Tabs was unexpectedly off last week because I came down with some kind of middle-school incubated plague whose main symptoms were exhaustion and brain fog. But no brain fog, no gain fog, as the saying goes, and the gain fog for you is that I spent most of the week lying in bed reading Takes as they slowly dribbled out of the leaky garden hose which is all that remains of digital media now. When I was young we all drank straight from the overflowing garden hose of digital media and got Buzzfeed lead poisoning without any adults caring. Only 90’s kids will understand. Nevertheless I took all the Takes and put them into the Take-o-matic 9000 and blended them into a thick nutritive slurry of correct opinions for you, so let’s choke that down instead.
The New Atlantis is a pretty squishy, Aquarian sounding title for a “public journal of ideas.” Which is odd, since The New Atlantis was founded by a Heritage Foundation aligned nonprofit whose Board of Directors currently includes Leonard Leo (yes, that Leonard Leo) and which according to Influence Watch “advocates for overturning Roe v. Wade, opposes gender ideology and the Equality Act, and supports the creation of a conservative, pro-family economic policy agenda.” The magazine appears to be a semi-arm’s length effort to smuggle conservative “Judeo-Christian” trad views into an existing humanist anti-technology discourse that doesn’t need them and largely isn’t interested in them. The paucity of potential readership for a public journal of ideas that is philosophically opposed to ideas probably explains why no one paid any attention when The New Atlantis published a long essay back in December for its Winter 2025 issue titled ”American Diner Gothic.” Unfortunately last week someone finally read it, so now it’s everyone’s problem.
The piece is by Robert Mariani who is “a writer and editor in Portland, Oregon” and “also the CEO of Wingman.live, an AI dating assistant app.” Anyone even vaguely attuned to current socio-technological vibes can clock that as a profoundly cursed bio. The shorter but more fun part of “American Diner Gothic” is a personal story of the time Mariani dated a nonbinary anime gamer girl, who ultimately (and correctly) dumped him for being a boring yuppie. That’s not even me being mean—don’t worry, I’m gonna be mean in a second—it’s what Mariani himself wrote.
The breakup was sudden. Her reasoning was incoherent to the point where I am not even sure she understood her own feelings, but buried in the jumble of justifications was an insinuation that I was too much of a yuppie for her. This was indeed a disconnect — I worked in tech, she worked at a vape shop; she liked the simple things in life and I had cosmopolitan intellectual pretensions; I lived by status gradients that I couldn’t admit, and she just existed in cozy downward mobility.
The longer and much worse part of the essay is Mariani struggling to describe the commodification of anime otaku culture without any of the critical tools required to make that description legible or interesting. It’s like watching a squirrel try to disarm a nuclear weapon—no surprise that he fails to do it, but the reader is left wondering why he even wanted to try. Ultimately “American Diner Gothic” is less a cultural analysis and more the soggy issue of a prolonged session of pseudo-critical gooning.
Oh, dear.
What sources or research Mariani consulted to develop his subcultural analysis are never specified. I suspect they consisted mainly of watching Tiktoks, which leaves the alleged real-world cultural dominance of the dinergoth an open question, but the general archetype is at least reasonably recognizable. He describes the dinergoth this way:
Dinergothdom exists as both a concentrated archetype and a mass-cultural wave. 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.
In his 1979 book Subculture: the meaning of style, Dick Hebdige wrote that British punk fans of the late 1970’s, and particularly fans of David Bowie, were:
…confronting the more obvious chauvinisms (sexual, class, territorial) and seeking, with greater or lesser enthusiasm, to avoid, subvert or overthrow them. They were simultaneously (1) challenging the traditional working-class puritanism so firmly embedded in the parent culture, (2) resisting the way in which this puritanism was being made to signify the working class in the media and (3) adapting images, styles and ideologies made available elsewhere on television and in films (e.g. the nostalgia cult of the early 1970s), in magazines and newspapers (high fashion, the emergence of feminism in its commodity form, e.g. Cosmopolitan) in order to construct an alternative identity which communicated a perceived difference: an Otherness. They were, in short, challenging at a symbolic level the "inevitability', the 'naturalness" of class and gender stereotypes.
Wow that sounds familiar. Mariani continues:
But like microplastics, dinergoth traits — anime consumption, subcultural diffusion, digital-first socialization — have spread into everything. You don’t need to be deep in it to show signs. It’s in the memes, the slang, the TikToks. Culture that once lived on 4chan and Tumblr now shows up in the bros’ group chat.
