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Is Dinergoth a real thing? (soft-paywalled; use reader mode to get the whole article)
Before we get carried away with narrative, let's do a reality check. Is "Dinergoth" pointing to a real cultural phenomenon? Can anyone provide anecdotal evidence?
I can probably think of one or two people I know who meet this description, but that's not enough to validate the claim, which is that:
The problem is, this archetypal Dinergoth is, by construction, invisible to anyone who's not one of them. They can't afford to live in big cities, so you'll never encounter them there. Even in a small town, the Dinergoths are shut-ins who never leave their (parents') homes and never venture out into the community to meet people. Instead they (supposedly) spend all their time chatting with each other on Discord (hence, so the article claims, the flattening of regional accents among the youth - although I think that trend is older than gaming chats).
And now that I've read this article, the next time I run across one of those obese 20-something piercing-having pink-hairs I occasionally spy at CVS or Walmart, I'll update my stereotype of them from "Antifa" to "Dinergoth"; but really I'll have no evidence either way unless I talk to them and get to know them, which I won't.
Perhaps some of you reading this are Dinergoths yourselves, although I rather doubt it.
"Far from being woke left-wing gender activists, they are completely checked-out and apathetic about politics, including LGBTQ+ issues."
Others may have raised this point before me, but the dinergoth type (which, from growing up in a small-ish, poor town in the American South, I am quite familiar with) has a set of political beliefs formed entirely from TikTok/social media. This vague anti-Trump outlook and wannabe anti-Americanism has no real, concrete beliefs, just fads. If you're familiar with the empathy politics of the 2020s, you'll know what I'm talking about; it's quite similar. If you've been on the underclass side of TikTok (the "I prefer my ice... crushed" comments and the self-censoring TikTok Lives) you'll totally know what I'm talking about here. I think it goes along with the mushy-brain style of thinking and ideology that the kids these days have. A key part of being a dinergoth is having a mushy brain.
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I think the author has glued a bunch of unrelated ideas together and then gave it an unrelated label. The look is just what's for sale. Mall-emo metastasized because there was still money to be made selling it, much like every other youth fashion trend from the last 30 years didn't go away.
Probably no trend that gets big enough will ever really go away now. Older cultural phenomena like pet rocks and poodle skirts didn't have the internet and access to a global market to prop them up so eventually they went away. Pokemon and mall-emo hit fixation and will be here forever, they'll just continue to mutate over time.
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Add me to the chorus of people who don't like the name. I think the aesthetic the article is describing is real, but it doesn't seem to have anything to do with either diners or goths.
I agree that what it's describing isn't a subculture, though possibly I'm using the word a bit restrictively and thinking of a subculture as something that implies a community or a scene. It's not necessarily 'the mainstream' because I think that implies a kind of universality, but I think it is a mainstreaming of a certain kind of low-effort, passive engagement with online culture.
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Agree with the overuse of the term goth, there’s nothing really goth here. I will note however that there’s sort of a stereotype here that gender ideology is something associated with college-educated coastal elites, and it may be at an intellectual level, but not as-lived on the ground. Walk around Princeton campus and the kids will look normal, they wouldn’t even look bizarre by the standards of twenty years ago. You’ll see much more gender nonconformity at a Walmart in rural Alabama than at Harvard.
I think this is basically the intellectually permissive ideology of colleges finally filtering down to Walmart, where it just gets interpreted as a complete collapse of any normative standards or shame. So you get this mixture of mall ninja aesthetics, anime, furries, piercings, tattoos, hip hop/black culture in an unholy combination assisted by algorithmic blending of previously distinct subcultures. Similar to interracial relationships. There may be nigh unanimous support for interracial relationships at Harvard, but you won’t see many except some White/Asian pairs, you see far more at your local Walmart, especially White/black. These ideas are formed at colleges but mostly inflicted on the trailer park class.
You know, separately I want to talk about poptimism and the death of subcultures. I was reading Chuck Klosterman’s book on the 90s (good fun, I highly recommend it) and he was pointing out how “selling out” was a huge concern among indie music fans in a way it isn’t today. In the 90s subcultural fans had an expectation for their celebrities of loyalty to the subculture, of purity, and of resistance to debasement. In the early 2000s for example, hip hop had its own unique fashion that was totally independent from the world of high fashion houses and luxury design And you would have never seen Modest Mouse collaborating with Cam’ron. At some point around 2012 when proto wokeness was emerging, indie music press started to become self conscious that their disdain of pop music was in some ways sexist and racist and they began to notice that the then-popular bearded-flannel-mandolin indie of Fleet Foxes and Iron & Wine was disturbingly White They shifted their ethos from searching for the most obscure music to praising the top-40 hits of Beyonce or Kanye for their racial politics, thus poptimism was born and the end of subcultural gatekeeping. I mean look at the writing credits on Beyonce’s 2016 lemonade, you have former indie darlings like Ezra Koenig of Vampire Weekend on there, this is like if Jeff Mangum was writing songs for Britney Spears, absolutely unthinkable twenty years ago. IMO aside from the algorithmic melange & capitalistic aspects, there really is a part of the story where wokrness and concerns over sexism/racism/gatekeeping destroyed distinct subcultures
While I agree with most of what you write:
This isn’t true. Until last year the freshman classes in the Ivy League were like 12-15% black, those students (especially in that class and that environment) weren’t only dating other black people.
But those 12-15% are extraordinarily self-segregated into various affinity groups, dedicated URM-only spaces, grievance study classes, etc. Now that I think of it, in the 7 years I spent on elite college campuses, I can't recall seeing a single black/white romantic pairing outside a couple of star black athletes with white girlfriends. Meanwhile, according to Facebook at least, something like half my right-wing trailer trash high school graduating class is currently part of an interracial relationship and raising mixed race kids.
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I guess OP was referring to the life choices of white and Asian students, not blacks.
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It's a good article, and there's definitely something real there, but I hate the term "dinergoth."
