Homer: You wouldn't understand, Dad, you're not with it!
Grampa: I was with it once! And then they changed what it was! And now what I'm with isn't it and what's it seems weird and scary to me! And it'll happen to you!
One argument I've enjoyed has been Elliot Sang on "The Loss of Third Places" and how that impacts teenagers: https://youtu.be/9Ku9csXhvJY
I would argue during these times we need those with wealth to fund third spaces and possible 'learning centers' embedded in nature, to help to "hold the complexity of rapid social change without freaking out.". (See https://youtu.be/TJa_6AHjLw0?t=3719 )
> hold the complexity of rapid social change without freaking out
this kind of reminds me of the concept of a "social surplus" from a talk Clay Shirkey gave over a decade ago: https://gist.github.com/jm3/6724931
The gist being that for a long time television was basically a "buffer" that people would sink extra time into, and this absorbs what otherwise might be social angst (or productivity)
> If I had to pick the critical technology for the 20th century, the bit of social lubricant without which the wheels would've come off the whole enterprise, I'd say it was the sitcom. Starting with the Second World War a whole series of things happened--rising GDP per capita, rising educational attainment, rising life expectancy and, critically, a rising number of people who were working five-day work weeks. For the first time, society forced onto an enormous number of its citizens the requirement to manage something they had never had to manage before -- free time.
so extending this thought, teens have lost this "third place" where much of the time they were sinking time and energy... now we've got this pent up energy that has no where to go. It's no wonder why a lot of kids are producing content for youtube or tiktok... but this has a lot of problems as a replacement, it's essentially replacing socialization and idle time with something that looks more like a job.
> For the first time, society forced onto an enormous number of its citizens the requirement to manage something they had never had to manage before -- free time.
Medieval (and earlier!) peasants also had ample free time, much more in fact than we have today once you account for the many months of various holidays and festivities [1]. It was industrial capitalism that completely turned over the equation.
> we've got this pent up energy that has no where to go. It's no wonder why a lot of kids are producing content for youtube or tiktok... but this has a lot of problems as a replacement.
No argument there, but it has advantages, too. TV is entirely passive, whilst creating for TikTok, or wherever, is well, creating. Not, perhaps, an ideal medium - and algorithmically controlled by sinister others - but the collaborative joy I see youngsters bring to their efforts to create the perfect [whatever] is lovely.
I'm old enough to remember 'zines, and Geocities, and Flash games, and I wish they were still doing that, because that was great, right? But our elders didn't "get" our youth culture, either, and so I think it's probably OK that I don't totally get most of what they're up to now. They're excited by it, and they're doing it together, and it brings them joy, and (apart from my concern about the algorithmic gods) it's just fine.
yes and no, the basics are pretty good... but as you mentioned there are some insidious effects from the centralized platforms themselves that weren't as broad reaching in earlier technologies; instagram promoting content that makes teens girls spiral into feeling terrible about themselves, youtube radicalizing incels, etc
then there's the monetization aspect that's leading kids to say things like they want to aspire to become youtubers when they grow up
Thanks for fleshing out my point a bit. I completely agree. Centralized platforms always drove culture, but when that was broadcast (emphasis on the first syllable), it was a) visible to, (potentially!) comprehensible, and able to be influenced by outside observers, and b) sub-cultures developed outside the opticon's view. Now the vast majority of social activity belongs to a few opaque platforms, with consequences we don't yet know, but already seem sinister.
I'm honestly more worried about how that affects adults than kids! Young people, mainly because they go to school, have more (albeit enforced) opportunities for offline socialization. As a parent, I know I'll have at least some control over my kid's online activity for a while (and once he finds a way around my router rules he'll be a journeyman hacker, so that's cool too), but there's no brake on twenty-somethings (or thirty- or forty-somethings) being pulled down the dark paths you mention.
As for kids aspiring to be YouTubers or whatever? Eh, they're just chasing the high-prestige choices within their cultural ambit. It's no different than wanting to be an athlete or rock star once was. They'll find (as we all did) that actually doing so takes a ton of hard work, and a bit of luck; some will dedicate themselves to it, and learn plenty (through either success or failure); most will drift towards different dreams.
> 'zines, and Geocities, and Flash games, and I wish they were still doing that
Honestly there is no difference between a crappy Flash animation and a crappy TikTok video, it's just the accessibility of the producing tools and hence accessibility of the end product is different.
