One subculture I got somewhat involved in was the internet cyberpunk-hacker culture, until about a year ago. Communicating through 4chan threads, alt-chans, and IRC channels, these users were always interesting to read from on various topics such as cyberpunk media, politics, current events, hacking, software, fashion, and travel.
I'm dismayed that it petered out. I see the cyberpunk form of art and worldview as more useful with each passing year.
Do you have any theories as to why it petered out? Like you I feel it's more relevant today than ever before but also can't find a growing or healthy community with that mindset anymore.
Aside from conspiracy-theorizing about current events (and I don't use that term pejoratively), people tended to discuss the same topics. New cyberpunk media doesn't come out very often, so people tended to talk about the same books, movies, manga, anime, videogames, and fashion. Some of the alt-chans with dedicated cyberpunk boards would run out of ideas to talk about pretty quickly, since there weren't enough posts that the website had to prune old threads like 4chan did.
Another hypothesis I have is that cyberpunk media is not as captivating as it used to be since we arguably live in a cyberpunk world. In America there is unimaginable wealth inequality, with some cities having insane costs of rent for cramped apartments, with access to the best technology and medicine in the world but only if you can afford it. We also don't have to use media to imagine a world where digital corporations have a huge amount of power over daily life and the government spies on everyone all the time since both of those things are happening right now. I think we live in a cyberpunk world, it just doesn't have huge buildings, neon lights, and widespread punk fashion.
I came in contact with a few guys who wanted to make another alt-chan with a different model (see what other users are typing in real-time, and all posts get deleted early in the morning) but it never materialized as far as I can tell.
Edit: do any of you want to join an online cyberpunk community?
I don't think your two points are mutually exclusive, and suspect they are both correct to one degree or another. I live in a second-tier city working for a second-tier company and my daily life is already fairly cyberpunk! During the day I actively work on the advertising economy surveillance state, and at home I do things like install the Pi-Hole for my family and try to help anybody who will listen reduce their target profile for the eye in the sky. I mention this, particularly that my city and company are second-tier, because you don't have to work at FAANGM in SV to experience these things.
There is definitely a sense in which I would be interested in at least checking out a cyberpunk community, but as other have mentioned, it's more or less culture now.
Another challenge is when your alt culture goes mainstream, now it's just culture. The alt community has to tack deeper to the extremes to stay alt. You don't need an alt board to talk about current events (aside from conspiracy theories)
While this is true, I still experience a little of that early-exposure-to-the-Internet sense of wonder when I stumble across a community that's off the beaten path technologically. sdf.org's Gopher service was such an experience in the past couple years.
I think you nailed it there. We live in the cyberpunk world envisioned by so much if great cyberpunk media. Sure it's not as gritty and bleak, at least not in the West but I'm pretty sure that there are less fortunate places, where hi tech resides alongside low-tech in the cyberpunk aesthetic. Wikileaks, Anonymous, bitcoin, data heists, billionaires going to mars, VR, AR, stuxnet and cyberwarfare. The real world has it all.
>Edit: do any of you want to join an online cyberpunk community?
I will when Cyberpunk 2077 comes out next year. That game has been in development for more than 7 years and looks absolutely insane. They have released 48 minutes of gameplay for anyone who is interested (I have no connection or monetary interest in this game).
By now, it should be obvious that your efforts to attenuate the duration of long-running content won't prove to cultivate an increase in the quality of participation.
There are (at least) three aspects of online community participation, that seasoned users are pretty well-versed in:
1. Archiving, mirroring and back-ups.
2. Leaked screen captures and scrapes
of private direct messaging.
3. Back-end aggregation of logs and
messages, even for supposedly private
SMS interactions.
Forget it dude. We all know that whatever signals get placed onto the wire turn out to be spliced through passive beam splitters and land in an open S3 bucket.
The ones that don't? Your girlfriend just screenshots it, and and tweets it out in the open for the world to see anyway. Whoops!
There are no more online subcultures. Only distortions of perception enforced by impulsive, would-be moderators.
The point of imageboard-style thread pruning isn't to erase the content from the Internet (after all, there's a small archive for every board on 4chan on 4chan itself and much larger ones elsewhere on the net) but rather it's to keep the content fresh and encourage new material rather than ruminating on old material - it's much easier to notice new posts when threads are small, instead of scrolling through 1000 posts that most people never bother to read. HN deals with it with the fact that if you comment on a HN post two weeks after it was posted then it won't bump the thread.
