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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

by 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.
  - GenerocUsername 4y ago
    Well it wouldn't very well be counter culture if it's ideals matched the mainstream
  - weedking 4y ago
    You're also creating your own subjective reality. The poster made the claim that the dominant views on 4chan regarding Ukraine and vaccines may be viewed positively in the future, not the disturbing imagery.
  - vorpalhex 4y ago
    Several hippies wrote in favor of having sex with children. Many of them took their own advice. Look at how whitewashed hippies are now.
    - ipaddr 4y ago
      You couldn't get away with a lot of the content from the 60s now.
    - farmaway 4y ago
      The nonces are still with us. Prostasia Foundation is the new NAMBLA, working hard to normalize "minor-attracted persons" within academia and the nonprofit space. They're aided by those who rationalize children's consent on questions of sexual and bodily integrity. If you trust a nine-year-old boy to tell us they're actually a girl, and you trust an eleven-year-old child who wants to inject puberty blockers, and you oblige a thirteen-year-old girl who wants to inject testosterone and cut off her breasts at fifteen, where is the logical barrier to other forms of sexual consent?
      - s5300 4y ago
        If you trust Peter Thiel to put a suicide collar on anybody working for him lest they disobey… Hope moral people will never not be completely weirded out by the amount of tech oriented folk who look up to him or aspire to be like him.
  - ipaddr 4y ago
    Well I've got news for you. The 60s were about making disturbing sexual content available. People were trying to freak out the mainstream. History repeats. Your situation isn't as unique as you belief.
  - concordDance 4y ago
    I suspect the opposite, that making disturbing sexual content will indeed be seen as free love is now.
  - mise_en_place 4y ago
    Whether you like it or not pornography is always at the forefront of technology. I’m sure there will be much pearl clutching when sex robots are released.
- koprulusector 4y ago
  The hippies were shit on during the sixties because of politics and the Vietnam war. The hippies were a big part of the anti war movement. The simplest and quickest way to shutting the movement down was to criminalize its constituents, like hippies, or civil rights activists, through tactics like draconian drug laws and a drug war. The hippies were rooted in things that were objectively good: peace, love, self discovery, acceptance, mutual aid, egalitarianism, free thought. That contrasts sharply with 4chan’s demographics and motivations. I don’t think that anyone will look back with fondness or positivity toward a bunch of closeted homophobic, racist, sexist, emotionally and mentally stunted incels circle jerking themselves into a froth over who’s the edgiest edge lord.
  - eddsh1994 4y ago
    > The hippies were shit on during the sixties because of politics and the Vietnam war. The hippies were a big part of the anti war movement. The simplest and quickest way to shutting the movement down was to criminalize its constituents, like hippies, or civil rights activists, through tactics like draconian drug laws and a drug war. That's an interesting point I haven't heard of before, thanks :)
    - z3c0 4y ago
      If you'd like to see it stratified as a full-blown fact, here's the interview where John Ehrlichman explained that it was a planned strategy to discredit Nixon's naysayers. https://harpers.org/archive/2016/04/legalize-it-all/ https://harpers.org/archive/2016/04/legalize-it-all/ > “You want to know what this was really all about?” he asked with the bluntness of a man who, after public disgrace and a stretch in federal prison, had little left to protect. “The Nixon campaign in 1968, and the Nixon White House after that, had two enemies: the antiwar left and black people. You understand what I’m saying? We knew we couldn’t make it illegal to be either against the war or black, but by getting the public to associate the hippies with marijuana and blacks with heroin, and then criminalizing both heavily, we could disrupt those communities. We could arrest their leaders, raid their homes, break up their meetings, and vilify them night after night on the evening news. Did we know we were lying about the drugs? Of course we did.”
