I think it might save time if the people who write about Dimes Square would provide us with some primary source material.
Can they please show us a good song, a good painting, a good film or a good essay—and no, I will not accept an essay *about* the Dimes Square scene—that this milieu has produced?
I'm not buying the punk analogy until I see some actual artistic output and have the opportunity to be impressed by it, or not.
This. Where is the artistic output? Is the issue just that fringe online weirdos aren’t connected to the art scene in a meaningful way and that they find underground music too declasse or whatever?
Yeah I get the sense that the Dimes Square scene has more to do with excitement about pushing a particular form of politics through low-effort artistic efforts (podcasts, memes, NFTs, performance art) than with excitement about a new artistic movement. Reminds me of that infowars correspondent Paul Joseph Watson trying to promote the meme that "conservatism is the new punk rock" at https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=avb8cwOgVQ8 or Proud Boys founder Gavin McInnes' 2015 video claiming that conservative views like "welfare is bad" and "transgenderism is fake" are a product of his punk anarchist background at https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9rrtttOCtq8
'“We fund some stuff,” he told me. “But we’re not funding an army of meme posters.” He told me that he and Thiel had met with Khachiyan, one of the cohosts of Red Scare. “Which was cool,” he said. “Their podcast is interesting.” I asked if there was a world in which they might get funding from Thiel. “Maybe, yeah,” he said. “We fund some weird stuff with the Thiel Foundation.”'
There's also the prominence of the "neo-reactionary" blogger Curtis Yarvin aka "Moldbug" in the Dimes Square scene--Yarvin is a friend of Thiel, the Vanity Fair article above goes into it, and mentions that Yarvin claimed he watched the 2016 election returns with Thiel who he said is "fully enlightened". The Mike Crumplar piece above mentions that Yarvin was among the people haranguing him at that event, and Yarvin appears in Crumplar's reporting on several other Dimes Square events like the event at https://mcrumps.substack.com/p/the-bourgeoisie-can-mourn-the-end promoting the idea that the aristocrat De Vere was the real author of the works attributed to Shakespeare.
The "clear pill" meme mentioned in Pourteaux's piece was also invented by Yarvin in his 2019 piece at https://americanmind.org/salvo/the-clear-pill-part-1-of-5-the-four-stroke-regime/ (Yarvin also popularized 'red pill' as a term for a right-wing political awakening back in 2009, though it's not clear if it originated with him or with the 'manosphere' which began using it around the same time). And Urbit, which from what I understand is Yarvin’s attempt to build a new kind of operating system on principles analogous to crypto, is also popular with the Dimes Square crowd, Mike Crumplar talks about the Wet Brain podcast hosting an Urbit event at https://mcrumps.substack.com/p/fear-and-loathing-on-planet-urbit and the De Vere event above is also mentioned to have been 'a social event to promote the Urbit-affiliated Mars Review of Books', Red Scare has had some very boring episodes with an Urbit enthusiast as well as with Yarvin himself, etc. Hardly anyone outside the sphere of Yarvin admirers seems to have found any use for Urbit (see https://awful.systems/post/116 and http://distributedweb.care/posts/who-owns-the-stars/ for some critiques of it as basically motivated by politics rather than any kind of apolitical functional utility), is the enthusiasm for Urbit really an organic matter of these artists and scenesters finding creative inspiration from it? This is a case where the Thielbucks theory seems especially plausible IMO.
This is really good context! Urbit is certainly a part of this too, I considered adding it in but didn't think I could do it justice in a paragraph or two. Thanks for this comment!
> he enthusiasm for Urbit really an organic matter of these artists and scenesters finding creative inspiration from it?
It's unlikely. Yarvin is a bore and you couldn't find artistic inspiration from him; people (by which I mean SSC types) just sometimes feel an obligation to have right-wing friends and go find him.
I believe he's lost favor in the right-wing sphere because he can do math correctly and told them to get vaccinated so they all decided he was effeminate.
It’s also art (or at least expression—not sure it qualifies as art) through meatspace retail “curation”, though, no? I’m a decade or two too old to fully get it, but live a few blocks from Dimes Square and there are all kinds of interesting shops in the area selling carefully selected clothing and objects. I get the impression it’s also heavily reliant on trust funds. Although maybe that’s always been true to an extent for creative movements?
Now I know what people born in the 1930s must have felt like when confronted with Richard Hell or Patti Smith (”you’ve discovered Rimbaud, how cool of you”). Also want to be the first to point out that MP5 shoots 9mm pistol bullets and is therefore not a machine gun.