There is still one place left on the internet where conversations more or less fade away forever after they end: IRC
Sure, there are probably logs somewhere. User logs and server logs. But in all the decades I've been using IRC, I've never seen my chatlogs show up on a search engine before. It's just obscure enough and just low value enough to slip under the radar.
Oooh, If you're still at the stage of getting ideas for what people want to see...
Merchandising. I'd love to support a site like that with mugs or shirts of my favourite greentexts. You could get memorabilia of the instant when memes were born, and it would fix the monetization problem that pops up when they get big.
> You could get memorabilia of the instant when memes were born
An irrational anger stirs deep within my soul at this suggestion. Too many marketing agencies have attempted to monetize internet culture with catastrophically misguided results. At this point, monetizing internet culture is synonymous with meme murder.
I have a couple theories. I think there's a genuine attempt to subvert the countercultures and it's easier to do so now than ever before, the decline of 4chan didn't feel organic to me at all, more like the members of the community got crowded out by automated accounts. Then there's the fact that the /punk communities have kind of splintered, I try to get involved in a lot of ecopunk or solarpunk for example, and there are various aesthetics that people gravitate to depending on what they think the solution is. And on a positive note, I think that this might just be a year where a lot of people are building - groups like 4 thieves, the Odin, Blockcon are actually getting after it. People are fairly busy, but this year in particular it's the kind of busy that doesn't make much noise.
You might consider asking why so many of the greatest cyberpunk authors abandoned the genre. Many science fiction authors idealistically try to produce stories they feel society needs to hear at a given point rather than just retreading genres that have been well-mined and which they feel aren't contributing to progress.
Google Neal Stephenson and "getting big stuff done". Stephenson wrote some of the best books late in Cyperpunk's sci-fi reign, but later came to feel that portraying technological advance as leading to decay, inequality, and corruption was contributing to the stifling of technological ambition in the U.S.. When huge technological leaps are necessary to get past pressing problems like clean energy, space exploration, etc., does it make sense for pop culture to portray technological progress as a negative force that will lead to dystopias?
William Gibson gradually moved away from Cyberpunk for a long period of time, writing novels that were set closer and closer to the present day. "The Peripheral", released in 2014, was the first book by Gibson set in what could be considered "Cyberpunk" for quite a while, but it's not really cyberpunk. (Note: Mild spoilers ahead) Technology does indeed create a calamity that negatively impacts world society in this book, but "cleptocrats" are just as much to blame for creating a dystopia. However, the book also shows some "big stuff" being done, even in the dystopia, and some pretty far-out tech ultimately prevents the calamity it created in the book's prime timeline. A fairly idealistic group of heroes actually change the world for the better using technology in this book, which is rather more optimistic view of both people and technology than is consistent with standard cyberpunk.
While Ernest Cline was not an established author before writing "Ready Player One", it's interesting to note that this book doesn't really represent a return to cyberpunk for serious science fiction. The plot can certainly be considered cyberpunk. (Note: I have read the book, but not seen the movie yet). However, it's basically one long dose of 80's nostalgia, so the cyberpunk setting makes perfect sense for that book. Thus, it's not really science fiction in this respect. It's not trying to predict or shape the future. It's an exercise in wallowing in the past, and the form of this novel matches that function.
I'm still a fan of cyberpunk, but I recognize that science fiction has moved on. It responds to the needs of society, and nightmarish technocratic dystopias are not what is needed today.
I think post-cyberpunk, which is essentially cyberpunk but with a more balanced view of the impact of technology, stands in good stead. Rather than having technocrats lording it over neon slums filled with addicts and hackers, post-cyberpunk portrays high-tech futuristic environments where technology is a disruptive rather than an oppressive force.
Not everyone is a stim-addicted decker working for the mob, but there's still a corrupting element when you include e.g. pervasive smart glasses that make regular social interaction more manipulative (Sight by Sight Systems), or biomechanical arms that give the wealthy an unbeatable advantage in sports (briefly touched on in Deus Ex: Human Revolution). It addresses real ethical questions about near-future advances in technology instead of the fairly blunt instruments of cyberpunk like power and oppression. I think there's still plenty of room for more post-cyberpunk content because the questions it poses are the ones we're actively talking about at the moment (or will be in the near future).
