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.
> 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.
To be fair, a lot of people still have this question about the Beat Generation.
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.
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.
There's a lot of overlap between the Nazis and both major parties in the US. That said, I don't think it is fair to say that being a Nazi is mainstream because there is some ideological overlap.
It just means that some parts of their platform have become mainstreamed. A simple and non-controversial example is that the Nazis were extremely Progressive on animal rights. Just because modern political parties also endorse animal rights, that does not make them Nazis
Another example is that Nazi rhetoric relied heavily on utilitarian analysis of the greater good. I don't think it's reasonable to say that any party that promotes the greater good over individual freedoms is a Nazi party.
I would argue that a counterculture has to be oppositional and can't be happily compatible.
The hippies who were burning their draft cards, dropping out of school, and living as mendicants were a counterculture that could not truly coexist with the mainstream.
These dramatic characters inspired a youth culture that adopted more moderate signifiers (long hair, folk/rock music, nonviolent protest, maybe vegetarianism/meditation/yoga) that could coexist with the mainstream.
There is a mis-perception in your statement, in that :
1. "techies" are some uniform block of people.
2. "techies" as a whole were at any point an anti-mainstream counterculture.
Many/most techies throughout history have been employed by the rich and powerful - individuals, private corporations, government institutions, religious institutions (if we go back far enough). So, the extent to which they are part of a counter-culture is through a critical evaluation of their own roles. There are also "independent" techies, of course - but those too often from well-off social strata and do not have much of a mind to subvert dominant culture on the social level (as opposed to in their personal habits).
... and I personally can't read the article since the corporate firewall I'm behind is blocking it, so that's kind of ironic :-(
In my time hanging out on Mastodon, I feel like I’m seeing this play out.
Many people who openly identify as “tech” people asking for new features, more or less complaining about the resistance to such new features and arguing that the cultural resistance doesn’t make sense.
Now these tech people tend to also be new to mastodon. But they also seem pretty oblivious to the fact that they are the mainstream which many on the platform tried to avoid or establish a counter culture from. They don’t seem to realise that leaving Twitter in 2022 was a comparatively mainstream thing to do, and that the resistance they meet often has a point or perspective that they haven’t even thought of and is coming from people who are just as technically inclined and informed but just don’t tie that to their identity so tightly or openly.
Broad generalisations, but I think it’s definitely playing out to some extent.
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.
I do have to admit there are effectively no "dark corners" anymore. The percentage of the population that can be involved in a new cultural movement without its details becoming common knowledge is getting smaller and smaller.
There are more dark corners than ever... and they are as dark as it gets. You just don't want/know how to look for them and they are also as private as it gets.
There's a lot more fragmentation.
The few common grounds, the most popular music, 'content creators', ideas and current events get amplified by news sites relying on ads, algorithms seeking maximum engagement.
It's hard to promote a fringe issue in a wide content channel and there's a lack of everything in between fringe and mainstream.
Yeah sure, but saying that there are no "dark corners" is just naive. Counterculture in the 70s or 90s weren't massive movements at all. I don't see how it has changed looking at teens at the school of my children. It's mostly the problem of getting older can centering more with the mainstream yourself.
> I do have to admit there are effectively no "dark corners" anymore.
This is the problem. As soon as a counter-culture gets any amount of steam going a million marketers swoop in to sell it as an identity to anyone with a credit card. Marketers are constantly searching for the undiscovered cool or subversive thing. They have undercover agents infiltrate hobbies, movements, and cliques. They collect endless amounts of data so that they can fine tune their pitch to every individual person's most obscure interests. Whatever you identify as or stand for, there's a marketer willing to sell you something so that you can signal who you are to those around you. Marketers then slowly start to manipulate and change the counter-culture so that it sells better too.
There is no counter-culture because everyone is busy being a part of their preferred culture-bubbles only all of it is mainstream now. It's all so easily accessible that everything esoteric has become exoteric. No matter what it is, you can buy your starter pack right off the rack. Eventually it all gets watered down to capture as many dollars as possible and we're left with all these options, but still wondering where the counter-culture went.
Seems to be conflating the distribution of culture (via social media, google and the internet at large) with the culture itself.
But then, if a counterculture falls in a forest and nobody was around to hear it, did the counterculture really exist? Could be a valid argument too. Maybe
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.
I think there never was stronger counterculture than today
I disagree. Can you expand on your claim?
YouTube and TikTok are not countercultural, even if some users are using those platforms for genuine countercultural creative acts. By definition, a social media "influencer" with millions of followers is not countercultural.
" they are the platforms where counterculture happens"
And where exactly can I find them?
Trough the corporate algorithm, that doesn't even let me rewind a video?
Counterculture exists and sone of those expose their lifestyle and projects on these plattforms for fame and money, but that culture surely does not "live" on those plattforms.
> Trough the corporate algorithm, that doesn't even let me rewind a video?
It's worse than that. You used to have to "sell out" to corporate interests before your countercultural cache evaporated. Most YouTube creators "sell out" to advertisers the second they start their channel because getting any revenue on YouTube requires following YouTube's rules. And these rules are getting increasingly draconian with swearing now being sort-of banned. Also forget remixing existing cultural artifacts like older countercultural movements because that's just asking for an automated DMCA strike.
If you stick with the comparison they were making to cinema this is like saying a movie star is not countercultural and you'd be right. The influencers with millions of followers are not countercultural, they've broken into the mainstream and are busily selling out for money and fame. At the same time you can have countercultural activities happening on those platforms and the "true" revolutionaries will actively eschew money from sponsors and ads and will sabotage any mainstream attempts to make them famous by trolling the normies that jump on the band wagon or by intentionally poisoning their content with things that go far beyond the pale.
Is culture music or is it composed of individual songs and artists? Is culture literature or is it some set of books and authors? Is culture film or is it the movies and directors? Is culture the internet or is it the content and creators?
The hippies weren't tiny and they were the quintessential counter culture. You can have millions of followers and the average cat on the street wouldn't know who you are.
> we have a counterculture — many of them, in fact — but they are systematically excluded from seeping into the mainstream
I don't understand this and by extension the entire article. Counterculture is by definition outside of mainstream. It would just be culture and not anti otherwise. This sounds like semantics but then that is what I think the entire article is, and imho it is wrong.
Ya. My noob understanding of these things is that there is no culture without counterculture. Because we can only understand things, like culture, identity, and self, in contrast to other things.
From Gioia's OC:
> A sense of sameness pervades the creative world ...
aka "Kids these days..."
I've been hearing this exact same criticism for as long as I remember.
One observation (McLuhan? Warhol?), using the example of da Vinci's Mona Lisa, which made some sense to me:
Modern tech makes reproduction trivial. So any original content quickly becomes ubiquitous. Separating content from original creator. Thereby mooting any of original intention or meaning or esthetic or whatever.
In other words, everything popular becomes banal.
My example, from the 90s era new age fads, I always thought of the yin-yang symbol showing up every where. Especially as tattoos. Oh so original.
Further, I think this also helps explain the disappointment about "selling out". It's a rare thing for a creator to become popular, not wear out their welcome, and retain their original fan base.
>> they are systematically excluded from seeping into the mainstream
> I don't understand this and by extension the entire article. Counterculture is by definition outside of mainstream.
Yes, that's what they said. The danger they are going on about is how heavily it is buried so that it never seeps into mainstream.
Your not understanding is confusing to me, especially since you quoted the bit "we have a counterculture", and then replied as if they said "we have no counterculture".
Art today is definitely and absolutely still made with love and passion. Films like Everything Everywhere All At Once (or the recent episode of The Last Of Us) take a popular concept or franchise and make it their own. Fanfiction is still at crazy levels, thanks to websites like AO3. The book industry still has outstanding popular modern works which stand on their own and refuse to let genre define them. (Becky Chambers is my favourite for this, with her hygge scifi). There's also a whole host of internet culture - lots of tumblr tags and subreddits - that are actively filled with sharing, passion and community, not for good art that sells, but something that lifts the spirit in its own weird way.
Anecdotes aside, at least for independent artists it may be economical effects that constrain passion and make projects feel so for-profit. Which have always been a thing, unfortunately. Given technology, maybe there is so much art to consume that making art requires forgoing distraction and the general worry that the art will be bad (which is nonsense, because some art simply has a limited audience).
In today's era, stuff like EU art grants [0] can do some good, although I have the feeling that patronage-per-capita is considerably lower than it was in the past; it would be an interesting metric to look at and try best to increase.
Taking established media and making it a LGBT story is has been pretty much mainstream for long time. We live in a world where all major corporations put rainbows on their logos for a month every year, just to meet the expectations of general audience.
I do think Daniels are a great example of actual counterculture like this article is talking about. Swiss Army Man is weird as shit, and deeply affecting. EEAO has very much broken into the mainstream while preserving a lot of their style and sensibility. I think there will probably be a set of filmmakers in the future who saw their movies at a young age and thought "you can do that?"
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, I can see a new counter, hopefully genuinely less partisan and not tipped the other (ie right wing) way as the old guard is kicked out (as we have seen with Twitter etc).
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.
I'm strictly considering the definition as "an alternative to dominant [as opposed to popular] opinion and social mores".
I'd probably agree the bulk of indier-than-thou creations are produced by people on the left (not all of whom demand we also bow to their political interpretation of the world); some of the work excellent, most of it perhaps not.
That's not what the article is about. The article is about creative content, and how YouTube content is aesthetically all the same. Jordan Peterson videos have the same stupid thumbnails as all other clickbait.
People have said it in the thread, but counter-culture is really defined retrospectively. You look at the movements that existed on the periphery but later inspired the mainstream. Velvet Underground wasn't selling millions of records, but everyone who started a band listened to them. Lou Reed is pretty indier than thou.
Well, it's no wonder since you're looking at YouTube which is basically a curated experience. Take a look at Rumble and other YT alternatives and you'll see plenty of counter-cultural video content. Plus there's other media like image macros, real-world social stunts etc. The counter-culture is quite real.
> The article is about creative content, and how YouTube content is aesthetically all the same.
Yeah, but Youtube is mainstream now; it comes installed on almost every single consumer TV available for sale right now. You don't get more mainstream than that.
If you wanted to see counterculture, you'd have to use the youtube alternatives.
Thousands of sad frogs, wojaks and other memes. The fringe fashwave music videos. Greentext stories with their weird rules as whole new literary genre. It's obvious there are real artists spending days and hours making them, but posting any of these things on mainstream cultural outlets gets you banned. How this is any different from independent filmmaker being shunned out of cinemas for his extreme take on coprophilia in the 80'?
Like gays in the 50s, conservatives in Hollywood (and at big tech) are careful not to out themselves. Given that Hollywood has lots of wealthy, business oriented people much of the media you like was made by conservatives without you knowing.
The alt right is essentially some 'stronger' people giving themselves permission to (try to) hurt 'weaker' people. Not sure that can be called a culture, counter or otherwise.
IMHO, this is simply born of the new age of surveillance: an internet that never forgets, tracks you unless you take excessive inconveniences to avoid it, and cheap cameras everywhere. Not only is creating counterculture hard to do for fear of reprisal, but also consuming it.
I'm pretty sure I've been existing in a number of counter-cultures for the last decade or two. These have been either linked to my identity or physical location, I couldn't have properly experienced them through consuming media on the subject. Certainly all required an active choice and/or lifestyle change on my part.
Maybe people mean something else by counter-culture, but here are examples from my life:
- Freelancing/contracting, and actively living substantially below my means. This has given me free time in a way that really changed my view on the world and allowed me to be around other people who were not in the 9-5 working world.
- Sexuality & ENM, plus living in a large city. There is a huge non-obvious culture of LQBTQIA people in this culture which often have very different outlooks on life to the mainstream.
- Communal living. Living in a warehouse with people from very different walks of life. I was exposed to so many fascinating ideas and people this way. It was a truly magical time of my life in which I also played a part in supporting the queer/ENM sub-culture of my city.
- Buying land and living off grid. There is a whole sub-culture of people doing this, both online and (more importantly) physically around me.
So I think counter-culture is available but – having written the above – I'm not sure if I am agreeing and disagreeing with the OP. On one hand it exists, but on the other hand I'm saying that it is very hard to access without making material changes to one's life.
Bingo! As soon as you get to define counterculture as something else but "a kind of bullshit you read on the Internet which is different from what normies read", you realise that there is plenty of it.
My bank decorates rainbow ATMs during pride month. A block away from my house my local council has created a rainbow street crossing. I don’t think it’s possible to get more mainstream than that.
Sounds like gatekeeping to me. I know LGBT culture generally used to be edgy and underground. But widespread mainstream acceptance means that’s not really true anymore.
In other countries it's still kinda "edgy". Yeah - gay pride is allowed and my bank changed its app icon to include rainbow colours. There also are no "LGBT propaganda" laws so gay-friendly pop culture is allowed. (Like movies depicting same sex families)
But at the same time gay marriages and civil unions are both illegal.
Adoption for gay couples is illegal too. Even if they are performed abroad. The state still treat gay couples as if they were roommates or something.
Lots of people are still against gay marriage in the USA. In many states it was legalised against the wishes of the majority. And it can be made illegal again. Just like abortions.
The public opinion numbers on this topic have changed drastically over the last two decades. It's an increasingly minority opinion. In 2004 it was 2:1 against same sex marriage. By 2022 it's 6:4 in favor. It's probably outdated to consider opposition to same sex marriage a majority opinion in much of the US.
In some states that's not a minority opinion. And the court decision also was kinda flimsy - 5:4 instead of 8:1 or something like that. That 5:4 can become 4:5 in the future. And just like abortions - gay marriage can become illegal in some states again.
In many states support is around ~50%. So opposition to same sex marriage isn't a fringe opinion in a lot of places in the USA. Even in liberal California 33% still don't support it.
