The Death of Subculture: Gibson's Failure and Chapman's Explanation

If you're a geek of a certain age (i.e., middle) you've read Neuromancer. And lines from this novel may occasionally come back to you, and not just the opening hook about Chiba. For me, one of the repeaters is

Night City was like a deranged experiment in social Darwinism, designed by a bored researcher who kept one thumb permanently on the fast-forward button.

This sets the frenetic hyper-competitive pace of the future. In Gibson's future, youth culture followed suit:

Fads swept the youth of the Sprawl at the speed of light: entire subcultures could rise overnight, thrive for a dozen weeks, and then vanish utterly.

And here Gibson did what science fiction does best - straight-line extrapolation, which often fails, as it did here.

My own youth subculture was metal (which drags on into old age for many of us.) But rather than accelerating in their life cycles, subcultures seemed to disappear as a cultural phenomenon. I realized this when I was passing through a very small remote town in the western U.S. on a vacation in 2008, saw a gaggle of teenagers with metal shirts and trenchcoats by the side of the road, and realized that I hadn't seen such an assemblage for years by that point. I speculated about the mechanism here.

David Chapman at Meaningness has an explanation which, while not necessarily in conflict with this mechanism, is much broader and relates the phenomenon to modes of developing meaning, understanding of morality, and explains why a counterculture appeared, then subcultures (a "native" mode prevalent from 1975-2000 for Gen Xers), then the atomization of youth culture in the aughts. The full chart is here (you REALLY should view and consider it), but the specific discussion of subcultures is here.