For one thing, they're literally not hanging out in diners. The classic 24 hour diner doesn't exist in most locations anymore, and when it does it's too expensive for broke young people to go there casually. Also they kind of frown on people just hanging out for hours, and young people are staying at home online anyway.
Also they're not goth in any way. The glassic goth aesthetic is dark, muted colors and sad, serious emotions. This aesthetic of anime, games, and internet memes is more about bright colors and direct, intense displays of vibrant emotions. Almost the exact opposite of goth.
I would call it something like "proleanime" or "e-prole." They're not pretentious, they don't want to hide behind many layers of irony, and they're not educated enough to even understand postmodernism. They want something simple and affordable which they can enjoy, heavily based online since that's where they spend their time. Also, they want to express their sexuality free from the constraints of modern feminism, which is often "performatively" sex-positive but "practically" sex-negative for anyone who isn't gay or trans. And sure, some of them are obese or ugly because lots of people are, but some of them are traditionally attractive too (like the girls who get super into cosplay). It's a big tent of people who want to express sexuality and don't have a good venue for it in today's society! So while I'm not part of this group myself, I do support it.
Also I think maybe older people have the idea that anime is more high-brow than it is? We got this small subset of poorly translated anime films in the 90s, plus everything from Studio Ghibli, and thought it should be some high-class artistic statement because we didn't understand it. But when you watch the majority of mainstream anime with proper translations, you quickly realize how low-brow and fanservice-heavy it is. Nothing wrong with that, let people enjoy themselves, it's just a very different aesthetic than you normally expect from people who watch foreign media with subtitles.
In my own small-ish town, I've encountered old teens / young 20s somethings having conversations that are, without exaggeration, just the trading back and forth of what I assume are memes or Very Online references and meta-references. There's no "Hey, did you go to the movie with Jeff?" levels of basic fact exchange.
Teenagers were talking in Homestar Runner references 20 years ago, that's nothing new.
I said consummate Vs!
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Picard and Dathon at El-Adrel.
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As someone not from the US I'd ask you to elaborate on this a bit. I've only seen such particular diners in movies and I can only assume that they normally make cozy third places in the terms of sociology. Is there any particular reason why they are normally open around the clock and are disappearing and are relatively expensive?
This is supposedly such a widespread media phenomenon that it has its own article on TvTropes. Sadly I cannot remember the term anymore. The short story is that importing anime in the '80s, dubbing and distributing it was a big market risk, so these companies only selected those anime series that were pretty much guaranteed to be popular. This created the misconception among many Westerners that these series represent the entire anime industry and that anime is always high-class. Unfortunately Sturgeon's Law applies to it as well.
COVID killed off 24-hour businesses, including restaurants and retail. Plenty of other places (banks, libraries, etc.) reduced hours during the pandemic and never expanded them again. The lockdowns did permanent damage to our society.
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I think it's mostly a culture change. My parents, like to reminisce about hanging out at the local Denny's with their friends in the middle of the night. I have never even thought about doing that, despite going to the same college with the same Denny's. It just never came up, I did other things instead. Maybe an arbitrary change, or phone and internet related. Not only did they not have cell phones, they might not have even had an individual landline, I wouldn't be surprised if the phone was for the whole floor.
Before cellphones, you used to have specific gathering spots to hang out and meet up with people, where you'd shoot the shit while waiting for a critical mass of people to show up and decide to go do something else. A lot of times you'd never really get around to figuring out what to do, so you'd just hang out until someone made you leave for not buying anything. For me in high school, this was usually a local Dennys or mall food court. Now that smart phones are ubiquitous, these types of gathering points are no longer a necessary part of organizing a night out.
The decline of the classic American diner long predates this though, and begins with the interstate highway system and development of drive-thru fast food restaurants. Long distance travel used to involve driving down a lot of local streets and stopping at little diners for food/to stretch your legs. But the interstates streamlined a lot of that travel, and the ability to grab McDonald's at any freeway exit without having to get out of your car outcompeted the diners on both convenience and cost. And then COVID shut downs dealt the final blow to most of those who managed to survive.
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It definitely used to be a thing. I remember going to places like that as a teenager, but most of the places I remember have either shut down or are no longer open late at night. There are still some, notably IHOP and Waffle House, but they're mostly near freeways, and not somewhere I'd really like to go unless I'm driving long distances at night. Even most fast food places shut down at night (but there are some exceptions). I did see a few classic 24 hour diners in New York City, but that's NYC being different, and they were very expensive.
For why, I'm not exactly sure, but I can guess a combination of factors. It just costs a lot more to run a restaurant than it used to, because of rent and labor costs, so it's not profitable to keep a big space open with few customers. Or if it's peak dinner time, they want people to eat and leave quickly so they can turn the table over to a new customer. Especially if the "customers" are bored young people who are going to sit around for hours talking loudly and not ordering anything except maybe one soda, it's just bad business. Then, if it's in a city, you also have to worry about homeless people using it as a shelter, which is even worse for business. Maybe in the past there were more middle-class people who wanted to use it as a third space and could afford to buy a full meal there at 2am, but those kind of people would just stay home now. Something like the classic "Nighthawks" painting I just don't see, and maybe it's better that people can just stay home and go to sleep, but it is a bit sad.
Shouldn't higher rent encourage you to keep the business open 24/7, since it's a fixed cost that does not scale with hours of operation?
Rent is, but labor isn’t, and I bet restaurant owners have to pay a big premium to get employees to take the graveyard shift.
It's likely even worse than the normal premium, because a big chunk of their workforce has a curfew, either due to parole/probation or being teenagers. If you're not making a profit being open, you're not making a profit being open- especially when you add increased electrical and gas(restaurant kitchens are electricity hogs when they're in operation), and staff getting more lightfingered(all cooks use the kitchen as their personal pantry when on the clock, all the time. Good restaurant management can minimize this or limit it to cheaper items, but not get rid of it- and that's leaving out waitstaff and cashiers pocketing money directly, and the hourly workers[again, mostly kitchen] stealing time when not being watched, etc) when less senior managers are watching them(more senior ones won't take night shift).