It's not fringe yet, but it is extremely well on the way to being a minority opinion. It already is when you consider the national scope.
The states where a majority are still opposed are all states nobody wants to live in for a variety of reasons including poor educational standards and lack of economic development.
There might be some relations between these facts. Maybe not. But it is interesting, isn't it? That those are the places where these opinions stick around the longest?
I mentioned this in other comments, but the actual edgy counterculture these days is the tradcath types. They have all the funny memes, they make the media angry, Karens despise them – reminds me a lot of the hippies.
I suppose it is counter-culture in a universe where people dismiss it as being hedonism.
And while hedonism may be a side-effect in some situations, even that comes from eschewing the standards of wider society. I'd argue that is the definition of counter-culture.
You would be hard pressed to find many people who would publicly call it “hedonism”, particularly among the cultural elites. Just because there is some niche that disapproves of a culture doesn’t necessarily make that culture a “counter culture”.
google:
coun·ter·cul·ture
/ˈkoun(t)ərˌkəlCHər/
Learn to pronounce
noun
noun: counterculture; plural noun: countercultures; noun: counter-culture; plural noun: counter-cultures
a way of life and set of attitudes opposed to or at variance with the prevailing social norm.
"the idealists of the 60s counterculture"
Being not native, I googled before I posted. In the first page I saw some phrases that seemed to confirm for me. For example, Wikipedia, citing a book from 1991:
Counterculture may or may not be explicitly political. It typically involves criticism or rejection of currently powerful institutions, with accompanying hope for a better life or a new society.
One big difference between the US and other countries: The US doesn’t look at counterculture as a fundamental threat or challenge to the government. The US citizens actually have freedom. The constitution went so far as to identify the sovereignty of the country with its citizens - thus no royalty.
This might sound quaint to some critical ears of the US, but that is the basis of the law and US systems. The US citizens only need to be reminded of this fact and decide whether they want to reinforce that fact with their personal choices - nonviolent protest, voting, etc.
Edit-That might not seem related to the definition of counterculture, but it absolutely is. The US has a culture of multiculturalism. It has the Amish and lets them largely have their culture within the larger culture. There are many such examples with gradients all over and within the US. Sure, sometimes some of those subcultures get political and exert themselves. But they do it within the peaceful political system as a strong trend.
I think this is a good point, and you don't deserve to be downvoted for it.
I think some of my examples do try to change wider society, but it is just more subtle and less overt/wholesale. I think there will be activists/evangelicals in any sub-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 point. They think if they focus on saying words and not doing deeds, people will move on and forget.
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.
imo that's the problem - everything gets corporate poseurs so quickly now
could just be i'm out of touch and the countercultures have successfully hidden from me tho
That's faking low financial or political status in order to obtain cultural status. If the rich and powerful are generally hated, you don't become popular by flaunting your wealth but by distancing yourself from it.
Police budgets are up, but policing is down, killings by police are way down, and consequentially violent crime is way, way up. Protesters didn’t get everything, but they got a lot of what they asked for (reduction in policing, basically) and they seem content (no more major protests or riots since the precipitous drop in policing following the Floyd protests).
It seems hard to argue that there haven’t been disruptive changes considering violent crime levels (esp homicides), but I fully agree that “capitalists” (or maybe corporatists?) embraced BLM and other identity stuff because it’s a convenient distraction from substantial policy issues. A lot of folks made themselves into “useful idiots” over the last decade.
I don't think it's that activists are content. Rather I think it's that a combination of people returning to work, the end of Covid financial support, and high inflation means that people can't protest anymore. There's probably also a lot of fatigue after protests were going on for months.
I'd also contest whether activists really got much of what they were asking for. They generally weren't asking for simply no-police. Rather they were asking for issues like poverty, mental illness, and homelessness to be addressed rather than just being policed.
People protested for half a decade before COVID. Even if they couldn’t get out and protest, they could still engage in social media, and yet it seemed like their enthusiasm for the subject largely evaporated, even on social media. Even the cheapest of symbolic stuff like “#BLM” in Twitter handles and bios seemed to largely disappear. It very much feels like they cut policing in the name of black Americans and then lost interest when policing drove up crime rates, particularly in black communities.
> Rather they were asking for issues like poverty, mental illness, and homelessness to be addressed rather than just being policed.
I’m sure some were asking for those things, but mostly this was a media retcon when it was becoming apparent that “abolish the police” was jeopardizing Biden’s election campaign (“when protesters say ‘abolish the police’ and ‘all cops are bastards’, surely they’re really advocating for more spending on social services, right?”).
That wasn't my experience. From the start I heard people saying that "defund the police" was a poor slogan because it didn't convey to most people what activists actually meant.
You're claiming that the US, unlike the rest of the civilized world, can't address crime without having death squads summarily execute people for trivial or imagined offences every other week?
Sure thing: "An event study design finds census places with early BLM protests experienced a 10% to 15% decrease in police homicides from 2014 through 2019, around 200 fewer deaths." - https://papers.ssrn.com/sol3/papers.cfm?abstract_id=3767097
> You're claiming that the US, unlike the rest of the civilized world, can't address crime without having death squads summarily execute people for trivial or imagined offences every other week?
The US obviously doesn't have "death squads" who "summarily execute people every other week". Lol I can't imagine asking for a citation about police killings and then tossing this claim out there.
This is such a misunderstanding of the current situation. The demands were varied, but common ask was _not_ just a reduction in policing paired with a ballooning police budget. Ironically, the "defund" movement ended up causing an even more reactionary movement such that police actually got more funding.
Protesters wanted to re-allocate resources away from the police towards other services, so that cops are not the first responders to every situation, they often wanted fewer police with more training.
Crime goes up as a result of the material conditions of people. The more unequal society is, the more poor and desperate people get, the higher crime is going to be. Acting like it's merely a function of enforcement is silly.
Society did not get abruptly and dramatically unequal between 2013 and 2015 nor between 2019 and 2020. Socioeconomics doesn’t predict these crime surges.
Richard Rosenfeld speaking to The Guardian: “The only explanation that gets the timing right is a version of the Ferguson Effect”
Vox reporting on Travis Campbell’s research: “Campbell’s research indicates that these protests correlate with a 10% increase in murders in the areas that saw BLM protests”.
Harvard’s Roland Fryer and Tanaya Devi found that prominent BLM protests were associated with 900 excess homicides in the 5 cities they examined and 34k excess felonies. They report that the leading hypothesis is a change in policing activity, and the cities they studied had precipitous drops in the quantity of police-civilian interactions following the protests.
These are professional criminologists and economists—I doubt they’re being “silly” as you suggest.
Of course they're being silly if they decide the mere discussion of holding criminals accountable is responsible for a rise in crime, just because said criminals happen to be wearing blue.
The solution is obvious. Start rolling heads of Police Chiefs until they get their hierarchies of people in line. If it ends with the entire police union fired so be it, insubordinate lawless police are worse than useless.
This is just a recipe for chiefs that are good are juking stats or playing PR. You can't just fire the person at the top, the institution needs to change.
If you don't think there is any correlation between the material conditions of people and crime I don't know what to tell you. You're basically subscribing to essentialism. There are plenty of cranks with ivy league degrees in economics.
edit: You are cherry picking your data points. I spent literally 30 seconds looking up your first quote it's not even congruent with what you're saying.
Obviously no one in this thread ever disputed the relationship between socioeconomics and crime. This is a flimsy, transparent attempt to move goal posts.
"The leftist of the over-socialized type tries to get off his psychological leash and assert his autonomy by rebelling. But usually he is not strong enough to rebel against the most basic values of society. Generally speaking, the goals of today’s leftists are NOT in conflict with the accepted morality. On the contrary, the left takes an accepted moral principle, adopts it as its own, and then accuses mainstream society of violating that principle.” --Theodore J. Kaczynski
Changing the colour of your logo on a certain date is not really "supporting". Corps gonna corp and if changing the logo and publishing some nice post brings more money, they'll do it. (While donating to Republicans at the same time)
But what you're describing is exactly where "counterculture" flips over to "culture". It may have been counterculture at one point, but once it's grabbed up by the mainstream canon, it is no longer counterculture.
This is an important element of "cool", which is essentially the ebb-and-flow of ideas between counterculture and mainstream culture.
Pretty sure BLM was a media darling from the moment it was discovered. Maybe I have a weird media bubble, but the content I saw was endlessly pro-BLM (even contortions such as the memorable CNN reporter wearing a gas mask against a burning Kenosha with the caption “fiery but mostly peaceful protests”) for most of the last decade.
I can’t think of a way that BLM was ever counter-cultural.
> Pretty sure BLM was a media darling from the moment it was discovered.
It was the polished, highly educated, upper-middle class version of the activists that sprang up around the Ferguson protests. BLM was the mainstream corporate replacement of a street level movement, whose leaders acquired a habit of being found executed in the trunks of burned cars. A rehearsal for #TimesUp.
If the entire establishment is seeking to ally itself with your movement/culture/etc then that’s a strong indicator that your movement isn’t counter-culture or otherwise subversive. They don’t have to become True Believers IMHO.
And FWIW, lots of big companies have DEI departments that preach this stuff internally and market it externally (my wife is a marketing consultant with these big companies and they eat this shit up so much that their contracts are dependent on proving their commitment to DEI by centering their “diverse” employees, holding internal and external DEI ceremonies, etc). I’m sure there’s still a profit motive, but there’s quite a lot more than an annual profile photo update.
When Coca-Cola embraced the flower children with its ads in the late 1960s / early 1970s, did that mean that the US counterculture of that time had become "the culture"?
Of course it did not. The flower children, the back-to-the-landers, the bikers, the free love communers all remained a tiny slice of the population (and a shrinking one by that time).
What the late 60s/early 70s US counterculture had going for it was a kind of credibility as "the new thing". It was not "the culture" (and it never really became it without mutating heavily), but it was interesting to many people who did not participate in it. It remained a counter-culture until it had changed so radically (and this was years after Coco-Cola first tried to ride the hippy chic train), and then, indeed, it was no longer subversive in any meaningful way.
As actor Peter Coyote noted of that era, that particular counterculture won the culture war in the long term - you can find yoga classes and wholewheat bread in almost every small town in the USA now, our attitudes towards sexuality and the environment and women and racism have been fundamentally altered - but it lost almost every political battle that it was concerned with. Wars continued, economic inequality, corporate control, the military-industrial complex ... all continued unabated.
> When Coca-Cola embraced the flower children with its ads in the late 1960s / early 1970s, did that mean that the US counterculture of that time had become "the culture"?
Surely you understand that Coca-Cola wasn't "the entire establishment"?
Thing about 60s/70s counterculture is, it didn't become the culture. Rather, its members were recruited by mainstream culture with the promise of wealth and the good life, to betray the values they espoused as youths.
Were Gramsci alive in the 80s, he would be like "See? See? This is EXACTLY what I was talking about!"
This is not really true. While there were a few hippies who moved to wall st., the reality is that only a tiny percentage of the population were hippies (or their cousins). The "older adults" who made up the 80's/90's culture were, for the most part, the "young adult" members of mainstream culture in the late 60s/70s.
It's just like the way that the 90s mainstream culture in the UK was not based on punks ... not because absolutely no punks "crossed over", but because, as a percentage of the population, there were hardly any punks to start with (just a lot of media noise).
I want to add that my final paragraph above really describes the fundamental flaw with countercultures if you believe they are a vehicle for political change. They are really premised on the idea that it is possible to make a set of personal, individual choices and that if enough other people make similar choices you can build a sort of parallel society to mainstream culture. If you believe in them as a mechanism of political change, you tend to imagine that parallel society serving as an example/lesson to mainstream culture and being adopted by it.
As Coyote's observations note, this can work for "culture" issues, which do indeed tend to be the result of individual choices about consumption, but it rarely works for issues rooted in the distribution of political and economic power. These require political movements demanding change from the mainstream.
Imagine if F500 companies displayed the Christian cross to the extent they did the Pride colors, for one month. Would that signal "support" for Christianity?
Oh God, not one of these "we used self-reported statistics from metropolitan police departments to determine valid discharges of firearms to paint with broad strokes all over the country" studies.
As if they say anything about the rural parts of this country, like my hometown, half an hour from where Ahmaud Arbery was gunned down.
That data generally agrees with victim surveys about the race of offenders of violent crimes. It stands to reason that a group with a larger share of violent criminals is also going to have more police killings. Is there any data that contradict these? Is there any plausible theory about why victims might conspire with police to make it appear as though black Americans collectively overcommit violent crimes?
At first, I typed out a more long-winded reply about why one can't conflate the self-report statistics of victims with the motivations of police in violent skirmishes, but I've been reflecting a lot lately on choosing my battles.
The "but black people are more likely to be violent criminals" rebuttal is a despicable one, and if you can't see the absence of causal links that you're deliberately hopping over in an attempt to shoehorn that in, then I doubt I'm going to make you see it in a HN comment. That said, I sure hope you don't ever correct someone on "causation vs correlation", as you'd be a tremendous hypocrite.
It’s only appears to be despicable to people who don’t understand statistics on a basic level (which, sadly, describes most Americans, even educated ones) or ardent racists who believe that “the race” supersedes “the individual”.
Notably, we can correctly observe that black people commit more violent crimes per capita than other races without implying any of the following:
1. black people are biologically disposed to crime
2. a significant percentage of black people are criminals
3. any given black person significantly more likely to be a criminal than any given non-black person
I definitely think your decision to pick your battles more carefully is the right one, and I encourage you to be even more judicious.
I firmly believe that you don't understand statistics on a basic level, and you've wholly demonstrated that in this comment by throwing around a bunch of "explanations" with no basis but your own intuition. So the irony of your opening assertion has a wonderfully humorous tinge to me, a literal statistician. Take your pseudo-intellectual trolling back to reddit.
