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.
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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.
FWIW, the joke is presented as a joke, not a philosophical proof. Nonsense tends to be a component of humor.
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.
This is a recent problem with big cities and it primarily concerns the price of real estate. New York in the 60s was a truly counterculture place because with a little bit of money you could live downtown and afford to do your art.
Now if you want to be an artist in New York City, you have 2 options: be a full time artist but completely aligned with wealthy gallery culture (i.e., be appealing to "mainstream") or work in finance and do art on the side.
This is why NYC produces no actually interesting culture anymore.
Same is true of Berlin, CDMX, etc. such places are maximally interesting within the constraint of "must be wealthy" which necessarily excludes lots of cultural expression. They are also riding on the interestingness that was generated decades ago when the financial situation was different.
I think you're right about all this. Fundamentally, world cities have just become too expensive. If you want to live in them you have to be wealthy or earn a high income, neither of which are historically associated with culture generation.
When I moved to NYC my cohort was initially a lot of former SF residents, and their main reason by far for leaving was that there's more than just tech people in NYC and that's so refreshing. Some of that has to be a bubble effect, because NYC isn't tons better: you're looking at lots of people in tech and finance.
None of this is conducive to creating the kinds of environments where art thrives: low cost of housing, sufficient part-time day jobs, and weird, diverse, inspiring milieus.
I think the fix is really simple: build more housing and build more public transit to get there (more or less the Tokyo model, structurally). Unfortunately the US seems to be uniquely trash at both, so my guess is the big cities' loss is the middle cities' gain. And this is maybe healthy: big Emerald Cities domiciling a huge percentage of the professional/managerial class along with a similarly huge percentage of artists has created all kinds of cultural and political problems.
living in another insanely high rent city, people talk about the cost of housing a lot, but one thing that doesn't come up enough is the cost of commercial real estate. you simply can't afford to run a small business that caters to a minority culture because the rents will kill you, not to mention the precarity of never knowing how much they will be jacked up the next time your lease is up for renewal. that has a chilling effect on community diversity as well.
Absolutely yeah, this is why you get loss leader prestige stores and dozens of clone businesses because that's what unimaginative banks will finance. It'll give you expensive salads, but that's about it.
Where is the actually interesting culture coming from? I'm in my 40s, and a parent, so I feel like (at least for now) I've lost the ability to tell and the inclination to seek it out anymore anyway.
Being a seriously big city, NY must still have "home-grown" art and culture, like its hip-hop scene or the modern equivalent? Kids are still growing up in rent controlled apartments surrounded by hundreds of thousands of other kids, even if starving artists aren't arriving from the outside like they used to.
Culture grows at boundaries, in places of uncertainty and chaos. Culture tests the limit of what is acceptable.
As we start building permanent structures (such as a family) we naturally start avoiding these zones of turbulence because they are challenging to navigate and we need the energy elsewhere. It's ok.
> Where is the actually interesting culture coming from
Your kid's bedroom (if your a Gen X parent).
Youth culture is now heavily social media or short content based, making it easier to reach out to large audiences while staying at home.
You can build and manage an entire community of friends just by using Discord or other similar products, so you can develop a network effect without having to be in-person.
Take a look at SoundCloud Rap, TikTok shorts, Gamer Youtube, Podcasts, ASMR, etc.
Also, a lot of us younger people had some of our most formative years during the lockdowns, which turbocharged online culture.
> We're better when things outside our control influence us at least a little.
Could be a good argument for being religious.
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.
Albany, the city referenced in the article, has a million people in its metro area. Yeah, rural areas tend to be ultra-conformist in most places; mid-size cities, less so.
It also has several universities between itself and nearby spots like Troy. That tends to help these types of cultures flourish.
Although when I lived there *mumbles* years ago it seemed like a lot of the stuff was driven by kids from towns like Cohoes
There's a massive spectrum between NYC and a tiny village. Almost every place you can live is in between. Why bring up such extremes when the author is talking about more common places?
Author's example of Newmarket is over 80k people. They just mention Tiny town goths as an idea that does exist - not something extremely common.
I think parent was trying to make the point that it is not linear progression, but more bathtub curve where very small places and big cities are similar dead zones. Goth town sweet spot is in the middle.
