strivers, stoners, scammers, and builders

notes on dinergoth

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Source: The New Atlantis

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The ghost of status continues to haunt our cultural discourse.

Its current avatar is the dinergoth: the downwardly-mobile, vape-puffing, cat-ear-wearing, blue-haired, tatted-up denizen of small town and suburban America. The dinergoth works retail, collects benefits, does OnlyFans. They're adventurous in their sexual appetites and gender identities; addicted to video games and social media; and immune to old codes of conformity.

And while I'm wary of calling this phenomenon a subculture. They do share one trait with their goth forebearers. They’ve spawned a moral panic.

According to The New Atlantis, the publication that popularized the viral term, American dinergoth describes:

Placelessness without cosmopolitanism and with complacent downward mobility. A post-subcultural 'alt' aesthetic. Queerness but casual and prole-ified.

Dinergoth: 'diner' for provincialism, 'goth' as lazy shorthand for alternative aesthetics.

The term is supposed to name something new, but subcultural aesthetics have always been downwardly mobile. That's why the classic subcultures people always point to—punk, grunge, goth, and emo—were all seen as symptoms of social decline. The best neologisms describe something genuinely new in the world. Others work because they reframe the familiar. Dinergoth is an example of the latter and not a particularly sharp one.

The triumph of this new term is apparently symbolized by a cover from Emmy Magazine featuring mainstream cartoons such as Bob’s Burgers, which began airing in 2011. Even Helluva Boss, the adult animation that the accompanying piece "Vibing in the Ruins" goes into detail framing as paradigmatic of this aesthetic, began airing roughly six years ago and shares a visual affinity with Invader ZIM, which ran on Nickelodeon from 2001 to 2006.

Once again, the new thing is that there really aren't any new things.

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the rationale of the striver class

Most of America is in decline. This is true in both spatial and demographic terms. Midtier cities, inner-ring suburbs, un-gentrified downtowns, rural counties, small towns. The anxiety of our rising striver class is reasonable.

What does it mean to cast yourself as an elite in an era of decline?

This sentiment is the origin of Europoor discourse too. America may not be doing well, but it’s doing marginally better than its peer competitors. It's not ideal. But it's something.

That’s why complacency is key to understanding this framing of downward mobility in 21st century America. The upper middle class needs to believe that the economic woes of others are due to a moral failing. That if the dinergoths really wanted to succeed in America, they could. To contemplate that maybe there are structural forces at play which prevent everyone from being upper middle class is to admit that maybe forces beyond your control could one day push you down that same slope.

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your half-zip won’t save you