But at the bottom the idea is still the same - I have some spare time, I have some tools to convey an idea, no matter what it is.
I could quibble by saying that making Flash games was a gateway into programming for many of us on this platform, and I don't see similarly useful skills being exercised by making TikTok videos.
On the other hand, our elders by and large didn't see the value in computers, either, and thought we were wasting our time. So, that opinion might be me being an old man yelling at clouds!
Or, more interestingly, our generation created (helped create; yeah, I know there are grey(er) beards than me on here) a world that highly values the skills we cut our teeth on messing around with Flash; the kids these days will have their turn making a world in their image, which may (read: will) have different values. I can't say what our generation's done with / to tech (or creativity in general) has been an un-alloyed good; what comes next will certainly be different, but different doesn't imply worse. The kids making TikToks right now won't think it is, and I expect that in some ways they'll be right.
The first one is a very good video, both factually and philosophically. I do think it's a bit odd that near the end the speaker concludes that only smashing the capitalist system can restore third spaces, though, since all of the examples of useful third places earlier in the video were consequences of the first waves of industrial capitalism. Pubs, bars, soda fountains, coffeehouses, skating rinks, bowling alleys etc.
> It seems as though they are looking, hard, for identity, for validation…
I think the word the author is searching for is anomie. Kids used to develop their personalities via the strictures of a dominant culture, or in opposition to one. Now, there’s no dominant culture. There are a thousand, or a million, little cultures. There’s no big overarching societal goal/narrative to hook yourself to (or to oppose).
A sibling comment quotes Abe Simpson on being with it. I prefer a different Simpsons quote, from the ants on the space shuttle:
I think that maybe the author is projecting here. I would argue that that search for validation from the previous generations was in some ways invented by the advertising industry - and now it's not working anymore - but the author is still feeling the sway of it.
The author was given a faux need that the people she's projecting on don't even consider at all in the framework of their lives.
> some ways invented by the advertising industry - and now it's not working anymore
There’s an entire occupation of “influencer” that basically exists for GenZ and younger.
The idea that advertising is not working anymore when if anything advertising is more insidious than ever before and is targeting kids at increasingly earlier ages is clearly false.
It's the preferred occupation even for Gen Z and younger. Get paid to go on vacations, get products for free and have thousands (millions) of people desperately want your life as you talk about it endlessly. The perfect job in the teenage mind.
You're right, of course, about "influencers" and advertising and how they work now. But so was the poster to whom you responded, in that those do not create a shared mono-culture.
What you see here is that the forces are in effect as they have been for a while, if anything moreso than ever as you say, but they are not on a metaphorical frequency the author can pick up on anymore.
yes - it was easier to create themes in impressionable folk (mods, rockers, punks, hippies, etc) - artificial creations that somewhat assuaged a feeling and sell a lot of product.
It seems to me that the author is observing that in the past you would have sub-cultures based on lived experiences (preppy…New England prep school, goth…alienated teenagers, etc) that would develop an aesthetic, whereas today the aesthetic exists without any underlying sub culture.
The author is using this observation as a jumping off point to notice that as far as they can tell there just aren’t any lives sub cultures anymore.
It’s the lack of these sub cultures that kids can participate in that the author is bemoaning.
The chance of a 50-year old (and I say that as someone not too far off that) being correct about youth (non-?)subcultures is so low, I really wonder why people bother. I guess there was an article to write. The "aesthetic" proliferation sounds fun and harmless. I wish adults would write about younger people (if they really have anything to say at all) with a respectful interest and open-mindedness rather than whatever this is.
Nothing pisses your kids off more than "getting it". You need to be
able to shoulder a massive amount of indignity, self-irony, self
mocking and deprecation. I threaten to dad-dance at the school
disco. Work hard enough at it and one day you may hear the greatest
compliment when they're talking to friends ... "you know I think my
parents may actually have been cool once".
Agree. This feels like judging youth because they don't feel compelled to conform to some "subculture" in order to have a happy, fulfilling youth.
As the parent of a teen, I see a massive difference from what I saw as a teen in the late 1980's. At my school, there were very clear and visual identifiers for whatever group kids were in. Crossing these lines was effectively leaving one's comfort zone, and was awkward and difficult.
