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);
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.
> "What? Where's the trick? He just bounced on his board"
That's the natural state of innocence - their reference frame is how the experience feels (I'm going fast and almost falling over!). When the scene takes over, the reference point shifts to how it looks - the raw experience is overtaken in importance by progress and status and comparison.
Punk and skateboarding may have been commodified but if you still go to shows or go skate, it’s still filled with kids (and now adults) just having fun.
And now within subcultures are sub-subcultures. Within skateboarding, everyone hangs with each other but at the same time, your Baker kids aren’t your Creature kids and they aren’t your Andy Anderson/Rodney Mullen kids.
Some people may join a subculture to be “non-conformists” but most people pick up things because they like it. Sometimes what you like isn’t something everyone else likes and a subculture is born.
There are still millions of these pockets of subcultures that are completely invisible to most people on the outside.
Zines and DIY screen printing are still very much alive. If you live in a big city, check out some small local punk venues if you want to re-connect (or connect if you want to check it out). And of course, you can always start skating again (but maybe wear gear the first day).
It's not just commodification. If you were a punk in the 80s with a green mohawk, you might find it cute to put one on your kid in the 2000s. I have long hair, my son has long hair. This isn't a commodification of a culture, it's me, like every parent ever, using my culture to inform how I raise my kids. What am I going to do? Not dress and present my kid how I want to and how I identify?
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 don’t give a shit about thrasher and all that.
Kind of like bluejeans. You can buy them predistressed but the wear patterns are different than if you made them yourself. Maybe most people can’t tell but the true in group of the subculture can.
I find it hilarious how anti-capitalist and anti-consumerist sentiments are heavily monetized with targeted products. You can buy t-shirts on Amazon that say “stop buying shit you don’t need.” I am embarrassed in hindsight that as a teenager I had a Che Guevara shirt from the Hot Topic store in the mall. The ubiquitous popularity of the “Obey” clothing fad- where people were caving to social pressure to buy clothing with pithy commentary on not caving to social pressure was equally ironic.
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 would also add things that are unprofitable and/or participating in them requires a high degree of personal investment which can't be substituted with money.
Which describes a lot of things if you think about it.
They don't need to be obscene - I think a good example would be non-sparring martial arts like Aikido or Tai Chi.
There isn't really an incentive to pay to watch top performers in the arts demonstrate technique beyond a handful of people wanting DVDs. There's zero stakes because you aren't competing against another person to be "the best". BUT, the physically can also be a turn off to many people. The joke I was taught was "to make a small fortune, start with a large one and open a dojo".
The martial art business model therefore is pretty small scale - kids classes, seminar fees, clothing and equipment sales, that's about it. But none of those things are really going to make you super wealthy because the non-competing aspect removes a lot of that business-oriented focus.
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.
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 vanilla corpora-liberalism is as the defining filter culture is sifted through.
Maybe the chapo trap house people or Adam Friedland or other socialism adjacent people fit the bill a little bit as well, but they seem more in line with the types that are ultimately corporately unpalatable, like you mention.
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.
"One may dye their hair green and wear their grandma’s coat all they want. Capital has the ability to subsume all critiques into itself. Even those who would critique capital end up reinforcing it instead."
—Joyce Messier in Disco Elysium
Probably inspired by Mark Fisher:
"The power of capitalist realism derives in part from the way that
capitalism subsumes and consumes all of previous history: one
effect of its 'system of equivalence' which can assign all cultural
objects, whether they are religious iconography, pornography, or
Das Kapital, a monetary value. Walk around the British Museum,
where you see objects torn from their lifeworlds and assembled
as if on the deck of some Predator spacecraft, and you have a
powerful image of this process at work. In the conversion of
practices and rituals into merely aesthetic objects, the beliefs of
previous cultures are objectively ironized, transformed into
artifacts. Capitalist realism is therefore not a particular type of
realism; it is more like realism in itself."
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.
