The internet didn’t kill counterculture – you just won’t find it on Instagram

https://www.documentjournal.com/2021/01/the-internet-didnt-kill-counterculture-you-just-wont-find-it-on-instagram/

by isanengineer • 5 years ago

559 413 5 years ago

uniqueid• 5 years ago

Is there anything but counterculture on the internet anymore? How I miss the occasional measured, adult point of view! The internet has destroyed most of my interest in eccentric artists or alternative viewpoints.

Animats2• 5 years ago

Yet his examples are people who did stuff to get clicks.

Arguably, the most effective counterculture in recent times was QAnon. That didn't end well.

galangalalgol• 5 years ago

It didn't end at all, I still see people adding Q stickers to cars.

shakezula3• 5 years ago

It's been very interesting to see counter culture swing to the (arguably far but that part is up for interpretation) right. Terrifying, but nonetheless interesting.

edrxty5• 5 years ago

In a way this makes sense, the mega platforms have become a highly uniform slightly left leaning milquetoast walled city. That leaves being either a raging socialist (guilty) or a raging....bigot.

The far right isn't tolerated as they're dangerous to advertisers sensitivities. Meanwhile the far left individuals are mostly tolerated but they're also all very aware that if the far right were to disappear overnight, they'd be the next target.

spaetzleesser2• 5 years ago

A lot of qanon came from flat earth and now have moved on to vaccines and other conspiracies. I wonder what they'll be doing next year but I am sure they will find something. There is a significant part of the population who are deeply uncomfortable with the state of the world and look for an explanation that comforts them. This used to be mainly religion but it's spreading out into things like qanon. Extreme partisanship probably has the same origin because it explains that the world is bad because of "others".

Animats2• 5 years ago

There is a significant part of the population who are deeply uncomfortable with the state of the world and look for an explanation that comforts them.

Yes. A real problem is that the US has no consensus on how society should work. It did, in, say, the 1950s. People were expected to get jobs, and work, and the spectrum of available jobs was matched, roughly, to the range of human capabilities. That was a generally stable situation. That's the US from 1945 to 1975 or so.

That's changed, leaving behind a huge number of unemployed and under-employed people. More education doesn't help; about half of US college graduates are doing jobs that don't need a college education.

Nobody really has a good answer to this. Which is why conservative populism looks to the past.

SyzygistSix16• 5 years ago

Your first observation regarding clicks was right on but QAnon is just another consumer choice for people to add to their Identity. As a general rule, if there is advertisement and sales around a space, it isn't countercultural.

JasonFruit6• 5 years ago

I'm going to have to read this again to see if it's brilliant or just pretentious. But I'm going to print it and read it again more carefully, which suggests to me that it may lean toward the former.

camjohnson26• 5 years ago

Got about halfway through and feels like it’s taking a lot of words to say very little, the author seems to think it’s hard to be an anarchist today and that’s sad.

rossdavidh• 5 years ago

Keeping in mind, it can be both brilliant _and_ pretentious, especially in different paragraphs.

JasonFruit6• 5 years ago

Having reread it, I'm going with pretentious but occasionally insightful. Like me, I guess.

everdrive3• 5 years ago

Still reading the article, but this is an interesting blurb if nothing else:

"To be truly countercultural today, in a time of tech hegemony, one has to, above all, betray the platform, which may come in the form of betraying or divesting from your public online self."

I hadn't thought of boycotting much of popular online space as being counter-cultural. It's an interesting thought.

lukebuehler• 5 years ago

I think there is something similar at work with decentralized platforms: they might never be as slick as their centralized counterparts, but it’s a kind of ascetic choice that opens new doors.

edrxty5• 5 years ago

I find this is a good way to learn. Comfortable mega-platforms don't really foster anything productive (generalizing, obviously) but when you start to play with the bleeding edge decentralized options it allows you see "what could be".

Trying to rid my life of google has opened all sorts of doors. If you're a tinkerer there are a plethora of options available for you to customize your experience and discover new capabilities.

AshleighBasil2• 5 years ago

Do people perceive popular platform UI's as 'slick'? To me they always seemed like a mess that is insane to navigate because the company's massive org chart digests into a massive turd that gets smeared over the landing page. Facebook is the worst, but they all seem to have this problem.