- ur-whale 4y ago
  > 60 years from now they might look like the good guys. If they're anti Ukraine war, they already are.
  - undersuit 4y ago
    The anti-war people, not so much... or did something change since <insert major US military operation that started in your youth>?
- wellthisisgreat 4y ago
  > generally anti-ukraine war Forgive my ignorance, but do you mean 4Chan is against the war in Ukraine in principle (anti-war), sides with Russia in that conflict (anti-Ukraine) or against US/West involvement in that war (anti-war but with a catch).
  - snerbles 4y ago
    Participants in the general war threads on /pol/ fill every permutation of the above, including pro-war/radical pro-NATO involvement and anti-Russia elements as well. Overall it's been more of an ideological bar brawl than a hive mind aligned in any particular direction.
- bglazer 4y ago
  Being antisocial is not the same thing as being counterculture. There’s not really a flourishing of new ideas or material culture on 4chan, just a race to the bottom of taboo-breaking.
  - Natsu 4y ago
    Weird, that's what they said about prior counter-cultures, too.
    - bglazer 4y ago
      That’s not an argument. If you think it’s not true you would need to provide a counterexample. What’s the 4chan equivalent of Jimi Hendrix or tie dye clothes?
      - Natsu 4y ago
        Greentext, Pepe and quite a few other things that they seem to have popularized come to mind.
  - jbm 4y ago
    Not a fan of 4chan, but almost all memes (the foundation of modern culture) seem to start there.
  - Clubber 4y ago
    >just a race to the bottom of taboo-breaking You've basically described cultural art and music since at least the 1950s. Elvis dared to play black music and gyrate his hips. Madonna rolled around in a wedding dress talking about virgins. RAP broke a whole bunch of them. Cardi B sang about WAP. If a band just sings about relationship troubles and drugs like everyone else, their music / art probably isn't very remarkable.
- woodruffw 4y ago
  This is confusing cause and effect: 4chan was a countercultural force, in the same way that SA was. Countercultural forces always end the same way: they're either co-opted for a purpose, or they fade into irrelevancy (as counterculture becomes culture). 4chan is a case of being co-opted: there hasn't been meaningful countercultural activity on 4chan in over a decade, but there is ample reactionary activity masquerading as counterculture. Muddying the distinction between the two is the reactionary's objective.
  - Minor49er 4y ago
    I think this is an important point. 4chan today is largely populated by bot posters, especially on the bigger boards like /b/. Regular users will suffer through captchas mysteriously not working, getting (range) banned for proxy use when the poster is not using a proxy, or even just shadowbanned
- ohbleek 4y ago
  “Conservatism is the new counter culture” is a very old line that has been passed along by older conservatives as a way to allure itself with young right leaning teens in mostly rural areas. It takes a complete misunderstanding of what “counter culture” means in order to believe it. It was always just marketing.
- alphazard 4y ago
  There are a lot of sibling comments that seem to be upset that two counter cultures could be both different from one another and the dominant culture. I really don't understand the gate keeping of what is and isn't a counter culture. A culture is information collectively held across many minds. A counter culture is a culture with contradictory information to the dominant culture. It's clear both the hippies and 4chan meet the criteria. I found your analysis cogent.
  - Clubber 4y ago
    >I really don't understand the gate keeping of what is and isn't a counter culture. The people who brought in the mainstream culture are now older; they are now the fuddy-duddies. Time to move over for the next generation; it's either complimentary or contradictory and sometimes both.
- birdyrooster 4y ago
  I mean the KKK was also counter culture. Not sure why counting hate groups is meaningful in this discussion.
- longbrass 4y ago
