Alt-girl, Alt-right, Alt-rock - Whynow

I’ve recently developed a fascination with the alt-girl. For the uninitiated, she’s a Gen-Z archetype, who’s made her name through TikTok. She wears Doc Martens, fishnet tights, and spaghetti strap dresses over white tees. She’s got piercings and tattoos, colourful streaks of hair dye, and very thick eyeliner.

She listens to Nirvana until the early hours. She’s a self-professed antidote to ‘straight’ TikTok, whether that means championing LGBTQIA+ voices or just kicking against mainstream fads and fashions. So she’d never wear heels or pink trackies or listen to Little Mix. She rarely uses caps when she writes texts, and she never, ever uses an emoji. She’s far too alt for that : |

Let me be clear: my fascination with the alt-girl doesn’t stem from a desire to emulate. These subcultural characters always serve to remind anyone over the age of about 25 that they’re just the wrong side of ripe. No, for me the alt-girl is fascinating as a cultural phenomenon because, in fact, there’s nothing new about her or her interests – she’s a throwback. Alt-girl of the twenty-first century is mining all of the same influences that I was, about fifteen years ago (only we would have called it scene or indie or emo, back in the day). And yet, there exists a chasm, a profound gulf between 13-year-old me and today’s alt-girl, which lies in those three, unassuming letters: A-L-T. 

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On the fringe

Just as there’s nothing new in alt-girl’s interests, there’s also nothing new in the adoption of the term ‘alt’ to signal subcultures. Music has been appending ‘alt’ to every kind of genre since the late 1970s. But the way in which the term has entered contemporary jargon is worth pausing over, because its evolution might be more revealing about the twenty-first century mindset than you’d expect.

Alt is, of course, a short hand for the word alternative. Entering the English language in the 1500s, it’s an old term and, like all well-worn words, it comes with the baggage of historical association; by which I mean, a host of minor variations in its definition.

For example, the term ‘alternative’ may describe something that is characterised by an alternating movement. Then again, in speech, it can suggest two statements that would be united by an either / or proposition. Or else it denotes disjunction. Though all very closely related, no two definitions are quite the same.

Teenage girls dance in their socks under a nightclub disco ball, 1970s. (Photo by Archive Photos/Getty Images)

But wait – there’s more. “Of or characterizing any of various (hypothetical or imagined) realities, worlds, or realms of existence, differing from our own in trivial or fundamental ways (esp. in the context of science fiction and computer games).”

It’s a definition that gets added to the dictionary as recently as 1939 (about the time that sci-fi and fantasy really start to take off), and shows the beginning of a new direction for the term, one that lifts us up and out of our familiar existence. Or this one, added to the dictionary even later, in 1962: “Of or relating to activities that represent an unorthodox style or approach; of a kind purported to be preferable to or as acceptable as those in general use or sanctioned by the establishment. Fringe, underground.”

Here we have it – the root of our alt-girl. 

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Liberal alts  

And then, something peculiar happens. As soon as this definition enters the popular imagination, alternative compound words start springing up, from the late 1960s through to the mid 1980s. First, there’s ‘alternative lifestyle’, which pops into usage in 1968. Following hot on its heels, you get the first mention of the ‘alternative press’ in 1969 and then ‘alternative technology’ in 1972.

By 1974, both ‘alternative medicine’ and ‘alternative therapy’ are gaining traction – and then ‘alternative births’ are all the rage in 1976. By the late 70s, ‘alternative music’ is a thing, and by the 80s we’re well and truly familiar with all manner of alternative sub-genres, from music to comedy.

Its a funny moment in history, the 1970s, because it’s characterised by crystallisation of two, seemingly opposing, groups: the countercultural hippies and the champions of neoliberal economics. Yet, for all their apparent differences, it turns out there’s an awful lot that puts Thatcher, Reagan, and Frank Zappa in the same libertarian loop of the Venn Diagram.