1propionyl• 5 years ago

The analogy to Cixin Liu's "dark forest" concept also seems apt and enlightening. (Basically: it's a game theoretic response to the Fermi Paradox that suggests that any sensible galactic civilization would avoid making contact with any other civilization and attempt to stay hidden.)

More and more over the past few years, I've seen my own social circles migrate away from public forums like Facebook and Twitter and into private WhatsApp group chats, Discord groups, and so on.

In some cases these are groups of people I know in real life, and in some cases everyone is anonymous or pseudonymous.

And there is definitely an unspoken rule of "don't unilaterally invite anyone, don't advertise that this group exists, stay hidden, we like what we have going on here."

It's in some ways a reversion to the style of older private Usenet/BBS/IRC channels, but in other respects it's a lateral move. For one, it's still mostly happening on centralized platforms.

What I think is interesting is how our media ecology (in the sense of media as means we communicate and express ourselves, not "mass media") is an interplay between these big public spaces and a proliferation of smaller private spaces. It's not _just_ a dark forest, there's also a bright canopy into which people emerge, forage, and carry back down into the forest.

jaspax• 5 years ago

The Dark Forest analogy strikes me as apt as well. All of the best (most interesting, most active, most insightful) groups that I belong to are off of the public internet these days. Some of them are just small Discord servers, some are even more heavily encrypted groups on Signal, Mattermost, or Mastadon. But what they have in common is that not everyone is welcome, and we don't even advertise our presence.

dghlsakjg• 5 years ago

The thing that I hate about what social media has done is that it is resistant to persistance of knowledge. I grew up in the heyday of forums (late 90s to mid-late 00s). It seems like a lot of these groups have moved to facebook (or discord, or whatsapp), and now a lot of that knowledge for specialty stuff is unsearchable and behind a wall.

One of my hobbies is boatbuilding, and there is a LOT of good material that is still available on forums since they just happily sit there seemingly forever, and are easy to archive. But a lot of the new stuff is now done on FB, and it means that knowledge gets pushed to the bottom of the feed, and it is impossible to archive.

My feeling is that the switch to algorithmic feed-based discussion is a serious regression for a lot of interest groups.

An excellent illustration of this is Stack Overflow. They take after the forum model of preserving knowledge to the degree that they shut down discussions that have happened before. Stack Overflow's database of solutions brings literally billions in value to the world, and it simply would not work without persistance of information.

Der_Einzige• 5 years ago

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Culture_jamming

bluefirebrand• 5 years ago

I hadn't thought of boycotting much of popular online space as being counter-cultural. It's an interesting thought

I think the interesting part is that it's kind of counter-culture but it itself is not really a culture at all. There are no groups (as far as I know) for people who eschew social media. They don't meet up at the pub and talk about it, they don't have any kind of organization, even a loose one. People just kind of decide to wash their hands of Facebook and Instagram and Twitter and such, then go about their lives. I don't think they generally feel a part of some larger culture (or counter-culture)

Maybe I'm wrong about that. To me though it almost seems like a stand-alone complex.

planet-and-halo• 5 years ago

As one of these people, totally agree. I don't really have people I sympathize with over this stuff (except a few friends with whom its a minor topic of conversation) or anything I'd consider a culture. Mostly I just deleted my accounts and moved on. On the other hand, despite the lack of other people to commiserate with, it does feel a little countercultural insofar as I'm doing something different from most people, and it sticks out on occasion.

briankelly2• 5 years ago

Yes, I think that's an important distinction - you need a critical mass of people sharing in countercultural behavior/practices in some way to get an actual counterculture. Many people have eschewed social media for one reason or another but not in some unified way that I know of.

rsj_hn2• 5 years ago

Eschewing social media is not a culture in and of itself, anymore than eschewing the telephone or TV is a culture. But it is an attribute that some cultures have. Cultures have to be based around the actual ways they do interact, whether in person meetings via church groups, in person hiking groups, bike riding, falconry, camping, whatever. Similarly many people prefer to use person-to-person communication such as text messages, email, telephone calls, rather than broadcasting an edited version of their own thoughts to the world all the time. To assume that if you are not constantly engaging in this type of one-to-many communication, then you must be absolutely alone is to have serious tunnel vision.

jdefelice• 5 years ago

I think there will be such a group but you won’t know about them because they won’t be on social media telling people about it. I don’t think their identity will be anti-social media, but an identity to strive for a slower way of life.

nsxwolf• 5 years ago

We're on Signal. You don't see us unless invited.

