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Do we live in a society without a counterculture?

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Re: Do we live in a society without a counterculture?

#781

Post by germinalphrase »

runarberg wrote: post #491
erybodyknows wrote: post #337

Earlier quoted context omitted.

On this topic: part of counterculture used to be the ability to *signal* your identification with the group to other group members. Styles of dress, certain symbols or artifacts have all been commonly used. How does one signal to others their social media rejectionism in the age of social media communication ubiquity?

A dumb phone, an old walkman, etc. but also some of the following: second hand clothes, a second hand bicycle, a car from the 90s, a cheap second hand watch etc. The gathering spaces include your local library, your small local music venue/record store, and your local print shops and book cafés.

“ local library, your small local music venue/record store, and your local print shops and book cafés”

With the except of publicly funded libraries, it might be notable to suggest that, in many/most communities, everything else on this list is struggling to exist.

Re: Do we live in a society without a counterculture?

#782

Post by rnd0 »

s1artibartfast wrote: post #410
luckylion wrote: post #137

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The hippies were the counterculture, weren't they? Yet they weren't hard to find or identify. I guess it can get muddy, but what you're describing sounds more like underground culture to me. It can be happily compatible with the mainstream culture, it's not oppositional, it's just obscure and hidden because of it.

Hippies were until they weren't. Counterculture either becomes culture or dies off. Naziism was counterculture in 1920's Germany, Mainstream in the 30s and 40's, and back to counterculture now.

An argument could be made that there is a lot of ideological overlap between current far right GOP/Qanon people and the tenants of Nazism. Considering the number of elections won by the GOP you cannot tell me they're not mainstream.

Re: Do we live in a society without a counterculture?

#783

Post by mshake2 »

banannaise wrote: post #733
Perceval wrote: post #677

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> homophobic, racist, sexist, emotionally and mentally stunted incels This is the counter-culture. The dominant culture opposes all of these things and makes obligatory the celebration of the opposite values. 4chan being one of the few lightly-restricted free speech zones allows for culture generation that would be censored anywhere else. Counter-culture is supposed to be edgy, just like jazz and rock were edgy, grea…

> LGBTQ was edgy Aside from monogamous gay people, queerness is very much still edgy and not particularly accepted by the dominant/mainstream culture. (This is not a positive thing, but it is reality.)

>queerness is very much still edgy and not particularly accepted by the dominant/mainstream culture

Being supported by advertising, movies, tv shows, signaled by major corporations and workplaces, and supported top-down by the government means its edgy and counterculture? We live in completely different realities I guess.

Re: Do we live in a society without a counterculture?

#784

Post by Gollapalli »

oneplane wrote: post #740
Perceval wrote: post #677

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> homophobic, racist, sexist, emotionally and mentally stunted incels This is the counter-culture. The dominant culture opposes all of these things and makes obligatory the celebration of the opposite values. 4chan being one of the few lightly-restricted free speech zones allows for culture generation that would be censored anywhere else. Counter-culture is supposed to be edgy, just like jazz and rock were edgy, grea…

> Counter-culture is supposed to be [... list of stuff...] No, it's not. The words explain themselves perfectly fine: an opposing culture. What you describe boils down to being irrationally angry, stunted in various ways, and generally destructive... It's not a counter-culture but just counter-productive and essentially a defect. If anything, it is devoid of culture. And just in case someone takes "counter-productive…

>irrationally angry

Angry to be sure, but Irrationally? Take a closer look.

>stunted in various ways

To be sure. C’est la vie. But also undeniably brilliant on occasion.

>generally destructive

Not unlike the hippies then.

>If anything, it is devoid of culture.

Simply ignorant.

Re: Do we live in a society without a counterculture?

#785

Post by throwaway923663 »

PuppyTailWags wrote: post #280
throwaway4aday wrote: post #145

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Speaking of bubbles, it seems like you're in a pretty big one. To speak directly to your comment. The shared fireplace is now composed of streaming services, news, and social media with its heavily censored content. There is a very strong dominant narrative in society right now, in the US it is somewhat two pronged but those tines are joined at the handle. The Western leaders all subscribe to the same clubs and seem…

I don't know if we can say that because YouTube censors some things that whatever it censors is counterculture. I guess pornography has been the ultra counterculture for a while now, or filming and streaming executions. But IDK, I don't consider just sexual material to be a culture. Maybe specific fetishes, like sexual enslavement fetishes?

