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Qualitative research data in this article was collected from a Koi Pond study run by NinetyEight in March 2025. All names have been changed for privacy purposes. The Koi Pond is NinetyEight’s proprietary research community with over 1500+ Gen Z participants. Learn more about The Koi Pond here.
Subculture just got a reboot and it’s… um, confused?
#IdentityCrisisRevolutionReinvention TBH, TBD
“The way we present ourselves conveys where we fit within society and signals to others that we are one of them.” - Alex, 2003 via The Koi Pond.
Generationally, Gen Z is obsessed with identity. If I had to guess why, I’d say it’s because the world we live in cares more about our feeds than our faces. This, as it turns out, seems to have really done a number on us… like, observably so. There is an omnipresent awareness of self that seeps into our language, habits, and consumption. Online, the exertion to manicure perception manifests in our social rituals: polishing personal branding on LinkedIn, plucking and pruning for the perfect Instagram feed, and TikTokifying yourself into a consumable contradiction buried seven layers deep in irony (we call this brain rot, it comes in different strains). In a way, we’re kind of living in a pseudo-metaverse (don’t get too excited Zuckerberg, I said pseudo). For Gen Z, your online presence is as important as your real-life one.
Now, considering this, you can hardly blame us for pandering to our profiles; I mean, I can’t even tell you how many jobs I’ve seen ask for social handles to accompany a resume. We are long past the days of personal pages and anonymity. This 2025! You’ll need an app to do your laundry, a subscription for your dishwasher, and an Instagram profile to show your boss.
Online identity carries more than just social capital; it’s how we can tell the world who we are. This question of identity has partly to do with why the online space has segmented itself into oblivion. Subculture, which up until now had always been rooted in identity, has needed to shift and adapt to this new online framework. And while Gen Z may be demographically opposed to labels and their generalizations, oh boy, do we love a ✨cutesy✨ category. We are officially in an era of a social media-induced identity... um, I hate to say crisis, so let’s go with exploration and let the hashtags fill in the rest.
#OOTD#darkacademia#prep#romanticacademia#bookish#bookishhaul#twee#tweeaest hetic#thesecrethistory#donnatart#booktok#lightacademia#AHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHH HHHHHH
One Gen Z Koi Ponder put it plainly: “Culture is based mostly from values. Aesthetics really only exist for those chronically online.” - Nat, 1999
It’s well reasoned - that being said, pretty much everyone you know is likely operating at some degree of chronic online-ness. These days, it’s difficult not to be. But, despite how catalytic they are in our self-actualization, could the algorithms in our lives be holding us back?
(Spoiler: YES!)
Youth Culture Post the Death of the Third Space
The death of the third space is being addressed with a mind-numbing (but begrudgingly understandable) slowness, and that molasses pace of change is not going to dethrone the dominant meeting place for youth culture: social media. This isn’t really breaking news, though. Third spaces have been disappearing for years, leaving fewer places for young people to gather, create, belong, blah blah blah. But that loss has pushed Gen Z further and further online; when the pandemic hit, even our most organic spaces had to be rebuilt to survive isolation and distance.
Post-pandemic, social media has spurred the inception of many (toooo many) online subcultures, allowing people to make space for themselves in a way that was previously only possible through local coffee shop meet-ups and the artsy, coffee-stained zines you get there. “I think it’s helped people to be able to discover many different parts of themselves,” one of the respondents told us. “It’s birthed so many niche communities within subcultures which allows for individuals to find a place where they truly belong.” - Nat, 1999
But from a bird's-eye, 2025 viewpoint, the internet is basically just this big huge web of micro-niches eating each other in the lawless kingdom of the digital swamp. Believe it or not, this is an endpoint no one was aiming for. Before social media, online communities were fairly self-contained and built around specific, localized interests. Fast forwarding to now of course, those spaces have ballooned quadruple the size, reshaped into something faster, broader, and much less organic for today’s user. It’s a more fertile soil for culture to take root, sure - but everything in it is also hugely influenced by our consumption habits. As forums morph into marketplaces, a large part of crafting our online personas becomes curating what will be seen - and rewarded - by the spaces they exist in.
In this context, subcultural movements are just as likely to be disseminated across channels as they are packaged up as TikTok trends. And while subculture has historically existed pretty inextricably with larger sociopolitical movements, the lines between expression and commercial interest are blurring with our principles.
Subculture vs core-ification
Traditionally, the basis of subculture has always been about who you are in contrast to who you are conditioned to be; it’s formed on ideology that creates music, fashion, and art within a specific niche. It made the inner self visible to the world and hardened that vulnerability into a statement - more often than not, a political one. That’s why, for many, these spaces are still so deeply personal. One Koi Ponder shared, “it’s kind of a ‘cringe-free' environment I can participate in and be myself. Especially when it comes to exploring my fashion and queer identity. I also love the music and how it's not manicured or over-polished—just people being awesome.” - Gray, 2001. For a lot of us online, subculture is a refuge hiding inside a declaration.
But the digital space is constantly changing as more of us engage with it; what was initially a way to decentralize and diversify subculture has led to the dilution of communities there. This is where core-ification comes in, subculture’s shitty Shein dupe.