For my own kid and those that I see at his school, it's much more about common interests, and that feels like more of a matrix than the coveted & siloed subculture worshipped by the author. Kids seem to be more united by what they do than what group they identify with. There are still peer pressures, elements of shared culture (especially in clothing), but it doesn't feel as rigid as in the days of my youth. The old cliquey tropes seem very, very diminished.
Except that’s not what the author is saying at all.
For example, the example you’ve given about shared interests is exactly what the author wants, and is bemoaning the lack of.
I’m not sure why you say that’s siloed, but the argument the author makes is that these shared interests don’t exist anymore which they noticed because of the lack of aesthetics around them, since shared interests usually generate a set of aesthetics.
Imagine a group of D&D players who then decide to start role playing in costumes, and invent the idea of cosplay. They hold conventions, etc where they show up to celebrate their shared interest in D&D and usually dress up in certain costumes which emerges as the cosplay aesthetic.
In this case the shared interest, D&D forms the sub culture, and the costumes forms the aesthetic based on that subculture.
Now, say no one is playing D&D anymore, and a few decades pass, and suddenly the cosplay aesthetic sees a resurgence. People are dressing in those same costumes, but no one participating in this aesthetic has heard of D&D anymore.
That’s what the author sees. Aesthetics that exist almost entirely independent of any subcultures (which could also be based on shared interests). And the author implicitly stipulates that most shared interests (subcultures) would lead to aesthetics, so the lack of such aesthetics indicates to the author a lack of subcultures.
The author arrives from the outside in, but their argument is entirely around the lack of shared interests and has nothing to do with the aesthetics, other than being an entryway into subcultures.
> The chance of a 50-year old (and I say that as someone not too far off that) being correct about youth (non-?)subcultures is so low, I really wonder why people bother.
The chance that any random 50 yo will get it is moderately low, but the chance that there are some who do is quite high. The latter are involved in marketing to these collectively high-spending groups, and have been since the 50s.
Then there’s a cohort who claim to get it (or loudly claim not to get it) who maybe do, maybe don’t, though it doesn’t matter: what they do is talk to their contemporaries.
Also if you live with teens there’s a pretty good chance you do actually know quite a bit about them culture. Some teens are closer to their parents than others, even within a single family.
> The chance of a 50-year old (and I say that as someone not too far off that) being correct about youth (non-?)subcultures is so low,
Care to elaborate? Why is there somethin intrinsic in age that makes teen subcultures so difficult to grasp? And that is for everybody? I mean, even an educator working 10 hours a day in close contact with such subcultures?
And what does make teen subcultures so evasive specifically? They change fast?
> The "aesthetic" proliferation sounds fun and harmless.
The author's thesis is that these aesthetics have replaced subcultures and that has led to kids being lonely and sad. You can disagree with that, but it seems that you are just ignoring that.
> with a respectful interest and open-mindedness
How is the author being disrespectful to young people? The criticisms are entirely pointed at the content producing machine.
The author isn't blaming kids, but is falling into the same trap as previous "back in my day" types of focusing on cultural trappings rather than material conditions.
I didn't say the author was being disrespectful to anyone; I guess I should have added more caveats or something but I was just trying to describe my preference.
So if I understand, your (fair) response to a criticism of aesthetism replacing meaning, is that the critique is too cultural and not materialist enough (not evaluating either arguments here, just trying to rephrase it)
This is the most Marxist stuff I've seen in a while on a public forum, thank you HN.
I suppose the youth writing about 50-year olds is going to be just as fraught with incorrectness.
Why should either party bother then making observations about the other at all?
To answer my own question, I think the more observant, reflective, and contemplative individuals from either group very likely will have something to say that may cause the other to pause. While they may often not get the other, I think being immediately dismissive of what they have to say is the worse sin.
Idk, this article seems like it's from the perspective of someone either entirely removed from subculture, or like, just failed to think clearly about the intersection of online spaces and identity.
The main point of the article seems to argue that lacking some cohesive "box" is making it harder for kids to find a community. And even if this _may_ have been a thing before (idk, maybe it was invented by John Hughes movies, it's before my time wtv), I feel like the argument is just pretty weak. It privileges clique-identity over a more diverse, less monolithic identification, and it assumes that community can only found w/in these cliques.
I'm also not sure why the author spends so much time centering on aesthetics as if that's the be-all and end-all of internet culture, and its fragmentation being that which is preventing self-identity. The lack of physical third spaces is indeed a problem, but the kids are still having fun lmfao. The internet has just exposed people to so many more interesting things.
