123 ms·

Do we live in a society without a counterculture?

• neiman 4y ago
  Which country is this from? I don't feel it fits where I live at all.
  • tumdum_ 4y ago
    Sounds like it’s from USA, home of generic kpi driven ‘art’
• ChrisMarshallNY 4y ago
  I feel that the original Gioia article may be more interesting: https://tedgioia.substack.com/p/14-warning-signs-that-you-are-living https://tedgioia.substack.com/p/14-warning-signs-that-you-ar...
  • drewcoo 4y ago
    The "article" in which he explains how there is no counterculture in a series of linked tweets? Hmmm . . .
• seydor 4y ago
  The moment in which techies realize that they became the mainstream, and counterculture is elsewhere.
  • jrumbut 4y ago
    In the present moment, the counterculture is always hard to find and identify. That's what makes it the counterculture. Now you can read and listen to the Beat poets anywhere, but that would have been challenging in the early '50s. You had to go to the right coffee shop on the right night and if you went and saw what was going on you might question if these were geniuses pushing the frontiers of expression or a bunch of degenerates exploiting impressionable young people. You can still have that experience today, probably easier than ever.
    • pieix 4y ago
      > if you went and saw what was going on you might question if these were geniuses pushing the frontiers of expression or a bunch of degenerates exploiting impressionable young people. To be fair, a lot of people still have this question about the Beat Generation.
    • luckylion 4y ago
      The hippies were the counterculture, weren't they? Yet they weren't hard to find or identify. I guess it can get muddy, but what you're describing sounds more like underground culture to me. It can be happily compatible with the mainstream culture, it's not oppositional, it's just obscure and hidden because of it.
      • s1artibartfast 4y ago
        Hippies were until they weren't. Counterculture either becomes culture or dies off. Naziism was counterculture in 1920's Germany, Mainstream in the 30s and 40's, and back to counterculture now.
        • rnd0 4y ago
          An argument could be made that there is a lot of ideological overlap between current far right GOP/Qanon people and the tenants of Nazism. Considering the number of elections won by the GOP you cannot tell me they're not mainstream.
          • s1artibartfast 4y ago
            There's a lot of overlap between the Nazis and both major parties in the US. That said, I don't think it is fair to say that being a Nazi is mainstream because there is some ideological overlap. It just means that some parts of their platform have become mainstreamed. A simple and non-controversial example is that the Nazis were extremely Progressive on animal rights. Just because modern political parties also endorse animal rights, that does not make them Nazis Another example is that Nazi rhetoric relied heavily on utilitarian analysis of the greater good. I don't think it's reasonable to say that any party that promotes the greater good over individual freedoms is a Nazi party.
  • einpoklum 4y ago
    There is a mis-perception in your statement, in that : 1. "techies" are some uniform block of people. 2. "techies" as a whole were at any point an anti-mainstream counterculture. Many/most techies throughout history have been employed by the rich and powerful - individuals, private corporations, government institutions, religious institutions (if we go back far enough). So, the extent to which they are part of a counter-culture is through a critical evaluation of their own roles. There are also "independent" techies, of course - but those too often from well-off social strata and do not have much of a mind to subvert dominant culture on the social level (as opposed to in their personal habits). ... and I personally can't read the article since the corporate firewall I'm behind is blocking it, so that's kind of ironic :-(
  • maegul 4y ago
    In my time hanging out on Mastodon, I feel like I’m seeing this play out. Many people who openly identify as “tech” people asking for new features, more or less complaining about the resistance to such new features and arguing that the cultural resistance doesn’t make sense. Now these tech people tend to also be new to mastodon. But they also seem pretty oblivious to the fact that they are the mainstream which many on the platform tried to avoid or establish a counter culture from. They don’t seem to realise that leaving Twitter in 2022 was a comparatively mainstream thing to do, and that the resistance they meet often has a point or perspective that they haven’t even thought of and is coming from people who are just as technically inclined and informed but just don’t tie that to their identity so tightly or openly. Broad generalisations, but I think it’s definitely playing out to some extent.
    • jacooper 4y ago
      But mastodon doesn't hate the mainstream, that's the difference, HN for example obviously isn't mainstream, and for one reason, the UI. Its made on purpose to stop nontechnical people from joining
      • throwaway4aday 4y ago
        HN has a pretty large population of mainstream people. Bigger than ever I would say.
        • jacooper 4y ago
          Compared to something like reddit? Its more like a subreddit of some sort
      • randallsquared 4y ago
        HN was made this way when Reddit looked this way.
    • seydor 4y ago
      Even if Mastodon had such currents beforehand, the influx of twitter users must have muddied the waters
  • cheschire 4y ago
    I’ve been wondering for a few years… was Big Bang Theory the instigator or the indicator?
    • seydor 4y ago
      indicator Same with 'The silicon valley'. When something becomes a movie, it's already ending its hype cycle
      • cheschire 4y ago
        Oh that's a great example too. Big Bang was more about the hollywood nerd, but Silicon Valley is a great example of peak hollywood hacker. Why is it taking till the 2020's for it to be so obvious though?
        • kneebonian 4y ago
          We're only two years in bro give it time.
  • deleted 4y ago
    [deleted]
• uniqueuid 4y ago
  It's an interesting question, but way too simplistic. In his great book "the myth of digital democracy", Matthew Hindman pointed out what most people don't get: The web is becoming more centralized AND more spread out at the same time. Popularity is a scale-free distribution that gets more extreme over time. So we have counterculture, it's just not the large homogenous blobs that we were used to.
  • Aromasin 4y ago
    Maybe that's today's true counter culture; anti-consumerism and switching offline. Thousands of people do it daily - delete their Social Media accounts, stop sharing everything online, stop watching endless video streams, stop playing meaningless games, and just escape the marketers trying to make a quick buck from their identity. You're not worth targeting if they can't sell you anything. It's the first "silent" counter culture. It's not that it doesn't exist. There is no "dark corner of the room" dynamic like you had between punk and the nuclear family; more like, it's a different room altogether, and the other cultures don't get to see what's in that room. It's a society where the culture and the counter-culture don't share the "town square" together like they used to as much. Alternatively, like you mention, it's existing in a different digital sphere to the mainstream. This can be intentional; using alternative forums like Mastodon instead of Twitter, Discord instead of Facebook, or whatever alternative it might be. IRC chats and email threads are still going to this day. It could also be unintentional; two people can be using YouTube but have completely and utterly different feeds and comments that they interact with due to an algorithm. These alternate realities never really existed to the degree they do today. Previous cultures had the ruling and working classes, or ruling, working, and slave if you go back far enough. Stricter class boundaries, but within those classes things were more homogenous culturally. Less people, that meet in the same forum, pub, feast hall, or religious center. Now, the lines between classes are blurred and the classes themselves less homogenous. More people, more meeting places. More things to build an identity and culture around. That dilutes the predominant counter-culture enough for people to ask whether it exists at all.
    • noobermin 4y ago
      While this is true, the dominant culture does still exist. It exists the moment you lock your phone and talk to a real human.
• causality0 4y ago
  I do have to admit there are effectively no "dark corners" anymore. The percentage of the population that can be involved in a new cultural movement without its details becoming common knowledge is getting smaller and smaller.
  • badcppdev 4y ago
    I'm going to query the phrase "common knowledge". To mutilate Gibson I think that common knowledge is not evenly distributed.
  • Zetobal 4y ago
    There are more dark corners than ever... and they are as dark as it gets. You just don't want/know how to look for them and they are also as private as it gets.
    • tapland 4y ago
      There's a lot more fragmentation. The few common grounds, the most popular music, 'content creators', ideas and current events get amplified by news sites relying on ads, algorithms seeking maximum engagement. It's hard to promote a fringe issue in a wide content channel and there's a lack of everything in between fringe and mainstream.
      • Zetobal 4y ago
        Yeah sure, but saying that there are no "dark corners" is just naive. Counterculture in the 70s or 90s weren't massive movements at all. I don't see how it has changed looking at teens at the school of my children. It's mostly the problem of getting older can centering more with the mainstream yourself.
  • AstixAndBelix 4y ago
    A corner is still a corner. The vast majority of people don't care about corners, whether they are illuminated or not.
  • 4y ago
• davedx 4y ago
  Seems to be conflating the distribution of culture (via social media, google and the internet at large) with the culture itself. But then, if a counterculture falls in a forest and nobody was around to hear it, did the counterculture really exist? Could be a valid argument too. Maybe
• magic_hamster 4y ago
  I think there never was stronger counterculture than today - but the platforms for this changed. A few decades ago an avant-garde film or student project could make ripples in the film industry and gain a cult following. However, I think that anyone under 20 (possibly under 30) sees cinema as far less important than the previous generation. YouTube (and TikTok) stars became bigger than movie stars, and more young people can tell you who the top streamer is for Valorant than who played Luke Skywalker in Star Wars. The "criteria" mentioned in that post assumes the importance of cinema, radio and television is static, but in fact all of traditional content mediums are just a small detail in the peripheral vision of a younger audience, and they are pushing their values and ideas harder than it was ever possible before. There's culture and counterculture online. It's just not taking place in the same space as before, leaving the old mediums to corporations trying to maximize profits. Kids and teens don't dream about changing the world through cinema anymore, but rather Twitch, YouTube or TikTok, or if they're really ambitious, a game. Edit: forgot to mention Discord.
