Goth has been all over the news and the feed recently, but people who work at these legacy publications don’t seem to know anyone in the goth subculture. As someone who was involved in my earlier years, I kept in touch with people in goth scene and booked a few of their musical artists for my gallery opening last year.

What many people don’t know, especially when they work in tech and/or politics and are therefore removed from anything truly alternative, is that musicians in the goth scene are now fighting cancel culture and producing albums about it. There’s a group called Goths Against Cancel Culture on FB that has been rapidly growing, now with almost 50K members.

Goths are done being told what they can and cannot say by liberal hall monitors. They’re sick of pretending to be woke, and carrying the torch of the real counterculture by fighting against the petty cliques in their scene who want to restrict their freedom of speech, association, and expression. I had a talk with Danielle Astraea, the force behind the musical project Crucifera and creator of Goths Against Cancel Culture to find out what was happening.

This interview serves to bring readers of The Cultural Futurist into their world.

Track is Black Tongues by Crucifera. It’s a battle cry against cancel culture and call for truth and restoration in the scene.

Rachel Haywire:

Hey Danielle. It’s a pleasure to catch up with you. There’s been a lot of media noise about goth recently, yet very few people seem to understand what goth is about. They think it’s just fetish girls in graveyards listening to The Cure. As someone who has real skin in the game with your gothic musical project Crucifera, how would you describe goth to the uninitiated? What are some important bands for people to get into? What’s the vibe like at a goth club? Tell us about the fashion.

Danielle Astraea:

It’s great to speak with you too, Rachel! To anyone curious about what goth is, I’d say it’s fundamentally about the music. If you want to get into trad-goth, start with old Christian Death. You should also listen to Bauhaus, Clan of Xymox, Siouxsie & the Banshees, and Sisters of Mercy. Into the 90s, I have to mention Switchblade Symphony. There’s a lot of history regarding who actually coined “gothic.” When I was younger I thought it was Siouxsie, but I did a deep dive and learned that critics used it for The Doors in ‘67 and Sabbath in ‘75. This was long before the post-punk era. Despite the over-complication of subgenres, all these acts share the same gothic DNA at their core.

The vibe at a goth club should be a place of radical inclusion, but newcomers have abused the scene by succumbing to divisive identity politics. We were all awkward kids once, and the older generation didn’t judge us for our first attempts at darkness. They handed us a mixtape and let us dance. There’s no need to dictate who is or isn’t “goth” by ideological criteria. I was adopted by my Gen X friends early on and society ostracized us, but we chose to be part of the scene anyway.

Fashion is actually the least important part of goth. Still, I maintain my penchant for it. My preferences have evolved toward designers like AllSaints, Alexander McQueen, and Versace. Style is an exoskeleton. While it’s a form of creativity and expression, it’s also the armor we build to protect and express the weird things inside us in a world that demands conformity. Now, I feel more rebellious if I wear jeans or natural hair to a festival because everyone goes for the alternative look. Sometimes I look at my tattooed body and realize I accidentally adopted what became the modern uniform.

RH:

Let’s talk Crucifera. What was the origin of the name for your musical project, and what were your influences and inspirations? What are the themes that encompass it?

DA:

The name Crucifera refers to the spider Neoscona Crucifera, specifically the orb-weaver. When my husband and I moved into our home in 2021, I befriended a beautiful orb weaver who lived on our porch. She would catch all the mosquitoes for me. I’ve always loved bugs. As a kid I collected them, and as an adult I could never bring myself to kill one. I remember trying that trick where kids squish lightning bugs to leave bioluminescent streaks on the sidewalk, and it made me feel awful. I’ve had three pet tarantulas, the first of which I DIY-taxidermied after she passed.

To me, spiders are like mini land octopuses. They operate purely on instinct, feeling the earth’s vibrations, just wanting to exist and be left alone. A spider doesn’t see the world the way most humans do. It feels it via vibrations from the web it creates and through the ground. That’s how I experience reality. I’m a chronic existentialist, and my music is about navigating the heavy chaos of past traumas, grief, and abuse, weaving those violent frequencies into a silver-lined web.

Musically, everything starts organically. I’ve heard symphonies in my head and dreams since I was a baby. Every track begins on my piano or nylon acoustic guitar using paper and pencil. Once I capture that raw emotion, I move into Cakewalk. My music is the internal symphony in my brain.

RH:

Recently you’ve become notorious for starting Goths Against Cancel Culture, a group of artists, musicians, DJs, and cultural architects that is almost at 50K members. There was a recent appearance on Tim Pool’s show where Brian Graupner of The Gothsicles and now Gasoline Invertebrate spoke with anti-cancel culture goth YouTube personality Jake Munro. It was hilarious to see Milo Yiannoplous involved. Why did you start Goths Against Cancel Culture and how did all of this come to be?

DA:

GACC is essentially a Rorschach test for the modern mind. In a world marinated with relentless propaganda, people project onto it exactly what they’re primed to fear or demonize. I founded it as a nonpartisan movement and open-dialogue environment for people of all walks of life to support unfairly targeted artists in our genre who have been “canceled” over benign nuance and rumors that had gone out of control via games of telephone, originating every time from the same repeat Cancel Vulture offenders. These people are no more than irrelevant bullies who wish to destroy others for the sake of their own visibility.

Real cancellation means you’ve faced real-life consequences like defamation, blacklisting, and losing your ability to earn a living or share your art with the world because a psychotic mob took to the internet to destroy you. I watched self-appointed gatekeepers drive out the very talented rebels who defined goth and industrial. I got tired of the hypocrisy, so I built a platform to fight it with fact-checks, fan support, and zero tolerance for bullshit. The fact that it exploded proves how starving the silent goth/industrial community members have been for a space free from performative outrage.

Many of our most outspoken critics have criminal, sexual, and drug records on file. They have histories of substance abuse, and are generally just a bunch of club kids who got old, bored, and decided they wanted to pretend to be DJs when Spotify came out. Meanwhile, our supporters are talented musicians, legends, icons, promoters, and veterans who have been humble in shaping and growing the scene as we know it today. You can try to cancel a fringe group, but you can’t cancel the entire scene.

RH:

You’ve gotten a lot of pushback from starting GACC from people on both the left and the right, but you’ve also brought a bunch of people together from the scene who were previously afraid to speak about their views. It’s almost like everyone was pretending to be woke because they were afraid of being cancelled by the mob. Now musicians and fans in the scene are uniting under the banner of freedom of speech and expression. This feels like a cultural milestone to me. Do you consider it worth it?

DA:

It has been exhausting, and the death threats have been scary, but it’s absolutely worth it because I can sleep at night. In the past, I have lived both inside and outside society. Freedom from urban chains for a few years taught me to reject all forms of authoritarianism, and that we are all being tricked into a prison we’re encouraged to create for ourselves. The “woke” mindset isn’t exclusive to any one side. It’s a cult-like purity test, and it’s time to leave the Mean Girls lunch table behind. Veteran goths fought to escape cancel culture, and we can’t let ourselves get pushed back.

RH:

It feels like people celebrating the assassination of Charlie Kirk was, quite literally, a turning point for a lot of people in the scene. How much of a role do you think this played in popularizing Goths Against Cancel Culture? Why do you think so many leftist goths took pleasure in a complete stranger being assassinated? I still find the celebration of this horrifying, far more than any goth bands album imagery or music videos. How did this disgusting kind of behavior ever became acceptable in the goth scene?

DA:

At its core, this was an issue regarding the degradation of humanity. It had little to do with politics when you look at it from a philosophical angle. While unrelated to GACC, it could be indirectly related.

One example is the particular cancellation of my dear friends Lisa Hellen and Chris X of Xentrifuge. When Charlie Kirk was assassinated in front of his wife and children, Lisa, being an empathetic soul in addition to being a mother, called out all the hatred she was seeing on the internet. For asking for basic human decency in not celebrating the death of another human being she received death threats and harassment. Lisa was also called an “anti-vaxxer COVID conspiracy theorist,” which is deeply deranged considering she and Chris lost both of his parents to COVID-19 within 12 days of each other. Her husband Chris suffered a permanent COVID vaccine injury in the same timeframe. “Anti-vaxxers” don’t typically get vaccine injuries because they do not receive them to begin with.

