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I sometimes wish I could time travel back to when goth meant something—when it wasn’t just an aesthetic curated for engagement, but a lived experience, rooted in alienation, art, and actual subversion. A time before TikTok makeup tutorials, before everyone and their algorithm thought “goth” was just fishnets, eyeliner, and whatever they saw trending.
When short form content didn't exist, there wasn't all this tendency towards trivialization and mishmash of meaningless e-girl-style subcultures.
Back then, individuality mattered. No two goths looked alike, and there was a spirit of experimentation and rawness that you just don’t see now, not in a feed designed to reward sameness. Now we’re stuck in a digital culture of regurgitated aesthetics and irony-poisoned mimicry. Goths have become content. A meme. A lookbook. Something to try on. They want the aesthetic, the sex appeal, the softcore version that won't threaten their algorithmic reach.
It makes me wonder: do we need gatekeeping again? Not in the elitist sense of "you can't sit with us," but as a way to protect subcultural depth from becoming completely hollowed out. Because how can something stay alternative if it’s constantly being broadcast, commodified, and reabsorbed into the mainstream?
Web 1.0 had its problems, but at least it allowed for genuine subcultural isolation—forums, fan sites, LiveJournal pages with 12 people who got it. Social media has stripped that away. Everything is visible. Everything is shareable. And in the process, everything starts to look and feel the same.
If everyone can access everything at once, without history, without context, without cost—then what even is a subculture anymore?
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Roey Go
I agree with what you said, when I was younger the community was in its final stages as a real subculture that had less to do with fashion and more to do with a perspective, a world view with some valid intellectual merit behind it, but then in the early 2000s the Emo scene exploded and goth somehow got absorbed into that mainstream cliché and lost it's meaning as an idea, the mainstream raped it into nothing more than a collection of chokers on a shelf at Hot Topic.
but the fact (unfortunately) is that those of us who were part of the community allowed it to die out... Maybe it was due to the inherit nihilistic "all shall wither and die" attitude that was part of the whole charm, or part of the fact that most of us were reluctant to carry it with us into our 20s, it eventually turned into a parody of itself, like the "Goth Kids" in South Park.
I take comfort in the fact that just like any other real authentic subculture at the time, it came to an end exactly because it was real. We held the idea to a higher regard than the thing itself. The 21st century, it appears is no place for ideology.