🟧 Does subculture still exist?

A debate.

At Silver Lyan

Kyle Chayka: The other night I went to a party for Brendon Babenzien, the men’s creative director of J. Crew. This was a rare occasion for DC, a city not known for its fashion sense but one that doubtless consumes a high volume of the brand for office wear. Babenzien held court in the Silver Lyan, a basement cocktail bar in the Riggs hotel. When we chatted, what was on his mind was the way that social media has sped up the transmission of culture: Trends go viral so fast now, he said. Nothing ever stays within a small group for long.

Babenzien would know. He spent many years as a lieutenant at Supreme, the clothing brand that pioneered streetwear as mainstream fashion. Babenzien started his own high-end streetwear brand, Noah, and then went to work for J. Crew to join the company’s post-bankruptcy attempt to reboot itself into relevance. He grew up mixing preppy fashion with punk and skate culture. Now, everyone wears everything, and a particular aesthetic is only as durable as a TikTok meme. It doesn’t take time to get into a scene or embrace a style; it’s as easy as buying something on Amazon and getting it the next day, then posting it online. You might as well identify with drinking martinis.

That conversation reminded me of a recent NYT article: “Teen Subcultures Are Fading. Pity the Poor Kids.” In the essay, Mireille Silcoff writes about the decaying meaning of “preppy” and the profusion of aesthetics, which are commingled with identities, on social media: 

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.

Decades ago, friction was what made a subculture. You had to figure out what punk or goth was about, learn its codes, seek out compatriots, and then maybe go to Hot Topic or a hardcore show. Friction is lower online and visibility is higher. We are all constantly performing our preferences in public. “Subcultures,” in the sense of aesthetic niches, will always exist. But perhaps the subculture question is better phrased as: How do we seek out and cultivate a sense of real belonging, online or off? Hitting the like button on a TikTok or buying one item of clothing doesn’t constitute belonging. Belonging comes from shared fluency, exchange within a community.

One example of a true digital subculture can be found in CrunchyRoll, the anime-focused streaming service. There’s a good interview with the company’s president Rahul Purini on The Verge’s Decoder podcast. Purini talks about how CrunchyRoll serves its customers’ “fandom” through every avenue it can: licensing Japanese anime, developing new series, creating video games, and selling merch. There is an inside and an outside to this subculture: outside of it, it may not look like much, but inside, it is an entire universe, and a thriving industry. Are fandoms the new subculture? 

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Nate Gallant: How do we wrestle the idea of community back from social media? Actual connection, solidarity, and intimacy with other human beings seems to be the insipid object of commodification through which social media functions. But is there any way back? Forward? Out? These were the questions I was brought back to after reading Silcoff's NYT piece — in addition to the nightmarish scenario of not just having to go to high school with the people in my surrounding towns, but the entire fucking world on social media. Truly horrifying. 

I couldn't agree with Kyle more that what is missing from "the aesthetic" as a medium of belonging online is a kind of friction, some form of resistance to the immediate identification and re-presentation of yourself within that aesthetic through consumption. I'm reminded here equally of two thinkers that have been recurring themes here at One Thing, both Walter Benjamin and Byung-Chul Han. 

Benjamin quite famously claimed in "The Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction" that politics, for him largely defined by the material struggle between classes, are made to be purely an aesthetic matter by fascism, where property ownership was no longer subject to change, or even struggle. The means of expression is completely and entirely made to function separate from its content. Ultimately, that means you may make whatever art you like or wear whatever clothes you want, but you will never have any say over how that happens or where it happens, much less the material conditions under which you live and make your art. 

To bring this into the realm of social media: You may dress up in whatever clothes you want, say whatever you feel about the apparently radical potential of Dark Academia, but there is very little give to or potential struggle within the medium through which that version of yourself is presented back to you and others. This is the substance-less quality that Silcoff’s essay identified. 

What we get instead is what Byung-Chul Han (who we called the next hot philosopher) has described as an "overheating of the ego." Pure individuality through momentary identification of yourself with an aesthetic, which exhausts us by depriving us of any real conflict or difference.  What we consume online amounts to a cheaply reproducible set of vague designs. There is only an endless hall of shiny standees, of potential versions of yourself you can pop your face into as you go. Take the photo. And move on. The problem with this "aesthetic," as Silcoff so candidly shows, is that it is entirely a product of the internet’s selfie culture. Offline, these relations – the social construction of identity — were once mediated by something with a bit more give and a sense of reality. 

One might be tempted to try opting out and hold onto their treasured human and family relations, while everyone else buys the viral Stanley mug, posts a picture online, and becomes the Stanley person. But then, even though you quit social media ten years ago and still use the ancient, leaky water bottle you always leave in your car, your own mother might send you the Stanley for your birthday, and you realize that, to be honest, it's a pretty good water bottle. Finally, one of your best friends reminds you that she had it four years ago to stay maximally hydrated as she grew angrier and angrier on her egregiously annoying commute to work and is furious that it's now a trend. Clearly, it's all a very, very well insulated trap.  

Anyways, stay safe out there, and remember, the Stanley is not water-proof when in straw-mode and will spill all over your books if you're not paying attention.