Katherine Dee reflecting on the dinergoth discourse of the moment:

What makes Mariani’s essay frustrating is how close it gets to getting it. He acknowledges that “mallgoth aesthetics become Walmart defaults.” He knows Hot Topic scaled this culture. But he treats a change in scale as a change in kind, as though moving from niche to mainstream produces a new species of person. It doesn’t!

This is where the essay reveals more about the observer than the observed. The dinergoth becomes interesting because of her distance from his world. He writes about simplicity, lack of guile, a low-stakes way of being. This is a familiar move in writing about class: mistaking distance for innocence, reading someone else’s constraints as freedom.

I’m not on X so mostly insulated from the wider discussion of the original essay. I spent my public secondary school years in a rust-belt town dealing with a long tail of economic disinvestment and with the ripples of myspace and social media just starting to become noticeable on the surface of the cultural river. Katherine’s take seems right.