Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

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

dezeen.com

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

61–70 of 273 posts

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

#61

Post by implmntatio »

namaria wrote: post #55
coldpie wrote: post #51

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> I'm not a fan if present-ish day sci-fi though, reality is depressing enough as it is. I subscribe to the Asimov's sci-fi short story magazine (I highly recommend it!) and yeah, I have to skip every story that starts with "the world was devastated by climate change 20-50 years ago, here's how we're surviving now above the flooded remains of our world." I just can't take it.

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

In cases like this, it helps me to think of a simulation - that the book does not talk about - that has a specific framework and set of rules to decide whether to let people out of the portrayed present or not. I had that idea a long while ago and started to apply it to TV shows, books, news, even myself when I had a weird flashback to boring drug-induced times. It works well to kill the depression that can arise out of narratives (except song lyrics, music productions in general and Rick & Morty. once something feels like too many shrooms and too much LSD aka too much harmony in bullshitting oneself and the audience, the whole thing breaks down and I get an Agent Smith vibe, an Agent Smith that didn't age well at all)

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

#62

Post by flocciput »

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 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.

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

#63

Post by s1artibartfast »

torginus wrote: post #39
s1artibartfast wrote: post #21

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.

Playing an instrument (or being part of a band), being part of a writing club. Anything where the meat of the activity either requires genuine ability and/or effort, or enjoying skillful humans performing that activity for you. The problem of a lot of subcultures is that they define themselves in large part by flashy externalities, and commodification is part of their DNA. For example: You like an underground band's…

I think it's important to distinguish between an act and a culture. I wholeheartedly agree that individuals can act in ways that aren't commodified.

If people like it, there's almost always someone packaging it and selling it. Now, I don't think that means you can't enjoy playing or listening to music. If someone stops listening or playing a genre of music because someone is commodifying it, that just means a big part of what they enjoyed was the idea of being underground, transgressive, or counter cultural for its own sake.

Also, some things can be more easily commodified without losing authenticity. Gutter punk music doesn't have the same impact when sung by a sold-out multi-millionaire. Inversely, it doesn't much matter how much money Yo-Yo ma has in the bank and that he's a guest at davos.

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

#64

Post by bluefirebrand »

bakuninsbart wrote: post #47
s1artibartfast wrote: post #21

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.

I would argue that Big Tech has successfully commercialized FOSS culture simply by using FOSS output to build commercial software

Cloud Services like AWS probably would not exist without the foundation that FOSS provided

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

#66

Post by sporkydistance »

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 number of book with the same character (e.g., Count Zero). That can be boring to someone expecting lots of "pew-pew-pew I hacked the mainframe". Snow Crash also didn't really age well in terms of dorkiness (cyberdogs breaking the sound barrier, nukes attached to a biker-thugs brain, gangs in cyberspace ?!?!?, etc.), but at the time we were all floored by the new concepts.

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

#67

Post by sporkydistance »

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 market for things like T-Shirts with Anarchy symbols on them. This stuff didn't exist at scale in the 1970's, you needed to know someone with a silk screen, or live in a city like Chicago or San Fran that had the first wave of non-conformists. But 30 years later you could walk into a mall and come out looking like you had a personality even though you just bought it.

What's really funny, watch "Dogtown and Z-boys", a movie about the rise of skateboarding with lots of footage from the 1970's. The first "tricks" they do will make you say, "What? Where's the trick? He just bounced on his board", and then compare it with today's batshit insane achievements. Skateboarding was peak commodified in the late 1980's (Thrasher magazine helped) early 1990's, but in the 1960's it was ... a simpler time and the outcasts looked like normal kids having fun compared to today.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dogtown_and_Z-Boys

You can see how something goes from a "weird kid activity" to "every kid does it".

Like green mohawks on toddlers in the early 2000's. Edgy in 1970's, preschool in 2010.

Man, I'm showing my age. :|

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

#69

Post by sporkydistance »

hluska wrote: post #43
grey-area wrote: post #4

Reminds me of this from 1986 (The Dead Kennedys), talking about the co-option of the Punk counter-culture by the mainstream: Punk's not dead; it just deserves to die.

If anyone is interested, that song is called Chickenshit Conformist. It’s on Bedtime for Democracy.

Yo rocky, watch me pull a massacre outta my pants...

aaaaa-gaaaain????

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

#70

Post by RGamma »

namaria wrote: post #55
coldpie wrote: post #51

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> I'm not a fan if present-ish day sci-fi though, reality is depressing enough as it is. I subscribe to the Asimov's sci-fi short story magazine (I highly recommend it!) and yeah, I have to skip every story that starts with "the world was devastated by climate change 20-50 years ago, here's how we're surviving now above the flooded remains of our world." I just can't take it.

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
Post reply on HN