All the subcultures are undead

When there's no more content in hell, the dead will walk the earth.

Previously: All the nerds are undead

One of the other 3-4 drafts I’m sitting on is trying to find a coherent way of linking David Chapman's commentary on Robert Kegan's stages of adult development and simulacra levels, which I thought seemed intuitively related at first but have sort of stumbled in drawing the actual links between.

So instead we’re going to ponder another David Chapman classic: Geeks, MOPs, and sociopaths in subculture evolution. As with Sam Kriss’ All the nerds are dead, I think there’s some interesting ideas there but I take issue with some of the core premises.

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Chapman starts by claiming subcultures haven’t been a dominant cultural force since around 2000, beyond which people stopped trying to create them due to a repeating cycle of cool thing attracting fans => fans plus cool thing attracting casual fans => casual fans attracting “sociopaths” => sociopaths bleed all the cool out of the cool thing.

Does it not seem absurdly obvious that this is not only not dead, it’s virtually the cycle that drives and sustains modern popular culture? Like, again, it seems very much like someone positing a thing is dead when it’s very clearly just not. I’m having trouble pinning down when this particular article was written but it references the Gervais Principle¹ which puts it at 2009 at the earliest. I can’t quite remember if it was as obvious in 2009 as has been in, say, the last 10 years or so that subculture generation is still very much the engine that drives western entertainment culture broadly. Markedly so since the increasing ubiquitousness of the internet and smart phones.

What Chapman gets right is the characteristics of the cycle itself as a description of how niche cool things tend to become mundane and oversaturated; that novel creators attract first devoted fans, then casual fans, then imitators all checks out. Casual fans diluting the cool thing and imitators moving in to extract sociocultural (and, often, significant monetary) rent is all definitely real. There’s a lot of detail left out here though. It could be that this is a uniquely modern phenomenon but most subcultures aren’t dying and don’t die, if anything they’re notably and shockingly undying.

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Chapman calls creators and [first/original/devoted] fanatics collectively “geeks”² and the later casual fans “mops”³ but we already have really good descriptors for these that we can borrow from Kriss: hipsters and nerds.⁴ Notice I’ve also independently come up with a better descriptor for what he’s calling sociopaths: imitators.

Chapman’s description of the cycle obfuscates what makes (and makes consuming) new subcultures “cool”, and that’s typically a mixture of unique quality⁵ and the first mover social status of being the gateway to that quality—hipsters get their cool from pimping their New Thing to the unwashed masses. Casual fans don’t have time and emotional/monetary resources to spend on things they don’t get status for liking (less cynically: casual fans aren’t motivated to invest in things their coworkers won’t have heard of yet). You don’t get mops without a requisite level of geeks being motivated to draw them in.

Calling late-mover creators in a subculture space “sociopaths” is also obfuscating a lot. Again, the idea that imitators move in and make diluted reproductions of the original, cool New Thing for mass appeal and clout is definitely a real thing that happens, but that’s leaving out a lot of what’s going on from the point that New Thing’s appeal takes off and New Thing becoming Old Thing.

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Part of what makes modern subcultures more enduring compared to the past is that the lines can become very blurred between creators and consumers. Because the tools to create are becoming more accessible over time, deep cut fanatics are now more active than ever before in generating new content both derivative of and adjacent to the New Thing, whether that be in memes or fan content. The subculture oftentimes has its own subculture.

Content generation, broadly, is kind of the subcultural zeitgeist now, both because it’s a gateway to status and also often the gateway to monetizing New Thing in pursuit of making it a full-time career.⁶ Again, while it’s true that there’s some amount of sociopaths moving in to cash out, they’re mostly following the lead of everyone else involved; original creators, hipsters, casual fans, and grifters are all in the race to monetize. So while once upon a time you would have had the cool new indie band with their hipster followers who mostly just hung around and would maybe occasionally start their own band, there’s a wider variety of engagement. People are starting their own bands and conventions and Discord groups and podcasts and posting the fanart.

Another thing that blurs the lines here is that genuine creators aren’t always idiots losing out to sociopaths who are uniquely attuned to extracting income from the mops. Originality itself will tend to drift in the direction of where the clout and money is at, and while this can be palpably bad it’s also often just part of the good-stuff-gets-bad cycle.

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Another thing missing from Chapman’s critique is the identity component, which is where I’m again drawing parallels between what Chapman calls mops and Kriss calls nerds. Hipsters have a tendency to more genuinely embody their Thing, and can harvest status and identity from being associated with Thing, but they generally prefer their Thing be better (better Thing = more status). Nerd identity tends to be subsumed and defined by liking and consuming the Thing, often regardless of quality (more Thing = more status). Because identity and fangroup tribalism demands signaling, and effectively signaling requires authentic sacrifice, the quickest way to signal identity is buying the merch.

