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In some areas I care about like gaming, the counter culture is as good as it’s ever been. So many of my top ten games of all time have been indie titles from th

In some areas I care about like gaming, the counter culture is as good as it’s ever been. So many of my top ten games of all time have been indie titles from the last 5 years. Disco Elysium, Slay the Spire, Edith Finch, Outer Worlds, Inscryption, Vampire Survivor. Just an almost unprecedented level of innovation in gameplay and storytelling and that’s just scratching the surface of a few sub genres I personally enjoy

civilized 4y ago
Yeah, I'm having a hard time telling if this guy has a point, or if he lives in a bubble that I feel like I also inhabit. I hear a lot about comic book movies and those are getting extremely samey (or maybe they already were), but there are other things going on that I don't hear about. Also, Shape of You is a super good song, so it's not SO awful that people love it year after year.
- rootsudo 4y ago
  Comic books are long gone counterculture. Look at all the marvel/DC movies as of late. No counterculture item is going to be front page news like the whole new "Doctor Strange" movie. Which, I get, knowing this makes me so not counterculture. It's also at the point where even recreational substances, which were the idealogy of what countercultre was - is now legalized. We see this now with Marijuana and Mushrooms (Denver, at least.) - For medical reasons or not.
  - civilized 4y ago
    I guess different patterns of mass media consumption were never quite a sustainable way to distinguish oneself from the mainstream.
  - HKH2 4y ago
    I doubt acid will ever be legal again.
- thaumasiotes 4y ago
  > I hear a lot about comic book movies and those are getting extremely samey (or maybe they already were) They weren't. Compare Spider-Man 2 (2004) and Batman Begins (2005). Compare X-Men (2000). All of those had a story to tell. Recent superhero movies... not so much.
krapp 4y ago
I feel like a lot of the conversation here is confusing subcultures and countercultures. Like, goth (was) a counterculture, because it existed in opposition to mainstream aesthetics of beauty and fashion and gender performance. Punk rose in opposition to postwar British society. Counterculture is always transgressive, at least until it gets assimilated and commodified by capitalism, like goth and punk were. Gaming isn't a counterculture. What does it stand in opposition to? What is it rejecting from the mainstream, and what is it replacing that with? It's just a subculture. Like anime. Like D&D. Like being a fan of any commercial media. If you can buy it in a store, it isn't counterculture. Anyone who looks at society and just sees the same dreary, banal wasteland of consumer garbage year after year is, themselves, far too mainstream to even be aware of counterculture. FFS, OP is looking for signs of counterculture in the Oscars and the New York Times Book Review. No surprise they don't find it, given how little relevance those old media gatekeepers have, and how they literally exist to define the mainstream and maintain the status quo.
- bsder 4y ago
  Yeah, there was a "punk" documentary at some point that had all these modern artists going on about how influential the movement was to their music and how much they admired those artists, etc. The punch line at the end of the movie was interviewing the original punk folks and seeing how angry they were that everybody missed the damn point. The point wasn't to imitate the "punks" well--the point was to stand against the mainstream any way you could. > Anyone who looks at society and just sees the same dreary, banal wasteland of consumer garbage year after year is, themselves, far too mainstream to even be aware of counterculture. I disagree. The counterculture very much ripped through to the normies in the 1960s and 1970s. So, much so that it terrified the mainstream. Since then, the mainstream has made damn good and sure that won't happen again.
  - astrange 4y ago
    > Since then, the mainstream has made damn good and sure that won't happen again. Sounds conspiratorial. The best you can say is psychedelics were banned, which is half of what made the hippies lose interest in their parents’ generation. But the other half was improved communications technology, and it improved again after that so there’s no longer a way to have a single counterculture. Just because you’re into one thing about hippiedom doesn’t mean you need to sign up for all of it. Since then there have been countercultures, but they were right-wing ones like the Moral Majority. You wouldn’t recognize those if you just think they’re being extra-normie.
kelseyfrog 4y ago
Maybe I'm completely off base here, but 1950s counterculture wasn't in the public eye. On the Road, for example, served as a messenger which signaled the existence of such a counter culture 10 years earlier and served it to a broad public audience. In the same way, Bourdain's Kitchen Confidential primed an popular obsession with restaurant culture which resulted in the celebrity chef literally mediated by media. The point is that by and large counter/sub-culture isn't readily accessible by the greater public (if it was it would simply be culture). It takes effort and activity. Kerouac literally had to be 'on the road' for On the Road to exist. The public doesn't have access to the back of the house, etc. The author will never connect directly with counter culture if he doesn't find our present's roads and the kitchens. His connection to counter culture will always be mediated through second-hand accounts at best, or substantively diluted by mass media leaving the hollow husk of form at worst. This is a tale about what happens if one doesn't stray off the beaten path to seek out niche communities and untold stories. It's a feeling of suburban sameness, that there should be more, and that we're capable of being more. It's out there, friend - waiting for you.
- pvg 4y ago
  I don't think 'out of the public eye' is really a requirement for something to count as counterculture. 60s counterculture was highly visibly, a zillion people showed up to Woodstock, etc. 'Successful' counterculture eventually bleeds into and is sometimes outright absorbed into mainstream culture but that doesn't really make it not-counterculture the moment it gains visibility.