I ascribe to the Rent Theory of Everything. People can afford to be weird, where they don't have to be perfect corporate people in order to pay rent.
At least in Colorado, living in the mountains was so you could live a little more freely. I will say living in a large city certainly has different freedoms. It’s far easier to find your people for example.
SLC Punk! Is a “good” movie about subculture conformity.
See also the Law of Jante which seems to be a universal phenomenon.
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.)
The sameness is just the carrier wave; the signal is in the details. To people immersed in the subculture, it doesn't look the same at all! You can experience the same phenomenon by listening to an unfamiliar genre of music: it will all sound the same at first, but once you've tuned your ears to the conventions of the genre, you'll start to hear where the variation lives, and the idea that it all sounds the same will come to feel absurd.
I think it depends on one's goals maybe.
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).
I think american suburban goths are basically teenagers readings of European urban trends
It always felt like "goth" as we see it here was a product of American culture?
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.
I know goth (the subculture, which is distinct from "gothic architecture") has many meanings to many different people, but they all go through Siouxsie Sioux, Ian Curtis and that subculture in late 70s UK. It seems like that's what we're talking about here, too.
Manson came later & certainly drew influence from there in addition to glam and, probably most heavily, industrial metal. Avril Lavigne was a Canadian pop star who drew from the pop-punk aesthetic. She wasn't goth at all.
Like parent comment I was talking about perception, not reality.
no, it comes from UK post-punk 1977-1980.
> Siouxsie and the Banshees, Joy Division, Bauhaus and the Cure were examples of post-punk bands who shifted to dark overtones in their music, which would later spawn the gothic rock scene in the early 1980s
The later artists that you listed are not regarded by that wave as being "really" goth at all.
Parent comment was saying that US goths are a reading of European trends.
Meanwhile, I was saying that here (in France) and during my teens, goths where actually seen as a product of American culture.
I wasn't saying that the goth culture is coming from America, but that people who identified as goths were inspired mostly by American artists.
> people who identified as goths were inspired mostly by American artists
My peers and I certainly were not. It was mostly or entirely inspired by UK artists.
Later waves may be different, there might indeed be people inspired by Vision Video, Twin Tribes and Boy Harsher (all current US). Or by the German scene.
Yep. When I hear goth I think Bauhaus, Joy Division....
I think I would describe these as "scene kids", which is often conflated with "goth" but is quite different culturally. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Scene_(subculture) If a scene kid is dressed mostly in black—which is always common—they would probably be conflated with goth pretty easily. (...and frankly few of the people I grew up with were even aware of the difference; this is certainly something imposed partially in retrospect to describe trends.)
EDIT: the same as the above but with "emo", which is much closer to the goth all-black look I guess, but still looks compiled at the mall rather than the DIY look that goth typically implies.
"True goth" (i.e. someone associated with the original UK scene) can be found here, but you'll want to hit up an eighties night at the alt club to find it.
Then there's a lot of people who dress in black and don't particularly care about goth music, but they're still colloquially referred to as goth.
It really depends who you're around and how deep they are into music culture how these fits are interpreted and named. For the most part these days, these music subcultures blur pretty heavily and policing/being sticklers about whether or not someone is a "poser" is frowned upon. For instance, I have a friend who dresses distinctly punk, and likes to attend punk shows, but does not call herself punk just to avoid dealing with kids who are eager to establish an identity by mocking a "poser" (which, tbh, I feel like if you're over 35 the concept should be absurd).
gothic architecture, gothic literature, and the goth subculture are three very different uses of the word, all of which likewise have nothing to do with the original goths. (tangentially, there are amusing tshirts saying "if you're really a goth, where were you when we sacked rome?!")
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).
What can I say. I grew up in a town of ~500 people.
I'm now living in a 2500 people town, I can understand you :)
All one had to do was go to the QE2 in Albany
This person knows Smallbany well.
This is hilarious. I grew up right across the border in Massachusetts and to me growing up, Albany was the big city. Crossgates was the nice, clean, well-maintained mall with the better movie theater, (our rural one was literally decaying in front of our eyes), and I was always so jealous of the teenagers who were able to hang out there and the skateboarders dodging cops in the parking lot.
The region is doing really nicely these days. I could easily imagine living in the area again, the people are very friendly, and Dinosaur BBQ is surprisingly delicious for upstate new york. (I hope I didn't just cop to liking a tourist trap.)
