Came across this op-ed last week from John Cameron Mitchell. While on a speaking tour, a classroom of college students asked him flat-out: “How do we access punk?” The instructions:

“Your homework is to stop canceling each other, find out about punk, and get laid while you’re at it,” I told them. “Punk isn’t a hairstyle; it’s getting your friends together to make useful stories outside approved systems. And it’s still happening right now, all over the world.” MAGA has adopted an authoritarian style of punk that disdains what Elon Musk calls our “greatest human weakness,” empathy.

I lived in the kind of house where I had to sneak over to a friend’s place to watch SLC Punk. Maybe this was for the best. I’d like to think that my folks were doing what they could to protect me from ill influences, but in hindsight they likely just didn’t want to deal with a kid who said “fuck” all the time. Like a lot of my friends, there was the approved system of Suburbia Colorado – good grades, no drugs, go to college.

There wasn’t a lot of “cancelling” going on. No one had smartphones. We knew we weren’t supposed to talk to strangers, but overall I think we were far less afraid fo the world.

Gotta wonder if the proliferation of social apps – with their community standards and algorithms that favor certian content styles – squashed the “punk” ethos in the younger generations. The reprocussions for going outside of the defined boundary are swift and severe – there’s no room for experiments, there’s no way to take a chance.