Dark Academia, Deconstructed.

July 2, 2021 10:25 PM

Dark Academia and internet Aesthetics generally have taken over the internet, yet we haven't fully stopped to consider the consequences of this phenomenon. [Youtube]
posted by antihistameme (67 comments total)

For those who are curious, the linked video runs about 27 minutes. The first ten of which are devoted to explaining the notion of "aesthetic", more than a little bit confusedly for talking about the concept in three different ways, as a philosophical discipline, as a personal affectation of style/taste, and as a "new" slang adjective akin to beautiful. The speaker sort of glancingly addresses each, then slips back and forth between them in speaking, leaving those definitions more than a bit vague.

The remaining 17 minutes are addressed more specifically towards the "dark academia" aesthetic from, as the speaker puts it, a philosophical framework. He puts heavy emphasis on "intent" in adopting the aesthetic and what he thinks that says about its "meaning" and also leans heavily into "authenticity", with a emphasis on Sarte's thoughts on that subject. As in a couple other videos I briefly browsed on the subject, a good portion of the discussion of the aesthetic is focused on the influence of Donna Tartt's book, The Secret History, which is claimed as foundational to the Dark Academia mindset. The aesthetic overall is criticized largely via a "read" of that book and by reference to Goethe's Faust. The speaker's take on Dark Academia finds it ultimately more dangerous than laudable, even as accepting some of the values as meritorious in measured use, and takes it as seriously as those who are really into the aesthetic in doing so.

My take is that he misses the mark in most facets and falls into the trap of accepting the terms and weight given the fashion by its most devoted adherents rather than giving it more distance in consideration. I'm not keen on his definitions for aesthetics and find the emphasis on intent and authenticity to be misguided and overstated.

Because of this I think his criticism also misses by accepting the terms and importance of them in that manner. Dark Academia, isn't that different than other cult like group aesthetics in that is is more a response or reaction to the world than a coherent ideology to follow. In this case it seems notable that Dark Academia sets itself in opposition to the anti-intellectualism of the resurgent right, as represented by politicians like Trump, Johnson, Modi, and so on, but also to the demands of representation and change set out by minority groups who are not a part of the history Dark Academia seeks to reclaim in its love of a very white boarding school mentality. It suggests intellectualism as a tradition being lost in both instances, but doesn't differentiate much between the two.

It's reactionary liberalism that finds inspiration by looking to the ideals of a fictionalized past while keeping the narrative and visual pleasures associated with so much of the more or less fantasy driven media of our times. It's all a bit juvenile, which is usual for this kind of cultish group identity desire, and seems more imposing than it likely is for its devotees being exactly the kinds of people most likely to spend lots of effort and time posting their thoughts online. And after watching some of the videos by those devotees, the imagined importance of the aesthetic is pretty far out there, way beyond any reasonable estimation of its limitations. The Dark Academia is the New Renaissance video would be testament alone to that, but shows why the ideal is so appealing to those involved for being able to show off their smarts through digging into already existing "canons" of greatness and its criticism. It makes it easier to demonstrate one's value set when the terms come predefined, guaranteed "Importance", while the aesthetics application to more current works suggests how superficial that depth of appreciation is.
posted by gusottertrout at 2:09 AM on July 3, 2021 [42 favorites]

The Take did a video on Dark Academia some weeks ago that goes more into pop culture examples.
posted by sukeban at 2:51 AM on July 3, 2021 [13 favorites]

The Take did a video on Dark Academia yt some weeks ago that goes more into pop culture examples.

Oh, yeah, that one is a much better, and more concise take. Glad you mentioned it.
posted by gusottertrout at 3:06 AM on July 3, 2021 [1 favorite]

Here is a New York Times overview for anyone who, like me, was out of touch and baffled by not knowing what the context is of this topic.
posted by johngoren at 3:33 AM on July 3, 2021 [18 favorites]

Came in here to note, since it's not mentioned in the FPP, that the link is a video. But gusotterttout beat me to it and then some.
posted by eviemath at 4:19 AM on July 3, 2021