  4chan is almost 20 years old, it may have been a countercultural element but I assure you kids these days are not on the chans like they once were. If it is still a cultural touchpoint for males 18-24 it is unlikely to remain so for much longer. Your yardstick for cultural relevance centered around creative AI usage is myopic when compared to the interests of actual younger humans who presumably would make up the counterculture. What is hilarious is that by your definition it is concevable that the increasingly old men who continue to use 4chan could infact be the counterculture you seek... so in 60 years they will all be dead anyway (vax or no vax)
- johnny22 4y ago
  > 4chan is generally anti-ukraine war most people are against the war in ukraine. I have a feeling the motivations are different though.
- deleted 4y ago
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- licebmi__at__ 4y ago
  I still enjoy diving into *chans, (even 4chan which has become so mainstream) because the hobbyist boards are still the best places to have some engagement with hobbyists. Still thinking 4chan culture is a counterculture only supports the thesis that we are living in a society without a counter culture. You have to be a coddled kid to believe that 4chan and their racism, misogyny and xenophobia are not mainstream or challenge the status quo. I mean, yes liberalism tries to stick a smiley face on the grimm reality, but it’s stupid to think you’re challenging anything just because you draw a frown and a hitler mustache on said smiley face.
dr-detroit 4y ago
[dead]
fedeb95 4y ago
I feel the same. I bet every period of time thought there wasn't a counterculture. Yet it was there, ready to become the new mainstream.
- bilbo0s 4y ago
  A person could have made billions. If only that person could have known which of the umpteen million counter cultures was going to be successful! /s Identifying counter cultures is trivial. Knowing which one will become mainstream in the always uncertain future is unimaginably difficult. Empires have fallen because people bet on the wrong counter culture. There are some similarities of successful counter cultures through history. Loose organization. Ease of understanding. Low financial cost of participation. And extreme inclusiveness. Fortunately for empires, princes, and presidents, counter cultures and movements with all those attributes don't come along all that often.
Taywee 4y ago
4chan is obnoxiously and brainlessly countercultural to the point of contrarianism, though. It used to be a fun place where people didn't care so much about social conventions and focused mostly on having a good time and poking fun at each other, but it's degraded into just hating anything and everything that they can attribute to anybody they don't like. I've seen tons of cases where they were on-board for something until it became mainstream and then viciously attacked it. There is "alive and well" counterculture, but 4chan is "automatic, boring, annoying, kneejerk" counterculture. It's like a sad shell of what it was, with all the fun sucked out of it.
- mantas 4y ago
  A lot of counter-cultures attack their owns once it becomes mainstream. Edit: downvoters should ask a punk or metalhead what he thinks about certain bands that went mainstream.
- ipaddr 4y ago
  It sounds like you grew up and are beyond the childness. Don't take that experience away from others.
  - Taywee 4y ago
    It's not childish anymore. It's just angry and cynical. It looks less like the shit-talking edgy teenagers having fun being idiots like it was in 2007, and more like unhinged, hateful, contrarian paranoid schizophrenia. I wish the people on 4chan had the stupid childish fun that I did 15 years ago.
    - skyyler 4y ago
      >and more like unhinged, hateful, contrarian paranoid schizophrenia. You and I did not use the same 4chan in 2007... I learned new slurs there, ways to insult people that I could have never imagined. I read posts from a schizoid that claimed to have evidence that the government was influencing his life through the ratings of popular animes on My Anime List. I saw child porn get posted regularly. I saw extremely hateful posts about women, extremely hateful posts about people that aren't white, extremely hateful posts about literally anyone. I believe you're looking back with rose tinted glasses.
flunhat 4y ago