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I spent most of my 20s as a 24-hour diner creature. This doesn't make me an authority, but it makes me feel like I am. The pandemic caused most of the 24-hour businesses around me (not just diners) to get rid of their overnight hours. The local diners mostly all failed and reopened afterward with new owners, reduced and much more expensive menus, and much more limited hours. My suspicion is that, long before the pandemic, those 24-hour diners had already lost most of their overnight clientele (graveyard shift employees, EMS, cops) to mega convenience stores along the lines of Royal Farms, Sheetz, and Wawa, so once the pandemic killed the inertia that was propelling the 24-hour service there was no reason to bring it back.
There are lots of factors keeping the current crop of 20 year olds who should be lurking in diners in their homes, whether it's lack of jobs, the internet, or social-developmental damage from the reaction to the pandemic. But even if they did want to go hang out somewhere, I think there are even fewer places left to go than ever. We went to the diner because it was the place that was open once everyone was done second shift. Even once everyone was old enough to drink we mostly wound up there because it was open later than the bars and our cop and firefighter friends would cycle through. It's how we made our friends in the first place. Now where can they go? Not even the local Wal-mart is 24 hour anymore, so that last resort of killing time is also gone.
(As an aside, I knew real human beings who were goths lurking in diners. Dinergoths, you could call them I guess. This article seems to me like the author's brain made the noise "dinergoth" and he found a way to staple it to a concept that, in so far as it even points at a real thing, has nothing to do with either of those ideas.)
Yeah. Somehow I surmised that whatever happened is largely due to the lockdowns.
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As someone from the US I've got to second this request. I've got 6 24-hour diners from 3 different franchises within a 15 minute drive of my house! Maybe @MollieTheMare is right that it's just a Southern thing now? 3 of those diners are Waffle House.
Maybe the "relatively expensive" qualifier is what's important here? Or maybe not. A quick check says that a big (eggs, bacon, toast, waffle, hashbrowns, but water to drink) breakfast at the closest spot to me would top $15 after tax and tip, and a full but cheap lunch or dinner (I'm assuming you don't get a T-Bone or something) is in the same range. That makes me wince as an old person whose mind recoils at accumulated inflation, but it's still only an hour's wage as a new fast food hire here. It looks like the situation is about the same for the "working poor" as it was a generation ago. This Denny's menu from 2003 shows comparable meals that would be around $7.50 with tax and tip, at a time when fast-food cooks were earning $7.27 per hour.
Or maybe the change was much earlier? My "young person in debt (not poor, just not working during college semesters) going to 24 hour diners" days were a few years before and after 2000, and I didn't notice any skyrocketing prices during that period, but maybe things were much cheaper in the 80s or 50s or something.
Is Waffle House safe for dinergoths to hang out in? As a somewhat-too-online Brit I have mostly heard of the chain in two contexts:
Yes. Waffle house is rowdy and... odd, but fights turning into all out brawls is genuinely rare.
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This is just anywhere that's open later than the bars and serves greasy food.
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So you haven't heard about their insane marker system? It's right up there with the Waffle House Index and their chair-parrying employees for infamy.
This is the longest Tim and Eric sketch I've ever seen.
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Can said dinergoths deflect flying furniture one-handed? (famous chair deflection about 1:30 in)
But I actually have no idea whether this 2022 event remains unbeaten because Waffle House violence is actually rare, or just because getting such awesome chair-fu caught on video is rare. Back in my "go to the diner at 1am" days the diner was either a Denny's or a local chain with only a couple franchisees.
The worst crime against memetics caused by the British English-US English divide is that the Waffle House Wendy story is not called "Chavatar - The Last Chairbender"
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Re:
Maybe @BahRam You can chime in with what he meant more specifically.
As some general US-based commentary, it is true that the charming, cheap, accessible, "everyone knows your name" movie diner is virtually gone now.
That's not to say there is no residual of the 24-hour diner left. Notably, Waffle House continued this tradition well into the 90s and is still extremely common in the American South.
In that era it did serve as a third place sociologically. Describing the eponymous song:
Dreams don't come true anymore.
Through a combination of prices rising, penny-pinching degraded service, and more widespread public drug use, it has now developed a reputation as a place for vagrants, not a place to hang out.
Being open 24 hours a day is part of the draw. They are often on the side of the expressway. And if you need a cheap(ish), filling place for food, you can be assured they will be open. Even after a hurricane.
Waffle House manages to survive because of highly highly optimized supply chains, and dirt-cheap wages. An independent diner with highly competent, friendly staff would have much higher overhead. Particularly a problem is that classic American diner staples have seen a dramatic increase in input costs. Eggs, chicken fried steak, coffee, etc. have all seen price increases that vastly outpace broader inflation. You still find some small diners limping along, but it's often more of a boutique, higher-priced thing.
I think this is a slightly different place.
The 24-hour diner wasn't charming. Cheap, certainly. Always looked at least slightly grungy. There were regulars, but also a lot of people who were just passing through. The waitress called you "Hon" (or local equivalent) regardless of which you were.
There's been whole books written about diners, but I think it's probably expressways which were a large part of killing them. A lot of them were on old through routes (US Routes and similar, like the Conowingo Diner on US 1) that weren't limited access.
Some of these original diners still exist and are open though. Some have re-invented themselves as basically a nostalgia version of themselves, and there have been others purpose-built as nostalgia versions -- these are not cheap.
Disagree - diners have always served mostly local customers. The market has been for food done quickly with minimal service and without pretense, at reasonable prices [ETA: and where it's normalized to dine alone]. As such I think three things primarily killed diners:
Frozen meals - I think a lot of people have forgotten how big a deal the introduction of TV Dinners was. For the first time, you could have a prepared meal in your own home, with no cooking required, at a price competitive with or even cheaper than cooking from scratch. Prior to this, if you wanted anything more complicated than a cheese sandwich and didn't want to or couldn't cook, your only option was a diner. Afterwards, you could have diner-quality meals at a substantially lower price, in the comfort of your own home, and all you needed was a freezer you probably had already and a toaster oven.