I don't care if Dinosaur BBQ is a tourist trap, it's delicious and I very much miss it. I would definitely conciser moving back to the Albany area.
Let's just say I'm familiar with steamed hams
> unless you are really really self-confident
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.
>"unless you are really really self-confident."
And then, WOW.
True also in northern europe.
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.
“You’re unique, just like everyone else”
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.
Ah, this is a great topic on its own.
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 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.
> 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.
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.
Must be circa 2002 at the latest! By 2003 or so Scene was in full swing in Australia
You picked it exactly. We left Australia for the UK in 2002.
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, etc. is orthogonal.
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.
St. Vincent's font on her music video looks exactly like the logos in the article that have all merged to the same gray goo.
That 2D plane plot of the overton window distribution versus population density is why humanity needs a frontier that isn't instantly centrally controllable or communicable (like the seconds light lag to the moon, or minutes to asteroids and mars).
Read somewhere a long time ago: Being different is not going to highschool dressed in black, being different is going to highschool dressed as a clown.
"Lonely dissent doesn’t feel like going to school dressed in black. It feels like going to school wearing a clown suit."
The article that the author links to for "goth taxonomy" (^f "many kinds of goth") is pretty clearly composed of entirely lightly edited AI-generated images, and likely AI-generated text.
For example, the confusing "goth family tree" at the beginning of the article is clearly Dall-E/ChatGPT prompted with just that, with labels edited in after the fact in a way that makes the whole thing nonsense. For the "trad goth" picture further down, it's blantantly obvious it's Dall-E's cluttered style with meaningless lines. It's the exact kind of slop the article complains about, and I'd go so far as to say it's anti-information, because you can't trust any of it. It would be fine if the images were purely for decorative purposes, but for an article that purports to authoritatively describe visual aesthetics, handing that work off to a hallucination-prone AI renders it untrustworthy.
I assume this was the result of a 30 second google, but the author including that as a reference source is so bad that it makes the rest of the article hard to take seriously.
edit:
This particular line jumps out at me:
>Particularly if the AI products assisting us now are successfully trained to not hallucinate anymore
I'm normally one to jump in and defend AI when someone says it's useless because it hallucinates sometimes, because that could not be further from the case. But if you think it doesn't hallucinate at all anymore, then your credibility when writing about AI is severely limited.
> But their actual deal is cookie-cutter counterculture, like it came out of a street punk paint-by-numbers kit. Whatever Albany is for them, they would never be caught there.
There is a classic joke about that -- they all want to look different, but they all look different in the same way.
Personally loved the article. And as usual, shared it with a friend and he got actually a bit defensive. Dismissing cynically. Unsurprisingly, is kind of the same attitude here.
I found super interesting the parallels of cookie cutter contra-culture and the results of a heavily vetted AI slop. How most original/interesting thought has a great insight but is easily dismissed...
> parallel interrogation of a creative process leads to boring outcomes; serial investigation gives you creative outcomes.
There’s a reason many subcultures are obscure, and it’s because they suck. I started out in English-speaking anime forums like Reddit and 4chan, then eventually spread to darker and more obscure places. I learned extremely quickly that hidden gems are rare, and if you have no friends and nobody walks to talk to you about anything you like, it’s probably because you’re a socially maladjusted asshole. I left those communities and never looked back.
"Different" or "out of distribution" in the context of LLM actually means "wrong."
When people are different, they are wrong relative to each other. When someone is in a far-off subculture (far left, far right, super goth, super avant garde, etc.) they are "wrong" to the majority culture. Compared to the mainstream cultural understanding, anarcho-primitivism is wrong, it's incorrect, it does not fit. You will not find it being used to explain current events in mainstream newspapers or CNN. Because it is wrong.
However, the difference between people and LLM is that the person has a sense of self, an agency, etc, and the LLM is just a tool. When a person is wrong, they have an opinion that differs, it's maybe interesting, there may be some value to glean from talking to them and understanding what reasons they have for being wrong. When an LLM is wrong, it's a tool that is malfunctioning. It's just wrong. By the way, when an employee is wrong, they're a tool that is malfunctioning; that's why weird out of distribution people make bad employees (and why they tend not to become employees).