> Saying “we live in a society without a counterculture” sounds ridiculous the more you think about it. How could it possibly be true, especially when you consider the past? And a lot of the 14 "warning signs" are general enough that they've always been true to some extent. > But somewhere between your 38th Marvel movie and the millionth Heard-Depp trial rehash video, you might start to believe it. Even if it isn’t new, even if it’s easy to escape, and even if it’s not that bad, a cloying sameness occupies the cultural mainstream. It seems impenetrable, same as ever. But it’s especially surprising given how much creative work today exists outside the mainstream. > It is a jarring contrast. 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.
JKCalhoun 4y ago
> 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. Covered in the 14: "Alternative voices exist-in fact, they are everywhere--but are rarely heard, and their cultural impact is negligible."
- jjk166 4y ago
  Not at all. The weird stuff is well heard and has a large cultural impact. You'll have no problem finding countless examples of weird things that have been viewed and interacted with by hundreds of thousands or even millions of people. Compare that to say a punk band in the 80s that may have only had a few thousand people ever see it perform, or even the entire hippie movement which was only about half a million people at its peak. Yeah, these things are still smaller and less impactful than the mainstream culture, but that's what it means to be a counterculture.
  - JKCalhoun 4y ago
    You seem to be trying to stand on a knife's edge between saying counterculture is not mainstream, counterculture has mainstream impact. > Compare that to say a punk band in the 80s that may have only had a few thousand people ever see it perform Or the Velvet Underground that sold only a few thousand records but "everyone who bought one went out and started a band."
    - jjk166 4y ago
      That's not a knife edge, counterculture is by definition not mainstream, and certainly today most people are not active participants in counterculture, but it has become easier to participate in countercultures if you so choose then ever before, and (while still being a very small minority) the absolute number of people participating has never been larger. The distinction between impact and mainstream impact is a very important nuance. There are certainly creators today who are as influential to their groups as the Velvet Underground was to theirs, but just like plenty of people had never heard of them in the 60s, you're probably not going to know about them for another 20 years.
acchow 4y ago
"It has never been easier to be weird nor easier to find weirdness." Completely agree. It has also never been easier to discover sameness, broadcast sameness, or replicate sameness. The Instagrammification of the world is why the hip local coffee shop in Thailand looks like it could be in Brooklyn or Amsterdam.
- bilbo0s 4y ago
  Meh. Even countercultures replicate sameness. Find someone from any counterculture and everything from his/her ideas, to their music, to the perfume they stink from are probably all exactly the same. There's really nothing new that 99.99999999% of humans come up with. I mean a 4chan user in Poland spouts the same tired nonsense as a 4chan user from Argentina or the US. Same styles of dress. Same haircuts. Even uses the same wording in their posts. Try it for yourself, you'll find yourself reading the exact same comments and posts over, and over, and over again. There's literally nothing new there. Or, as another example, when was the last time you heard a genuinely new idea from a conservative? Or from a liberal? If we're being honest, I mean, we'd have to admit that we haven't heard any new ideas out there. So you end up with 4chan users all having the exact same crap in their rooms, and political parties all having the exact same formats, colors, and even overall look to their "conventions". You only noticed the "sameness" with coffee shops. The reality is that cultures, and even counter cultures, thrive on sameness. Without sameness they don't exist.
  - deleted 4y ago
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deleted 4y ago
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GoblinSlayer 4y ago
Mainstream culture is quite corrupted it goes against many de jure ideals, it may prove to be more counterculture than others.