Fast food restaurants - A major appeal of the diner was a hot meal you could get quickly and cheaply, and sit and eat at your leisure. Fast food restaurants offered hot meals even more quickly and cheaply, and many built indoor dining areas so you could sit down and relax. You were never rushed and dining alone is fine. Granted, the menu was much more limited, but it ended up capturing a lot of the remaining people that wanted a simple and cheap hot meal and didn't want to make frozen dinners.
Bar food - I think a not insubstantial amount of diner traffic, especially the 24-hour variety, was from bar patrons desiring some food to soak up the alcohol, when most bars would offer popcorn or pretzels at most. Now many bars have a TurboChef convection oven to heat up all kinds of frozen snacks, and many have a full kitchen to serve up pub grub, so if you are drinking and want some food, you can just stay at the bar and eat.
That's why I think most diners now survive mostly on breakfast, which is under-served by all those categories.
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Yeah, I have the mental defect of thinking things that are slightly grungy are charming. The fact that purpose-built as nostalgia versions are not grungy is partially why I don't like them. In addition to not cheap.
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Civil-engineer nitpick: According to the official definitions (MUTCD ¶ 1C.02.03 items 83 and 91; probably also AASHTO, but I don't have access to that any longer and I don't care enough to look up a pirated copy), expressways are full-access (e. g., the parts of US 1 that you're talking about) and freeways are limited-access (e. g., I-95).
Official definitions be damned, I'm in that-sort-of-diner central and only limited access roads are termed expressways. Nobody calls anything a "freeway", they look at you like you're from California if you do that.
The Conowingo Diner I mentioned was on a part of Route 1 that wasn't (and still isn't) divided, so it wasn't even an expressway by the MUTCD defintion. It was here, where the Royal Farms is, though IIRC Route 1 was two lanes rather than 3 when it was open.
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I mean the standard diner that is a recurring location in Goodfellas, for example.
Your independent diners are being pinched by inflation(egg prices, in particular, and large wage increases for lower blue collar workers like cooks etc) and changing tastes, with the younger crowd often preferring fast casual food or less greasy meals. The logical business move is to reduce hours, and overnight is the fastest axe to fall. Remember, this is, except for waffle house, a full kitchen with a full kitchen staff, so it's expensive to pay $15+ per hour 24/7. You can find a normal diner pretty easily if you go at normal breakfast or lunch hours, but independent diners are mostly not open for dinner or overnight anymore.
Waffle house is special, because they serve a restricted(and much cheaper) menu, have a business model that relies on hiring the cheapest labour possible, and specialize in selling to drunks after the bars close. It has a reputation that... reflects that.
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It's the availability/filtering problem. First it was "some feature-length cartoon from Japan won a lot of awards worldwide, we should dub it for art hoes". Then it was "looks like cartoons are big in Japan, we can take the most popular series and dub them for kids. Wait, you think we can attract the teens as well? Noice!" Finally, we've reached the point where you can watch almost every release with fansubs or genAI subs.
And this means you finally have access to the full unfiltered range of formulaic slop that is made in Japan every year. Turns out it's just as bad on average as telenovelas or Saturday morning cartoons or horror movies.
It's the old "foreign prolefeed becomes high-status because consooming foreign product shows cosmopolitan sophistication" scam. In my youth it was Asterix and Tintin being more sophisticated than Marvel and DC.
In Japan, anime is slightly higher-status than Mickey Mouse because there is no animation age ghetto, but it is fundamentally mass-market TV. Sturgeon's law applies, and also the 10% that isn't crap is still passive entertainment for Japanese normies.
I remember seeing bus-stop ads in NYC ripping off this issue for beer in the late noughties. I don't remember who paid for them - the vibe is right for Yeungling but it may have been a generic Drink American ad by a trade association. There was a picture of two bottles of Stella Artois. One was captioned "The beer of the poor in Holland" (This is cuts even deeper than the target audience would have spotted - at 5.2% Stella has a relatively high ABV for mass market beer, so it is the beer of drunks and hooligans. In the UK at the time, it was called "beater" because it was said to be what you drank before beating your wife) and the other "$7 a bottle in the US" (or whatever a bottle of overpriced beer cost at the time).
Might have been Heineken, who also mocked Sam Adams ("Benedict Arnold Pittsburgh Lager") and some other beer they called "Grandpa's Old Fuzzy Ale". Or Newcastle, which has mocked Stella before. I don't recall Yeungling doing mocking ads.
Reminds me of this scene from Mad Men: https://youtube.com/watch?v=deXGXYJo4-0?si=V5uQm8Q-7JoJlZQ1
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Isn’t the “beater” thing also a reference to “A Streetcar named Desire” where Marlon brando’s character screams “stelllla!” while wearing a tank top undershirt? (AKA, a wife beater.)
It is possible that it began that way, but I doubt it. The overlap between people who drank lager in the UK in the 1990s (the respectable working class still drank bitter, and the middle class drank wine) and the people who were familiar with vintage Marlon Brando movies, let alone Tennessee Williams plays, was not large. When I was introduced to the saying, there was no suggestion that the reference to wife beating was other than literal.
There was a straight-to-VHS remake of A Streetcar named Desire in 1995 starring Alec Baldwin, that might also be the source if it has the same scene in it.
I mean it's worth noting that a 'wife beater' tank top undershirt in the US has, by repute, the same etymology- it's the garment of people who beat their wives(in this case explicitly class based- it has always been associated with people who can't afford air conditioning, for perhaps understandable reasons).
It’s the euphemism treadmill in action again. My dad (silent gen/New Jersey kid) still calls it a guinea tee
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I always thought this was also due, in part, to shows like Cops wherein arrested male suspects ended up handcuffed wearing the tank top? Because many of these were related to domestics, the fashion-guilt-by-association emerged.
Probably, yeah, but isn’t it an older term than Cops?
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But Asterix is far more sophisticated than 50s Marvel ever was. (Of course, that says more about 50s Marvel than anything else. I'm not sure it's more sophisticated than Carl Barks's Donald Duck from the same period.)
