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

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181–190 of 273 posts

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

#181

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

MaKe YoUr HoBbY yOuR cArEeR.

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

#182

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…

Also check out The Rebel sell by Joseph Health and Andrew Potter. Another great read in the same vein https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Rebel_Sell.

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

#183

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Hard disagree - even before the domination of Big Tech, the reason open source became the way it is - the domination of GNU/Linux - was because of the commercial interests of server vendors pushing Linux (a server OS) as a product. It's the same reason Linux has had a limited success in other spaces (embedded, mobile, desktop) - as opposed to something like Windows, it's poorly engineered for the needs of these domai…

> I don't really consider Android Linux

Why not? Obviously it's heavily modified, but it's not a hard fork: unless something's changed since I last checked, they re-apply their patches on top of upstream LTS releases -- so they very much depend on ongoing kernel development.

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

#184
post #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…

Didnt believe a bug got a mention here in hn

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

#185

Earlier quoted context omitted.

That's a pretty weird description of the British Museum. Yes, I know people can (and do) criticize the collection they have as the spoils of colonialism, but in no way do they present their collection as "merely aesthetic objects" -- they do explain what the artifacts are in terms of the cultures that created them.

I believe "merely aesthetic objects" in this case should be interpreted as "dead objects". The very word "artifact" signifies the distinction. These objects were once alive - they were parts of active interactions. Now they are dead and ossified. This is the difference between your album CDs when you actually listened to them, and then when you put them on a display case on the wall.

But that's not true. The objects in museums are used by museum visitors (who look at them, or draw studies of them, etc) and researchers (who remove them from the displays and study them).

Mark Fisher is just an idiot like the bullshit jobs guy, who doesn't respect anyone he doesn't personally know and thinks they're all faking doing real work.

Note that the other thing Fisher was known for is writing an essay about how Russell Brand is cool and people should stop caring that he's a rapist.

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

#186
post #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…

I would say a heavy YouTube presence is almost on par with corporate palatableness with respect to how not counterculture you may think something is. Want something "punk" in say the comedy world? Redbar

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

#187

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 ar…

I think a lot of the time there's an implicit clash of classes there.

The people that lived it often can't buy the nicest gear and stuff, or if they did it's because it involved real sacrifice and dedication. Historically, they fucking made it themselves because it wasn't something you even COULD buy if you wanted to. So seeing some rich kid duplicate your drip overnight just because they can rubs people the wrong way. And I kind of get it: it's counterfeit. Its the same disdain people have for anything not made by a real artist but passed off like it is. They show up with all the nicest shit duplicating your real effort and struggle, but not having done the work.

A lot of those poor kids only have that thing in their life and the crowd dedicated to it because their homelife sucks.

Most the skaters I grew up with that were really good were that way because they suffered. They were out skating after-school because there was no family dinner and warm welcome waiting for them at home. We were our own family and support. When a friend of mine handed me down a box of old gear so I could put together a new-to-me board , that saved me months of struggling to come up with the cash to replace a board that got stolen.

And honestly the skaters kids were the most welcoming group I ever saw. They took in all the otherwise rejects of society. But no one likes a poser.

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

#188

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Not sure how mainstream furries are. Sure, they have conventions and whatnot but do you expect to see one on a box of cereal anytime soon? Probably not.

I... assume this is a joke? https://cereal.fandom.com/wiki/Chip_the_Wolf

I think the charitable interpretation is that parent-poster meant it like how cereal boxes have featured famous athletes, as opposed to brand mascots.

For example, Frosted Flakes has "Tony the Tiger", but he is widely understood to be a fictional tiger, rather than an endorsement by a real human who got famous for wearing a tiger-suit.

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

#189

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

I'd say fanworks are a good example of this, albeit more in the legally grey area than the proven illegal one. You can't really run a business selling derivative works, so things like fan fiction, fan games and mods kinda remain unaffected by gentrification and hustle culture.

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

#190

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

If you read Neuromancer in 1984, it was mind-blowing. Same thing with Snow Crash in 1992 So do you like, only enjoy art produced in the last N years? Or art that was produced more than N years ago but didn't produce any imitators that retroactively diminished the original for you? I guess I'm not enjoying things right. I read Snow Crash in the 2000s (and LOTR in the 90s) and enjoyed the hell out of them even though t…

> Feels like you're missing out on some good stuff though. Possibly a lot of good stuff. Possibly the vast majority of human artistic output.

Hardly. Most human artistic output does not create its own genre and spawn a host of imitators.

Classics are coordination points but generally less fun. "Seinfeld is unfunny" is real, you're genuinely better off watching something more recent if you just want to enjoy yourself.

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