The author is lamenting the increasing effectiveness of advertising and propaganda on children, but the advertisers sign his checks, so he doesn't realize it.
The author is a woman. I don't think she's blind to this; a substantial chunk of this article is dedicated to previous cultural lodestones (TV, music), which were similarly underpinned by advertising.
She might not be blind to it, but since that's what the article is about, and yet also somehow not what the article is about, I don't think I would say that she's particularly sighted.
As an adult, teen subcultures are fundamentally obscure. It's hard as adults to say whether they're truly "fading" or whether they're simply inaccessible, which is what they're meant to be. Or both.
I tend to think it's both, and that these kinds of articles miss a critical piece of the puzzle: you cannot have a youth culture if the surrounding culture is hostile towards public spaces, third spaces, &c. One consequence of American suburbanization and car dependence has been the development of a fundamental apathy towards those kinds of third spaces.
Subcultures directly prior to the iPhone felt entirely mediated by movies, tv and advertisement. The boundaries they provided didn't match reality, they were flavors that people found themselves fit into, willing or not. But they were more consistently defined.
It only makes sense that internet influencers - who are even less aware of their role in media than Hollywood writers and massively outnumber them - have lead to faster shifting and looser definitions of subcultures.
One might have said the same thing about the millenials since the 00's and the 10's were known for being "culturally poor" in comparison to previous decades.
I think there is a huge economic and demographic phenomenon driving these trends. Young people today have less money and less economic perspective than the young people from previous generations in the same age bracket and this reflects in the art and everything else. The continuous deceleration of the econonomic growth in the last five decades together with unprecedent inequality brought the world to the sad times we're living in.
In the past also your parents were expected to die at 60 and something and pass their wealth to their children. The boomer generation broke this trend with force, they are living much more and don't seem slightly interested in ceasing any kind of power to the younger generations.
This article demonstrates a fundamental misunderstanding of what teenagers are—language like "what teenagers today are offered instead", and "kids ... need more, deserve more"—this is a mom who thinks that teenagers live in a world created for them by the adults and that the adults have failed them.
This is the opposite of my memory of being a teenager. Teenagers, as a rule, are actively seeking to define their identity independent of the adults around them. The subcultures of our teenagehood weren't carefully constructed extracurriculars that our parents prepared for us, they were formed organically by the kids themselves, and they were subcultures intentionally crafted to exclude the adults in our lives. My dad was big into football, so my brother and I went all-in on the nerd culture. My dad didn't get D&D and MTG and fantasy novels any more than this mom gets what her daughter is participating in, and that was part of the point.
Teenagers are kids who have hit the age where the modern, hovering parenting style completely falls apart. They're not living in your world anymore because their hormones are telling them it's time to forge their own path. It's time to begin to let go, not attempt to craft a better subculture scene for them.
I don't think I've ever really gotten the whole teenage rebellion thing; don't most people grow up and emulate the religion, politics, and lifestyle (education, career type, marriage preference, etc..) as their parents?
Rebellion can mean a lot of different things. Mostly it amounts to opposition in a fairly superficial sense. Different clothes, different haircut, different music, maybe some intentional bad choices... But although these things are high-visibility, they're not that fundamental to identity and culture. It's rare for kids to completely cut ties with the fundamentals (i.e. all the things you mention) of their parents, particularly now when kids are still dependent on their parents for longer into adulthood.
For me it was self-exploration and exploring the fringes of my identity using psychedelics and other drugs that my parents didn't particularly approve of. For some of my friends it was sexual identity (which was much more taboo than today). In general I think "rebellion" is the consequence of becoming a fully aware individual capable of independence from parents. Parents want to exert control over their teens, teens want to have agency over their lives, and the conflict between those two positions is framed as "rebellion".
Elders have complained about the impetus of youth for longer than the boomers.
"The young people of today think of nothing but themselves. They have no reverence for parents or old age. They are impatient of all restraint ... As for the girls, they are forward, immodest and unladylike in speech, behaviour and dress." - Peter the Hermit, 1274
Those quotes are made up, though I didn't mean it couldn't have happened before, but in recent history. It was obviously not expected then and their parents had no idea how to deal with it.
If you think about it, teenage rebellion makes sense from an evolutionary perspective as it encourages a subgroup (teenagers) to explore outside whatever's the norm (aka adults). I wrote more about it in my blog post:
A couple years back I was walking through a very affluent public high school. Nearly every kid had the same school hoodie on. Boys in shorts, girls in matching warmup pants.