This is the same critique of hallucination. "Hallucination" is a word we use to describe when the model does not fit reality. But both the model and reality are relative, of course. The same applies for human to human we just assign different value judgements, and rightly so.
i was with you, until this:
when an employee is wrong, they're a tool that is malfunctioning
weird out of distribution people make bad employees
that's a very dystopian view of employment that i can't subscribe to. employees are not mindless drones. when they are "wrong" the same considerations should apply that you give to people otherwise.
Cultural observations: Goths[0]
He also did "mall goths"[1] but the mall is located in London so...
Not "his source of information" instead it is used (as an example) to indicate how many sub-categorizations there are.
From the guidelines:
> Please don't post shallow dismissals, especially of other people's work. A good critical comment teaches us something.
His easily presentable example. We don't know about his actual sources. Just like if I'm trying to explain the internet to a normie, I'll use a simple colourful diagram, not a stack of raw RFCs - even though I read them.
Surely the fact they've linked to a shopping site backs up the opening paragraphs.
> Those are attractive people with heavily vetted idiosyncrasies. Every eccentric fashion choice has been run through a think tank of NYU undergrads that would blow your hair back
> But their actual deal is cookie-cutter counterculture, like it came out of a street punk paint-by-numbers kit
It's worse than a shopping site, the whole article seems to be AI generated. Certainly the images are - even the confusing "goth family tree" at the beginning of the article is clearly Dall-E/ChatGPT prompted with just that, with labels edited in after the fact in a way that makes the whole thing nonsense. It's the exact kind of slop the article complains about, and I'd go so far as to say it's anti-information, because you can't trust any of it.
More than a shallow criticism, the fact that the article links to it at all puts the whole thing in question.
30+ years ago, Christian thought was the dominant force in society. You wanted to piss off your elders and society? Say something bad about Christianity (I should know, I was there front-and-center). Current year in many places of the country, the pendulum has now swung left and there's this new neo-liberal order. You want to piss off society now? Say something bad about that. And that's precisely why movements like the alt-right have risen to the heights they are at now.
You've probably heard phrases being thrown around online like "conservative is the new punk"; while mostly silly, there is a nugget of truth to them.
> 30+ years ago, Christian thought was the dominant force in society.
Was around back then. While there's a lower percentage of professed Christians in the USA now than there was then, the power wielded by the evangelical/Christian Nationalist crowd has only grown.
> conservative is the new punk
I've not heard that, but it doesn't surprise me. Nazis have been trying to pretend what they are doing is very punk and rebellious rather than the bootlicking, racist, leader worship that it really is.
Dead Kennedys said it best with Nazi Punks Fuck Off.
The fact that "neoliberalism" is considered left should seriously concern anyone who has opened a history book.
> The fact that "neoliberalism" is considered left should seriously concern anyone who has opened a history book.
The problem is with the word liberalism in US. For Europeans: Liberalism == right wing...
I guess it has taken a more cultural sense in US, where US liberalism is more about morals than economics (drugs, sex, gender, immigration...) and became a synonym for progressive, as opposed to conservatism and its pseudo religious aspects.
Neo-liberalism clearly has a negative connotation in Europe, at least politically, it is synonym of ultra capitalism.
> where US liberalism is more about morals than economics
Unmooring politics from the economic concerns of the voter (or of the person who lives here if voting isn't a question) rarely bodes well for the long-term health of the state.
There are exceptions of course—North Korea, perhaps?
"You never see an old man eating a twix"
[flagged]
"Those aren’t freaks, okay? Those are attractive people with heavily vetted idiosyncrasies. Every eccentric fashion choice has been run through a think tank that would blow your hair back. You want to see a freak? Go to Albany."
paraphrased,from,Chris Fleming
and to paraphrase a exta freeky person I know
"eccentric people dont ever get less eccentric, they get more eccentric"
or another one, the difference between bieng eccentric and crazy, is a million dollars
freeks fall somewhere inbetween
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.
FWIW, the joke is presented as a joke, not a philosophical proof. Nonsense tends to be a component of humor.
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.
This is a recent problem with big cities and it primarily concerns the price of real estate. New York in the 60s was a truly counterculture place because with a little bit of money you could live downtown and afford to do your art.
