Things I discovered: astrology, Marxism, co-ops, political science fiction, Food Not Bombs, psychedelia, ‘arthouse’ films, anti-zionism, drugs, abolitionist politics, cynicism, scarcity is a myth, ethical non-monogamy, self-publishing, transformative justice.

  It was a protracted adolescence. I didn’t want to leave. It was, per Born Against front-person Sam McPheeters in Mutations, ‘as if the three of us were one team and society was the other team, and society, being composed of everyone, had an insurmountable advantage.’ This was particularly true considering how many of us had already overcome adolescence by then, most of which was awful by many accounts. It wasn’t rare that people would have a bully story, or something about a bad home life. A lot of it was self-protection. I didn’t get to be a kid so I wanted to tap into it, extend the feeling for as long as possible. It was like being given a second shot, a way to find out how it’d felt for others but without any rules. The validation and affirmation it imparted were almost unbearable. It was a sense of belonging that was unparalleled.

  As Suckdog accurately identifies while writing of her initial encounters with punk troubadour GG Allin in her memoir Drugs Are Nice, we were people who were ‘needing attention yet at the same time fearing detection’. Just a bunch of people with undiagnosed post-traumatic stress syndrome schlepping around. The reverse is maybe worse. Who knows what would have happened if I hadn’t found this world? I might have become a teenage mum, saddled with children I don’t want, further steeped in poverty. I might have decided that I couldn’t continue living a futureless life. I might not have survived.

  In the extended printed conversation ‘Punk is History’, Malcolm McLaren talks about the first time he saw a teddy boy – a youth subculture in 1950s and 60s England, where young men, and later, women, dressed in Edwardian-style clothing – and how that moment made him realise that ‘fashion could make you look completely out of step with everything else that people were terming good’. This recognition helped him understand how he could ‘fit in’, which he recounts ‘was a bit like the t-shirt I created in my shop during the Sex Pistols era, with the slogan “Fuck your mother and run away”.’

  McLaren was the manager of the Sex Pistols, and as we now know, orchestrated it such that the band ‘made it’, managed to make their brand of rebellion marketable. On a Reddit thread from 2016 that attempts to taxonomise bands who had ‘sold out’,* the Sex Pistols and frontman Sid Vicious are included without any comment other than ‘obviously’. Then came bands such as the New York Dolls, the Ramones, the Stooges, Misfits, the Clash. The list goes on and on. In The Psychic Soviet, Svenonius notes how McLaren – through his shop ‘SEX’ – ‘was attempting to make a King’s Road trend out of the fetish wear favoured by leather boys, hustlers and perverts at the time’. None of this came across as that surprising to observers then, especially as it proved more unmistakable with every evolution: after all, punk arose as a reaction against the presumed falsity of rock as a kind of corrective, but surrendered to its allure nonetheless, even if sub-genres would continue to appear, like people were trying to plug in holes, halt the leakages. Mark Fisher had previously noticed two strains: ‘the rockers who appealed to the authentic and the natural’, as opposed to mods, who ‘embraced the hyperartificial’ where ‘alienation had become something of a deliberate stance’. For punk, it was a haphazard merging of the two.

  Although the Do-It-Yourself underground would continue to evolve in the new millennium, the underlying character remained crystal clear. It continues to serve as a rebellious sanctuary within a small social group that’s made to feel like it’s the whole world. This became a template for everyone else that came later: generation after generation of youths, each seeking their unique form of guidance and companionship. Yet you were either in or out.

  When asked about his relationship to designing and producing records through his independent record label* during a time of unprecedented mass consumption, McPheeters, in a 2010 interview in Touchable Sound: A Collection of 7-Inch Records from the USA, states it plainly: ‘I see now that the economy of the punk and weirdo scenes has the same dynamics of a pyramid scheme’.

  I see it now too. How else to explain this peculiar internal economy where items and merchandise are handed down through successive generations? It’s an attractive premise – mesmerising, even; the consumerism inherent to the sub-culture works to build social power for those who’ve never managed to come close to having any, whether as black sheep within reputable lineages or outcasts from working-class and impoverished families who were often not made to feel included in anything. A type of two-way trade-off. McLaren – and many others from the 70s onwards to the 90s, depending on how close to the imperial centre(s) you lived in: Ian McKaye, Jello Biafra, Kathleen Hanna, Henry Rollins, Poly Styrene, et al. – had an outsized influence that reverberated across the global underground. These figures were considered its antecedents in how they paved the way, going as they did especially in the era of the Cold War where rebellion had a certain social cost – even if insidious co-optations hummed in the background unawares, only to reveal themselves much later. We are beginning to see more of its vestiges now. Nevertheless, it is not dissimilar to the current phenomenon of seeing a relatable person gain attention as an influencer: if they could do it, then couldn’t we, too? It isn’t enough simply being a spectator. ‘Getting involved’ – as it’s frequently used as a summoning of sorts – is almost an imperative, otherwise it’s difficult for others to see how you can be considered a part of it; it requires a certain commitment, at times even be willing to entertain the idea of an initiation. It depends on how agreeable you are, how pure one thinks the scene is, how uncommodifiable you reckon the whole thing is.