Exactly. There have been high quality sophisticated comics that have come out of US but Marvel and DC sure as hell aren't those.
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Yes, well, we can't all have a concept album created by a symphonic metal composer, now can we?
That album was inspired by Don Rosa's Life and Times of Scrooge Mcduck, though Don Rosa himself was a Barks fanboy who mostly expanded on his work.
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"E-prole" is a great coinage. It captures the alt-slop normie aesthetic while avoiding all three of those now very tired words.
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Anime is the only real remaining mass entertainment artform where 1) the chasm between good and bad craftmanship is obvious to the average consumer, and simultaneously 2) not irony poisoned.
The vast majority of anime is painfully, awfully earnest. Characters train hard to get stronger. Characters pursue romance for romance, not for self-actualization. Characters fight for lizard-brain reasons; survival, power, money, sex, respect - or for noble reasons like meaning, brotherhood, friendship. Hollywood used to produce this stuff on the regular but then got bored or got high on their own supply/addicted to masturbating and navel-gazing, or some combination of the two. Or just got profoundly disgusted by the people they were making the Content for.
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It strikes me that this aesthetic is much more related to the old scene subculture than goths (as is e-girl subculture). e-prole sounds about right.
I know the type. The "they live in flyover country and have bleak economic prospects" thing strikes me as quite real. When rainbow hair colors started going big, I thought it was really strange -- around here that's only associated with the e-prole type, CVS worker, down on their luck, demoralized. There's a lot of hopelessness in flyover country, which competes with the hopefulness of family and faith and confusingly messianic-hope that "Trump will fix this broken country" and, of course, drugs. But there's a lot of hopelessness and a lot of drugs on the coasts, too -- I just don't know what hopefulness competes with it.
But I'll challenge that this is principally sexual. Or that cosplay is. Hell, the cosplayer I dated briefly in college turned out to be asexual, which made her the second woman I've dated that turned out to credibly claim asexuality and the fourth such woman I've had a crush on. Obviously neither relationship lasted long or went very well. (Women I've dated have turned out to be either sexless or more sexual than me, I still don't know why.) One of the latter two is someone I thought of when I read the description of the dinergoth.
I think it's fairly true that these folks are mostly politically disengaged, but in flyover country the type runs consonant with being a political leftist. But I'd describe the type as "politically disengaged because they believe the Democratic party is full of rich people who don't want to help people like them," or "politically disengaged because they believe the only solution to America's problems is gay space communism established through the revolution," which they fantasize about while standing dead-eyed at the CVS checkout counter.
I don't know that this is the default youth culture, but it certainly is huge. I'm an elder zoomer -- this is the end-fate of a lot of people I went to school with. The Asians and the gays went to elite colleges, the Christians went to <evangelical_school>, and the dorks, who I hung out with, often tried to go to college, dropped out, and ended up listless and hopeless.
Apparently I'm pessimistic tonight. I don't mean to be. I'm actually very proud of where I grew up and the school I went to, despite their problems. But there's real hopelessness out there, and everyone of my generation I speak to almost identically tells me they have no real hope for the future and almost feels humiliated in spite of their achievements. Even if they're married, have a good job, a house, friends...
That said, the author of this particular piece is far too pretentious, and far too apt to see the elements of flyover country he's noticed as meaningfully distinct from their coastal cousins. I see confluence between the e-proles and the coastal progressives -- a lot of it. In some ways it feels like he's just now realized the existence of social class in America, and is astonished to find that lower-middle and lower-class people in flyover country exist, and live different lives from coastal strivers, overfitting this astonishment to the particular problems of young people who struggle with mental illness. I know the type, "I have OCD and ADHD and major depression, I live with my parents", I know the type. But I'm not convinced this type doesn't exist on the coasts; just not in the upper-middle-class social communities that the author lives in.
By and large, these are depressed, poor people who see gaudy self-expression as one of their few remaining possibilities of mattering in the world. If anything, their existence says more about the hopelessness of modern America than about its objective economic decline.
Definitely a lot of hopelessness going on. I'm a millenial, so I've heard us described as "the sad generation," an entire generation of young adults longing for the days of our youth when things were so much better. Which is weird, because all the economic stats say that we're much wealthier than ever, and there's a million new options for entertainment that we never had before, and... somehow that made everything worse? Odd.
I'd agree that e-proles and cosplay aren't just about sexuality. I meant it more like... any raw, unfiltered display of emotion. The male cosplayers I've seen at cons usually favor huge weapons and elaborate armor, which is more of a power fantasy. Then you've got the people super into historical recreation, or cute slice of life, fantasizing about some life of pure coziness. And even the more sexual anime stuff they rarely actually have sex, it's just blatantly showing off the bodies of hot women with no shame. I think it's that feeling of like "raw burst of emotion" that appeals to people who are kinda depressed and hopeless, because it at least lets them feel something. It's like taking a straight shot of cheap tequila, as opposed to sipping a fancy wine.
But also, yes, it's just a very convenient aesthetic. They can stay at home in their parents house, talking to their friends on discord, and apply some $5 hair dye or wear a $20 cat ear headset, and instantly they're part of it. No need to buy expensive concert tickets, or name-brand clothes, or a racing car, or cocaine or anything like that.
Reminds me of the discussions about vsco a couple of years ago. Identity made cheaper and easier to purchase than ever before.
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I don't think anime was ever "highbrow" like French cinema, but in the Millennial anime period (maybe 1995-2015) it did have a certain edge to it, like all things Japanese (think: karate, console games, cyberpunk, sushi, Zen). You probably had to have an above-average IQ to be into these things (although whether that translated into social status was another matter). If Dinergoth is real, that's no longer the case today.
An artifact frozen in amber:
Definitely a difference in the sort of crowd that would download a torrent + apply the .sub file, or pay expensive import fees, or join a club just to watch someone else's bootleg tapes, vs the current meta of endless mindless streaming on demand.