I will, as much as I enjoyed most of your posturing, including your misunderstanding of what constitutes an ad hominem AND the feeble attempt to invoke the guidelines. Is my tone too harsh for you? Or was it that I assumed the bad faith that you wear on your sleeve?
Flamewar comments like you posted to this thread will get you banned here, regardless of how wrong someone else is or you feel they are. If you'd please review https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html and stick to the rules when posting here, we'd appreciate it.
Flamewar comments like you posted to this thread will get you banned here, regardless of how wrong someone else is or you feel they are. If you'd please review https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html and stick to the rules when posting here, we'd appreciate it.
Read your own citation. That conclusion did not reach the level of statistical significance. The authors admit it studied a single precinct that self-reported data. They had no way to corroborate or verify the accuracy of the data they were given.
“In essence, this is equivalent to analyzing labor market discrimination on a set of firms willing to supply a researcher with their Human Resources data!”
I think your argument is wrong in several ways, but even accepting it hypothetically -- equality of far too many murders by the police is not actually what anyone is looking for.
It’s certainly not what I’m looking for, but BLM was obviously about purported racial inequality with respect to police killings or else Daniel Shaver, Tony Timpa, Justine Damond, etc would be among the Names that we’re told to Say.
So it's not monolithic, I've definitely been at "BLM"-y protests against police violence where non-Black victims were mentioned.
As far as actual policy changes we might want to advocate for or support, does it make any difference? I guess it would mean that "diversity training" for cops is not the way to go -- I agree and I think most BLM organizers would too (the ones I know anyway do). Instead ways that increase police accountability or limit police interactions are the way to go, which I again think would be agreeable.
I think the level of violence and aggression that police enact on certain communities would probably not be tolerated if it affected people with more political power -- they target people with less political power, which has racial components in the USA is why race matters, but is not exclusively "black and white", sure.
> So it's not monolithic, I've definitely been at "BLM"-y protests against police violence where non-Black victims were mentioned.
Yes, I'm generalizing. It's not possible to make meaningful statements about a millions-strong movement that apply universally, so I'm generalizing just like we generalize about "liberals", "conservatives", "progressives", "Trump supporters", etc. And I stand by my generalization--any mention of white victims of police violence was an aberration, an outlier.
> I think the level of violence and aggression that police enact on certain communities would probably not be tolerated if it affected people with more political power -- they target people with less political power, which has racial components in the USA is why race matters, but is not exclusively "black and white", sure.
I mean, I think virtually everyone agrees that police killings are classist. Of course, BLM wouldn't have been controversial if the message was merely "police target poor people (who are disproportionately black)". Something like 90% of Americans in 2020 (per Gallup or Pew--I forget which--but think about how big this number is particularly in light of the polarization of American politics) agreed that police brutality was a problem and police reform was needed--this was extremely uncontroversial. But the claim wasn't "classism", it was "racism"--police target ("hunt" was even commonly invoked) black Americans because of their race.
> Of course, BLM wouldn't have been controversial if the message was merely "police target poor people (who are disproportionately black)"
I'm confused why you think this is "of course"?
I'm confused why you are so caught up in whether the problem is described as "classism in a society where the poor are disproportionately black" or "racism in a society where black people are disproportionately poor."
I think in America you can't actually totally separate racism and classism as completely separate things, they are always related. Slavery, one major part of the beginning of American race relations, was, of course, a class relation -- enslaving people for their labor.
I think one reason non-poor Black people do get targeted by police is because they are perceived ("coded" to use fancy language) as poor, because in America Black is associated with poor. Like not even necessarily that the individual person is assumed to be poor -- although they may be, but it may not be that explicit or conscious. I don't think the police are even necessarily explicit or conscious about the fact that they can behave abusively toward poor people specifically (although they may be sometimes); but implicitly and unconsciously they know that certain kinds of people can be mistreated, that it's even their job to mistreat certain kinds of people -- and they are likely to read a Black person as that certain kind of person.
You can disagree with this analysis. No big deal. I don't understand why it seems to make you so angry that other people have this analysis you disagree with though; or why, if you agree that there is a problem with police brutality and abuse, as you seem to, and even agree with the problem statement "police target poor people (who are disproportionately black)" -- you can't work with people who agree with you so much of the way even though they disagree on some analysis, work together on solutions that make sense to all (like no, not "diversity training" for police, literally nobody I know that's BLM or "abolish the police", and I know a lot of people, think that's useful either) -- instead of considering them somehow on another side. "you" being you personally, or anyone in this category.
> I'm confused why you are so caught up in whether the problem is described as "classism in a society where the poor are disproportionately black" or "racism in a society where black people are disproportionately poor."
Because those are different problems with different solutions, and picking the wrong set of solutions tends to exacerbate problems (as we're seeing now with soaring crime from which black communities suffer disproportionately).
> I think in America you can't actually totally separate racism and classism as completely separate things, they are always related.
I'm sure there's an element of "black == poor" (brings to mind Biden's "poor kids are just as bright as white kids" gaffe) and in that sense these things are interrelated, but it doesn't follow that we can solve the problem by ignoring what is likely a considerably classism component altogether.
> I don't understand why it seems to make you so angry that other people have this analysis you disagree with though
I think this is entirely in your imagination. I can chuck a few smiley emojis around if it helps? :)
> if you agree that there is a problem with police brutality and abuse, as you seem to, and even agree with the problem statement "police target poor people (who are disproportionately black)" -- you can't work with people who agree with you so much of the way even though they disagree on some analysis, work together on solutions that make sense to all (like no, not "diversity training" for police, literally nobody I know that's BLM or "abolish the police", and I know a lot of people, think that's useful either) -- instead of considering them somehow on another side. "you" being you personally, or anyone in this category.
As is often the case in politics, agreement that there is a problem is not actually very much agreement. 90% of Americans agree that we need police reform (Gallup 2020), that doesn't mean we should pick the proposals offered by the most extreme 10% (proposals which 80% of black Americans reject). Notably, there's a lot of research that indicates that the little bit of de-policing we've done in this country seems to be driving a tremendous amount of additional violent crime. Homicides are up 60-70% since ~2014, amounting to about ten thousand additional lives lost every single year (that's about three 9/11s every single year just in homicides, not to mention all of the "mere" assaults, armed robberies, etc) in order to stop a handful of unjustified police killings. Why would I work with the most extreme 10% who are actively making things worse when there's another 80% of the country that are open to more moderate reforms which can address police brutality without enormous body counts?
> elevated for blacks because the commit more crime
True perhaps, but very misleading. Consider that blacks are far more likely to end up in jail (and for longer) for the same crime a white person commits. Consider that ending up in jail and with a criminal record puts someone in a situation where they're more likely to commit crimes in the future. Sounds to me like racial bias is creating a higher likelihood of the police encounters that may result in shootings occurring.
That's happening in spite of BLM being endlessly supported. Doesn't negate the fact that BLM is supported by "literally every news outlet [save Fox News], major tech company, big 5 sports league, F1000, university, and at least half of the political class" AND the US government [0].
"Supported" in only the very thinnest sense. The Raytheon Pride flags are generally considered to be extremely "virtue signalling" even within the community; at best this means "we'll allow you to work here and prevent people using slurs openly in the office", not "we'll stop donating to politicians and parties pushing anti-trans legislation or increased police budgets".
The Tyre Nichols incident response shows some improvements, but those responsible have not yet been charged, and because US police are so fragmented it will be a very long time before standards are raised nationally.
I think their point was that BLM has flipped from counter cutler to mainline culture
It’s on flags at schools, supported by government, roads are named after it, they have an enormous foundation with staff, and it’s even in college course curriculum
Ehh. I dunno, if that's "mainstream", why is this the third+ time this has had to be fought for? (BLM, Civil Rights, Civil War).
We've had pictures of MLK in schools, Civil Rights has been "supported by government", roads were named after people, there were and are enormous foundations with staff, and it's definitely in college curriculums - and it's been that way for an entire human lifetime...
...and yet the same fight is being fought again.
I'd figure if something achieved "mainstream", it wouldn't have to happen again and again.
(edit: In my head, I'm compare/contrasting with suffragette and other aspects of women's rights)
I'll believe BLM is mainstream culture when people of color aren't being disproportionately killed by police.
Until then, if police forces are upholding a mainstream concept of law and order resulting in said disproportionality, BLM is countercultural.
Otherwise, if acknowledging the aims of basically what's a human rights movement via flags and spots on AP tests constitutes inclusion into mainstream culture, then the mainstream culture is absurd and perverse.
This is like saying being "anti-murder" is countercultural because murders still happen.
Just because something occurs does not mean there is no mainstream opposition.
I would go further and say that the most basic elements of the BLM were never countercultural.
opposition to excessive police force has been mainstream since the 70s-80s.
The only part of BLM that is actually controversial and countercultural is the idea of abolishing the police. As a result, the majority of BLM supporters reject this aspect.
I agree with this, I had a friend who lived in a caravan in a forest in the north of England with a bunch of hippies. They'd throw parties now and again and there were tons of them. There are loads of people doing van life for various reasons or something similar like bike packing or living on a homestead. These people are counter culture but you won't hear about them because most of them aren't hustling to become social media influencers - they'll do some honest work to earn some money and then spend the year living out of a van and rock climbing or whatever. It's mostly word of mouth or messaging groups with them. At the party I went to, all the music played was mp3s on the guy's hard drive because he didn't want to pay for Spotify because he thought it devalued music. If you're looking for the counter culture on the mainstream platforms then you're not going to find it. The counter culture is 100% there they just don't really care about influencing you. You have to choose to break free of the mainstream yourself, they're not going to try and do it for you anymore.
Yup, people living it dont brag about it, gotta keep the poser johnny come lately herds away from ruining it. I have been living and crusing on a sailboat, mosty off anchor rent free when I can, surrounded by many other sailors who rather not see it ruined by Instagram.
The key here is the counter culture starts and ends in your heart. Get out and break out of the matrix.
It seems you are out of touch with the liveaboard boat market. It's totally feasible to pick up a boat suitable for coastal cruising for a couple of people for $2,000. Budget another $2,000 for upgrades and you're good to go.
Any boat you pick up for $2000 will need $2000 just for new bottom paint. Then you can start addressing the rusted rigging and the broken inboard and the rotten sails and the failing mast step supports... why yes, I have been boat-shopping recently! :)
>Maybe people mean something else by counter-culture, but here are examples from my life [...] I'm not sure if I am agreeing and disagreeing with the OP.
Your examples of counter culture are alternative lifestyles.
The author (Kirk Thaker) and his cited author (Ted Gioia) were talking about media and entertainment content. Basically, the "long-tail" of obscure/experimental content not being widely exposed and whatever content they do see all looks the same to them.
Those are orthogonal areas of counter culture. E.g. You have a digital nomad living 100% in a camping RV ... but watches the same popular Netflix shows as everybody else. Or, you have the person that ignores popular sports and tv shows and only reads obscure Japanese comics... but works at a conventional 9-to-5 office job.
The extent to which these kinds of lifestyles are astroturfed is always interesting. Not claiming it is necessarily the case, just that it does happen from time to time. Thomas Frank’s “The Conquest of Cool” is a good reference here.
Take a look at Twitter on pride month, even Raytheon changes their logo to a rainbow version. That stuff is so mainstream it hurts. It's a counterculture in Saudi Arabia where the logos don't change and they throw gay people off of buildings, but in the US/Europe it's part of the dominant culture.
There is the Walmartized rainbow culture that you’re talking about and then there’s the meat and potatoes queer culture that is and will always be counterculture for as long as human reproduction remains sexually binary. There is still a substantial amount of “queerness” that you don’t see on TV.
Primary culture loves to pull from counterculture after the morsel has been thoroughly sanitized and monetized.
Countercultures have always been "cool" - the rejection of the dominant culture is part of their cool factor. Some of the most memorable aspects of recent Western cultural history are counter-cultural: hippies, punks, slackers.
A counterculture isn't defined by whether or not it's considered cool, but by whether or not it is actively participated in and shared among the majority of people. Queer identities may have a lot of public support (and even that's debatable), but queerness is not part of most people's lives. Western societies are still cis- and heteronormative. Queer culture is an other, not the mainstream.
I don't know, I think it's much more complicated. On one hand Raytheon changes their rainbow to logo for pride month, on the other hand some states are trying to ban crossdressing or force crossdressing people to register as sex offenders. And the majority of youth who are homeless are homeless because their families kicked them out for being gay/trans. I don't think it's reasonable to say that LGBTQ people are completely mainstream/acceptable or completely counterculture/unacceptable. Maybe it's more like it's mainstream to appear accepting but its counterculture to actually accept the gay/trans/crossdressers in your own life.
> And the majority of youth who are homeless are homeless because their families kicked them out for being gay/trans.
People lie about anything they can get away with.
When only one side of the story is being heard, people claiming victimhood because of a singular external issue are almost always grossly misrepresenting the situation.
See also: "I got fired because my boss / my car / my dog / etc."
IDK, I don't think the majority of children who are homeless have much incentives to lie about being gay or trans. It's still legal in some states to claim panic when killing a gay or trans person, just because they're gay/trans and it shocked you into killing them. Homeless people are rarely looked for if they're murdered, so there's less incentive for you to claim to be gay/trans because it literally targets you for murder more than you already are as a homeless person.
In my experience, more often than not the "homeless" kids waving the gay flag are glossing over unrelated behavioral issues on their own part.
> It's still legal in some states to claim panic when killing a gay or trans person, just because they're gay/trans and it shocked you into killing them.