  • bmj 4y ago
    I think there never was stronger counterculture than today I disagree. Can you expand on your claim? YouTube and TikTok are not countercultural, even if some users are using those platforms for genuine countercultural creative acts. By definition, a social media "influencer" with millions of followers is not countercultural.
    • magic_hamster 4y ago
      YouTube and TikTok are not counterculture but they are the platforms where counterculture happens. > a social media "influencer" with millions of followers is not countercultural. A social media "influencer" could be more important to a younger audience than other mediums, meaning this is the "culture" they will try to counter. Edit: narrowed it down a little.
      • hutzlibu 4y ago
        " they are the platforms where counterculture happens" And where exactly can I find them? Trough the corporate algorithm, that doesn't even let me rewind a video? Counterculture exists and sone of those expose their lifestyle and projects on these plattforms for fame and money, but that culture surely does not "live" on those plattforms.
• trabant00 4y ago
  > we have a counterculture — many of them, in fact — but they are systematically excluded from seeping into the mainstream I don't understand this and by extension the entire article. Counterculture is by definition outside of mainstream. It would just be culture and not anti otherwise. This sounds like semantics but then that is what I think the entire article is, and imho it is wrong.
  • specialist 4y ago
    Ya. My noob understanding of these things is that there is no culture without counterculture. Because we can only understand things, like culture, identity, and self, in contrast to other things. From Gioia's OC: > A sense of sameness pervades the creative world ... aka "Kids these days..." I've been hearing this exact same criticism for as long as I remember. One observation (McLuhan? Warhol?), using the example of da Vinci's Mona Lisa, which made some sense to me: Modern tech makes reproduction trivial. So any original content quickly becomes ubiquitous. Separating content from original creator. Thereby mooting any of original intention or meaning or esthetic or whatever. In other words, everything popular becomes banal. My example, from the 90s era new age fads, I always thought of the yin-yang symbol showing up every where. Especially as tattoos. Oh so original. Further, I think this also helps explain the disappointment about "selling out". It's a rare thing for a creator to become popular, not wear out their welcome, and retain their original fan base.
  • lelanthran 4y ago
    >> they are systematically excluded from seeping into the mainstream > I don't understand this and by extension the entire article. Counterculture is by definition outside of mainstream. Yes, that's what they said. The danger they are going on about is how heavily it is buried so that it never seeps into mainstream. Your not understanding is confusing to me, especially since you quoted the bit "we have a counterculture", and then replied as if they said "we have no counterculture".
• yunruse 4y ago
  Art today is definitely and absolutely still made with love and passion. Films like Everything Everywhere All At Once (or the recent episode of The Last Of Us) take a popular concept or franchise and make it their own. Fanfiction is still at crazy levels, thanks to websites like AO3. The book industry still has outstanding popular modern works which stand on their own and refuse to let genre define them. (Becky Chambers is my favourite for this, with her hygge scifi). There's also a whole host of internet culture - lots of tumblr tags and subreddits - that are actively filled with sharing, passion and community, not for good art that sells, but something that lifts the spirit in its own weird way. Anecdotes aside, at least for independent artists it may be economical effects that constrain passion and make projects feel so for-profit. Which have always been a thing, unfortunately. Given technology, maybe there is so much art to consume that making art requires forgoing distraction and the general worry that the art will be bad (which is nonsense, because some art simply has a limited audience). In today's era, stuff like EU art grants [0] can do some good, although I have the feeling that patronage-per-capita is considerably lower than it was in the past; it would be an interesting metric to look at and try best to increase. [0]: https://culture.ec.europa.eu/funding/cultureu-funding-guide https://culture.ec.europa.eu/funding/cultureu-funding-guide
  • hbossy 4y ago
    Taking established media and making it a LGBT story is has been pretty much mainstream for long time. We live in a world where all major corporations put rainbows on their logos for a month every year, just to meet the expectations of general audience.
    • jacooper 4y ago
      When did the audience ever want that? Its rather a movement that companies just ran with, and audience tolerated or ignored.
      • chasd00 4y ago
        If corporations don’t play along they certainly get punished for it. The audience expects them to be onboard or else.
• mellosouls 4y ago
  I see the counter culture over the last few years as the less obnoxious elements of the alt-right/conservative and centrist/"classic liberal" in their opposition to the overreach and oppression by the "liberal"/left especially in their domination of big tech and classic media. However, as the recognition of that unpleasant latter tendency has become mainstream and everybody and her grandma now knows what "woke" means, I can see a new counter, hopefully genuinely less partisan and not tipped the other (ie right wing) way as the old guard is kicked out (as we have seen with Twitter etc).
  • cfltlayoffs 4y ago
    What are the great creative works you identify with the alt-right? I know lots of great leftist artists, musicians, etc. but I don't see alt-righters making a lot of daring indie cinema for instance.
    • mellosouls 4y ago
      I'm strictly considering the definition as "an alternative to dominant [as opposed to popular] opinion and social mores". I'd probably agree the bulk of indier-than-thou creations are produced by people on the left (not all of whom demand we also bow to their political interpretation of the world); some of the work excellent, most of it perhaps not.
      • cfltlayoffs 4y ago
        That's not what the article is about. The article is about creative content, and how YouTube content is aesthetically all the same. Jordan Peterson videos have the same stupid thumbnails as all other clickbait. People have said it in the thread, but counter-culture is really defined retrospectively. You look at the movements that existed on the periphery but later inspired the mainstream. Velvet Underground wasn't selling millions of records, but everyone who started a band listened to them. Lou Reed is pretty indier than thou.
        • zozbot234 4y ago
• notjulianjaynes 4y ago
  "Better a child should die than live bereft of subculture" https://open.spotify.com/track/16EDqZeb9duwbe6SZGHkUy?si=b8bdbecc23a54c72 https://open.spotify.com/track/16EDqZeb9duwbe6SZGHkUy?si=b8b...
• lr4444lr 4y ago
  IMHO, this is simply born of the new age of surveillance: an internet that never forgets, tracks you unless you take excessive inconveniences to avoid it, and cheap cameras everywhere. Not only is creating counterculture hard to do for fear of reprisal, but also consuming it.
• adamcharnock 4y ago
  I'm pretty sure I've been existing in a number of counter-cultures for the last decade or two. These have been either linked to my identity or physical location, I couldn't have properly experienced them through consuming media on the subject. Certainly all required an active choice and/or lifestyle change on my part. Maybe people mean something else by counter-culture, but here are examples from my life: - Freelancing/contracting, and actively living substantially below my means. This has given me free time in a way that really changed my view on the world and allowed me to be around other people who were not in the 9-5 working world. - Sexuality & ENM, plus living in a large city. There is a huge non-obvious culture of LQBTQIA people in this culture which often have very different outlooks on life to the mainstream. - Communal living. Living in a warehouse with people from very different walks of life. I was exposed to so many fascinating ideas and people this way. It was a truly magical time of my life in which I also played a part in supporting the queer/ENM sub-culture of my city. - Buying land and living off grid. There is a whole sub-culture of people doing this, both online and (more importantly) physically around me. So I think counter-culture is available but – having written the above – I'm not sure if I am agreeing and disagreeing with the OP. On one hand it exists, but on the other hand I'm saying that it is very hard to access without making material changes to one's life.
  • voldacar 4y ago
    It's hard to call something countercultural if every major corporation pays lip service to it 24/7
  • deleted 4y ago
    [deleted]
  • anovikov 4y ago
    Bingo! As soon as you get to define counterculture as something else but "a kind of bullshit you read on the Internet which is different from what normies read", you realise that there is plenty of it.
    • isthisthingon99 4y ago
      LGBTQ stuff is pretty mainstream now, in the sense that it is an omnipresent "other" though 20 years ago, it definitely wasn't. I'd say today's counter culture is people eschewing corporate life, sort of like it was before corporate culture took over.
• dcx 4y ago
  No, the counterculture is actually thriving. But many people just don't understand it yet, because of how, well, counter it is to their ideas about culture: its roots are now in conservatism. It currently seems to be cool and edgy amongst the kids to be alt right in pretty much exactly the same way that it was cool and edgy to be very liberal in the 60s. I'm not saying I agree with or subscribe to the tenets of conservatism (I don't). But it's a natural process for the pendulum to swing as society advances. Liberal counterculture "won" and went completely mainstream. Which is great! Gay marriage is legal, we care about sustainability, and so on. But every system has gaps and blind spots, and movements which oppose the incumbent mainstream are, by definition, not liberal counterculture. Some touchpoints - President Obama's failure to penalize banks in the Great Recession. One percenters and the new cathedral. Joe Rogan. The intellectual dark web (Jordan Peterson et al). The red pill. The alt right. I feel many of the above are often stupid, but in the same way that there were a lot of stupid 60s counterculture movements. It doesn't invalidate the fact that valid ideas exist within both. Also, they aren't using your signaling channels. For example, music doesn't seem to be a relevant cultural rallying point any more.
