The internet used to be counterculture. Now it’s the mall. Those of us who feel nostalgia for the countercultural internet … I fear we’re too old to be admitted into current counterculture. We are the culture the youths are countering.
Answering the phone, wearing clothes in public, taking a bus, driving a car, using a popular social media app, visiting a mall.
You can be at a mall ironically. Observe signaling from outside of your identity. Come in to take a dump in a nice bathroom. All that’s required is some self-awareness.
In fact, it is the other way around: problems often begin when a thing seems countercultural, leading you to approach it as part of your identity—it can be much harder to ironically or out of pure utility visit an artisan alley or an underground music club. In this sense, if we imagine some hypothetical scale of counterculturalness, I’d say it’s very well possible that some artisan alley would do much worse than a mall on it.