This is basically just one college student who's high on the fumes of his favourite continental philosophers doing overwrought cultural criticism on a harmless subculture mainly comprised of his fellow college students. I was not surprised to find amongst the other videos he's posted a slavering review of Jordan Peterson's latest book.
posted by Panthalassa at 4:30 AM on July 3, 2021 [41 favorites]

Dark Academia seems to be this generation’s goth and a similar amount of pearl clutching moral panic has resulted.
posted by interogative mood at 4:57 AM on July 3, 2021 [10 favorites]

It kind of is "tweed goth". Personally, I'm fine with kids fetishizing learning, and I hope they drive the trend into something less Eurocentric.
posted by sukeban at 5:14 AM on July 3, 2021 [11 favorites]

I really wish that for niche topics like this, we could flesh out the FPP a bit. Even a brief “dark academia, which is … “ would help. I get that whatever people are into seems ubiquitous and globally known to them, but adding some context would draw more people to engage and comment instead of skipping the post I think. I have never even heard the term before on Metafilter or elsewhere and my iPad tells me I spend 6 hours a day online (yikes).
posted by freecellwizard at 5:15 AM on July 3, 2021 [41 favorites]

I stopped watching when the video claimed that the entire movement he was examining wasn't art because, basically, he didn't like it. It's a bad take turned into an entire bad video. Pretty, though.
posted by PennD at 5:19 AM on July 3, 2021 [6 favorites]

Isn't that essentially Professor Snape with the trademarks filed off?
posted by acb at 5:29 AM on July 3, 2021 [13 favorites]

Interesting. I'd never heard the term before today. The additional links in comments have been really useful.

As someone twice as old as most of the participants seem to be, I'd have naively called this "humanities grad student party attire." (To be clear, I have no objection to it. I'm jealous of those who can pull it off convincingly.) That the people involved seem to be willing to use the label to describe themselves - if I understand that based on a very brief glance - strikes me as the surprising thing.

I'm not at all convinced by the arguments in the original video. It's hard to take pleas for authenticity seriously in this context, especially in a stream of barely related intro-to-philosophy references. (I'm also tempted to argue with the author in detail about Faust, but that's a real derail.) Relating this to my own social milleau and age group, arguing that pop SF and steampunk presentations undermine science seems like a very hard case to make. It's not science. It doesn't claim to be. It celebrates science, occasionally in ways that reaffirm dangerous habits of thought. But, no more so than a newspaper or Nobel Prize ceremony. It also can challenge them. More often than not, it really has nothing to do with them. It sure looks like Dark Academia is the same thing, but with cooler outfits.
posted by eotvos at 5:40 AM on July 3, 2021 [7 favorites]

Is Lex Fridman dark academia?
posted by shenkerism at 5:53 AM on July 3, 2021 [3 favorites]

Oh, dear. This all appears to be my actual academic uniform from graduate school and teaching in a prep school, or perhaps a reworking of the Preppy Handbook, but then I'm olllllld. The chief advantage of such outfits is that they hide dirt excellently well and can be worn every day without anybody realizing it. The worship of academia is what lured me into the awful trap of doctoral studies. Ah, well, people have to make their own mistakes.
posted by Peach at 6:34 AM on July 3, 2021 [16 favorites]

If this trend helps kids to fight back against colonialism and the war on the humanities, then that sounds good to me.
posted by ob1quixote at 6:36 AM on July 3, 2021 [5 favorites]

I guess this also explains why I inexplicably have wanted a tweed sport coat for the last couple of months.
posted by ob1quixote at 6:38 AM on July 3, 2021 [2 favorites]

Dark Academia is a bunch of young people cosplaying Harry Haller I guess.

I mean, honestly, it makes sense. Faced with ecocide and fascism, depressive rates are skyrocketing, Haller's central complaint (feeling like he wasn't made to live in this world, specifically bougie society) probably screams loudly in the ears of the youth.

I do actually wonder deeply if any of these kids have read Steppenwolf because it's instantly what comes to mind: the dark academic, steeped in books, rarely leaving the study, feeling flummoxed by the wider world around them and retreating to the easily-grasped world of books.