The idea that deceiving someone into having sex with you is considered "shocking" and not "rape" astounds me. You can't induce arousal in someone, lure them into a position of vulnerability and spring surprises on them in the dark-- unless you're trying to become a martyr and add to the body count.
We already had to outlaw "pozzing" since the gays couldn't be bothered to disclose minor things like positive HIV status to unsuspecting partners. Now we're supposed to be cool with "stealthing"/"surprise sex" from the trans? It seems there is a pathological dishonesty at play here.
The laws should be changed-- LGBTs should be held more accountable for deceiving others. Murder has never been an acceptable response to fraud, so that needs to change too. This is not an example of sympathetic behavior on either side. I don't understand why you even brought it up.
I don't think you understand what gay/trans panic defense is.
I think if you didn't know what a legal thing was, you could've googled it, instead of making up some crazy hypothetical. Sorry, I'm dipping from this convo.
I know they don't care about it. That's the point. They don't care about it but they do it, because it's socially expected that they do it, because it's mainstream. If being green was counterculture, greenwashing would have the opposite of the intended effect.
As a corporation why would you co-opt something that the public in general isn't on board for? Ask several people on the street "Should companies be more green?" and they will mostly say yes, as that is a mainstream idea. If you wanted to be counter culture you could start a company that isn't green, "We pollute ten times what our competition does!", lots of people out in the culture would be very upset, they would protest, that's what being counter to the culture is like.
Raytheon's advertising employed "rainbow capitalism" on twitter, like most other American companies, is just following in the footsteps of Subaru and RJ Reynolds who realised gays have money in the 90s.
Rainbow capitalism isn't LGBT culture. It's attempts at getting our money.
The large majority of queer culture cannot be commercially re-packaged and will never be part of the dominant culture.
I don't think that what you described counts as counterculture in what the people in general understand as the "societal" meaning of the term. All societies in all epochs had their share of people living off of the grid or in hedonistic and socially repproachable ways.
A counterculture is a set of social norms that clash with the establishment to the point of generating a credible threat of replacing it and creating a new cultural reality. LGBTQIA people living in warehouses and doing orgies is not a common way of living for sure, but it sounds more like a bout of isolated risky behaviour than a new cultural norm.
Having lived in some of those scenes, the environment or the identity or political affinities that lead to the creation of those groups are only indirectly linked to the cultural aspects that emerge from it. There very much is specific music, specific visual art, written art, zines, comics, software (!) that emerge when people live off the mainstream. As for lgbtqia cultures even, with the lip embrace or sometimes slightly more heartfelt embrace by mainstream media, is far from being culturally present, let alone politically. Just tally up the ratios in the comments here…
A rainbow flag is not techno/house/zines/novels, advertising is not culture. Advertising is by definition the antithesis of culture, adopting cultural norms. Ultimately it will be hollow and opportunistic because that’s its mission. An ad showing a leatherbear is not culture, and I don’t think you will ever see a leather show on prime time, if at all. Yet a culture it is (and possibly a lifestyle, but one doesn’t imply the other).
This is a great counterpoint, but you're missing the other half of the argument. The realm of subcultures that do not require one to change their material lives/location is far vaster than it has ever been. Perhaps the author is unaware of the seemingly endless array of niche blogs and forums and servers that cater to far-flung populations of people engaging in all manner of counterculture, some of it radically "counter", that did not and could not exist without the internet.
I think it's clear that there is a dominant culture in the United States, one of consumption and competition, with a strong history of puritanical influence in our way of thinking; everything from how we view and treat 'others', to how we feel about our own actions.
The other clear thing to me, is that enough people find the dominant culture so objectionable that they are inclined to form other cultures, even when there are massive social barriers to doing so.
I think that one positive change, and this seems to be what TFA was really trying to say, is that it has become somewhat less punitive to seek out these other cultures and join them, largely because of our digital connections.
One thing I have found valuable in thinking about our culture, is living outside of it for a while. Experiencing another dominant culture and trying to gel with it gave me a lot of perspective on both how systems we take for granted can be different and work just fine, and on how hard it is for foreigners in our country to just exist here.
So yeah, I think counter-culture is alive and well, perhaps a bit too easy to access, but that's for the most part a good thing.
It's really unfortunate that the comment chain attached to the queer aspects of your comment, because it seems that the communal living/ off-grid aspects are more interesting. I think that the article is lamenting the idea that these sorts of things no longer appear to have runway to potentially enter "mainstream" culture in a way that, e.g., raisin bran did in the early part of the last century.
It's possible that maybe the reality is that there's some aspect of abiltity-to-be commercialized that has always limited counter cultures reach? Or maybe that's an alternate way of valuing culture - can it produce concepts that can be adopted by the majority.
Ironically, given the replies, it seems that Christian communities (i.e., Hudderites or Mennonites) had discovered what you discovered a century ago, but the very nature of the counterculture they express limits their impact on the mainstream?
No, the counterculture is actually thriving. But many people just don't understand it yet, because of how, well, counter it is to their ideas about culture: its roots are now in conservatism. It currently seems to be cool and edgy amongst the kids to be alt right in pretty much exactly the same way that it was cool and edgy to be very liberal in the 60s.
I'm not saying I agree with or subscribe to the tenets of conservatism (I don't). But it's a natural process for the pendulum to swing as society advances. Liberal counterculture "won" and went completely mainstream. Which is great! Gay marriage is legal, we care about sustainability, and so on. But every system has gaps and blind spots, and movements which oppose the incumbent mainstream are, by definition, not liberal counterculture.
Some touchpoints - President Obama's failure to penalize banks in the Great Recession. One percenters and the new cathedral. Joe Rogan. The intellectual dark web (Jordan Peterson et al). The red pill. The alt right.
I feel many of the above are often stupid, but in the same way that there were a lot of stupid 60s counterculture movements. It doesn't invalidate the fact that valid ideas exist within both. Also, they aren't using your signaling channels. For example, music doesn't seem to be a relevant cultural rallying point any more.
I think we might still consider this counterculture as long as its norms are not mainstream culture. And I think it's fair to say the dominant culture of many cultural institutions in the US currently has a distinct leftward lean - Hollywood, news, education, research, social media, advertising, other large swathes of industry. (Which again, I'm not saying is a bad thing)
Also, Trump represented many things to many people, as opposed to just this emerging alt-right counterculture idea cloud. And by the numbers, most voters soundly rejected him in 2020.
90% of the people that would identify with those touchpoints listed above wouldn't and didn't vote for Trump. I think they get lumped in with die hard Trump supporters because they weren't buying in to the same paranoia and delusions that the rest of society was imbibing while Trump was in office.
Hah, kids today. I’m half expecting cigarettes to make a comeback. Imagine the reaction millennials would have to a handful of teens smoking in front of drop off at a high school.
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 bar).
Exactly my reaction. The article made me think of the Gemini/Gopher/Smolnet space I like so much as a counter-culture.
But then it defines "counter-culture" has having a significant impact. This is a bit of a paradox to me: either you are mainstrean, either you are counter-culture. You can’t be both at the same time. Only history made us realize that a counter-culture movement had a strong impact when it became… mainstream! (and is not counter-culture anymore)
Yet, on the individual level, it would be nice if people could realize: "hey, I’m mainly consuming mainstream stuff. I should try to diversify."
You use Gopher, use an "alternative" OS, get your news from longform nuanced podcasts? Great, but 99% of people don't.
Contrast that with the counter culture of the 60s, or even 90s, where people were at least _aware_ that something else existed, even if they were violently against it.
Perhaps we have far too many people producing very diverse counterculture however our brains are too small to absorb it all. We become numb and overwhelmed by trying to take it all in.
This leaves us in a state of utter confusion about what is important, what isn't and what it all means.
This comment thread is fascinating as there are so many people who are obviously in totally different bubbles even though they are all commenting on the same HN item.
Please supply some context! You (We) all live in bubbles and you have to be clear about where you are coming from before you spout off your observations and thoughts.
Not at all. Silicon Valley tech companies crushed all dissenting opinions online to a comical level. The only place you’re allowed to have a dissenting opinion is in real life
You can find dissenting opinions online. The major hubs are of course the places that the mainstream will claim are full of terrorists and other miscreants, e.g. the *chans and now the fediverse instances that more mainstream ones refuse to federate with. But there are many smaller spaces online, not run by big tech and small enough to fall under the radar of the mob. HN itself does still tolerate plenty alternate opinions.
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 us a lot better at that, and therefore the process of incorporating and destroying counterculture has accelerated. It's like trawlers finding smaller and smaller fish every year - which they take anyway, even if they're not mature, because they want to meet quota. Even if this further destroys the stock.
Over the past couple of years lockdowns must have done damage to offline-only cultural spaces. This is difficult to quantify.
Another observation hinted elsethread is that of "dark" spaces. One way to protect your culture against commoditization is to make it spiky or poisonous, like an animal that doesn't want to be eaten. Culture that contains elements that are both toxic to the mainstream and hard to separate out can exist as a subculture.
It seems to me that there are (at least) two such "left" and "right" subcultures. One left one is too queer-NSFW to be mainstream; another is too tankie-communist to be mainstream. Similarly there's a "right" culture that exists between the "banned from Twitter, had to use Gab" and "arrested on Jan 6" zones.
I'd also add a "gentrification" angle. For subcultures to have a physical presence, it needs to be really cheap. The stock of cheap-central-but-nasty (dilapidated, crime infested) property in cool cities has largely been re-absorbed.
Feels that way. Inside metro areas in the US there is very little difference of opinion on most issues. It was not always this way. People seems mostly content to consume content and ‘raise awareness’ online, and repeat.
You can't have non-standard opinions anymore. All opinions are now politics. If I say I like guns people instantly categorize me as Right-Wing-Nut or Alt-Right-Nut. If you express any kind of differing opinion publicly you will be associated with everything and anything the person hates.
There are differing opinions, but those need to be kept private for fear of retaliation.
Wait what? You adopt some right wing ideas and some leftist ideas? You are "modernist"?, you are just a right/left winger!!!(depending on their enemy)/s
Don’t know why you are downvoted. It is common to be called a “fence sitter” if you aren’t completely aligned with views of one of the US parties.
Like everyone says I like to form my own opinions, but sometimes life is just simpler when I don’t voice those opinions publicly. Most of the time whatever shit storm was brewing is already forgotten by lunchtime anyway.
This is very true. Honest opinions are expressed privately with trusted partners only. In public, only the current, local, mainstream is what you’ll hear. “If you’re going to fight a war over nothing, it’s best to join the side that’s gonna win” - Bright Eyes
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.
The people jumping to conclusions about your politics due to your views on guns are just playing the odds. There are a lot more conservatives defending gun rights than there are moderate democrats doing so, and there are a lot more of those than there are far-left people (like myself).
Basically, if someone says they support gun control, it's a very safe bet they're in the center-right political band that the Democrats cater to. If someone opposes gun control, while there's a chance they're a " “Under no pretext should arms and ammunition be surrendered; any attempt to disarm the workers must be frustrated, by force if necessary” -Marx "--type socialist, by sheer numbers it's far more likely they're supportive of the conservative regime.
> Because social media services are now the promoters of mainstream culture, that culture is effectively fueled and guarded by metric-driven algorithms
And political and cultural biases, that's something not really mentioned enough when talking about algorithmic goals.
Not really. Youth tend to gravitate toward counter-culture naturally as a form of rebellion against their parents growing up. Having kids going toward traditional values is exactly what this society needs to begin the healing process.
Genuine question from a gay person in a conservative country: What sort of healing would traditional values do? Is it the nuclear family sort of thing? I'm not familiar with those theories.
They are values which promote the functioning of a healthy and balanced society with people less inclined and/or enthusiastically supported for being inherently self-centered and self-destructive. Endless drug epidemics are a very prominent and visual symptom of the damage rampant degeneracy has inflicted upon society and that in general, things as they are currently are NOT alright.
So do you believe gay people for example, are a threat to a healthy and balanced society?
edit:
Oh and conservative culture in my land means mostly lots of alcohol. The first time I vomitted from alcohol was as a teenager on a catholic wine fest, by wine gifted to us from the church. There might be conservatives, that are free from drugs, but mostly they just like other drugs. Drugs are a big problem in todays society, but conservatives as a whole are not a prime example if living sober. Puritans might be, but they are a subclass of "conservatives".
Well, it's a simple equation from a societal health perspective.
As things are currently, society is well below the minimum and ideal birth replacement rates (scarily low in fact). So from that perspective, promotion of homosexuality runs directly counter to what is best for society as a whole versus what is currently seen as best for any one individual.
It is a bit telling, that you perceive it as "promoting of homosexuality". I am not gay and I don't see anything like it. What I see, is promoting of a idea, that people are free to live their (consented) sexuality, whatever that might be, instead of forcing them to live an unhappy life not fitting to them. That is not really good, if you want stable people. And without stable people you won't have a stable society.
And about birth rates in general, that is a way longer debate. I would start with world population and limited ressources, but rather leave it at that.
> Your opinion and the actual growth rates do not seem to be in agreement.
Believe me or not, it makes no difference to me. I know I'm right.
Even the resident HN golden boy Elon Musk has been very outspoken recently about his significant concerns regarding the forthcoming population collapse. So it's happening whether you want to acknowledge it or not.
Human society survived just fine with one quarter the current population 70 years ago. Why can't it survive with that again? Especially now that we have better technology that makes each human much more productive? Unless you can only look at the world through the lens of capitalism (which requires infinite growth)... but capitalism is definitely not required for humanity in general (human society existed before capitalism and will continue to exist after it).
I think a lot of anti-gay thoughts today are more anti gay culture, such as many of the things people do and display in the pride parade that has nothing to do with liking people of the same sex.
So... by that argument isn't "gay culture" actually counter-cultural? As in it goes against the mainstream opinions held by a fairly conservative society?
