Certain youth activities have been subjected to criminal sanction and regulation, even though the activities may not be within the paradigms of criminology and deviance. Such activities may be viewed as examples of an affirmative cultural politics operative through inversion and appropriation technologies. These subcultural events assume the status of resistant practices, not in terms of ideology but rather in terms of dissensus. The discussion of dissensus illustrates the limitations of official methods for describing social problems and the importance of a particular series of social problems in terms of resistance. The events of computer hacking, joyriding, and raving demonstrate a transition in the nature of the boundary between fixed conceptions of right and wrong, good and bad, and order and disorder. These events may be consequences of excess within the existing system of social and economic relations. 37 notes