Kelamir2• 5 years ago

I think the interesting part is that it's kind of counter-culture but it itself is not really a culture at all.

It reminds me of a chapter from Kino's adventures, where she finds a city, which has a culture of cat lovers. When she leaves them, she meets their king, who tells the story of the land: people had decided they don't need the king and any culture, so they've decided to appear to every traveller with a different culture.

However, the king says, they are not aware that that is their new culture.

aaron-santos• 5 years ago

There are no groups (as far as I know) for people who eschew social media.

There is at least one group who (arguably in part) eschews political social media: the grillpilled.

krapp5• 5 years ago

There are no groups (as far as I know) for people who eschew social media. They don't meet up at the pub and talk about it, they don't have any kind of organization, even a loose one.

Hacker News is basically that culture. A lot of people here spend their time complaining about how much they hate every aspect of social media, the web and modern culture (except for HN, of course) and make a point of virtue-signaling how unplugged, and detached from the mainstream they are, including their refusal to touch any form of social media.

I think it's fair to say that a part of the userbase here has built a cultural identity around its contrarianism.

mattgreenrocks• 5 years ago

It doesn’t need to be a culture, or atomized in that way. It isn’t a statement of identity, either.

It is being intentional about one’s time, attention, and emotions. Me, I play a lot more guitar these days, and really enjoy having something that I can learn.

Social media just doesn’t work for me. I can’t deal with a constant stream of people dumping their emotions. I’m aware that most other people can. And that’s fine. But I’m happier just ignoring it and working hard on work, family life, and guitar.

ghgdynb1• 5 years ago

How about exit from the platforms while continuing to build on the Internet?

balajis.com vs twitter.com/balajis

lmarcos• 5 years ago

I've been thinking exactly that. The problem is that the average internet user would have to: - buy a domain name (and pay for it every year) - rent hosting (cheapest provider is probably DO at 5$/month) - setup your machine so that it's secure enough it doesn't end up hacked - setup whatever is needed to publish content in your machine (could be as simple as HTML, but then the average internet user doesn't know HTML. It could be wordpress... But then you have to install it by yourself)

It's a lot of hassle for the average internet user. The worst case scenario: you end up paying ~70$/year for something you have no idea how to setup property. Beast case scenario: some startup takes over the hassle for you for "only" 50$/year... But that's not that different from Facebook (except that you would "own" a domain name and a host you have no idea how to "own").

pochamago• 5 years ago

"To be truly countercultural in a time of literate hegemony, you must become illiterate"

TacticalCoder• 5 years ago

What's posted on social networks makes you feel like we live in a time of literate hegemony?

aeturnum• 5 years ago

In an age of corporate sponsored wildly increasing visibility & reach, it's a counter-cultural act to forgo visibilty & reach for other goals.

franklampard• 5 years ago

Really? Isn’t it already trendy to bash big tech and diss tech platforms?

akurzon• 5 years ago

I think so, but for most people it doesn't stop them from using the platforms. And then the criticism doesn't amount to much.

crocodiletears• 5 years ago

I wouldn't call it counter-culture. Sounds more like taking a prominent cultural metanarrative about the evils of social media (which has been authored and perpetuated by many papers of record over the last several years), and embracing its implicit call to action.

It's play-acting rebellion in a pre-aproved manner

8bitchemistry• 5 years ago

I hadn't thought of boycotting much of popular online space as being counter-cultural. It's an interesting thought.

The only winning move is not to play: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=MpmGXeAtWUw

lambda_obrien• 5 years ago

Well, if everyone is an attention seeker online trying to pitch their own line of BS and side hustling, then not using social media, or being genuine there, is counter to culture.

