Do we live in a society without a counterculture?

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.

> I do have to admit there are effectively no "dark corners" anymore.

This is the problem. As soon as a counter-culture gets any amount of steam going a million marketers swoop in to sell it as an identity to anyone with a credit card. Marketers are constantly searching for the undiscovered cool or subversive thing. They have undercover agents infiltrate hobbies, movements, and cliques. They collect endless amounts of data so that they can fine tune their pitch to every individual person's most obscure interests. Whatever you identify as or stand for, there's a marketer willing to sell you something so that you can signal who you are to those around you. Marketers then slowly start to manipulate and change the counter-culture so that it sells better too.

There is no counter-culture because everyone is busy being a part of their preferred culture-bubbles only all of it is mainstream now. It's all so easily accessible that everything esoteric has become exoteric. No matter what it is, you can buy your starter pack right off the rack. Eventually it all gets watered down to capture as many dollars as possible and we're left with all these options, but still wondering where the counter-culture went.

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.

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.

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.