Now if you want to be an artist in New York City, you have 2 options: be a full time artist but completely aligned with wealthy gallery culture (i.e., be appealing to "mainstream") or work in finance and do art on the side.
This is why NYC produces no actually interesting culture anymore.
Same is true of Berlin, CDMX, etc. such places are maximally interesting within the constraint of "must be wealthy" which necessarily excludes lots of cultural expression. They are also riding on the interestingness that was generated decades ago when the financial situation was different.
I think you're right about all this. Fundamentally, world cities have just become too expensive. If you want to live in them you have to be wealthy or earn a high income, neither of which are historically associated with culture generation.
When I moved to NYC my cohort was initially a lot of former SF residents, and their main reason by far for leaving was that there's more than just tech people in NYC and that's so refreshing. Some of that has to be a bubble effect, because NYC isn't tons better: you're looking at lots of people in tech and finance.
None of this is conducive to creating the kinds of environments where art thrives: low cost of housing, sufficient part-time day jobs, and weird, diverse, inspiring milieus.
I think the fix is really simple: build more housing and build more public transit to get there (more or less the Tokyo model, structurally). Unfortunately the US seems to be uniquely trash at both, so my guess is the big cities' loss is the middle cities' gain. And this is maybe healthy: big Emerald Cities domiciling a huge percentage of the professional/managerial class along with a similarly huge percentage of artists has created all kinds of cultural and political problems.
living in another insanely high rent city, people talk about the cost of housing a lot, but one thing that doesn't come up enough is the cost of commercial real estate. you simply can't afford to run a small business that caters to a minority culture because the rents will kill you, not to mention the precarity of never knowing how much they will be jacked up the next time your lease is up for renewal. that has a chilling effect on community diversity as well.
Absolutely yeah, this is why you get loss leader prestige stores and dozens of clone businesses because that's what unimaginative banks will finance. It'll give you expensive salads, but that's about it.
Where is the actually interesting culture coming from? I'm in my 40s, and a parent, so I feel like (at least for now) I've lost the ability to tell and the inclination to seek it out anymore anyway.
Being a seriously big city, NY must still have "home-grown" art and culture, like its hip-hop scene or the modern equivalent? Kids are still growing up in rent controlled apartments surrounded by hundreds of thousands of other kids, even if starving artists aren't arriving from the outside like they used to.
Culture grows at boundaries, in places of uncertainty and chaos. Culture tests the limit of what is acceptable.
As we start building permanent structures (such as a family) we naturally start avoiding these zones of turbulence because they are challenging to navigate and we need the energy elsewhere. It's ok.
> Where is the actually interesting culture coming from
Your kid's bedroom (if your a Gen X parent).
Youth culture is now heavily social media or short content based, making it easier to reach out to large audiences while staying at home.
You can build and manage an entire community of friends just by using Discord or other similar products, so you can develop a network effect without having to be in-person.
Take a look at SoundCloud Rap, TikTok shorts, Gamer Youtube, Podcasts, ASMR, etc.
Also, a lot of us younger people had some of our most formative years during the lockdowns, which turbocharged online culture.
> We're better when things outside our control influence us at least a little.
Could be a good argument for being religious.
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.
Albany, the city referenced in the article, has a million people in its metro area. Yeah, rural areas tend to be ultra-conformist in most places; mid-size cities, less so.
It also has several universities between itself and nearby spots like Troy. That tends to help these types of cultures flourish.
Although when I lived there *mumbles* years ago it seemed like a lot of the stuff was driven by kids from towns like Cohoes
There's a massive spectrum between NYC and a tiny village. Almost every place you can live is in between. Why bring up such extremes when the author is talking about more common places?
Author's example of Newmarket is over 80k people. They just mention Tiny town goths as an idea that does exist - not something extremely common.
I think parent was trying to make the point that it is not linear progression, but more bathtub curve where very small places and big cities are similar dead zones. Goth town sweet spot is in the middle.
I ascribe to the Rent Theory of Everything. People can afford to be weird, where they don't have to be perfect corporate people in order to pay rent.
At least in Colorado, living in the mountains was so you could live a little more freely. I will say living in a large city certainly has different freedoms. It’s far easier to find your people for example.
SLC Punk! Is a “good” movie about subculture conformity.
See also the Law of Jante which seems to be a universal phenomenon.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Law_of_Jante
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.)
