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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

#41

Post by mordechai9000 »

AshleighBasil wrote: post #12
lukebuehler wrote: post #7

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I think there is something similar at work with decentralized platforms: they might never be as slick as their centralized counterparts, but it’s a kind of ascetic choice that opens new doors.

Do people perceive popular platform UI's as 'slick'? To me they always seemed like a mess that is insane to navigate because the company's massive org chart digests into a massive turd that gets smeared over the landing page. Facebook is the worst, but they all seem to have this problem.

I think there is something slick about them, if you just go with what they put in front of you. Don't try to navigate beyond a very high level, just take what it brings and hope for that momentary reward that comes from the likes and the comments.

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

#42

Post by pjc50 »

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.

Kpop stans are a live example of a subculture, if not a counterculture, that teenagers may be familiar with.

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

#43

Post by edrxty »

shakezula wrote: post #22
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.

It's been very interesting to see counter culture swing to the (arguably far but that part is up for interpretation) right. Terrifying, but nonetheless interesting.

In a way this makes sense, the mega platforms have become a highly uniform slightly left leaning milquetoast walled city. That leaves being either a raging socialist (guilty) or a raging....bigot.

The far right isn't tolerated as they're dangerous to advertisers sensitivities. Meanwhile the far left individuals are mostly tolerated but they're also all very aware that if the far right were to disappear overnight, they'd be the next target.

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

#44

Post by ghgdynb1 »

everdrive wrote: post #6

Still reading the article, but this is an interesting blurb if nothing else: "To be truly countercultural today, in a time of tech hegemony, one has to, above all, betray the platform, which may come in the form of betraying or divesting from your public online self." I hadn't thought of boycotting much of popular online space as being counter-cultural. It's an interesting thought.

How about exit from the platforms while continuing to build on the Internet?

balajis.com vs twitter.com/balajis

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

#45

Post by pochamago »

everdrive wrote: post #6

Still reading the article, but this is an interesting blurb if nothing else: "To be truly countercultural today, in a time of tech hegemony, one has to, above all, betray the platform, which may come in the form of betraying or divesting from your public online self." I hadn't thought of boycotting much of popular online space as being counter-cultural. It's an interesting thought.

"To be truly countercultural in a time of literate hegemony, you must become illiterate"

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

#46

Post by helen___keller »

AnthonyMouse wrote: post #37
helen___keller wrote: post #18

I think this is the biggest takeaway for me: > We saw this dynamic metastasize in the wake of George Floyd’s murder, when well-intentioned claims of “silence is violence” (recalling the powerful 1987 ACT-UP “Silence = Death” campaign) spiraled into calling out individuals with even a small following who hadn’t come forward with a timely public statement of solidarity or remorse. Yet public posts were subject to popul…

> From well-compensated marketing teams, to hordes of self-interested proselytizers (see: bitcoin), to propaganda teams looking to influence public opinion, mainstream dark forest sites simply shift the balance of power from the platform itself to the most motivated and well-funded members of the platform This is making the perfect the enemy of the good. Also, voting systems take care of a lot of this, because naked…

> This is making the perfect the enemy of the good.

To be fair, I'm not saying that we should all ditch Reddit and only congregate on obscure message boards with maximum user limits; I'm simply saying that a place like a default subreddit should never be considered counter-cultural.

> Also, voting systems take care of a lot of this, because naked propaganda spam gets downvoted by the users.

Strong disagree. Naked propaganda is downvoted, sure, but good propaganda is never naked. Add enough eyeballs and increasingly sophisticated and coordinated actors will find a way to get their message to the top.

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

#47

Post by echoradio »

I signed on to the internet when everything was handled through terminals, so I’ve always viewed cyberspace — and the culture which developed there — as completely separate from IRL. People can take on different personas, customs, etc. So it’s no surprise to me the customs within this “new” world are mirroring how a physical world society spreads across a spectrum of ideology. (Granted, the ideas don’t always blend with what exists in the real world.)

I’ve often thought of the counterculture to online space as those who are breaking free of centralization and the digital “monopolies.” They’re the people who are homesteading on tildes, Mastodon, or their own self-hosted instance, for example. In cyberspace, FAANG are the new industrialists (the new informationalists?), so to me it makes sense that a portion of online society wants to separate or rebel from this establishment which controls a good portion of this cyberspace.

As IoT becomes more prevalent, I can see those who seek a break from connectivity in general as countercultural, too. Some of the ideas in Aldous Huxley’s “Brave New World,” or Ted Kaczynski’s* “Industrial Society and Its Future” reflect this.

* I do not condone Kaczynski’s actions. I’m merely stating the concern about technology’s negative impact on society has long been thought about. It makes sense that there would be those who seek to shun it entirely.

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

#48

Post by twobitshifter »

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.

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.

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

#49

Post by dghlsakjg »

1propionyl wrote: post #8
everdrive wrote: post #6

Still reading the article, but this is an interesting blurb if nothing else: "To be truly countercultural today, in a time of tech hegemony, one has to, above all, betray the platform, which may come in the form of betraying or divesting from your public online self." I hadn't thought of boycotting much of popular online space as being counter-cultural. It's an interesting thought.

The analogy to Cixin Liu's "dark forest" concept also seems apt and enlightening. (Basically: it's a game theoretic response to the Fermi Paradox that suggests that any sensible galactic civilization would avoid making contact with any other civilization and attempt to stay hidden.) More and more over the past few years, I've seen my own social circles migrate away from public forums like Facebook and Twitter and int…

The thing that I hate about what social media has done is that it is resistant to persistance of knowledge. I grew up in the heyday of forums (late 90s to mid-late 00s). It seems like a lot of these groups have moved to facebook (or discord, or whatsapp), and now a lot of that knowledge for specialty stuff is unsearchable and behind a wall.

One of my hobbies is boatbuilding, and there is a LOT of good material that is still available on forums since they just happily sit there seemingly forever, and are easy to archive. But a lot of the new stuff is now done on FB, and it means that knowledge gets pushed to the bottom of the feed, and it is impossible to archive.

My feeling is that the switch to algorithmic feed-based discussion is a serious regression for a lot of interest groups.

An excellent illustration of this is Stack Overflow. They take after the forum model of preserving knowledge to the degree that they shut down discussions that have happened before. Stack Overflow's database of solutions brings literally billions in value to the world, and it simply would not work without persistance of information.

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

#50

Post by spaetzleesser »

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 partisanship probably has the same origin because it explains that the world is bad because of "others".
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