Because there is no more "sticking out". Everything has been commodified and accepted. There is no longer a way to differentiate yourself from the pack, because the pack is so diverse. I think that has really shaken things up: there's nothing to rebel against, and Gen-X cynicism/nihilism has left an identity crises for Mil/GenZ. Although it appears these groups are going back to tradition and don't give a f*k about nonconformity.
Steve Albini (legendary producer) wrote an essay in "Commodify Your Dissent" from the Baffler magazine around the time of the Dead Kennedys. He hits on the ability to buy anarchy patches in department stores as fashion items when in the past they were signs of a true counterculture. I highly recommend it, it captures what you are feeling up to a point, because it refers mostly to the 80's and 90's, and not the utter weirdness of today.
https://www.amazon.com/Commodify-Your-Dissent-Salvos-Baffler...
Wait, doesn't that sound like the same thing? Presumably some kids are still non-conforming, and they are still the minority (because most kids of all generations have prioritized fitting in).
Be very wary of survivor bias when looking back in time, especially when there is a risk of nostalgia. There was plenty of popular garbage in the 70s and 80s, there is plenty of good music being made now. The only real difference is that we have yet to apply the "is this good enough to keep around" filter to modern culture.
Case in point: MTV of the 80s would play little to no black music. There's a famous 1983 interview bit of David Bowie where he asked the MTV VJ why they play no black music, and the VJ waffles a bit on the white suburban market. That does not sound very subversive to me.
Here's the excerpt: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=XZGiVzIr8Qg&feature=emb_logo
you understand black americans have historically been repressed, right? this is pretty uncontroversial.
black american art, especially music, is absolutely saturated with themes of resistance, and even the mildest, most innocent examples have historically been perceived by racists and the establishment as dangerous and rebellious.
the 80s were at the tail end of white flight, when relocation of white people from diverse cities to majority-white suburbs was an explicit response to the desegregation and rebellions of the preceding years. mtv agents making a statement about suburban markets in that time has a clear meaning.
There's also the issue of how well you know them. When I was a kid myself, as far as I could tell, all 40 year-olds had dull, shallow personal lives and were boring people. I don't have that impression now than I'm in my 40s and my experience of the lives of 40 year-olds goes beyond being told what not to do by them every now and again. How well do you seriously know and understand the inner motivations of your friend's kids?
> “Conformist,” he sneered, averting his eyes in disgust and flipping his dyed black hair over his eyes. :D
Check out Hyman Rickover, a proponent of a nuclear Navy that pushed members of Congress to vote mothball 10 years of thorium reactor research for uranium reactors so they had weapons material.
I laugh at the notion we have a free market since the basis of our system is 50-70 year old back room deals that boosted families like Gates, Musk, Andreesen, Bezos.
There’s zero science that explains how they’re ahead of anyone else in skill and intelligence. Plenty to suggest typical old fashion political propaganda and corruption.
Can you please clarify what you mean?
50 years ago Gates was 16, Bezos was 8, Andreesen was 1 and Musk was newborn. 70 years ago none of them were even born. I highly doubt they were party to backroom deals!
Any suggestion reality owes eternal deference for some greater good is laughable on its face.
Gates’ father’s legacy is founding partner of an internationally known law firm, though I believe he stepped aside before it achieved global status.
Bezos conveniently had 25 relatives and family friends that could invest 50,000.
Musk family and African gem mine abuses are easy to source online.
IBM wanted nothing to do with transistor computers that might cannibalize their vacuum tube computer business until government funded the research; forcing progress through government action is pretty well established in history, just saying.
Austerity is for those with integrity.
The benefits of collective effort are pretty clear; why agency is locked up unless a billionaire can profit further is bizarre.
Relativity implies people without healthcare or universal healthcare are making an uninformed choice without experience.
The philosophy of our system is moral relativism and sunk cost fallacy, obfuscated by government funded propaganda. IMO.
The thorium reactors at that time were molten salt. Molten salts used react very poorly with water. Uranium reactors are generally pressurized water. You might imagine another reason Admiral Rickover might have preferred the uranium solution?
In a real counter culture the goals are aggressively anti-corporate.
