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Following up on a discussion with @drmanhattan16 downthread:
I think the answer is usually going to be "yes."
A couple months ago, during some meta-discussion of disappearing threads, I wrote up my thoughts on conspiracy theories as countersignaling. As long as there's incentive to appear cool, independent, unique, there is incentive to push the boundaries of acceptability. It's called "edgy" for a reason.
One of the common cultural touchstones for edge is forbidden knowledge. As a result, anywhere you find edgy status games, you'll find someone claiming to know whatever it is They don't want you to know. Except...if one can just say it out loud, how cool and secret can it really be? The theorist is incentivized to play up their edge, a rebel who won't be cowed rather than an attention-seeker. As an aside, antisemitism is past its heyday because it's not very good for this. Enough people pattern-match it to "attention-seeker" that it loses its edge. This is the result of decades of memetic immune response to those status games. Of course, given that one very definitely can get banned for it, it retains edgy credentials...sometimes.
(Note that I'm not claiming the antisemites here are just edgy. I understand you're pretty serious about the subject. The motte is a weird place and has other status games; personally, I think that COVID skepticism has a grip on more of the edgelords.)
In the end, some people will find themselves drawn to signal their edge. Those who do so overtly will usually end up banned, unless they signal something really milquetoast, in which case they're probably "cringe." Those with a little more tact, though...they are incentivized to find something under the radar. To maintain that sweet, sweet plausible deniability while still getting a rise out of the opposition. They need something that will prove their status as an independent free-thinker who doesn't fall for the party line.
And they take the black pill.
I think this misunderstands edginess. Edginess is a mix of the young desire to show your courage, and the desire to plot out the unknown frontier of ideology. It’s commonly an adolescent and young adult phenomenon when the sex hormones are highest and social identity is being developed. It is typically male. Then there’s the (more urban) desire to prove that one is “in the know”, has new insight and intellectual uniqueness. It’s a typically cosmopolitan feature of following the latest trend. Progressives have commodified this urge to being in the know in the form of being woke (literally awakened). That term has died, but the desire to know the truth about the grimdark fantasy of America’s evil racism is still alive.
Many progressives certainly want to appear cool — they follow the latest trends in fashion and music — but does this desire foment any edginess? I don’t really think so. So I would say we’re talking about different phenomena.
I'm going to disagree on several points here.
Female teenagers are edgy in other ways, they'll rebel against trad parents by espousing communism, sexual promiscuity or drug/alcohol abuse, dating outside/below their socioeconomic class, etc.
Trend opposition is just as twitchy and fickle as trend following. Edginess can also express itself as disagreeing with consensus, not just aligning with it.
Edginess strikes me as fractal, on a small enough scale, you're at the edge of some boundary. In hyper-woke circles, any pushback or criticism of the status quo might be considered edgy.
Are those female teenagers really being edgy against hegemonic currents, or are they simply assenting to what they consume in popular media and music to the dismay of their less powerful parents?
Are they actually doing as much of that as they’re said to? I mean I spend most of my time in a subculture where teenaged rebelliousness looks very different, but my priors are distinctly that boys are more likely to ‘ironically’ use the N word than girls are to carry on forbidden relationships. Even adjusting for the obvious level of commitment entailed in the two decisions it totally seems like boys just feel more need to be edgy.
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Republicans got more than 46% of the votes in 2020. Of the Republican vote, more than a third is white evanlegical protestant, and more than 70% belong to a white Christian religious group (PRRI). These populations tend to be geographically segregated: if you're from Cullman, Alabama, where more than 85% of the 40000 or so votes went red, I think it's safe to say a tatooed psychonaut pansexual anarchist hippie is not so much on the edge as levitating above the adjacent gulf, cartoon physics style.
It doesn't matter where you live, everyone is inundated with the same messages from media and the internet.
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