Obviously not everything they censor is counterculture. But a lot of counterculture is censored.

Sexual acts are definitely culture. "Giving head" used to not be a part of mainstream culture and now it is. It is a part of our language, or media, and most people's private lives.

Separately, the word "kink" is better than fetish in this context. Kink means not mainstream. Fetish means primarily psychological rather than primarily physical. I think that all kinky non-fetish things are bound to inevitably enter mainstream culture, it's just slow because of censorship.

Re: Do we live in a society without a counterculture?

#786

Post by zirgs »

nextlevelwizard wrote: post #665
zirgs wrote: post #208

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Thank god that I live in a country with more than two political parties. And where gun control isn't part of a culture war. Gun ownership is no different to car ownership and isn't tied to any political opinions.

Car ownership is very much a political issue for some people who are very into bicycles

Not car ownership, but car-centric infrastructure that makes biking and walking unsafe.

Re: Do we live in a society without a counterculture?

#787

Post by Natsu »

bglazer wrote: post #750
narrator wrote: post #509

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The way you know 4chan is the counterculture is every time someone releases a new generative art tool, 4chan figures out a way to do stuff with it that makes the creators have to restrict and/or shut it down. Like in the 1960s how the mainstream culture would whisper under their breath and point in shock and horror at hippies and try to get them banned from various public venues, and send mobs to beat them up, we hav…

Being antisocial is not the same thing as being counterculture. There’s not really a flourishing of new ideas or material culture on 4chan, just a race to the bottom of taboo-breaking.

Weird, that's what they said about prior counter-cultures, too.

Re: Do we live in a society without a counterculture?

#788

Post by sys32768 »

With so much talk of hippies, nobody has mentioned the Yippies [1] (Youth International Party (YIP)) who, on the anniversary of the Hiroshima bombing in 1970, tried to take over Disneyland [2]:

>The Yippies planned to hold a Black Panther breakfast at Aunt Jemima's Pancake House, followed by a feminist liberation of Minnie Mouse, a barbecue of Porky Pig and the capture of Tom Sawyer Island in order to protest the American war in Vietnam.

The Yippies seem a bit like the ANTIFA and autonomous zone folks, but with a better sense of humor and optics.

[1] = https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Youth_International_Party

[2] = https://www.kcet.org/shows/lost-la/the-yippie-invasion-of-di...

Re: Do we live in a society without a counterculture?

#789

Post by germinalphrase »

drewcon wrote: post #114

I’m going to get flamed for this but at this point the closest we’re getting to counter culture is the exact opposite… “Trads”. Young people with super traditional values doing exactly the opposite of most of what you just listed. No one would seriously suggest the trendiest most mainstream supported or glorified lifestyles (van life, queerness, gig work) are counter culture…that IS the culture; there’s very little c…

IDK. Maybe “radically” is doing a lot of heavy lifting in that sentence, but I live in the upper Midwest and what you’re describing is the dominant culture.

Re: Do we live in a society without a counterculture?

#790

Post by syntheweave »

skyyler wrote: post #734
revolvingocelot wrote: post #699

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I wholeheartedly agree with this analysis, and submit that those users condescendingly suggesting that it's we who've changed and not 4chan may never have actually experienced the kind of 4chan to which the parent refers. Things were, are, and presumably always will be done for "the lulz", but what those things are, at whom those things are targeted, and why those targets are chosen have changed dramatically . A brig…

>much of the internet's "culture" is created on 4chan And other lies 4chan users tell themselves to feel important. It wasn't even true back in the day, a lot of stuff came from SomethingAwful and Newgrounds... Then came Twitter!

The categorical error is that none of it was a "come from", rather it was a "passing through". The sites were all popular waystations, but none of them owned the creativity of their users, they just happened to host the party, and once the party died down something new came up and the same users moved on to that thing. Thus the large number of Twitter users who will post things starting like "in my 4chan days" "in my SA days".
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