Didn’t read this until Friday, but I found it interesting, especially because it touches on something I’ve been noticing since I was a kid in the 90s. I remember visiting relatives in rural Utah and Idaho and being struck by how many locals were fully gothed out, and wondering why this aesthetic was so well represented in rural and impoverished places.
Mariani has good observations and anecdotes, but I think the underlying dynamic is simpler than the framework he builds. The diner goth is one manifestation of what I’d call the “ethnically online.” Not something entirely new, but something that has become visible enough to register as a recognizable type.
The internet didn’t invent cross-regional, self-constructed identities. Those have existed for a long time in subcultures, fandoms, and other mediated communities. What’s changed is that you can now clearly see a kind of person whose primary reference points, including humor, aesthetics, and norms, are shaped in and through the internet. And now we are seeing the first cohorts of people who have grown up online from the start, which gives this identity a kind of continuity and inheritance it didn’t previously have.
What we’re seeing is something like an ethnogenesis. A group of people whose “homeland” is the internet, and whose sense of style, behavior, sense of sexual morality, and taste reflects what they learned there, much like earlier identities reflected what people absorbed from place, religion, or inherited culture.
There’s also a practical side to it. For some, this functions as a kind of default or fallback identity. If stronger forms of belonging, rooted in place or tradition, are weak or unavailable, the Nation of Online offers a ready-made set of signals, norms, and affiliations that can be adopted with relatively low cost.
I don’t think this group is dominant. In many ways it is still marginal. But it is increasingly legible. Seen this way, the diner goth sensibility is less an abrupt rupture and more the point at which this ethnically online identity becomes visible everywhere.
@RokoMijic >“Gut micro biome can’t be measured”
what? Have you never heard of PCR
Gut microbiome is correlated with mood disorders. Serotonin is made in the gut and regulated by the microbiome. Stop being silly