Are Subcultures Dead?

Unlike the radical subcultures of yore, which had their own visual schema, language, and aesthetics, these digital scenes aren’t exactly subcultures, at least not in the traditional sense.

But social media has created a mass ability to publish images and curate them. On Tumblr and Pinterest and Are.na, you can group images into categories and comment on them. Through cheaper, consumer-grade media production tools, ideas once restricted to the underground or the zine now have glossy indie magazines, self-burnt mixtapes, and dozens of ... See more

One major benefit of subcultures is that they open up necessary space when the mainstream becomes too crowded. Now, thanks to the internet, everything is supposedly a subculture—the mainstream has supposedly broken into a thousand fragments. One would assume this creates more room for everyone to spread out, literally and figuratively, but even tha

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Just outside the mainstream stuff, you have roleplayinggame culture, you have furry culture, you have indie music culture, you have graphic designers… You have “cores” and “waves” and completely invented subcultures bootstrapped off Tumblr curation—techwear, bloghouse, cottagecore, daddy’s girl, pro-anorexia girls, witch girls… if you were on Reddi

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“Social media commoditises culture for views and engagement,” she says. “Therefore, subcultures become stripped to mere aesthetics [and] participation in them requires consumption of material goods.”