This behavior became acceptable because people traded actual rebellion for a witch-hunt mindset driven by weaponized propaganda. It functions like religious zealotry. They use moral grandstanding to gain status and cheap thrills. Dopamine hits within their echo chambers, and suddenly, celebrating a murder becomes a twisted way to signal your “virtue” to the mob. When you strip away a person’s humanity to score internet points, you are no longer the resistance; you are the oppressor. It’s about jealousy and self-loathing. It’s about control. What it’s not about is morality. That is what they use as the excuse.

RH:

Now that goth is getting more media attention from mainstream publications, industrial might be next. These subcultures are close cousins. When I did my time as an industrial musician, I went to a lot of goth clubs where my favorite DJs were spinning industrial. I also worked with goth musicians and remixed their tracks or did vocals for them, and they did the same thing for me. So many cool new collaborations happened this way.

Do you collaborate with industrial musicians? How would you personally describe the difference between goth and industrial? Is it ultimately one big tent, a hybridization, or two separate scenes?

DA:

If goth is the esoteric, emotional frequency, industrial is the machinery that amplifies it. The industrial scene’s origins were a raw, unapologetic middle finger to conformity. It was a dangerous but safe arena for the rough-around-the-edges misfits to thrive.

I strongly tie industrial to goth. I started loving gothic music in the late 90s, but by early adulthood industrial had taken over my tastes. I consider myself more of a rivethead than a goth. Bands like Wumpscut, Nine Inch Nails, PIG, Marilyn Manson, Snake River Conspiracy, Skinny Puppy, and Battery shaped me. My love for industrial likely stems from my childhood passion for doom and black metal, as well as Pantera - particularly The Great Southern Trendkill, which is incredibly dark and atmospheric, and which Trent Reznor had a hand in the production of.

I love collaborating. The music scene should be a community, not a place for cult-of-personality frontmen to strut their bullshit on social media. We need more and more of that supportive mentality. While my composition is solo, my journey in learning the technical side of executing Exostential was heavily fueled by the mentorship of industrial pioneers. Sebastian Komor (Icon of Coil, Komor Kommando, Kommunion, Zombie Girl) did the mastering for my debut album, and Steven Seibold (Hate Dept., Pigface) perfected my own mix of my first single Martyr Box while continually mentoring and encouraging me to get my music out there.

Beyond that, and in spite of what is supposedly “cancel culture” that true artists who can calcify a spine do not actually care about whatsoever, I have been in discussions with quite a few musicians I’ll be collaborating with, and I actually just wrote a piano piece for a popular Metropolis act who has been around quite a long time, and released a new album last month - the track is done, but that will be announced later!

I will also be doing several upcoming remixes. My first was for my friend Brian Graupner’s project Serpadeuce, where I remixed the track Soros. Remixes are coming soon for Komor Kommando, Experiment Haywire (that means you), Wynardtage, and more.

RH:

Speaking of my own musical project, I remember having had some political drama with a few bands from way back when. Their fans were protesting neofolk acts like Death in June while hazing me for being a woman who was new to the scene as a musical artist. I got painted as some leftist crusader for taking a stand and pointing out the hypocrisy of it all and. Later on, the main music producer I had drama with ended up being cool and remixing one of my tracks. The drama was now long gone.

Yet years later in my career, some of those same bands turned out to be part of the social justice mob. They came after me for appearing on Richard Spencer’s show to discuss corruption in Silicon Valley, even though I clearly didn’t endorse his views. They thought me authoring The New Art Right made me an evil Nazi when I was writing to represent individuality. Do you think a mob is always just a mob, whether it’s left or right? Is it the plague of groupthink? The alternative scene is supposed to be about individuality. This all seems so backwards. What happened to individuality?

DA:

A mob is absolutely always a mob. It’s the ultimate plague of groupthink. Individuality vanished because people became terrified of being ostracized, so they allowed self-appointed gatekeepers to dictate whom they could talk to and what nuanced thoughts they could express. These very same people, in the 90s and early 2000s, had a different name: “bullies.” Now, beneath the guise of “politics,” they weaponize a reason to not only destroy you but get celebrated for it.

The alternative scene is supposed to be about protecting the weirdos. Instead, certain veterans have built empires on the aesthetics of rebellion, while simultaneously wielding their platforms to caricature any actual resistance as bigotry. If you speak to the “wrong” person to have a nuanced discussion, you get labeled a Nazi by people who lack the mental bandwidth to understand gray areas. Everyone deserves to be left the fuck alone. If you are imposing your will or judgment upon others, you are the fascist.

RH:

I’ve noticed some cool new developments that have come out of Goths Against Cancel Culture. For example, Ligerhawk Records with Gasoline Invertebrate and my old electro-industrial favorite Xentrifuge are carrying on the torch for freedom of expression and real alternative culture. Bitman produced an entire album to fight against social media witch hunts. The production is fantastic and the lyrics are deeply raw and honest. It’s great to be witnessing this moment and getting back to the music, which is what this was always truly about. How do you see the future of the scene?

DA:

I believe the future of the scene relies exclusively and foundationally on undoing the stranglehold of cancel culture. The declining demand for live events isn’t because fans don’t like the music anymore; it’s because the environment has become too judgmental, hypocritical, narcissistic, and annoying. It’s also because talented musicians are being chased away from expressing themselves, and because they never signed up for walking on eggshells when it came to writing lyrics or creating art.

So many Gen X and Millennial scene veterans just stopped showing up because they didn’t want to deal with the performative drama. Promoters and venue owners become scared at the decline and complied with the few who tried to dictate the narrative, yet they don’t realize these trolls were the reason for said decline to begin with. Younger kids are not into this gatekeeping, judgmental culture. In fact, most of them refuse to even use social media. They are chasing them away as well, all because a few bitter middle-aged people aren’t getting enough attention on the internet anymore.

Regarding Ligerhawk, what Brian did is a very nice thing that completely defies the norms of all music labels. It’s really a coalition of artists who support one another. We all release our music independently, but we support one another because we want to, not because we have to or because we stand to gain anything. There is a lot of camaraderie, and it serves as a support network. I got involved and helped Brian with the rebranding/logo design, album art, and even a little bit of merch design for Ligerhawk and Gasoline Invertebrate. A couple of artists have even been dropping labels like Metropolis and Cleopatra to join, us just to wave a middle finger at the current state of affairs. It’s pretty amazing.

That is also why we are looking into launching Problematik events alongside GACC. We’re creating mature, peaceful platforms where art is judged on merit, not on whether an artist passed an ideological purity test. The silent supporters and veterans of our beautiful music scene are returning. We’re seeing real streaming boosts for supported artists, and loyal fans are eager to come out again to events. We have promoters who refuse to cower to random trolls and stand up for the artists we love. The future is bringing the crowd back peacefully, profitably, and purely for the love of the music.

RH:

Finally, I listened to a preview track of your upcoming album Exostential which is set to be released on April 3rd. It was dark, enchanting, harsh, and beautiful all at once. I’m excited that this type of music is making a comeback. Where can people check out your music and how can they purchase your new album?

DA:

Thank you so much, Rachel. That truly means the world to me, especially since I consider you a talented ‘girldustrial’ artist as well. Creating this album was my way of reaching past the illusions of this world and peeling back down to the true resonance behind everything. I was not exactly aiming for anything in particular. It just came out the way it did, and I love genre-bending! It’s an awesome soundtrack to deprogram ourselves from the manufactured societal divide, let go of the performative outrage, and get back to the music.

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Invisible Front is the one podcast that understands you.

Summary of Episode 1:

• Is podcasting dead, or is it the last popular medium left?

• Has AI made people stupider and more illiterate, or were they always this way?

• Rearranging pieces of time

• Why obscure music is harder to find now

• Raven on immersive experience design and hyper-sexuality control systems

• Rachel on living inside separate social realities

• Peter in the park watching a man grill

• Marquis de Sade as decadent reactionary

• Why conservatives misunderstand art

• Finding the others and hidden signaling

• Art, divinity, beauty, and religion

• Death of the persona

  ---

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When you’ve been in the discourse long enough you start noticing patterns. It’s not only that you notice patterns in the culture but that you notice patterns in yourself. There will be a point in time when you’ll reach a certain moment, and in this moment that you’ll realize that the very thing you’re railing against is the same thing you dreamed up ten years ago.