I think a worthy and more relevant successor to classic cyberpunk may be bio/ecopunk or whatever it's called, like The Windup Girl and much of what Paolo Bacigalupi writes.
It describes struggling or weird futures without the somewhat outdated trappings of cyberpunk, but with some of the same attitude.
I don't think it did. I was just like OP here, getting involved in the anonymous boards around 2004 because they were spreading funny images and links.
But I was 19 at the time. And around the age of 26-27 I stopped spending time in that culture.
So I think you just outgrow it.
But those cultures are still alive out there. New people come in, some old people stay.
There are always going to be kids who refuse the "normal" trends like snapchat. Who seek out alternative places and those alternative places are imo still websites. Apps will never breach this space because apps are too easy to adopt by large groups of your peers.
The alt.kids want something tougher, a challenge. And most of all they want to get away from the throng.
I'm just waiting to see persistent community forums in darknets. Of course I don't make an effort to track these things anymore but I'd love to know that it has become a reality.
Anonymity is important because just like games lead to programming and hacking, anonymous forums lead to free expression and sub-cultures. It might look like they're just goofing around but look at what 4chan became. We were just goofing around but enough people came to goof around to make it a potential movement.
It's many things at once. For some people, it's just an aesthetic. It's the whole "hacker, rebel, techy, lone-wolf" aesthetic.
It's also a genre of science fiction. It basically combines futuristic tech with dystopian/utopian elements, and grimy, old-world stuff. For example, a cyberpunk setting may have godlike AI, but everyone lives in the ghetto. Usually there are rogue actors that try to disrupt or exploit the technology system in place-- the "hackers". These actors are all about reclaiming old tech, building gadgets, and often cyborg-like body mods.
Cyberpunk is a sort of philosophy as well, along the same lines. This is where the subculture aspect comes in. Ever heard of steampunk? Steampunk in a fictional setting is where all technology is mostly mechanical, usually drawing on Victorian elements as well, and sometimes magic or supernatural stuff is included. Steampunk can be boiled down to an initiative to create stable, reliable, mechanically sound systems, usually put to interesting/novel use.
Cyberpunk as a subculture is similar. It's all about making tech work for you, pushing it to its limits, experimenting and exploiting within the given system. It's a rebellious attitude and a response to corporate and government tech control. It incorporates a fashion element like all good subcultures, likes to resurrect old tech (like nixie tubes), and often incorporates body modification (like NFC chips under the skin). People like to repair their own technology, modify their own technology, and collect obscure technologies. Many are also hackers, or want to be.
> It basically combines futuristic tech with dystopian/utopian elements, and grimy, old-world stuff.
In other words, “The future is already here—it’s just not very evenly distributed” — William Gibson.
And it will probably always be that way, not just in terms of global inequality, but even in a single person’s life: you might be among the billion or two people living as humans have lived for thousands of years, on subsistence agriculture and herding with no running water, but you also have a smartphone and can video-chat with your cousins across the world. That aspect of cyberpunk storytelling is just taking this fact of existence and amplifying it to draw attention to it.
A decent explanation of the media genre is "radical breakdown of the social order combined with radical progress in technology". It is also an aesthetic inspired by cyberpunk media. It is also a mindset which is quite hard to define, but is definitely prevalent among certain subcultures.
What was the cyberpunk worldview? Afaik it was something along the lines of "the world is run by vast networks of shadowy dystopian entities and we must use cryptography to resist this so we can have freedom" (basically, Information Technology libertarians)
"CYBERPUNK is Marianne Trench's stylistic documentary about the cyberpunk movement of the 1980s. William Gibson, author of cyberpunk classic Neuromancer, and Timothy Leary, famous advocate of psychedelic drugs, share their thoughts on the future of society and technology.
While looking a bit dated now, this film provides an interesting insight into the cyberpunk movement of the 80's. The feeling at the time was there was some overlap between this new technical age we were entering vs the counter culture of the 1960s."
Fascinating! Even back then people confused apostrophes with French accent marks. It's no new occurrence.
Survey of appearances of negative-decadent youths in the GDR
From the left:
* Ted's
Age: 15-30 years
Very small group by numbers, fanatic supporters of 50's Rock'n'Roll. Usually organized in respective fan clubs.
