Aesthetics Power

The Internet is truly an astonishing place. There is an unthinkable variety of subcultures, some of which have migrated from the real life, acquiring new forms and rooting their ideas in the digital environment. However, a plenty of "native" web communities, or "microcultures" have been arising, too. Undoubtedly, every subculture is unique and distinctive, having its personal atmosphere, art, and even ideology. The whole set of subjectively beautiful forms produced by these subcultures is the modern web aesthetics. It can appear in many forms of art: traditional and digital art, pixel art, collages, 3D modeling, photography, music, and even fashion, forming the single and unique image of a subculture.

Over the last decade, a big amount of such communities have been spawned, and all of them share common features. Of course, I mean the music subcultures like Outrun (often called Retrowave but that is primarily a music term), Seapunk, Vaporwave, and others. The last one even has turned the very word "aesthetics" into the memes, as well as the "wave" as the genre foundation.

It is no surprise that many online subcultures are based on the nostalgia. Honestly speaking, nostalgia has always been a sort of fuel for the civilization machine. Nowadays, many realize the wide availability of this fuel and begin to overuse it, causing the romanticization of the past to reach its peak. During the Renaissance, people were nostalgic for classical antiquity (although they needed to search for some source of values and principles to break free from the oppression of Middle Ages), in the 1980's they were longing for the 50's, and in the 2010's everybody is praising the nineteen-eighties. The 80's have become the icon of the "good old days" feeling even for those who has never lived during that time, as the neon and hypertrophied image of this era has penetrated all areas of the media and is being successfully exploited. However, absolutely any aesthetics could be exploited, if only it would be quite popular and in demand as the eighties.

Of course, this had happened to Outrun. In our time, when the verge between the underground and the mainstream is especially fragile, as if there was an invisible wall, the popularization is just a matter of time. By 2013, the outrun aesthetics, like nostalgia for the 80's, was gathering momentum, spawning pieces like Drive, Hotline Miami, and Far Cry 3: Blood Dragon, as well as raising such artists like Perturbator, Kavinsky, Carpenter Brut, and many others. In 2015-2017 it went mainstream and entrenched in the mass consciousness. Thus, Outrun has grown from a subculture into a part of the mainstream pop culture, a massive cultural stratum. I guess, the peak of its popularization came along with the phenomenon of Stranger Things and especially the Retrowave Text Generator that devalued the visual aspects of Outrun. Thus, nostalgia turned into a product.

Meanwhile, vaporwave was gaining popularity, being remembered as a meme. The fans were complaining about "normies" that killed their favorite genre, turning it into some kind of a joke. However, I can understand them, since many started to confuse all those styles. Indeed, such overflow led to the crisis of visual aesthetics. There were simply over too many of them, and the people began to mix them, unconsciously exploring new forms but misinterpreting the very point. Some, as it has been said, was confusing the genres, while others sarcastically mocked the endless "waves" and "aesthetics" phenomenon itself. However, the popularity of vapor, seapunk, and other microgenres has faded because fashion is constantly changing, and for masses they were nothing more than another trend.

The Runet didn't stand aside, as in 2014 it gave birth to the new aesthetics, webpunk (вебпанк). Inspired by the low-quality 3D-models from the 90's Russian music videos and the web 1.0 stylistics, as well as the Tumblr aesthetics (including vaporwave and seapunk), this genre of visual art became the local phenomenon. Its variety included the Arabic script, images of Putin, synthetic cannabinoids, symbols of the Russian imageboards (that were at the time assimilating with VK, the largest social network in Russia), glitches, seapunk dolphins, various vaporwave elements, and anything else. As a means of self-expression, webpunk captured the minds of young people, and over time turned itself into an absolutely eclectic genre of collages with its canons (like symmetrically arranged figures and details) but with no thematic limits. Nevertheless, by 2015 it has lost its popularity. Also, unlike other styles, webpunk is primarily a visual aesthetics. Some, however, define it as a music genre but this a common mistake, since all the tracks under that label are the same vaporwave/seapunk, or even Witch House. Another progenitor of the microculture is the "web-punkzine" Guerilla, an independent journal which in 2013 decided to change the principle of news publication, transferring them into Google Docs. They also wrote about the mentioned currents, seapunk in particular. So, originally webpunk is a kind of protest between the web designers that have been tired of boring and soulless minimalism of today's websites.

As already mentioned, the loads of these microcultures were just a trend, nothing more than a fleeting spirit of the time. Thus, the reasons of their popularity are quite obvious. The catchy visual style coupled with peculiar but understandable music both made the people feel the need for belonging to one or another digital sub- and microculture, bringing many talented artists, and became a global meme. Moreover, another factor is the emergence of demand for nostalgia caused by narrowness and crisis of modern culture. Who knows, maybe in 30 years we will praise the 10's era and its recursive 80's nostalgia, or it will be a single eclectic chimera. Anyway, all this is just a little page of the Internet history.