Do we live in a society without a counterculture?

The moment in which techies realize that they became the mainstream, and counterculture is elsewhere.

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.

I'm going to query the phrase "common knowledge". To mutilate Gibson I think that common knowledge is not evenly distributed.

In the present moment, the counterculture is always hard to find and identify. That's what makes it the counterculture.

Now you can read and listen to the Beat poets anywhere, but that would have been challenging in the early '50s. You had to go to the right coffee shop on the right night and if you went and saw what was going on you might question if these were geniuses pushing the frontiers of expression or a bunch of degenerates exploiting impressionable young people.

You can still have that experience today, probably easier than ever.

I think there never was stronger counterculture than today - but the platforms for this changed. A few decades ago an avant-garde film or student project could make ripples in the film industry and gain a cult following. However, I think that anyone under 20 (possibly under 30) sees cinema as far less important than the previous generation. YouTube (and TikTok) stars became bigger than movie stars, and more young people can tell you who the top streamer is for Valorant than who played Luke Skywalker in Star Wars.

The "criteria" mentioned in that post assumes the importance of cinema, radio and television is static, but in fact all of traditional content mediums are just a small detail in the peripheral vision of a younger audience, and they are pushing their values and ideas harder than it was ever possible before. There's culture and counterculture online. It's just not taking place in the same space as before, leaving the old mediums to corporations trying to maximize profits.

Kids and teens don't dream about changing the world through cinema anymore, but rather Twitch, YouTube or TikTok, or if they're really ambitious, a game.

Edit: forgot to mention Discord.