Oh, that makes sense. I have other gay friends that express the same concern privately. In my country (no gay rights yet; it just got decriminalised) I tend to say that "the best gay pride protest is no gay pride protest", because if we have equal rights, there's no need to protest, and we just want equal rights.
This argument is contingent on things actually getting worse, whereas most social indicators like crime rates or life expectancy seem to indicate that things have improved over the last half century. I would not want to go back to the society of the 1980s, for example, because I'd be more likely to be robbed.
Also, what about the role that greed has played in the latest drug epidemic? The Sacklers were not driven by degeneracy but by the lust for money.
Stop gay people from being treated as beneath the "normal" people.
Of course, this is "real" traditional values; not surface-value "traditional values" co-opted by people: who aren't in-tune with their emotions; people with a void a that needs filling; people who need to feel better about themselves; those who would use it as a banner to gain more power for themselves; and true believers without an ounce of introspection.
With the looming bans and restrictions on social media, and the current atomization of social interactions: it's possible we're beginning a period of great isolation, where man will finally have to deal with sitting in a room all by himself.
Maybe this will spur some self-reflection in a few, leading to a resurgence in deep traditional values and beliefs; rather than the shallow, surface-level stuff, such as the nuclear family or some made-up duty to one's abstract family or some frothingly and puritanically mad ideas about sex.
> This is a very offensive question for someone from my counter culture, Christianity.
Which recent US president was not Christian again? Is the correct answer "none of them"? It's very counter-cultural when the "leader of the free world" consistently shares (or has to pretend to share) your faith.
Society didn't use to be "conservative". Like, the romans and the greeks were a lot more sexually free than we are right now. What they also had in their time is conservative people, as in, people that were against the changes in the society they were living in (like accepting Christianism during the Roman Empire, etc).
Being conservative can't be counter-culture because by definition it is preseving the CURRENT culture (which is not the "woke" one, even if boomers like to think different. All the people with power are conservatives). Being downvoted in HN doesn't mean anything, same as Twitter and Reddit. You can be "cancelled" in Twitter and still sell out the Madison Square Garden, like Louis CK. The real power is outside the social media, and that part is definitely conservative.
I didn’t use any adjectives to describe their society. Only commented that you can’t think that “conservatism” is always about believing in God, in monogamy, etc.
> Like, the romans and the greeks were a lot more sexually free than we are right now.
Not really, unless maybe we count their elites' exploitation of enslaved folks as a kind of "sexual freedom" but that's not something we would ever want to endorse. We know from ancient sources that their sexual behavior was highly constrained otherwise, and people who transgressed prevailing norms were widely seen as weak and lacking in self-control.
> Someone expressing the above sentiments in a non-sarcastic way anywhere on HN or Reddit would be downvoted to hell.
You'd be surprised. The only comments I get downvoted to Hell on are either explicitly anto-communist or are just dumb comments. Even comments where I evangelize about God are typically well received, with maybe a few triggered atheists in the replies.
If I lead with facts cutting against Bay Area Received Values narrative or highlight some of the inconsistencies of BARV themselves, I usually get quite a few upvotes.
> And I didn't even dare venture into the racial views of conservatives.
What views are these? The debate seems to be between those who think blacks, other non-whites and immigrants are typically inherently socially conservative; and those who believe these minority groups are irrevocably allied with the Democrat machine. A typical conservative view today is that non-whites have agency just as much as whites, but face constraints such as bad government programs and social pressures to conform. Ben Carson, for example, used to be hailed as a hero, a regular staple of Black History Month. But when he "came out" as a conservative, he's been belittled and seen his stature crumble, even to the point of schools removing his name.[0]
The mainstream can't tolerate a likable conservative or a non-white one, and has a lot of funny ideas about what conservatives in particular think. Most of it is projection based on a deranged (but consistent!) interpretation of Trump's presidency.
This in itself was the counterculture within conservatism. It used to be much more diverse before the goofball contingent took over. Uncle Phil on Fresh Prince was a conservative, and he would throw someone out of his house for this garbage. That was as recent as the 90s.
I'm sure there are communities where stating this would be controversial, but the US public has never elected an openly atheist president. It's ridiculous to claim that believing in God is somehow countercultural.
In a sense I agree with you. What the person you are responding to is trying to say, I assume, is the new status quo is liberalism. As in lgbt, blm, van life, cannabis culture, casual dating, multiculturalism, secularism, etc.
I labelled the above idea space “liberalism” but I’m not convinced it’s the right term. I am just lacking a better one. In any case, if we assume the to be the status quo, which I think we mostly can, people trying to preserve these values and bolster them are conservative. They enjoy the status quo, wish to keep it and wish to reinforce it. They wish to prevent progress ( as in movement ) towards a different direction.
There is also another idea space, generally associated with christian identity, belief in God, the existence of two biological sexes with clear roles to fulfil, european heritage, abortion is murder, sex strictly within marriage, no homosexuality, gun rights, etc
This would be called conservatism. But, as in the “liberalism” mentioned above, it’s not really the best term. If we just take it as an idea space and assume liberalism to be the status quo, this would definitely be a counter culture.
It dislikes the current status quo, wishes to undermine it and shift it in a different direction.
And, in this sense, I agree with the person you responded too. “Conservative” is the new counter culture.
You’re mistaken if you think “liberalism” is the status quo. It might be in the internet, but real life is not the same as Twitter. Just look at the push against abortion, or the massive incarcerated population, or the constant killing of poor people by the police. Or the raising of the interest rate to freeze salaries in detriment of bigger unemployment which won’t target the rich people?
Honestly saying that being conservative is a counter-culture just shows how alienated conservatives are.
> In any case, if we assume the to be the status quo, which I think we mostly can, people trying to preserve these values and bolster them are conservative. They enjoy the status quo, wish to keep it and wish to reinforce it. They wish to prevent progress ( as in movement ) towards a different direction.
It is true, but there is not only one or two directions, and it must be necessary to consider that there is no only one or two directions.
People can believe in God or not as they wish, and might or might not be Christian (and there is many different Christians anyways, as well as many different non-Christians, and you need not only necessarily one religion, also). Either way can result people do good things and bad things.
Furthermore, "God exist" is not even very clearly defined. They shouldn't shame people for believe in God, although to say that it is right or wrong to believe in God can be mistaken because many people fail to consider that it is not really well defined.
Although two biological sexes do have clear roles to fulfil (specifically, mother vs father), that is a simplification and also is sometimes expanded too much (especially in the past, more often than today). That fails to consider intersex, and also people who do things differently from each other, you can do such things which are not part of biological sex.
Some people have some European heritage but not necessarily all. However, "European" is not very specific compared with e.g. "Italian", I think.
Homosexuality is not such a bad thing and even if you do not like it, it is not what should be illegal. (But, they should not force you to like it or to hate it.)
About gun rights, I think that you should need right to have weapons (especially unpowered and improvised weapons, rather than guns, but guns too) and other devices (including clothing, pencil/paper for writing, etc), and the right to not have weapons and other devices (including clothing) in case you do not want it, but that they should not just sell guns to everyone without proper safety training, etc. Proper safety training is important. However, if you make up your own weapons and other devices then you can do that; the government should not get in the way of everything. However, such a thing should not mean that you can just shoot everyone or bring guns everywhere; the law would still need to prevent against such a thing, which they already do anyways.
There are some Canadian laws relating to guns. Some of these things seems like good ideas but should not be mandatory, and are often more restrictive than they should be.
Furthermore, even if guns are legal should not mean that they should be encouraged. Use of weapons should normally be discouraged, not encouraged.
(I do not want any guns and I do not like guns, but that is just my opinion.)
Too often they say they either want gun rights or gun restrictions, either yes or no, and fail to consider a more nuanced possibility.
Cannabis, also, they fail to consider a more nuanced possibility. Now, smoking marijuana is legal, and I also do not think they should make the drugs illegal, but unfortunately they can still harm the air outside, and make smell even inside someone else's house right next to it too, so there still need to be the restriction of that. But, usually the people just consider yes or no instead of the more complicated possibility like I have described.
Abortion also is complicated, often both side they fail to consider the nuance. Ideally, I think it should be something to be avoided (it is better to start to not be pregnant, if possible), but conditions are not ideal and never are ideal. If it is your body then you will have the right to do with it (although you should still consider whether or not it is a good idea; just because something is or should be legal does not necessarily mean that it is a good idea), and can be self-defense from your own body (in case you would die otherwise), but the government should not make it difficult by getting in t...
I think it's inaccurate to call a group that has large political parties in essentially every democratic country "counterculture". To me that seems like calling the moderate left counterculture. Maybe neo-nazis and other radicals are, but that's because nobody likes them except for themselves.
Referring to everyone as a nazi or radical that holds a different opinion from one's own is a huge reason why conservatism is growing so quickly as the new counter-culture, especially amongst youth. Societies simply cannot grow and thrive with degenerate movements which are inherently built on being immoral, self-centered, and self-destructive to both one's self and society as a whole.
When the difference of opinion involves the minimization to the point of eradication of specific groups within society, most of which are predisposed to oppose the political views you hold, then there is No Other Term for it than Naziism.
Not everyone I disagree with is a nazi, but everyone who wants all queer people to stop being publicly visible, everyone who would rather immigrants, muslims, and jews to stop coming to the country or become invisible in daily life, anyone who would think about the problems that disabled people have and come to the 'solution' that they should not reproduce? They're Nazis. To call them anything else would do the memories of those already lost a disservice.
And those who buck at being called Nazis should genuinely detach and reexamine their views to see whether they resemble those of the Nazi party. If they don't, if the people calling them Nazis are simply being reactionary, then fine. But to ignore it without giving the most basic consideration to one's own views is deeply foolhardy at best.
Consider for yourself what you term as 'degenerate', and whether those things have any material impact on your life. Consider what solutions that are non-authoritarian for that degeneracy may look like. Is it offering better mental health services? Is it providing community that doesn't shun, but helps rehabilitate maladaptive practices? Is it allowing general differences of opinion on what counts and doesn't count as degenerate behavior? Is it minding your own goddamn business?
Conservatism can never be counter-cultural because it is concerned with enforcing pre-existing social hierarchies. If you are looking for an example of anti "degeneracy" counter-culture, one might be the DC hardcore bands of the early 80s.
"back in my times", you had a bunch of different people with a bunch of different outlooks, wishes and views on the world... from anarchist punks to skinheads, peaceful "modern...ier" hippies, "the left", "the right", the what-would-now-be-called "libertarians", from people in schools, to adults at work, to people having kids at 20s, to adult swingers in their 60s... and all of them were represented as somehow 'special' but existing here.
Now it seems that we have a mainstream "culture", which doesnt actually exist, atleast noone identifies by it, then we have a mainstream "counterculture", which considers themselves as "alternative", but (atleast with younger people) is a majority, which occupies themselves by issues such as racism, sexism, trans-, and other -isms and more recently ecology.
It has gone so far, that you have "protests" for equal rights for some of those groups, or other 'mainstrea' issues where people actually in charge of laws are parading next to the "protesters"/"paraders" (in our, slovenian case, our prime minister at a protest for a healthcare reform).
And the rest? Those are invisible. Hippies and anti-war people? Nope.. now we have everyone cheering for more weapons and a longer war in ukraine. People complaining about housing prices... sure, a lot of them... people actually wanting more housing to be built.. a minority. Preppers? Just weirdos... even after quite a few events where prepping actually helped people.
Ok, i might be exaggerating a bit, but there really seems to be a lot of overlap between the current "counterculture" and what is being served from the people/groups/organizations that historically would have been seen as the "bad guys" by those counterculture groups. But again.. stuff like this is talked in "conspiracy circles", and again, shunned by the mainstream counterculture - eg https://i.redd.it/yj3vs93bi7691.jpg
> in our, slovenian case, our prime minister at a protest for a healthcare reform
I think it's happened a few times already, I'd say it's mostly a PR move & nothing more. Meanwhile I think there have happened a few protests at the very same place (Trg republike) yet the "mainstream" media didn't cover it.
Well sure, but he's the one who should make the changes needed for people to get the healthcare they pay a lot of money for... and instead he's "protesting" against.. himself?
The protests, activism, and other stuff, that was once a sign of counter culture has become so mainstream that even the politicians do it... go out, wave some flags, take some photos, pat themselves on their backs, and go home and change nothing.
I miss the old times, when the establishment was actually afraid of countercultures, of people going against the mainstream... the current state, where the mainstream is acting as if it's against itself is bad for society, because it never changes anything.
1,022 comments
[ 10.2 ms ] story [ 287 ms ] threadNow 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.
To be fair, a lot of people still have this question about the Beat Generation.
Naziism was counterculture in 1920's Germany, Mainstream in the 30s and 40's, and back to counterculture now.
It just means that some parts of their platform have become mainstreamed. A simple and non-controversial example is that the Nazis were extremely Progressive on animal rights. Just because modern political parties also endorse animal rights, that does not make them Nazis
Another example is that Nazi rhetoric relied heavily on utilitarian analysis of the greater good. I don't think it's reasonable to say that any party that promotes the greater good over individual freedoms is a Nazi party.
The hippies who were burning their draft cards, dropping out of school, and living as mendicants were a counterculture that could not truly coexist with the mainstream.
These dramatic characters inspired a youth culture that adopted more moderate signifiers (long hair, folk/rock music, nonviolent protest, maybe vegetarianism/meditation/yoga) that could coexist with the mainstream.
1. "techies" are some uniform block of people.
2. "techies" as a whole were at any point an anti-mainstream counterculture.