Also, excuse me while I go full weeb a minute, but I feel the same way about sushi. There's levels to it. On the low end, you can buy cheap premade stuff as a snack, and that's perfectly fine, just don't expect any complex flavors. American restaurants usually oyster California rolls or some deep fried monstrosity and that's... fine... but you might as well just order fried shrimp. The better places offer simple nigiri or sashimi with nice rice, so you can really taste the subtle flavors of the fish, and a clear mild liquor like sake really does complement it well. Some fancy plates and a cool chef also helps the experience. But at some point people go to extremes where they're just wasting money on "the secret, ultimate fish" or whatever and that's just stupid. Or you get drunk salarymen snacking on sushi while also binge drinking and smoking so... that can be fun too, in its own way. But once in a while its worth making the effort to appreciate a fancy meal with more subtle flavors than typical restaurant fare.
You mean @George_E_Hale?
ばれた!
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I think it's one of these midwit meme distribution. Glug thinks cartoons are low-brow childish entertainment, midwit thinks since it's not aimed at kids it's adult and somewhat sophisticated. Genius knows it's mostly endless rehash of tropes comfortable to its audience.
This would be odd given the Black + Asian fanbase of anime.
Anime is aimed at teens and is for teens. Adults who are black appear to love it as well. If the meme is to be fufilled the jedi at the right end of adults should also love it.
It's the barbershop pole distribution, then.
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Yeah that's fair. I'd like to point out that there is some sophisticated anime, and especially the niche manga that never gets turned into anime. But I'm well aware that's not what people are watching on Crunchyroll or Toonami.
Do you know of a good resource for a list of niche manga you'd consider good? That's something I've never explored but would probably enjoy.
Try Blame! It is not without its faults, but it sure is unique.
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Not an easy one. I used to use MangaRock, but it got shut down for piracy. Im not as plugged into the scene as I used to be- the big mainstream western accrptance and commercialization kinda killed off the indie scanlation volunteers. Your best bet is probably to search the list of manga that have win awards not in the shonen/shoujo category, like the general category of https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Shogakukan_Manga_Award. Once you find something you like, you can search what else they've done- often they have more experimental works that never hit it big, but are more intellectual. Or if there's a specific genre that interests you, you can see if there's a magazine for that (eg, there's https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Comic_Yuri_Hime for yuri manga that's actually aimed at women, instead of male fanservice). Unfortunately the rabbit hole gets pretty deep, and the really niche stuff is often print-only, not sold outside Japan.
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I'm not sure Dinergoth is a useful category, outside of designating an aesthetic. There's a broader issue--the listlessness and demoralization of youth--and the Dinergoth is a good example of affliction by it. But it's shared across pretty much every youth subculture. Hustler, incel, NEET, based tradcath, femcel, influencers. To the extent any of them are political, it's an identity-defining gesture. Even antifa is just a bunch of young men wanting to break shit for an adrenaline rush.
A more provocative take: what is the cause? "Capitalism." Or, more precisely, capitalism as implemented on actual humans. Humans are wildy disparate in their capabilities and intelligences, and capitalism, by flattening the world in its relentless pursuit of legibility and information, has identified the weak and dumb and deterritorialized them from the structures that once protected them. When they previously would have found refuge in burrows or bramble, now they're easy prey on the open savannah. And a caste of strivers are the predators here, who bloodlessly condemn millions to a debased state with new, maladaptive structures that are more easy to exploit and are delivered over technology that was supposed to liberate us.
Gen Z and, to an extent, millennials are just the leading edge of it. They won't ever snap out of it, because they don't even know of any other way to live.
I disagree with you, but I don't want to argue because it won't get anywhere new and interesting.
Instead I genuinely want to ask you to what extent you think culture and local community degeneration are responsible? Or, in your model, is that downstream of capitalism?
I'm a capitalist and always will be. I am also - very roughly - what might be called a technological accelerationist. More succinctly, I think capitalism+technology = overall massive material improvements for society. That being said, I do admit that as technology progresses and as the capitalist machine turns, there are some folks who will end up on the short end of the stick. My solution, or, the idea for it, has always been that local first communities work to support the stragglers and that things like family formation and, especially, extended family mutual reinforcement would do a good job of evening out the rough edges of capitalism for all who aren't repetitively highly anti-social (i.e. criminals and drug abusers).
I am not at all a socialist or any other -ist, btw; my comment was meant as descriptive, not polemical.
Entirely responsible; all of capitalisms' ill-effects are mediated through how it hollows out culture and local communities. Capitalism delivers massive material improvements to society through whatever ways its able to find to deliver those improvements. One way that's been very effective is by mining and hollowing out local communities, customs, traditions; turning the sacred profane. Socialism and various other -isms have their own issues: capitalism's genius is in allowing its participants to make that trade (of community for self-interest) in the most effective way possible.
It's a romantic vision, and probably the best option we have on an individual basis. But I don't believe it can amount to much, collectively; capitalism is too good at harnessing our energies to its own ends.
There are counterexamples, right? To be sure, they're small scale and niche - mostly traditional religious communities. I'll be specific here in that I do not mean the loudest groups (i.e. evangelicals) but those with the strongest and deepest tradition - Amish, Traditional Catholic, Orthodox, Haredi Jews.
I guess the counter to the counter here is that these groups are often not exactly capitalist and are also often somewhat techno-skeptic.
Curious your thoughts on that
I agree that those communities are kind of counterexamples. The reason for "kind of" is that they didn't emerge through any intentional action or planning, and attempts to replicate them through a plan have all failed AFAICT. Any attempt in contemporary times to recreate their success will end up co-opted and corrupted. They're more historic relics that occupy niches that so far have been resilient to capitalism.
Though, perhaps they'll survive and out reproduce us all, and capitalism can be retried on a more resilient culture.
Fair and good reasoning. I commend your internal consistency.
So, again, genuine question, what do you see as the end state of capitalism?
Spectacular wealth and corrupt hedonism. The masses of people in their state-provided goonboxes, with a small elite caste engaging in their own particular kind of debasement except with spectacular wealth, with an AI zookeeper watching over us all. And, in an accelerationist sense, I think it's inevitable, unless the AI decides to put us out of our misery.