There was no real dress code. Very fashion different from my era. Not sure what an advertiser would market to unless Squid Games was a fashion.
What an amazingly shallow way to look at the half-connected, sedentary nature the internet has wrought upon The Youth. "We've shifted from one way of splitting hairs to a different hair splitting method, and this more casual, less committed hair-slitting approach is a failure"? Riveting.
Subcultures continue to exist, but they have become smaller and more focused on online communities such as Subreddits and Discord servers. Subcultures were identified by people expressing similar aesthetic values through visible means like clothing. Now there is a greater emphasis on shared internal belief systems rather than external social performances. Newer subcultures position themselves as cultural-memetic innovators within the mainstream, which proves to be more subversive than the LARP-like performances in previous visually-oriented subcultures.
Oh heck yes, let's get all Baudrillard's Sign Order Stages. Are we here yet?
> Stage 4 is a pure simulacrum, in which the simulacrum has no relationship to any reality whatsoever. Here, signs merely reflect other signs and any claim to reality on the part of images or signs is only of the order of other such claims.
From the article:
> What teenagers today are offered instead is a hyperactive landscape of so-called aesthetics — thousands of them, including everything from the infamous cottagecore to, these days, prep. These are more like cultural atmospheres, performed mainly online, with names and looks and hashtags, an easy visual pablum. They come and go and blend and break apart like clouds in the wind, many within weeks of appearing. They have much content but little context — a lot to look at but a very thin relationship to any "real life" anything, like behaviors or gathering places. On one end, even a distinctly in-the-world subculture (like, say, grunge) can be reduced to a vibe packet of anodyne references (cigarettes, grimy things); on the other, a mere mood tone can be elevated to something offered as lifestyle (there are girls who enjoy the color red and a certain Euro effortlessness, and they are called Tomato Girls, while others who prefer white are called Vanilla Girls). If two dozen things on a Pinterest page feel as if they go together, chances are someone, even just as a lark or experiment, is calling it an aesthetic.
Maybe not Full Stage 4 simulacra/hyperreal but it feels like the meaning is left, the signs are starting to blur & become indistinct, are indeed becoming little more than pointers to other signs. Hyperreal mmay be upon us.
My hackles briefly came up with what seemed a dig at screens; I was afraid it was going to chalk up all the problems of culture to social media. But it avoided that & fell really really close to my feelings, with the hazy lack of resolution that seems due for a weird wild world spinning on:
> It’s the culture available to them that is failing, by no longer being able to connect any of these categories with lived experience or social meaning. Kids, in all their blowzy creativity — the same creativity that invented movements from Romanticism to hippiedom to hip-hop — need more, deserve more.
The local world around us have effervesced into far off high flying supply chains, and we are surrounded by whiz-bang fancy tech we absolutely positively can no longer disassemble & understand & figure out (there's always reams of code and trying to see it is a Felony Anti-Circumvention because the devices terms of service can say that now).
Rebuilding local meaning seems so hard. This is such a challenge.
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[ 2.9 ms ] story [ 110 ms ] threadGrampa: I was with it once! And then they changed what it was! And now what I'm with isn't it and what's it seems weird and scary to me! And it'll happen to you!
I would argue during these times we need those with wealth to fund third spaces and possible 'learning centers' embedded in nature, to help to "hold the complexity of rapid social change without freaking out.". (See https://youtu.be/TJa_6AHjLw0?t=3719 )
this kind of reminds me of the concept of a "social surplus" from a talk Clay Shirkey gave over a decade ago: https://gist.github.com/jm3/6724931
The gist being that for a long time television was basically a "buffer" that people would sink extra time into, and this absorbs what otherwise might be social angst (or productivity)
> If I had to pick the critical technology for the 20th century, the bit of social lubricant without which the wheels would've come off the whole enterprise, I'd say it was the sitcom. Starting with the Second World War a whole series of things happened--rising GDP per capita, rising educational attainment, rising life expectancy and, critically, a rising number of people who were working five-day work weeks. For the first time, society forced onto an enormous number of its citizens the requirement to manage something they had never had to manage before -- free time.
so extending this thought, teens have lost this "third place" where much of the time they were sinking time and energy... now we've got this pent up energy that has no where to go. It's no wonder why a lot of kids are producing content for youtube or tiktok... but this has a lot of problems as a replacement, it's essentially replacing socialization and idle time with something that looks more like a job.