For subculture suggestions, I have some (no specific order):
Permies
The name's derived from "Permaculture", aka people trying a specific way of having a neutral or positive ecological footprint, often followers of Paul Wheaton. By necessity an offline first culture but it does organise online.
BDSM subculture
egirl culture
(Maybe substack writer sympathetic opposition would be up for that one? I remember her mentioning liking the culture several times)
Scouts and Guides
As in, the organisation and movement founded by Lord Robert Baden-Powell in 1907. By membership numbers probably the greatest youth movement of all time. Out of the 312 American astronauts, 207 were Scouts, including Neil Armstrong. The only subculture on the list I'd be qualified to write about.
Punk and new wave were done and dusted as artistic forces by the 1980s
The ethos was DIY, individuality, self-expression and fun -- soon to be subsumed by imitation, conformity, emo and grunge; polar opposites under the sun.
It was more about “chop my way though the path of life” than “run with the dog pack / is that the way to be the one to survive.”
Punk is a state of mind telling the olds and the establishment to fook right off, not an intellectual or academic pursuit, or J. Lydon swooning over the coronation.
Thanks for sharing this article. Personally I was jaded by the punk rock that I grew up with. And hard for me to see the people grasp that they truly see the societal overtones over their actions. I asked them one time if they wanted to check out a punk rock band and they responded that was a “jock” show.
One tiny correction: Kiki’s has signage! Yes, they left up the old printing store’s signage, but the restaurant spans two storefronts and the other one (white awning with red writing on the right in the photo) clearly says “Kiki’s Greek Tavern”—in Chinese.
I know it's not central to the piece at all (and apparently an observation made elsewhere), but it's weird to see the Residents labeled as punk. They may have been giving the finger to the same man, but hard to find any other rationale for the label to my eyes/ears.
Punk rock was very, very messy. There were plenty of highly intelligent lyricists who used being offensive as a way to bring attention to issues, and they did this with a refined sense of irony. Unfortunately, they also assumed their listening base would be on the same mental wavelength as them, and in doing so they got lumped in with other, less intelligent songwriters. Punk became a caricature during the early 1980s, and you can see this reflected in both the cynical lyrics of the time, and in the fact that many intelligent bands railed against this anti-intellectualism invading their thoughtful genre.
I made the same mistake years ago on social media, assuming my readers understood things at a higher level, and I overused irony, probably exacerbating the very problems I was trying to solve.
I think I have done a much, much better job with this over the last few years, particularly here on Substack, but I'm cognizant that it's better to err on the side of being a little less funny, while avoiding the risk of making things a lot worse. It's a delicate balance, and we all have to be careful.
I’m beginning to think that if we had listened to the soccer moms and Reaganites back in the 90’s who complained about places like 4chan we might not be drowning in this garbage heap of accelerationist bullshit. At the very least we might have stymied the flow of low effort, esoteric memes enough that they wouldn’t be leaking into meatspace now.
The 1990s caused this funhouse mirror distortion of culture, where the squares and scolds (soccer moms and Reaganites) are rejuvenated by the very young people who've weaponized the culture and communication the square-scold elders tried to smother.
Post-1990s, the squares and scolds ended up in the blue tribe. The self-expressionism and aggro posture of Gen X gave way to group expressionism (which is not a bad thing, and great for women, people of color and LGBTQ+ people who can now push back at their roles and identities forced upon them) and catharsis (as an Xer, I think it's a category mistake by millennials and younger people to be open about mental health as they are, because they are signaling to society that they have buttons that their enemies yearn to push).
I'm dying to see this go further than some insular references to a few podcasts and niche celebs. A wider movement with more writers, bands, performers, artists... basically a reinvention of 21st-century counter-culture without the moral policing. I went to edgier parties just going to industrial events in my 20s in Bushwick than what a lot of these people seem to be putting on now, (4chan irl + titties) but I believe the seeds have been planted for something long-term that is going to be brilliant. I'm mostly excited by the fashion designers like Elena Velez taking part in the scene. Yet I'd want to attend an actual event before fully commenting, because a bunch of blog posts tell me little about an actual community.
I enjoy reading about subcultures. It's enjoyable to learn about the different ways people try to build belonging and community.
This one feels like a stretch, though. I'm not seeing any "culture". With this essay as my only exposure, it seems like a group of meme posters with less than 100 people creating any content. Basically, neighbors in a city that spend their time posting online?