Welcome to The Ouroboros of Influence

Lately I’ve been having this creeping sensation that I’m standing in a hall of mirrors, except that every reflection is just me from a different era, and that they’re all pointing at each other accusingly. I spent years advocating for a certain kind of aesthetic extremity. The merging of high fashion and transgression. The idea that beauty and danger should coexist in the same frame. I wrote manifestos. I threw parties. I cultivated entire scenes.

Now I see it everywhere. It’s diluted, debased, and castrated. My first instinct is always disgust. Well, here’s the joke the universe played on me: I helped cause it.

Not directly, maybe. I’m not sitting in a boardroom at some advertising company deciding to appropriate underground aesthetics for mass consumption. Yet influence doesn’t always work that way. Influence is a virus. You release it into the ecosystem and it mutates, spreads, and evolves into forms you never intended. You’re patient zero for a plague that you later catch yourself.

This is especially true for anyone who was involved in what I’ll generously call the “alternative internet” of the 2000s and early 2010s. We thought we were building something different. A new kind of discourse. A new mode of expression. A new way of being transgressive in a culture that desperately needed transgression.

So what happened? That energy got absorbed. Processed. Regurgitated as “disruptive” startup culture, “edgy” marketing campaigns, and the general vibe of irony-poisoned nihilism that now permeates everything.

So yes, the language I helped popularize shows up in places I never expected. The ideas I championed became weapons wielded by people who didn’t understand them. Or worse yet, these people understood them perfectly well and used them for purposes I find repellent. The joke is that some of these purposes were my own, filtered through time and iteration until I no longer recognized myself as the source.

There’s a certain kind of intellectual who never has to face this. They work in academia or some other sealed off environment where their ideas stay theoretical. They critique without consequence because their critique never touches the machinery of culture. They stay outside of the system they’re observing.

Yet the rest of us who actually build things, throw events, publish journals, create communities, and host salons don’t get this type of distance from the behemoth. We have to confront the Frankenstein problem. The monster we’ve created is wandering the countryside, and the villagers are right to be upset, but we also kind of forgot that we created it.

This isn’t a confession and this isn’t an apology. It’s a field report from someone who has been doing this long enough to see the wheel turn.

Here’s what I’ve learned.

Influence isn’t a Monument

You don’t build a statue of your ideas and point to it proudly. Instead, your ideas dissolve into groundwater and show up in unexpected places, coloring things you’ll later encounter without recognizing the taste.

That aesthetic you find derivative? Well, check your own archives from 2016. That discourse you find tedious? Listen for the echoes of arguments you made when you thought you were the only one making them. That movement you find embarrassing? Go ahead and feel around for your fingerprints of its earliest iterations.

This is the Ouroboros of Influence. You swallow your own tail and become the thing you were pushing against, not because you changed, but because you succeeded in ways you didn’t anticipate. The question isn’t whether you’ve shaped more than you remember. If you’ve been active in cultural production for any significant length of time, you have. The question is what you do with that knowledge.

Option A: Denial

Pretend you were never there. Act like the current landscape has nothing to do with you. This is cowardly and probably impossible if anyone has access to your digital footprint.

Option B: Ownership as Brand

Lean into it. Claim credit for everything. “Well, actually, I was doing that in 2012.” This is even worse than denial because at least denial has shame.

Option C: The Middle Path

Accept that you’re implicated. Accept that your ideas mutated in ways you didn’t control and don’t fully endorse. Accept that you’re now critiquing from within the thing you helped create, not from some imagined outside.

This is the only honest position. It’s also the hardest.

I’m not going to tell you I’ve figured everything out. This is simply what I’ve learned. Every day I see something in the culture that bothers me I have to do the internal archaeology:

• Was I there?

• Did I contribute?

• Is this somehow my fault?

Sometimes the answer is no, and I can critique freely. Sometimes the answer is yes, and I have to sit with that before can I open my mouth. Most of the time the answer is “it’s complicated,” which is the answer to most interesting questions. It’s also the most unsatisfying.

What I know to be true is that the people who pretend they have no culpability in the world they’re criticizing are lying. Either they’ve never actually influenced anything (in which case, why should we listen to them?) or they’re engaged in a fantasy of purity that doesn’t exist for anyone who has actually has.

Those of us who made moves and took risks have to live with the consequences of our influence. This sometimes includes the consequence of becoming unrecognizable to ourselves. Some of things I’ve created have mutated into forms I hate, so I’m now critiquing my own cultural offspring. I’ve entered the Ouroboros of Influence. If you have skin in the game you will enter it too.

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Everyone is talking about Diner Goth on Twitter, the platform I’m not supposed to be on. They won’t stop sending me this article, so I’m in a difficult position. See, I’m reinventing myself and dropping the scene persona. I’m a serious fascism instructor who is building a new institution. I’m writing one final scene report on Dimes Square before I officially become an adult in the room. I can’t be seen posting to Elon’s timeline or my reputation will be ruined. I’m back on Substack now, where people have never even heard of looksmaxxing. They just make puns about it.

Yet Robert Mariani, a name I haven’t heard in a while, went viral with this piece he wrote for The New Atlantis on the phenomena he calls “Diner Goth.” This is essentially a term he coined to describe the downward mobility of alternative subcultures. I do feel the need to say something here. Mariani has given a name to something I’ve been witnessing in real time for fifteen years. He calls it Diner Goth and defines it with the precision of someone who arrived on the scene a decade after it ended. Yet he’s not entirely wrong.

He hands you “diner” for provincialism and “goth” as shorthand for alternative aesthetics. Mariani’s lane is building an AI dating app, which aligns him with the cohort of NRx posters who didn’t make the next funding round and pivoted to cultural criticism. Well, Cultural Anthropology has one rule that these journalists keep forgetting: know the culture you’re anthropologizing. We want to know if you were there. Were you?

Am I really doing material analysis in 2026?

The story goes like this. There were very few genuinely alternative people left in cities that could afford to be genuinely alternative. The ones who remained either had roommates stacked deep in Bushwick or family money they didn’t talk about. Perhaps they made it into the mainstream economy that slowly removed the edges that made them “alternative.”

What Mariani is documenting in his Wisconsin CVS trips and Portland Tinder dates is not some new subculture that’s spontaneously generating itself in the provinces. It’s an old subculture, redistributed downward by economic pressure, decanted into places where the rent is cheap and the roads are broken. It’s aesthetically grotesque, he notes. The Hills Have Eyes material. Well, its queer anti-intellectualism is what happens when you sever a subculture from the cities and strand it in places where development was never an option.

The kid who may have moved to New York at 22 and found his people in Alphabet City now stays in a mid-size town and builds his identity on Discord. He can no longer move into the Hotel Chelsea to find the others. This is the demographic displacement that racialists have been talking about for so long, even if their politics are at war with this latest cadre of Diner Goths. Those being displaced will never admit this, but that’s a topic for another essay. I’m not feeling a particular desire to air that grievance right now. No, I’m doing a material analysis on Diner Goth in 2026, which is somehow even more vanguard.

If we really want to break things down as deconstructionists, we can think about The Literal. Think, for a moment, about what all smalls towns have in common. Take a wild guess. You’re probably beginning to figure it out now. Everything except for the dive bars shuts down by 8PM with one notable exception: The Diners.

Nothing Else was Open

Here are some footnotes that the faculty lounge is afraid to cite. I want to the Savannah College of Art and Design (SCAD) in Savannah, Georgia. It was a beautiful historical postcard of a town with its Spanish moss, cobblestones, and preservation ordinance that froze time. You would fall into its capsule or go insane, sometimes both. We hung out at diners before Discord had been invented. Why diners? Nothing else was open. That's the origin story. I remember outsider students and townies pulling out their sketchbooks at the Waffle House and showing me what I’d now describe as prison-esque sketch art. They’d read me their schizophrenic poetry with the fervor of dictators trapped on platforms without an audience.

I remember thinking: how do I organize this into a live performance and get it to Atlanta? Atlanta was the answer. Atlanta was always the answer back then. As a Graphic Design major, I was focused on business. What else can you focus on in a small town? I may have changed my SCAD major to Business later on, but I honestly don’t remember. Was that how I became an entrepreneur? When there’s raw material you want to get it somewhere with infrastructure. That’s precisely what these Diner Goth subjects are missing: infrastructure.

