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.
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.<p>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'.
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.<p>3 years ago, there was that 3D look. No idea where it came from, but the first time I saw it was from Revolut.<p>About 10 years ago, we had emojis sprinkled everywhere. Replacing icons, prefixing email titles, being used at bullet points.<p>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.<p>When I was a teenager, websites were all "microsoft blue".<p>90s design, no longer web, were colorful and had handwriting font. While 80s had a lot of stripes and 3D text.<p>There's definitely something trendy and edgy about these websites but not <i>too</i> 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.
> 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.<p>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.<p>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 <i>becoming</i> “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.<p>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.
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.<p>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.
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.<p>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.
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.<p>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.
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.
<a href="https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=RYJxPg6quL4" rel="nofollow">https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=RYJxPg6quL4</a><p>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).
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.<p>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 <i>authoritatively describe visual aesthetics</i>, handing that work off to a hallucination-prone AI renders it untrustworthy.<p>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.<p>edit:<p>This particular line jumps out at me:<p>>Particularly if the AI products assisting us now are successfully trained to not hallucinate anymore<p>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 <i>at all</i> 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.<p>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]<p>- You're all different!<p>- WE are all different!<p>- (lonely voice) i am not<p>[0] <a href="https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=jVygqjyS4CA" rel="nofollow">https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=jVygqjyS4CA</a>
Ghost town you said?<p><a href="https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=RZ2oXzrnti4" rel="nofollow">https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=RZ2oXzrnti4</a>
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.<p>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...<p>> 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 <i>extremely</i> 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."<p>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.<p>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).<p>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.
Cultural observations: Goths[0]<p>He also did "mall goths"[1] but the mall is located in London so...<p>[0]: <a href="https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zPE44MPNf2s" rel="nofollow">https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zPE44MPNf2s</a>
[1]: <a href="https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2Q5CyC85sI8" rel="nofollow">https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2Q5CyC85sI8</a>
His source of information about goths is a shopping site.[1]<p>[1] <a href="https://www.litlookzstudio.com/blogs/news/types-of-goth" rel="nofollow">https://www.litlookzstudio.com/blogs/news/types-of-goth</a>
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 <i>that</i>. And that's precisely why movements like the alt-right have risen to the heights they are at now.<p>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.
"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