Many/most techies throughout history have been employed by the rich and powerful - individuals, private corporations, government institutions, religious institutions (if we go back far enough). So, the extent to which they are part of a counter-culture is through a critical evaluation of their own roles. There are also "independent" techies, of course - but those too often from well-off social strata and do not have much of a mind to subvert dominant culture on the social level (as opposed to in their personal habits).
... and I personally can't read the article since the corporate firewall I'm behind is blocking it, so that's kind of ironic :-(
Many people who openly identify as “tech” people asking for new features, more or less complaining about the resistance to such new features and arguing that the cultural resistance doesn’t make sense.
Now these tech people tend to also be new to mastodon. But they also seem pretty oblivious to the fact that they are the mainstream which many on the platform tried to avoid or establish a counter culture from. They don’t seem to realise that leaving Twitter in 2022 was a comparatively mainstream thing to do, and that the resistance they meet often has a point or perspective that they haven’t even thought of and is coming from people who are just as technically inclined and informed but just don’t tie that to their identity so tightly or openly.
Broad generalisations, but I think it’s definitely playing out to some extent.
Its made on purpose to stop nontechnical people from joining
Same with 'The silicon valley'. When something becomes a movie, it's already ending its hype cycle
Why is it taking till the 2020's for it to be so obvious though?
https://tedgioia.substack.com/p/14-warning-signs-that-you-ar...
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.
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.
It's hard to promote a fringe issue in a wide content channel and there's a lack of everything in between fringe and mainstream.
This is the problem. As soon as a counter-culture gets any amount of steam going a million marketers swoop in to sell it as an identity to anyone with a credit card. Marketers are constantly searching for the undiscovered cool or subversive thing. They have undercover agents infiltrate hobbies, movements, and cliques. They collect endless amounts of data so that they can fine tune their pitch to every individual person's most obscure interests. Whatever you identify as or stand for, there's a marketer willing to sell you something so that you can signal who you are to those around you. Marketers then slowly start to manipulate and change the counter-culture so that it sells better too.
There is no counter-culture because everyone is busy being a part of their preferred culture-bubbles only all of it is mainstream now. It's all so easily accessible that everything esoteric has become exoteric. No matter what it is, you can buy your starter pack right off the rack. Eventually it all gets watered down to capture as many dollars as possible and we're left with all these options, but still wondering where the counter-culture went.
But then, if a counterculture falls in a forest and nobody was around to hear it, did the counterculture really exist? Could be a valid argument too. Maybe
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.
I disagree. Can you expand on your claim?
YouTube and TikTok are not countercultural, even if some users are using those platforms for genuine countercultural creative acts. By definition, a social media "influencer" with millions of followers is not countercultural.
> a social media "influencer" with millions of followers is not countercultural.
A social media "influencer" could be more important to a younger audience than other mediums, meaning this is the "culture" they will try to counter.
Edit: narrowed it down a little.
And where exactly can I find them?
Trough the corporate algorithm, that doesn't even let me rewind a video?
Counterculture exists and sone of those expose their lifestyle and projects on these plattforms for fame and money, but that culture surely does not "live" on those plattforms.
It's worse than that. You used to have to "sell out" to corporate interests before your countercultural cache evaporated. Most YouTube creators "sell out" to advertisers the second they start their channel because getting any revenue on YouTube requires following YouTube's rules. And these rules are getting increasingly draconian with swearing now being sort-of banned. Also forget remixing existing cultural artifacts like older countercultural movements because that's just asking for an automated DMCA strike.
My mom has no idea who PewDiePie is.
I don't understand this and by extension the entire article. Counterculture is by definition outside of mainstream. It would just be culture and not anti otherwise. This sounds like semantics but then that is what I think the entire article is, and imho it is wrong.
From Gioia's OC:
> A sense of sameness pervades the creative world ...
aka "Kids these days..."
I've been hearing this exact same criticism for as long as I remember.
One observation (McLuhan? Warhol?), using the example of da Vinci's Mona Lisa, which made some sense to me:
Modern tech makes reproduction trivial. So any original content quickly becomes ubiquitous. Separating content from original creator. Thereby mooting any of original intention or meaning or esthetic or whatever.
In other words, everything popular becomes banal.
My example, from the 90s era new age fads, I always thought of the yin-yang symbol showing up every where. Especially as tattoos. Oh so original.
Further, I think this also helps explain the disappointment about "selling out". It's a rare thing for a creator to become popular, not wear out their welcome, and retain their original fan base.
> I don't understand this and by extension the entire article. Counterculture is by definition outside of mainstream.
Yes, that's what they said. The danger they are going on about is how heavily it is buried so that it never seeps into mainstream.
Your not understanding is confusing to me, especially since you quoted the bit "we have a counterculture", and then replied as if they said "we have no counterculture".
Anecdotes aside, at least for independent artists it may be economical effects that constrain passion and make projects feel so for-profit. Which have always been a thing, unfortunately. Given technology, maybe there is so much art to consume that making art requires forgoing distraction and the general worry that the art will be bad (which is nonsense, because some art simply has a limited audience).
In today's era, stuff like EU art grants [0] can do some good, although I have the feeling that patronage-per-capita is considerably lower than it was in the past; it would be an interesting metric to look at and try best to increase.
[0]: https://culture.ec.europa.eu/funding/cultureu-funding-guide
However, as the recognition of that unpleasant latter tendency has become mainstream and everybody and her grandma now knows what "woke" means, I can see a new counter, hopefully genuinely less partisan and not tipped the other (ie right wing) way as the old guard is kicked out (as we have seen with Twitter etc).
I'd probably agree the bulk of indier-than-thou creations are produced by people on the left (not all of whom demand we also bow to their political interpretation of the world); some of the work excellent, most of it perhaps not.
People have said it in the thread, but counter-culture is really defined retrospectively. You look at the movements that existed on the periphery but later inspired the mainstream. Velvet Underground wasn't selling millions of records, but everyone who started a band listened to them. Lou Reed is pretty indier than thou.
Yeah, but Youtube is mainstream now; it comes installed on almost every single consumer TV available for sale right now. You don't get more mainstream than that.
If you wanted to see counterculture, you'd have to use the youtube alternatives.
Maybe people mean something else by counter-culture, but here are examples from my life:
- Freelancing/contracting, and actively living substantially below my means. This has given me free time in a way that really changed my view on the world and allowed me to be around other people who were not in the 9-5 working world.
- Sexuality & ENM, plus living in a large city. There is a huge non-obvious culture of LQBTQIA people in this culture which often have very different outlooks on life to the mainstream.
- Communal living. Living in a warehouse with people from very different walks of life. I was exposed to so many fascinating ideas and people this way. It was a truly magical time of my life in which I also played a part in supporting the queer/ENM sub-culture of my city.
- Buying land and living off grid. There is a whole sub-culture of people doing this, both online and (more importantly) physically around me.
So I think counter-culture is available but – having written the above – I'm not sure if I am agreeing and disagreeing with the OP. On one hand it exists, but on the other hand I'm saying that it is very hard to access without making material changes to one's life.
I'd say today's counter culture is people eschewing corporate life, sort of like it was before corporate culture took over.
The real counterculture is showing up to work and feeding your kids
But at the same time gay marriages and civil unions are both illegal. Adoption for gay couples is illegal too. Even if they are performed abroad. The state still treat gay couples as if they were roommates or something.
https://www.pewresearch.org/fact-tank/2022/11/15/about-six-i...
In many states support is around ~50%. So opposition to same sex marriage isn't a fringe opinion in a lot of places in the USA. Even in liberal California 33% still don't support it.
The states where a majority are still opposed are all states nobody wants to live in for a variety of reasons including poor educational standards and lack of economic development.
There might be some relations between these facts. Maybe not. But it is interesting, isn't it? That those are the places where these opinions stick around the longest?
Hell most of them won’t even acknowledge Christmas anymore.
And while hedonism may be a side-effect in some situations, even that comes from eschewing the standards of wider society. I'd argue that is the definition of counter-culture.
The remainder are not inherently more hedonistic than being straight.
https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=33267641 (Oct 2022)
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=30880209 (April 2022)
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=25349726 (Dec 2020)
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, IMHO, generally ephemeral.
Counterculture may or may not be explicitly political. It typically involves criticism or rejection of currently powerful institutions, with accompanying hope for a better life or a new society.
But if I'm completely besides the mark, apologies
This might sound quaint to some critical ears of the US, but that is the basis of the law and US systems. The US citizens only need to be reminded of this fact and decide whether they want to reinforce that fact with their personal choices - nonviolent protest, voting, etc.
Edit-That might not seem related to the definition of counterculture, but it absolutely is. The US has a culture of multiculturalism. It has the Amish and lets them largely have their culture within the larger culture. There are many such examples with gradients all over and within the US. Sure, sometimes some of those subcultures get political and exert themselves. But they do it within the peaceful political system as a strong trend.
I think some of my examples do try to change wider society, but it is just more subtle and less overt/wholesale. I think there will be activists/evangelicals in any sub-culture.
>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
Capitalists have co-opted the least disruptive demands of advocates in an attempt to draw attention away from the actual point. They think if they focus on saying words and not doing deeds, people will move on and forget.
They do. One of the most successful directors of all time built his career telling stories about faking low cultural status.
Perhaps that’s too abstract. But if people don’t fake low culture, then what is Hillbilly Elegy?
The very opposite.
It seems hard to argue that there haven’t been disruptive changes considering violent crime levels (esp homicides), but I fully agree that “capitalists” (or maybe corporatists?) embraced BLM and other identity stuff because it’s a convenient distraction from substantial policy issues. A lot of folks made themselves into “useful idiots” over the last decade.
I'd also contest whether activists really got much of what they were asking for. They generally weren't asking for simply no-police. Rather they were asking for issues like poverty, mental illness, and homelessness to be addressed rather than just being policed.
> Rather they were asking for issues like poverty, mental illness, and homelessness to be addressed rather than just being policed.
I’m sure some were asking for those things, but mostly this was a media retcon when it was becoming apparent that “abolish the police” was jeopardizing Biden’s election campaign (“when protesters say ‘abolish the police’ and ‘all cops are bastards’, surely they’re really advocating for more spending on social services, right?”).
[citation needed]
> consequentially violent crime is way, way up.
You're claiming that the US, unlike the rest of the civilized world, can't address crime without having death squads summarily execute people for trivial or imagined offences every other week?
Sure thing: "An event study design finds census places with early BLM protests experienced a 10% to 15% decrease in police homicides from 2014 through 2019, around 200 fewer deaths." - https://papers.ssrn.com/sol3/papers.cfm?abstract_id=3767097
> You're claiming that the US, unlike the rest of the civilized world, can't address crime without having death squads summarily execute people for trivial or imagined offences every other week?
The US obviously doesn't have "death squads" who "summarily execute people every other week". Lol I can't imagine asking for a citation about police killings and then tossing this claim out there.
Protesters wanted to re-allocate resources away from the police towards other services, so that cops are not the first responders to every situation, they often wanted fewer police with more training.
Crime goes up as a result of the material conditions of people. The more unequal society is, the more poor and desperate people get, the higher crime is going to be. Acting like it's merely a function of enforcement is silly.
Richard Rosenfeld speaking to The Guardian: “The only explanation that gets the timing right is a version of the Ferguson Effect”
Vox reporting on Travis Campbell’s research: “Campbell’s research indicates that these protests correlate with a 10% increase in murders in the areas that saw BLM protests”.
Harvard’s Roland Fryer and Tanaya Devi found that prominent BLM protests were associated with 900 excess homicides in the 5 cities they examined and 34k excess felonies. They report that the leading hypothesis is a change in policing activity, and the cities they studied had precipitous drops in the quantity of police-civilian interactions following the protests.
These are professional criminologists and economists—I doubt they’re being “silly” as you suggest.
The solution is obvious. Start rolling heads of Police Chiefs until they get their hierarchies of people in line. If it ends with the entire police union fired so be it, insubordinate lawless police are worse than useless.
edit: You are cherry picking your data points. I spent literally 30 seconds looking up your first quote it's not even congruent with what you're saying.
This is an important element of "cool", which is essentially the ebb-and-flow of ideas between counterculture and mainstream culture.
I can’t think of a way that BLM was ever counter-cultural.
Counterculture is a like a good stock tip - if you're hearing about it, that ship has already sailed.
Fighting the police is about as counter as you can get.
It was the polished, highly educated, upper-middle class version of the activists that sprang up around the Ferguson protests. BLM was the mainstream corporate replacement of a street level movement, whose leaders acquired a habit of being found executed in the trunks of burned cars. A rehearsal for #TimesUp.
And FWIW, lots of big companies have DEI departments that preach this stuff internally and market it externally (my wife is a marketing consultant with these big companies and they eat this shit up so much that their contracts are dependent on proving their commitment to DEI by centering their “diverse” employees, holding internal and external DEI ceremonies, etc). I’m sure there’s still a profit motive, but there’s quite a lot more than an annual profile photo update.
Of course it did not. The flower children, the back-to-the-landers, the bikers, the free love communers all remained a tiny slice of the population (and a shrinking one by that time).
What the late 60s/early 70s US counterculture had going for it was a kind of credibility as "the new thing". It was not "the culture" (and it never really became it without mutating heavily), but it was interesting to many people who did not participate in it. It remained a counter-culture until it had changed so radically (and this was years after Coco-Cola first tried to ride the hippy chic train), and then, indeed, it was no longer subversive in any meaningful way.
As actor Peter Coyote noted of that era, that particular counterculture won the culture war in the long term - you can find yoga classes and wholewheat bread in almost every small town in the USA now, our attitudes towards sexuality and the environment and women and racism have been fundamentally altered - but it lost almost every political battle that it was concerned with. Wars continued, economic inequality, corporate control, the military-industrial complex ... all continued unabated.
Surely you understand that Coca-Cola wasn't "the entire establishment"?