  But the thing was that it was always going to be subject to commodification, because it had never been sacred and pure. It’s a kind of enduring fantasy, a dream that you can very well see out to the very end. It is, as philosopher Agnes Callard defines in her book Aspiration, ‘the distinctive form of agency directed at the acquisition of values’ – an aspiration, as it were. To new adherents however, that was the very basis itself: a gleaming illusion, a new kind of hope, something that could very well be the last bastion of trueness. We were trying to locate our homes. The doctrine had been received. I’m speaking from experience. It goes through cycles and it splits into sects. Impossible to police; mutating on its own, a reaction to the outside. You’re either in it or you’re not. There were often little to no resources at all. No degrees, no capital, no connections, no support, nothing nothing nothing. A friend would jokingly invoke how we all had ‘no future’, a warning that had been passed down since the state gained independence; a guiding principle that had originated from how it had no natural resources of its own apart from human capital.

  But what we lacked at the time we made up for in imagination. While the cracks would only be evident in retrospect, everyone practised a form of class suicide even though the whole thing was nonetheless packaged within a bourgeois sensibility. It was a mixed bag: children of teachers, children of addicts, university students poking their anthropological heads in, kids who were maybe on the brink of houselessness, travelling trust fund kids visiting from the west in their hobo or crusty garb, nerds, freaks, eighteen-year-old street punks who’d get shitfaced every other night. A heterotopia, so to speak. As young people gathering in our late teens and early twenties we were yet to be proximate to that stink that comes with the accrual of respectability. We gotta smash the state, we gotta smash the state. Maybe we need to stop buying those Coopers greens and cigarettes.* We dressed in an – albeit unspoken – sanctioned uniform and talked about money openly. We took each other in, allowed ourselves to fuck up, so we could keep trying. Many were, in various degrees, frequently on the edge of suicide. We’d all gradually discover this later as we angrily mourned those who’d leave us without so much as a letter. A hotbed of experimentalism. How would you know you wanted to commit your life to something if you hadn’t tried at least a couple of alternatives? A frightening thought. We should have known. We should have been exposed to political theory earlier, known that the idea of ‘freedom’ in the free market was an intellectual ruse, capitalism’s most famous trick. But if we did, maybe the subculture would not have existed at all. Like many others around me, I was so desperate for freedom I wouldn’t have known it if freedom hit me over the head with its axe. I get it: we can play the game towards our advantage, even ‘ironically’, but what happens after? Rightfully, offer some congratulations. Wrongfully, bitch about ‘selling out’. Rightfully, bitch about ‘selling out’. Wrongfully, offer some congratulations. We were experiencing our very own version of what our predecessors had already witnessed decades prior. The comment sections were aflutter after a well-known grind band agreed to play a festival sponsored by a multinational automobile corporation. I was so flummoxed by this dilemma that I contributed a column in a friend’s zine. ‘A lot of us, in our years of “punk education” come up against the metaphorical crossroads: after going through the Process: of exhilarated discovery to weary disillusionment …’

  That year lifestyle’s suffocating presence loomed large, casting a bleak shadow and obscuring the once-promising horizon. Although it was a spectre that had already been stalking me, it was beginning to emerge much more forcefully, clinging to my conscience as both camps waged their merciless battle inside my head. Crushed by the weight of authoritarianism veiled as democracy I lacked the strength to fight back. Already, having to survive was dampening every desire. I remember asking myself if I regretted anything, nearly got a tattoo of ‘je ne regrette rien’ somewhere on my body. Never look back! Really, it was beginning to dawn on me that this was a social circle just like any other – its landscape sporadically populated by a few thousand people scattered across the globe producing records and zines, crafting passable art out of discarded magazines, bargain bin watercolours, found objects, diaristic recollections, little seemingly worth cherishing or defending. You learn, you unlearn, you relearn, you unlearn. What if we were wrong; what if ideology was a function, not an identity? As Jean Baudrillard wrote so acutely in Impossible Exchange, ‘Sovereignty was a mastery; identity is merely a reference’.

  It was where I learned that I could do anything. Anything that I could get away with, at least, and without asking. If I hadn’t learned how to socialise at gigs I wouldn’t have known how to conduct relationships at all. It was in this space where we, building on from the unnameable resentments that couldn’t be stifled as a result of our chaotic upbringings, learned how to defy society’s expectations, refusing to foreground permission, hoard information and fetishise professionalism. It was where I discovered zines and self-publishing, learned that I could write. Bands were started on a whim, disbanding as quickly after. There were no yardsticks. No one explicitly told me I couldn’t, and the more transgressions I committed the more I felt a part of the counterculture.