by jjk166 4y ago

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.
- GenerocUsername 4y ago
  Well it wouldn't very well be counter culture if it's ideals matched the mainstream
- weedking 4y ago
  You're also creating your own subjective reality. The poster made the claim that the dominant views on 4chan regarding Ukraine and vaccines may be viewed positively in the future, not the disturbing imagery.
- vorpalhex 4y ago
  Several hippies wrote in favor of having sex with children. Many of them took their own advice. Look at how whitewashed hippies are now.
  - ipaddr 4y ago
    You couldn't get away with a lot of the content from the 60s now.
  - farmaway 4y ago
    The nonces are still with us. Prostasia Foundation is the new NAMBLA, working hard to normalize "minor-attracted persons" within academia and the nonprofit space. They're aided by those who rationalize children's consent on questions of sexual and bodily integrity. If you trust a nine-year-old boy to tell us they're actually a girl, and you trust an eleven-year-old child who wants to inject puberty blockers, and you oblige a thirteen-year-old girl who wants to inject testosterone and cut off her breasts at fifteen, where is the logical barrier to other forms of sexual consent?
    - s5300 4y ago
      If you trust Peter Thiel to put a suicide collar on anybody working for him lest they disobey… Hope moral people will never not be completely weirded out by the amount of tech oriented folk who look up to him or aspire to be like him.
- ipaddr 4y ago
  Well I've got news for you. The 60s were about making disturbing sexual content available. People were trying to freak out the mainstream. History repeats. Your situation isn't as unique as you belief.
- concordDance 4y ago
  I suspect the opposite, that making disturbing sexual content will indeed be seen as free love is now.
- mise_en_place 4y ago
  Whether you like it or not pornography is always at the forefront of technology. I’m sure there will be much pearl clutching when sex robots are released.
koprulusector 4y ago
The hippies were shit on during the sixties because of politics and the Vietnam war. The hippies were a big part of the anti war movement. The simplest and quickest way to shutting the movement down was to criminalize its constituents, like hippies, or civil rights activists, through tactics like draconian drug laws and a drug war. The hippies were rooted in things that were objectively good: peace, love, self discovery, acceptance, mutual aid, egalitarianism, free thought. That contrasts sharply with 4chan’s demographics and motivations. I don’t think that anyone will look back with fondness or positivity toward a bunch of closeted homophobic, racist, sexist, emotionally and mentally stunted incels circle jerking themselves into a froth over who’s the edgiest edge lord.
- eddsh1994 4y ago
  > The hippies were shit on during the sixties because of politics and the Vietnam war. The hippies were a big part of the anti war movement. The simplest and quickest way to shutting the movement down was to criminalize its constituents, like hippies, or civil rights activists, through tactics like draconian drug laws and a drug war. That's an interesting point I haven't heard of before, thanks :)
  - z3c0 4y ago
    If you'd like to see it stratified as a full-blown fact, here's the interview where John Ehrlichman explained that it was a planned strategy to discredit Nixon's naysayers. https://harpers.org/archive/2016/04/legalize-it-all/ https://harpers.org/archive/2016/04/legalize-it-all/ > “You want to know what this was really all about?” he asked with the bluntness of a man who, after public disgrace and a stretch in federal prison, had little left to protect. “The Nixon campaign in 1968, and the Nixon White House after that, had two enemies: the antiwar left and black people. You understand what I’m saying? We knew we couldn’t make it illegal to be either against the war or black, but by getting the public to associate the hippies with marijuana and blacks with heroin, and then criminalizing both heavily, we could disrupt those communities. We could arrest their leaders, raid their homes, break up their meetings, and vilify them night after night on the evening news. Did we know we were lying about the drugs? Of course we did.”
ur-whale 4y ago
> 60 years from now they might look like the good guys. If they're anti Ukraine war, they already are.
- undersuit 4y ago
  The anti-war people, not so much... or did something change since <insert major US military operation that started in your youth>?
wellthisisgreat 4y ago
> generally anti-ukraine war Forgive my ignorance, but do you mean 4Chan is against the war in Ukraine in principle (anti-war), sides with Russia in that conflict (anti-Ukraine) or against US/West involvement in that war (anti-war but with a catch).
- snerbles 4y ago