  • omnicognate 4y ago
    I don't think a movement can be called countercultural once it's taken over one of the two major US political parties and chosen a president.
    • dcx 4y ago
      I think we might still consider this counterculture as long as its norms are not mainstream culture. And I think it's fair to say the dominant culture of many cultural institutions in the US currently has a distinct leftward lean - Hollywood, news, education, research, social media, advertising, other large swathes of industry. (Which again, I'm not saying is a bad thing) Also, Trump represented many things to many people, as opposed to just this emerging alt-right counterculture idea cloud. And by the numbers, most voters soundly rejected him in 2020.
    • throwaway4aday 4y ago
      90% of the people that would identify with those touchpoints listed above wouldn't and didn't vote for Trump. I think they get lumped in with die hard Trump supporters because they weren't buying in to the same paranoia and delusions that the rest of society was imbibing while Trump was in office.
• roenxi 4y ago
  This author must have missed the 2017-2021 presidential term in the US. There are some very strong differences of opinion out there, and they have a significant impact on the nature and direction of creative work. There is without doubt a strong counter-cultural push brewing up from the world of podcasts too which will probably herald a golden age of intelligent mass political debate (clearing a truly low historical bar).
  • deleted 4y ago
    [deleted]
• hbossy 4y ago
  So the author realized he is consuming only the mainstream culture and concluded anything other is too hard to notice, therefore not a counterculture?
  • ploum 4y ago
    Exactly my reaction. The article made me think of the Gemini/Gopher/Smolnet space I like so much as a counter-culture. But then it defines "counter-culture" has having a significant impact. This is a bit of a paradox to me: either you are mainstrean, either you are counter-culture. You can’t be both at the same time. Only history made us realize that a counter-culture movement had a strong impact when it became… mainstream! (and is not counter-culture anymore) Yet, on the individual level, it would be nice if people could realize: "hey, I’m mainly consuming mainstream stuff. I should try to diversify."
  • ghusto 4y ago
    If no one knows about it, does it matter? You use Gopher, use an "alternative" OS, get your news from longform nuanced podcasts? Great, but 99% of people don't. Contrast that with the counter culture of the 60s, or even 90s, where people were at least _aware_ that something else existed, even if they were violently against it.
• Towaway69 4y ago
  Perhaps we have far too many people producing very diverse counterculture however our brains are too small to absorb it all. We become numb and overwhelmed by trying to take it all in. This leaves us in a state of utter confusion about what is important, what isn't and what it all means.
• badcppdev 4y ago
  This comment thread is fascinating as there are so many people who are obviously in totally different bubbles even though they are all commenting on the same HN item. Please supply some context! You (We) all live in bubbles and you have to be clear about where you are coming from before you spout off your observations and thoughts.
• codingdave 4y ago
  Am I being overly simplistic to say that the answer is that countercultures are found in real life, and not on social media?
  • n0tth3dro1ds 4y ago
    Not at all. Silicon Valley tech companies crushed all dissenting opinions online to a comical level. The only place you’re allowed to have a dissenting opinion is in real life
    • zirgs 4y ago
      Or you can learn a non-English language.
    • account42 4y ago
      You can find dissenting opinions online. The major hubs are of course the places that the mainstream will claim are full of terrorists and other miscreants, e.g. the *chans and now the fediverse instances that more mainstream ones refuse to federate with. But there are many smaller spaces online, not run by big tech and small enough to fall under the radar of the mob. HN itself does still tolerate plenty alternate opinions.
• pjc50 4y ago
  I'd like to import an idea via Gibson of the "coolhunters": since the beginning of the mass media age, there have been people looking to commoditize "cool" by importing it into the mainstream. This process dissolves it; it ceases to be "counter", but also loses its distinctiveness and meaning. Rebellious music gets used for adverts. Revolutionary slogans used to sell tshirts. That sort of thing. Technology has made us a lot better at that, and therefore the process of incorporating and destroying counterculture has accelerated. It's like trawlers finding smaller and smaller fish every year - which they take anyway, even if they're not mature, because they want to meet quota. Even if this further destroys the stock. Over the past couple of years lockdowns must have done damage to offline-only cultural spaces. This is difficult to quantify. Another observation hinted elsethread is that of "dark" spaces. One way to protect your culture against commoditization is to make it spiky or poisonous, like an animal that doesn't want to be eaten. Culture that contains elements that are both toxic to the mainstream and hard to separate out can exist as a subculture. It seems to me that there are (at least) two such "left" and "right" subcultures. One left one is too queer-NSFW to be mainstream; another is too tankie-communist to be mainstream. Similarly there's a "right" culture that exists between the "banned from Twitter, had to use Gab" and "arrested on Jan 6" zones. I'd also add a "gentrification" angle. For subcultures to have a physical presence, it needs to be really cheap. The stock of cheap-central-but-nasty (dilapidated, crime infested) property in cool cities has largely been re-absorbed.
  • yadoomerta 4y ago
    idk why every comment i like gets downvoted here :p this feels accurate to me, it's definitely part of the appeal of music so deliberately unlistenable that it will never become corporate trash https://paradiserecordshtml.bandcamp.com/album/music-for-7-juvenile-black-pine-snakes https://paradiserecordshtml.bandcamp.com/album/music-for-7-j... https://chezmonplaisir.bandcamp.com/album/cellphone https://chezmonplaisir.bandcamp.com/album/cellphone
• stcroixx 4y ago
  Feels that way. Inside metro areas in the US there is very little difference of opinion on most issues. It was not always this way. People seems mostly content to consume content and ‘raise awareness’ online, and repeat.
  • nextlevelwizard 4y ago
    You can't have non-standard opinions anymore. All opinions are now politics. If I say I like guns people instantly categorize me as Right-Wing-Nut or Alt-Right-Nut. If you express any kind of differing opinion publicly you will be associated with everything and anything the person hates. There are differing opinions, but those need to be kept private for fear of retaliation.
    • zirgs 4y ago
      Thank god that I live in a country with more than two political parties. And where gun control isn't part of a culture war. Gun ownership is no different to car ownership and isn't tied to any political opinions.
      • nextlevelwizard 4y ago
        Car ownership is very much a political issue for some people who are very into bicycles
        • zirgs 4y ago
          Not car ownership, but car-centric infrastructure that makes biking and walking unsafe.
    • jacooper 4y ago
      100% Wait what? You adopt some right wing ideas and some leftist ideas? You are "modernist"?, you are just a right/left winger!!!(depending on their enemy)/s
      • 4y ago
• jacooper 4y ago
  > Because social media services are now the promoters of mainstream culture, that culture is effectively fueled and guarded by metric-driven algorithms And political and cultural biases, that's something not really mentioned enough when talking about algorithmic goals.
• ChrisMarshallNY 4y ago
  Heh. Funny story. I'm an older (60) programmer. Have over 35 years' experience in software. As a result, my approach tends to be fairly ... heterogenous ... In today's tech scene, that makes me "counterculture." Judging from some of the reactions that I get, you'd think I was a punker at a royal wedding.
• gbN025tt2Z1E2E4 4y ago
  [flagged]
  • jacooper 4y ago
    I mean going from mainstream to counter culture is a bit of a downgrade isn't it?
    • gbN025tt2Z1E2E4 4y ago
      Not really. Youth tend to gravitate toward counter-culture naturally as a form of rebellion against their parents growing up. Having kids going toward traditional values is exactly what this society needs to begin the healing process.
      • CaptainFever 4y ago
        Genuine question from a gay person in a conservative country: What sort of healing would traditional values do? Is it the nuclear family sort of thing? I'm not familiar with those theories.
        • gbN025tt2Z1E2E4 4y ago
          They are values which promote the functioning of a healthy and balanced society with people less inclined and/or enthusiastically supported for being inherently self-centered and self-destructive. Endless drug epidemics are a very prominent and visual symptom of the damage rampant degeneracy has inflicted upon society and that in general, things as they are currently are NOT alright.
          • hutzlibu 4y ago
            So do you believe gay people for example, are a threat to a healthy and balanced society? edit: Oh and conservative culture in my land means mostly lots of alcohol. The first time I vomitted from alcohol was as a teenager on a catholic wine fest, by wine gifted to us from the church. There might be conservatives, that are free from drugs, but mostly they just like other drugs. Drugs are a big problem in todays society, but conservatives as a whole are not a prime example if living sober. Puritans might be, but they are a subclass of "conservatives".