The most impressive part is the way that individualism has become almost entirely a corporate creation. You "express yourself" by choosing and displaying products, all of which are either corporate or sold through a corporate monopoly (Amazon, Ebay, Etsy). The middle classes are allowed some artisanal choices, but only because they signal a more refined and informed kind of consumerism.
There really isn't much evidence of individualism which isn't assembled from some combination of corporate-friendly competitive ambition, Veblen signalling, standardised rebellion/outsider tropes, and political and religious tribalism.
You see someone say something racist or sexist or homophobic and it's no longer the just a small voice that would blast the racist, sexist, homophobe but now it's everyone - including corporate America (and their twitter bot voices). And in the mean time since all those companies have "fallen in line" with the culture - it's OK to Buy Nike, Buy Starbucks, Buy Apple, Buy Microsoft because they all tow the line.
I mean it's good and bad. For one, it's good because now there's justice for the repressed. It's bad for it's cancellation culture. There are a lot of "cancelled" people that have done FAR less than say Harvey W. yet with a single tweet - mostly careless words - they're done. Even when they have that 15 second scramble after someone calls them out it just blows up. Apologies are meaningless after that. Being one person you can't defend against unlimited neural activity of millions of people digging into the background and lobbing as far as Twitter will let it go.
I think you are confusing the deluge of internet ads that tell me to 'express myself' and 'unleash my potential' by <buying their crap>, with how people actually express themselves. Maybe I hang out with the wrong people, but I've never heard any of my friends 'expressing themselves' in those ways.
They obviously make statements about their take on fashion through their purchasing habits (as do I), but I don't confuse what I wear with what I am.
Well, if they're "expressing themselves" on mainstream social media, that's "corporate" and oligopolistic in a very real sense. It's puzzling to see so much knee-jerk anti-corporatism on sites like Twitter and even here at News.YC.
How people signal to others what they are is by what they're wearing. Asking people not to - good luck with that.
The closest thing to good govt art in the US is the tax-dodge stuff such as opera.
It has to do with the nature of the dissenters themselves. Nowadays they are politics / social media wannabees. When corporates coopot your movement, they make you rich and famous. Nothing makes a 'ladder climber' more happy.
The nature of dissent in the 50s was more about the problems than the status assigned to the people. You couldn't easily lure them away with sneaky gifts.
Worst of all, the 50s-esque true believers do exist. But they get cannibalized and spit out by the exact cabal of milque-toast corporate activism. The ones that don't are so radical that they only serve as red-flags on the danger of true belief, because all the reasonable ones got squash under corporate America's feet.
Did you read this?
https://www.amazon.com/Commodify-Your-Dissent-Salvos-Baffler...
Not everybody considered those things cool - obviously they were specifically NOT the mainstream pop crowd, or else there was nothing to be "underground" or "alternative" against.
There's certainly still underground/alternative pop culture. More than ever before! In some ways its harder to find (e.g. your search bubble isn't going to pop it up to you if it doesn't think you want it), ironically!
But with that new bubble of being in your sub-community largely comes less need to "act out" against the rest of the crowd. This is largely good, except in cases of e.g. violent incel egging-on spiral-downward communities or your more "old fashioned" sorts of violent radicalism that continue to exist.
(Here's a trivially simple example: the author claims that a smaller and smaller group is claiming a larger and larger share of the market in TV. But then look at something like this from wikipedia's I Love Lucy page: 'The episode "Lucy Goes to the Hospital", which first aired on Monday, January 19, 1953, garnered a record 15.105 million homes reached, equivalent to 44 million viewers resulting from 71.7% share of all households with television sets at the time having been tuned in to view the program.[69] That record is surpassed only by Elvis Presley's first of three appearances on The Ed Sullivan Show, which aired on September 9, 1956 (82.6% share, 60.710 million viewers and a 57.1 rating ).[69] The overall rating of 67.3 for the entire 1952 season of I Love Lucy continues to be the highest average rating for any single season of a TV show.[70]' No show or musician commands anything close to that now. )
I think you're just commenting from your bubble, and using the flawed argument from the article to rationalize it (not to mention the fact that the people you're most likely to see are the minority vying for your attention).