Now excuse me while I start working on some Metamorphosis-themed Dark Academia cosplay. I'm going to be the most scholarly cockroach in town.
posted by deadaluspark at 7:00 AM on July 3, 2021 [17 favorites]

sigh - steppenwolf is about a mid-life crisis, not youth - it amazes me that people consistently miss this, mostly because they're young and haven't had a mid-life crisis yet

i couldn't finish the video after 18 minutes - i think these are people who don't go to the kind of colleges i went to, don't live in the kind of town i grew up in, and seem to be cosplaying j alfred prufrock

do i dare to eat a plate of beans?
posted by pyramid termite at 7:39 AM on July 3, 2021 [9 favorites]

the world has been dying for a long time - gradually and then suddenly, as they say
posted by pyramid termite at 7:46 AM on July 3, 2021 [1 favorite]

Dark Academia seems to be this generation’s goth and

If it is (and I'll leave it to others better informed than I to discern), then it certainly makes sense insofar as my experience of goth back in the day (and I was there when it first started defining itself in the early 1980s) was that it was profoundly middle class (aka bourgeois) and apolitical. That is, the young people who embraced it, raised its moody flag, were mostly from comfortable backgrounds and though they were rejecting absolutely the bland to the point of suffocating aesthetics of these backgrounds, this negation tended to avoid definable radical ideology as if it were the plague. It was way more about ruining the family photos than overthrowing the state ... or even moving out.

[I say this as someone who was a DJ at the time. So much as I loved my Bauhaus, I never really adopted any of the fashion -- just saw Bela Lugosi's Dead as a great way to transition from Computer World Kraftwerk to Sandinista era Clash. All just part of the mix that made the era endurable, sometimes even fun.]
posted by philip-random at 8:02 AM on July 3, 2021 [14 favorites]

Is this where we talk about ContraPoints? Does she fit into this Dark Academia thing? Because she's definitely academic, and she definitely has her goth moments.

Me, I'm tickled the Young People have found a new way to be literate and slightly pretentious. I love that folks are airing their competitive philosophic takes in meme-laden Tik Toks.

Also for some reason I'm enamored with this cottagecore image. It makes perfect sense to me as a sort of "I grew up with Twilight and now I aspire to be the next Martha Stewart" thing.
posted by Nelson at 8:24 AM on July 3, 2021 [3 favorites]

Wasn't "The Secret History" about being seduced by a sophisticated aesthetic that turned out to be depraved?
posted by acrasis at 8:40 AM on July 3, 2021 [7 favorites]

A proto version of this was totally my jam in high school in the late 90s. I was all about suits, fedoras, classical music, and dreams of a tweed laden career in the academy surrounded by gothic architecture if at all possible. It’s nice that like minded people can so easily find each other on the internet. Except - of course - when it undermines herd immunity and results in insurrection.
posted by vorpal bunny at 8:42 AM on July 3, 2021 [3 favorites]

Is this like the ‘young fogies’ of the British eighties?
posted by Phanx at 8:50 AM on July 3, 2021 [3 favorites]

Strong wypipo energy.
posted by signal at 8:52 AM on July 3, 2021 [9 favorites]

One of the things I do find kinda fascinating about all these internet lifestyle aesthetics is how they both seem to emulate something of the notion of videogame skins, tricking out your character with the right gear and look to suit your chosen mode and how it seems to work with the TV Trope-ization of media consumption, where concepts are codified through the collection of tropes used by mass media and then converted by repetition into "rules" of familiarity that tells the audience what to expect. They may have some historical or real world basis, but become meaningful through exaggeration of effect, connoting a fictional milieu that is the idealized genre form of real life.

Cottagecore or Dark Academia aren't meant to signal the desire to actually work a farm nor to misunderstand how Universities work, but to just conjure the image of the ideal experience as captured by mass media to play at it all being more exciting and controlled than life actually is. Popular fiction amplifies the emotions so adopting the "skin" of that fiction and borrowing the rules of media to magnify one's own experience seems somehow reasonable for a generation that grew up online enmeshed in media product.
posted by gusottertrout at 8:53 AM on July 3, 2021 [28 favorites]

I get a bit tired of all the ‘Dark’ stuff, btw. These days if someone has a hotdog stand they go around calling themselves the Dark Lord of the Furter.
posted by Phanx at 8:56 AM on July 3, 2021 [16 favorites]

Wasn't "The Secret History" about being seduced by a sophisticated aesthetic that turned out to be depraved?

