Geeks, MOPs, and sociopaths in subculture evolution

From wikipedia: "a subculture is a group of people within a culture that differentiates itself from the larger culture to which it belongs, though often maintaining some of its founding principles."

Those who do selfies are not identifying themselves as part of their own group, and separate from the larger culture. Even the early adopters of the selfie never thought of themselves as a subculture, just cool within the larger one. STEM and celebrity worship also could be seen as part of the larger mainstream. Just because something is fashionable or cool does not make it a sub culture.

I would have a hard time qualifying re-brandings of misogyny as subcultures. Misogyny is traditional, normative and reactionary; subcultures are non-normative by definition.

They're subcultures. Just because they're "normative and reactionary" doesn't make them less so. Sadly, they're cases of opposition to mainstream misogyny with extreme misogyny. (Not to say that all of MRA is misogyny. Gender injustice is such a complex topic that it's inaccurate to believe that it would fall entirely on one "side", or even that there are sides. That said, much that's under the MRA tent is pretty horrifying.)

The high school and college casual sex scene (and, perhaps, the young-professional one) is one where, as an emergent property, bad men ("chads") who objectify women get most of the sexual yield. This is an expression of the mainstream, traditional misogyny that lives in our society. Misogynist patterns (man as conqueror, woman as defeated "slut") have been absorbed by men and women both. In long-term romantic relationships, most of the misogyny has disappeared, but it's still quite prevalent on "the sexual marketplace".

What PUAs and "Red Pill" neo-misogynists miss is that they're extrapolating behaviors observed in small subcultures to all women, which is unfair and wrong (both in the sense of being morally wrong, and in the sense of being incorrect). Take the PUA playbook, which is build on running exploits that work against damaged women. Men who pick that stuff up, learn that it actually works at its intended goal of high-frequency sexuality, and start deploying it on a regular basis... are going to conclude (falsely) that most women are damaged, sexually confused, and attracted to superficially charming but toxic "bad boy" types. Then when they get bored of the high-frequency sexuality (most long-term PUAs are clinical sex addicts) and try to have long-term relationships, they're going to fail at it (because PUA skills don't work on any woman you'd want to have a long-term relationship with) and blame that on women too.

To make it more bizarre, the neo-misogynists blame the bad female behaviors resulting from traditional/mainstream misogyny on "feminism". To them, mainstream misogyny's superficial coddling and infantilization of women (and the female misbehavior-- flakiness, bad taste in men, disloyalty-- that results from it) is somehow lumped in with this "feminism" thing that they don't really understand but reflexively hate.

  "Eventually - around 2000 - everyone understood 
   this, and gave up hoping some subculture could 
   somehow escape this dynamic."

So why 2000 as the magic year music died? The Internet.

That's the whole answer. The internet killed music. Not just because of peer-to-peer file sharing, but so many other aspects of pre-internet music economies simply didn't make sense anymore, from composition, to production, to distribution, to consumption, all aspects of recorded music were turned inside out and flipped upside down.

Sure, performing music hadn't really changed all that much, but the controlled release of physical copies of music simply didn't work anymore, and so The New Thing wasn't permitted to steep in its own Newness, and fester and grow moldy and get weird anymore.

The transformation of distribution technologies from 1990 to 2000 was like taking a healthy adult St. Bernard, and replacing all of its internal organs with the organs of 50 kittens, and expecting it to come out healthier than before. Except the St. Bernard's brain doesn't know how to breathe with 100 kitten lungs, or pump 50 kitten hearts, or swallow food into 50 kitten stomachs and digest vital nutrients.

From a technology perspective, with music, where we are now, is like where music was in 1950. We're still figuring out the new capabilities of what can be done with this technology, the same way people back then were still figuring out amplifiers and feedback and taped distortion. In that respect 1990 is still 40 years away, culturally speaking. Longer still if more disruptive technology keeps getting introduced, and upsetting established skills.

There are no more geeks to create scenes, because geeks haven't had enough time to learn the vast depths of modern technology, to master it, and spawn new scenes.