Mostly, ‘cores’ just give watered-down knockoff vibes - all the aesthetics but rarely anything below the surface or beyond the affiliate link. A Koi Ponder expressed it this way: “[Core-ification] fractures subcultures into an exponential amount of meaningless labels with no backing/culture to them, and it makes true finding of identity harder to achieve.” - Harley, 2005
And yet, our fleeting obsessions churn up a whole lot of digital and material waste. Don’t believe me? Try trudging through the graveyard of #egirl content on TikTok from 2020. It doesn’t take much to become a ‘core’, nor does it take much for one to fall out of fashion. In our struggle to assert who we are, we end up defining it with what we consume, and this is the result. Where once the worst a subculture could be is gatekept, it’s now paywalled.
Marginal and mainstream all at once
Hate to go all ‘in yee old days’ on you, but in this case, it’s relevant. See, it used to be that subcultures’ primary place was on the margins, bubbling up from underground communities before meeting the mainstream. Now, everything kind of exists all at once, hyper-categorized and immediately accessible.
“Everything used to last longer before TikTok,” one of our Koi Ponders pointed out. “Memes, fandoms, etc. It just feels so much faster and less remarkable! People should take their time with interests and have fun, that's what puts the culture in subculture, it needs time to brew between people.” Jean, 2006
Post-social media, our online spaces have turned subculture into a petri dish where aesthetics, trends, and movements develop at an accelerated rate, going viral before their explorations are fully defined. There’s experimentation, but less incubation; the commodification comes built-in. Every niche, no matter how obscure, is optimized for shopping, search, and social. As a result, online culture has become both deeply specific and insanely uniform all at once. Sure, it’s easier than ever to find your people - but harder to protect what you’ve built once it starts to gain traction.
That said, not everyone sees the fast churn of aesthetics and identity online as a loss. Some view it less as dilution and more as accessibility; proof that subculture has always been a tool for self-discovery, even if the tools may look different now. “The people creating these poorly thought-out aesthetic names are just teenagers trying to find their personal style,” one of our respondents explained. “I don’t think it’s wrong for them to be seeking out community online… There were plenty of niche subcultures in the 2000s-2010s; they all just sort of used similar umbrella terms. Now it’s just easier to find your niche.” - Dallas, 2006
Communities vs customers
So the Algorithm ate the Scene. Oops. But does that mean all of our subcultures are doomed to be performative? The Instagram ads can certainly make it feel like that, but then we’d be putting things way too simply.
Undeniably, there’s an inherent tribalism to subculture that can sometimes feel like community, and others, that one scene from Sister Sister where all the girls show up to prom in the same dress. But social media didn’t invent that; as humans, we are always blurring the line between belonging and conforming. It’s just that our FYP’s have made the task of extricating our identities from our wallets more difficult. One Koi Ponder told us that this has “reduced very unique and complex cultural influences into something you consume rather than something you participate in.” Which, yeah, sounds about right. Ultimately, are we expressing who we are, or just signaling our aesthetic affiliations (and by proxy, value) to our feeds? Either way, our endeavors of individuality are making us all look and talk the same.
Online culture as subculture as mainstream culture (and every other designation that belongs on this theoretically endless chain) creates a collective opportunity to share culture, yes - but it can make the one we live in more homogenous as opposed to more diverse. And that homogeneity is a threat to the very individuality these niches were literally built to cultivate.
That being said, sometimes it really can be hard to realize when performance replaces participation, even when you’d think it’d be easy to tell the difference. Hence the question at the heart of every overly-serious Substack post: am I participating in a culture, or a customer base? Probably followed by a screenshot of Sylvia Plath eating a fig or something. A Koi Ponder put it succinctly: “Brandy Melleville flannels and Shein jeans aren’t grunge. You’re just wearing flannel and denim.” - Darcy, 2006
At one point, we have to stop and reckon with the divergence from the whole point of it all. Because the ultimate danger here isn’t dilution; it’s detachment. And then we forget why we cared in the first place.
The future of subcultures
There is something beautiful, yet essentially broken, in how we’ve built subculture to exist online; the rules are different now. And in this new space, the tools designed to help us discover ourselves have created an environment that erodes those identities.
It’s probably fair to say that Gen Z has killed subculture as it previously existed (I know, RIP 🪦). But our new norm doesn’t necessarily negate the cultural value of these online communities; it instead forces us to reconsider how the infrastructure of our social spaces affects them, and in turn, how they then affect us. For better or worse, we’ve erected something new and more nebulous in this hyper-accessible meeting ground. The way we indulge it evolves with the ecosystem. So… I suppose it’ll just have to grow with us.
The future of subculture, straight from Gen Z:
Want a glimpse into what comes next? Here’s our vision for evolving subculture in the social space.
“Make shit messy again. Don't make it all visually clean and perfect. I wanna see your duct tape wallets and bows and your shirt you painted to be all colorful and your homemade band tees. Bring back diy.” - Cameron, 2008
“More variety and authenticity. More slices of people’s lives, more emotion, more action. There’s so little revolution in this era, and it makes everything feel so dull. I want to see people really expressing what they’re passionate about.” - Reese, 2006
“It really wouldn't be possible to change virality, but I'd start pushing more actual goth creators to the front of tags and fyps. A core benefit to social media is its ability to teach visual examples of concepts! Let's capitalize on that and reduce misinformation about the goth community by featuring actual goths.” - Shea, 2005
“Bring back forums. Like Reddit seems pretty cool. Also, get rid of the algorithms!! It makes it less democratic and organic when we all get fed the same shlop, which gets boosted to the top just because of all the arguments in the comments.” - Avery, 2000
“I would present it as it is: a lifestyle. The real "punk aesthetic" in 2024 would be learning from community, donating to those in need, taking public transit, and not participating in overconsumption.” - Jay, 2005
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