Pretty much, yeah. What Henry says, near the end of the novel, about having always wanted to be able to act without thinking, is very interesting, on these lines.

For the record: the novel being appropriated by some kind of edgelord bros must not be allowed to stand.
posted by thelonius at 9:18 AM on July 3, 2021 [1 favorite]

One of the things I do find kinda fascinating about all these internet lifestyle aesthetics is how they both seem to emulate something of the notion of videogame skins

I think this is an important point about this. One of the things I noticed about this though is that while it seems to be fairly aesthetic in focus, it seems to have slowly broken down barriers among "cliques." I just remember growing up feeling like the youth were always focused on aesthetics, but whichever aesthetic you chose defined the clique to which you belonged. And god forbid you wore the wrong stuff or admitted you actually liked pop music to your goth friends, you basically just burned half your bridges with your clique. I could be wrong, but it seems from my limited, outside, old-man perspective seems now that outfits can be changed regularly, and it is much more akin to wearing skins in a game, because you can feel all goth for a week, but then you want to show up all rainbows and kitties because you had a really good day, and there's fewer social repercussions. I honestly wish I had an environment like that growing up, where experimentation within aesthetic was more widely accepted and didn't limit your social environment. Of course, I could be wrong, since I'm on the outside looking in. Maybe there's just more stratified cliques now.
posted by deadaluspark at 9:23 AM on July 3, 2021 [17 favorites]

.....admitted you actually liked pop music to your goth friends, you basically just burned half your bridges with your clique.

I remember playing a record for a friend, who outright refused to offer an opinion on it until he knew what band it was from. Gotta be careful!
posted by thelonius at 9:26 AM on July 3, 2021 [10 favorites]

insofar as my experience of goth back in the day (and I was there when it first started defining itself in the early 1980s) was that it was profoundly middle class (aka bourgeois) and apolitical.

I kind of want to push back on this idea of goth being apolitical. The goth scene always welcomed queerness, which in the early-to-mid 80s especially meant that it was inherently political.
posted by mr_roboto at 9:36 AM on July 3, 2021 [9 favorites]

I was also pretty obsessed with The Secret History in high school, all credit to a bookstore owning aunt. That was almost 30 years ago. I think it’s kind of endearing that the Zoomers are still into it.

(It doesn’t age the way you think, kids. Keep that in mind when you go back for a reread at 40-something)
posted by thivaia at 9:44 AM on July 3, 2021 [4 favorites]

The comparisons to cosplay and character skins are apt, but I also kinda want to make a connection to main character syndrome, where 'you envision yourself as the main character of the movie version of your life'. It's like these kids are both the directors and the method-acting stars of their own fictionalised student experiences, and they evoke their favoured aesthetic with perfect mise-en-place. The ubiquity of quality smartphone cameras and fast broadband enable these stills and clips to be rendered and consumed in gloriously potent hi-def.
posted by Panthalassa at 10:02 AM on July 3, 2021 [11 favorites]

Dork Academia.
posted by MartinWisse at 10:06 AM on July 3, 2021 [6 favorites]

*mise-en-scene, argh. I must be hungry.
posted by Panthalassa at 10:11 AM on July 3, 2021 [6 favorites]

It doesn’t age the way you think, kids. Keep that in mind when you go back for a reread at 40-something

I don't know, I re-read The Secret History at 50, and I quite enjoyed it. I had forgotten how funny it is sometimes. It was a bit cringey remembering how I wanted to live in it, when I read it like age 22.

I suppose it is technically possible that I didn't age the way you'd think, of course.
posted by thelonius at 10:49 AM on July 3, 2021 [5 favorites]

they evoke their favoured aesthetic with perfect mise-en-place

*mise-en-scene, argh. I must be hungry.

Maybe you were right the first time, and were hungry for hei an liao li, roughly translated as “dark cuisine"
posted by otherchaz at 10:52 AM on July 3, 2021 [1 favorite]

Dork Academia

Dank Academia, Which is like Dark Academia, only with an emphasis on pipe smoking.
posted by acb at 11:03 AM on July 3, 2021 [4 favorites]

"Dark Academia and internet Aesthetics generally have taken over the internet,"

And here's me having never heard the term "Dark Academia" until an hour or two earlier today, when I followed a link to NYT article about a new TikTok scene called Dark Academia.

