Departing from the usual pattern for a long form seriouspost about subcultures and community dynamics (~1000 words):
synkretie.net/writings/subcu
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In which I refer to this: meaningness.com/metablog/geeks
And how it pains me every time I see it because I think I'm in a position to know better
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My current interpretation is, "geeks, mops and sociopaths" is the story of a single person's path through a subculture and not the story of a society. That's why it resonates, but also why it breaks down if you stay in the subculture for more than one generation.
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And some subcultures do only last for one generation! But it's still silly to blame entropy for your extinction when what you should've been doing is reproduce, which is to say attract and mentor new members. In the longer-lived cultures, these can even be your own children.
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I think you'd do better to lay out an explicit model of where you think the different local equilibria can be found, rather than setting yourself up to bicker about whether imageboards were better in 2004
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your post is basically "Not all MOPs!" but that's a sort of trivial objection - the interesting thing would be to sketch out which "initial conditions" for the subculture lead it to stabilize at which phase
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oh sure but for that I would have to study a whole lot more subcultures than just a handful, and be an ethnographer about it too. certainly a worthy project but I only have so many lives
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that's fine, the way you wrote it just seems very emotionally invested (i'm guessing there were one or two specific subcultures you had in mind at the time?)
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pretty much, yes (and I'd already developed an allergy to the folk theory analogous to the MOP theory)
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when i was younger i was allergic to that folk theory because it made me sad that it was true
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I personally lasted about 3.5 generations, saw the pattern confirmed a few times but falsified often enough to not be an iron law
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