The countercultural, for example, were all about the cult of the individual; so too were the free market capitalists (as Thatcher once said, “no government can do anything except through people, and people must look after themselves first”).

The hippies hated rules imposed by the establishment, while cries of “deregulate!” issued from the mouths of the neoliberals. And, at the very core of both movements, there lies an absolute faith in positive models of freedom. Control? Delete. 

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Meta-morph

While all of this alternative / libertarian stuff was going on, one group was quietly getting down to work – a group who, as it turns out, would draw together these two side of the same libertarian coin in the name of a new utopia. They were the architects of our future, the agents of the technical revolution that would dictate life as we know it: they were the creators of the modern computer. By 1975, Bill Gates was already working on BASIC and, one year later, Steve Jobs and Steve Wozniak had dreamt up Apple – on April Fool’s Day. 

The computer has shaped our thinking in myriad ways. But one facet of design that often gets overlooked is the development of the keyboard. And one small, discreet button in particular may have been responsible for the rise of a particular mindset: the alt key. Successor of the older Meta key, from computer keyboards of the 1970s, the Alt key was standardised across PC-model keyboards by the 1980s and its role was (and is), quite simply, to alternate the function of another key. 

Perhaps its most iconic function remains what those in the inner tech circle refer to as the “three finger salute”: Ctrl + Alt + Delete. It’s every Windows user’s saviour, the final recourse when all seems lost. Permitting the termination of the unresponsive window – that universal language of frustration – Ctrl + Alt + Delete is the triumph of flesh and blood over hard drive and circuit board. But, writing in 2021, that oddly martial bit of slang – “three finger salute” – inevitably brings to mind another model of ‘alt’, taken up by groups who have been known to perform another, far more noxious, type of salute: I’m talking about the alt right. 

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Keyboard warriors 

The term ‘alternative right’ was first used in 2008, in an article on Takimag titled ‘The decline and rise of the Alternative Right’. Its a term that slithers out of neat definition but, broadly speaking, defines an American wing of the political right that’s founded on ideas of white supremacy. Just like the alt-girl, the ideas aren’t really new – in fact, they’re staunchly retrograde.

But, as Jessie Daniels writes, in her 2018 article ‘The Rise of the “alt-right”’, the ascendancy of this movement  “is both a continuation of a centuries-old dimension of racism in the U.S. and part of an emerging media ecosystem powered by algorithms.” As she explains, the alt-right has been “algorithmically amplified, sped up, and circulated to other White ethno-nationalist movements around the world, ignored all the while by a tech industry that “doesn’t see race” in the tools it creates.”

Daniels reveals a surprising point of continuity between the teenage alt-girl and the alt-right movement – a fundamental reliance on the use of digital technologies, virtual spaces and algorithmic channels. And so it has happened that the term alt has morphed, quietly and without fanfare, into a shorthand that denotes more than just a desire to be alternative; it signals the creation of identity in virtual space.

In its current form, alt has seamlessly blended those two definitions from 1939 and 1962 – the escape to imagined realms and the desire for unorthodox or anti-establishment modes of living.

An alt-girl without social media is just a teenager wearing eyeliner 

Across various digital stages, the term crops up everywhere, from Twitter to TikTok, in role-playing games (alternate character identities) and in Instagram posts (where alt text stands in for absent images). It’s a shorthand that bears the traces of its alternative origins – that hinge moment in the 1970s, where counterculture met neoliberalism and gave birth to Silicon Valley – and one that’s come to define a digital mindset.

An alt-girl without social media is just a teenager wearing eyeliner; an alt-right without an algorithmic network is probably a ragtag band of rednecks in a parking lot, somewhere out in the Midwest. And so, through the endlessly self-perpetuating channels of social media, these alt movements reproduce, then grow, then reproduce again. It’s time to forget the three finger salute of the outdated 80s – there’s a new credo now: Ctrl, alt, repeat.