The sameness is just the carrier wave; the signal is in the details. To people immersed in the subculture, it doesn't look the same at all! You can experience the same phenomenon by listening to an unfamiliar genre of music: it will all sound the same at first, but once you've tuned your ears to the conventions of the genre, you'll start to hear where the variation lives, and the idea that it all sounds the same will come to feel absurd.
I think it depends on one's goals maybe.
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).
I think american suburban goths are basically teenagers readings of European urban trends
It always felt like "goth" as we see it here was a product of American culture?
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.
I know goth (the subculture, which is distinct from "gothic architecture") has many meanings to many different people, but they all go through Siouxsie Sioux, Ian Curtis and that subculture in late 70s UK. It seems like that's what we're talking about here, too.
Manson came later & certainly drew influence from there in addition to glam and, probably most heavily, industrial metal. Avril Lavigne was a Canadian pop star who drew from the pop-punk aesthetic. She wasn't goth at all.
Like parent comment I was talking about perception, not reality.
no, it comes from UK post-punk 1977-1980.
> Siouxsie and the Banshees, Joy Division, Bauhaus and the Cure were examples of post-punk bands who shifted to dark overtones in their music, which would later spawn the gothic rock scene in the early 1980s
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Post-punk#United_Kingdom
The later artists that you listed are not regarded by that wave as being "really" goth at all.
Parent comment was saying that US goths are a reading of European trends.
Meanwhile, I was saying that here (in France) and during my teens, goths where actually seen as a product of American culture.
I wasn't saying that the goth culture is coming from America, but that people who identified as goths were inspired mostly by American artists.
> people who identified as goths were inspired mostly by American artists
My peers and I certainly were not. It was mostly or entirely inspired by UK artists.
Later waves may be different, there might indeed be people inspired by Vision Video, Twin Tribes and Boy Harsher (all current US). Or by the German scene.
Yep. When I hear goth I think Bauhaus, Joy Division....
I think I would describe these as "scene kids", which is often conflated with "goth" but is quite different culturally. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Scene_(subculture) If a scene kid is dressed mostly in black—which is always common—they would probably be conflated with goth pretty easily. (...and frankly few of the people I grew up with were even aware of the difference; this is certainly something imposed partially in retrospect to describe trends.)
EDIT: the same as the above but with "emo", which is much closer to the goth all-black look I guess, but still looks compiled at the mall rather than the DIY look that goth typically implies.
"True goth" (i.e. someone associated with the original UK scene) can be found here, but you'll want to hit up an eighties night at the alt club to find it.
Then there's a lot of people who dress in black and don't particularly care about goth music, but they're still colloquially referred to as goth.
It really depends who you're around and how deep they are into music culture how these fits are interpreted and named. For the most part these days, these music subcultures blur pretty heavily and policing/being sticklers about whether or not someone is a "poser" is frowned upon. For instance, I have a friend who dresses distinctly punk, and likes to attend punk shows, but does not call herself punk just to avoid dealing with kids who are eager to establish an identity by mocking a "poser" (which, tbh, I feel like if you're over 35 the concept should be absurd).
gothic architecture, gothic literature, and the goth subculture are three very different uses of the word, all of which likewise have nothing to do with the original goths. (tangentially, there are amusing tshirts saying "if you're really a goth, where were you when we sacked rome?!")
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).
What can I say. I grew up in a town of ~500 people.
I'm now living in a 2500 people town, I can understand you :)
All one had to do was go to the QE2 in Albany
This person knows Smallbany well.
This is hilarious. I grew up right across the border in Massachusetts and to me growing up, Albany was the big city. Crossgates was the nice, clean, well-maintained mall with the better movie theater, (our rural one was literally decaying in front of our eyes), and I was always so jealous of the teenagers who were able to hang out there and the skateboarders dodging cops in the parking lot.
The region is doing really nicely these days. I could easily imagine living in the area again, the people are very friendly, and Dinosaur BBQ is surprisingly delicious for upstate new york. (I hope I didn't just cop to liking a tourist trap.)
I don't care if Dinosaur BBQ is a tourist trap, it's delicious and I very much miss it. I would definitely conciser moving back to the Albany area.
Let's just say I'm familiar with steamed hams
> unless you are really really self-confident
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.
>"unless you are really really self-confident."