Maybe put another way - These subcultures are so foreign to my own grew-up-in-the-suburbs existence. My world of church, extended family, neighborhood picnics, and sports leagues as the primary means of community bonding and socialization.
I recognize personal bias. However I wonder sometimes if these "transgressive" groups really just need some "normal" human interaction. And if possibly those suburban house hangouts are actually elegant in their boring, real-ness.
This seems to be evidence that people in NYC do the kinds of drugs that make you annoying instead of chill.
> discussing the Freudian themes of the anime series Neon Genesis Evangelion
Well, when white people discuss Evangelion they actually just discuss the things other white people read into it.
(As basic examples, Eva is not a "deconstruction", and the writers thought they were writing Gendo as a good dad and were surprised when Westerners disagreed.)
Sometimes we get it, sometimes we don’t. IIRC the opposite problem happened with Serial Experiments Lain in that the creator expected the West to have a different view on it than the Japanese and was surprised when the reaction was pretty much the same.
the idea that the neighborhood described as “dimes square” only gentrified + inspired an outmigration of people to brooklyn in 2020 is ludicrous lmao. it’s been just about the most expensive place to live in the country for years.
almost anyone able to participate in this “scene” IRL is obscenely wealthy, or their parents are.
I remember reading this piece by Mike Crumplar a while back and wondering if I was having a stroke:
https://mcrumps.substack.com/p/my-own-dimes-square-fascist-humiliation
I think it might save time if the people who write about Dimes Square would provide us with some primary source material.
Can they please show us a good song, a good painting, a good film or a good essay—and no, I will not accept an essay *about* the Dimes Square scene—that this milieu has produced?
I'm not buying the punk analogy until I see some actual artistic output and have the opportunity to be impressed by it, or not.
This. Where is the artistic output? Is the issue just that fringe online weirdos aren’t connected to the art scene in a meaningful way and that they find underground music too declasse or whatever?
They make podcasts for people who became right-wing because being socialist was no longer ironic enough for them.
One of their parents did a lot of work in linear programming mathematics: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Leonid_Khachiyan
Yeah I get the sense that the Dimes Square scene has more to do with excitement about pushing a particular form of politics through low-effort artistic efforts (podcasts, memes, NFTs, performance art) than with excitement about a new artistic movement. Reminds me of that infowars correspondent Paul Joseph Watson trying to promote the meme that "conservatism is the new punk rock" at https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=avb8cwOgVQ8 or Proud Boys founder Gavin McInnes' 2015 video claiming that conservative views like "welfare is bad" and "transgenderism is fake" are a product of his punk anarchist background at https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9rrtttOCtq8
Also I don't want to be the inverse of one of those "George Soros is behind every left-wing movement" people but I do have a hunch that Peter Thiel has a heavy hand in promoting the Dimes Square scene, for example the article at https://www.buzzfeednews.com/article/josephbernstein/peter-thiel-anti-woke-film-festival-trevor-bazile talks about how his foundation was funding an "anti-woke" Dimes Square film festival, and in an article about Thiel funding the "new right" at https://www.vanityfair.com/news/2022/04/inside-the-new-right-where-peter-thiel-is-placing-his-biggest-bets Blake Masters disparages the idea of "Thielbucks" but does also say:
'“We fund some stuff,” he told me. “But we’re not funding an army of meme posters.” He told me that he and Thiel had met with Khachiyan, one of the cohosts of Red Scare. “Which was cool,” he said. “Their podcast is interesting.” I asked if there was a world in which they might get funding from Thiel. “Maybe, yeah,” he said. “We fund some weird stuff with the Thiel Foundation.”'
There's also the prominence of the "neo-reactionary" blogger Curtis Yarvin aka "Moldbug" in the Dimes Square scene--Yarvin is a friend of Thiel, the Vanity Fair article above goes into it, and mentions that Yarvin claimed he watched the 2016 election returns with Thiel who he said is "fully enlightened". The Mike Crumplar piece above mentions that Yarvin was among the people haranguing him at that event, and Yarvin appears in Crumplar's reporting on several other Dimes Square events like the event at https://mcrumps.substack.com/p/the-bourgeoisie-can-mourn-the-end promoting the idea that the aristocrat De Vere was the real author of the works attributed to Shakespeare.