I think I experience a very different internet than the creator of this video. Actually I am positive I do, what with not even having a TikTok account.

"Dark Academia" mostly looks to be "steampunk without the whimsical mania for gluing gears on everything", right down to the undercurrent of fetishizing the British imperial era.
posted by egypturnash at 11:23 AM on July 3, 2021 [13 favorites]

right down to the undercurrent of fetishizing the British imperial era

Also, if it overlaps with Hogwarts houses, those have since become a transphobic dog whistle (“Hogwarts house in bio” is a sort of opposite of “pronouns in bio” these days).
posted by acb at 11:32 AM on July 3, 2021 [5 favorites]

Boy this stuff seems like it takes a lot of time and energy.
posted by Saxon Kane at 11:35 AM on July 3, 2021 [3 favorites]

Fun! Fun?

So, is early Mare Winningham the aspirational figure here? I think, sadly, I would have gravitated towards Dark/Dork Academia if I had read The Secret History in my teens and not in my forties. You know, less the ecstatic murdering and sibling fucking.
posted by Don.Kinsayder at 11:58 AM on July 3, 2021

The consequences of this phenomenon will be the same consequences as the consequences of the steampunk phenomenon. It will transform the dress, speech, and behavior of members of the clique and if the clique is sufficiently large, the perceivable markers of the clique may baffle, amuse, or annoy nonmembers, or all three, to a degree slight or severe depending on the popularity of the phenomenon and its duration. Given that I heard of this about 30 minutes ago for the first time and that looking at piles of tweedy kids in eyeliner while listening to one of them say "Sartre" fifty times through a mouthful of mashed potatoes is already making me want to burn off all my hair and skin and run howling through the streets until I drop, charred, lifeless offal, into the indifferent gutter, I give today's youth an A+.
posted by Don Pepino at 12:20 PM on July 3, 2021 [17 favorites]

God, why can't we let the kids be a little pretentious and self-absorbed. It's developmentally appropriate! Let them be silly!
posted by airmail at 1:06 PM on July 3, 2021 [33 favorites]

Yes, this seems pretty wholesome, though the all white, wealthy and colonialist criticisms are valid.
posted by Bee'sWing at 2:14 PM on July 3, 2021 [5 favorites]

So, my headcanon is that Dark Academics (Goth + British schools in early 20th cent) are basically what the grandchildren of Gothic Lolitas (Goth + Victorian fashion) would be like.
posted by FJT at 2:49 PM on July 3, 2021 [4 favorites]

Mind you, I wasn't criticizing. The dedication is admirable in its way. My comment reflect my status as an old man (mid40s) marveling at the ability for someone to put the work in to sustain these sorts of lifestyles under all the crushing weight of life. I'm struggling to stay awake and competent 8 hours straight during my slow time of the year, I can't imagine curating my life as well. Or maybe that level of discipline makes the rest easier, I don't know.

anyone have a non-paywalled version of the NYT article linked by egypturnash?
posted by Saxon Kane at 3:05 PM on July 3, 2021

METAFILTER: seems pretty wholesome, though the all white, wealthy and colonialist criticisms are valid.
posted by philip-random at 3:14 PM on July 3, 2021 [9 favorites]

At first glance, seems like dark academia is to academia as Hamilton is to American history.
posted by mariokrat at 3:20 PM on July 3, 2021 [3 favorites]

The vid sukeban linked mocks the toxic tropes and is kind about what the TikTokers (?) in question are making for themselves and each other.

From any point of view before WWI, while the institutions of scholarship have been rich and associated with power, it didn't often make actual scholars rich. Often it made them poor much as adjunct labor is today. Garrets, chilblains, ink frozen in the inkwell, etc. Tweed wears a long time, you can get it used -- it's the black worsted suiting that's a 19th c image of wealth, because it gets shiny with use. It seems like a very natural vein for people who can't afford a college degree, or need an immediately employable one, but still want to read a lot. This last bit is from the end of the Cut's take. Does pop culture not remember that scholars are poor?

Now imagining an adorkably well dressed Flying University.