And then, WOW.
True also in northern europe.
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.
“You’re unique, just like everyone else”
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.
Ah, this is a great topic on its own.
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 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.
> 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.
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.
Must be circa 2002 at the latest! By 2003 or so Scene was in full swing in Australia
You picked it exactly. We left Australia for the UK in 2002.
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, etc. is orthogonal.
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.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=RYJxPg6quL4
St. Vincent's font on her music video looks exactly like the logos in the article that have all merged to the same gray goo.
That 2D plane plot of the overton window distribution versus population density is why humanity needs a frontier that isn't instantly centrally controllable or communicable (like the seconds light lag to the moon, or minutes to asteroids and mars).
Read somewhere a long time ago: Being different is not going to highschool dressed in black, being different is going to highschool dressed as a clown.
"Lonely dissent doesn’t feel like going to school dressed in black. It feels like going to school wearing a clown suit."
https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/CEGnJBHmkcwPTysb7/lonely-dis...
The article that the author links to for "goth taxonomy" (^f "many kinds of goth") is pretty clearly composed of entirely lightly edited AI-generated images, and likely AI-generated text.
For example, the confusing "goth family tree" at the beginning of the article is clearly Dall-E/ChatGPT prompted with just that, with labels edited in after the fact in a way that makes the whole thing nonsense. For the "trad goth" picture further down, it's blantantly obvious it's Dall-E's cluttered style with meaningless lines. It's the exact kind of slop the article complains about, and I'd go so far as to say it's anti-information, because you can't trust any of it. It would be fine if the images were purely for decorative purposes, but for an article that purports to authoritatively describe visual aesthetics, handing that work off to a hallucination-prone AI renders it untrustworthy.
I assume this was the result of a 30 second google, but the author including that as a reference source is so bad that it makes the rest of the article hard to take seriously.
edit:
This particular line jumps out at me:
>Particularly if the AI products assisting us now are successfully trained to not hallucinate anymore
I'm normally one to jump in and defend AI when someone says it's useless because it hallucinates sometimes, because that could not be further from the case. But if you think it doesn't hallucinate at all anymore, then your credibility when writing about AI is severely limited.
> But their actual deal is cookie-cutter counterculture, like it came out of a street punk paint-by-numbers kit. Whatever Albany is for them, they would never be caught there.
There is a classic joke about that -- they all want to look different, but they all look different in the same way.
heh, the Life of Brian..[0]
- You're all different!
- WE are all different!
- (lonely voice) i am not
[0] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=jVygqjyS4CA
Ghost town you said?
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=RZ2oXzrnti4
Personally loved the article. And as usual, shared it with a friend and he got actually a bit defensive. Dismissing cynically. Unsurprisingly, is kind of the same attitude here.
I found super interesting the parallels of cookie cutter contra-culture and the results of a heavily vetted AI slop. How most original/interesting thought has a great insight but is easily dismissed...
> parallel interrogation of a creative process leads to boring outcomes; serial investigation gives you creative outcomes.
There’s a reason many subcultures are obscure, and it’s because they suck. I started out in English-speaking anime forums like Reddit and 4chan, then eventually spread to darker and more obscure places. I learned extremely quickly that hidden gems are rare, and if you have no friends and nobody walks to talk to you about anything you like, it’s probably because you’re a socially maladjusted asshole. I left those communities and never looked back.
"Different" or "out of distribution" in the context of LLM actually means "wrong."
When people are different, they are wrong relative to each other. When someone is in a far-off subculture (far left, far right, super goth, super avant garde, etc.) they are "wrong" to the majority culture. Compared to the mainstream cultural understanding, anarcho-primitivism is wrong, it's incorrect, it does not fit. You will not find it being used to explain current events in mainstream newspapers or CNN. Because it is wrong.
However, the difference between people and LLM is that the person has a sense of self, an agency, etc, and the LLM is just a tool. When a person is wrong, they have an opinion that differs, it's maybe interesting, there may be some value to glean from talking to them and understanding what reasons they have for being wrong. When an LLM is wrong, it's a tool that is malfunctioning. It's just wrong. By the way, when an employee is wrong, they're a tool that is malfunctioning; that's why weird out of distribution people make bad employees (and why they tend not to become employees).
