Part 2: Generational Rebellion: How Subcultures are Born

This is the second in a five-part series I’m writing about how subcultures are built. Read the rest here. This week we dive into the socio and cultural condition required for a subcultre to be born.

From September, Niamh Donoghue and I are hosting The Worldbuilder Show on The Stack World, where I'll do more a weekly deep dive into building a brand world and my process. But before we start that, I wanted to sort of show how I look at the process of trends rising and falling.

Subcultures don’t just appear. They are not spontaneous eruptions of cool or random quirks of taste. They emerge out of a set of forces that repeat themselves across history, generation after generation. If you zoom out far enough, you see the pattern: rejection, osmosis, and the generational wave. These are the Three Laws of Subculture.