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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)

#131

Post by lupusreal »

RGamma wrote: post #70
namaria wrote: post #55

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I tried re-reading Brave New World recently. It was too depressing how it felt it was describing present times.

Even more depressingly these works come to be used as a sort of handbook. Ostensibly Snow Crash is dystopian literature, but tech bros liked it and its author even has been co-opted as a "futurist" by Blue Origin. See https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Snow_Crash

Stephenson was one of the first people to work at Blue Origin, back when it was more of a "talk about cool space shit" club. He left long ago though, around the time it started to become a serious rocket company.

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

#132

Post by kjkjadksj »

ajsnigrutin wrote: post #37
Palomides wrote: post #6

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

You mean the ones banned by most social media, hard to find on google and even harder to find in real-life?

Some non commodifiable sub cultures are easy to find in real life. E.g. drinking or doing drugs in public.

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

#133

Post by bluefirebrand »

namaria wrote: post #109
bluefirebrand wrote: post #80

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> There's no ethical consumption under capitalism I've seen this catchphrase thrown around a lot online, but I've never seen anyone explain how consumption becomes any more ethical under any other system without leading to other systemic problems "Consume less" seems to imply that any consumption is unethical by default. If that's the case, then the only way to consume ethically is by minimizing consumption This seem…

Runaway consumption is bad. But it increases profits quarter after quarter. You're right, people will not give it up. Neither those who want to consume more and more, nor those who profit from and foment that cycle. Consumption under capitalism is therefore a problem, because it creates and reinforces rampant consumerism, which is destroying the habitat. We will drive society all the way into the ground before we giv…

> Runaway consumption is bad

Right, no disagreement there

I am just not sure I agree that runaway consumption is a unique feature of capitalism in particular

I tend to think it's a function of population size and average standard of living expectations tending to increase over time

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

#134

Post by s1artibartfast »

FrustratedMonky wrote: post #121
s1artibartfast wrote: post #119

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I never said hundreds of percent, that's all your imagination. If I were to guess, I would ballpark 25% more efficiency if population were 1% and no growth. I think we are well into the linear and decreasing scale for most industries. How many parallel factories do you think there are around the world building tractors. How many independent factories making cars and trucks? Also, consider how much labor is spent on R…

There are a lot more single threaded supply chain factories that you'd think. When they start falling apart, it all starts falling apart. We got a dry run of this in covid with chips. One small part of chip making, think some substrate, was in short supply, and shut down the automakers And even the Hurricane that hit NC, took out one of the single factories making high end quartz for chips.

Chip making is one of the most concentrated industries in the world, and in no way representative the whole. Even then, a huge amount of the chipmaking industry aside from the bleeding edge is parallelized.

Let me ask you a question. How much efficiency do you think would be saved with zero population growth and zero innovation?

What percent of the world do you think works in Chip making? It is tiny.

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

#135

Post by lupusreal »

sporkydistance wrote: post #66
BarryMilo wrote: post #20

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.

I think with books like Neuromancer it is a matter of "when" you read it. If you read it today, it seems trite, like Snow Crash. If you read Neuromancer in 1984, it was mind-blowing. Same thing with Snow Crash in 1992. These books were decades ahead of their time. Neuromancer is more like PKDick, in that they are adult-themed books more about personal problems with sci-fi on the side, and it is actually part one of a…

I think Neuromancer is timeless and will prove to have extremely long-lasting appeal, even long after the ideas in it are hopelessly dated, because of how stylish it is. It will last like Lovecraft gas because of how much fun it is to read.

Contrast with Asimov, who's books were carried by ideas but had a very tedious style.

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

#136

Post by dkarl »

rightbyte wrote: post #118
dkarl wrote: post #96

Earlier quoted context omitted.

All that's being "ruined" is people's ability to pretend that building identity through access to exclusive cultural groups and hard-to-get consumer items represents some kind rarified social achievement. Commodifying it punctures their illusion of specialness and makes it clear that they don't value their culture in itself, they value how it sets them apart from putatively lesser people. If capitalism ruins that for…

You might want to have some sort of simple effort filter for your subculture. Fashion is a simple one.

Then you have a subculture defined by fashion, which might be fun for the people in it, but it's not something anyone else has any stake in preserving. Nothing of value is lost if it disappears.

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

#137

Post by philipkglass »

pfdietz wrote: post #124
Semaphor wrote: post #111

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I highly enjoy it, thank you very much

Sure, that's a state that will persist until it doesn't. One common barrier to suspension of disbelief is the Fermi Problem. A great deal of space opera just ignores it, but once you take the argument seriously it ruins much of the world building. If I want to ignore rationality of the world design and just read human achievement porn I'll head over to r/HFY.

I thought that you were going to condemn the genre's ubiquitous faster-than-light communications/travel. I approach space opera as a specialized variant of high fantasy, where the usual tropes are as genre-acceptable as wizards and ghosts.

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

#138

Post by _DeadFred_ »

kjkjadksj wrote: post #126
sporkydistance wrote: post #67

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…

I think that just covers maybe the first dip of the toe into a niche being commodified. For a skateboarder there are signs that kind of show if you really are a hardcore skateboarder or have just bought a board at zumies and don’t really ride it much. Is the board graphic damaged from rails? Are the shoes torn apart? The skaters I see hitting a waxed public cement bench without a shirt on during the work day probably…

No offence, but fuck the true in groups and you sound pretentious. True in groups are always just 'cool kids' who happen to micro focus on XYZ. Skaters skate not gatekeep people, and were just hyped to skate with anyone (at least in Santa Cruz). 'Oh you got a Nash board, cool. We should probably check if your trucks need tightening.' is the only normal response, not 'we should probably check how ground your trucks are before we can hang and you can join our club'. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=MQ_eBTkB-rs

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

#139

Post by zem »

sporkydistance wrote: post #66
BarryMilo wrote: post #20

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.

I think with books like Neuromancer it is a matter of "when" you read it. If you read it today, it seems trite, like Snow Crash. If you read Neuromancer in 1984, it was mind-blowing. Same thing with Snow Crash in 1992. These books were decades ahead of their time. Neuromancer is more like PKDick, in that they are adult-themed books more about personal problems with sci-fi on the side, and it is actually part one of a…

I wasn't too impressed by neuromancer even back in its day because I had read gibson's brilliant short story collection "burning chrome" first, and felt neuromancer didn't quite measure up to it. I feel like a lot of the stories in "burning chrome" would still hold up well today, for that matter.

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

#140

Post by _DeadFred_ »

lupusreal wrote: post #128
sporkydistance wrote: post #67

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…

> in the 1960's it was ... a simpler time and the outcasts looked like normal kids having fun compared to today Seems like some sort of gatekeeping and old-man shaking his fist at youth to me. The overwhelming majority of people skateboarding today are regular kids and young adults who are just in it to have fun. If their techniques are more advanced, its probably because technology has improved and also because they…

You didn't 'happen to know someone who made t-shirts' if you were around the scene. If you went to the skate park regularly, Bennie was always there, and Bennie hustled struggled by doing things like make t-shirts to support the scene. Bennie always had decks/trucks/stickers/t-shirts for sale out of the back of his car. If people were working on a park or a ramp or something Bennie let everyone know when and where. So you couldn't not know Bennie if you regularly were around. Hence not knowing Bennie meant you weren't regularly around.
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