Clothing in 50's style: Skinny jeans, Winklepickers. Hair in the style of R&R-times (Elvis quiffe, "Duck").
Politically uninterested.
Hardly noticed operationally, activities mostly at birth and death days of idolized rock stars.
* Tramper (bum, blueser)
Age: 20-30 years.
Classic manifestation of the negative-decadent youth in the 70's. Blues fans. Participation in traditional events.
Long hair, jeans parka, tramping, Birkenstock (literally: "jesus slippers"), beards, sometimes fashin accessories similar to Hippies.
Not bound to any political worldview.
Noticed through organizing inter-regional meetings, no firm attachment to church groups, hardly growing.
* Skins
Age: 15-22 years.
English: "head skin". society-threatening manifestation of negative-decadent youths as lone wolfs or in loose groups without firm structures.
Outer attributes: baldness or very short hair, bomber jacket, skinny jeans, high steel-toe boots studded with nails and iron.
Deprecative negative to hostile political attitude, partly neo-fascist tendencies, glorification and use of violence, brutal action.
In danger of criminality (rowdyism, battery, resistance to state action.
Partly in open church youth groups.
* Heavys
Age: 15-25 years.
Fan of the so-called Heavy-Meta music (extremely hard rock).
Similarity to rockers in the west: black leather clothing, leather cap, Rivet-studded jackets and pants, wearing heavy chains etc., normal to semi-long hair.
Originally deprecative attitude towards state and society, growing integration into organizations forms og the Free German Youth with society-conforming attitudes.
Originally aggressive attitude, partly neo-fascist tendencies after the example of the west, with the proliferation of Heavy music increasingly society-conforming.
* Goths
Age: 15-20 years.
New Heavy scene, originating in hostility to that, glorofication of creepy effects, satanic and death cult, fans of the group "The Cure".
black or white dyed hair, sticking out in all directions. White powdered face, black clothing. Wearing of symbols like crucifixes upside down.
Totally uninterested in politics and society.
Hardly noticed operationally. High profile by collecting grave utensils, sometimes grave desecration. Calm, isolated from other youths.
* Punks
Age: 15-22 years.
English: Garbage/trash.
Characterized externally through documented decadence, society-adverse to -threatening. No firm structures.
Deprecative to hostile political attitude, rejection of all state forms and societal norms. Glorification of anarchist thoughts, "total freedom".
Violent appearance, criminal actions and antisocial ways of life, often regulars in public church youth groups, instructed by Deacons.
* New Romantics
Age: 15-18 years.
English: "New romantics", "dropout" movement, developed from punk, is punk's more society-conformant variant.
Black or grey clothing, often contrasting black-red as a symbol of anarchy. Hair most of the time dyed black, short at the back and the sides, long on top. Hanging into the face, eyes concealed.
Stand for same negative to hostile postitions as Punks,but reject all forms of glorification and use of violence.
Partly attached to church youth work, diminishing tendency.
* Popper
Age: 13-20 years.
Performing as break-dancer. Notable one-sided interest in disco and dancing.
Youth with extremely modern clothing. Haircut similar to New Romantics, multi-coloured.
Totally uninterested in politics.
So far no operational appearance. Mostly involved in quarrels with Heavys.
> Hardly noticed operationally. High profile by collecting grave utensils, sometimes grave desecration. Calm, isolated from other youths.
I remember a policeman in London joking with some of us at a goth nightclub he was "patrolling". He said it was a pointless task for him, as there was never trouble at a goth event, but he had to pass by every few months to avoid accusations of discrimination.
I find that most non-mainstream nightclubs tend to be the safest and have the least trouble.
I don't think I've heard a single person complain about sexual harassment or violent behaviour in the underground techno scene in my city. Meanwhile getting sexually harassed as a woman, or having guys trying to pick fights with you as a man is such a common occurrence that I'd never bother go to to a mainstream club even if I liked the music.
A London taxi driver explained to me back in the 1980's how he liked fares from clubs where boys wore make-up because anyone who has spent three hours crimping and back-combing and spraying their hair is unlikely to want to risk damaging it by having a fight.
How in the heck did rockabilly/greasers end up as "Teds"? The rest pretty much lines up with the West but man, that one seems like someone misheard something.
