821–830 of 1001 posts
I am old enough to remember the hippies and related counterculture(s). (I was very young.) This is something to keep in mind: the counterculture then was a place where people made a living. And the cost of living was cheap. You could raise kids on an organic farm, sell in the local alternative stores, have a live show on pirate radio. And pay your modest bills. Health insurance and college tuition was cheap. Jeez --…
> Now the tastemakers are gone or impotent, replaced by automated systems that optimize for engagement and revenue (within whatever constraints of safety and integrity that each company applies). I’m not sure how any countercultural work would make it into the mainstream at this point or how the mainstream could shift going forward. that’s the point that sticks out to me. optimize aggressively for revenue, everywhere…
Earlier quoted context omitted.
The hippies were shit on during the sixties because of politics and the Vietnam war. The hippies were a big part of the anti war movement. The simplest and quickest way to shutting the movement down was to criminalize its constituents, like hippies, or civil rights activists, through tactics like draconian drug laws and a drug war. The hippies were rooted in things that were objectively good: peace, love, self discov…
> 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…
I am old enough to remember the hippies and related counterculture(s). (I was very young.) This is something to keep in mind: the counterculture then was a place where people made a living. And the cost of living was cheap. You could raise kids on an organic farm, sell in the local alternative stores, have a live show on pirate radio. And pay your modest bills. Health insurance and college tuition was cheap. Jeez --…
People need to give more attention to the collapse in ad-hoc labor. We've made life far too regimented and regulated for many people. I don't think we give enough attention to this gap in the economy.
I am old enough to remember the hippies and related counterculture(s). (I was very young.) This is something to keep in mind: the counterculture then was a place where people made a living. And the cost of living was cheap. You could raise kids on an organic farm, sell in the local alternative stores, have a live show on pirate radio. And pay your modest bills. Health insurance and college tuition was cheap. Jeez --…
> Now the tastemakers are gone or impotent, replaced by automated systems that optimize for engagement and revenue (within whatever constraints of safety and integrity that each company applies). I’m not sure how any countercultural work would make it into the mainstream at this point or how the mainstream could shift going forward. that’s the point that sticks out to me. optimize aggressively for revenue, everywhere…
The difference is that there is, and intentionally so, little legibility to how crypto "does" anything. Increasingly so as you go down the rabbit hole into less prominent projects that are untethered to traditional finance or venture capital. And if we're seeing like a state, that makes it a useless technology, ties it only to crime and the underground, because it can't be seen and controlled using men with guns or tattling gossips. And from a counter-cultural perspective, that should make one go, "hmm, that's interesting." Someone who is able to access state resources while being insulated fron state coercion could be seen as "useless parasite" or "bold counter-culturalist".
Right now it is highly inconvenient to adhere to a "crypto lifestyle", even more so than it was to be a hippie. As you say, buying drugs with it is a common entry point, and it's hard to use a crypto wallet for any kind of consumer activity. And everywhere you go, the discussion is unhinged speculation with an "exit strategy". The actual believers are quite a bit fewer in number, and are more likely to be along the lines of a Vitalik than an SBF - living relatively simply and focused primarily on intellectual concerns, vs a grand-scale dishonest charlatan.
And protest movements, while visually impactful, don't seem to terrify the mainstream like crypto. In many respects they have become co-opted, part of the show.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
LGBTQ stuff is pretty mainstream now, in the sense that it is an omnipresent "other" though 20 years ago, it definitely wasn't. I'd say today's counter culture is people eschewing corporate life, sort of like it was before corporate culture took over.
I think that's mainstream as well. People talk about digital nomadism x going off grid whatever all the time. The real counterculture is showing up to work and feeding your kids
If you only consume mainstream media then you may personally live in a society which lacks a counterculture. You strike up a conversation with the girl picking mushrooms in the middle of nowhere or you go to an underground death metal concert or spend a bit of time on 4chan and you'll find countercultures alive and well that you're just not part of. If you think a sense of sameness pervades the creative world then yo…
"It has never been easier to be weird nor easier to find weirdness." Completely agree. It has also never been easier to discover sameness, broadcast sameness, or replicate sameness. The Instagrammification of the world is why the hip local coffee shop in Thailand looks like it could be in Brooklyn or Amsterdam.
Even countercultures replicate sameness.
Find someone from any counterculture and everything from his/her ideas, to their music, to the perfume they stink from are probably all exactly the same. There's really nothing new that 99.99999999% of humans come up with. I mean a 4chan user in Poland spouts the same tired nonsense as a 4chan user from Argentina or the US. Same styles of dress. Same haircuts. Even uses the same wording in their posts. Try it for yourself, you'll find yourself reading the exact same comments and posts over, and over, and over again. There's literally nothing new there. Or, as another example, when was the last time you heard a genuinely new idea from a conservative? Or from a liberal? If we're being honest, I mean, we'd have to admit that we haven't heard any new ideas out there.
So you end up with 4chan users all having the exact same crap in their rooms, and political parties all having the exact same formats, colors, and even overall look to their "conventions". You only noticed the "sameness" with coffee shops. The reality is that cultures, and even counter cultures, thrive on sameness. Without sameness they don't exist.
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…
The motivation matters. Jazz and Rock was the music of african americans that became mainstream in white america just like rap did later. Punk was a reaction to rock becoming boring and stale. Disco came out from the african-american AND LGBTQ community, and the eventual "disco sucks" mainstream backlash was at least somewhat motivated by racism/homophobia, not anything inherent with disco. None of these creative out…
...
>None of these creative outlets were a result of anyone overtly TRYING to offend anyone.
So when Sid Vicious (and other punks) wore a swastika, he wasn't trying to offend people?
Earlier quoted context omitted.
I just had that conversation yesterday. The only pictures of me that exist are in relation to my current employer, and only because they post headshots of all new execs in the local paper (small towns are weird like that). Otherwise, I flat do not exist online. People are ASTOUNDED when I ask them to crop me out, or to ask my permission before posting with me in it. I'm always polite, but people act like I asked them…
People are ASTOUNDED when I ask them to crop me out, or to ask my permission before posting with me in it. I'm always polite, but people act like I asked them to lick the bottom of my foot. Most people are happy to have photos with themselves in it. Like it or not, you're the strange one in this situation.