Now Atlanta has gutted itself. Portland is a punchline that stopped being funny after its show aired one too many times. The Diner Goth can’t get out, and there’s nowhere left to go. I was there when Diner Goth started. It felt like I was an art school student in a tourist trap. I thought I was the only artist hanging out with the local biker gang, but the biker gang went to the same parties as the students, and that was just small town physics. Everyone orbits the same three venues until somebody leaves or dies. I was a teenage Diner Goth.

There was Tybee Island. It was Savannah's resort-town cousin, a barrier island thirteen miles east where the real estate was owned by people who did weekends and the residents were a different species. Picture it like this: you're at a Tybee Island house party. Invite-only, but everyone you know is there because the invite list is everyone. Black men with muscle make semi-intellectual arguments about how slavery is dignified. White liberal dominatrix girls with septum piercings explain their strategies to pay film school tuition. It's normal. This is normal. Savannah and Tybee Island are having a normal one, and what you're witnessing is proto-Diner Goth.

The Subculture Downmarket

Mariani documents a copy, and to some people the copy is genuinely interesting and/or repulsive, whether it’s the furry CVS assistant manager or the Amazon fulfillment center streamer who dreams of voice acting while doing shows on OnlyFans. Yet Mariani mistakes the symptom for the disease and the copy for the subculture. He discovers that alternative aesthetics have gone downmarket and writes a feature-length sociology essay about it. The more interesting question is this: why did they go downmarket, and what was the cost?

This is an American story about class.

I’d been asking for years why all the goth women disappeared from New York and San Francisco, and my answer was usually that they had been replaced by immigrants or trad influencers. Neither of these answers seemed to satisfy anyone because they appeared reactive or maybe just radioactive. What Mariani is describing is very real. It’s too real. The neurodivergence is real. The longing is real. The sadness is real. It’s what happens when people who don’t fit their conservative small-town backgrounds have nowhere else to go. It’s when the aesthetic of alienation becomes the aesthetic of immobility, performative or not.

Can these towns be fixed? Has Mariani lived their realities or is he just a downwardly mobile techie in Portland? Giant among the swine, right? Yet I can relate, except that I would never do journalism on it. Not until now, I mean. Have I become one of them? As an adult I was holed up in Jacksonville for almost a year after needing to, let’s just say, cut some corners. Jacksonville is a town in Florida that makes Savannah seem like Los Angeles. I was working a middle class job at a Republican propaganda outlet while producing tiny art and music events that made the city a catalyst for a place that existed in my mind. Nobody knew who I was online. Nobody cared. They only wanted my Discord handle.

The thing about “making a town better” is that the town’s daily life goes completely unchanged. The people you’re trying to “enrich” still go home to the same despair. They don’t have access to the cities where a career in a creative field is possible, where the feedback loops exist, and where you can network your way to social capital. The townie suspicion of the cultural organizer is class-correct. They know you’re practicing on them. They know this city is your experiment and not your home. They’ve seen it all before and they’ll see it all again. They hate you.

Goth and its Glamorous History

What frustrates me the most about “Diner Goth” is the implication, never quite stated but present throughout, that this is simply what goth is now. Provincial, downwardly mobile, and prole-ified. It’s traced with sympathy and a certain sociological affection, accepting of the declassing as a given, inevitable, current state of things. It’s a blackpill, yet it never had to be.

The alternative subcultures I worked with in my youth were not déclassé when I became alternative professional, yet so what if they were? They were expressive. They were transgressive in ways that required investment in craft and aesthetic development. Alexander McQueen was goth. Vivienne Westwood was goth. There is an entire tradition of dark aesthetics as high fashion, glam, and luxurious provocation that gets completely erased when we accept the Amazon warehouse as its natural habitat. I wrote about this for Evie Magazine last year.

Mariani was born after the subculture he’s describing, using a template that already existed in a more mature form. The goth clubs of the ‘80s. The fashion world of the ‘90s. Even in the NYC of today there are well-off alternative models, actors, and fashion designers. Fewer than ever, sure, but they’re present. I spent years assuming it was a simple story of who was replacing who in the cultural ecosystem. I’m now convinced it actually might be class. Diner Goth has me introspecting.

The post-COVID landscape gave us trad influencers rather than a genuinely creative subculture, because genuine creativity requires room to fail that people can no longer afford. Being into dark aesthetics is not compatible with the current economic landscape. Free expression is now costly in the most literal sense. We fixed cancel culture only to get zombie culture.

Feeing Dizzy Yet?

There’s a vertigo that comes from realizing that what you thought was a creative subculture was simultaneously a socioeconomic condition. That the people you were hanging around with were united less by a shared aesthetic vision than a shared economic ceiling. This whole time I thought I was engaging with a creative subculture when I was really just hanging out with poor people isn’t exactly the coming-of-age story I was hoping to read about Gen Z. It’s an honest one, and I want to give Mariani that. Yet is it the only one? Clearly not.

He finishes his article with some boardroom pandering about the Internet as the new myth, fandom as the soul, and Discord as community for people the economy has left stranded in America. He gets boring here. He’s doing nostalgia he never was around for while highlighting a coping mechanism as a cultural milestone.

I’ll say it again: trad influencer is merely the new goth. The trad aesthetic that swept through cities like New York after COVID has the same longing for structure, beauty, and belonging that goth always did. It’s just inverted in sunlight instead of darkness. Both were responses to economic collapse, and both were reactions to what people did when the future shut down and we wore costumes to play inside the ruins.

The question worth asking, and the question Mariani circles without landing, is whether we can build something that doesn’t accept the ruins as permanent. Can dark aesthetics be reclaimed from the fulfillment center and returned to the vault? Can doing alternative culture become affordable again, or will we spend the next decade writing elegies for subcultures that become mass aesthetics for vape shops?

Only time will tell.

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The most important commitment you can make is to stay true and pure. At first this sounds simple, but it’s not.

When you navigate the insidious maze of social dynamics, you’ll come to realize that purity is one of the hardest things to maintain. When people latch onto trends and discard the original versions, staying true and pure requires a brute and intentional mindset. It must be genuine and it can’t be learned through anything but personal experience.

You’ll need to take a step back and let go of the urge to perform. Forget about all of that noise. It doesn’t concern you anymore. It’s over. It’s out the door. Release the desire to validate yourself through others. Staying true and pure requires a very strict type of discipline. It’s a spiritual practice that anchors you inward. People will come and go. They’ll exit as quickly as they enter. That’s just the way it works and you can’t let it phase you.

When these gatekeepers in Silicon Valley deemed me too unconventional and unfiltered for their tastes I was furious. They accused me of being “alt right” because they saw my approach as too rough around the edges. I delivered unusually high output, but my affect disrupted their precious image. Now let’s get real. This had nothing to do with politics, yet I was cancelled for being a “nazi” and I write this during Chanukah.

This loss of status and social mobility tormented me for longer than I’d like to admit. I was thrown me into the pit of an angry mob that hated me. (waves) The people who threw me into this pit were the same people who borrowed my work and stripped it of its soul, only to deem me unworthy of the circles they’d built on diluted echoes of my creations.

So how did I stay true and pure? Something in me changed after all of this went down and I took some time to reflect. I understood that I had to make a choice. I could either allow the bitterness to consume me or use my experience as fuel to deepen my commitment to truth.

Here’s how I moved forward…

Read more

You Say You Want a New Institution

It’s me, Rachel. I wanted to thank all of you who attended the launch for the Fiume Gallery on May 10th. It was an extraordinary beginning, and we’re now raising funds to secure our permanent gallery space as we call for visionary patrons, strategic backers, and aligned investors ready to fuel this new culture. Whether you were in attendance or not, here is how it all began.

It began in a state of beautiful disorder. Alliances were forged in whispers. Rivalries took shape before the paint even dried. Nothing was fixed and everything was up for grabs. We were building something raw, dangerous, and alive. I wanted more time to talk to people during the launch party. I remember thinking: One day, I want to be in the audience and watch it all unfold. No one will know it was me. That will be the real victory.

Yet nothing comes easy in the art world. A rehearsal clip completely unrelated to the show had gone viral and triggered a wave of speculation. The algorithm picked up on it, and with virality came vultures. Enter Sam Venis, a journalist I’d never met. He showed up uninvited and penned a hit piece that read like some deranged fan fiction. His take was as confusing as his presence. We had more detractors than I was prepared for, but I relish a fresh set of antagonists!