  But I never went as far as Navin. He kept getting arrested.* Conversely, I nearly shat my pants when the police contacted me asking if I had a permit for a SlutWalk event I was organising. I had already explicitly stated that it wasn’t going to be a protest, referring to myself as a graphic designer when the media spoke to me. There was so much red tape to begin with – we had to depoliticise it all the way down, veil it as a ‘fun’ event and not a bunch of feminists wanting to advocate against rape culture. This is the reality of living in a neo-colonial ‘hybrid regime’, its systems a hodgepodge of governances mashed together on a stick. Plus, being Chinese, I had never really had any major encounters with pigs, especially not for things significantly more consequential than petty crime. There were times where I questioned myself as to why I was even doing what I was doing, and in times of hopeless self-critique would conclude that it was to make myself feel like I was playing the part, show the men – they made up about 90 per cent* of the scene at the time – that I was capable of doing the same things. I had to do something, didn’t I? I had to give back, had to get involved. I’d write my little scene reports, interview bands, critique the state of the microcosm I existed in, a few little political missives. People said they enjoyed it. I was still working at the cybercafe, so it was easy for me to keep doing it. I put my boss’s printer to good use.

  Those years caused me to realise that language had a perverse kind of power. I never really had any kind of power in my life; no, scratch that: I had never been made to feel empowered. There was so much to learn. Sometimes we used our politics – newfound or otherwise – to gain power over others. What kinds of trauma did one have to endure as a child to result in this allegiance to structures of power, aestheticised?

  Regardless, exposure to those knowledges was how I learned how to survive in a material sense, yet still be able to do what I wanted, when I wanted, with the little time and money I had. It’s where you can teach yourself how to be savvy with business as you organise gigs, tally the value of old records, master the language of marketing to promote gigs and the things you made to sell. The future? Forget it – only the present existed at any given moment in time.† It was perhaps the precursor to the omnipresent presentism we see now. We might have unwittingly been preparing for it all along. It seemed second nature that the entrepreneurialism the subculture instilled in us was at the same time symptomatic of what we frequently worked hard to reject; we were fuck-ups but we also had something to sell. It was the pursuit of impossibility, so to speak.

  In Money’s Nothing, Lisa Carver’s 2015 collection of essays, she writes:

  The collapse of our anything-for-adventure DIY civilisation was all so ephemeral. We’d already been working at the poverty line fourteen hours a day seven days a week for years. Some of us had children. When the economy tightened, there was nothing left to squeeze except our beliefs.

  This occurred around the time when the insult ‘sell-out’ was starting to turn into an anachronism. The trickle-down effect from the global financial crisis was enormous, arguably more so than previous iterations. Maybe some people had stronger anti-capitalist belief systems than others, but everyone was dragged down with it unless they had a solid material foundation in the first place. But what’s undeniable about counterculture, even before 2008, is that each scene transforms in tandem with the locations they are born in, its histories eventually getting dragged down alongside inexorable changes in that particular urban landscape – it is easy to witness venues, bands, inclinations and motivations dissolve in such a setting as people gave up, ran out of money, moved on, apparently grew the fuck up. Like art itself, its inherent irreconciliability made it especially prone to gentrification, even if it was itself a source of gentrification. As Sarah Schulman establishes, ‘Gentrification is a process that hides the apparatus of domination from the dominant themselves.’

  Few people had time to document each moment in time apart from a fervent few. Archives are scattershot. The internal economy we had created would often see cultural products change hands without so much as an afterthought. We’d sit around in drunk circles and quiz each other on whether the other knew of the existence of such-and-such, or ‘was there’. That sort of thing became a secret handshake of sorts, not always easy to look up online. Perhaps that is the trueness we continue to hunger for, even if it always feels just out of reach. See how I’m not naming names.

  What happened? Our forebears would probably know how to answer that question – after all, they’d seen it before. Except this time the monstrosity was larger, more far-reaching, seemingly much harder to contain. It happened around the time the word ‘community’ became co-opted by tech corporations, having evolved from its beginnings as start-ups which proselytised the ‘sharing economy’ they were building. Few could pre-empt the long game that Big Tech was playing, especially not at a time when techno-optimism was being placed front and centre, its inventions cast with a nascent radiance. ‘Our mission is to give people the power to build community and bring the world closer together,’ crooned one, and it’ll all sound so believable because the language that was being used was the persuasive language of marketing, and which we were already using to espouse similar ideas. Here was a new kind of realism, a capitalist one, which Fisher defines as ‘a pervasive atmosphere, conditioning not only the production of culture but also the regulation of work and education, and acting as a kind of invisible barrier constraining thought and action’.

  It was in these conditions that start-up mentality would flourish as it closed in on our little communities, its momentum increasing in the years between 2008 and 2016 and leading to a force that has been unrelenting ever since. Feel free to connect the dots. The fallout from the events of the world, based on what was pre-eminent, was commencing its downward ooze once again. As with all co-opted cultural products, new markets would be tapped where new groups were encouraged to emerge, each with similar grand ambitions that would build on the initial sell. It was a time of great fallout, but it was also a time of the great cash-in. Some notable people – whether that was through sheer talent alone was a matter to be debated – were funnelled upstream towards a kind of underground-adjacent mainstream visibility, becoming exemplars for a whole new generation of aspiring professional weirdos. History was repeating itself. It became challenging to discern who had a profit motive, what their affiliations were. Furthermore, as Schulman points out, people generally ‘did not know their own legacy of leadership’. Due to the fact that there is no playbook – that there are ‘no rules’ – there is little understanding of what can be made to last in a way that is ultimately resistant to anterograde amnesia.

 

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