Black beanie, persistent stench of Marlboros, battered jacket, alcoholism, chronically online, incel asset-less fuck-up, a new copy of Schopenhauer's Essays and Aphorisms dog-eared on page 20, red-pill, nondescript slavic country, industrial wasteland, sunset cigarette photo, night walk, Radiohead Ok Computer, Molchat Doma, “I want to escape this mess,” drug addiction, normie, chad, stacey, wojack, zoomer, Kesha “You’re Love is My Drug 8-bit Slowed,” winter arc, gym rate, Bloomer, Albert Camus, Crime and Punishment (Never finished), reddit, no sleep.
This assemblage illustrates the superficiality and grotesque self-aggrandizement of the “Doomer.” The whole movement, built on a deceptive sense of uniqueness, filled with anomic voids convinced they possess a unique clarity represents nothing more than the pervasiveness of a consumerist model that can turn the most diffuse sentiments into a marketable style.
“Punk died when it became punk.” I have heard this repeated so often it has lost the sparkle of a fresh axiom and become a tool worn out by the efficacy of its use. A name, as pointed out by Wittgenstein, is not a move in the language game so much as the start of it, the metaphorical placement of a chess piece on the board. A name allows the smooth transmission of meaning; an ethereal dinner table around which we can converse with a shared reservoir of meaning. This, however, comes with a risk. As soon as a thing is named and it is capable of being deployed in popular discourse, it can and will be commodified. Once punk was a recognizable thing, or a thing recognizable as something of value, the superficial dressing could be utilized to sell a whole new nexus of things. It’s not just the music; everything associated or engendered by the music, the ethos itself, becomes a thing to be sold. The seventies punk band Crass staged a noble assault against the phony revolution of punk with their song “Punk is Dead:”
Yes that's right, punk is dead,
It's just another cheap product for the consumers head.
Bubblegum rock on plastic transistors,
Schoolboy sedition backed by big time promoters.
CBS promote the Clash,
But it ain't for revolution, it's just for cash.
Punk became a fashion just like hippy used to be
And it ain't got a thing to do with you or me (Crass)
The ethos and tonal characteristics of punk became things in themselves, and detached from the movement the revolution and aggression could be easily integrated into the consumerist system. In an absurd turn of events, the anti-capitalist message of punk was absorbed into the system and utilized as an effective face to promote consumption. Marx could never have imagined an attitude could begin dancing with the same panache as the table.
We can turn to children's television for an insightful metaphor to illustrate the process of ethos being integrated and deployed by commercialism. In the first season of the Nickelodeon series Avatar the Last Airbender, we meet Koh the face stealer. Koh appears once in the show when the protagonist Aang enters the spirit world searching for information on the moon and ocean spirits. Aang’s mentor informs him that Koh will give him the information he requires, but warns him that if he shows any emotion Koh will steal his face. For a children's show, the encounter with Koh plays out with an anachronistic eeriness. Koh swaps through a variety of faces, revealing to Aang one face he attributes to the love of a past Avatar. Each transition between faces seeks to provoke an emotional response. This deployment of past faces in order to attain new faces is too perfect an allegory for consumerism to remain infantilized in children's television. The rigid social restrictions of the nineteen fifties yields Rock n Roll; the consumerist appeal of rock n roll brings it into the mainstream; the alienation felt from the presence of the consumerism in a movement once associated with youth freedom produces an acute alienation that produces punk; punk appeals to the disaffected; punk is integrated into the mainstream… so on ad infinitum. Capitalism is a more grotesque Koh, using emotion to provoke new emotions it can absorb and use to perpetuate the process.
We can return to the face eponymous with this essay: the Doomer. Punk, despite its failure, strove towards something; it had the audacity to offer an ethos and aesthetic that strove to challenge authority. No challenge can be found in the doomer. The doomer contents themself with the recognition of something being wrong; it arrives at the first step and ceases any further progress. Most observers miss that this lethargy contains nothing profound, one should look elsewhere for a scintillating indictment of society. Scroll through the Reddit Doomer feed and you will quickly come across some post inviting “Doomers” to participate in a study conducted to explain the movement.
What bullshit. Direct your attention elsewhere; Doomerism is just a boring derivative of punk. Koh has taken another face; without realizing it, you are showing emotion. It could be a simple wince or contraction of the lip; no matter how small, Koh notices and strikes. The most listless movements, so long as their is sentiment, will be integrated into the market’s lexicon. Soon after a group of alienated people begin to find solace and identity in their loneliness, there will be some kooks that want to name it and study it as a thing in itself; a few more kooks will notice the growing market for black beanies and marlboros, and after a few long meetings conducted in executive suites, the connection will be established, and the Doomer will become a marketable demographic, another face for the Koh and another aesthetic we can buy.