While Disco Elysium gets a pass for it as it's meant primarily as an entertainment product (and the ridiculousness of the sentence might serve as a parody of the idea, which would be incredibly on brand for the game), I've found Mark Fisher's analysis in Capitalist Realism to be incredibly surface level and either wrong, or so vague, as to be meaningless, and it revolves around Fisher's obession with pop culture, and failure to distinguish between images of the thing and the thing itself.
Obviously dyeing ones hair green does not constitute a meaningful attempt to subvert capitalism. In order to combat capitalism, one must first decide what capitalism actually is, what's actually bad about it and how to combat it.
Let's say the evil of capitalism is that it allows an incredible concentration of capital, therefore the enemy are the rich, and the solution is to raise social support for taxing them. Wearing a t-shirt saying 'tax the rich' is a hilariously inept mode of delivering said message in an impactful way, and serves more of a low-effort consumerist way of supporting the good cause, rather than geniune activism. Yet it can't be dismissed entirely.
If someone wrote a book on why the rich must be taxed, and said book became popular and influential, and influenced the tax policy in the end, you can't say capitalism won in the end, because people paid money for the book, or the author is a hypocrite because he got rich off of royalties.
As for the bit about the British Museum, it's utterly nonsensical - what does a state's military dragging away cultural artifacts by force, and displaying it in a state institution have to do with capitalism?
Firstly, there are many tiny subcultures that by definition you will not know about if you are not part of them. Secondly, I think that there is a hidden assumption in western audience that sub\counter culture are universally good, So when we see negative ones they do not register as counter cultures.
The Man-o-sphere, N-th level gender advocates, Fascists, National Purity, Marxists, Libertarians. If anything there is so much fragmentation that we have fractured to endless stream of sub cultures that can no longer talk to each other. There is no longer any cultural center to even deviate from when everyone lives in a personalized media landscape.
Dumpster diving specifically, maybe not, but thrifting and second-hand clothes definitely were. When thrifting was popular among the early hipsters, American Apparel would send buyers to thrift stores to gut them of all the best deals so they could offer curated collections of second-hand clothes at a steep markup. Companies like Urban Outfitters would send designers to Williamsburg parties to see what people were wearing so that they could start manufacturing knock-offs immediately.
The hipster subculture is an odd one, itself a product of poor urban artists wearing and doing what they could afford being co-opted by college-educated urban Millennials trying to reject conventional symbols of elitism and instead crafting more "authentic" snobbery on the back of traditional working-class aesthetics. But if it had any potential to mean anything, it was murdered in the crib by those who cashed in on a demand for an aesthetic and divorced it from its meaning, which is the very thing that the early hipsters were rebelling against.
Someone, somewhere out there is selling designer or artisanal-crafted dumpster diving shoes "for the very best comfort and agility during your homebrew solid-waste recovery activities."
I was a pretty avid dumpster diver 15-20 years ago. Lots of yuppies were very interested, I toyed with some performance art in my head about having high end dumpster diving coaching for the affluent dumpster-curious.
I did take some new people on cleaner, more mellow excursions, they absolutely loved it.
This is what makes capitalism so insidious, it coöpts our very reality. It is an amazingly persistent mind virus.
Easy to find oneself plaintively nodding along with this, but actually the free/open-source subculture has not been commodified. RMS is, I know, not exactly sexy, but he is actually hip. Someone somewhere I remember said that the icons of the counter-culture now are people like Snowden. I tend to agree with this. They are indeed rather nerdy, and one might quibble with Snowden's choice of national refuge (assuming he had some choice...), but if there are rebels and anarchists now, it is people like them, not the "punks" with spotify streaming and an instagram feed. Tattoos are mainstream. Emacs, and libreboot, are radical.
The biggest problem for me, is after the catastrophe, and collapse of everything, the survivors have "won the lottery". But the book never really explains how this future turned out 'good' for the survivors and not a 'mad max' like dystopia like every other post apocalypse story. If there was massive population decline, then how are they making all that technology? Is it all robots? Who built the robots?.
