In my experience it's actually the other way round. At least where I grew up (Southern Europe) In small towns/countryside it's really difficult to be a true minority (goth, metal, hip-hop etc when they were not mainstream anymore), unless you are really really self-confident. In big cities OTOH you just blend with the masses, nobody that looks at you really know you so you can express yourself as you want.
It is clear from the article that the joke calls into question whether these folks downtown truly are "goth" (or insert counter/sub culture here) or are just into the fashion/aesthetic, which, depending on the time and place, may have been particularly trendy. The next season, maybe these folks are wearing bell bottoms.
While if you see a goth presenting despite the difficulty, like you say in a small town or countryside, maybe you can assume they're a true believer.
In a small town pre-internet (I can't speak to now), goth could be a way of outwardly embracing an invisible social fact. When people felt rejected and excluded, some conformed and abased themselves to get back into the social good graces of the in-crowd, and others burned their bridges to show their defiance. Goth was one flavor of the latter.
God, small towns are shitty. Anyone who romanticizes small towns or small involuntary communities of any kind must see themselves as permanently part of the dominant group.
EDIT: To bring this back to the article, I guess it's nice if the country is now a place where being goth can be about "a quiet confidence, which manifests externally as shyness" instead of being about "if I accepted the community's evaluation of me, I would have to erase myself, and I still have enough of a survival instinct to fight against that."
Also, I disagree with this part:
> In the city the vectors come from many directions, but cancel out and you remain more or less a circle. In the country you get repeated perturbation by a few vectors that deforms you into a spiky, interesting shape.”
Being interesting can be about responding to different vectors of scrutiny differently. You can respond to them all and still be interesting if you respond in a mild way to some and an extreme way to others, and you're willing to make choices when different vectors contradict each other. Otherwise, interesting people wouldn't emerge in cities, and they do.
In my experience and logically, goths might form in smaller centres (or cities) but will converge in cities when they pursue university, careers, or richer environments. I hung out with goths in Toronto in the 90s, some were there for fashion reasons but many were quite committed including developing their own takes (hippy-goth, techno-goth, etc). The article's use of goths as an example is stretched.
Yes, but it's nonsense to equate identity with difficulty. The goth scene originated in a London nightclub, for goodness' sake (the Batcave). There are goths in every big city, and in a lot of cases they move to places _where the scene is_ so that they can participate.
Where I grew up in Switzerland, I'd say the most authentic subcultures were in the secondary cities. A couple of tens of thousands of people in population. Big enough to have minority communities, but still small enough to not get mainstreamed to the same degree as in the "big" cities
The joke the article references seems to think this too, saying you'll find real subcultures in Albany. For some reason the article thinks Albany is the county, despite the fact it is a city with a population of 100k and a couple blocks of skyscrapers downtown.
100%. Lately I'm kind of obsessed with cities "in the middle". I don't really know what the definition is exactly, maybe like "you have a pretty big train station" or something, but yeah something where you get all or most of the benefits of a city without the bonkers downsides of "world cities". I think there's a lot to be said about housing costs for sure--probably the main issue but I think it's downstream of a lot of liberal culture that was very OK with building a wall between the and poor people while their housing values skyrocket--but what TFA calls out is also a pretty succinct way to say what I think a lot of people are nibbling at the edges of: there's a single Airbnb/Instagram aesthetic everyone's pursuing and the mechanisms we have for honing whatever we're doing to more perfectly match that aesthetic are so powerful they're blanding things faster than we can create a backlash.
When I rented my first apartment in NYC I needed to buy a shower curtain, and I was in a very "don't use Amazon" mode, which meant I was about to discover how little choice you really have when it comes to buying one locally. I got one home I thought I liked, but hanging it up I discovered it had totally trite _words_ on it like "Happiness" and "Sunshine" or whatever. It was so cringe and not my personality even a little, and I cursed God for saddling me with a lot of unpleasant options at that point (throw it away immediately and create waste and go through the whole rigamarole or getting a new one blah blah). But for some reason I suddenly had the thought that this was really enriching my life. It was so totally unlike me it weirdly stretched my experience in a really refreshing way. It was a low-key funny story. It does actually put you kind of in a good mood if you're not actively resenting it while showering.
Secondary cities are like that, but for your whole life. It might not be your choice, you might not have access to everything you need to sculpt your life for maximum clout or virality, but it turns out that's an insidious kind of poverty. We're better when things outside our control influence us at least a little.