I grew up in West Germany and some used to call them "Teds". "Rockabilies" was more common. "New Romantiks" didn't exist were I lived, I think we called this "Postpunk" (guys who listened to bands like Tears for Fears).
And with hindsight knowledge of how that story ended, we can only congratulate the author on a job well done. Churches were relatively safe havens for dissent because despite fundamentally different ideology, the actual ideals were pretty much aligned. And they knew and respected that, on both sides. For a state with torture prisons (edit: and with mandatory paramilitary classes at school, almost forgot about that), a state that routinely had the army shoot its own citizens, the GDR was surprisingly committed to peace.
The only thing interesting to translate is the title "Overview of appearances of negative-decadent adolescents in the GDR".
Of note is that several entries refer to connections to the church[es] (esp youth work of those) - it makes perfect sense when one understands that christian churches (mostly protestants in the GDR, afaik) were seen by many parents as a more liberal alternative to state sponsored youth groups (liberal as in "not preaching communism non-stop").
To be clear, the term protestant is something different in Germany then in the US. The is also no "the churches" in a broader sense. There is the catholic church and the evangelical church in Germany, who are protestants by name and broadly lutherans. And thats it, only those two.
Both had people involved in the GDR civil rights movement, one of the recent German presidents, Joachim Gauck was an Lutheran/Protestant pastor and an anti communist civil rights activists, who wrote the preamble of the German version of the black book of communism. He compared the UDSSR to the Hitler regime. I would be careful to call that "liberal". It was mostly conservative and has been so after the reunification.
The role of the two churches is an extremely difficult subject throughout the last century and I dont think broad generalizations help anyone here.
"Liberal" and "conservative" also have very different meanings depending on country and context, and I don't see how opposition to the Stasi or GDR government automatically makes someone a conservative. Gauck was supported by the Social Democrats and the Greens, both of which are very progressive (well to the left of US democrats).
There is really not much to read. The title is as bad/good as it gets.
Overview of appearances of "negatively decadent" youth in the GDR.
Skin heads are rowdies prone to be fascists, Metal heads are violent and punks are dirty junk people who smell bad and are anarchists. Also, Teds, Tramper, Grufties and popper are not interested in politics.
Outside of some darker corners of the genre, most Heavy Metal listeners just like fun, some sex, some drinks, and some noise. They aren't even that big on drugs. And they're quite communal as a scene.
Whereas other genres attract more self-destruction, isolation, and negativity.
Plug "Gruftie" into google translate, German to English, and you get "Goth".
"Fans of The Cure and death" is close enough.
As I found out at the museum of communism on Leipzig, "Gruftie" means something like "graveyard creature", "crypt kid", etc. In other words, slang term for a Gothic.
Although I'm sure there was a lot of judge-y material about sub-cultures in the west too, that one is not a good example at least. I don't think a short, neutral guide to (edit: mostly) looks is "the same kind" as a police state's guide to "negative-decadent" youths that also goes into to who behaves the least "appropriate for society", political ideas and suspect affiliations.
The terms "police state" and "decadent" in the US are only used to describe other countries. The sentiments carry over, they're just called "law and order" and "losers" here.
Suggesting that the US has become a decadent, past-its-prime empire or that it is turning into a police state are pretty standard-issue critiques and have been for many decades. You can regularly find them on HN, too.
I can't recall hearing an American call another country decadent, at least not unironically. It's strongly associated with Communist countries or leftists criticizing the US, it seems to me. The term "police state" isn't as strongly associated with critics of the US, but I would say the majority of the time it is directed at the US.
As much as it's tempting to equate the Mirror to communist governments like East Germany, an article posted at least slightly tongue-in-cheek in a British newspaper is not the same thing as a guide provided to police in a police state.
Secret police records in former East Germany are subject to an unusual degree of transparency, because many of them were seized and subsequently made public after the wall fell.
We don't really know what the archives of western states would show if subjected to comparable scrutiny (to the limited extent those archives were made available, e.g. in Switzerland, they show an appalling amount of surveillance, though a comparatively limited amount and degree of repression).
> an ethnic, regional, economic, or social group exhibiting characteristic patterns of behavior sufficient to distinguish it from others within an embracing culture
But wouldn't your presence here indicate your participation in a type of subculture?
I'm dismayed that it petered out. I see the cyberpunk form of art and worldview as more useful with each passing year.