The rise of the internet, in nearly all facets of social and personal life, has had devastating effects on culture, society, and community. This is nearly universal as time marches on and more and more places are infected with the disease that is generative AI, along with the oversimplification of most topics of debate to the point of meaninglessness. Here, however, I’d like to focus more directly on punk, emo, goth, and, though I despise the term, so-called “alternative” circles within American society as it is today.
To understand what these subcultures mean, one must first understand what they evolved from. In fact, many of the contemporary issues we face in these circles stem from those that are either ignorant to the history or consciously choose to ignore it for their own personal gains.
This separation from one’s own past is not only applicable to the punk scene, but also to the broader cultural zeitgeist in America. The very nature of the U.S. is one of the forced “cultural melting pot”, and this has been the key reason for our success [1]. A downside of this, however, is the forced assimilation and eventual death of this variety of culture and life.
Part 1: Alienation
To understand the history of punk is to understand the history of nearly all of the “underground” styles. Without punk, there would be no emo, goth, hardcore, etc. The ethos at the core of the genre cannot be understated, and without it, it ceases to be given the privileged title of “alternative” in the first place.
Punk rock began to emerge in the 1970s when early bands like the Ramones and Sex Pistols took rock (which, in and of itself, directly came from Black blues artists in the American South) and sped it up, wrote more directly about social and political issues, made it messier, etc… [2] This evolved into early hardcore in the 80s with bands like Black Flag, Circle Jerks, Dead Kennedys, Bad Religion, Reagan Youth, and so on.
Many say that punk “died“ in the 90s, but I would argue that it simply splintered into various sub-genres [3]. Crossover, riot grrrrl, grindcore, and emocore all came from the punk movement but interpreted it in different ways. Bands that defined these sub-genres were rooted in anti-establishment, anti-corporate, and anti-capitalist thought. They were connected to the history because, quite frankly, the history itself wasn’t that long yet.
As the 2000s and 2010s ushered in even more ways to experiment with these sounds, the scene began to slowly shift. The internet became a major player in how young people are introduced to these subcultures. This change in and of itself is not inherently bad, but the scene was not nearly as cautious as it should have been, nor was it centralized enough to deal with the unpredictable effects that this would have on the culture.
Punk means nothing if it is not anti-capitalist and anti-racist. These fundamental beliefs are cornerstones of not only the bands that formed the movement, but the non-musical cultural aspects of it as well. $10 covers, house shows, and benefit shows that served as a sort of elementary mutual aid are all parts of the culture. Many of these, at most in vague structure and at least in spirit, come from the grassroots socialist and anarchist movements in England and America in the 1970s. While, in certain circles, these aspects have remained, many others have “sold out” and completely forgotten their roots. We must observe how technology plays into this cultural alienation in the modern day.
Part 2: “That Damn Phone”
A term that has been thrown around a lot recently is “TikTok alternative”. It essentially describes someone who, prior to “discovering” these spaces, has always had a spot in heteronormative western society. The term describes the process of these so-called “normal people” seeing alternative spaces online (mostly through platforms like TikTok, Instagram, etc...) and choosing to perform the culture without understanding where it comes from, mainly because it looks cool.
This aforementioned cultural separation is where you get the hilarious and inherently contradictory aspects of this pathetic new movement. Things like searching “goth style” on Shein or Zara, calling yourself a “right-wing punk”, and dating or supporting people who directly oppose everything the movement stands for. Furthermore, there is an insanely annoying sense of arrogance that these people show, and it comes from a phenomenon that I’ll call “buffet-style subcultures”.
The “buffet-style subculture” is a direct result of platforms like TikTok. These platforms portray the entirety of a movement as one “aesthetic”, a word which I write with the greatest disdain and hatred. As if going to a buffet, the poser is able to grab ten different subcultures from the metaphorical buffet, each with their own history and styles, and claim to be every single one at once. This is exemplified no more clearly than the word "alternative" to describe someone. It begs the question, “alternative to what?”. If a person is, in all other aspects of society, ideology, and personal life, completely conforming, do new clothes and a few songs make someone fundamentally “alternative” to the perceived “mainstream”? The issue is that a person can go on TikTok, watch a few videos of fit checks and singalongs, and come to believe that they have grounds to stand on as a "member of the alternative scene". The “alternative scene” is a fake, it doesn’t actually exist. It is the appearance of a unified whole, and is, in reality, 30 different groups stuffed into a trenchcoat. [4]
Make no mistake about my position, I don’t advocate for the exact opposite, or in other words, the strict adherence to labels and subcultures, record-store-snob-style, if you will. This becomes a new form of conformity and hierarchy. I believe the final solution is the dissolution of labels entirely. To call yourself “a punk”, or “emo”, or whatever, is to put yourself into a box, and a very restrictive one at that. While labels can be useful as a descriptive tool in order to categorize these circles, the issue arises when we try to be prescriptive and assign stereotypes to these labels [5].