Medieval (and earlier!) peasants also had ample free time, much more in fact than we have today once you account for the many months of various holidays and festivities [1]. It was industrial capitalism that completely turned over the equation.
[1] https://groups.csail.mit.edu/mac/users/rauch/worktime/hours_...
No argument there, but it has advantages, too. TV is entirely passive, whilst creating for TikTok, or wherever, is well, creating. Not, perhaps, an ideal medium - and algorithmically controlled by sinister others - but the collaborative joy I see youngsters bring to their efforts to create the perfect [whatever] is lovely.
I'm old enough to remember 'zines, and Geocities, and Flash games, and I wish they were still doing that, because that was great, right? But our elders didn't "get" our youth culture, either, and so I think it's probably OK that I don't totally get most of what they're up to now. They're excited by it, and they're doing it together, and it brings them joy, and (apart from my concern about the algorithmic gods) it's just fine.
yes and no, the basics are pretty good... but as you mentioned there are some insidious effects from the centralized platforms themselves that weren't as broad reaching in earlier technologies; instagram promoting content that makes teens girls spiral into feeling terrible about themselves, youtube radicalizing incels, etc
then there's the monetization aspect that's leading kids to say things like they want to aspire to become youtubers when they grow up
I'm honestly more worried about how that affects adults than kids! Young people, mainly because they go to school, have more (albeit enforced) opportunities for offline socialization. As a parent, I know I'll have at least some control over my kid's online activity for a while (and once he finds a way around my router rules he'll be a journeyman hacker, so that's cool too), but there's no brake on twenty-somethings (or thirty- or forty-somethings) being pulled down the dark paths you mention.
As for kids aspiring to be YouTubers or whatever? Eh, they're just chasing the high-prestige choices within their cultural ambit. It's no different than wanting to be an athlete or rock star once was. They'll find (as we all did) that actually doing so takes a ton of hard work, and a bit of luck; some will dedicate themselves to it, and learn plenty (through either success or failure); most will drift towards different dreams.
Honestly there is no difference between a crappy Flash animation and a crappy TikTok video, it's just the accessibility of the producing tools and hence accessibility of the end product is different.
But at the bottom the idea is still the same - I have some spare time, I have some tools to convey an idea, no matter what it is.
On the other hand, our elders by and large didn't see the value in computers, either, and thought we were wasting our time. So, that opinion might be me being an old man yelling at clouds!
Or, more interestingly, our generation created (helped create; yeah, I know there are grey(er) beards than me on here) a world that highly values the skills we cut our teeth on messing around with Flash; the kids these days will have their turn making a world in their image, which may (read: will) have different values. I can't say what our generation's done with / to tech (or creativity in general) has been an un-alloyed good; what comes next will certainly be different, but different doesn't imply worse. The kids making TikToks right now won't think it is, and I expect that in some ways they'll be right.
- attention restoration design ( Designing Restoration: Protecting and Restoring Our Attention Through Participatory Design , Beck Tench, 2022 ) https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=j4swGe2OFJ4
- Daniel Christian Wahl's [more urban or town-centre] idea around museums as bioregional learning centres ( https://designforsustainability.medium.com/museums-as-bioreg... )
Bioregional Learning Centre (Ecoversities) Donnella Meadows - History of the Ideas Underlying the Balaton Group(1982) https://donellameadows.org/archives/history-of-the-ideas-und...
Will likely be rambling about this more on https://transition-er.mn.co . (Originally aggregated this stuff on https://earth-regenerators.mn.co/posts/the-design-pathway-bo... )
I think the word the author is searching for is anomie. Kids used to develop their personalities via the strictures of a dominant culture, or in opposition to one. Now, there’s no dominant culture. There are a thousand, or a million, little cultures. There’s no big overarching societal goal/narrative to hook yourself to (or to oppose).
A sibling comment quotes Abe Simpson on being with it. I prefer a different Simpsons quote, from the ants on the space shuttle:
“Freedom! Horrible, horrible freedom!”
The author was given a faux need that the people she's projecting on don't even consider at all in the framework of their lives.
There’s an entire occupation of “influencer” that basically exists for GenZ and younger.
The idea that advertising is not working anymore when if anything advertising is more insidious than ever before and is targeting kids at increasingly earlier ages is clearly false.