Some examples of this:
- local restaurants take pretty bonkers chances with their menus and change them seasonally, so it's possible you just won't like anything at a place all winter, but then the spring menu is amazing
- there's a gas station a few blocks away from us which isn't that pleasant on paper (traffic, odors, light pollution, though we don't experience this from where we live) but for some reason it makes me super nostalgic
- we used to do a swim class with our oldest every weekend, but there really isn't one here (in English), but the music class we just found is also very fun even though we really wanted a swim class
I could go on. Maybe I'm aging, maybe it's becoming a parent, but the thought of moving back to an NYC or even a Chicago feels deeply uninspiring and exhausting. I want the weird decor/playlist choices. I want the people who only run their shop 2 days a week. The constraints big cities labor under have become too intense for them to really be surprising; they have to be so efficient they can't be robust.
I think the author's point isn't that it's easier, it's the fact that being in an isolated, low judgmental environment allows you to express edgy ideas more uniquely without the prepackaged style you often find in big cities, where fashion brands and think tanks have heavy interests in selling you the next big thing.
A good example in Europe is how Berlin went from being a cheap city with loads of artistic freedom to a place where people wait in line for hours outside a club just to find out if their black leather shirt is edgy enough. They're all trying to stand out, but somehow they all end up looking the same.
"low judgmental environment"? You have not grown up in a rural environment, have you?
Having grown up in a village of ~250, I can assure you that it's about as judgmental (and conformist) as it gets. And if you want to step it up a notch, try moving to a village of that size in the mountains.
The interesting part, which was also mentioned in the article, is that each individual seems unaware that they all look the same. A friend of mine once said, referring to people from Friedrichshain: „Die sind alle so individuell, dass sie alle schon wieder gleich aussehen.“ (They all have such individual styles that they end up looking the same.)
Big communities are more diverse and easier to find like-minded people. Good if you want to blend in whilst being part of a subculture.
However, if the point is to stand out/be different then small, more homogenous communities present a great opportunity for those with the requisite confidence or apathy
Albany isn't a particularly small town; it's a city with a million people in its metro area (though the city itself is only ~100k, so it's not a particularly big city).
The example mentioned in the article was Albany, NY which has a population of about 100,000 people. So it's not exactly a small rural town where everyone knows everyone but it's also not a major metropolis like NYC.
I grew up in a ~30k town/city, nearest bigger town was less than 100k, and while there was something more there, you had to go to bigger cities to truly be anonymous. Although in the 100k city, coming from an outside town, it was "enough" on that side. But I don't remember there being a "scene" at all (heavy metal in my case).
And capable of self-defence, in my experience growing up at a heavily right-wing and Catholic town. Self-proclaimed neo-fascists and groups of judgemental teens gave us trouble more than once.
Keeping capital N Nazis from taking over show venues was a full time job on the east coast in the 80s and 90s. Half my friends had box cutter scars by the time we were 17 and all of us that had cars kept a trunk full of improvised weaponry.
A lot of people seem to be misreading the article as saying that goths are the 'cookie cutter counterculture' that he's accusing st vincent of calling her 'other freaks', but that's not what the article states, the example of goths is to highlight an actual counterculture that is not determined by NYU think tanks, and that they are the example you should look to for how your society treats actual freethinking.
Some will, no doubt, thereafter argue that goths all dress/look the same and thus can't be actually free thinking, but that would require not having a clue about goths or that their expression of being goth tends to look similar because 'the aesthetic' is the defining aspect, but even within that aesthetic there is quite a wide variety of styles and looks that some people will not even consider to be a 'goth'.
the example of goths is to highlight an actual counterculture that is not determined by NYU think tanks, and that they are the example you should look to for how your society treats actual freethinking.
Think about what you just said there. How much "freethinking", is going on in either case if they are both demanding you look to them to determine how society treats, um, "freethinking"?
Shades of "People's Front of Judea" extolling the unauthentic nature of the "Judean People's Front".
Because that's not what being goth is about which is good because it makes the author's metric one that isn't also a target. It's a somewhat well defined subculture that doesn't consider itself counterculture and so is more a fixed black obelisk than something positioned in opposition to the current state of the world.
So I think the author has a good idea, that The Goth Index is a good proxy for how well a community will tolerate other ideas outside the norm.