So, to save one's soul, the option would be to become a literal monk. If you have a family ... move to outside the monastery and live as survivalists? Not trying to be hyperbolic or sarcastic here. It just seems like the stakes are high in your model.
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In the olden days, subcultures had real functions, a chief one of which was that they allowed one to explore genres of music efficiently. If you were dissatisfied with mainstream pop and happened to hear, say, gothic rock and liked it, it's not like you had hundreds of curated Spotify playlists (or, earlier, music blogs) to find more stuff quickly; you'd get handmade zines, sections in obscure record shops, small clubs (or club nights) and, especially in non-Anglo countries, the necessity for mail-ordering stuff. To find all that you'd need to get into the local goth scene, and of course there would be other benefits like other media, interesting conversations, drugs, strange ideas and belief systems you wouldn't get elsewhere and so on that would keep you there.
Since all that is not particularly necessary now - due to the said Spotify playlists and music blogs and such - all the subcultures have since started to bleed together to create some sort of a general lowest-common-denominator simulcra of a subcultural look which, for some odd reason, is now being called "goth" despite not particularly resembling the goths of old, expect perhaps for the derided "Hot Topic goths". Earlier the same look was often called "emo" with only marginally more of a connection to the claimed musical genre.
Greatest punk zine of all time
It's kind of sad that the best DTTW t-shirts are always unavailable. Have wanted the one with the Arabic Lord's Prayer for some time.
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I think the bigger one was the sense of community itself. Maybe you were a loner in your class, but you could put on your "uniform" and mingle with people like you. You could even identify each other from a distance, just one glance to see that the person across the street was one of yours.
The sense of community probably dominated once you were in the community, but the exploration of niche interests, chiefly music, was what got people in the first place and the communities formed.
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I agree that subcultural aesthetics are kind of pointless now, but it's not so much that Spotify made them pointless, it's that alt aesthetics have gone mainstream, or at least aren't really judged anymore, and hence there is no sacrifice and no meaning in dressing for a subculture. It doesn't tell you anything about the person.
The other day I was at a zoning meeting, the engineer came in to present and he was a youngish white kid with a man-bun. There was a time, and not all that long ago, when at a formal meeting no one would take a guy with a bun seriously. You just wouldn't. Everyone would comment on the guy's fuckin' hair.
Similarly, we've had the conversation on if tattoos are attractive or cool many times over, but one thing that is beyond dispute: they are so normal that you can't really judge based on them and achieve much of anything. In 1960, if my grandmother went to the hospital, she would have pretty much refused service from a nurse with a visible tattoo. In 2026, if you refused service from any nurse with a tattoo, you'd just die in the lobby.
A punk or goth in the 80s got bullied in school. In my high school years they got mocked as emo kids a little ("remember to cut down the road not across the street!") but could fit in as skaters or whatever. In 2026, a goth or emo or punk kid is dressing like and listening to bands that his teachers and parents listened to. He fits in, more or less, the same as he would if he dressed in polo shirts and khakis.
Maybe we have different definitions of "manbun", but IMO it's one of the more professional hairdos for guys with long hair, especially if it isn't straight. Or am I thinking of a topknot type of thing, and a manbun is different?
But having long hair, as a man, would have been a Serious Statement until quite recently, and not one that you could have in a professional white collar job.
Only if you consider 30+ years ago as ”quite recently”.
It would have been in 2005, I'm quite sure. I remember strong disapprovals of it in the early 2010s, at least, as well.
Back in 2001 I had a lecturer in the university whose day job was as an engineering R&D department leader at Nokia (a company not exactly known for being "hip" or a hotbed of alternative culture). As an old school goth he naturally had long black hair and dressed in all black, with a suit jacket being his only reconciliatory gesture to corporate dresscode. Absolutely nobody batted an eye at his style.
As another example, Mikko Hyppönen has been a well known computer security researcher / expert / educator for three decades, whose hairstyle has stayed the same at least since 1995. In some ways you could call his entire career a fight against a type of counterculture.
So, yes, long hair absolutely was something you could have in many professional white collar jobs unless you perhaps happened to live in a particularly conservative place. It really was and is more about your overall conduct and presentation than about any particular subculture style attributes. As an extreme example, an acquaitance of mine was a hard core crust punk in the late 2000s. In his free time he was all about sticking it to the man, fighting the police (in a very physical sense), multiple large piercings, tattoos etc. I've also rarely met anyone who's exuded as much polite professionalism as he did in his professional role (with the piercings and all) as a technical documentation specialist for a Fortune 500 company.
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I don't disagree, in the year of our lord 2026. But 20 years ago, everyone would have commented on an engineer with hair like that, and it would have impacted his credibility in that room. 50 or 60 years ago, they might not have even let him talk. Find me the engineer with hair long enough to bun in this photo. Long hair on men was a serious, serious CW issue for like a good thirty years! It would have been considered wildly strange and unmanly, let alone unprofessional, for a man to have hair long enough to bun in America before the 60s. And until pretty recently, you could with workable accuracy judge that a guy with long hair did not have a good professional job. Now, you can't, that guy might be your traffic engineer. He might even be a good traffic engineer!
Other "weird" and "alt" aesthetics have developed similarly.
I rue the day that a short sleeved button down shirt + dark tie became code for "McDonald's manager" instead of "NASA meat eater that shoots his load at the moon"
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More than 20 years, I think. Lee Kwan Yew called out long hair on PMC men as a sign of western degeneracy in the 1990's. I had teachers with man-buns in a posh UK private school at that time.
I live in the sticks, even moreso twenty years ago. "Leather boots are still in style for manly footwear, Beads and Roman sandals won't be seen." It would have been highly unusual and mockable to see a professional engineer with hair long enough to bun in our town.
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You mean like Don Eyles?
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20 years ago? I wouldn't be too surprised to see a Gen-X engineer with long hair in 2006.