Or, as Hebdige put largely the same observation forty seven years ago:
Youth cultural styles may begin by issuing symbolic challenges, but they must inevitably end by establishing new sets of conventions; by creating new commodities, new industries or rejuvenating old ones (think of the boost punk must have given haberdashery!). This occurs irrespective of the subculture's political orientation... It also happens irrespective of the startling content of the style: punk clothing and insignia could be bought mail-order by the summer of 1977, and in September of that year Cosmopolitan ran a review of Zandra Rhodes' latest collection of couture follies which consisted entirely of variations on the punk theme.
“At Target, the anime section has metastasized from one shelf to an entire aisle,” writes Mariani. Yeah dog, that’s how commodification of subcultures works. First it’s underground, and then it’s a whole aisle at Target. Think of the boost e-girls must have given haberdashery!
None of this really contradicts what Mariani wrote, it’s just one of several much more interesting potential essays that he dodges like Neo in bullet time in his determination to instead deliver grandiose but facially meaningless sentences such as: “Gen Z is disinherited by Boomer policy that culminates but never crests, rationing the good life in generational warfare.” Which Boomer policies are these exactly? How would a policy “culminate” in the abstract, and what would it possibly mean for a policy to “crest?” Or to never crest? Do normal policies both crest and culminate? Should they crest in generational peace and accord? What does any of this mean? I have no idea, and anyway Mariani is immediately off into more bong rips like: “Instead: a riot of myth and meaning in the fandom-noosphere that bootstraps itself from and then forgets the North American provinces.” That is absolutely nothing. That’s just a list of words.
I was surprised to not see even a gesture toward the inherent radicalness of presenting openly queer or “alt” in these supposed bastions of “middle America,” which has become synonymous with conservatism. Maybe the story is that these smaller cities and towns aren’t as conservatively coded as we in the “superstar cities” think; that’s an interesting story.
In fact one of the few sourced facts in the piece is (not coincidentally) one of the only interesting things Mariani observes:
In a 2022 study, rural Appalachian youth — in deep-red Trump country — reported transgender or nonbinary identity at 7.2 percent, four times the 2017 national baseline of 1.8 percent. This inverts the adult pattern where cities are queerer than rural areas.
That’s wild! Why is that? “No coastal elite indoctrination here,” explains Mariani. “It’s what happens when traditional life paths close everywhere and the Internet becomes the only space with options.” Oh, it’s what happens when it happens. Ok! Another bullet dodged.
I swear this is not me writing satire, this is literally a couple paragraphs later in the essay:
The sigh from the provinces is the Hello Kitty ketamine raver, the dispensary cashier in the Korn T-shirt, the TikTok cosplayer dancing in the parking lot, the VTuber with a day job in a suburban office park: the Deltarune hyperfixator, the Tumblr alumnus, the state college theater-enby, alt-prole girl-autism. Mallgoth aesthetics become Walmart defaults, subcultures converge into the downwardly mobile mass aesthetic.
The piece is quite long and much more of it reads like this than you would naïvely imagine could be possible. Kyle Chayka is a friend of mine and a nice guy, which regrettably I am not, so his take on “Diner Goth” was characteristically tolerant and open-minded:
It’s a provocation rather than an authoritative statement. The furor with which the essay has been met on social media is proof of its incendiary quality. The critic must also be a troll these days.
It certainly annoyed me, so mission accomplished there I suppose. Not even the conservatives are really buying it though. The Spring New Atlantis issue has a paywalled part two, “Vibing in the Ruins” which as far as I can tell no one has paid to read. Maybe it mentions Dick Hebdige! We’ll probably never know.
Whoops! I didn’t mean to write a whole post about an essay everyone hated, including me, but here we are over 1,500 words so I guess I did. I haven’t even had time to talk about Lindy West’s memoir yet. I’ll get to it later this week, somehow. But until then…
Very Briefly: The war is going great. Delve: another case where “A.I.” is Actually Indians. The final days of the Mall of America Hooters. Wiki Gacha. Vibe Coding Against Critical Infrastructure. Shoot Men Into Space: A Proposal for Temporary Gender Sequestration.
Today’s Song: David Bowie, “I’m Afraid of Americans”
Hey thanks for being you. No one else could do it quite like you do. I dug up my much annotated copy of “Subculture: the meaning of style” from the bookshelf today, so if you learned something from Dick Hebdige, a paid subscription would help me with book storage expenses.
also wtf exactly are beeboes