The "clear pill" meme mentioned in Pourteaux's piece was also invented by Yarvin in his 2019 piece at https://americanmind.org/salvo/the-clear-pill-part-1-of-5-the-four-stroke-regime/ (Yarvin also popularized 'red pill' as a term for a right-wing political awakening back in 2009, though it's not clear if it originated with him or with the 'manosphere' which began using it around the same time). And Urbit, which from what I understand is Yarvin’s attempt to build a new kind of operating system on principles analogous to crypto, is also popular with the Dimes Square crowd, Mike Crumplar talks about the Wet Brain podcast hosting an Urbit event at https://mcrumps.substack.com/p/fear-and-loathing-on-planet-urbit and the De Vere event above is also mentioned to have been 'a social event to promote the Urbit-affiliated Mars Review of Books', Red Scare has had some very boring episodes with an Urbit enthusiast as well as with Yarvin himself, etc. Hardly anyone outside the sphere of Yarvin admirers seems to have found any use for Urbit (see https://awful.systems/post/116 and http://distributedweb.care/posts/who-owns-the-stars/ for some critiques of it as basically motivated by politics rather than any kind of apolitical functional utility), is the enthusiasm for Urbit really an organic matter of these artists and scenesters finding creative inspiration from it? This is a case where the Thielbucks theory seems especially plausible IMO.
This is really good context! Urbit is certainly a part of this too, I considered adding it in but didn't think I could do it justice in a paragraph or two. Thanks for this comment!
> he enthusiasm for Urbit really an organic matter of these artists and scenesters finding creative inspiration from it?
It's unlikely. Yarvin is a bore and you couldn't find artistic inspiration from him; people (by which I mean SSC types) just sometimes feel an obligation to have right-wing friends and go find him.
I believe he's lost favor in the right-wing sphere because he can do math correctly and told them to get vaccinated so they all decided he was effeminate.
If I may, as a stranger to this comment section and fellow skeptical distant-ethnographer of this scene, Matthew Gasda's titular play is good:
https://grandhotelabyss.substack.com/i/66514905/matthew-gasda-dimes-square
As is the scene-adjacent Madeline Cash's new story collection, Earth Angel, reviewed in the last entry here:
https://grandhotelabyss.substack.com/p/july-books
the art is happening online, and certainly is not a song or painting.
Is it all memes?
Is this a discussion about an artistic movement whose output consists entirely of memes?
It’s also art (or at least expression—not sure it qualifies as art) through meatspace retail “curation”, though, no? I’m a decade or two too old to fully get it, but live a few blocks from Dimes Square and there are all kinds of interesting shops in the area selling carefully selected clothing and objects. I get the impression it’s also heavily reliant on trust funds. Although maybe that’s always been true to an extent for creative movements?
Now I know what people born in the 1930s must have felt like when confronted with Richard Hell or Patti Smith (”you’ve discovered Rimbaud, how cool of you”). Also want to be the first to point out that MP5 shoots 9mm pistol bullets and is therefore not a machine gun.
I really like your amateur ethnography series!
For subculture suggestions, I have some (no specific order):
Permies
The name's derived from "Permaculture", aka people trying a specific way of having a neutral or positive ecological footprint, often followers of Paul Wheaton. By necessity an offline first culture but it does organise online.
BDSM subculture
egirl culture
(Maybe substack writer sympathetic opposition would be up for that one? I remember her mentioning liking the culture several times)
Scouts and Guides
As in, the organisation and movement founded by Lord Robert Baden-Powell in 1907. By membership numbers probably the greatest youth movement of all time. Out of the 312 American astronauts, 207 were Scouts, including Neil Armstrong. The only subculture on the list I'd be qualified to write about.
Thanks! I'll think about those!
Sorry, but who cares?
Punk and new wave were done and dusted as artistic forces by the 1980s
The ethos was DIY, individuality, self-expression and fun -- soon to be subsumed by imitation, conformity, emo and grunge; polar opposites under the sun.
It was more about “chop my way though the path of life” than “run with the dog pack / is that the way to be the one to survive.”
Punk is a state of mind telling the olds and the establishment to fook right off, not an intellectual or academic pursuit, or J. Lydon swooning over the coronation.
https://youtu.be/KZmth7DcRNU
That’s how I remember it.
Thanks for sharing this article. Personally I was jaded by the punk rock that I grew up with. And hard for me to see the people grasp that they truly see the societal overtones over their actions. I asked them one time if they wanted to check out a punk rock band and they responded that was a “jock” show.