I still don’t know who most of these detractors are, and I’d be more impressed if I did, but what I do know is that every day I receive messages from people asking to stop by Chelsea to visit our gallery. Even as a pop-up we’ve drawn serious attention, and now everyone wants to come by and check out the scene. We launched a major cultural event with no institutional support, budget, or safety net. We handled permits, curation, hospitality, security, press, and programming with a tiny crew.

We decided to go mainstream.

Works from our in-house artists are selling faster than I imagined, and collectors of distinguished names are now pursuing representation at Fiume. What began as a provocative experiment evolved into something far more serious. Now, we are merging the worlds of avant-garde performance and established fine art as we transition into a fully operational gallery and cultural hub in the heart of Chelsea.

Fiume’s launch party was an immersive theater experiment.

The Fiume launch party was a twisted collision of art, politics, and historical theater. So many people showed up: artists, musicians, dark intellectuals, poets, freaks, reactionaries, bohemians, goth girls, tech guys, and obscure philosophers. It was an oddball convergence of factions like the original Fiume in Italy. Last weekend, I was at a nightclub and the bouncer recognized me from the event. There were so many people who attended that I wish I could have talked to. For all I know, some of them are fated to become central to my life, and our real conversations have yet to begin.

The event was an absurdist gathering that was a tribute to French surrealist Antonin Artaud, hence the Theater of Cruelty name. It was a liminal space in which history was reimagined in the setting of an art gallery. Fiume is alive, inhabited by performers, provocateurs, and exhibitions.

It was foundational. It was primal. I regret nothing.

I didn’t think we were actually going to have protestors, but they immediately showed up outside with pamphlets and made themselves a part of the show. Did they know they were participating in the spectacle? I’d have thought they had a background in surrealism. I’m told one of them had to be physically removed by security, yet I’m also told one ended up being a nice guy who ended up buying a ticket so who knows?

They claimed was that we weren’t real Futurists. No, we were the Futurist version of posers who listened to Green Day and Sum 41 in the punk scene. Not the real punks who died of heroin overdoses in their warehouses while listening to GG Allin. D’Aunnunzio would have traveled forward in time to kill us, or so I’m told. Gabrielle, if you’re out there, come meet me in the fields.

Now speaking of D’Aunnunzio, there was a moment when I could have sworn he had possessed me. It was the day of the event and I was feeling burnt out from the endless work, blasting Laibach in the Uber on the way to the venue with one of the other organizers. Everything had happened so fast. Months of prep, 6 AM work sessions, sleepless nights, people dropping out, people hopping in to help at the last minute, and everything else you could imagine. The chaos had accelerated into a fever pitch, everything collapsing into a single ride. Was it D’Annunzio moving through me, or was I staging my own psychotic opera?

So, this Sam Venis guy told our security that Fiume was “a fascist art exhibit for the New Right” and claimed in print that Nazis had attended the launch. He seemed upset that this wasn’t some ironic Red Scare type event. We were perceived to be competing with this incestual clique and viewed as serious people which he really didn’t like.

“For all my wandering through Far Right spaces, I’d never encountered true, straight-to-the-vein fascists first-hand. I was used to the performative fascists: the Dimes Square edgelords with five-bedroom apartments on the Upper West Side. The ones that said ‘retard’ and called it avante-garde. I suppose I should’ve known something was different here.” -Sam Venis seeking attention in his Marinetti in Manhattan hitpiece

Given that in this era Fascism has devolved into the intrusive-thought of the chronically deranged, the farce of this virtue signaling pantomime isn’t worth the dignity of a response. But yeah, something was different. I’m a Jewish artist who isn’t some Dimes Square edgelord. Congrats, Sam. You’ve noticed. (but apparently not that I’m Jewish)

Art is a Rorschach test. It’s meant to provoke, inspire, delight, and infuriate. Anyone can look at your art and tie their own agenda to it. They project. They fantasize. They accuse. You see them through your own lens and this is part of the experience. Everyone sees something different because everyone brings their own private mythology to the viewing. When your gallery is its own work of art people go a little mad with interpretation. This is why Andy Warhol was a brilliant concept artist, the Factory being his true masterpiece—the epicenter of interpretation, of experience.

The Grand Spectacle

The night started with my friends DJ Octopussy and DJ Hervor spinning industrial, goth, synthwave, and electro at the Chelsea loft we’d rented for the launch. People trickled in slowly, like they’d stepped through the wrong door at the right time. Some of the Sovereign House people looked confused. I’m not sure how many of them had been to an art opening or musical event before. Nevertheless, they found their friends in the crowd. It was fun to see them interact with the more artistic people who were now interacting with the more theoretical and pinned down types.

Categories had now stopped making sense. People who would’ve hated each other were deep in conversation. The gallery circuit, veterans of opening nights and art world networking, were also thrown into the mix. I’d met them at other art openings in Chelsea and invited them to mine. I was a crazed socialite birthing my own scene from the trenches. Everyone was there.

Adam Lehrer took the stage and began reciting a violent manifesto as he smashed hideous plastic art someone had purchased from Target. It felt like we were at an early noise show. Queen Thugshaker screamed during her Funeral for Irony as she threw the plastic art into the crowd. People moved to get out of her way in bemusement and fear. When Orcbrand took the stage he began channeling the spirit of Artaud with his absurdist music and giant sword, delivering a hilarious performance that took cringe to the next level. We weren’t trying to be “based.” We were having fun and being ourselves.

Next was a poetry performance from Bexiexz, a poet I met at Deep Tech Week. I think it was around this point Sam Venis asked her why she was black and on the bill for a “white nationalist event” while she was reciting her work. She ignored him because the whole thing was too absurd to address. She just kept on reading. Next, my friend Mark went on and continued the scene with some visceral intensity as he delivered his own set of poetry like a wound laid bare.

The Dictator Pageant - It’s Called Dark Cabaret

It was The Dictator Pageant that drew the most fevered attention, yet what’s historical theater without a little controversy? Goth girls strutted down the runway in beautiful outfits for the Strut of the Valkyries, reading dictator speeches on the catwalk in competition with one another. Who would be queened dictator of the night?

People from the audience yelled comments at the models, some less than charitable, and I personally could have done without that. Yet the girls stood their own and returned the fire. They bit back, one in a literal sense. Martial neofolk thundered as the score. I’d had this kind of thing in mind for a while now, so why not do it for the launch?

Dark Cabaret had once defined my youth, but every age demands its resurrection. The pageant was the highlight of the event, and people won’t stop talking to me about how much fun they had. A few people are still infuriated while others remain perplexed.

The Art of Fiume

As the doors to the art room opened people began trickling in. The Skinless Frank prints sold immediately. People flew all over the country to check out his digital art, along with the fine art paintings of Giovanni Pennacchietti and Alexander Adams, Fiume’s original artists we had showcased at our pre-party. We also showed the digital works of Lordess Foudre, an artist with a cult following who mixes cyberpunk with digital nostalgia. She named her collection the Museum of Deleted Emotions.

The art of Fiume wasn’t necessarily Futurist, despite artists like Giovanni Pennacchietti and Alexander Adams taking inspiration from them. We mixed it all up: the digital art of Skinless Frank and Lordess Foudre with the fine art of Giovanni and Alexander Adams and the realist paintings of Madeleine Carson who is creating masterpieces at the young age of 18.

Continued Affairs

The prestigious Tara Isabella Burton decided to share a few words on us:

“I am not particularly interested in whether Ye wants to say “Heil Hitler” onstage or not, or whether or not some art gallery in Chelsea wants to perform a new version of Artaud’s “Theater of Cruelty” with some guy named Skinless Frank or DJ Octopussy. It may well be that we are so ideologically kaleidoscopic these days, that true culture striding “transgression” itself is now a nonsense term.” -Tara Isabella Burton on Fiume here

Tara and I had met last year at a literary event where she’d told me that she wasn't into the downtown scene. I’d told her that I wanted to recruit the more interesting people for something new because everyone was sick of the very online sphere and needed something more IRL and visceral. I respect Tara for her journey and not for her prestige, but it seems like her point was to bemoan the death of religion with Fiume as a sidepiece.

