)

#86

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…

> "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.

Re: Anything threatening to be a subculture is commodified before it can walk (2014)

#87

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

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.

Re: Anything threatening to be a subculture is commodified before it can walk (2014)

#88

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…

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?

Re: Anything threatening to be a subculture is commodified before it can walk (2014)

#89

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Man i was so disappointed by hyperion. felt like they didn't really go anywhere satisfying with the premise

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.

Re: Anything threatening to be a subculture is commodified before it can walk (2014)

#90

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…

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?

You are going to let him choose his own hairstyle.
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