Alt-Culture

On SuicideGirls: The Sunday Hangover with Warren Ellis, the question is asked, what has happened to alt-culture?

Why doesn't alt culture exist? Perhaps because it's been devoured by the mainstream monoculture. It's a hungry bastard, after all, and it'll choke down anything that'll fill its stomach. That we see things in Hollywood movies and tv now that were limited to experimental film twenty years ago is only the nature of the beast. It's not an evolution of Hollywood culture -- it's simply the beast widening its diet because it's eaten everything else in reach. You might not like the look of that weird foreign food, but if there's fuck all else on the table and you're still hungry, you'll gnaw on Korean film, Dutch film, Thai film and any other goddamn thing. And you can yank 'Hollywood' out of that equation and replace it with fashion, music and half a dozen other things. The DIY-ambience in portrait photography that this very site pioneered is now meaningless because it's everywhere.

Here is my response.

It is everywhere, fuckers! You are just looking in the wrong places. Don't look to the internet. Especially don't look here. But don't look to the internet because so many people have hit the internet that it is impossible to find alt-culture there. It's the same as looking for alt-culture in the pages of Newsweek back in the 1990's. If you turn to any major media source for news of the underground you are already in need of help. And the internet is the biggest of the major media outlets these days.

Alt-culture cannot be kept down. It happens on the fringe. Right now the fringe is not the internet. The fact that I am posting this here means that I am not part of the alt-culture. No, really. I am not. I don't care what you fucking say. I am not involved in alt-culture in any way. I am mainstream. I am status quo. Put that in your pipe and smoke it. See? That is a total status quo statement. My ideas are mainstream. Anarchy and atheism and conspiracy are so common as to make this blog dull. So don't bother reading it. You'll find nothing counter-culture or revolutionary here. Sorry.

Just go about your lives you has-beens.