Crossing the Wires

Our sponsors were fantastic. Imperium Press sent us books from Alexander Adams himself, Nick Land, and critical volumes on Jonathan Bowden. We even stocked Georges Sorel. People loved the literature. They browsed, flipped pages, and talked. Heterodox Labs, a startup bringing wonder and imagination back to science, sent in their own swag of hoodies and t-shirts, offering a bold counterpoint to Silicon Valley’s bland uniformity. Jokes Review sent in their fun literary magazines.

Our Movement is on the Rise - Uplift with your Support!

A couple months after our launch, Curtis Yarvin posed with his friend Vlad with a caption about D’Annunzio and Marinetti for a stunt at the Venice Biennale. The influence of Fiume is making waves in DC and Italy.

I want real artists, real talent, and real sincerity. I’m not into the “dissident art hoe” branding. I reject it. I disavow these uncultured swine! I stand opposed to the way so much of the Right is against theater. I support theater, love it, and embrace it. Fiume is theater and it will always be theater.

As we shift into a more mainstream and structured gallery we are looking forward to collaborating with new people and raising to:

• Secure our permanent Chelsea gallery space

• Fund more exhibitions and performances

• Book exceptional musical talent

• Establish a cutting-edge artist residency program

• Expand new staff and scale our operations

Email us at info@fiume.nyc to become part of this cultural movement. Get in contact and say hello. We can’t do this without you. Let’s make history together.

Thank you again to the inside crew, artists, patrons, supporters, and everyone who showed up for the party. As for those of you who couldn’t make the launch, I hope you now have a better idea about our gallery and that you’ll come to our next event in November.

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We’re creating tastemakers for the new regime.

We’ve got a new Culture and Couture Brief today. Our last brief was with notorious writer and editor Matt Forney, and you can check it out here if you missed the explosion. Twice a month, I’ll feature someone who is leading the culture in an unexpected way. We’re influencing the influencers, and this time I’ve brought over pagan sweetheart Georgina Rose to reawaken your soul.

What are Georgina Rose’s fashion inspirations?

Georgina Rose: This outfit remains one of my favorites, even if it is a bit older. The dress is inspired by the ballet Giselle which is a romantic story about a woman who is betrayed by her lover. When I was a bit younger, I was the stage manager for a few ballet performances, so even though I am not a dancer myself, I have a lot of nostalgic ties to ballet. It’s a very romantic art form, showing a complex story through simple movement and sound.

I am quite romantic, emotional, and drawn towards darker tones. I find that the rich saturated tone of a deep jewel tone sticks out in my brain. When contrasted with feminine soft details like lace and bows it brings me a lot of joy. In my personal style, I wear a lot of what people call “Romantic Goth” and this is pretty much that distilled down to its essence.

This outfit is also interesting to me, because once again, I adore rich dark tones. Yet instead of sticking just to black, this darkly inclined look pulls in some white. I love white as a color within gothic fashion. It creates such vivid contrast and makes things a bit more interesting. The tablier this girl is wearing is also iconic. It’s from Moi Meme Moitie, a Japanese EGL brand, that remains my favorite fashion label. The design on it is incredibly intricate with custom lace, a stark departure from the low-effort fast fashion pieces we often see.

It’s a shame how craft seems lost in fashion, and that we care more about quantity more than quality, sacrificing on little details. At the end of the day, the details are what bring an outfit to life. This beautiful church and gate pattern on the lace instantly evoke a mental image of strolling through a churchyard. I also like the use of accessories and detest minimalism. I adhere to the opposite of that Coco Chanel rule about taking one item off before leaving the house. I often add an extra item. This really brings things together, and there’s no shame in being the town eccentric. Someone has to do it, and in my town it has to be me.

If you like what I’m doing here at The Cultural Futurist, don’t forget to buy me a coffee.

Dear young influencer,

I understand you call yourself a writer.

You see life as a journey and you’ve cast yourself as the protagonist nobody noticed.

A character so immersed in your own narrative you forgot to translate it into something others could feel.

And now you’ve found the indie lit scene.

So you’ve built a persona.

I’m sorry.

I almost got killed by mine once.

Let me be the first to tell you:

Your videos won’t save you.

A million followers equals very little money.

A million people watching doesn’t mean even one understands you.

A million views won’t save you at 4 AM when your own voice echoes too loudly in the silence.

You have so much to say yet so little to say about anything that truly matters.

You think it’s a hustle but it’s attention without substance and praise without loyalty.

You’re dancing in the mirror of some false invocation.

You’re feeding the algorithm your fantasies like sexual therapy.

Your captions are confessions that nobody will grasp no matter how many likes they give.

You think you’re building a castle of self-expression when you’re creating the biggest trap in the village.

Now you’re stuck inside the gates you designed and don’t know how to escape.

Every post that you make is a calling to be seen to be noticed to be loved to be acknowledged to be placed at the top of the feed.

You call it writing and you call it a performance and you call it yearning and you may even call it a career.

But where is your soul?

Where is your sense of self?

Where are your values?

What are your values?

Have you defined them?

How can you live without defining your values?

I’ll tell you something I wish someone told me:

The self, once branded, rarely comes back whole.

So young influencer,

I ask this of you before the month is over.

Pick up a book that calls to your inner spirit and start reading it tonight.

Don’t pose with a picture of it and share it online or it will be best left unseen by your eyes.

Stop posting about your escapades, if they are even true at all, and let your knowledge do the work.

Ignore the indie lit scene gossip, the obnoxious clout games, the fabricated drama, and the juvenile posturing.

Become someone who carries a legacy instead of someone who gets drowned out the day you turn 30.

Because you know what happens to young influencers after they age?

Absolutely nothing.

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If you like what I’m doing here at The Cultural Futurist, don’t forget to buy me a coffee.

Who is Johnson Riggs? For the uninitiated, he’s a philosopher-king in exile disguised as a novelist. If you’re been around these parts, you’ve probably heard about his dystopian fantasy book Pandemonia. It’s a fantastical satire of COVID and it’s utterly insane. With physical copies set to explode on July 4th, I took the time to sit down with Johnson and figure out what in the hell was going on for The Cultural Futurist.

How, exactly, could a novel about the COVID regime be a comedy?

Rachel Haywire:

You’ve written a book where knights fart, kings wrestle, and demons possess the bureaucracy. Let’s begin at the edge of the map. What exactly is Pandemonia? A satire? A kingdom? A diagnosis?

Johnson Riggs:

Pandemonia is at its heart, a self-indulgent exorcism. But way less self-indulgent than Stephen King, and the writing is twice as good.

Setting-wise, I mashed up Venice and DC to create Quagmerica, an empire sinking into the mire. I also take the reader on a cartoon tour of vistas inspired by the Middle East, Colombia and Amber Waves of Grain. As for the characters, I had a bit of fun. Let’s just say that:

This novel is entirely a work of fiction. The names, characters and incidents portrayed in it are the work of the author’s imagination. Any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, events or localities is entirely coincidental.

A video trailer about this whole psychotic thing:

RH:

Knight Captain Pickle isn’t exactly the archetypal hero. Why did you choose such a ridiculous idiot to lead your tale?

JR:

Pickle is a rockhead, but he’s not an idiot. I’ll grant that with a nickname like Pickle, it’s easy to underestimate him. But pickles are well-preserved, probiotic, and phallic. Furthermore, the pickle is a great metaphor for patriarchal values and low, monastic time-preference (winter is coming). He’s competent in all the wrong ways and therefore presents a sphinx-like character growth curve.

So why this protagonist? Well, modern conspiracy theories lack any protagonist – therefore, they deny human agency. Therefore, insert hero. This is an anti-propaganda, pro-conspiracy heroic legend.

RH:

You’ve created a world that’s both grotesquely funny and eerily prophetic. Did you set out to write “high fantasy for a collapsing empire” or did the empire simply catch up to you?

JR:

Well, the real world is grotesquely funny, and prophets are eerie. I’m not sure I predicted anything, I just read some old books and intuited an alternate universe. The wheel of time turns, or something. I did get high off my own fantasy, but I think readers will enjoy a whiff of my genuinely musty brand. The muse caught me off guard and she wrote half of this thing, then the old whore tricked me into doing the rest of the work. I guess we’re splitting the proceeds and custody of Sir Pickle.

