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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?

#91
post #38

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 u…

idk why every comment i like gets downvoted here :p

this feels accurate to me, it's definitely part of the appeal of music so deliberately unlistenable that it will never become corporate trash

https://paradiserecordshtml.bandcamp.com/album/music-for-7-j... https://chezmonplaisir.bandcamp.com/album/cellphone

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

#92

It's an interesting question, but way too simplistic. In his great book "the myth of digital democracy", Matthew Hindman pointed out what most people don't get: The web is becoming more centralized AND more spread out at the same time. Popularity is a scale-free distribution that gets more extreme over time. So we have counterculture, it's just not the large homogenous blobs that we were used to.

Maybe that's today's true counter culture; anti-consumerism and switching offline. Thousands of people do it daily - delete their Social Media accounts, stop sharing everything online, stop watching endless video streams, stop playing meaningless games, and just escape the marketers trying to make a quick buck from their identity. You're not worth targeting if they can't sell you anything. It's the first "silent" counter culture.

It's not that it doesn't exist. There is no "dark corner of the room" dynamic like you had between punk and the nuclear family; more like, it's a different room altogether, and the other cultures don't get to see what's in that room. It's a society where the culture and the counter-culture don't share the "town square" together like they used to as much.

Alternatively, like you mention, it's existing in a different digital sphere to the mainstream. This can be intentional; using alternative forums like Mastodon instead of Twitter, Discord instead of Facebook, or whatever alternative it might be. IRC chats and email threads are still going to this day. It could also be unintentional; two people can be using YouTube but have completely and utterly different feeds and comments that they interact with due to an algorithm.

These alternate realities never really existed to the degree they do today. Previous cultures had the ruling and working classes, or ruling, working, and slave if you go back far enough. Stricter class boundaries, but within those classes things were more homogenous culturally. Less people, that meet in the same forum, pub, feast hall, or religious center. Now, the lines between classes are blurred and the classes themselves less homogenous. More people, more meeting places. More things to build an identity and culture around. That dilutes the predominant counter-culture enough for people to ask whether it exists at all.

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

#93
A counterculture requires privacy, and we're increasingly becoming a society of constant surveillance and permanent records shared between authorities, a society that is very suspicious when people speak to each other without an intermediary escalating anything interesting being said to their manager.

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

#94
post #76

Personally I think the word “counterculture” should be retired, as we no longer live in monocultural societies. We no longer gather round any shared fireplace. For a counterculture to meaningfully exist, it has to be somehow discordant with a dominant narrative - but there is no dominant narrative any more. The west is not ruled by the left or the right or the church or the state. We are all fragmenting off into echo…

Yet I suspect you look and think like your neighbors with a 90% probability.

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

#95

I see the counter culture over the last few years as the less obnoxious elements of the alt-right/conservative and centrist/"classic liberal" in their opposition to the overreach and oppression by the "liberal"/left especially in their domination of big tech and classic media. However, as the recognition of that unpleasant latter tendency has become mainstream and everybody and her grandma now knows what "woke" means…

What are the great creative works you identify with the alt-right? I know lots of great leftist artists, musicians, etc. but I don't see alt-righters making a lot of daring indie cinema for instance.

Basically all memes? Pepe, Wojak, Soyjak, the Bogdanoffs, etc.

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

#96

[flagged]

The thing that really shocked me was watching an episode of South Park.

The boys all got into airsoft, and really enjoyed it (in contrast to a bunch of older jaded teens that used drugs and were largely miserable.)

The dads weren't sure about letting their boys play, but when they saw the teens picking on their kids, went and bought a bunch of tactical gear and airsoft guns and went on the field with their kids.

Oh, and the kid that didn't have a dad? They got an uncle to stand in for him.

This is the show that my parents warned me about as a kid for how sacrilegious and profane they were. It came out like it was directed by Jordan Peterson. I mentioned this to a friend, and he responded... "Well, that show has always been counter culture."

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

#97
post #43

Earlier quoted context omitted.

My understanding of counterculture is that it 'counters'. I.e. it inherently searches to change or influence the dominant culture. Your examples do show that we are (thankfully) not a monoculture. But they place themselves outside of our culture, instead trying to influence. A good example of counter culture is BLM, Extinction Rebellion or Occupy Wallstreet. Only thing: those are movements, not cultures. And they are…

>BLM >LGBT >counter culture Endlessly supported by literally every news outlet, major tech company, big 5 sports league, F1000, university, and at least half of the political class. You’re not counter to any major institution, lmao. You’re not the resistance

> BLM > Endlessly supported

Black people are still being murdered by police every day in America.

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

#98
post #22

This author must have missed the 2017-2021 presidential term in the US. There are some very strong differences of opinion out there, and they have a significant impact on the nature and direction of creative work. There is without doubt a strong counter-cultural push brewing up from the world of podcasts too which will probably herald a golden age of intelligent mass political debate (clearing a truly low historical…

[deleted]

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

#99

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>BLM >LGBT >counter culture Endlessly supported by literally every news outlet, major tech company, big 5 sports league, F1000, university, and at least half of the political class. You’re not counter to any major institution, lmao. You’re not the resistance

This is such a superficial understanding of "support". They make their logo rainbow for a month. None of the groups you mentioned support police abolition, prison abolition, for instance. Police budgets still go up. Homeless encampments still get bulldozed. Black people are still killed by police. Capitalists have co-opted the least disruptive demands of advocates in an attempt to draw attention away from the actual…

If your culture is well-known enough and seen as desirable enough that you start having to no-true-scotsman to differentiate between the corporate poseurs and the true believers, it's a pretty strong sign that you're not a counterculture anymore. People don't try to fake having low cultural status.

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

#100
Given the accessibility to like minded groups of people made possible by the Internet I’d say we’re all the counter culture. Which I suppose implies no counter culture.

Edit: after reading another comment I think digital disconnection is the new counter culture

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