The truth is that today the counter-culture is the right wing dudes (and ladies) who won't be beholden to trigger warnings, won't treat particular words as if they have magical powers and won't try to get you fired if you openly believe that male and female are real concepts. If your cursor is hovering over the downvote button right now then that's natural - counter culture isn't popular. By definition.
The bog standard opinions of CPAC, a recent President, nearly every straight-laced conservative, and the majority of Republicans aren't counterculture, they're just grievance culture. There are some grievances they like to complain about, but it is still part of mainstream, popular culture to do so, and plenty of people have ridden to fame and fortune repeating those grievances to mainstream audiences.
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.
In an age of corporate sponsored wildly increasing visibility & reach, it's a counter-cultural act to forgo visibilty & reach for other goals.
The truth is that today the counter-culture is the right wing dudes (and ladies) who won't be beholden to trigger warnings, won't treat particular words as if they have magical powers and won't try to get you fired if you openly believe that male and female are real concepts. If your cursor is hovering over the downvote button right now then that's natural - counter culture isn't popular. By definition.
That's precisely the irritating image people like that have of themselves, which does not correspond to reality. What does it mean "beholden to trigger warnings"? I'm not sure in which sense you are beholden to something which you likely haven't even encountered outside of internet posts making fun of trigger warnings. What magic words are those? Not saying n*gger in polite company isn't censorship, it's just good ma…
I've worked at at least one place where if I stated "male and female are real concepts" I would have raised eyebrows at min and received some official reprimand at max
> I hadn't thought of boycotting much of popular online space as being counter-cultural. It's an interesting thought I think the interesting part is that it's kind of counter-culture but it itself is not really a culture at all. There are no groups (as far as I know) for people who eschew social media. They don't meet up at the pub and talk about it, they don't have any kind of organization, even a loose one. People…
As one of these people, totally agree. I don't really have people I sympathize with over this stuff (except a few friends with whom its a minor topic of conversation) or anything I'd consider a culture. Mostly I just deleted my accounts and moved on. On the other hand, despite the lack of other people to commiserate with, it does feel a little countercultural insofar as I'm doing something different from most people,…
I've similarly ghosted social networks and other "platforms" some years back. A culture is usually formed around shared experience. In the case of social media escapists there are two sets of shared experiences:
The escapists themselves are simply living their lives as usual. This sort of baseline human experience is a rare thing these days, but it doesn't get much exposure because escapists aren't likely to go out of their way to broadcast their experiences - that would be antithetical to the idea of disconnecting from social media.
Other people are wondering where the escapists have gone. Did they die? Move to Mars? Get convicted of a major crime and sentenced to a long stint in state prison? This too takes places quietly: it's not as if anyone's mounting a nationwide search to locate the escapists.
These experiences to me form a kind of bifurcated culture.
> While there may be no "algorithm" controlling the narrative you see on 4chan (or a straightforward and ostensibly fair one on a site like reddit), the content you see (and by extension, the narrative) is shaped by profit motive: From well-compensated marketing teams, to hordes of self-interested proselytizers (see: bitcoin), to propaganda teams looking to influence public opinion I've realized I have exactly one ou…
I find plenty of these types of communities through Discord, and I think that is part of the equation that's left out here. I don't really like discord much, but the reason I get when I do is to go check in on those friends. Usually these communities are just people that I've met playing games. I don't know that these would qualify as counter-culture or subculture, but they are free of marketing and advertising, and…
Old farts still had irl friends. The amount of teens who have no tangible friendships outside of Discord is sobering.
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.
WSB is a shade of its former self now due to the onslaught of new members
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.
Really?
Isn’t it already trendy to bash big tech and diss tech platforms?
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.
> I hadn't thought of boycotting much of popular online space as being counter-cultural. It's an interesting thought I think the interesting part is that it's kind of counter-culture but it itself is not really a culture at all. There are no groups (as far as I know) for people who eschew social media. They don't meet up at the pub and talk about it, they don't have any kind of organization, even a loose one. People…
Eschewing social media is not a culture in and of itself, anymore than eschewing the telephone or TV is a culture. But it is an attribute that some cultures have. Cultures have to be based around the actual ways they do interact, whether in person meetings via church groups, in person hiking groups, bike riding, falconry, camping, whatever. Similarly many people prefer to use person-to-person communication such as text messages, email, telephone calls, rather than broadcasting an edited version of their own thoughts to the world all the time. To assume that if you are not constantly engaging in this type of one-to-many communication, then you must be absolutely alone is to have serious tunnel vision.
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.
> I hadn't thought of boycotting much of popular online space as being counter-cultural. It's an interesting thought I think the interesting part is that it's kind of counter-culture but it itself is not really a culture at all. There are no groups (as far as I know) for people who eschew social media. They don't meet up at the pub and talk about it, they don't have any kind of organization, even a loose one. People…
I think there will be such a group but you won’t know about them because they won’t be on social media telling people about it. I don’t think their identity will be anti-social media, but an identity to strive for a slower way of life.
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.
One big problem with decentralized platforms is that, while technologically and conceptually fascinating, they offer a complex and not average-user-friendly UX.
Users are so inured by the down-to-earth, nanny-ready, repetitive and instant-gratification driven UIs of mainstream platforms that many of them have a hard time just understanding where to start with the decentralized ones.