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The internet didn’t kill counterculture – you just won’t find it on Instagram

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Re: The internet didn’t kill counterculture – you just won’t find it on Instagram

#151

Post by Animats »

spaetzleesser wrote: post #50
Animats wrote: post #3

Yet his examples are people who did stuff to get clicks. Arguably, the most effective counterculture in recent times was QAnon. That didn't end well.

A lot of qanon came from flat earth and now have moved on to vaccines and other conspiracies. I wonder what they'll be doing next year but I am sure they will find something. There is a significant part of the population who are deeply uncomfortable with the state of the world and look for an explanation that comforts them. This used to be mainly religion but it's spreading out into things like qanon. Extreme partisa…

There is a significant part of the population who are deeply uncomfortable with the state of the world and look for an explanation that comforts them.

Yes. A real problem is that the US has no consensus on how society should work. It did, in, say, the 1950s. People were expected to get jobs, and work, and the spectrum of available jobs was matched, roughly, to the range of human capabilities. That was a generally stable situation. That's the US from 1945 to 1975 or so.

That's changed, leaving behind a huge number of unemployed and under-employed people. More education doesn't help; about half of US college graduates are doing jobs that don't need a college education.

Nobody really has a good answer to this. Which is why conservative populism looks to the past.

Re: The internet didn’t kill counterculture – you just won’t find it on Instagram

#152

Post by juststeve »

redisman wrote: post #78
browningstreet wrote: post #34

My teenage son asked me the other day what "grunge" and "goth" were. I was then trying to explain "subculture" and "counterculture", and it was surprisingly difficult to explain.. or convey, especially in the context of what he's seen so far in his life. I tried using examples of my own youthful adventures and communities -- still not easy.

Try explaining next that computing and gaming used to be subcultures/countercultures. I remember how Mortal Kombat and DOOM were going to cause the fall of civilization.

> DOOM

Now we’re talking. Doom was a massive deal because of the violence (as you mentioned), but also because it moved entertainment revenue away from MSM and onto PC’s and the internet.

Re: The internet didn’t kill counterculture – you just won’t find it on Instagram

#153

Post by dmitrygr »

Mediterraneo10 wrote: post #144
imaginationra wrote: post #90

I run an independent film/animation/music/interactive studio- I have never owned any mobile phone and don't use any social media except for youtube. Our studio is not on any social media platforms. We are the counterculture. Our studio has released torrents of media over the past 15 years that I would classify as counterculture but you would never know because we aren't hustling on Zuckerbergian platforms or playing…

> I have never owned any mobile phone Eschewing a mobile phone has been pretty counterculture these recent years, but I think we are close to a point where it will no longer be sustainable, at least for anyone wanting to cross borders – or depending on the country, even enter a restaurant or concert. Several governments have announced that their vaccine passports will exist as mobile phone apps, because paper certifi…

Wait till they see how easy it is to make a lookalike app :)

Re: The internet didn’t kill counterculture – you just won’t find it on Instagram

#154

Post by redisman »

TimedToasts wrote: post #33
kart23 wrote: post #20

I agree that you have to be essentially anonymous to take part in counterculture these days. But the author claims that Discord and Reddit are examples of counterculture. I wholeheartedly disagree, these platforms are overly sanitized, moderated by the company, not the community. On Discord, people get banned for empty mass reports, and they can delete servers as they please. Reddit is valuable for driving communitie…

Reddit is the least countercultural site I can imagine. It's still Top 10 in sites visited, is it not? It's the very zeitgeist of the times. Those examples weaken an otherwise good article.

It used to be fairly "counter-culture"ish back in the day before it was run like a corporation.

Re: The internet didn’t kill counterculture – you just won’t find it on Instagram

#155

Post by pope_meat »

keiferski wrote: post #109
imaginationra wrote: post #90

I run an independent film/animation/music/interactive studio- I have never owned any mobile phone and don't use any social media except for youtube. Our studio is not on any social media platforms. We are the counterculture. Our studio has released torrents of media over the past 15 years that I would classify as counterculture but you would never know because we aren't hustling on Zuckerbergian platforms or playing…

YouTube is filled with so many interesting little channels. I wish the algorithms highlighted them more. I remember one channel of an old guy just smoking a cigar for an hour. Said nothing, just sat there. There were thousands of videos of him doing this, going back years. I don’t remember the name of it, unfortunately.