• ajsnigrutin 4y ago
  "back in my times", you had a bunch of different people with a bunch of different outlooks, wishes and views on the world... from anarchist punks to skinheads, peaceful "modern...ier" hippies, "the left", "the right", the what-would-now-be-called "libertarians", from people in schools, to adults at work, to people having kids at 20s, to adult swingers in their 60s... and all of them were represented as somehow 'special' but existing here. Now it seems that we have a mainstream "culture", which doesnt actually exist, atleast noone identifies by it, then we have a mainstream "counterculture", which considers themselves as "alternative", but (atleast with younger people) is a majority, which occupies themselves by issues such as racism, sexism, trans-, and other -isms and more recently ecology. It has gone so far, that you have "protests" for equal rights for some of those groups, or other 'mainstrea' issues where people actually in charge of laws are parading next to the "protesters"/"paraders" (in our, slovenian case, our prime minister at a protest for a healthcare reform). And the rest? Those are invisible. Hippies and anti-war people? Nope.. now we have everyone cheering for more weapons and a longer war in ukraine. People complaining about housing prices... sure, a lot of them... people actually wanting more housing to be built.. a minority. Preppers? Just weirdos... even after quite a few events where prepping actually helped people. Ok, i might be exaggerating a bit, but there really seems to be a lot of overlap between the current "counterculture" and what is being served from the people/groups/organizations that historically would have been seen as the "bad guys" by those counterculture groups. But again.. stuff like this is talked in "conspiracy circles", and again, shunned by the mainstream counterculture - eg https://i.redd.it/yj3vs93bi7691.jpg https://i.redd.it/yj3vs93bi7691.jpg
  • trinix912 4y ago
    > in our, slovenian case, our prime minister at a protest for a healthcare reform I think it's happened a few times already, I'd say it's mostly a PR move & nothing more. Meanwhile I think there have happened a few protests at the very same place (Trg republike) yet the "mainstream" media didn't cover it.
    • ajsnigrutin 4y ago
      Well sure, but he's the one who should make the changes needed for people to get the healthcare they pay a lot of money for... and instead he's "protesting" against.. himself? The protests, activism, and other stuff, that was once a sign of counter culture has become so mainstream that even the politicians do it... go out, wave some flags, take some photos, pat themselves on their backs, and go home and change nothing. I miss the old times, when the establishment was actually afraid of countercultures, of people going against the mainstream... the current state, where the mainstream is acting as if it's against itself is bad for society, because it never changes anything.
• shjfddhfdhd 4y ago
  everyone should read the wikipedia definition at least before commenting (or writing articles) too many misnaming of subculture as counterculture
• neonnoodle 4y ago
  The medium is the message dudes. At this point in history, what will qualify a true counterculture is NOT BEING ONLINE. Whatever the true counterculture will be, it won’t be subject to the Internet and its all-seeing eye. It won’t be made out of memes and flame wars. No matter what the political bent, we’re all very much a captive audience online. “Master’s house/master’s tools” and all that.
  • yadoomerta 4y ago
    perfect comment <3
  • shanebellone 4y ago
    "medium is the message" That brought back grad school memories. The Internet is an excellent example of this. We're watching -- in real-time -- the medium challenge society (at all levels and across boundaries). The Internet is still an infant; yet look at its impact.
    • seydor 4y ago
      Really? The internet looks old. A teenager in the 90s, aged fast in the 2000s, got a family in 2010s and now is seeking to police everyone through its retirement.
      • shanebellone 4y ago
        The medium hasn't changed. We're still on "Version 1".
        • seydor 4y ago
          We see versions but maybe there's a lifecycle to every medium. I m sure when TV was invented people made blue-sky predictions about how it would change the world for the better and not become the means that rich people use to rule over democratic audiences. The internet we know was the medium of one-to-all communication but it seems we -very soon- stumbled on the limits of such communication with all the censorship & tracking . Maybe the next medium will use some other mode, where one-to-all does not matter anymore And while the internet changed societies, it did not "change societies", as in the western world democracies function pretty much as they did in the 80s, but with digital tools instead of analog. We did not see huge changes like when printing was invented: The world map is still the same
• jl6 4y ago
  Personally I think the word “counterculture” should be retired, as we no longer live in monocultural societies. We no longer gather round any shared fireplace. For a counterculture to meaningfully exist, it has to be somehow discordant with a dominant narrative - but there is no dominant narrative any more. The west is not ruled by the left or the right or the church or the state. We are all fragmenting off into echo chambers and bubbles of culture, where we each take a slightly different slice of the cake. If anything, we are all the counterculture, and so the term’s meaning evaporates.
  • giraffe_lady 4y ago
    There have always been meaningful distinctions and divisions in society that radically shape how specific groups and individuals relate to and participate in it. The boundaries and dynamics change, have maybe changed faster in the last few generations than ever before, but the phenomenon isn't peculiar to our time.
  • pessimizer 4y ago
    Yet I suspect you look and think like your neighbors with a 90% probability.
    • jl6 4y ago
      Are you agreeing with the bit I said about society fragmenting off into bubbles (of local similarity)?
      • bluetomcat 4y ago
        You are correct that society is fragmenting into groups based on diverse interests. However, there is an overarching political narrative among most of these groups. There are "easy", widespread and accepted opinions which do not challenge the "grand" social order.
        • bilalnpe 4y ago
          Things like 1+1=2, water is wet, sky is blue?
• countercul 4y ago
  Having the median beliefs and political opinions of your grandparents is counter culture enough that you will be banned from pretty much any social media website.
  • n0tth3dro1ds 4y ago
    Grandparents? How about Obama (or most mainstream Dems) from ~2006 >against gay marriage >against illegal immigration, supported erecting physical barriers >pro wars in Middle East You surely do not need to go back two generations to get shrieked out of a room. Just dip back ~10 - 15 years into mainstream Democrat positioning.
    • deleted 4y ago
      [deleted]
• WeylandYutani 4y ago
  Is it any wonder that the artistic scene is curiously conformist? "Wiens brood men eet diens woord men spreekt". Ah Dutch language has so many great sayings involving money- like Eskimos and the snow. Artists are clowns hired by a small elite that has the disposable income to spend. Ofcourse we live in a society that idolises the arts for some reason but most people never go to ballet or buy a sculpture. In Europe the government has subsidized theatre productions for a hundred years and it hasn't made a dent.
• magwa101 4y ago
  [dead]
• ihateyouall123 4y ago
  It was wake up call around 2015 when Comic-con started having banners that say "celebrating the popular arts". In 2006 and earlier, this sign used to say something along the lines of "celebrating counter culture."
• machina_ex_deus 4y ago
  [flagged]
  • bjt2n3904 4y ago
    The thing that really shocked me was watching an episode of South Park. The boys all got into airsoft, and really enjoyed it (in contrast to a bunch of older jaded teens that used drugs and were largely miserable.) The dads weren't sure about letting their boys play, but when they saw the teens picking on their kids, went and bought a bunch of tactical gear and airsoft guns and went on the field with their kids. Oh, and the kid that didn't have a dad? They got an uncle to stand in for him. This is the show that my parents warned me about as a kid for how sacrilegious and profane they were. It came out like it was directed by Jordan Peterson. I mentioned this to a friend, and he responded... "Well, that show has always been counter culture."
    • chasd00 4y ago
      That shown has been around for a long time and has changed a lot. When they folded and censored their own episode criticizing extremest Islam they lost a lot of edge/credibility.
      • selimthegrim 4y ago
        They had an earlier episode that showed Muhammad for a bit.
    • Kye 4y ago
      South Park isn't really counterculture. It takes low-effort shots at everyone regardless of the merits of the target's position. Rarely, they have a moment where the unique naivety of the targeting falls just right and you get a decent episode.
  • arisu 4y ago
    Sometimes the labeling is correct.
• pessimizer 4y ago
  A counterculture requires privacy, and we're increasingly becoming a society of constant surveillance and permanent records shared between authorities, a society that is very suspicious when people speak to each other without an intermediary escalating anything interesting being said to their manager.
  • jmeister 4y ago
    Exactly. A counter culture needs some room to take risks. You can’t do that with the Damocles’ sword of visibility/virality hanging over you 24x7. The other comment about being offline is right. You’ll find some cool pseudonymous writers online too.
    • Evenjos 4y ago
      100%. I see a lot of originality in web serials and fiction by indie authors. I've more or less stopped reading books that were curated by the Big Five publishing houses.
• chasd00 4y ago
  Given the accessibility to like minded groups of people made possible by the Internet I’d say we’re all the counter culture. Which I suppose implies no counter culture. Edit: after reading another comment I think digital disconnection is the new counter culture
  • throwaway4aday 4y ago
    Digital disconnection will fizzle out, they go too far by completely isolating themselves. Even the hippies with all their back to nature zeal had their own circulations, pamphlets, and recordings of talks and music. My guess is that the next major cultural shift will be disciplined use of modern media and a subversion of technology that simultaneously circumvents censorship and removes the algorithmic control over content.
• marssaxman 4y ago
  The counterculture I was part of seems to have died, or gone mainstream, which is basically the same thing; but I don't feel any more like part of the mainstream than I ever did. Which leads me to wonder: do we live in a society at all? I see an overwhelmingly dominant economy, with a gigantic political-corporate machine operating it and setting the terms for all forms of non-local communication - but outside of all those transactions and legislations, are there still any gaps large enough to hide a society in?
• drewcon 4y ago
  I’m going to get flamed for this but at this point the closest we’re getting to counter culture is the exact opposite… “Trads”. Young people with super traditional values doing exactly the opposite of most of what you just listed. No one would seriously suggest the trendiest most mainstream supported or glorified lifestyles (van life, queerness, gig work) are counter culture…that IS the culture; there’s very little cultural risk in living those glorified identities. But say you’re an 18 year old with radically traditional values…that’s counter cultural now. Not supporting either direction. Just observing.
