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Notes -
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.
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