Here’s where we can go really off the meta rails. The real reason we hate mops is because they want to collect all the merch. Because they’re willing to conspicuously make sacrifices to Things We Don’t Like. Children starving because mom and dad can’t stop buying Funkopops? It’s not until you add the latter that people start clicking on the ragebait for the former.

Why does it make sense to lose interest in something because it’s become more popular? If it’s the dilution of quality, you’re probably a hipster. If it’s the dilution of status, you’re probably a nerd.

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While this is more of a spiritual sequel to All the nerds are undead there’s an additional thread through Anger at how other people waste their time as misplaced angst at not having personal claims on other peoples' time that I want to address. We’re gonna get a lil more political than I typically prefer here so I’m hiding it after the proper conclusion (you’re supposed to stop reading after the share button jeez).

I’ve seen a few reactions to the latter that are like “lol ya capitalism sucks” and I think I probably need to make it more clear that my style of cultural critique is not aimed at capitalism. First off, how dare you all make tempt me to quote Ayn Rand. (I was gonna quote the Francisco d’Anconia money speech but holy fuck that’s way too long and I ain’t gonna take time to edit it down.)

Avoid the temptation to believe that because I am critiquing culture that means I hate it. It’s the same kind of thing I’ve already warned about wrt needing validation:

So, in the end, this is an admonishment against seeking validation. This isn’t just a “wake up sheeple row row fight the powah think for yourself escape the Matrix” soft implication that you need to live up to something greater. It’s the humble opposite. Be okay with liking things but be skeptical of the need to have to like a thing or to have the thing you like be everyone’s thing they like. Don’t be a goddamn zombie, or a Marvel fan.

Except this also applies in reverse. Be okay with not liking things and be skeptical of the need to have to not like things.

Without capitalism and without money, you don’t get entertainment. This post wouldn’t exist because Chapman’s post wouldn’t exist because creators wouldn’t exist. Not literally of course, art will always exist because it’s an ineffable part of the human spirit and even the Soviets and modern China make Stuff, but they never did and still don’t have the freedom to make stuff. We can bitch about Disney all day (it’s definitely more fun than it should be) but we’re fortunate enough to live a world, in the western world where we’re not stuck with only state-sponsored Disney. PBS is alright but it ain’t good enough to have the monopoly.

The quality hipster shit very frequently has an element of subversiveness to it, and you get significantly less of that if everything is decided by a state enforced social convention. We’re free to decide to not like things, but when it becomes essential to state security that everyone doesn’t like the correct things you end up with a distinct lack of Things, generally. You get the Great Firewall. You don’t just get canceled, you get disappeared. Ain’t no raging against the machine once the machine starts spitting bullets.

I’m the kind of person who loves to see humanity build things, even if they’re gross things. I’m the kind of person who perversely enjoys the Bakersfield to San Diego route through 4 hours of uninterrupted city on I-5. It’s both awful and awe-full. I can accept the hideous if it also leaves room for the beautiful. You’re all welcome to hate on capitalism, my identity doesn’t hinge on defending that either, but you will never get positive affect from me for only for wanting it torn down without having built something glorious in its place.

1. Chapman cites inspiration from Venkatesh Rao’s The Gervais Principle, which I can’t say I’ve read but from what I understand via the ACX book review, I’m not especially keen on it. Rao is very much one of those people that lots of people I respect seem to like but whom I don’t personally catch the appeal of. Chapman’s critique of this subculture cycle leaves the same sort of impression on me: it has some interesting, wise, and no-doubt-true things to say but feels far too polluted by how their authors want to see the world through a particular half-baked cultural lens to be a meaningful or truly useful reflection of reality.

2. Chapman:

I’m using “geek” here to mean “someone fascinated by the details of a subject most people don’t care about.” There’s another sense of “geek,” meaning the sort of person you’d expect to find at a science fiction convention. There’s significant overlap, but in the first sense there are gardening geeks and golfing geeks, and most probably aren’t geeks in the second sense. They might create gardening subcultures, though.

3. Also Chapman:

“MOP” is an abbreviation for “member of the public”; it seems to be fairly common in Britain. My American (mis-)use of it here is probably somewhat non-standard. Other terms that could be used are “casuals” or “tourists.”

4. In a footnote, Chapman also draws rough parallels between Geeks/Mops/Sociopaths to the Gervais Principle’s Clueless/Losers/Sociopaths, but again I think he’s stretching too hard to try to make that throughline work.

5. It doesn’t have to be universally amazing but there is a threshold. You don’t get a monetizeable subculture around minimalist glitchcore because it’s kind of shitty.

6. I mean look at this post, let’s be real I wouldn’t be writing this shit if I didn’t think there was a distant risk of maybe someday getting some coolboy points here.