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PaperclipPerfector  3d ago (text post)   14190 thread views

Culture War Roundup for the week of September 14, 2026

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Other sub cultures and scenes have been destroyed by the internet and modernity.

What do you have in mind? As far as the metal scene is concerned which you already mentioned, it's not exactly destroyed but is greatly transformed for sure, and the usual explanation that I'm familiar with is that it's completely mainstreamed and gentrified, to a point where old rock stars get knighted etc., and is thus no longer a fitting avenue to express teenage rebellion. This is why relatively few youths and much more adults and middle-aged people attend metal events nowadays. Also, much of its popularity was generated by a hostile Christian conservative right-wing milieu, and that has largely lost its relevance by this point. I guess that does count as a consequence of modernity but only in a rather wide sense of the word. Regarding the Goth scene, on the other hand, I've seen accounts that its members were prone to practising rather strict gatekeeping and exclusion due to an overall strong antipathy and concern regarding 'posers', which meant that rather few youngsters were entering the scene and eventually it withered away. Not exactly the fault of modernity, I think.

The internet surely has a corrosive effect on all of this, but I think only in the sense that teenagers and young people no longer feel compelled to meet in person whenever they merely want to chat. I'm guessing this was a big factor in the demise of malls, although I'm also guessing the mall is an institution that is particularly vulnerable to any social pathology.

You don't have to do drugs to be a raver, but you absolutely need to tolerate people being high around you [2]. This provides some level of costly buy in that separates it from mainstream culture. My tentative theory is that the desire for a space where you can semi openly use drugs provides a constant incentive towards holding underground shows.

It seems then that from a sociological point of view, the rave scene sort of hits the spot - it scares the normies away, as open and massive drug use is technically illegal, which prevents gentrification, but at the same time it's sufficiently acceptable to the mainstream so that large numbers of people are attracted to it: the police are apparently willing to generally look the other way, rave music is not seen as countercultural or fringe, and the drug consumption is of the sort that is not seen as a serious social problem by most normies.

One example: Science-fiction conventions were huge in the 70s through the 90s, but barely seem to exist in the cultural zeitgeist any more. ("Convention" in popular parlance nowadays translates to anime, furry or whatever Dashcon was.) The ones that still exist all have woke codes of conduct that are seemingly aimed at eliminating fun and spontaneity. No -isms or -phobias, no flirting with women, etc. Plus they're a hell of a lot more expensive to attend than they were in their heyday.

And they are more expensive to boot?!

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