On the coming of evening, I return to my house and enter my study; and at the door I take off the day's clothing, covered with mud and dust, and put on garments regal and courtly; and reclothed appropriately, I enter the ancient courts of ancient men, where, received by them with affection, I feed on that food which only is mine and which I was born for, where I am not ashamed to speak with them and to ask them the reason for their actions; and they in their kindness answer me; and for four hours of time I do not feel boredom, I forget every trouble, I do not dread poverty, I am not frightened by death; entirely I give myself over to them.

posted by clew at 5:11 PM on July 3, 2021 [7 favorites]

"When you came up I remember advising you to dress as you would in a country house. Your present get-up seems an unhappy compromise between the correct wear for a theatrical party at Maidenhead and a glee-singing competition in a garden suburb."
posted by betweenthebars at 5:30 PM on July 3, 2021 [2 favorites]

I am somewhat relieved that Dark Academia is a fashion trend and not some kind of academia equivalent of the Dark Web -- I was imagining a secret network of nameless degree-granting institutions identified only by their tax incorporation numbers doing shady privately-funded research free from the restraints of Research Ethics Boards.

Also, the fashion itself kind of reminds me of beat poets.
posted by heatherlogan at 6:10 PM on July 3, 2021 [13 favorites]

As an aging goth who has done a looooot of research on Dark Academia, trying to understand it: there's not much that's "goth" about it. @egypturnash has it right: it's really more vintage academia fetishizing the British Imperial era.

The "dark" part seems to come in largely via the mood of the books that adherents cite as inspiration, like The Secret History, and there's definitely a vibe of romanticizing mental illness (especially the kind that could be a result of pressure from a heavy academic work schedule, especially if you're trying to finish your thesis while also trying not to get arrested for a murder you committed)... but the look itself isn't really dark. It's a classic tweedy look that romanticizes 20th century Oxbridge/Ivy League looks. In some ways, it seems to have a lot of overlap with Whit Stillman's 1990s oeuvre, which I doubt many Dark Academia adherents have ever heard of.

A lot of these people did grow up with Hogwarts Aesthetics all over Tumblr, and have let go of them because of the transphobic associations. A lot of Dark Academia is just rebranded Ravenclaw. But it's all pretty harmless. It's just kids being mildly pretentious and reading murder-related thrillers set on aesthetically pleasing university campuses.
posted by verbminx at 6:32 PM on July 3, 2021 [11 favorites]

Count me among those who are relieved that this has nothing (as far as I can tell) to do with red-pillers/dark enlightenment/neo-nazi/alt-right/incel bullshit. Democratizing scholarly study/appreciation of the humanities? I can get behind that. Some of the kids these days are alright. Or at least seem to be, based on a video I just watched about something I'd never heard of.
posted by treepour at 11:21 PM on July 3, 2021 [7 favorites]

there's not much that's "goth" about it

I called it "tweed goth" from steampunk being "brown goth", but aside from the music, goth is also literature and aesthetics that call back to imagined pasts of wealth and power, so it's not completely gratuituous. Maybe the kids are more interested in historic libraries than in cemeteries, but which goth hasn't gone starry eyed at historic libraries or Victorian neogothic buildings in cloudy weather. I admit to owning more retro-aesthetics stationery than it is rational.
posted by sukeban at 11:48 PM on July 3, 2021 [3 favorites]

Although, be honest, merely owning stationery in 2021 is itself retro-aesthetics.
posted by hippybear at 12:16 AM on July 4, 2021 [9 favorites]

"These aesthetics have evolved past visually pleasing images, and have become actual lifestyles, with large followings."

...citation needed? Maybe I'm just completely out of touch (I wouldn't be surprised), but it seems to me that "internet aesthetics" are just that – visual styles which exist mainly (if not exclusively) in the virtual world of social media.

And it's always been clear to me that most of these "aesthetics" (Dark Academia included) are partly tongue-in-cheek jokes.

Like, someone will declare that they've invented a new "aesthetic" – "health goth", or "seapunk", or whatever. The improbability of the aesthetic's premise; the performative self-importance of saying "voila! behold the new ａｅｓｔｈｅｔｉｃ that I have created"; the strained, transparent artificiality of trying to force something to become a thing by declaring "this is a thing now" – these are all part of the joke.

