We’ll all be dinergoths soon

Those unable to compete in the rat race often choose to run a different race

The transgender assistant manager at CVS has a septum piercing, a wolf cut, and a nametag that reads “Finn”… They’re a new American type, young but trans-generational, as distinctive as the organization man or the valley girl once were. I call them dinergoths: what you get when economic mobility dies…

Placelessness without cosmopolitanism and with complacent downward mobility. A post-subcultural “alt” aesthetic with a post-nerd fandom orientation that’s become a new mainstream. Queerness but casual and prole-ified. Dinergoth: “diner” for provincialism, “goth” as lazy shorthand for alternative aesthetics.
Robert Mariani, The New Atlantis, Spring 2026

Well, here’s a sentence I never imagined writing – that postgraduate thesis I wrote three decades ago (Middle-class subcultures 1975-1995) has belatedly acquired some real-world relevance.

More on that shortly, but first some background for those who haven’t yet encountered Mariani’s insightful sociological observations.

“Geek equals goth equals left-behind American”
Mariani is the CEO of an AI-powered dating app and hence not an entirely disinterested observer. But even his critics typically concede he’s onto something with his identification of the Dinergothus provincialis.

Mariani fleshed out his description of the type after a brief but intense relationship with one.

After moving to (where else?) Portland, Oregon in 2021, he matched with an alt girl on Tinder.

“Her profile listed she/they pronouns, mentioned trauma and showed her in cosplay… Her nose was aquiline with a septum piercing. And her other features were catlike – high cheekbones, weak chin, and big steel-blue eyes under dyed red hair.”

His dinergoth doesn’t appear to be university educated, though many are. She has a low-status, low-paying, dead-end job that he likes to imagine she’s content with. Like many young adults nowadays, she’s still living (unhappily) with her parents.

As Mariani observes of their break-up:

“I was too much of a yuppie for her. This was indeed a disconnect – I worked in tech, she worked at a vape shop; she liked the simple things in life and I had cosmopolitan intellectual pretensions; I lived by status gradients that I couldn’t admit, and she just existed in cozy downward mobility.”

While his other observations are astute, I suspect Mariani is romanticising the “cozy downward mobility” of dinergoths. A “simple” job might look appealing to a member of the endlessly striving professional-managerial class, but that’s only because they don’t know what it’s like to be trapped in one with little hope of advancement. And plenty of fear of ever-more-punishing downward mobility.

“I loved her simplicity, her lack of guile, her low-stakes way of being that was so different from the status-anxious lifestyle that was practically the law of living in San Francisco or Washington, D.C. I wanted to be part of her little world.”

Only someone who isn’t familiar with the quiet despair half-hidden inside that “little world” could have written that. Which brings me to my own research into why subcultures are so appealing to those on – or circling – the bottom rungs of the social status ladder.

If you don’t like how the table is set, turn it over
Academics, specifically left-leaning British ones, first took a serious interest in youth subcultures in the 1970s. They theorised that working-class youth – the mods and the rockers, for instance – were using membership of a subculture as a psychological salve.

Working-class youth realised they were never going to achieve the trappings of a bourgeois lifestyle. So, instead of trying to work their way up the conventional status hierarchy – get a good job, get married, buy a nice house, etc – they created another one. One with more achievable goals – dress unconventionally, know a lot about certain genres of music and, in some subcultures, be a skilled pugilist.

In the 1990s, I noticed that middle-class individuals were also getting involved in subcultures much like the ones described in Dick Hebdige’s 1979 classic Subculture: The Meaning of Style.

A couple of these subcultures – being part of the indie music scene or a raver – didn’t require much commitment and could be dipped in and out of. But some – being a goth or feral (a kind of eco-activist hippy), for example – did mandate unconventional haircuts and clothes. Piercings were also often involved, though tattoos were less common back then.

Something that soon became apparent when I began my ethnographic research was that those with bright futures weren’t usually attracted to subcultures, especially the more hardcore ones.

They may have existed, but I never encountered any ferals with a medical degree or goths who worked at top-tier law firms.

The subculturalists I studied were often university-educated but they weren’t enjoying the ‘comfortable’ lifestyles readily accessible to previous generations of graduates. Overwhelmingly, they were what we’d today call surplus elites or downwardly mobile graduates.

The dinergoth era is just getting started
The massive overproduction of university graduates was apparent even back in the 1990s. By the late 1980s, in Australia and similar Anglosphere nations, most kids were finishing high school and about a third of them were going on to university. And even back then, there simply wasn’t a sufficient supply of good jobs to meet the ever-growing demand.

That meant, like their blue-collar predecessors, many middle-class individuals decided to ditch the conventional status games and fashion new ones. Ones where their lack of an impressive degree or well-paying job was proof of their non-conformist bohemianism, rather than evidence of failure.

Or as Mariani puts it:

The dinergoth is made possible by two things: American stagnation and the breakdown of barriers.

The economics tell the story. Roughly half of 18-to-29-year-olds now live with their parents — numbers not seen since the Great Depression…

Sixty-four percent of Gen Z say they prioritize “peace of mind” over wealth accumulation. Of course they do. When a one-bedroom costs 70 per cent of your income, when your student debt payments are higher than your parents’ mortgage, when every job is temporarily permanent, what exactly are you supposed to accumulate? The economic race is over, and normal Americans lost. The dinergoth looks at this and makes the only rational choice: stop trying to win.

One of the interesting things about dinergothdom, which Mariani doesn’t really explore, is that it appeals to both graduates and non-graduates. That’s despite Anglosphere societies having become deeply stratified by levels of educational achievement. I’d argue that’s because growing numbers of graduates have found themselves culturally middle class but economically working class.

There have long been lots of degree-qualified twentysomethings and thirtysomethings working modestly paid jobs, living with their parents, and trapped in the hell of a prolonged adultescence.

The dinergoth emerged as a result of Anglosphere societies encouraging middle-class aspirations while dismantling middle-class career paths. If there are growing numbers of dinergoths, that’s because there are growing numbers of graduates joining the ranks of the ‘left behind’.

If AI vaporises even more entry-level white-collar jobs, dinergothdom will spread for the same reason subcultures always spread – when the dominant status game seems rigged, people start inventing new ones.