> is going on in either case if they are both demanding you look to them to determine how society treats, um, "freethinking"?
There is no demanding, the point is that as an outsider you can observe societies actual approach to freethinking by observing the groups within it and which of those are actually freethinking vs self-reinforcing group think.
Off topic to the AI, let's talk about websites for a moment. Lately everyone has been using the same "glitch design". Bright yellow on pink, some out of place eye. Stripe uses this but not as much as other sites. I don't know what it's called, I just call it corporate contemporary and I think it's inspired by TikTok.
3 years ago, there was that 3D look. No idea where it came from, but the first time I saw it was from Revolut.
About 10 years ago, we had emojis sprinkled everywhere. Replacing icons, prefixing email titles, being used at bullet points.
Before that, we had vector flat art, which was reflecting responsive design. Sometime after this was the trend of putting videos in the sign up page of an app.
When I was a teenager, websites were all "microsoft blue".
90s design, no longer web, were colorful and had handwriting font. While 80s had a lot of stripes and 3D text.
There's definitely something trendy and edgy about these websites but not too edgy. They're always seasonal. I mean we still see flat design but we almost never anything like Windows Vista and their Aero design. Windows 98 had a certain charm.
The other layer of website same-ification is the technology choices people make. By and large, React Apps with Tailwind look, behave, feel, "samey" no matter how many tweaks one makes to the stylesheet.
Just like how you can immediately hear the sound of FM radio regardless of which station, you can immediately smell "modern tech stack." Its blandness oozes out between the cracks.
Old-school early 00s web applications were basically all bespoke and felt VASTLY different from one another for that reason.
> I’m encouraged by people who talk about their AI setups using the same words that musicians use to talk about their guitar amps or pedalboards. This is a good sign. Obsessing over gear - not over purchasing gear exactly, but anything that feels like “how do I get a particular kind of crunch out of this preamp” is a great sign for the medium because it’s a format where you look at your own output serially over time and develop a style that you actually want.
Hmm, I tend to dismiss this idea mainly because I think it'll soon become unnecessary and also belies why most people have "custom setups". My feeling is most people are using LLMs to achieve concrete goals: How to do some basic woodworking, bake bread, get a condensed version of a college course on nuclear physics, or write code to accomplish a task.
Right now specialized setups and finely-tuned models might make sense for bridging the gap between "almost there" and "good enough", but the overall trend seems to be moving toward general-purpose LLMs becoming “good enough” to handle most of these tasks. Over time, the gap between a highly specialized model and a general-purpose one seems to
shrink for the level of expertise most people are looking for.
No doubt there may still be some customization for more novel creative applications (and the author even touches on one I expect to see-emulating the dreamlike aesthetic of early generative AI). But novel creativity is a small minority of "My AI Setup" type articles that I see at the moment.
I wonder how much of goth locations depend on mass transit options. We should put trackers on all of them, obviously, and do a controlled study.
I just started reading "The Brief Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao" by Junot Diaz, and it is about a kid who is into subcultures within a strong Dominican community inside a larger NYC community. Interesting parallels.
The metaphor "lowest common denominator" describes (and tries to explain) phenomena like the blandness of chart music, and it's very old. I just did a search and found it in a New York Times piece about commercial
TV from 1975, and this: "Popular music of restaurant level is the lowest common denominator of Viennese operetta", from a review in The Times in 1952.
In the 'old days' goths made their own outfits. Then Hot Topic came along and homogenised things.
I also experience culture shock when I moved to the UK. I left Australia which was still "pre-emo", and arrived in the UK and was confused as to why goths were running around with fat pants, pokemon backpacks and riding skateboards. It took me a little while to realise there was a next generation subculture already established.
Disagree, because I think everyone's conforming. No psychologically healthy human being just acts out their authentic self without any calibration with some type of peer group. Whether that peer group is NYU undergrads, or their fellow misfits in Albany / pump.fun, is just a difference in degree.