  • Pigalowda 4y ago
    I think you are right. The US kinda feels like Asimov’s foundation, especially in the west coast. Fewer people acting like adults and more people chasing dopamine and letting entropy do its damage. Maybe I just need to stop taking public transportation and walking the city. Perhaps suburbs feel further from the precipice.
    • Mezzie 4y ago
      I've been wondering lately if it's down to the lack of agency on the part of average people. Like I see that America is in decline and has a decent chance of falling apart in my lifetime (I'm 34), but what exactly am I going to do about it? Nobody in charge cares, they're too busy fiddling. If you can't stop the decline and have to live it, why not try to enjoy what you have while you have it?
      • Pigalowda 4y ago
        I’m 37 so we’re pretty much the same cohort. And I’ve also reached that conclusion - I get out of the city and ski and hike, spend time with SO, etc. I won’t be dragged into the bullshit doomerism and constant shifting existential crises that online and west coasters seem to be addicted to. However, my daily commutes through seattle runs me right into the Pioneer square station and I swear it’s like something from “the Wire”. It feels like hamsterdam, a hell on earth. So while I generally resolve to do whats best for myself I still run into the effects of the society I live in everyday and it’s depressing/demoralizing. This city is diseased with an aggressive malignancy.
• DrNosferatu 4y ago
  Munich surely feels like it!
• benob 4y ago
  Maybe culture has shifted to other areas than music, movies, performing arts, etc as those have become entertainment business opportunities.
• deleted 4y ago
  [deleted]
• donatj 4y ago
  We live in a time without major trials or struggle. It’s lead by and large to people that have little to say. Most people’s lives are by the measure of any other generation in history more-or-less perfect. The average persons quality of life surpass that of Royalty not that long ago - access to exotic fruits in off seasons, all the nations libraries in your pocket, lack of any kind of physical labor. We are all princes of our own kingdoms. Our gripes today are so minor previous generations would have largely found them laughable. It’s why so much of our decent media depicts the past. It’s hard to make a compelling story about social media addiction. It’s been done, but it’s difficult. We’re approaching Brave New World much more quickly than I’d ever anticipated reading it in the 90s.
  • dougmwne 4y ago
    I live in a city with a lot of Ukrainian refugees. I have a chance to see a lot of art and music from young people fleeing the war. It is POWERFUL. Paradise lost.
• strken 4y ago
  Most definitions of a counterculture are about the entry of an alternative culture into the mainstream. Those conditions only exist when widespread cultural change is about to happen. Before, the mainstream culture is not opposed by a single large countercultural bloc; after, the mainstream culture has integrated the counterculture. The slow centralisation of the reins of culture into a handful of institutions goes beyond counterculture. You don't need to have a big countercultural movement to have culturally relevant movies from companies that aren't Disney, or popular songs that aren't by Ed Sheeran. It's a bigger problem than just "we don't have a 21st century hippy equivalent".
  • trgn 4y ago
    > we don't have a 21st century hippy equivalent Today's counter-culture won't be identified somewhere on the left-right spectrum, or be found in the struggle for mass media attention. Which was basically the hippies. The truly dominating force today is the weight of our technological environment. The actual physical things. The actual algorithms of the bureaucracies. The world doesn't "feel" the same. It actual "is" the same. To our senses. The counter cultural movements are the ones that reject submission to technology. Cyclists stand up to the car (the actual thing). Homeschoolers threaten the processes of the school district (the actual bureaucracy). In the mainstream, the driver submits to the car, the redshirter submits to the bureaucracy. All the rest; music you listen to, political opinions you hold, movies you see, books you read, sexual disposition. It is completely irrelevant because they do not challenge technological foundations. For the hippies, those were anchors since culture still attached much value to say e.g. artistic expression. But today, culture is not defined by those. That is also why much of this discussion is actually about the premise, we can't even recognize counterculture. We're looking in the wrong places. A boomer certainly won't recognize it. Music is more diverse than ever, and the big networks don't define culture. But to be sure: death metal is not counterculture. That just gets co-opted in a headphone ad or whatever. Instead, those cyclists who are now doing critical mass events, they are laying the foundations of a future in which the past will be unrecognizable. Death metal hobbyist lay the foundation for nothing but more niche consumption. I'm somewhat joking with that last example, but even so. Look at dominant technology (physical or procedural), as concrete and specific as you can make it. What is in opposition of _that_, that is counter culture.
• auctoritas 4y ago
  This article misunderstands what a "culture" is. Specific activities do not constitute a culture. Niche interests within a single domain do not constitute a culture. "Interest in Marvel movies" or some other figment of pop culture is not itself a culture, not by a long shot. This is why we can speak of a "pop culture" in the first place, because we sense that many things - nominally unrelated products situated within different domains though they may be - are all related in some important way, contained within a broader popular culture that transcends any of its manifestations. Perhaps the defining mark of popular culture is that the people who consume it and participate in it tend to overlap, or resemble one another. This way of thinking means that cultures are defined more by their participants than anything else. Culture is broad, it is cohesive, and it extends and influences across many domains. There are absolutely countercultures out there, but most people aren't aware of them given how dominant the dominant culture is, which is generally the case but especially true today.
  • bluetomcat 4y ago
    "Counterculture" is a very US- and Anglo-centric term to begin with. It implies that there is a "mainstream" culture to be opposed. In this view there are nerds with eyeglasses and specific interests and normies with a better chance of reproduction. The mainstream culture is the post-WW2 consumer culture that grew around commercial TV shows, blockbuster movies and advertising and household consumption through items like washing machines and vacuum cleaners. Today, YouTube and TikTok are channels which multiply and amplify this kind of culture worldwide.
    • auctoritas 4y ago
      Culture and Counterculture have always existed. What you're describing is just the most recent instance of the Culture/Counterculture dichotomy. That doesn't mean the entire concept is inapplicable to other places or times.
• bob1029 4y ago
  No, but the counter culture is usually a reflection of what could have been, and we have really powerful technologies for suppressing these regrets now.
• Stranger43 4y ago
  The counterculture of the day is the MAGA movement they have their own reality and is begging for a fight, until someone shows up to give them one and is basically an text book example on an co-dependent counterculture that cannot exist without the mainstream culture existing as something to counter. I know it's kind of tipping the debate on the head to suggest that the counterculture is not the "future left" but the "3rd way right" but there is nothing in the mechanics of mainstream to counterculture that suggest that the challenge to the mainstream have to come from the traditional left. And like the Hippies of the(mostly post civil rights movement) counterculture the maga trumpets are only tangentially linked to any concrete actionable goals as it's about a return to the past that never was without any real clear idea of what that's supposed to look like only that they personally will be bigshots once it happens. What is however increasingly clear is that the traditional left have been hunted into extinction by both the radical centrist mainstream and the right-wing counterculture as neither of those movement's have any real appetite for the old optimistic "Liberté, Egalité, Fraternité" values of the enlightenment, but prefers stability through authority as a response to an world they mostly don't understand.
• arrakeen 4y ago
  Juggalos and your immediate, visceral reaction to that word proves their counter-cultural legitimacy. both articles seem to be under the assumption that a counter-culture must "break through" and have impact on the mainstream, but that's completely contrary to the existences of counter-cultures-- they reject mainstream culture and in fact "breaking through" to the mainstream represents the death of the counter-culture.
• synthpop 4y ago
  Society of the Spectacle. The revolution will not be televised.
• AnimalMuppet 4y ago
  We may live in a society without a counterculture. We have many, but not one dominant one.
  • prpl 4y ago
    I’ve definitely been part of a musical counterculture my entire adult life (maybe you might omit the last 3 years though). I’ve easily seen more than 1000 performances in that time, from cave shows to pickle factories to stadiums. You’d probably identify it as punk/garage/indie, but there is a subculture there. I’m usually amazed that it’s larger than I expect, at least in the bay area. I also worked in physics most of that time, which is probably a subculture there as well (some overlap I suppose with a broader subculture of non-profits workers). I also lived in Utah (Salt Lake City), where you are effective a subculture (counter culture) almost by virtue of living there and not being LDS. None of those are homogenous, but all are counter to the prevailing culture - which is the much harder thing to define. Which is my point - we don’t even have a prevailing culture, and we never really did, not a universal one anyway. That said, it’s likely that white/christian/suburban/nuclear family was considered the prevailing culture though. That’s a subculture today - albeit an unusually powerful one.
• biomcgary 4y ago
  I was really confused by "the animals asking for help compilation" referenced in the blog post. What animals compile? I was disappointed, but I'm sure a near future AI will be able to generate what I was looking for.
• cbeach 4y ago
  A major factor here is that social networks rely on advertisers interspersing their content in between user-generated content. For business reasons, the networks can't have their ads placed near anything controversial. So the networks systematically demote controversial content.