  Participants in the general war threads on /pol/ fill every permutation of the above, including pro-war/radical pro-NATO involvement and anti-Russia elements as well. Overall it's been more of an ideological bar brawl than a hive mind aligned in any particular direction.
bglazer 4y ago
Being antisocial is not the same thing as being counterculture. There’s not really a flourishing of new ideas or material culture on 4chan, just a race to the bottom of taboo-breaking.
- Natsu 4y ago
  Weird, that's what they said about prior counter-cultures, too.
  - bglazer 4y ago
    That’s not an argument. If you think it’s not true you would need to provide a counterexample. What’s the 4chan equivalent of Jimi Hendrix or tie dye clothes?
    - Natsu 4y ago
      Greentext, Pepe and quite a few other things that they seem to have popularized come to mind.
- jbm 4y ago
  Not a fan of 4chan, but almost all memes (the foundation of modern culture) seem to start there.
- Clubber 4y ago
  >just a race to the bottom of taboo-breaking You've basically described cultural art and music since at least the 1950s. Elvis dared to play black music and gyrate his hips. Madonna rolled around in a wedding dress talking about virgins. RAP broke a whole bunch of them. Cardi B sang about WAP. If a band just sings about relationship troubles and drugs like everyone else, their music / art probably isn't very remarkable.
woodruffw 4y ago
This is confusing cause and effect: 4chan was a countercultural force, in the same way that SA was. Countercultural forces always end the same way: they're either co-opted for a purpose, or they fade into irrelevancy (as counterculture becomes culture). 4chan is a case of being co-opted: there hasn't been meaningful countercultural activity on 4chan in over a decade, but there is ample reactionary activity masquerading as counterculture. Muddying the distinction between the two is the reactionary's objective.
- Minor49er 4y ago
  I think this is an important point. 4chan today is largely populated by bot posters, especially on the bigger boards like /b/. Regular users will suffer through captchas mysteriously not working, getting (range) banned for proxy use when the poster is not using a proxy, or even just shadowbanned
ohbleek 4y ago
“Conservatism is the new counter culture” is a very old line that has been passed along by older conservatives as a way to allure itself with young right leaning teens in mostly rural areas. It takes a complete misunderstanding of what “counter culture” means in order to believe it. It was always just marketing.
alphazard 4y ago
There are a lot of sibling comments that seem to be upset that two counter cultures could be both different from one another and the dominant culture. I really don't understand the gate keeping of what is and isn't a counter culture. A culture is information collectively held across many minds. A counter culture is a culture with contradictory information to the dominant culture. It's clear both the hippies and 4chan meet the criteria. I found your analysis cogent.
- Clubber 4y ago
  >I really don't understand the gate keeping of what is and isn't a counter culture. The people who brought in the mainstream culture are now older; they are now the fuddy-duddies. Time to move over for the next generation; it's either complimentary or contradictory and sometimes both.
birdyrooster 4y ago
I mean the KKK was also counter culture. Not sure why counting hate groups is meaningful in this discussion.
longbrass 4y ago
4chan is almost 20 years old, it may have been a countercultural element but I assure you kids these days are not on the chans like they once were. If it is still a cultural touchpoint for males 18-24 it is unlikely to remain so for much longer. Your yardstick for cultural relevance centered around creative AI usage is myopic when compared to the interests of actual younger humans who presumably would make up the counterculture. What is hilarious is that by your definition it is concevable that the increasingly old men who continue to use 4chan could infact be the counterculture you seek... so in 60 years they will all be dead anyway (vax or no vax)
johnny22 4y ago
> 4chan is generally anti-ukraine war most people are against the war in ukraine. I have a feeling the motivations are different though.
deleted 4y ago
[deleted]
licebmi__at__ 4y ago
I still enjoy diving into *chans, (even 4chan which has become so mainstream) because the hobbyist boards are still the best places to have some engagement with hobbyists. Still thinking 4chan culture is a counterculture only supports the thesis that we are living in a society without a counter culture. You have to be a coddled kid to believe that 4chan and their racism, misogyny and xenophobia are not mainstream or challenge the status quo. I mean, yes liberalism tries to stick a smiley face on the grimm reality, but it’s stupid to think you’re challenging anything just because you draw a frown and a hitler mustache on said smiley face.