Through this new “movement”, the well-known hand of the capitalistic market does everything that it can in order to extract profit from the movement [6]. More specifically, the “rebellious” image becomes yet another way that the bourgeois system is able to exploit the working class.
Part 3: Commodification of Rebellion
To return to the character of the “TikTok alternative person”, despite their “apolitical” nature, they do in fact feel unrest within the given system. This feeling is inherent in the human soul, despite the efforts by the capitalist class to silence and placate the people. But instead of direct action, community organization, and mutual aid, they are manipulated by the media, and so-called “moderate” culture in America itself, to believe that the answer is something like the “No Kings” protest [7]. They are led to believe that we simply need a nicer capitalism, and that you can go to your police-controlled protest and write your local politician a strongly-worded letter to change things. This leads people to miss the forest for the trees, and cling onto electoral politics as the end-all-be-all solution.
We must understand that these people are (at least partially) victims of a system. In their minds, they are truly doing everything that is needed and they truly stand for what “alternative” means. The solution to this problem lies in education, careful exclusion, and contradictory means.
Part 4: Synthesis
I hate being the person that complains all day and never gives a solution, so here is my imperfect and sloppy idea of an answer.
"Gatekeeping" is a term used and misused a lot in the underground recently. It generally refers to the act of stopping someone that is new to the culture from participating in it for a variety of reasons. Now, this goes without saying, but gatekeeping for your ego and for the sake of gatekeeping is generally a bad thing. After all, how do we expect to grow the subculture without letting new people in? It's fun to two-step, to sew band patches, to listen to the music, all of that! Why stop someone that is genuinely interested in this unique piece of American culture from being a part of it? With this being established as our baseline, we must introduce Hegelian dialectics to search for an answer.
In the simplest, most watered-down-for-a-zine way, Hegelian dialectics is a way of finding resolution between contradictions. The world is filled with contradictions, like the decomposition of natural matter by mushrooms, or the rocky cliffside and the sea. The form goes: Thesis, Antithesis, and Synthesis. Using the example of the cliffside and the sea, the thesis is the sturdiness of the cliffside, the antithesis is the erosion caused by the sea, and the synthesis is the creation of sand that builds up into a beach. Both the cliffside and the destructive force of the wave have been negated by a new thing being created. Again, this is insanely simplified and you should go read Marx at some point to really get into it [8]. That aside, how does this apply to TikTok posers?
The thesis, here, is of course the inclusive and anti-establishment nature of the underground scene. The scene is built off of equality and including people in the movement. The antithesis is the poser, the commodification and watering down of the subculture into a meaningless slop that inherently erodes the scene itself over time. Therefore, looking at these two contradictory and conflicting forces, the answer is of course, synthesis. In other words, the solution is the scene being more restrictive to those looking to enter it, something that seemingly contradicts the scene's inclusive nature, while also educating and informing the young person interested in the scene of the history and nature of it. Through both these actions, the poser is fundamentally changed; that is, the holes in their understanding of punk are filled with the knowledge and experiences given to them by the scene, changing them from a poser into a slightly more informed member of the "alt" scene. Those that are turned away at first may either give up and return to their socially acceptable lifestyles, or they may persist, go to shows, interact with the community, and so on, until they themselves are fundamentally changed through that process.
In conclusion, all I'm trying to say in this very informal and imperfect writing is that the alternative scene is very important to the youth and those in society that have never felt they belonged. Once poser behavior is seen as a destructive force, which it is, we can begin to diagnose the problem with education, careful inclusion, and specific exclusion that can grow the scene into a healthier and more genuine expression of resistance against the capitalist mainstream culture. Is punk already dead, and have the forces of commodification already sunk their claws into the core of the scene to the point where it's futile to try to save it? I don't think I'm the one to answer that, but I do hope that this has given you a little insight into the issues that the "alternative" culture faces, and the ways to solve those issues.
Anteater Zine
September 2026
This writing was created without the use of AI.
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Email anteaterzine@gmail.com for questions!