• gumby 4y ago
  MAGA is the major counterculture at the moment (in the USA). It is different from others of the past (punk, hippies, the beats, racist, socialists, populists) but has the key markers such as rejecting the dominant paradigm, being big enough to write about but not big enough to be a movement, pulls largely from the dominant population group, has some but limited influence on the dominant culture, has its own “literature” and belief system, etc. Note that what isn’t different is its dependence on telecommunications. I tried to think of legitimate countercultures before the late 1880s US populism but couldn’t. Regency fops didn’t count, nor did know-nothings.
• gpjanik 4y ago
  https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Betteridge%27s_law_of_headlines https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Betteridge%27s_law_of_headline... The answer is obviously no.
• gr4yb34rd 4y ago
  counter cultures that aren't advertiser friendly for the tech giants seems to simply get stamped out nowadays.
• tarkin2 4y ago
  It exists. But it's not liberal.
  • LesZedCB 4y ago
    yeah it's post-left
    • phendrenad2 4y ago
      liberal != left
      • LesZedCB 4y ago
        yes, that was the commentary i was making.
• godot 4y ago
  So, I work in tech and I may pattern-fit too much, but I feel some of it is due to PM culture in modern business and product development. In short, product teams in companies look for the best performing variant of products and once it determines it, it doubles down there. It only makes sense in terms of ROI for a business. In the grand scheme of things when whole industries do it, we as a society converge toward something, whatever category of product we're talking about (TV, suburbs, content algorithms, etc.).
• anonym29 4y ago
  There are many countercultures that are alive and well. One example: People who deliberately avoid social media, tape over webcams, use non-android, non-ios phones, who value their privacy. These people scrub the internet of their info, make aggressive use of GDPR/CCPA deletion requests. They do not want to be part of mainstream society for whatever reason. They are routinely marginalized by people around them, labelled as "weird", unjustly suspected (and accused) of all sorts of criminal activity under the premise that "privacy is for people with something to hide" - a train of thought that is concerningly common among younger generations. Another example is anticonsumerism. People who do not use any streaming services nor purchase media. They don't blow money like there's no tomorrow on fast fashion, pointless trinkets from Amazon, exorbitant vacations that will be forgotten as quickly as they happened, or routinely eating out. These are the people with high 6 and low 7 figure net worths in their 30's driving cars that they paid $5k cash for that look like trash. These people avoid conspicuous consumption like the plague - why throw away so much money while painting a target on your back for criminals just for the approval of others, most of whom you don't even know? Screw a gym membership, exercise is free. These people are relentlessly mocked as cheapskates in spite of the fact that it's more about values than financial concerns. Look for the hated, the despised, the mocked, and the belittled in mainstream culture to find counterculture. The counterculture movements of the 1960s went with those labels like peanut butter goes with jelly when described by the prevailing culture of the time.
  • kurthr 4y ago
    Interestingly, of the on-line crowd I'd even put Qanon up there with the other countercultures. Being counterculture doesn't mean you aren't older or being grifted.
    • anonym29 4y ago
      Counterculture also doesn't inherently mean just / moral / admirable, just that it stands in juxtaposition against the mainstream culture, which itself could be just or unjust, moral or immoral, admirable or detestable.
  • thedriver 4y ago
• refuse 4y ago
  I can't think of a counter culture that wasn't somehow absorbed by the economy and sold back to the masses. It all ends up getting commodified which makes it part of "culture" without the "counter". I've watched the trend accelerate in my life and I wonder if we're reaching some sort of point (because of social media?) where there is very nearly no culture (counter or otherwise) unless it is commodified. Everything has been reproduced and divorced from it's meaning so we have this neutered insipid idea of culture that inspires nothing.
  • sudosysgen 4y ago
    You're not the only one with this impression. This process is called recuperation in sociology : https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Recuperation_%28politics%29?wprov=sfla1 https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Recuperation_%28politics%29?wp...
    • refuse 4y ago
      Thank you, I hadn't heard of this.
      • sudosysgen 4y ago
        If you're interested in going down the rabbit hole, as far as I'm aware the concept first came up in Guy Debord's The Society of Spectacle. It's a bit of a weird read though. The term did take on a wider meaning in political philosophy and critical theory since, however. Now that I think about it, Embrace Extend Extinguish can be understood as the explicit application of the process recuperation to the free software counterculture.
        • refuse 4y ago
          I'll put it on my reading shortlist! Sounds interesting.
• dragonwriter 4y ago
  We live in a society without a single distinct unitary “counterculture” and where the title of “counterculture” is coveted so that each competing subculture tries to claim that it is both a counterculture and the most significantly “counter” one (even the strongest contenders for being the dominant subculture do this.)
• chadlavi 4y ago
  https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Betteridge's_law_of_headlines https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Betteridge's_law_of_headlines
• jjk166 4y ago
  If you only consume mainstream media then you may personally live in a society which lacks a counterculture. You strike up a conversation with the girl picking mushrooms in the middle of nowhere or you go to an underground death metal concert or spend a bit of time on 4chan and you'll find countercultures alive and well that you're just not part of. If you think a sense of sameness pervades the creative world then you must be looking at a woefully tiny portion of the creative world. It has never been easier to be weird nor easier to find weirdness.
  • narrator 4y ago
    The way you know 4chan is the counterculture is every time someone releases a new generative art tool, 4chan figures out a way to do stuff with it that makes the creators have to restrict and/or shut it down. Like in the 1960s how the mainstream culture would whisper under their breath and point in shock and horror at hippies and try to get them banned from various public venues, and send mobs to beat them up, we have that same situation now, but instead 4chan is treated like that. BTW, just because it's not your counterculture, doesn't mean it's not counterculture. You guys are looking at this all 60 years after the fact and saying that hippies were awesome. That's not what people thought at the time. 4chan is generally anti-ukraine war and anti-vax. 60 years from now they might look like the good guys.
    • tomdell 4y ago
      "narrator" is a fitting username since you're narrating your own subjective reality. I don't think making disturbing sexual content with AI image generators is going to be viewed the same way as free love.
      • narrator 4y ago
        "Free love" to the very conservative social morals coming out of the 1950s was just as shocking. You're looking at this with a perspective 60 years after the fact when "free love" has largely been normalized. Obscenity and homosexuality used to be regularly prosecuted back in the 1950s for example. Also, some aspects of the counterculture like the Manson family, Various Sex Cults, or Jim Jones Cult, massive drug use, the huge increases in crime were not good. However, now all the ugly parts have been ignored and idealized by the people who took the hippie culture mainstream.
• PuppyTailWags 4y ago
  I kind of think we have a fragmentary counterculture going against prevailing culture in certain aspects only. Just as hippie counterculture was obviously mostly in american college-educated middle class students and black panthers were obviously primarily black. We have traditional catholics in america who are going against the pope's relatively progressive positions on gay people. We have aggressive de-institutionalize-the-cops people. We have had (for a while now!) anti-prison people (this is far longer than "defund the police" and has roots in anti-racism) and I think they're pretty countercultural. (This is not "we should make better prisons" people, I mean "we should have no prisons".) We have had monarchists, people who believe we should do away with democracy and go back to monarchist rule. IDK about them but I know they exist. I think all counterculture is going against some aspect of a culture, not all aspects of all culture. But since we're aware of so much more cultures than before, the relative counter movements all seem small in comparison individually. I'm sure hippies were never that big, nor punks.
  • runarberg 4y ago
    When I think of counter culture, I think more about the cultural artifacts then some shared political believes. Sure the scene might have some shared politics, but that is a by-product, and is not necessary. I mean, see the punks and their wide range of politics. As an example, other people have mentioned furries. They do have a pretty easily distinguishable aesthetics which you’ll spot immediately when you look at their art or their fashion. They might all share a pro LGBTQI+ agenda, but that is as far as their politics will agree, and besides most people have the same political view about LGBTQI+ anyway.
    • Taywee 4y ago
      > They might all share a pro LGBTQI+ agenda They definitely do not. The majority do, but there are plenty of weirdly conservative and almost traditionalist furry sects. > besides most people have the same political view about LGBTQI+ anyway. Most people do not. Even among people who openly say the same thing, their internal private views can vary a whole lot. I know plenty of people who are openly pro LGBTQI+, but have more ambivalent feelings about popular narratives that they don't publicize for fear of public shaming and ostricization. They aren't internally against it, but their opinions are more nuanced than they feel people will tolerate.