dr-detroit 4y ago

[dead]

fedeb95 4y ago

I feel the same. I bet every period of time thought there wasn't a counterculture. Yet it was there, ready to become the new mainstream.

bilbo0s 4y ago
A person could have made billions. If only that person could have known which of the umpteen million counter cultures was going to be successful! /s Identifying counter cultures is trivial. Knowing which one will become mainstream in the always uncertain future is unimaginably difficult. Empires have fallen because people bet on the wrong counter culture. There are some similarities of successful counter cultures through history. Loose organization. Ease of understanding. Low financial cost of participation. And extreme inclusiveness. Fortunately for empires, princes, and presidents, counter cultures and movements with all those attributes don't come along all that often.

Taywee 4y ago

4chan is obnoxiously and brainlessly countercultural to the point of contrarianism, though. It used to be a fun place where people didn't care so much about social conventions and focused mostly on having a good time and poking fun at each other, but it's degraded into just hating anything and everything that they can attribute to anybody they don't like. I've seen tons of cases where they were on-board for something until it became mainstream and then viciously attacked it. There is "alive and well" counterculture, but 4chan is "automatic, boring, annoying, kneejerk" counterculture. It's like a sad shell of what it was, with all the fun sucked out of it.

mantas 4y ago
A lot of counter-cultures attack their owns once it becomes mainstream. Edit: downvoters should ask a punk or metalhead what he thinks about certain bands that went mainstream.
ipaddr 4y ago
It sounds like you grew up and are beyond the childness. Don't take that experience away from others.
- Taywee 4y ago
  It's not childish anymore. It's just angry and cynical. It looks less like the shit-talking edgy teenagers having fun being idiots like it was in 2007, and more like unhinged, hateful, contrarian paranoid schizophrenia. I wish the people on 4chan had the stupid childish fun that I did 15 years ago.
  - skyyler 4y ago
    >and more like unhinged, hateful, contrarian paranoid schizophrenia. You and I did not use the same 4chan in 2007... I learned new slurs there, ways to insult people that I could have never imagined. I read posts from a schizoid that claimed to have evidence that the government was influencing his life through the ratings of popular animes on My Anime List. I saw child porn get posted regularly. I saw extremely hateful posts about women, extremely hateful posts about people that aren't white, extremely hateful posts about literally anyone. I believe you're looking back with rose tinted glasses.

flunhat 4y ago

> Saying “we live in a society without a counterculture” sounds ridiculous the more you think about it. How could it possibly be true, especially when you consider the past? And a lot of the 14 "warning signs" are general enough that they've always been true to some extent. > But somewhere between your 38th Marvel movie and the millionth Heard-Depp trial rehash video, you might start to believe it. Even if it isn’t new, even if it’s easy to escape, and even if it’s not that bad, a cloying sameness occupies the cultural mainstream. It seems impenetrable, same as ever. But it’s especially surprising given how much creative work today exists outside the mainstream. > It is a jarring contrast. 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.

JKCalhoun 4y ago

> 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. Covered in the 14: "Alternative voices exist-in fact, they are everywhere--but are rarely heard, and their cultural impact is negligible."

jjk166 4y ago
Not at all. The weird stuff is well heard and has a large cultural impact. You'll have no problem finding countless examples of weird things that have been viewed and interacted with by hundreds of thousands or even millions of people. Compare that to say a punk band in the 80s that may have only had a few thousand people ever see it perform, or even the entire hippie movement which was only about half a million people at its peak. Yeah, these things are still smaller and less impactful than the mainstream culture, but that's what it means to be a counterculture.
- JKCalhoun 4y ago
  You seem to be trying to stand on a knife's edge between saying counterculture is not mainstream, counterculture has mainstream impact. > Compare that to say a punk band in the 80s that may have only had a few thousand people ever see it perform Or the Velvet Underground that sold only a few thousand records but "everyone who bought one went out and started a band."
  - jjk166 4y ago
    That's not a knife edge, counterculture is by definition not mainstream, and certainly today most people are not active participants in counterculture, but it has become easier to participate in countercultures if you so choose then ever before, and (while still being a very small minority) the absolute number of people participating has never been larger. The distinction between impact and mainstream impact is a very important nuance. There are certainly creators today who are as influential to their groups as the Velvet Underground was to theirs, but just like plenty of people had never heard of them in the 60s, you're probably not going to know about them for another 20 years.

acchow 4y ago

"It has never been easier to be weird nor easier to find weirdness." Completely agree. It has also never been easier to discover sameness, broadcast sameness, or replicate sameness. The Instagrammification of the world is why the hip local coffee shop in Thailand looks like it could be in Brooklyn or Amsterdam.

bilbo0s 4y ago
Meh. Even countercultures replicate sameness. Find someone from any counterculture and everything from his/her ideas, to their music, to the perfume they stink from are probably all exactly the same. There's really nothing new that 99.99999999% of humans come up with. I mean a 4chan user in Poland spouts the same tired nonsense as a 4chan user from Argentina or the US. Same styles of dress. Same haircuts. Even uses the same wording in their posts. Try it for yourself, you'll find yourself reading the exact same comments and posts over, and over, and over again. There's literally nothing new there. Or, as another example, when was the last time you heard a genuinely new idea from a conservative? Or from a liberal? If we're being honest, I mean, we'd have to admit that we haven't heard any new ideas out there. So you end up with 4chan users all having the exact same crap in their rooms, and political parties all having the exact same formats, colors, and even overall look to their "conventions". You only noticed the "sameness" with coffee shops. The reality is that cultures, and even counter cultures, thrive on sameness. Without sameness they don't exist.
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GoblinSlayer 4y ago

Mainstream culture is quite corrupted it goes against many de jure ideals, it may prove to be more counterculture than others.