.webp?h=11 "Nuzzles, pounces on you, UwU, you're so warm!..")
This isn't an original observation, but I feel like modern mainstream culture, and most niche online culture, too, is a warmed over rehash of things that have been done before – AI slop without the AI. Even the edgy right are pushing monarchy and racism: they don't have any new ideas.
Are there places where new, interesting culture is happening? If so, where?
I know there was a hot minute when Tao Lin and the autofiction boys were supposed to be the shape of the new, but that was more than a decade ago now. In the 2010s, Tumblr was the cultural vanguard; dumb shit reblogged there wound up on the NYT three years later. Is it TikTok now?
Is Dimes Square a real scene? Or was it a scene, since Vanity Fair has already written the obituary?
I'm too old for it but hyperpop sounds genuinely new to me. quinn is doing something I haven't heard before – she's trans MtF and swings wildly from brash violent hip-hop masculinity to surprisingly introspective vulnerability in the same verse:
Bitch, you oppin', flodgin', posted on my watch list
Say that you invincible, okay, nigga, watch this
One phone call and his brains we'll get to moppin'
Sorry I'm so hyped up, I'm just dumb obsessed with violence
Anxiety, I'm runnin' out of options
Cut 'em out my life just like a photo, I just crop 'em
If-if-if they start to bother me, I cut 'em off or stop them
Why am I so ignorant? Why am I so toxic?
I don't want that many friends in the first place
I don't really enjoy hyperpop, but I can recognize that these kids are throwing hip hop, pop, and EDM into a blender and trying to produce something new.
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Does TESCREAL kinda count as a novel iteration of edgy right wing culture? I guess its hard to call it a culture or ideology because I have a hard time thinking of anyone who fully embraces the entire acronym.
Isnt hyperpop kinda already on the decline now? It seems like the dysgenic queer left types who embraced hyperpop are now more interested in taking over other older, established alt subcultures and claiming they belonged to them the whole time.
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Myself, but orthonymically
Affirmative, but misnomically
Feels as much
Feels as much, though not much older in a few cases
Which?
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They'll claim goth and to a lesser extent punk were queer movements at their core. It's partially true in the sense that both subcultures embraced at least some degree of gender bending and gay-coded aspects, but they werent necessarily centered on LGBT identity.
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Yeah, kinda. I guess the rationalists/effective altruists do qualify as "new culture" but I am arbitrarily ruling they fail the "interesting" test by having lame unsexy vibes. Aellagirl is the closest thing they've produced to a sex symbol and she is like the female
@peepeehands where her weird awkward personality (god bless her she seems sweet) and terrible hygiene almost totally negate her appearance. Autism chic is never going to happen. Even if they could come up with an Andy Worholeqsque figure, they'd be doing better than they are.
You might be right that hyperpop is fading. I don't know much about it, really. It feels like a billion tiktok teens should be able to come up with something cool and new, but maybe the algorithm rewards feeding people the same shit they already like.
Maybe influencer culture itself is new? My friends who teach high school age kids say that they all want to be streamers and influencers. In the old days, kids dreamed of being models, rappers, actresses, sports stars, porn stars, rock stars. Now you have a whole generation who want to be stars but don't want to fuck.
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Yeah i mean the rationalists do embrace MANY elements of TESCREAL, but maybe not all of it. I could be wrong, but I dont have the patience to go deep in that rabbithole because like you said, its rather unsexy. Most tech rightists have unfortunately shifted their focus to room temp conspiritard narratives over taking the TESCREAL vision 100% seriously.
Maybe boredom really is obsolete and social media kinda drowns out much of the thinking space needed for meaningful creativity?
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AI will mostly kill that dead soon.
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Case in point Milady/Remilia, impervious to coolness notwithstanding a jizzillion Thieldollars.
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