This is the same critique of hallucination. "Hallucination" is a word we use to describe when the model does not fit reality. But both the model and reality are relative, of course. The same applies for human to human we just assign different value judgements, and rightly so.
i was with you, until this:
when an employee is wrong, they're a tool that is malfunctioning
weird out of distribution people make bad employees
that's a very dystopian view of employment that i can't subscribe to. employees are not mindless drones. when they are "wrong" the same considerations should apply that you give to people otherwise.
Cultural observations: Goths[0]
He also did "mall goths"[1] but the mall is located in London so...
[0]: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zPE44MPNf2s [1]: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2Q5CyC85sI8
You can’t satisfy everyone, and if you try to, you become the average of all their opinions. Optimally safe, maximally dull.
The problem with such articles is that I don't know beforehand if it's worth it to invest my attention
His source of information about goths is a shopping site.[1]
[1] https://www.litlookzstudio.com/blogs/news/types-of-goth
Not "his source of information" instead it is used (as an example) to indicate how many sub-categorizations there are.
From the guidelines:
> Please don't post shallow dismissals, especially of other people's work. A good critical comment teaches us something.
His easily presentable example. We don't know about his actual sources. Just like if I'm trying to explain the internet to a normie, I'll use a simple colourful diagram, not a stack of raw RFCs - even though I read them.
Surely the fact they've linked to a shopping site backs up the opening paragraphs.
> Those are attractive people with heavily vetted idiosyncrasies. Every eccentric fashion choice has been run through a think tank of NYU undergrads that would blow your hair back
> But their actual deal is cookie-cutter counterculture, like it came out of a street punk paint-by-numbers kit
It's worse than a shopping site, the whole article seems to be AI generated. Certainly the images are - even the confusing "goth family tree" at the beginning of the article is clearly Dall-E/ChatGPT prompted with just that, with labels edited in after the fact in a way that makes the whole thing nonsense. It's the exact kind of slop the article complains about, and I'd go so far as to say it's anti-information, because you can't trust any of it.
More than a shallow criticism, the fact that the article links to it at all puts the whole thing in question.
30+ years ago, Christian thought was the dominant force in society. You wanted to piss off your elders and society? Say something bad about Christianity (I should know, I was there front-and-center). Current year in many places of the country, the pendulum has now swung left and there's this new neo-liberal order. You want to piss off society now? Say something bad about that. And that's precisely why movements like the alt-right have risen to the heights they are at now.
You've probably heard phrases being thrown around online like "conservative is the new punk"; while mostly silly, there is a nugget of truth to them.
> 30+ years ago, Christian thought was the dominant force in society.
Was around back then. While there's a lower percentage of professed Christians in the USA now than there was then, the power wielded by the evangelical/Christian Nationalist crowd has only grown.
> conservative is the new punk
I've not heard that, but it doesn't surprise me. Nazis have been trying to pretend what they are doing is very punk and rebellious rather than the bootlicking, racist, leader worship that it really is.
Dead Kennedys said it best with Nazi Punks Fuck Off.
The fact that "neoliberalism" is considered left should seriously concern anyone who has opened a history book.
> The fact that "neoliberalism" is considered left should seriously concern anyone who has opened a history book.
The problem is with the word liberalism in US. For Europeans: Liberalism == right wing...
I guess it has taken a more cultural sense in US, where US liberalism is more about morals than economics (drugs, sex, gender, immigration...) and became a synonym for progressive, as opposed to conservatism and its pseudo religious aspects.
Neo-liberalism clearly has a negative connotation in Europe, at least politically, it is synonym of ultra capitalism.
> where US liberalism is more about morals than economics
Unmooring politics from the economic concerns of the voter (or of the person who lives here if voting isn't a question) rarely bodes well for the long-term health of the state.
There are exceptions of course—North Korea, perhaps?
"You never see an old man eating a twix"
[flagged]
"Those aren’t freaks, okay? Those are attractive people with heavily vetted idiosyncrasies. Every eccentric fashion choice has been run through a think tank that would blow your hair back. You want to see a freak? Go to Albany." paraphrased,from,Chris Fleming and to paraphrase a exta freeky person I know "eccentric people dont ever get less eccentric, they get more eccentric" or another one, the difference between bieng eccentric and crazy, is a million dollars freeks fall somewhere inbetween