What ‘Dinergoth’ Gets Wrong About Class in 21st-Century America

Are America’s “normies” getting weirder? In his splashy recent piece in The New Atlantis, Robert Mariani answers in the affirmative. According to the writer—who is also described as a startup founder and CEO—there has been a “desacralization” of the country’s regional cultures in a corrosive slurry of internet strangeness. “In the 2020s, the weird soul of placeless America is being born on Discord servers,” runs the subhead. In Mariani’s telling, this is a story of the online world conquering the real world—of the internet, once a refuge for misfits in the U.S., spilling beyond its digital borders and subjugating the normie masses. 

At the heart of Mariani’s tale is a new demographic, which he brands the “dinergoth.” The “dinergoth” is both a person and a condition, “a concentrated archetype and mass-cultural wave.” The dinergoth is ubiquitous, appearing wherever internet-mediated popular culture and material hardship meet. Mariani lists the dinergoth in its various abject guises, painting a picture of marginalized modern-day small-town America. “The sigh from the provinces,” he writes, “is the Hello Kitty ketamine raver, the dispensary cashier in a Korn T-shirt, the TikTok cosplayer dancing in the parking lot, the VTuber with a day job in a suburban office park.” The dinergoth lacks both a history and a future, spawning almost without warning in those familiar landscapes of American ennui. Mariani cannot help but make the dinergoth emblematic of seismic changes in national life. “The dinergoth is made possible by two things,” he argues, “American stagnation and the breakdown of barriers.”

The former, he blames on house prices. The latter, on the internet.

“The dinergoth lacks both a history and a future, spawning almost without warning in those familiar landscapes of American ennui”

The essay’s cover illustration, a cloyingly current rendition of Manet’s A Bar at the Folies-Bergère, presents a kind of idealized dinergoth pin-up: an androgynous convenience store clerk replete with all sorts of recognizably “alt” personal adornment—colorfully dyed hair, cat ears, arm tattoos, septum piercing—hitting her (their?) elfbar, vainly. Mariani writes that dinergoths like this one are engaged in their own “complacent downward mobility,” having been thoroughly submerged (like Manet’s barmaid) in the tawdry material culture of capitalist excess. But where the mirrors in Manet’s painting playfully reflect the raucous social life of fin-de-siècle Paris, the convex security mirror behind the dinergoth reflects nothing. We don’t get a glimpse of who or what she sees, not even a warped one. The story this tells is of a society that remains composed of different classes, struggling as always to understand each other.

Case in point: Mariani first encountered the dinergoth, he says, in his romantic life. He met his ex-girlfriend on Tinder in Portland. Their differences were clear from the start. His affectations were calculated (“I had come from a world where it’s important to signal that you’re into ideas”); hers were reflexive (“her simplicity, her lack of guile…”). Where he self-consciously brandished his “higher” forms of self-cultivation, “she was oblivious to the status signals that I had taken as a given.” She was irreverent, indolent, and a little juvenile, everything Mariani “as a sophisticated adult” is not. When she ultimately broke up with him, Mariani felt compelled to retrofit her “incoherent” reasoning with his own explanation. Their relationship failed, he says, because of their mismatched social locations: “I worked in tech, she worked at a vape shop.” 

Still confounded by their breakup, Mariani “needed answers,” and most tellingly, “needed a category.” Desperate to put his dinergoth ex in her place, he retreated to a repository of internet categories (“Tumblr girl,” “e-girl,” “alt-girl”) that might contain her. Finding these received categories wanting, Mariani conjured up the “dinergoth” because, he argues, it condenses the apparent paradox of this specimen’s widespread presence across “Normal America” on the one hand, and the bricolage of its “alternative” self-fashioning on the other. In his mind, Mariani is able to master her and the rest of her ilk with this clunky neologism.

Whatever Mariani’s motivations, the real story here isn’t the emergence of the dinergoth as a new cultural type, nor is it the death of the regional cultures the dinergoth has supposedly destroyed. More pressing, I’d argue, is the creeping domestication of the internet in the 21st century—and the evolving appearance of that slippery thing called class, both online and IRL. 

“The real story, I’d argue, is the creeping domestication of the internet in the 21st century”

In the last 20 years, “aging out” of adolescent subcultures has become a class marker.

In the outward appearance of dinergoths and startup guys like Mariani, we see which young Americans are permitted to progress to adulthood. The dinergoth’s privation is legible precisely because they are openly, publicly a dinergoth; someone whose consumer identity hasn’t developed beyond what they can realistically afford. I can’t claim to know how Mariani dresses himself in everyday life. But there aren’t many patent attorneys who manage to retain the trappings of their adolescent selves. Goths of any stripe don’t tend to last too long in the white-collar world, as entering into it requires the “growing up” of one’s online self, a purge of all evidence of misspent youth. The dinergoth violates these hoary bourgeois notions of publicity and privacy: they don’t have any corporate executives to impress, either on LinkedIn or at the convenience store.

Mariani wants us to believe that the internet has rendered the effects of class inert. Here, his role as founder and CEO of an AI startup becomes doubly significant. In one exceptionally preening passage, he invites the reader to imagine looking down(!) from a bicoastal flight upon these sorry casualties of America’s protracted economic involution. “Pull back far enough and America becomes a single screen, ten thousand towns as pixels running the same program,” he writes. Mariani’s piercing Apollonian vision from 30,000 feet sounds less like a rigorous description of reality (at that distance, how could it be?) than a mask-off moment of misanthropic wish-casting. Mariani wishes the internet could reduce us all to pliable, algorithmic subjects. Instead, we remain tethered to who we are and where we came from—to our social class—as awkward as that might be for people like him to contend with.

“He invites the reader to imagine looking down from a bicoastal flight upon these sorry casualties of America’s protracted economic involution”

Mariani’s concept of the “dinergoth” speaks to what is actually a blinkered, self-serving vision of our online and offline worlds. Mariani presents us with a portrait of this distinctly online type, painted in the redolent colors of today’s internet subcultures. We never do see what the dinergoth sees. But we do catch glimpses of some of the divergent ways in which we press the internet into the service of fashioning our offline selves. We see guys like Mariani, for whom the internet is an instrument for farming status and distinction at others’ expense. And, if we zoom out, we might even see a newly monied class of tech founders and financiers, desperate to baptize its recent good fortune in the waters of the culture.

Indeed, those who stand to profit from the boom in tech, like Mariani, have striven mightily to make the march of the internet look irresistible. But he errs in making the internet the prime mover. According to Mariani the internet acts on society, but society does not act on the internet. That’s why the portrait he crafts of the dinergoth is a partial one: it speaks to the world of the internet, but it can only reflect so much about society.

“There is no class consciousness,” Mariani crows in the last paragraph, as if the internet has seized the reins of History from its old protagonists. Maybe not yet. But however much Mariani and others wish the internet could smother these old social contradictions, the perennial dilemmas of class-based society remain. The internet, for all its disruptive capacity, has failed to meaningfully extricate any of us from those offline hierarchies of status. To discuss the internet otherwise, as Mariani does, is to endow it with powers it does not have.

Follow Hugo Hansen on X @klarnic_debt

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