Were Gramsci alive in the 80s, he would be like "See? See? This is EXACTLY what I was talking about!"
It's just like the way that the 90s mainstream culture in the UK was not based on punks ... not because absolutely no punks "crossed over", but because, as a percentage of the population, there were hardly any punks to start with (just a lot of media noise).
As Coyote's observations note, this can work for "culture" issues, which do indeed tend to be the result of individual choices about consumption, but it rarely works for issues rooted in the distribution of political and economic power. These require political movements demanding change from the mainstream.
Meh. "really supporting it" or "poseur supporting it" is irrelevant, what's relevant is that it's mainstream, not counter[1] to mainstream.
[1] That's what the "counter" in counterculture means, dammit.
On the other hand every Christmas/Easter thing happening at your local supermarket - it's not support, just seasonal reason to get more money.
Black people are still being murdered by police every day in America.
As if they say anything about the rural parts of this country, like my hometown, half an hour from where Ahmaud Arbery was gunned down.
https://www.cnn.com/2022/11/22/us/jarrett-hobbs-camden-count...
https://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-2507322/Georgia-dep...
The "but black people are more likely to be violent criminals" rebuttal is a despicable one, and if you can't see the absence of causal links that you're deliberately hopping over in an attempt to shoehorn that in, then I doubt I'm going to make you see it in a HN comment. That said, I sure hope you don't ever correct someone on "causation vs correlation", as you'd be a tremendous hypocrite.
Notably, we can correctly observe that black people commit more violent crimes per capita than other races without implying any of the following:
1. black people are biologically disposed to crime
2. a significant percentage of black people are criminals
3. any given black person significantly more likely to be a criminal than any given non-black person
I definitely think your decision to pick your battles more carefully is the right one, and I encourage you to be even more judicious.
Maybe take some time to compose yourself, scan the HN guidelines, etc before commenting?
Enjoy your day, Literal Statistician. :)
“In essence, this is equivalent to analyzing labor market discrimination on a set of firms willing to supply a researcher with their Human Resources data!”
As far as actual policy changes we might want to advocate for or support, does it make any difference? I guess it would mean that "diversity training" for cops is not the way to go -- I agree and I think most BLM organizers would too (the ones I know anyway do). Instead ways that increase police accountability or limit police interactions are the way to go, which I again think would be agreeable.
I think the level of violence and aggression that police enact on certain communities would probably not be tolerated if it affected people with more political power -- they target people with less political power, which has racial components in the USA is why race matters, but is not exclusively "black and white", sure.
Yes, I'm generalizing. It's not possible to make meaningful statements about a millions-strong movement that apply universally, so I'm generalizing just like we generalize about "liberals", "conservatives", "progressives", "Trump supporters", etc. And I stand by my generalization--any mention of white victims of police violence was an aberration, an outlier.
> I think the level of violence and aggression that police enact on certain communities would probably not be tolerated if it affected people with more political power -- they target people with less political power, which has racial components in the USA is why race matters, but is not exclusively "black and white", sure.
I mean, I think virtually everyone agrees that police killings are classist. Of course, BLM wouldn't have been controversial if the message was merely "police target poor people (who are disproportionately black)". Something like 90% of Americans in 2020 (per Gallup or Pew--I forget which--but think about how big this number is particularly in light of the polarization of American politics) agreed that police brutality was a problem and police reform was needed--this was extremely uncontroversial. But the claim wasn't "classism", it was "racism"--police target ("hunt" was even commonly invoked) black Americans because of their race.
I'm confused why you think this is "of course"?
I'm confused why you are so caught up in whether the problem is described as "classism in a society where the poor are disproportionately black" or "racism in a society where black people are disproportionately poor."
I think in America you can't actually totally separate racism and classism as completely separate things, they are always related. Slavery, one major part of the beginning of American race relations, was, of course, a class relation -- enslaving people for their labor.
I think one reason non-poor Black people do get targeted by police is because they are perceived ("coded" to use fancy language) as poor, because in America Black is associated with poor. Like not even necessarily that the individual person is assumed to be poor -- although they may be, but it may not be that explicit or conscious. I don't think the police are even necessarily explicit or conscious about the fact that they can behave abusively toward poor people specifically (although they may be sometimes); but implicitly and unconsciously they know that certain kinds of people can be mistreated, that it's even their job to mistreat certain kinds of people -- and they are likely to read a Black person as that certain kind of person.
You can disagree with this analysis. No big deal. I don't understand why it seems to make you so angry that other people have this analysis you disagree with though; or why, if you agree that there is a problem with police brutality and abuse, as you seem to, and even agree with the problem statement "police target poor people (who are disproportionately black)" -- you can't work with people who agree with you so much of the way even though they disagree on some analysis, work together on solutions that make sense to all (like no, not "diversity training" for police, literally nobody I know that's BLM or "abolish the police", and I know a lot of people, think that's useful either) -- instead of considering them somehow on another side. "you" being you personally, or anyone in this category.
Because those are different problems with different solutions, and picking the wrong set of solutions tends to exacerbate problems (as we're seeing now with soaring crime from which black communities suffer disproportionately).
> I think in America you can't actually totally separate racism and classism as completely separate things, they are always related.
I'm sure there's an element of "black == poor" (brings to mind Biden's "poor kids are just as bright as white kids" gaffe) and in that sense these things are interrelated, but it doesn't follow that we can solve the problem by ignoring what is likely a considerably classism component altogether.
> I don't understand why it seems to make you so angry that other people have this analysis you disagree with though
I think this is entirely in your imagination. I can chuck a few smiley emojis around if it helps? :)
> if you agree that there is a problem with police brutality and abuse, as you seem to, and even agree with the problem statement "police target poor people (who are disproportionately black)" -- you can't work with people who agree with you so much of the way even though they disagree on some analysis, work together on solutions that make sense to all (like no, not "diversity training" for police, literally nobody I know that's BLM or "abolish the police", and I know a lot of people, think that's useful either) -- instead of considering them somehow on another side. "you" being you personally, or anyone in this category.
As is often the case in politics, agreement that there is a problem is not actually very much agreement. 90% of Americans agree that we need police reform (Gallup 2020), that doesn't mean we should pick the proposals offered by the most extreme 10% (proposals which 80% of black Americans reject). Notably, there's a lot of research that indicates that the little bit of de-policing we've done in this country seems to be driving a tremendous amount of additional violent crime. Homicides are up 60-70% since ~2014, amounting to about ten thousand additional lives lost every single year (that's about three 9/11s every single year just in homicides, not to mention all of the "mere" assaults, armed robberies, etc) in order to stop a handful of unjustified police killings. Why would I work with the most extreme 10% who are actively making things worse when there's another 80% of the country that are open to more moderate reforms which can address police brutality without enormous body counts?
True perhaps, but very misleading. Consider that blacks are far more likely to end up in jail (and for longer) for the same crime a white person commits. Consider that ending up in jail and with a criminal record puts someone in a situation where they're more likely to commit crimes in the future. Sounds to me like racial bias is creating a higher likelihood of the police encounters that may result in shootings occurring.
https://www.ussc.gov/research/research-reports/demographic-d... https://bjs.ojp.gov/library/publications/racial-disparity-us... https://ajph.aphapublications.org/doi/full/10.2105/AJPH.2019...
[0] https://abcnews.go.com/Politics/us-embassies-authorized-hang...
The Tyre Nichols incident response shows some improvements, but those responsible have not yet been charged, and because US police are so fragmented it will be a very long time before standards are raised nationally.
Which (snarkily) I guess is fair.
It’s on flags at schools, supported by government, roads are named after it, they have an enormous foundation with staff, and it’s even in college course curriculum
We've had pictures of MLK in schools, Civil Rights has been "supported by government", roads were named after people, there were and are enormous foundations with staff, and it's definitely in college curriculums - and it's been that way for an entire human lifetime...
...and yet the same fight is being fought again.
I'd figure if something achieved "mainstream", it wouldn't have to happen again and again.
(edit: In my head, I'm compare/contrasting with suffragette and other aspects of women's rights)
Colour-blind antiracism, preparing for global warming instead of pushing green deal & capitalism are countercultures now.
The AP even has it on tests for college credit
Until then, if police forces are upholding a mainstream concept of law and order resulting in said disproportionality, BLM is countercultural.
Otherwise, if acknowledging the aims of basically what's a human rights movement via flags and spots on AP tests constitutes inclusion into mainstream culture, then the mainstream culture is absurd and perverse.
Just because something occurs does not mean there is no mainstream opposition.
I would go further and say that the most basic elements of the BLM were never countercultural.
opposition to excessive police force has been mainstream since the 70s-80s.
The only part of BLM that is actually controversial and countercultural is the idea of abolishing the police. As a result, the majority of BLM supporters reject this aspect.
The key here is the counter culture starts and ends in your heart. Get out and break out of the matrix.
Half of Americans don't have that in their account.
Counterculture has nothing to do with either.
Your examples of counter culture are alternative lifestyles.
The author (Kirk Thaker) and his cited author (Ted Gioia) were talking about media and entertainment content. Basically, the "long-tail" of obscure/experimental content not being widely exposed and whatever content they do see all looks the same to them.
Those are orthogonal areas of counter culture. E.g. You have a digital nomad living 100% in a camping RV ... but watches the same popular Netflix shows as everybody else. Or, you have the person that ignores popular sports and tv shows and only reads obscure Japanese comics... but works at a conventional 9-to-5 office job.
Take a look at Twitter on pride month, even Raytheon changes their logo to a rainbow version. That stuff is so mainstream it hurts. It's a counterculture in Saudi Arabia where the logos don't change and they throw gay people off of buildings, but in the US/Europe it's part of the dominant culture.
You make it sound like a bad thing. I'm happy we don't throw people off buildings as often.
Primary culture loves to pull from counterculture after the morsel has been thoroughly sanitized and monetized.
A counterculture isn't defined by whether or not it's considered cool, but by whether or not it is actively participated in and shared among the majority of people. Queer identities may have a lot of public support (and even that's debatable), but queerness is not part of most people's lives. Western societies are still cis- and heteronormative. Queer culture is an other, not the mainstream.
People lie about anything they can get away with.
When only one side of the story is being heard, people claiming victimhood because of a singular external issue are almost always grossly misrepresenting the situation.
See also: "I got fired because my boss / my car / my dog / etc."
> It's still legal in some states to claim panic when killing a gay or trans person, just because they're gay/trans and it shocked you into killing them.
The idea that deceiving someone into having sex with you is considered "shocking" and not "rape" astounds me. You can't induce arousal in someone, lure them into a position of vulnerability and spring surprises on them in the dark-- unless you're trying to become a martyr and add to the body count.
We already had to outlaw "pozzing" since the gays couldn't be bothered to disclose minor things like positive HIV status to unsuspecting partners. Now we're supposed to be cool with "stealthing"/"surprise sex" from the trans? It seems there is a pathological dishonesty at play here.
The laws should be changed-- LGBTs should be held more accountable for deceiving others. Murder has never been an acceptable response to fraud, so that needs to change too. This is not an example of sympathetic behavior on either side. I don't understand why you even brought it up.
I think if you didn't know what a legal thing was, you could've googled it, instead of making up some crazy hypothetical. Sorry, I'm dipping from this convo.
And you think weapon manufacturers are sincerely concerned about discrimination and human rights in general?
Mainstream culture has been co-opting countercultures since decades. There are even words like https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pinkwashing_(LGBT) and https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Greenwashing.
Music genres like punk, rock, rap etc have been watered down in the same way. And many other things.
That's the opposite of going mainstream.
Then greenwhashing is real ecology?
Rainbow capitalism isn't LGBT culture. It's attempts at getting our money.
The large majority of queer culture cannot be commercially re-packaged and will never be part of the dominant culture.
A counterculture is a set of social norms that clash with the establishment to the point of generating a credible threat of replacing it and creating a new cultural reality. LGBTQIA people living in warehouses and doing orgies is not a common way of living for sure, but it sounds more like a bout of isolated risky behaviour than a new cultural norm.
A rainbow flag is not techno/house/zines/novels, advertising is not culture. Advertising is by definition the antithesis of culture, adopting cultural norms. Ultimately it will be hollow and opportunistic because that’s its mission. An ad showing a leatherbear is not culture, and I don’t think you will ever see a leather show on prime time, if at all. Yet a culture it is (and possibly a lifestyle, but one doesn’t imply the other).
The other clear thing to me, is that enough people find the dominant culture so objectionable that they are inclined to form other cultures, even when there are massive social barriers to doing so.
I think that one positive change, and this seems to be what TFA was really trying to say, is that it has become somewhat less punitive to seek out these other cultures and join them, largely because of our digital connections.
One thing I have found valuable in thinking about our culture, is living outside of it for a while. Experiencing another dominant culture and trying to gel with it gave me a lot of perspective on both how systems we take for granted can be different and work just fine, and on how hard it is for foreigners in our country to just exist here.
So yeah, I think counter-culture is alive and well, perhaps a bit too easy to access, but that's for the most part a good thing.
It's possible that maybe the reality is that there's some aspect of abiltity-to-be commercialized that has always limited counter cultures reach? Or maybe that's an alternate way of valuing culture - can it produce concepts that can be adopted by the majority.
Ironically, given the replies, it seems that Christian communities (i.e., Hudderites or Mennonites) had discovered what you discovered a century ago, but the very nature of the counterculture they express limits their impact on the mainstream?
Does the second Q stand for something else than the first? Or is it a typo?
I'm not saying I agree with or subscribe to the tenets of conservatism (I don't). But it's a natural process for the pendulum to swing as society advances. Liberal counterculture "won" and went completely mainstream. Which is great! Gay marriage is legal, we care about sustainability, and so on. But every system has gaps and blind spots, and movements which oppose the incumbent mainstream are, by definition, not liberal counterculture.