One tiny correction: Kiki’s has signage! Yes, they left up the old printing store’s signage, but the restaurant spans two storefronts and the other one (white awning with red writing on the right in the photo) clearly says “Kiki’s Greek Tavern”—in Chinese.
Thanks for this correction! Kiki's is across the street now too!
I know it's not central to the piece at all (and apparently an observation made elsewhere), but it's weird to see the Residents labeled as punk. They may have been giving the finger to the same man, but hard to find any other rationale for the label to my eyes/ears.
Punk rock was very, very messy. There were plenty of highly intelligent lyricists who used being offensive as a way to bring attention to issues, and they did this with a refined sense of irony. Unfortunately, they also assumed their listening base would be on the same mental wavelength as them, and in doing so they got lumped in with other, less intelligent songwriters. Punk became a caricature during the early 1980s, and you can see this reflected in both the cynical lyrics of the time, and in the fact that many intelligent bands railed against this anti-intellectualism invading their thoughtful genre.
I made the same mistake years ago on social media, assuming my readers understood things at a higher level, and I overused irony, probably exacerbating the very problems I was trying to solve.
I think I have done a much, much better job with this over the last few years, particularly here on Substack, but I'm cognizant that it's better to err on the side of being a little less funny, while avoiding the risk of making things a lot worse. It's a delicate balance, and we all have to be careful.
I’m beginning to think that if we had listened to the soccer moms and Reaganites back in the 90’s who complained about places like 4chan we might not be drowning in this garbage heap of accelerationist bullshit. At the very least we might have stymied the flow of low effort, esoteric memes enough that they wouldn’t be leaking into meatspace now.
The 1990s caused this funhouse mirror distortion of culture, where the squares and scolds (soccer moms and Reaganites) are rejuvenated by the very young people who've weaponized the culture and communication the square-scold elders tried to smother.
Post-1990s, the squares and scolds ended up in the blue tribe. The self-expressionism and aggro posture of Gen X gave way to group expressionism (which is not a bad thing, and great for women, people of color and LGBTQ+ people who can now push back at their roles and identities forced upon them) and catharsis (as an Xer, I think it's a category mistake by millennials and younger people to be open about mental health as they are, because they are signaling to society that they have buttons that their enemies yearn to push).
I'm dying to see this go further than some insular references to a few podcasts and niche celebs. A wider movement with more writers, bands, performers, artists... basically a reinvention of 21st-century counter-culture without the moral policing. I went to edgier parties just going to industrial events in my 20s in Bushwick than what a lot of these people seem to be putting on now, (4chan irl + titties) but I believe the seeds have been planted for something long-term that is going to be brilliant. I'm mostly excited by the fashion designers like Elena Velez taking part in the scene. Yet I'd want to attend an actual event before fully commenting, because a bunch of blog posts tell me little about an actual community.
I enjoy reading about subcultures. It's enjoyable to learn about the different ways people try to build belonging and community.
This one feels like a stretch, though. I'm not seeing any "culture". With this essay as my only exposure, it seems like a group of meme posters with less than 100 people creating any content. Basically, neighbors in a city that spend their time posting online?
Maybe put another way - These subcultures are so foreign to my own grew-up-in-the-suburbs existence. My world of church, extended family, neighborhood picnics, and sports leagues as the primary means of community bonding and socialization.
I recognize personal bias. However I wonder sometimes if these "transgressive" groups really just need some "normal" human interaction. And if possibly those suburban house hangouts are actually elegant in their boring, real-ness.
This seems to be evidence that people in NYC do the kinds of drugs that make you annoying instead of chill.
> discussing the Freudian themes of the anime series Neon Genesis Evangelion
Well, when white people discuss Evangelion they actually just discuss the things other white people read into it.
(As basic examples, Eva is not a "deconstruction", and the writers thought they were writing Gendo as a good dad and were surprised when Westerners disagreed.)
Sometimes we get it, sometimes we don’t. IIRC the opposite problem happened with Serial Experiments Lain in that the creator expected the West to have a different view on it than the Japanese and was surprised when the reaction was pretty much the same.
the idea that the neighborhood described as “dimes square” only gentrified + inspired an outmigration of people to brooklyn in 2020 is ludicrous lmao. it’s been just about the most expensive place to live in the country for years.
almost anyone able to participate in this “scene” IRL is obscenely wealthy, or their parents are.
Wasn't expecting the Red Scare pod to pop up here, but I'm not mad. Do Bari Weiss next.
milady
Milord