There is a specter haunting America: the specter of Dinergoth.
Here we have an NRP EXCLUSIVE interview with the mind behind this week’s most powerful meme. Robert Mariani joins Dudley to discuss his viral piece on the latest and last(?) youth subculture. It’s a scene report from nowhere, a distributed, extremely-online aesthetic mishmash that’s what’s left after your suburb got eaten by globohomo. It’s where geek, queer and alt collide and go mainstream, with extremely-online culture filling the gaps left by the decline of regional identity and economic stability.
The dinergoth core is the pierced-up, gender-fluid Amazon warehouse worker who streams on Twitch, writes fanfiction, wears a furry tail to raves, runs an OnlyFans, and dreams of voice acting while working nights at the fulfillment center.
Is it a portrait of dystopia, or is there something admirable and refreshing about the dinergoth’s rejection of millennial prudishness and striving? Are the kids alright?
Also mentioned:
Kitty’s Church of Graphs essay
Walt and Dave Status, Epistemics, and Praxis podcast
Verge Airspace essay from 2016
There you have it, folks. Another week in the bag. If you enjoyed yourself, please smash that like button so the Substack algorithm knows to spread it around.
As always, we are publishing All the Shit that’s Fit to Poast. Follow us on Twitter and Substack Notes for lots of other premium banter between issues that you won’t see here. Also, you can now get a paid subscription for full access to the NRP archives, plus a monthly subscribers-only issue.
