Masshysteri Live in Mullsjö

The footage is grainy and bulbously distorted, fisheye lens from a skate video. Posted eleven years ago: "Masshysteri plays live in Mullsjö at Dennis Lyxzén's birthday!" In what looks like Dennis Lyxzén's backyard, the singer for Refused, surrounded by trees, a small back house, one of those helicopter clotheslines. The band furiously knocks out two songs to a small crowd. The audio is crisp, brighter than the studio recording on Spotify. I find myself transported to this backyard, watching a Swedish garage punk band that barely played outside their home country. I've never been to Sweden. But I've been to shows like this many times.

I came of age in the post-"punk is dead" era, in the suburbs of D.C. I discovered hardcore through chance: a Vans skatepark grand opening, an Epitaph comp with Madball and Agnostic Front. In true teen angst spirit, I globbed onto early 2000s mall punk, convincing my mom to let me dye my hair, spending my allowance on band t-shirts from Interpunk.com. During high school I kept a LiveJournal, writing sub-posts to crushes and finding others who listened to the same music. I learned HTML and Photoshop customizing my profile. I frequented Pheer.com, a site maintained by the semi-mysterious D.C. legend Pablo. Black and white, minimal formatting, all HTML tables and non-breaking spaces. Show listings, messageboard, video archives. The messageboard read like a digital high school cafeteria: cliques, posturing, occasional bullying. Still an improvement over an actual cafeteria. Pablo built exactly what the scene needed and nothing more. No growth ambitions. The gatekeeping was the feature.

Then, overnight, everyone migrated to MySpace. Your top 8 friends, featured prominently. Songs pinned to your page, the original SoundCloud. Secret house show locations disseminated via DM. MySpace made the scene's social dynamics visible and portable. It scaled what Pheer did by hand. In undergrad, we moved to Facebook. We waited eagerly for our small art school to be added during the university rollout. All of MySpace's charm wiped out for convenience. Customization traded for uniformity. Community traded for network. I still go to shows, but with every passing year, I feel less responsibility to participate digitally, other than to amplify what my friends are doing on Instagram.

I'm not suggesting subculture is dead. If anything, it's the opposite: white nationalism, once a persistent problem in the scenes I participated in, is having a resurgence thanks specifically to YouTube. In college, I saw Agnostic Front in Fredericksburg, Virginia, a town that still believes the South will rise again. In the bathroom of a pool hall turned venue, a white nationalist skinhead was actively recruiting kids. When word broke, he was confronted and physically removed. Complete with flying chair. The scene had an immune system. Someone doing something wrong got dealt with, immediately, by people who were there. What's YouTube's immune system? Algorithmic moderation that can't tell the difference between a basement show and a recruitment video. A platform optimizing for watch time has no incentive to distinguish between community and audience.

I'm watching Dennis Lyxzén's backyard from my apartment. I can leave a comment, "I was at that show," except I wasn't. The video transports me somewhere I've never been, to a moment I wasn't part of, in a scene I have no stake in. It feels like community. It isn't. Every platform promises to bring people together. Each one trades away the thing that made the last one work.

Written for my application to SFPC's Critical Writing Workshop, a week-long program on essays, reviews, and personal writing about art, technology, and society.