• cptthrowaway2 4y ago
  Using a throwaway for this, because I know this topic is sensitive. Hello fellow HN'er :) I'm not sharp on the definition of counter culture, but just by the feeling of "counter", I'd argue that the pickup artist community has some aspects of it. I think about game obsessively for both genders, though mostly my own (male). The following that I'm writing is true for both, but in the pickup artist community it seems that almost exclusively men are practicing it (but women could too). A few things that feel counter: 1. You can take pro-active charge of your dating life by consciously/intentionally approaching people: on the street, in a book store, on the train, in a club, in a night club, in a bar, more or less anywhere. Especially the first 10 seconds to 2 minutes need to be scripted as you're basically talking to the autopilot of a person and not the actual person (my opinion). In normal culture, you just "naturally" meet people through friends or "it just happens". When I'm on the street and approach someone, it doesn't just happen. When I'm on Tinder even, it's optimized. The way I approach people is pre-meditated, the improv side comes out after 10 seconds to 2 minutes (there are also schools of seduction that use a fully scripted approach, I've never done that, can't talk about that. I started out with improv all the way and came to the sad conclusion that you can't do that for the first seconds to few minutes). 2. Sex with tens to hundreds to thousands of people is fine. There are a few other cultures that do this, but not the mainstream one. Note, it's not fully counter cultural here as having a GF as a goal is almost as admirable (I say almost because everyone says it is just as admirable, but the high lay count seduction guys don't care about what you have to say if your lay count isn't high because they believe you lack experience). 3. A fairly strong belief [1] that men should be dominant, leading, winning and powerful. Women are inherently submissive, caring, supporting and seen as weaker. This "seen as weaker" is even true when it comes to cognitive abilities. I don't think anyone would say it that way, but I can see it in the behavior. Such as the phrase a "girl is shit testing you." I've thought deeply about it and realized that men test as well and some tests by women are actually quite good (and others indeed utter nonsense, but that goes for both genders IMO). The thing is, I've met quite a few very appealing looking women in the US that come across as dumb, I can't put it any other way. I'm from Europe and it makes the dumb women from Europe look sophisticated (for example, they are aware of other European countries so know more about language than their US counter parts). But I personally find this whole view nonsense as my strategy is focused on finding intelligent women that are amazingly attractive as well (discussing the Bhagavad Gita on minute 3 in Florida? Yep, been there, done that :) Or what about Austrian politics and geopolitics on minute 1 in Vienna? Definitely). People exist on a distribution, but the strong polar image that the seduction community tries to create, it feels counter. I'm a hardcore fan of 1. I'm a fan of 2, no one should be slut shamed but slut celebrated. I disagree with 3, but I'm one of the few or so it seems. With that said, all these 3 things feel "counter" to the current culture (with perhaps not 2, in a sense because when you think about it, any form of sexual expression that doesn't harm others is worthy of celebration according to feminism). [1] Not by all, not by me anyway but I'm a complicated cookie in general for many cultures :) Careful with mapping the seduction community to me 1 to 1, it doesn't work.
• OkayPhysicist 4y ago
  There's a compelling argument to be made that the furries constitute a counterculture: they certainly fall outside the mainstream, with most external perceptions of them range from see them as "weird" to "degenerates". They create plenty of their own cultural artifacts in the form of art and writing. And they have a disproportionate impact on the tech world relative to their numbers. On the other hand they are a very small group relative to, say, the hippies, and aren't really framed a being in direct opposition of the status quo. But I don't think the status quo has much support in popular culture. Our current state of affairs is the result of a stalemated tug of war between many different groups who all oppose the status quo.
• notinfuriated 4y ago
  Can't have a counterculture without a culture.
• deleted 4y ago
  [deleted]
• RC_ITR 4y ago
  Say what you will about Dang and their moderation style, but whatever is causing this thread to stay up for 7+ hours (and climb the front page) is very intriguing. I wonder what the logic is for this 'flamewar bait' being unmoderated (is there anything more primed for a 'flamewar' than arguing about which cultures are mainstream and which are not?)
• jonas21 4y ago
  > At no point in history have people created so much with so few channels for consuming their work. Most consumers get their content through a narrow straw — TikTok’s “For You” page, the first page of Google’s search results, Instagram’s explore tab, miscellaneous streaming sites, and so on. Many lifetimes worth of creation get aggressively filtered down into a (very optimized) stream of content. Every person's TikTok feed is different, the first page of search results for every query is different, etc. Never have there been so many channels for consuming content. In fact, the complaint I hear more often from people is that society has too many countercultures. Of course they don't call them that -- they call them "filter bubbles," "extremist groups," or more derogatory terms, but aren't they the same thing?
• tonymet 4y ago
  There are plenty of active counter cultures. Even in America you have evangelicals, fundamentalist LDS, Amish & Quakers, "off-grid / preppers", Orthodox Jews & Conservative Islam, atheistic/materialistic guru cult communities, pseudo-religious "leadership" seminar cults, etc. In Europe you have traditionalist and nationalistic groups, farming communities, monastic communities, communes and more (about which i'm less familiar). Contemporary society is distinct for having a global mainstream monoculture propagated by a universal media enterprise, which gives the impression of a uniform global culture. Former bastions of counter culture like universities, museums , art galleries, local theaters now parrot the mainstream cultural zeitgeist. Moreover, mainstream adherents denigrate any counter cultural movement as "extremism". In the past we cultivated a diffused & distributed society with localized communities that were capable of sustaining & highlighting distinct cultural trends. Often I think the counter culture can be sought out, but too many people find it convenient to tap into the mainstream culture and believe counterculture has been snuffed out. Give it a shot.
• cleandreams 4y ago
  I am old enough to remember the hippies and related counterculture(s). (I was very young.) This is something to keep in mind: the counterculture then was a place where people made a living. And the cost of living was cheap. You could raise kids on an organic farm, sell in the local alternative stores, have a live show on pirate radio. And pay your modest bills. Health insurance and college tuition was cheap. Jeez -- in California even the UC system was free! The hippies were the pot growers back then and all of Humboldt was one big counter culture. There were lots of niche markets and vendors who could sell to them and pay their rent. A big part of what has happened is a huge rise in basic bills (rent, health insurance, tuition) and that has forced the counterculture people to make more money. It's an economic transformation and it has narrowed our culture in many ways. Smell the desperation. Part of that, in turn, is the slow death of the American working class. This is a much harsher society economically. That is why you step over bodies in San Francisco's Tenderloin. It wasn't like that when I moved here (early 80's).
  • LAC-Tech 4y ago
    Part of that, in turn, is the slow death of the American working class. This is a much harsher society economically. That is why you step over bodies in San Francisco's Tenderloin. It wasn't like that when I moved here (early 80's). But why are you surprised? The hippies pushed free love and drug use. The inevitable end result was more children without stable families and drug addiction. When you step over those bodies you are stepping over the fruits of the hippy ideal.
    • samtp 4y ago
      [flagged]
      • LAC-Tech 4y ago
        Would it upset you to know that's very far from the truth, and I've still come to this conclusion?
      • MockObject 4y ago
• miamibre 4y ago
  So maybe this is because I wasn't raised in the US or in what would be described as the suburbs but why isn't Rap / Urban culture considered counterculture? Just because a lot of acts have been turned mainstream and whitewashed doesn't mean they don't represent a radical departure from the status quo. And this isn't just in the US, in latin america you have reggaeton, in UK you have Grime and the rest of EU also have their own underground street culture marked by Violence, Crime, Drugs, Sex, and social issues which is very similar to Rock and Punk from back in the day. Just like previous movements they are born from a sense of resentment and ostracism from "normal" society and a lot of the music tell tales that are often ignored had they not been made into a catchy tune that kids around the world listen to. The highest grossing tour of 2022 was Bad Bunny's world tour [1] beating out well established acts and pretty much all his songs are in Spanish which is very surprising considering you see a lot of bilingual artists on the list. [1]https://news.pollstar.com/2022/12/12/2022-year-end-biz-analysis-record-setting-year-marked-by-bad-bunny-ed-sheeran-stadiums/ https://news.pollstar.com/2022/12/12/2022-year-end-biz-analy...
  • Vt71fcAqt7 4y ago
    >Just because a lot of acts have been turned mainstream and whitewashed Rap han't become "whitewashed," just mainstream. And that does make it non-counterculture. The truth is that counterculture died after 1960, to the extent monoculture ever even existed in the first place (in the US). The 60's eepresent the death of monoculture, and we never moved back to one (in the US). What you are reffering to is more like hipsterism.
• thedriver 4y ago
  Honestly I think that this article is just stupid. The writer basically complains that he can't find counterculture in mainstream media outlets and mainstream social media. Is that really surprising?
• empressplay 4y ago
  Isn't the counterculture now just anyone who's questioning the narrative? And I don't mean following right-wing media -- that's a counter-narrative for sure, but it's still just another narrative, which still needs to be thoroughly(!) questioned. Maybe the counterculture today is the few people left who practice critical thinking and make up their own minds about things. Who congregate at places like here on HN?
• danielvaughn 4y ago
  At first glance, this article seems somewhat parochial. I'm honestly not aware of any explicit counter-culture earlier than, say, the Bohemians in 19th century Europe. Maybe the Renaissance counts. But both of those are European. It's a question I've been interested in for a while but never explored. How common is it, historically, to have significant cultural shifts from one generation to the next?
• phendrenad2 4y ago
  There's still a counterculture, of course, but the current mainstream culture has become the liberal culture: Embrace counterculture, say you're on their site, and then stab it in the back so it shuts up.
• Eupraxias 4y ago
  Do we live in a society without a counterculture? Yes, because there is no longer a central, shared culture.
• kevin_thibedeau 4y ago
  The counterculture won so now the counterculture are a divisive cult that wallows in hatred.
• dotconnector 4y ago
  The purpose of 'counterculture' is an outlet for dissatisfaction, allowing the neo-colonial system to continue operating smoothly. Preferably getting the dissatisfied to buy things and serve their function among the colonized. The only true counterculture would be about changing the circumstances enabling the neo-colonial system, and this is the fear of the neo-colonialists and their enablers who benefit from status-quo. Everything else is window-dressing, distraction, and detours, made up to look like change.