I mean, some of them are pleasing images. Which also helps to explain their memetic popularity. But they're created, and consumed, as something engaging to look at while scrolling through Instagram in the checkout line. Not as the ideological foundations of subcultures.

(If I am, in fact, completely out of touch on this point – please let me know.)

I mean, I'm sure a few people wear clothes like this in real life, or decorate their homes with Dark-Academia-themed tchotchkes purchased from Etsy or Urban Outfitters – but that's not a "lifestyle". Making this kind of overstatement out of the gate makes me question the credibility of this vlogger's analysis.
posted by escape from the potato planet at 5:15 AM on July 4, 2021 [7 favorites]

I am somewhat relieved that Dark Academia is a fashion trend and not some kind of academia equivalent of the Dark Web -- I was imagining a secret network of nameless degree-granting institutions identified only by their tax incorporation numbers doing shady privately-funded research free from the restraints of Research Ethics Boards.

I thought it was maybe some alt-right "education" pipeline connected to the "intellectual dark web", and is similarly happy it's just someone cosplaying being students
posted by ymgve at 5:19 AM on July 4, 2021 [4 favorites]

Count me among those who are relieved that this has nothing (as far as I can tell) to do with red-pillers/dark enlightenment/neo-nazi/alt-right/incel bullshit.

Yes, I jumped to thinking this was the deal here. Teh kids are welcome to TSH.
posted by thelonius at 7:02 AM on July 4, 2021

Surprisingly, Moldbug and Nick Land didn't come to mind when reading about this. Now all you dark-web dorks got me thinking about their Dark Enlightenment crap ugh.
posted by deadaluspark at 9:44 AM on July 4, 2021 [1 favorite]

I have no idea what is going on, nor do I want to know, but I'm 80% sure it's all existential dread.
posted by Jacen at 9:48 AM on July 4, 2021 [3 favorites]

the fashion itself kind of reminds me of beat poets

Yes! There could be a mid century modern crossover. Clade? Offshoot? Is there a nomenclature of aesthetics?

Also, is typing it out with ~*decorations*~ a form of emphasis, honorific, satire, ??
posted by clew at 4:53 PM on July 4, 2021

Re the decorations, clew: while some internet aesthetics have specific text decorations associated with them (vaporwave is the big one), the marks you're talking about largely denote sarcasm or irony, tied to the idea that there's "this whole big thing" around the text being decorated. It's like using deadpan sparkly symbols around it. In some usages it might be like a textual eyeroll, but it's not always mocking.

(hello, I am Extremely Online.)
posted by verbminx at 10:42 PM on July 4, 2021 [1 favorite]

Also, sorry for the double post, but:

Aesthetics Wiki, "a community dedicated to the identification, observation, and documentation of visual schema."
posted by verbminx at 10:46 PM on July 4, 2021

I am somewhat relieved that Dark Academia is a fashion trend and not some kind of academia equivalent of the Dark Web

Lately, when I offer to loan students books, they often tell me they already have an illicit copy. I think this is probably a good thing. I don't ask about the details. Based on discussions of basic networking stuff, I'm pretty sure they're not actually using the dark web. I hope they're at least using encryption. Or, at the very least, not using their real names and campus IP addresses.

But, the idea of making a Silk Road for academic credentials is intriguing. I was going to make a joke about future funding options for metafilter, but it seemed mean. Instead I'm going to make an oblique reference to it, which lets me deny that I'm being mean.
posted by eotvos at 10:03 AM on July 5, 2021 [1 favorite]

Maybe you were right the first time, and were hungry for hei an liao li, roughly translated as “dark cuisine"

Not to be confused with "dark cousin", which was basically what Lovecraft was eternally terrified of finding out he had.
posted by Joakim Ziegler at 3:40 PM on July 5, 2021

what Lovecraft was eternally terrified of finding out he had

HP Lovecraft was like, "ooh I'm so scared of a mysterious vile island that rises out of the sea, is inhabited by fishlike, pallid-fleshed pseudohumans, follows a strange and horrible religion, and has an incomprehensible, inhuman tongue...but I love England."
posted by acb at 6:07 AM on July 6, 2021 [1 favorite]