Sometimes the peer group can be remote. The only emo kid in Baghdad is a unique snowflake relative to other Baghdadis, but is following a fashion code vetted by people on Tumblr.
anecdote, counter example. i left my home country to go to places where i would be accepted without having to conform. living in a country where i already stand out by my skin color alone makes it clear that i am not the same as everyone else, and as a result noone is surprised if i behave and think differently too. that was a big problem for me at home. people would not accept that i had different ideas and a different attitude towards things that mattered to them. (i don't care about soccer for example, the national sport where i come from. things like that, the problem being that people turned it into a problem, refusing to accept it)
sure there are groups online that i can and am joining, hackernews is one, there were (and are) even local groups where i fit in better. but even in those groups i am only appearing to conform to the outside observer. inside i often take on a non-conformist position, in part by conviction, in part because that's how i grew up. i was always the outsider, and i am comfortable in that role. all i need is an environment where being an outsider is accepted. in every group that i am joining, i am there because i believe in the idea the group represents, not because of the relationship i have with its members. i would remain there even if everyone else left.
Fashion is just a person broadcasting to others: I am like you, or, I am not like you: a way of finding peers (and acting as a red flag for the more closed-minded).
I see a deeper point in the person inside, if that makes sense. Fashion is just a filter.
i have been through that. i used fashion to distinguish myself from my classmates. until i realized that this was the only reason, and that if my classmates would start to copy me i would change my style just to remain different. at that point i dropped some things and focused on what i liked regardless of how it would be perceived or how it would allow me to distinguish myself.
Readit News
While if you see a goth presenting despite the difficulty, like you say in a small town or countryside, maybe you can assume they're a true believer.
God, small towns are shitty. Anyone who romanticizes small towns or small involuntary communities of any kind must see themselves as permanently part of the dominant group.
EDIT: To bring this back to the article, I guess it's nice if the country is now a place where being goth can be about "a quiet confidence, which manifests externally as shyness" instead of being about "if I accepted the community's evaluation of me, I would have to erase myself, and I still have enough of a survival instinct to fight against that."
Also, I disagree with this part:
> In the city the vectors come from many directions, but cancel out and you remain more or less a circle. In the country you get repeated perturbation by a few vectors that deforms you into a spiky, interesting shape.”
Being interesting can be about responding to different vectors of scrutiny differently. You can respond to them all and still be interesting if you respond in a mild way to some and an extreme way to others, and you're willing to make choices when different vectors contradict each other. Otherwise, interesting people wouldn't emerge in cities, and they do.
When I rented my first apartment in NYC I needed to buy a shower curtain, and I was in a very "don't use Amazon" mode, which meant I was about to discover how little choice you really have when it comes to buying one locally. I got one home I thought I liked, but hanging it up I discovered it had totally trite _words_ on it like "Happiness" and "Sunshine" or whatever. It was so cringe and not my personality even a little, and I cursed God for saddling me with a lot of unpleasant options at that point (throw it away immediately and create waste and go through the whole rigamarole or getting a new one blah blah). But for some reason I suddenly had the thought that this was really enriching my life. It was so totally unlike me it weirdly stretched my experience in a really refreshing way. It was a low-key funny story. It does actually put you kind of in a good mood if you're not actively resenting it while showering.
Secondary cities are like that, but for your whole life. It might not be your choice, you might not have access to everything you need to sculpt your life for maximum clout or virality, but it turns out that's an insidious kind of poverty. We're better when things outside our control influence us at least a little.
Some examples of this:
- local restaurants take pretty bonkers chances with their menus and change them seasonally, so it's possible you just won't like anything at a place all winter, but then the spring menu is amazing
- there's a gas station a few blocks away from us which isn't that pleasant on paper (traffic, odors, light pollution, though we don't experience this from where we live) but for some reason it makes me super nostalgic
- we used to do a swim class with our oldest every weekend, but there really isn't one here (in English), but the music class we just found is also very fun even though we really wanted a swim class
I could go on. Maybe I'm aging, maybe it's becoming a parent, but the thought of moving back to an NYC or even a Chicago feels deeply uninspiring and exhausting. I want the weird decor/playlist choices. I want the people who only run their shop 2 days a week. The constraints big cities labor under have become too intense for them to really be surprising; they have to be so efficient they can't be robust.
A good example in Europe is how Berlin went from being a cheap city with loads of artistic freedom to a place where people wait in line for hours outside a club just to find out if their black leather shirt is edgy enough. They're all trying to stand out, but somehow they all end up looking the same.
Having grown up in a village of ~250, I can assure you that it's about as judgmental (and conformist) as it gets. And if you want to step it up a notch, try moving to a village of that size in the mountains.
Big communities are more diverse and easier to find like-minded people. Good if you want to blend in whilst being part of a subculture.