RH:

Let’s talk metaphysics. Is Pandemonia a dreamscape or is it more like the real world in drag?

JR:

Metaphysics? They’re feeble. I exist in liminal spaces, so I’m confident that fiction is more real than the news. The book is a dreamscape in that all the female characters are either hookers or wives. This book is straight as hell, but its world is lurid.

There’s actually a DMT trip written into the book, which again, calls these feeble metaphysics into question.

RH:

What books, films, or fever dreams shaped Pandemonia? What’s in your stew?

JR:

My sources of inspiration include Army of Darkness, Final Fantasy 4-7, and 80s-90s spoof movies.

Again, without being a fart sniffer, I couldn’t have done this without Dante, Gilgamesh, and South Park.

RH:

There’s a strange sincerity to your book underneath the nihilist humor. Do you believe in redemption?

JR:

I’m laughing, and making humor, but I am also serious. Deadly serious.

If you’re a nihilist or atheist or something, you’re just being an edgy child. Now grow up, redeem yourself, and read my farty little book.

RH:

You’ve been called everything from a postmodern Tolkien to a bathhouse Lovecraft. How would you describe your literary lineage?

JR:

Who the Hell said that? I will fight them! Anyway, the first serious work of literature I read was Encyclopedia Brown. Then I read the Narnia books, Redwall, Dragonlance, Wheel of Time, and the Dark Tower series. I started the Song of Fire and Ice books, but quit when George R. R. Martin started writing about the Iron Bank and the Rothchilds replaced him with a fatter clone.

In college, the punchline of my philosophy major was Wittgenstein, who, during my senior year, mocked me for studying philosophy. It was annoying to get to the end of my course of studies and be told that it was a waste of time, that God was dead, and that the cannibals were coming to get me.

I’ve been doing penance for my illiteracy of late. Part of what sparked this journey is CS Lewis’ Space Trilogy, especially That Hideous Strength, which struck me as proto-Q-Anon. HP Lovecraft is superb and I regret not reading him earlier.

RH:

What’s next for Pandemonia? Is this a one-off exorcism or the first in a series of mythic transmissions?

JR:

MGM has optioned this for a $20M, so I’m set. I don’t even care that they recast my able-bodied, taciturn protagonist as a sassy black trans cripple.

Anyway, Mission accomplished: I wrote a book! But the real money is in merchandising. We’ll see how that goes before I write anything else.

RH:

If you had to deliver one prophecy for the future of culture, right this second, what would it be?

JR:

The Amish had it all figured out 2 centuries ago. The rest of us are cooked. Sorry if you missed the buggy.

RH:

Thanks for taking the time to do this interview. With your recent appearance on the Team Futurism podcast you’ve become a household name. It’s been great getting to know you before you inevitably become more famous than I am. Just don’t forget me on the way up.

You can get yourself a copy of Pandemonia on Amazon here.

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If you like what I’m doing here at The Cultural Futurist, don’t forget to buy me a coffee.

On May 10th I threw a launch party for my new art gallery Fiume in Chelsea and people are still talking about it. You may have heard about it through my interview with our in-house artist Giovanni Pennacchietti of Gio’s Content Corner. Perhaps you attended our pre-launch party that doubled as a Manifesto Salon, or even attended the Grand Opening of Fiume itself.

I’ll be doing a proper writeup with pictures from the event soon, so as to tell the story of the notorious Fiume launch in action, but for now I wanted to introduce you to the one and only Skinless Frank. It’s time for readers of The Cultural Futurist get to know the man behind the legend.

My friend Nic Dolinger of The Maryland Free Press reached out to Skinless Frank to ask him some questions.

Nic Dolinger:

Hello, Skinless Frank. I’m excited to be interviewing you today, as your art has a signature style that has developed a major following in our sphere. I’ve gotta ask you: what was the inspiration behind the “Skinless Frank" name?

Skinless Frank:

Thanks for having me, Nic. The name stems from the character of Uncle Frank in the 1980s horror film Hellraiser. I’m a big fan of the film and the 80s aesthetic in general, so I chose a pseudonym that reflects this. I find his character in the film is interesting because he’s constantly searching for more and looking for an escape from the mundane. It’s a a good analogy for how and why I became an artist.

ND:

Do you have any aesthetic or intellectual influences that have contributed to your creative process?

SF:

For the longest time I’ve had an obsession with using digital technology in new artistic ways. A big influence for me was Francisco Goya's Black Paintings series and the way he combines war imagery with fantastical elements. He creates disturbing work that reflects both the inner and outer horror of reality. I wanted to do the same for the digital realm.

ND:

Your work evokes images of martial and spiritual glory. I feel the force of will animating great men of action, vigor and excellence. Yet I also recognize the fury, damnation, ruin and despair. Would you say you’re reconciling opposing elements or that it’s all part of the same thing?

SF:

I like to play around with opposing imagery in my work while leaving things open to interpretation. My goal is to capture the viewers imagination rather than deliver a specific message. Power lives in capturing the imagination in new forms. Messaging is not what I’m about because it undermines the complex reality of consciousness. I operate on a different level.

ND:

There’s an alchemical presence in a lot of your art. How would you characterize your worldview and spiritual vision?

SF:

Symbols and motifs can be extremely powerful. I experiment with them while building up my own mythology. I like that they can be ambiguous and I wouldn't want to pollute them with my own worldview. You can find my spiritual vision in my work. To put it simply, my art is the spiritual vision.

ND:

Where do you think your sector of the art world is headed?

SF:

Digital artists like me are being massively impacted by AI, so for better or worse this will impact my own approach. Yet it's important to keep an open mind with these things and look for the opportunities rather than focus on the negative. It’s about the mythology.

ND: Thanks for taking the time to speak with me, Skinless Frank. I’m honored to have gotten a glimpse into your reality, and look forward to seeing more of your art in the future. It’s been a pleasure.

All images courtesy of Skinless Frank

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If you like what I’m doing here at The Cultural Futurist, don’t forget to buy me a coffee.

Hello! If you’ve been a member of The Cultural Futurist for a while, this type of email is nothing new to you. If you’ve joined recently, welcome to the aesthetic renaissance. Tomorrow, we’ll be going for a fun little trip.

During my last salon, we discussed all things art and philosophy as we performed live theatre and esoteric poetry. We engaged in hardcore debates and forbidden improv during a sacred Art Imperium that kicked off the foundation for our era. Word on the streets is that people are still discussing this event, so we’re keeping the momentum up on high at The Cultural Futurist.

We’re doing Speeches and Spectacle.

Cultural Futurist Salon VIII - Speeches and Spectacle is an online event. We’ll hang out and recite our speeches, everyone on the lineup getting a 5-10 minute slot. Our orators will hold the floor for the first half of the event. After they’ve commanded the stage, we will enter Total Spectacle Hour. Anyone who wants to read a speech will be given the stage until we shut the entire ordeal down.

You’re welcome to attend if you don’t want to recite anything. Your presence is enough. There are no limits as to what you can read, (only time limits) and you’ll have the choice to keep your camera off if you have any privacy concerns. No Cultural Futurist Salons are ever recorded. This is a members-only event, and what happens at my salons stays at my salons.

Get ready for Speeches and Spectacle. It’s loud and it’s controversial, just like the best orators of our time.

Our Ultimate Spectacle starts on April 19th at 2 PM EST. It will go on until 4 PM EST. This is literally tomorrow, so put it on your calendar before it’s too late. You can attend by becoming a paid member of The Cultural Futurist, which will cause the Zoom link to be displayed for you under the cut. Membership also grants you entrance to all my future salons and book clubs while giving you access to my writing archives and private chat.

So! Join the frontlines and grab a front-row seat to the creative vanguard, read your speeches to the craziest audience you’ll ever encounter, or simply stop by to have a great time and meet like-minded people. Become a member of The Cultural Futurist and join the spectacle before it has ended like it never even began.

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Don’t ask me if I’ll have any live recordings because the answer will always be the same: no. We’ve already been over this. Make the function or miss the regime change. You are free to show up late as long as you are intellectually appealing and don’t mind potentially missing your turn to recite your speech. The Zoom link is below and for paid subscribers old and new:

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We’re creating tastemakers for the new regime.

