I didn’t read RS’s claim as the claim that all subcultures persist through failure, but now that you ask, no, yeah, ime a really surprising number of these subcultures actually persist through failure.
I know of a fairly influential subculture of optics-oriented politics technologists who’ve committed to a hostile relationship towards transhumanism. Transhumanism (the claim that people want to change in deep ways and that technology will fairly soon permit it) suggests that racial distinctions will become almost entirely irrelvant, so in order to maintain their version of afrofuturism where black and white futurism remain importantly distinct projects, they have to find some way to deny transhumanism. But rejecting transhumanism means they are never allowed to actually do high quality futurism because they can’t ask transhumanist questions and get a basic sense of what the future is going to be like. Or like, as soon as any of them do start asking those questions, those people wake up and drop out of that subculture. I’ve also met black transhumanists who identified as afrofuturists though. I can totally imagine articulations of afrofuturism that work with transhumanism. So I don’t know how the entire thing’s going to turn out.
Anarcho-punks fight only for the underdogs. That means they’re attached to the identity of being underdogs, as soon as any of them start really winning, they’d no longer be recognised as punk, and they know this, so they’re uninterested in — and in many cases, actively opposed to — succeeding in any of their goals. There are no influential anarcho-punks, and as far as I could gather, no living heroes.
BDSM: My model of fetishes is that they represent hedonic refuges for currently unmeetable needs, like, deep human needs that for one reason or another a person can’t pursue or even recognise the real version of the thing they need in the world as they understand it, I think it’s a protective mechanism to keep the basic drive roughly in tact and wired up by having the subject pursue symbolic fantasy versions of it. This means that getting the real thing (EG, for submissives, a committed relationship with someone you absolutely trust. For doms… probably a sense of safety?) would obsolete the kink, and it would wither away. I think they mostly don’t know this, but the mindset in which the kink is seen as the objective requires that the real thing is never recognised or attained, so these communities reproduce best by circulating memes that make it harder to recognise the real thing.
I guess this is largely about how you define the movements’ goals. If the goal of punk is to have loud parties with lots of drugs, it’s perfect at that. If the goal is to bring about anarchosocialism or thrive under a plural geopolitical order, it’s a sworn loser.
I agree with the anarchopunk thing, and maybe afrofuturism, because you can interpret “a subculture advocating for X will often not think about some important component W of X for various political reasons” as self-sabotage. But on BDSM, this is not at all my model of fetishes, and I would bet at 2.5:1 odds that you would lose a debate against what Wikipedia says, judged by a neutral observer.
I don’t recognize wikipedia’s theories as predictive. Mine has some predictions, but I hope it’s obvious why I would not be interested in making this a debate or engaging much in the conceptual dismantling of subcultures at all.
I didn’t read RS’s claim as the claim that all subcultures persist through failure, but now that you ask, no, yeah, ime a really surprising number of these subcultures actually persist through failure.
I know of a fairly influential subculture of optics-oriented politics technologists who’ve committed to a hostile relationship towards transhumanism. Transhumanism (the claim that people want to change in deep ways and that technology will fairly soon permit it) suggests that racial distinctions will become almost entirely irrelvant, so in order to maintain their version of afrofuturism where black and white futurism remain importantly distinct projects, they have to find some way to deny transhumanism. But rejecting transhumanism means they are never allowed to actually do high quality futurism because they can’t ask transhumanist questions and get a basic sense of what the future is going to be like. Or like, as soon as any of them do start asking those questions, those people wake up and drop out of that subculture. I’ve also met black transhumanists who identified as afrofuturists though. I can totally imagine articulations of afrofuturism that work with transhumanism. So I don’t know how the entire thing’s going to turn out.
Anarcho-punks fight only for the underdogs. That means they’re attached to the identity of being underdogs, as soon as any of them start really winning, they’d no longer be recognised as punk, and they know this, so they’re uninterested in — and in many cases, actively opposed to — succeeding in any of their goals. There are no influential anarcho-punks, and as far as I could gather, no living heroes.
BDSM: My model of fetishes is that they represent hedonic refuges for currently unmeetable needs, like, deep human needs that for one reason or another a person can’t pursue or even recognise the real version of the thing they need in the world as they understand it, I think it’s a protective mechanism to keep the basic drive roughly in tact and wired up by having the subject pursue symbolic fantasy versions of it. This means that getting the real thing (EG, for submissives, a committed relationship with someone you absolutely trust. For doms… probably a sense of safety?) would obsolete the kink, and it would wither away. I think they mostly don’t know this, but the mindset in which the kink is seen as the objective requires that the real thing is never recognised or attained, so these communities reproduce best by circulating memes that make it harder to recognise the real thing.
I guess this is largely about how you define the movements’ goals. If the goal of punk is to have loud parties with lots of drugs, it’s perfect at that. If the goal is to bring about anarchosocialism or thrive under a plural geopolitical order, it’s a sworn loser.
I agree with the anarchopunk thing, and maybe afrofuturism, because you can interpret “a subculture advocating for X will often not think about some important component W of X for various political reasons” as self-sabotage. But on BDSM, this is not at all my model of fetishes, and I would bet at 2.5:1 odds that you would lose a debate against what Wikipedia says, judged by a neutral observer.
I don’t recognize wikipedia’s theories as predictive. Mine has some predictions, but I hope it’s obvious why I would not be interested in making this a debate or engaging much in the conceptual dismantling of subcultures at all.