It was just a big leap from "huge global collapse and there are no people left" to "those that are left are really living it up in the abundance that is leftover".
I want my subcultures to be commodified. I want it to be easy for folks who are interested in the things I’m interested in to join in. I want there to be an efficient market with mass producers to get people started, and then tiers of progressively more artisan producers as folks get deeper into the things I enjoy.
That’s why it’s sad to me every time a producer closes up shop.
“Capital has the ability to subsume all critiques into itself. Even those who would critique capital end up reinforcing it instead.”
—Joyce Messier, Disco Elysium
Gibson is a concrete example. He fashions critiques of capitalism in a book, the book is distilled into the aesthetics of cyberpunk, and the cyberpunk aesthetic is repackaged and resold to us.
Edward Abbey and his desert-austerity is so far gone it's bizzare. The denizens of his legacy went on to demand organic coffee shops, free-trade twine-made boho jewelry, and the worst, interpersonal soap opera instead of beautiful silence.
“A world of fetishised objects populated by weird obsessives.” Well, haven’t read a better description of our current era. And the people are now objects to be fetishised too.
[+] [-] sporkydistance|1 year ago|reply
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. :|
[+] [-] sdwr|1 year ago|reply
That's the natural state of innocence - their reference frame is how the experience feels (I'm going fast and almost falling over!). When the scene takes over, the reference point shifts to how it looks - the raw experience is overtaken in importance by progress and status and comparison.
[+] [-] harrall|1 year ago|reply
And now within subcultures are sub-subcultures. Within skateboarding, everyone hangs with each other but at the same time, your Baker kids aren’t your Creature kids and they aren’t your Andy Anderson/Rodney Mullen kids.
Some people may join a subculture to be “non-conformists” but most people pick up things because they like it. Sometimes what you like isn’t something everyone else likes and a subculture is born.
There are still millions of these pockets of subcultures that are completely invisible to most people on the outside.
Zines and DIY screen printing are still very much alive. If you live in a big city, check out some small local punk venues if you want to re-connect (or connect if you want to check it out). And of course, you can always start skating again (but maybe wear gear the first day).
[+] [-] thinkingtoilet|1 year ago|reply
[+] [-] kjkjadksj|1 year ago|reply
Kind of like bluejeans. You can buy them predistressed but the wear patterns are different than if you made them yourself. Maybe most people can’t tell but the true in group of the subculture can.
[+] [-] voldacar|1 year ago|reply
[+] [-] 52-6F-62|1 year ago|reply
Leading up to and during the Covid pandemic he recorded a large number of videos on recording craft and techniques for free viewing.
Died young, but of course…
[+] [-] UniverseHacker|1 year ago|reply
[+] [-] Palomides|1 year ago|reply
[+] [-] torginus|1 year ago|reply
Which describes a lot of things if you think about it.
[+] [-] tsumnia|1 year ago|reply
There isn't really an incentive to pay to watch top performers in the arts demonstrate technique beyond a handful of people wanting DVDs. There's zero stakes because you aren't competing against another person to be "the best". BUT, the physically can also be a turn off to many people. The joke I was taught was "to make a small fortune, start with a large one and open a dojo".
The martial art business model therefore is pretty small scale - kids classes, seminar fees, clothing and equipment sales, that's about it. But none of those things are really going to make you super wealthy because the non-competing aspect removes a lot of that business-oriented focus.
[+] [-] CM30|1 year ago|reply
[+] [-] ajsnigrutin|1 year ago|reply
[+] [-] notnaut|1 year ago|reply
Maybe the chapo trap house people or Adam Friedland or other socialism adjacent people fit the bill a little bit as well, but they seem more in line with the types that are ultimately corporately unpalatable, like you mention.
[+] [-] grey-area|1 year ago|reply
Punk's not dead; it just deserves to die.
[+] [-] BarryMilo|1 year ago|reply
I'm not a fan if present-ish day sci-fi though, reality is depressing enough as it is.
