I paid $10.99 for a STAB subscription this month.
What I got was an obituary for messy surf slang and a eulogy for the “imperfect” voice of the surf outsider as if grammatical chaos were the last living marker of authenticity.

The entire article revolves around one idea. Surf culture is becoming too perfect, too corporate, too sterile.

And honestly? On this point, I agree. Fully.

Corporate language, the templated, algorithmic, PR-safe precision of modern brand writing, is gross. It flattens nuance and removes personality. It turns everything into a moodboard of buzzwords. And I do not even want to start talking about aesthetics. I am all for keeping weirdness, idiosyncrasy, accent, flavor, and linguistic personality alive in surf culture.

But where the STAB article goes sideways is in assuming that language equals culture and that the loss of pirate slang equals the loss of surf identity. That argument is nostalgic, incomplete, and culturally narrow. We are not losing surf culture. We are evolving it because the people surfing today are different. Let's break it down.

And yes, Nathan’s writing is refreshing. It is chaotic, sincere, imperfect, human. But Nate is not the average surfer in 2025. He is the exception, the ultra-committed leave-everything-to-surf archetype, a modern extension of the dirtbag-prodigy lineage. Surfing has always had these figures. They are iconic. They are important.

But they are not representative. Most surfers today do not live in that reality.

They are entrepreneurs, chemists, consultants, designers, lawyers, product leaders, immigrants balancing multiple languages, mothers with daycare drop-offs, business travelers who pack a board in a rental car, and people fighting for one dawn patrol window each week.

Asking this modern demographic to replicate Nathan’s vibe is not authenticity. It is aesthetic cosplay.

The surf world today is multilingual, educated, urban, and global. It has evolved beyond the single dialect that STAB is clinging to.

The article asks, “What happened to the scallywags, the pirate slang, the social outcasts that the industry was built on?”

Nothing happened to them. They simply stopped being the center of gravity.

Those characters still exist. You see them in Indo boat trips, the North Shore backyards, the point breaks of South Africa, the carparks of West Oz. They are part of surf mythology, and they should be.

But surf culture today is not defined by a fringe, rural subculture. It is defined by scale.

As someone who speaks six languages, I can say confidently that language does not define identity, and does not disappear. It adapts to context.

Expecting the modern surfer to write like the 1980s Byron Bay drifters is like expecting Gen Z to still talk like Boomers. And has the author ever considered women, non-binary people, or other modern surfers in his narrow thinking? I bet not. Cultures evolve. Communities mature and diversify. Vocabulary reflects reality. Not regression.

The STAB article argues, “Everyone’s a fucking robot these days.” (please read this in a high-pitched voice 💅)

And honestly, yes. A lot of brand copy is pure and sterile. A lot of marketing is indistinguishable. Everything does feel like it was written by ChatGPT sometimes.

But here is where the article collapses. Surf culture is not threatened by sanitized language. It is threatened when we mistake language for identity.

You can hate corporate tone, and I do - I escaped corporate 4 months ago so you gotta believe me. But you cannot pretend that clean surf language is leading to the evaporation of the surf culture.

You can criticize brand sameness, and I will, without insisting that only pirate slang is legitimate surf expression. Homogeneity in language is a symptom of algorithms and risk-averse branding, not a measure of cultural health.

Surf culture is alive and well in so many places that STAB never mentions.

The article claims as a by the way, “IKEA is not a surf brand.”

Of course they are not. And they are not pretending to be. What they did do is study how surfers live, not how they fantasize themselves living. They recognized a demographic STAB barely acknowledges. The modern surfer living in the city.

The one who commutes. The one who rents. The one who lives in an apartment with limited storage. The one who has one board that needs to fit next to a washing machine. The one who dreams of surf trips yet spends most days in cities.

IKEA did not claim core surf credibility. They simply designed for lifestyle needs the industry has ignored: board storage, small-space furniture, gear organization, modular car racks, and home items that evoke calm in chaotic lives.

If anything, IKEA is more in touch with the actual modern surf experience than most legacy surf brands. The idea that only surf-town natives can define surf culture is the real outdated narrative.

The article says, “Own your brand. Think for yourself. Stop feeding the robots your soul.”

I agree wholeheartedly. Brands should not outsource identity to algorithms. Human creativity matters. Messiness matters. Voice matters. This is why I created surfssentials. Because I felt something was missing.

But using this as the argument to reject IKEA’s surf-related products is a false equivalence.

There are two separate issues. Corporate language becoming too perfect and soulless, and IKEA designing home and travel solutions for surfers. They are unrelated. STAB stitches them together to create a dystopian narrative, but the logic does not hold.

You can critique language without dismissing the evolving reality of surf culture.

STAB is right that surfing should not sound like a Fortune 500 briefing.

But here is what they do not see. The mess is still here. It is just not linguistic anymore.

The modern surf mess is gear exploding out of a trunk, sandy wetsuits in an apartment shower, sprinting from a dawn session to a Zoom meeting, juggling a surf trip with credit card points and PTO limits, chasing tide charts around work schedules, the existential crisis of missing a swell because your train was delayed, the emotional chaos of being landlocked but surf-obsessed.

This is the reality of the millions of surfers who do not fit into a nostalgic postcard. Surf culture did not get cleaner. It got broader, more diverse, and more complex.

Surf identity in 2025 is not just tied to where you surf. It is tied to where you live and how you build a life around a passion.

Modern surf culture happens in the water, in cities, and in the home. IKEA entering space three is not cultural theft. It is cultural literacy. This is not dystopia. It is a reflection of the world we live in.

Ironically, the article warns about sameness.

But surf media participates in its own form of sameness: fetishizing the core, worshipping the fringe rebel archetype, dismissing any evolution as dilution, framing modern surf life as lesser than a bygone era. This is not authenticity. It is repetition.

Surf culture is no longer one lifestyle, one dialect, one coastline, one personality type. It is a global identity held by millions of modern humans - men and women and non-binary people - whose lives look nothing like the romanticized vision STAB is trying to preserve.

Surfing is no longer owned by villages or dialects. It is not a linguistic museum piece. It is not threatened by IKEA shelves. It is not endangered by clear grammar.

Surf culture today is city commuters, multilingual surfers, design lovers, global nomads, side-hustle founders, corporate dropouts, people who surf when life allows, and people who carry the feeling everywhere they go.

If STAB wants to defend authenticity, I am with them. But authenticity is not preserved by nostalgia for pirate slang. It is preserved by recognizing the people who surf today, not the ones who defined it 40 years ago.

Surfing is evolving. Surf culture is expanding. And the soul of surfing was never in the poor grammar.

It was never about the language. It was in the feeling. And that feeling didn’t disappear. It moved inland and found its way into the lives of people who surf once a week or once a year or simply carry the ocean around in their imagination. That feeling belongs to anyone who feels pulled toward the ocean. This is it. I said it.