That's a sex thing. People are jerking off to videos of people smoking. The more you know.

Re: The internet didn’t kill counterculture – you just won’t find it on Instagram

#156

Post by everdrive »

oceanplexian wrote: post #135
lamp_book wrote: post #58

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Yes, I think that's an important distinction - you need a critical mass of people sharing in countercultural behavior/practices in some way to get an actual counterculture. Many people have eschewed social media for one reason or another but not in some unified way that I know of.

There’s 40% of the population you’re missing that doesn’t participate in social media because their ideas have been banned. Sure, they might have a Facebook or a Twitter but nothing substantive happens there. They believe in things like gun rights, freedom of speech and religion, and they often go to meeting places called a “church”, which these days could be considered “counter-culture”. Their values don’t come from…

>doesn’t participate in social media because their ideas have been banned.

>Sure, they might have a Facebook or a Twitter

I'm not sure what you mean by this.

Re: The internet didn’t kill counterculture – you just won’t find it on Instagram

#157

Post by monocasa »

edrxty wrote: post #35
kart23 wrote: post #20

I agree that you have to be essentially anonymous to take part in counterculture these days. But the author claims that Discord and Reddit are examples of counterculture. I wholeheartedly disagree, these platforms are overly sanitized, moderated by the company, not the community. On Discord, people get banned for empty mass reports, and they can delete servers as they please. Reddit is valuable for driving communitie…

Further, reddit is built from the ground up to force consensus. Counterculture cannot exist on the site by definition, as anything prevalent on the site is there by consensus.

I'd argue that the way reddit is currently designed is to hold on to it's user base without them having consensus. The way that subreddits allow separation of their user base (but they're all still users and seeing ads, buying gold, etc) allows communities to exist in a way other social media sites don't really allow (except maybe facebook groups).

Re: The internet didn’t kill counterculture – you just won’t find it on Instagram

#158

Post by keiferski »

pope_meat wrote: post #155
keiferski wrote: post #109

Earlier quoted context omitted.

YouTube is filled with so many interesting little channels. I wish the algorithms highlighted them more. I remember one channel of an old guy just smoking a cigar for an hour. Said nothing, just sat there. There were thousands of videos of him doing this, going back years. I don’t remember the name of it, unfortunately.

That's a sex thing. People are jerking off to videos of people smoking. The more you know.

Man, why did you have to ruin it. Oh well...

Re: The internet didn’t kill counterculture – you just won’t find it on Instagram

#159

Post by monocasa »

deliveryboyman wrote: post #66
twobitshifter wrote: post #48

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Maybe Reddit as a whole, but what are your thoughts on WallStreetBets? It seems that WSB has all of the elements of a counterculture, although maybe diluted after the wide spread GME interest.

WSB is a shade of its former self now due to the onslaught of new members

Has a "what was WSB before the eternal September" escape hatch subreddit popped up yet?

Re: The internet didn’t kill counterculture – you just won’t find it on Instagram

#160

Post by chordalkeyboard »

everdrive wrote: post #118

I was originally going to write a more thoughtful response, but then I got to this section: "The names of these e-deologies tend to be both fantastical and literal." "post-civilizationist" "voluntarist post-agrarianist" "Fully Automated Luxury Gay Space Communism" I've really never heard of categories like these. It makes me think the author has delved into subcultures I really have no experience in. In that sense he…

> post-civilizationist

http://www.johnzerzan.net/articles/why-primitivism.html

> voluntarist

https://voluntaryism.info/

> post-agrarianist

https://yalebooks.yale.edu/book/9780300182910/against-grain

> Fully Automated Luxury Gay Space Communism

I can’t help you there, sorry :)

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