civilized 4y ago

Yeah, I'm having a hard time telling if this guy has a point, or if he lives in a bubble that I feel like I also inhabit. I hear a lot about comic book movies and those are getting extremely samey (or maybe they already were), but there are other things going on that I don't hear about. Also, Shape of You is a super good song, so it's not SO awful that people love it year after year.

rootsudo 4y ago
Comic books are long gone counterculture. Look at all the marvel/DC movies as of late. No counterculture item is going to be front page news like the whole new "Doctor Strange" movie. Which, I get, knowing this makes me so not counterculture. It's also at the point where even recreational substances, which were the idealogy of what countercultre was - is now legalized. We see this now with Marijuana and Mushrooms (Denver, at least.) - For medical reasons or not.
- civilized 4y ago
  I guess different patterns of mass media consumption were never quite a sustainable way to distinguish oneself from the mainstream.
- HKH2 4y ago
  I doubt acid will ever be legal again.
thaumasiotes 4y ago
> I hear a lot about comic book movies and those are getting extremely samey (or maybe they already were) They weren't. Compare Spider-Man 2 (2004) and Batman Begins (2005). Compare X-Men (2000). All of those had a story to tell. Recent superhero movies... not so much.

krapp 4y ago

I feel like a lot of the conversation here is confusing subcultures and countercultures. Like, goth (was) a counterculture, because it existed in opposition to mainstream aesthetics of beauty and fashion and gender performance. Punk rose in opposition to postwar British society. Counterculture is always transgressive, at least until it gets assimilated and commodified by capitalism, like goth and punk were. Gaming isn't a counterculture. What does it stand in opposition to? What is it rejecting from the mainstream, and what is it replacing that with? It's just a subculture. Like anime. Like D&D. Like being a fan of any commercial media. If you can buy it in a store, it isn't counterculture. Anyone who looks at society and just sees the same dreary, banal wasteland of consumer garbage year after year is, themselves, far too mainstream to even be aware of counterculture. FFS, OP is looking for signs of counterculture in the Oscars and the New York Times Book Review. No surprise they don't find it, given how little relevance those old media gatekeepers have, and how they literally exist to define the mainstream and maintain the status quo.

bsder 4y ago
Yeah, there was a "punk" documentary at some point that had all these modern artists going on about how influential the movement was to their music and how much they admired those artists, etc. The punch line at the end of the movie was interviewing the original punk folks and seeing how angry they were that everybody missed the damn point. The point wasn't to imitate the "punks" well--the point was to stand against the mainstream any way you could. > Anyone who looks at society and just sees the same dreary, banal wasteland of consumer garbage year after year is, themselves, far too mainstream to even be aware of counterculture. I disagree. The counterculture very much ripped through to the normies in the 1960s and 1970s. So, much so that it terrified the mainstream. Since then, the mainstream has made damn good and sure that won't happen again.
- astrange 4y ago
  > Since then, the mainstream has made damn good and sure that won't happen again. Sounds conspiratorial. The best you can say is psychedelics were banned, which is half of what made the hippies lose interest in their parents’ generation. But the other half was improved communications technology, and it improved again after that so there’s no longer a way to have a single counterculture. Just because you’re into one thing about hippiedom doesn’t mean you need to sign up for all of it. Since then there have been countercultures, but they were right-wing ones like the Moral Majority. You wouldn’t recognize those if you just think they’re being extra-normie.

kelseyfrog 4y ago

Maybe I'm completely off base here, but 1950s counterculture wasn't in the public eye. On the Road, for example, served as a messenger which signaled the existence of such a counter culture 10 years earlier and served it to a broad public audience. In the same way, Bourdain's Kitchen Confidential primed an popular obsession with restaurant culture which resulted in the celebrity chef literally mediated by media. The point is that by and large counter/sub-culture isn't readily accessible by the greater public (if it was it would simply be culture). It takes effort and activity. Kerouac literally had to be 'on the road' for On the Road to exist. The public doesn't have access to the back of the house, etc. The author will never connect directly with counter culture if he doesn't find our present's roads and the kitchens. His connection to counter culture will always be mediated through second-hand accounts at best, or substantively diluted by mass media leaving the hollow husk of form at worst. This is a tale about what happens if one doesn't stray off the beaten path to seek out niche communities and untold stories. It's a feeling of suburban sameness, that there should be more, and that we're capable of being more. It's out there, friend - waiting for you.

pvg 4y ago
I don't think 'out of the public eye' is really a requirement for something to count as counterculture. 60s counterculture was highly visibly, a zillion people showed up to Woodstock, etc. 'Successful' counterculture eventually bleeds into and is sometimes outright absorbed into mainstream culture but that doesn't really make it not-counterculture the moment it gains visibility.