The author is using this observation as a jumping off point to notice that as far as they can tell there just aren’t any lives sub cultures anymore.
It’s the lack of these sub cultures that kids can participate in that the author is bemoaning.
As the parent of a teen, I see a massive difference from what I saw as a teen in the late 1980's. At my school, there were very clear and visual identifiers for whatever group kids were in. Crossing these lines was effectively leaving one's comfort zone, and was awkward and difficult.
For my own kid and those that I see at his school, it's much more about common interests, and that feels like more of a matrix than the coveted & siloed subculture worshipped by the author. Kids seem to be more united by what they do than what group they identify with. There are still peer pressures, elements of shared culture (especially in clothing), but it doesn't feel as rigid as in the days of my youth. The old cliquey tropes seem very, very diminished.
For example, the example you’ve given about shared interests is exactly what the author wants, and is bemoaning the lack of.
I’m not sure why you say that’s siloed, but the argument the author makes is that these shared interests don’t exist anymore which they noticed because of the lack of aesthetics around them, since shared interests usually generate a set of aesthetics.
Imagine a group of D&D players who then decide to start role playing in costumes, and invent the idea of cosplay. They hold conventions, etc where they show up to celebrate their shared interest in D&D and usually dress up in certain costumes which emerges as the cosplay aesthetic.
In this case the shared interest, D&D forms the sub culture, and the costumes forms the aesthetic based on that subculture.
Now, say no one is playing D&D anymore, and a few decades pass, and suddenly the cosplay aesthetic sees a resurgence. People are dressing in those same costumes, but no one participating in this aesthetic has heard of D&D anymore.
That’s what the author sees. Aesthetics that exist almost entirely independent of any subcultures (which could also be based on shared interests). And the author implicitly stipulates that most shared interests (subcultures) would lead to aesthetics, so the lack of such aesthetics indicates to the author a lack of subcultures.
The author arrives from the outside in, but their argument is entirely around the lack of shared interests and has nothing to do with the aesthetics, other than being an entryway into subcultures.
The chance that any random 50 yo will get it is moderately low, but the chance that there are some who do is quite high. The latter are involved in marketing to these collectively high-spending groups, and have been since the 50s.
Then there’s a cohort who claim to get it (or loudly claim not to get it) who maybe do, maybe don’t, though it doesn’t matter: what they do is talk to their contemporaries.
Also if you live with teens there’s a pretty good chance you do actually know quite a bit about them culture. Some teens are closer to their parents than others, even within a single family.
Care to elaborate? Why is there somethin intrinsic in age that makes teen subcultures so difficult to grasp? And that is for everybody? I mean, even an educator working 10 hours a day in close contact with such subcultures?
And what does make teen subcultures so evasive specifically? They change fast?
The author's thesis is that these aesthetics have replaced subcultures and that has led to kids being lonely and sad. You can disagree with that, but it seems that you are just ignoring that.
> with a respectful interest and open-mindedness
How is the author being disrespectful to young people? The criticisms are entirely pointed at the content producing machine.
I didn't say the author was being disrespectful to anyone; I guess I should have added more caveats or something but I was just trying to describe my preference.
This is the most Marxist stuff I've seen in a while on a public forum, thank you HN.
Why should either party bother then making observations about the other at all?
To answer my own question, I think the more observant, reflective, and contemplative individuals from either group very likely will have something to say that may cause the other to pause. While they may often not get the other, I think being immediately dismissive of what they have to say is the worse sin.
It isn't symmetric. 50-year olds have more experience at being young than young people do, although the experience is not as recent.
The main point of the article seems to argue that lacking some cohesive "box" is making it harder for kids to find a community. And even if this _may_ have been a thing before (idk, maybe it was invented by John Hughes movies, it's before my time wtv), I feel like the argument is just pretty weak. It privileges clique-identity over a more diverse, less monolithic identification, and it assumes that community can only found w/in these cliques.
I'm also not sure why the author spends so much time centering on aesthetics as if that's the be-all and end-all of internet culture, and its fragmentation being that which is preventing self-identity. The lack of physical third spaces is indeed a problem, but the kids are still having fun lmfao. The internet has just exposed people to so many more interesting things.
IMO this article in general has a much better understanding and take on the internet as it relates to a older idea of subculture: https://www.documentjournal.com/2021/01/the-internet-didnt-k...
Oops.