In 1977 the top 20 grossing movies were probably watched by over 50% of movie watchers because there were just so few options. What do you think that proportion is now? I'm willing to bet that if you sampled random movie watchers, fewer than 10% of them will have watched any of the top 20 movies this year. There's just so much content out there, I don't think the top grossing movies mean as much anymore.
People's attention is spread very thin across hundreds of thousands of small creators these days. And consider that if you're a small YouTuber with a few thousand core fans, you're roughly as successful as the most underground punk rock bands/indie film directors of the 70s. As I see it, the "alternative" culture is bigger than it's ever been. I could be a die-hard fan of a dozen different works that I consider very mainstream, and yet my next door neighbor will not be familiar with any of them.
It's all a matter of perspective, I don't see this trend as necessarily good or bad. There were some positives to the "underground" and "alternative" aesthetic, like being independent-minded and an emphasis on doing things that were new and original. There were some downsides too, like being jaded about everything, being too cool to show enthusiasm, and ultimately sometimes just blindly conforming to the "alternative" view for the sake of opposing the mainstream view.
Similarly I think there are positives to how I see young people behaving today, the flip-side to the negatives you mentioned. Being genuine and showing emotion is cool again, and, perhaps ironically, since there is less cultural pressure to be "alternative" people are arguably being more honest with themselves by openly seeking approval. We're all humans after all and we all seek approval from others, maybe it's good that there is no longer any stigma around that in the influencer age.
I think it's because anti-institutional cynicism has become the new norm with the rise of gen-x and the "ironic" hipsterdom of the early 2000s.
So much of modern culture is about operating in the negative space of the "normal" which takes significantly less effort than actively defining what you value and who you are.
The collorary is your "counter culture" was bought and sold too. That one stung to find out, but alternative lifestyles have been manufactured for a long, long time
It doesn't though. What percentage of people do you think made up the viewership of the top 20 movies in 1977 vs today? People's attention is spread much thinner over vastly more "content" than ever before. You can be a fan of 20 different things that your neighbor has never heard of; this was much more difficult 50 years ago. I don't think the top 20 means much anymore.
Culture, especially pop culture and various other side ones, have constantly been changing. The 50s were not like the 60s were not like the 70s etc.
But the constant trap that many posters here are falling into is nostalgia making you perceive the "different" that you grew up in specifically as "better."
I grew up in the 80s and 90s. I wish I'd grown up today, I'd be far more likely to find friends with somewhat overlapping interests, and far less likely to get bullied for some of them.
I think the constant trap I see today is people perceiving different eras' output as "different but equal". A lot of this has to do with the populist notion that everything is about "taste" and nothing can be possibly better or worse.
But there are absolutely periods of better and worse art output, decades or whole periods of cultural stagnation, sometimes in all arts or other times just in some, periods of burst developments, etc. When we see art and music history at large, we easily discern them and have names for them - and history scholars have.
But when it comes to post '50s music, we can't fathom that some period is better than another, as if history is finished, and every decade is perpetually equally good.
The funny part is that we think that in the period with perhaps the most decline compared to the past.
I just don't think it's a moral failing if you disagree.
Something I noticed was that being “underground” and “alternative” was considered “cool” when I was a youngster. Now, it seems all transgressive elements have been stripped from the mix and it’s all about “please like me, like my product, I’m desperate for your approval”
I’d had my own notions of this being fueled by the suit-vs-rocker dichotomy turning into the self-promoting-artist lonesome internet point of light thing.
But this article describes a bigger pattern, and I think it’s largely about commercial conquest and has little to do with the ideas inside.
There’s also the theme of nostalgia and “good old” style marketing. How much junk food is marketed as “grandmas good olde traditional natural authentic junk food”?
What is extremely frustrating is watching mediocre output be considered best in class merely due to the rubber stamp effect of popularity, popularity due to marketing power and branding.
Clearly xyz charttopper is the best singer in the world if they are the most popular, right?
The entertainment oligopoly falsifying the appearance of democracy and choice while limiting the range of presentable choices is actually symbolic of how many authoritarian systems fake democratic parliamentary procedures and such.
Clearly the people have spoken, approving the pre approved choice. Lol.
Everyone must obviously love autotune if 9/10 top ten songs use it.