[+] [-] DanielHB|1 year ago|reply
[+] [-] Sharlin|1 year ago|reply
—Joyce Messier in Disco Elysium
Probably inspired by Mark Fisher:
"The power of capitalist realism derives in part from the way that capitalism subsumes and consumes all of previous history: one effect of its 'system of equivalence' which can assign all cultural objects, whether they are religious iconography, pornography, or Das Kapital, a monetary value. Walk around the British Museum, where you see objects torn from their lifeworlds and assembled as if on the deck of some Predator spacecraft, and you have a powerful image of this process at work. In the conversion of practices and rituals into merely aesthetic objects, the beliefs of previous cultures are objectively ironized, transformed into artifacts. Capitalist realism is therefore not a particular type of realism; it is more like realism in itself."
[+] [-] jhbadger|1 year ago|reply
[+] [-] torginus|1 year ago|reply
Obviously dyeing ones hair green does not constitute a meaningful attempt to subvert capitalism. In order to combat capitalism, one must first decide what capitalism actually is, what's actually bad about it and how to combat it.
Let's say the evil of capitalism is that it allows an incredible concentration of capital, therefore the enemy are the rich, and the solution is to raise social support for taxing them. Wearing a t-shirt saying 'tax the rich' is a hilariously inept mode of delivering said message in an impactful way, and serves more of a low-effort consumerist way of supporting the good cause, rather than geniune activism. Yet it can't be dismissed entirely.
If someone wrote a book on why the rich must be taxed, and said book became popular and influential, and influenced the tax policy in the end, you can't say capitalism won in the end, because people paid money for the book, or the author is a hypocrite because he got rich off of royalties.
As for the bit about the British Museum, it's utterly nonsensical - what does a state's military dragging away cultural artifacts by force, and displaying it in a state institution have to do with capitalism?
[+] [-] ashoeafoot|1 year ago|reply
[+] [-] drdrek|1 year ago|reply
[+] [-] GuinansEyebrows|1 year ago|reply
[+] [-] unwind|1 year ago|reply
[+] [-] DiscourseFan|1 year ago|reply
[+] [-] detourdog|1 year ago|reply
[+] [-] brendoelfrendo|1 year ago|reply
[+] [-] MacsHeadroom|1 year ago|reply
[+] [-] RiverCrochet|1 year ago|reply
[+] [-] sitkack|1 year ago|reply
I did take some new people on cleaner, more mellow excursions, they absolutely loved it.
This is what makes capitalism so insidious, it coöpts our very reality. It is an amazingly persistent mind virus.
[+] [-] jabotram987|1 year ago|reply
Subculture is an act of rebellion.
If you want to go down a big philosophical rabbit hole it is worth the read.
[+] [-] bloomingkales|1 year ago|reply
The only real subculture is addiction, those people literally die in that culture.
[+] [-] _rpxpx|1 year ago|reply
[+] [-] FrustratedMonky|1 year ago|reply
The biggest problem for me, is after the catastrophe, and collapse of everything, the survivors have "won the lottery". But the book never really explains how this future turned out 'good' for the survivors and not a 'mad max' like dystopia like every other post apocalypse story. If there was massive population decline, then how are they making all that technology? Is it all robots? Who built the robots?.
It was just a big leap from "huge global collapse and there are no people left" to "those that are left are really living it up in the abundance that is leftover".
[+] [-] verisimi|1 year ago|reply
The middle aged reflecting on their teenage "nonconformist" activities is just more conformism.
[+] [-] eadmund|1 year ago|reply
That’s why it’s sad to me every time a producer closes up shop.
[+] [-] harimau777|1 year ago|reply
[+] [-] klodolph|1 year ago|reply
—Joyce Messier, Disco Elysium
Gibson is a concrete example. He fashions critiques of capitalism in a book, the book is distilled into the aesthetics of cyberpunk, and the cyberpunk aesthetic is repackaged and resold to us.
[+] [-] CrimsonCape|1 year ago|reply
The commodity in this case is real estate.
[+] [-] Mistletoe|1 year ago|reply