She might not be blind to it, but since that's what the article is about, and yet also somehow not what the article is about, I don't think I would say that she's particularly sighted.
I tend to think it's both, and that these kinds of articles miss a critical piece of the puzzle: you cannot have a youth culture if the surrounding culture is hostile towards public spaces, third spaces, &c. One consequence of American suburbanization and car dependence has been the development of a fundamental apathy towards those kinds of third spaces.
It only makes sense that internet influencers - who are even less aware of their role in media than Hollywood writers and massively outnumber them - have lead to faster shifting and looser definitions of subcultures.
I think there is a huge economic and demographic phenomenon driving these trends. Young people today have less money and less economic perspective than the young people from previous generations in the same age bracket and this reflects in the art and everything else. The continuous deceleration of the econonomic growth in the last five decades together with unprecedent inequality brought the world to the sad times we're living in.
In the past also your parents were expected to die at 60 and something and pass their wealth to their children. The boomer generation broke this trend with force, they are living much more and don't seem slightly interested in ceasing any kind of power to the younger generations.
Places to hang out are going, as an erosion of culture, as cities seek ever more business taxes to fund their stadiums and consolidate entertainment.
This is the opposite of my memory of being a teenager. Teenagers, as a rule, are actively seeking to define their identity independent of the adults around them. The subcultures of our teenagehood weren't carefully constructed extracurriculars that our parents prepared for us, they were formed organically by the kids themselves, and they were subcultures intentionally crafted to exclude the adults in our lives. My dad was big into football, so my brother and I went all-in on the nerd culture. My dad didn't get D&D and MTG and fantasy novels any more than this mom gets what her daughter is participating in, and that was part of the point.
Teenagers are kids who have hit the age where the modern, hovering parenting style completely falls apart. They're not living in your world anymore because their hormones are telling them it's time to forge their own path. It's time to begin to let go, not attempt to craft a better subculture scene for them.
"The young people of today think of nothing but themselves. They have no reverence for parents or old age. They are impatient of all restraint ... As for the girls, they are forward, immodest and unladylike in speech, behaviour and dress." - Peter the Hermit, 1274
https://praveshkoirala.com/2023/05/31/teenage-rebellion-is-j...
There was no real dress code. Very fashion different from my era. Not sure what an advertiser would market to unless Squid Games was a fashion.
> Stage 4 is a pure simulacrum, in which the simulacrum has no relationship to any reality whatsoever. Here, signs merely reflect other signs and any claim to reality on the part of images or signs is only of the order of other such claims.
From the article:
> What teenagers today are offered instead is a hyperactive landscape of so-called aesthetics — thousands of them, including everything from the infamous cottagecore to, these days, prep. These are more like cultural atmospheres, performed mainly online, with names and looks and hashtags, an easy visual pablum. They come and go and blend and break apart like clouds in the wind, many within weeks of appearing. They have much content but little context — a lot to look at but a very thin relationship to any "real life" anything, like behaviors or gathering places. On one end, even a distinctly in-the-world subculture (like, say, grunge) can be reduced to a vibe packet of anodyne references (cigarettes, grimy things); on the other, a mere mood tone can be elevated to something offered as lifestyle (there are girls who enjoy the color red and a certain Euro effortlessness, and they are called Tomato Girls, while others who prefer white are called Vanilla Girls). If two dozen things on a Pinterest page feel as if they go together, chances are someone, even just as a lark or experiment, is calling it an aesthetic.
Maybe not Full Stage 4 simulacra/hyperreal but it feels like the meaning is left, the signs are starting to blur & become indistinct, are indeed becoming little more than pointers to other signs. Hyperreal mmay be upon us.
My hackles briefly came up with what seemed a dig at screens; I was afraid it was going to chalk up all the problems of culture to social media. But it avoided that & fell really really close to my feelings, with the hazy lack of resolution that seems due for a weird wild world spinning on:
> It’s the culture available to them that is failing, by no longer being able to connect any of these categories with lived experience or social meaning. Kids, in all their blowzy creativity — the same creativity that invented movements from Romanticism to hippiedom to hip-hop — need more, deserve more.
The local world around us have effervesced into far off high flying supply chains, and we are surrounded by whiz-bang fancy tech we absolutely positively can no longer disassemble & understand & figure out (there's always reams of code and trying to see it is a Felony Anti-Circumvention because the devices terms of service can say that now).
Rebuilding local meaning seems so hard. This is such a challenge.