  • jmull 4y ago
    I don’t think it makes sense to reduce culture, counter- or mainstream, to neocolonialism. Sure, it can be a tool of neocolonialism, but that’s hardly the extent.
• chinchilla2020 4y ago
  > It’s possible that ChatGPT is the beginning of artificial general intelligence or that it will upend Google’s search business despite Google’s considerable moats. ChatGPT can never wander past its training data. If anything, chatGPT encourages a convergent monoculture. It has no creativity or problem solving skills.
• genderwhy 4y ago
  I mean, no, right? Obviously no? Is this even a question? I can think of many significant countercultures across all sorts of political spectrums?
• Thorentis 4y ago
  The feeling of not having a counter culture is probably exacerbated by the fact that "progressive" and "countercultural" have become somewhat conflated terms or concepts in the last decade. And almost all major corporations involve themselves in whatever the latest progressive social movement is. When every major corporation is doing something "countercultural" then it isn't really countercultural at all. It's mainstream.
• 6_6_6 4y ago
  there is always a counterculutre,,, it is very ying/yang :)
• neltnerb 4y ago
  > But it’s especially surprising given how much creative work today exists outside the mainstream. See, the issue here may simply be that the author isn't aware of the central limit theorem. It is not at all strange that as you increase the number of independent estimates of what culture is (using content creation as a proxy) you see less "counterculture" (proportionally) because there's a smoothish variation between the two extremes with a peak near "mainstream" simply because that's how statistics work. A few scores of people on TV will invariably have more obviously different (and known) opinions. But I'm also staring at this essay in quite a bit of confusion generally. There's all sorts of stuff that's counterculture being pushed into law by the extremist right, the extremist right is also a "counterculture", that's not slang for "the left". Outlawing teaching kids about LGBT people's existence and banning books is counterculture.
• EGreg 4y ago
  Well, it seems that hacker culture and open source software would be the antidote to all these. Web2 and Web3 have been captured by the profit motive. Web2 with professional VCs and Web3 with everyone playing VC. Web1 was very much a countercultural movement. I've been part of the IndieWeb, DecentralizedWeb, OfflineFirst movements, met with Tim Berners-Lee, just finished an interview with Noam Chomsky and David Harvey (raw video here: https://vimeo.com/795006182/31cdfcf335 https://vimeo.com/795006182/31cdfcf335). I've written about what needs to happen on the Web for it to change (https://cointelegraph.com/news/how-a-web-that-lost-its-way-can-find-a-new-one https://cointelegraph.com/news/how-a-web-that-lost-its-way-c...) It's hard to have a counterculture when the dominant tools are all owned by huge corporations and governments. Here is some open source software to get you started if you're interested: Web2: https://qbix.com https://qbix.com Web3: https://intercoin.org/applications https://intercoin.org/applications
  • zzo38computer 4y ago
    > It's hard to have a counterculture when the dominant tools are all owned by huge corporations and governments. Yes, that is one of the problems (it is not only things that can be problems, though). > Well, it seems that hacker culture and open source software would be the antidote to all these. I think it will not cure everything, but I think that it will help. However, in addition to the software being FOSS, it also needs to be good. (Fortunately, FOSS can help a bit since it makes it possible to make improvements, but that doesn't automatically make it good.)
• friend_and_foe 4y ago
  There is absolutely a counterculture, but you won't really see it in the usual "public spaces." Even if the members of it are there, the spaces dont allow expression of it, so it's not there. You won't find ot on Facebook and TV, what you'll find are caricatures of a previous counterculture expressed by the establishment, posing as a counterculture. The real counterculture is on the edges and in the shadows, as it always has been, but it's cultural form does not take the form you'd expect if you're looking for it that way. It's not wearing all black, it doesn't have nose rings, it doesnt listen to edgy music, there is no consumerist element to it being exploited by corporations yet, that's actually a cultural cornerstone of it. It looks a lot like business as usual from the outside, but it isn't.
• EasyTiger_ 4y ago
  > You can see this shift even in the rise of the word “content” itself. From Ted Gioia’s article: “The banal word ‘content’ is used to describe every type of creative work, implying that artistry is generic and interchangeable.” Just one of a number of things wrong with the overuse of this word. I can’t be the only one who gags everytime someone mentions “content” or worse, the phrase “consuming content” which is just gross and stupid
• sys32768 4y ago
  With so much talk of hippies, nobody has mentioned the Yippies [1] (Youth International Party (YIP)) who, on the anniversary of the Hiroshima bombing in 1970, tried to take over Disneyland [2]: >The Yippies planned to hold a Black Panther breakfast at Aunt Jemima's Pancake House, followed by a feminist liberation of Minnie Mouse, a barbecue of Porky Pig and the capture of Tom Sawyer Island in order to protest the American war in Vietnam. The Yippies seem a bit like the ANTIFA and autonomous zone folks, but with a better sense of humor and optics. [1] = https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Youth_International_Party https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Youth_International_Party [2] = https://www.kcet.org/shows/lost-la/the-yippie-invasion-of-disneyland https://www.kcet.org/shows/lost-la/the-yippie-invasion-of-di...
• logn 4y ago
  The mainstream culture has been pretty adamant about stamping out counter cultures, so it's merely hidden. I think the algorithms and filters are not blindly homogenizing culture but are rather used as tools by humans knowingly to connect to and persuade each other.
• an_aparallel 4y ago
  We still have counterculture - but boy is it ever harder to participate in: Private trackers Special interest forums Not using Mc-Social Media Off-grid. What's dwindled - due to media consumption habits is the "appearance" of a counterculture. When huge popstars appropriate every square inch of wierdness - what's wierd/different now? Nothing really... In the 90s, Reznor and Manson sold "edge by the pound"...that was a commonly consumed form of counter culture. Life getting too expensive is killing real counterculture - specialised stores, quirky cafes which attract fringe dwellers and so on. Depending on where you live - this is either less or more sad.
• canadiantim 4y ago
  Most likely if you are reading this you hate the counterculture and wouldn’t recognize it as such. Just like how most people today if they lived in nazi germany would’ve been a nazi and went along with it.
• MichaelMoser123 4y ago
  "meet the new boss, same as the old boss" In Germany they had the Green party, once upon a time that was a gathering point of those who were against 'the establishment'. Now the Green party is a major political party, and pretty much part of that same establishment. I guess that something similar happened with the techies. Some of those weird nerds became very rich - and that's quite popular with the general public. And then came twitter, that one killed both the radio star and the TV presenter. And than came Elon - the king of the nerds - and he is killing twitter :-)
• bawolff 4y ago
  > Why do so many Youtubers have that annoying open-mouthed smile in all their thumbnails? Or similarly exaggerated facial expressions? There are plenty that don’t, but your metrics look better if you have an exaggerated facial expression in the thumbnail. As a result, your video gets shown to users frequently. Vs back in the good old days of movies where hollywood cast all types of actors and not just young hot ones /s I feel this is mostly just glamourizing the past. Kids these days, etc. The defining feature of counter culture is that it is not mainstream. If you only consume mainstream media you won't consume non-mainstream media is as tautologically true now as it was in the past.
• DoItToMe81 4y ago
  It's increasingly the case. Web countercultures died in the 2010s, and what has replaced them is rather fringes within or coveting the mainstream. Streaming has broken the backs of a lot of music counterculture and overrun it with scene tourists who don't really participate in the culture.
• sirianth 4y ago
  Here is a thesis/thesis-question: the US has (primarily) one economic dominant culture/model, and resistance to that dominant economic culture/model is what constitutes a more hardcore/impactful/not surface/valuable (?) counter-culture. I'm not a big crypto fan, but I would have said previously before FTX that crypto was maybe our contemporary counter-culture. Unlike the solidarity economy https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Solidarity_economy https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Solidarity_economy, which I also think is a counter culture, it was more impactful/hyper-generating/getting people thinking, etc. I wish that the solidarity economy was as talked about. I think both the far left and far right (trads and LGBTQIA+) people are kind of counter-cultural in terms of their reaction to different large strains of culture in the US (I don't think there's one culture in this country, anymore, on the social and cultural level). Maybe I'm talking about being revolutionary, and not counter-cultural?
• JohnClark1337 4y ago
  [dead]
• berniedurfee 4y ago
  I think it’s just that counterculture almost always becomes the mainstream eventually. Tattoos, leather jackets and motorcycles used to be cool counterculture. Now they’re trendy. It does feel like we’ve descended into monoculture. Though, maybe that’s because those in the counterculture aren’t showing off and are hard to spot, unlike hippies and bikers. Counterculture is still alive and well I’m sure. Just hidden amongst the noise of our hyper signal to noise ratio reality.
• Epiphany21 4y ago
  There are countercultures aplenty, but many employ strict gatekeeping measures to exclude anyone they find unsavory for whatever reason. So if you see people refusing to throw you pearls, it may be pertinent to ask yourself "Am I the swine here?". Case in point, it's time to log back out of HN and ignore it for another few months.