However, if the point is to stand out/be different then small, more homogenous communities present a great opportunity for those with the requisite confidence or apathy
At least when I was a teenager, the goth people were into Avril Lavigne, Marilyn Manson & other american artists.
Which was weird because, at the same time, we were taught about gothic cathedrals and churches, which were a pure European product.
And capable of self-defence, in my experience growing up at a heavily right-wing and Catholic town. Self-proclaimed neo-fascists and groups of judgemental teens gave us trouble more than once.
And then, WOW.
Some will, no doubt, thereafter argue that goths all dress/look the same and thus can't be actually free thinking, but that would require not having a clue about goths or that their expression of being goth tends to look similar because 'the aesthetic' is the defining aspect, but even within that aesthetic there is quite a wide variety of styles and looks that some people will not even consider to be a 'goth'.
Think about what you just said there. How much "freethinking", is going on in either case if they are both demanding you look to them to determine how society treats, um, "freethinking"?
Shades of "People's Front of Judea" extolling the unauthentic nature of the "Judean People's Front".
So I think the author has a good idea, that The Goth Index is a good proxy for how well a community will tolerate other ideas outside the norm.
There is no demanding, the point is that as an outsider you can observe societies actual approach to freethinking by observing the groups within it and which of those are actually freethinking vs self-reinforcing group think.
3 years ago, there was that 3D look. No idea where it came from, but the first time I saw it was from Revolut.
About 10 years ago, we had emojis sprinkled everywhere. Replacing icons, prefixing email titles, being used at bullet points.
Before that, we had vector flat art, which was reflecting responsive design. Sometime after this was the trend of putting videos in the sign up page of an app.
When I was a teenager, websites were all "microsoft blue".
90s design, no longer web, were colorful and had handwriting font. While 80s had a lot of stripes and 3D text.
There's definitely something trendy and edgy about these websites but not too edgy. They're always seasonal. I mean we still see flat design but we almost never anything like Windows Vista and their Aero design. Windows 98 had a certain charm.
The other layer of website same-ification is the technology choices people make. By and large, React Apps with Tailwind look, behave, feel, "samey" no matter how many tweaks one makes to the stylesheet.
Just like how you can immediately hear the sound of FM radio regardless of which station, you can immediately smell "modern tech stack." Its blandness oozes out between the cracks.
Old-school early 00s web applications were basically all bespoke and felt VASTLY different from one another for that reason.
Hmm, I tend to dismiss this idea mainly because I think it'll soon become unnecessary and also belies why most people have "custom setups". My feeling is most people are using LLMs to achieve concrete goals: How to do some basic woodworking, bake bread, get a condensed version of a college course on nuclear physics, or write code to accomplish a task.
Right now specialized setups and finely-tuned models might make sense for bridging the gap between "almost there" and "good enough", but the overall trend seems to be moving toward general-purpose LLMs becoming “good enough” to handle most of these tasks. Over time, the gap between a highly specialized model and a general-purpose one seems to shrink for the level of expertise most people are looking for.
No doubt there may still be some customization for more novel creative applications (and the author even touches on one I expect to see-emulating the dreamlike aesthetic of early generative AI). But novel creativity is a small minority of "My AI Setup" type articles that I see at the moment.
I just started reading "The Brief Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao" by Junot Diaz, and it is about a kid who is into subcultures within a strong Dominican community inside a larger NYC community. Interesting parallels.
I also experience culture shock when I moved to the UK. I left Australia which was still "pre-emo", and arrived in the UK and was confused as to why goths were running around with fat pants, pokemon backpacks and riding skateboards. It took me a little while to realise there was a next generation subculture already established.
Sometimes the peer group can be remote. The only emo kid in Baghdad is a unique snowflake relative to other Baghdadis, but is following a fashion code vetted by people on Tumblr.
sure there are groups online that i can and am joining, hackernews is one, there were (and are) even local groups where i fit in better. but even in those groups i am only appearing to conform to the outside observer. inside i often take on a non-conformist position, in part by conviction, in part because that's how i grew up. i was always the outsider, and i am comfortable in that role. all i need is an environment where being an outsider is accepted. in every group that i am joining, i am there because i believe in the idea the group represents, not because of the relationship i have with its members. i would remain there even if everyone else left.
Fashion is just a person broadcasting to others: I am like you, or, I am not like you: a way of finding peers (and acting as a red flag for the more closed-minded).
I see a deeper point in the person inside, if that makes sense. Fashion is just a filter.