There's a Boomer engineer with long hair in the famous 1978 Microsoft employee photo. That's software, though. I expect civil engineering remained conservative longer.
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This is a bunch of fake academic sounding nonsense. I would completely disregard this article as it appears to be mostly cope for the author's breakup with a hot portland goth girl. He has a nice dump of random statistics, many of which are years old, and no real honest way to pull conclusions from them. You can alternatively just as well say that anime is popular because netflix made content for young adults boring and gay.
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For a few years now, I have been more and more worried about the youths. Sitting on my porch, in front of my lawn (get off!), I watch the they/thems scuttle by and think to myself, "kids these days!"
The aesthetics don't actually worry me. This is kids doing what kids do; picking fashions and accessories deliberately to freak out the squares. Long haired hippies, punk rockers, grunge, glam, goth, emo. It's all branches from the same trunk.
What worries me is the response to it by their peers. For most of post WW2 western history, there were normie aesthetics that were obvious and represented the median of teenage expectations. Think of your preps or in-crowd. Jocks and cheerleaders. Perhaps those were the zenith of normie expectations, but it filtered down. Being counter-culture was deliberate and carried real costs. If you had green hair and piercings, you'd be looked at weird. Peers would make fun of you. You might be bullied. You then got to respond to this in a number of ways;
You could endure the bullying and double down on your identity as a goth/punk/emo/sensitive kid. Good for you. These are the kids who go on to art school or something and at least maintain their weirdo integrity. You probably open up a Banh Mi shop in Portland years later and dabble in polyamory.
You could decide being bullied sucks and that conformity actually isn't so bad. You ditch the piercings and black clothing and get a decent pair of jeans, a polo, and a leather wristwatch. Later, you laugh at some old high school photos you find years later as you logon to your 10:30 zoom call and greet your peers with "Happy, Friday, gang!"
Or, least preferable, you let bullying soak into your soul. You maintain your goth aesthetic but develop anxiety and depression. Barely graduating High School, you self-medicate through your 20s and wake up at 35 as a committed misanthrope. You either turn into a hardcore burnout or find religion.
This spectrum is continuous, not discreet. Most kids experiment with some level of "rebellion" in the teenage years but shake out towards the median. That's fine and good. With that last example, of the committed burnout, I'm being a bit intentionally hyperbolic. This is also why I still am against extreme forms of bullying.
I am not, however, against all bullying because the alternative is worse. The alternative is what has resulted in these so called Dinergoths.
Total and radical acceptance means there's no cost to defecting from norms and median social aesthetics. If I come into 9th grade with cat ears on my pink dyed hair, black lipstick, a rainbow flag choker, and am met with a shrug from my peers and "you do you" milquetoast encouragement, I haven't encounter a real social cost function. This is a massive societal failure to the Youths. Childhood and adolescence is where you have unlimited (mostly) do-overs for social situations. You awkardly ask someone out, you make a bad joke, you make a poor outfit choice, you experiment with various identities. It's all (well, most of it) fine because the folly of Youth is expected and you can reset as many times as you like.
In adulthood, this isn't the case. The stakes are high. Being socially malformed can have real negative impacts on career and personal development. Of late, being an autistic weirdo male can even get you fired from your job (See: James Damore). I think these Dinergoths are what they are because they didn't encounter real social cost until it was too late and they had no emotional means of dealing with it, so they retreat to basements and discord servers.
To use a physical health analogy, it's always been folk wisdom that letting kids get a little dirty is a good thing for their general immunity. I don't know how accurate that is (although I believe exposure to peanuts has been proven to reduce or eliminate peanut allergy severity) but I think it is still useful. Likewise, it's good to let a kid make a few social faux pas - and to let his or her peers inform of this. Sure, there may be some tears and hurt feelings, but how many childhood embarrassment stories become the stuff of humorous remembrances later on?
Taking this useful and necessary feedback mechanism from kids makes them brittle and turns them inwards as they enter adulthood.
I hope that you are wrong and 2rafa is correct. I suspect you are right, though. Interesting take.
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Not now that dinergoths are the ones making the hiring decisions. Plenty of people get away with non-median social aesthetics now, and still make plenty of money and have successful social lives. The archaic social norms no longer matter at any stage of life (other than maybe for boomers, but soon they will be retired and irrelevant).
James Damore was fired because of wokeness, not because of his aesthetic or personality traits. He was fired for committing wrongthink. When has someone ever been fired from a tech company for wearing cat ears? The question of what lifestyles and aesthetics are allowed is different than freedom of speech and thought.
Subtext matters. As anti-woke as I am, sometimes it isn't the true believers standing on principle, but normies getting rid of weirdo under the auspices of righteous indignation. The Salem Witch Trials started with at least a few people who really thought the devil made them do it, then developed into back biting and score settling for petty offenses.
I'd offer you this meme
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This thread is veering off topic. If "dinergoths" exist at all, they aren't working as well-paid professionals, let alone as hiring managers for said professionals. They're going to be in dead-end jobs commensurate with their poor social skills, as remnants of the hollowed-out working class.
As much as engineers may bemoan getting bossed around by Woke HR Karens despite their lack of "real" skills (as in, pertinent to the company's stated purpose), becoming adept at Machiavellian court intrigue isn't exactly easy either. Your typical socially inept Dinergoth would never make it in HR.
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Isn’t this “what’s cool in Brooklyn” coming to flyover country 15-20 years later, but in an (inevitably) altered form?
‘Elite’ or niche subcultures never become common in the same form. So the libertine sensibilities of the Greenwich Village beatniks in the ‘50s became free love for college students (a much smaller proportion of high school graduates back then) in the late ‘60s and then became John Hughes / suburban teenage picket fence Americana for the wider middle class in the very late ‘70s and ‘80s. Teenagers who had casual sex in 1985 didn’t typically share the leftist, third worldist politics of many of the hippies on communes eighteen or twenty years earlier.
I think it's more of "this is what luxury beliefs look like when they hit the underclass."
My reaction is "This is what a Barista of Arts looks like with 15 fewer IQ points".
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