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Notes -
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.
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."
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