We’ve got a new Culture and Couture Brief today. Our last brief was with creative writer and aspiring model Layla, and you can check it out here if you missed the release. Twice a month, I’ll feature someone who is leading the culture in an unexpected way. We’re inf…

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We’re creating tastemakers for the new regime.

This is today’s Culture and Couture Brief. Our last brief was with creative producer and Seinfeld actor CK Steefel, and you can check it out here if you missed the action. Twice a month, I’ll feature someone who is leading the…

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We’re creating tastemakers for the new regime.

This is today’s Culture and Couture Brief. Our last installment was with cultural critic Mo Diggs here, so you can check it out if you missed the release. Twice a month, I’ll feature someone who is leading the way on the aesth…

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Remember when startups were about building apps and disrupting fallen industries? How quaint. We're about to enter an era where the most exciting ventures aren't about coding, unless we’re talking about coding entirely new cultures. Take a minute and think about the last time a tech company really blew your mind.

I’ll wait.

You’re bored, aren’t you? You’re bored with Silicon Valley. You miss the early days of the Bay Area in which pioneers and visionaries were breaking new ground. You miss the founder parties in which AI philosophers would mingle with creative geniuses focused on reinventing biotech. You miss the days when the blockchain was a cool idea you were discussing with your developer friends. Now the culture has declined and you’re sick of everything related to Silicon Valley.

So, what’s the problem? The problem is that Silicon Valley is boring. The solution is for us to create something better.

Chinese workers already behave like AI with their high-level conformity, yet somehow their ChatGPT overnight project DeepSeek managed to win over many OpenAI users. Today’s entrepreneurs who build products are in competition with monopolies that discard them like trash. These entrepreneurs are headed out the door on a one-way ticket to some shady self-help seminar. The same faction of the same names and the same faces run the same show. It’s all fake, and everyone authentic is done with the charade.

This traditional world of startups have become predictable at best. Another B2B platform, another marketplace app, and another AI tool promising to revolutionize something that doesn’t need revolutionizing. When a startup isn’t predictable it’s so over-the-top it seems like a prank. “Uber for sweatshops” was the latest pitch at Y-Combinator. We’re funding sweatshops in Silicon Valley now, but the efficient kind.

Nevertheless, anyone with good strategic foresight understands how the ways in which we’re accelerating will be defined by a new set of rules. Startups are, and have always been, set for disruption. What better way to create disruption than to disrupt the entire startup ecosystem itself? The political stage has left us with an exciting new market opportunity that we’re already seizing.

Real startups are about culture.

Welcome to the Age of the Cultural Startup

Always look on the fringes if you want to see what comes next. We’re seeing micro-communities spawn their own economies, aesthetics, philosophical frameworks, and nations. These aren't subcultures. They're startup cultures filling a lost void. Look at Praxis Nation. They recently received $525M to build a city based on what they define as heroic beauty. Praxis is cultural startup that only marks the beginning of this changeover.

Cultural startups are poised to create a new ruling class by producing myths for an ascendent elite. These ideas force founders and investors in Silicon Valley to become more innovative if they want to stay in the game. Real disruption is headed our way. Cultural startups will begin to reach critical mass in mid-2026.

So, how do you create a cultural startup? How do you know that a cultural startup will be a worthy investment? What is the anatomy of a cultural startup?

Read on.

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We’re back and we’re walking the tightrope. Get ready for another Nietzschean Book Club here at The Cultural Futurist. Last time, we discussed Twilight of the Idols, a classic title in which Nietzsche smashed false doctrines and idols with a hammer, sharing his life-affirming philosophy as he blasted the lies of universal morality. We discussed Nietzsche’s beef with Socrates and how he believed mankind had become weak in its pursuit of “progress.”

This time, we'll be discussing Thus Spoke Zarathustra, the first of Nietzsche’s books that I ever picked up. It was my gateway drug to becoming who I am today. Thus Spoke Zarathustra introduced us to the concept of the Übermensch. It became a Bible for freethinkers throughout history, its brutal and beautiful poetry remaining with us to this day. If you don't have a physical copy, you can find yourself a digital copy here.

This is a book club for vitalists who see beyond the mundane and lead their own way, even in the most difficult of times. This is not some networking event and we are not interested in hearing about your views on celebrity culture or political media. Of course any of you celebrities and politicians in my audience are welcome to attend, as long as Nietzsche speaks to you in a way that ignites the fire in your soul. Simply do not talk about your tabloids at the book club. As long as you’re a freethinker who can stand alone through the test of time, you are welcome to join us. No slave moralists allowed. Do not show me resentment for keeping the rabble out.

If you’ve ever felt like you’re the only person who knows what it’s like to think in a very certain way, Thus Spoke Zarathustra will bring you home. You may need to embark on a difficult journey, but who wants things to be easy when easy things are for dull and unfortunate cowards? Let us triumph through our struggles and discuss what it means to be alive in an era that is finally starting to awaken. At least a little bit, I mean! You don’t need to be a scholar of Nietzsche to attend. It’s fine if you haven’t read any of his books, as long as you’re ready to learn. There are 5 books discussed in this series, and their order is as follows:

1. The Birth of Tragedy

2. Twilight of the Idols

3. Thus Spoke Zarathustra [you are here]

4. Beyond Good and Evil

5. On the Genealogy of Morals

This will give everyone the opportunity to digest these books rather than skim through them like dilettantes. This selection of books does not mean that other works of Nietzsche are off-limits. It simply means that Thus Spoke Zarathustra will be our main focus for this particular event. Get ready to transcend the herd mentality and walk the tightrope toward a higher species. It’s the next step of human evolution and it’s not taking place in Silicon Valley. It’s taking place at The Cultural Futurist.

I’m offering a 40% off Lifetime Discount to anyone who joins The Cultural Futurist as a paid subscriber for the rest of this month. Why? I want to you enjoy the pleasures of my community, even if you’re a temporarily embarrassed aristocrat. You’ll be able to take part in my book clubs—starting with this one—and attend my salons. You’ll even be able to join my private group chat and view all of my locked posts. What are you waiting for?

Get 40% off forever

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This Nietzschean Book Club will take place on February 22nd @ 4 PM EST. If you become a paid subscriber you’ll see the Zoom link under the cut. If you’re already a paid subscriber, you’re one of the select few. I’m looking forward to seeing you soon, even if you just want to come hang out. What matters is that you’re a freethinker who is on the level. It’s our time now. Don’t miss it.

Zoom link under the cut:

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We’re creating tastemakers for the new regime.

This is today’s Culture and Couture Brief. If you missed our first installment with Theresa Tallien here, now is your chance to make things right. Twice a month, I’ll feature someone who is leading the way on the cultural fron…

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Fringe groups can be fun.

Fringe groups want mainstream recognition because they’re sick of slaving away at their jobs. They want to move up in society. Yet how does a fringe group achieve recognition? What is the theory behind the praxis?

It’s sort of like this.

The fringe group decides they’re going to recruit a Respectable Rita to make some magic happen. Once Respectable Rita is waving the flag, everyone can move out of Badtown. At least that’s the plan.

Respectable Rita is a bitch. Let’s get that out of the way. I have no problem admitting this, having both served as a Respectable Rita and been personally hired to discover Respectable Rita’s for questionable employers. Respectable Rita is a bitch, but the fringe group tolerates her because they want to move out of Badtown. They tell Respectable Rita what they think she wants to hear.

“We like your necklace. Your haircut reminds us of that one celebrity. Game of Thrones? More like Game of You, Rita!"

Yet people forget this one basic thing: Respectable Rita has her own fringe group. She’s serving as the Respectable Rita for your fringe group in order to get her own fringe group off the ground. Respectable Rita doesn’t care if you compliment her, but she’ll still pay lip service to your cause.

Like clockwork, the fringe group begins to argue and whine.

“Everything was chill until Respectable Rita came along. She doesn’t really understand our movement.”

“Just deal with her, bro.”

Eventually:

• Someone will sleep with Respectable Rita

• Someone will get jealous

• Someone will punch someone else

• Someone will call the authorities

• Someone will end up in jail

Respectable Rita was just another anti-social actor in the end, but you trusted her to make you popular. This was all your fault because you fell for her game. Now you’re a mere statistic, but at least she waved the flag one time at that party. Remember how hot it was when she screamed your agenda?

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If you like what at I’m doing here at The Cultural Futurist, don’t forget to buy me a coffee.