Some touchpoints - President Obama's failure to penalize banks in the Great Recession. One percenters and the new cathedral. Joe Rogan. The intellectual dark web (Jordan Peterson et al). The red pill. The alt right.
I feel many of the above are often stupid, but in the same way that there were a lot of stupid 60s counterculture movements. It doesn't invalidate the fact that valid ideas exist within both. Also, they aren't using your signaling channels. For example, music doesn't seem to be a relevant cultural rallying point any more.
Also, Trump represented many things to many people, as opposed to just this emerging alt-right counterculture idea cloud. And by the numbers, most voters soundly rejected him in 2020.
But then it defines "counter-culture" has having a significant impact. This is a bit of a paradox to me: either you are mainstrean, either you are counter-culture. You can’t be both at the same time. Only history made us realize that a counter-culture movement had a strong impact when it became… mainstream! (and is not counter-culture anymore)
Yet, on the individual level, it would be nice if people could realize: "hey, I’m mainly consuming mainstream stuff. I should try to diversify."
You use Gopher, use an "alternative" OS, get your news from longform nuanced podcasts? Great, but 99% of people don't.
Contrast that with the counter culture of the 60s, or even 90s, where people were at least _aware_ that something else existed, even if they were violently against it.
This leaves us in a state of utter confusion about what is important, what isn't and what it all means.
Please supply some context! You (We) all live in bubbles and you have to be clear about where you are coming from before you spout off your observations and thoughts.
Technology has made us a lot better at that, and therefore the process of incorporating and destroying counterculture has accelerated. It's like trawlers finding smaller and smaller fish every year - which they take anyway, even if they're not mature, because they want to meet quota. Even if this further destroys the stock.
Over the past couple of years lockdowns must have done damage to offline-only cultural spaces. This is difficult to quantify.
Another observation hinted elsethread is that of "dark" spaces. One way to protect your culture against commoditization is to make it spiky or poisonous, like an animal that doesn't want to be eaten. Culture that contains elements that are both toxic to the mainstream and hard to separate out can exist as a subculture.
It seems to me that there are (at least) two such "left" and "right" subcultures. One left one is too queer-NSFW to be mainstream; another is too tankie-communist to be mainstream. Similarly there's a "right" culture that exists between the "banned from Twitter, had to use Gab" and "arrested on Jan 6" zones.
I'd also add a "gentrification" angle. For subcultures to have a physical presence, it needs to be really cheap. The stock of cheap-central-but-nasty (dilapidated, crime infested) property in cool cities has largely been re-absorbed.
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
There are differing opinions, but those need to be kept private for fear of retaliation.
Wait what? You adopt some right wing ideas and some leftist ideas? You are "modernist"?, you are just a right/left winger!!!(depending on their enemy)/s
Like everyone says I like to form my own opinions, but sometimes life is just simpler when I don’t voice those opinions publicly. Most of the time whatever shit storm was brewing is already forgotten by lunchtime anyway.
Basically, if someone says they support gun control, it's a very safe bet they're in the center-right political band that the Democrats cater to. If someone opposes gun control, while there's a chance they're a " “Under no pretext should arms and ammunition be surrendered; any attempt to disarm the workers must be frustrated, by force if necessary” -Marx "--type socialist, by sheer numbers it's far more likely they're supportive of the conservative regime.
And political and cultural biases, that's something not really mentioned enough when talking about algorithmic goals.
I'm an older (60) programmer. Have over 35 years' experience in software.
As a result, my approach tends to be fairly ... heterogenous ...
In today's tech scene, that makes me "counterculture." Judging from some of the reactions that I get, you'd think I was a punker at a royal wedding.
edit:
Oh and conservative culture in my land means mostly lots of alcohol. The first time I vomitted from alcohol was as a teenager on a catholic wine fest, by wine gifted to us from the church. There might be conservatives, that are free from drugs, but mostly they just like other drugs. Drugs are a big problem in todays society, but conservatives as a whole are not a prime example if living sober. Puritans might be, but they are a subclass of "conservatives".
As things are currently, society is well below the minimum and ideal birth replacement rates (scarily low in fact). So from that perspective, promotion of homosexuality runs directly counter to what is best for society as a whole versus what is currently seen as best for any one individual.
And about birth rates in general, that is a way longer debate. I would start with world population and limited ressources, but rather leave it at that.
Believe me or not, it makes no difference to me. I know I'm right.
Even the resident HN golden boy Elon Musk has been very outspoken recently about his significant concerns regarding the forthcoming population collapse. So it's happening whether you want to acknowledge it or not.
Also, what about the role that greed has played in the latest drug epidemic? The Sacklers were not driven by degeneracy but by the lust for money.
Of course, this is "real" traditional values; not surface-value "traditional values" co-opted by people: who aren't in-tune with their emotions; people with a void a that needs filling; people who need to feel better about themselves; those who would use it as a banner to gain more power for themselves; and true believers without an ounce of introspection.
With the looming bans and restrictions on social media, and the current atomization of social interactions: it's possible we're beginning a period of great isolation, where man will finally have to deal with sitting in a room all by himself.
Maybe this will spur some self-reflection in a few, leading to a resurgence in deep traditional values and beliefs; rather than the shallow, surface-level stuff, such as the nuclear family or some made-up duty to one's abstract family or some frothingly and puritanically mad ideas about sex.
Which recent US president was not Christian again? Is the correct answer "none of them"? It's very counter-cultural when the "leader of the free world" consistently shares (or has to pretend to share) your faith.
Being conservative can't be counter-culture because by definition it is preseving the CURRENT culture (which is not the "woke" one, even if boomers like to think different. All the people with power are conservatives). Being downvoted in HN doesn't mean anything, same as Twitter and Reddit. You can be "cancelled" in Twitter and still sell out the Madison Square Garden, like Louis CK. The real power is outside the social media, and that part is definitely conservative.
I wouldn't recommend using collapsed civilizations as the beacon for what's good and right for a healthy and well-functioning society.
Not really, unless maybe we count their elites' exploitation of enslaved folks as a kind of "sexual freedom" but that's not something we would ever want to endorse. We know from ancient sources that their sexual behavior was highly constrained otherwise, and people who transgressed prevailing norms were widely seen as weak and lacking in self-control.
You'd be surprised. The only comments I get downvoted to Hell on are either explicitly anto-communist or are just dumb comments. Even comments where I evangelize about God are typically well received, with maybe a few triggered atheists in the replies.
If I lead with facts cutting against Bay Area Received Values narrative or highlight some of the inconsistencies of BARV themselves, I usually get quite a few upvotes.
> And I didn't even dare venture into the racial views of conservatives.
What views are these? The debate seems to be between those who think blacks, other non-whites and immigrants are typically inherently socially conservative; and those who believe these minority groups are irrevocably allied with the Democrat machine. A typical conservative view today is that non-whites have agency just as much as whites, but face constraints such as bad government programs and social pressures to conform. Ben Carson, for example, used to be hailed as a hero, a regular staple of Black History Month. But when he "came out" as a conservative, he's been belittled and seen his stature crumble, even to the point of schools removing his name.[0]
The mainstream can't tolerate a likable conservative or a non-white one, and has a lot of funny ideas about what conservatives in particular think. Most of it is projection based on a deranged (but consistent!) interpretation of Trump's presidency.
[0] https://www.outkick.com/detroit-school-board-to-remove-dr-be...
I'm sure there are communities where stating this would be controversial, but the US public has never elected an openly atheist president. It's ridiculous to claim that believing in God is somehow countercultural.
I labelled the above idea space “liberalism” but I’m not convinced it’s the right term. I am just lacking a better one. In any case, if we assume the to be the status quo, which I think we mostly can, people trying to preserve these values and bolster them are conservative. They enjoy the status quo, wish to keep it and wish to reinforce it. They wish to prevent progress ( as in movement ) towards a different direction.
There is also another idea space, generally associated with christian identity, belief in God, the existence of two biological sexes with clear roles to fulfil, european heritage, abortion is murder, sex strictly within marriage, no homosexuality, gun rights, etc
This would be called conservatism. But, as in the “liberalism” mentioned above, it’s not really the best term. If we just take it as an idea space and assume liberalism to be the status quo, this would definitely be a counter culture.
It dislikes the current status quo, wishes to undermine it and shift it in a different direction.
And, in this sense, I agree with the person you responded too. “Conservative” is the new counter culture.
Honestly saying that being conservative is a counter-culture just shows how alienated conservatives are.
It is true, but there is not only one or two directions, and it must be necessary to consider that there is no only one or two directions.
People can believe in God or not as they wish, and might or might not be Christian (and there is many different Christians anyways, as well as many different non-Christians, and you need not only necessarily one religion, also). Either way can result people do good things and bad things.
Furthermore, "God exist" is not even very clearly defined. They shouldn't shame people for believe in God, although to say that it is right or wrong to believe in God can be mistaken because many people fail to consider that it is not really well defined.
Although two biological sexes do have clear roles to fulfil (specifically, mother vs father), that is a simplification and also is sometimes expanded too much (especially in the past, more often than today). That fails to consider intersex, and also people who do things differently from each other, you can do such things which are not part of biological sex.
Some people have some European heritage but not necessarily all. However, "European" is not very specific compared with e.g. "Italian", I think.
Homosexuality is not such a bad thing and even if you do not like it, it is not what should be illegal. (But, they should not force you to like it or to hate it.)
About gun rights, I think that you should need right to have weapons (especially unpowered and improvised weapons, rather than guns, but guns too) and other devices (including clothing, pencil/paper for writing, etc), and the right to not have weapons and other devices (including clothing) in case you do not want it, but that they should not just sell guns to everyone without proper safety training, etc. Proper safety training is important. However, if you make up your own weapons and other devices then you can do that; the government should not get in the way of everything. However, such a thing should not mean that you can just shoot everyone or bring guns everywhere; the law would still need to prevent against such a thing, which they already do anyways.
There are some Canadian laws relating to guns. Some of these things seems like good ideas but should not be mandatory, and are often more restrictive than they should be.
Furthermore, even if guns are legal should not mean that they should be encouraged. Use of weapons should normally be discouraged, not encouraged.
(I do not want any guns and I do not like guns, but that is just my opinion.)
Too often they say they either want gun rights or gun restrictions, either yes or no, and fail to consider a more nuanced possibility.
Cannabis, also, they fail to consider a more nuanced possibility. Now, smoking marijuana is legal, and I also do not think they should make the drugs illegal, but unfortunately they can still harm the air outside, and make smell even inside someone else's house right next to it too, so there still need to be the restriction of that. But, usually the people just consider yes or no instead of the more complicated possibility like I have described.
Abortion also is complicated, often both side they fail to consider the nuance. Ideally, I think it should be something to be avoided (it is better to start to not be pregnant, if possible), but conditions are not ideal and never are ideal. If it is your body then you will have the right to do with it (although you should still consider whether or not it is a good idea; just because something is or should be legal does not necessarily mean that it is a good idea), and can be self-defense from your own body (in case you would die otherwise), but the government should not make it difficult by getting in t...
Not everyone I disagree with is a nazi, but everyone who wants all queer people to stop being publicly visible, everyone who would rather immigrants, muslims, and jews to stop coming to the country or become invisible in daily life, anyone who would think about the problems that disabled people have and come to the 'solution' that they should not reproduce? They're Nazis. To call them anything else would do the memories of those already lost a disservice.
And those who buck at being called Nazis should genuinely detach and reexamine their views to see whether they resemble those of the Nazi party. If they don't, if the people calling them Nazis are simply being reactionary, then fine. But to ignore it without giving the most basic consideration to one's own views is deeply foolhardy at best.
Consider for yourself what you term as 'degenerate', and whether those things have any material impact on your life. Consider what solutions that are non-authoritarian for that degeneracy may look like. Is it offering better mental health services? Is it providing community that doesn't shun, but helps rehabilitate maladaptive practices? Is it allowing general differences of opinion on what counts and doesn't count as degenerate behavior? Is it minding your own goddamn business?
Now it seems that we have a mainstream "culture", which doesnt actually exist, atleast noone identifies by it, then we have a mainstream "counterculture", which considers themselves as "alternative", but (atleast with younger people) is a majority, which occupies themselves by issues such as racism, sexism, trans-, and other -isms and more recently ecology.
It has gone so far, that you have "protests" for equal rights for some of those groups, or other 'mainstrea' issues where people actually in charge of laws are parading next to the "protesters"/"paraders" (in our, slovenian case, our prime minister at a protest for a healthcare reform).
And the rest? Those are invisible. Hippies and anti-war people? Nope.. now we have everyone cheering for more weapons and a longer war in ukraine. People complaining about housing prices... sure, a lot of them... people actually wanting more housing to be built.. a minority. Preppers? Just weirdos... even after quite a few events where prepping actually helped people.
Ok, i might be exaggerating a bit, but there really seems to be a lot of overlap between the current "counterculture" and what is being served from the people/groups/organizations that historically would have been seen as the "bad guys" by those counterculture groups. But again.. stuff like this is talked in "conspiracy circles", and again, shunned by the mainstream counterculture - eg https://i.redd.it/yj3vs93bi7691.jpg
I think it's happened a few times already, I'd say it's mostly a PR move & nothing more. Meanwhile I think there have happened a few protests at the very same place (Trg republike) yet the "mainstream" media didn't cover it.
The protests, activism, and other stuff, that was once a sign of counter culture has become so mainstream that even the politicians do it... go out, wave some flags, take some photos, pat themselves on their backs, and go home and change nothing.
I miss the old times, when the establishment was actually afraid of countercultures, of people going against the mainstream... the current state, where the mainstream is acting as if it's against itself is bad for society, because it never changes anything.