SyzygistSix16• 5 years ago

I don't think the article gets to the heart of the matter of why online platforms are not countercultural. The main reason, in my understanding, is that they still are selling the vision of the individual as rebel, and individual expression as our unique combination of consumer choices; Instagram is the perfect example and the logical conclusion of Individual Choice being our highest expression. Nothing about that dynamic is countercultural any more.

There are still online interactions though. Communities trading tracks and collaborating musically online. Torrenting. Open source software projects.

mdoms3• 5 years ago

The truth is that today the counter-culture is the right wing dudes (and ladies) who won't be beholden to trigger warnings, won't treat particular words as if they have magical powers and won't try to get you fired if you openly believe that male and female are real concepts. If your cursor is hovering over the downvote button right now then that's natural - counter culture isn't popular. By definition.

codezero• 5 years ago

That's a fun and interesting way to look at it, thanks!

TBH I think you got downvoted just for mentioning it, I don't think what you said is actually that controversial unless you're making a lot of assumptions about _your_ intent in sharing this, which doesn't seem fair.

mdoms3• 5 years ago

I'm not surprised by the downvotes haha. I never said I agreed with the things I mentioned - I am by no means one of those right wing people - but it's clear which way the cultural winds are blowing today.

quercus• 5 years ago

My finger was hovering over the upvote button but I think the downvotes were required to validate the comment.

andrepd• 5 years ago

That's precisely the irritating image people like that have of themselves, which does not correspond to reality. What does it mean "beholden to trigger warnings"? I'm not sure in which sense you are beholden to something which you likely haven't even encountered outside of internet posts making fun of trigger warnings. What magic words are those? Not saying n*gger in polite company isn't censorship, it's just good manners. And who exactly has been fired for "believing male and female are real concepts"? This is some borderline delusional shit.

The "I know I'll be downvoted for this brave opinion" bit is the icing on the cake.

aidenn04• 5 years ago

While I don't think the GP post is correct, counter-culture necessarily has bad manners, because manners are all about cultural norms.

naringas• 5 years ago

well, he was downvoted. but not overwhelmining so; let's call it controversial.

And who exactly has been fired for "believing male and female are real concepts"?

I recall some kind of minor debacle about a Stack Overflow moderator (or employee? details are vague) who got in trouble for something related to individual choice of pronouns. It seems to be what they're refering to.

darepublic• 5 years ago

I've worked at at least one place where if I stated "male and female are real concepts" I would have raised eyebrows at min and received some official reprimand at max

pessimizer2• 5 years ago

Not saying n*gger in polite company isn't censorship, it's just good manners.

Is this not polite company? Do you think adding an asterisk makes a significant difference?

I'm black myself, do I get to say it? Could the question be more complicated than you're making it out to be?

edit: I mean - MCNeil at the NYT was quite literally doing what you just did: discussing whether certain language was acceptable or should be punished. Imagine being fired for this post two years from now. I don't care about McNeil in particular (the US is an "At-Will" country, workers have no real rights, he's a privileged guy), but the state of free expression right now is bizarre. The fact that it comes when old (and most of new media) media is more consolidated than it's ever been is not coincidental.

thepasswordis• 5 years ago

You're absolutely correct.

Consider: your HR department is left leaning, your boss is probably left leaning, your teachers are left leaning, the government is left leaning.

How on earth could the "counter culture" be the hegemonic culture of the most powerful billionaires on earth, and the people who have the most power over the most people in their daily lives (HR departments for adults, school administrators for children)?

The people who you instinctively dislike, and who society counts as something that needs to be corrected are by definition the counter culture.

That doesn't necessarily need to be seen as a bad thing, btw. It just means that the hippies basically won and have all of the power now.

pjc502• 5 years ago

your HR department is left leaning, your boss is probably left leaning, the government is left leaning

.. if you think this, your definition of left leaning is completely broken and your Overton window is in a very strange place.

rurp• 5 years ago

Consider: your HR department is left leaning, your boss is probably left leaning, your teachers are left leaning, the government is left leaning.

You are doing an awful lot of generalizing from your own experiences. I have met a LOT of conservative managers and business owners, including more than a couple openly sexist and racist ones, who are doing just fine for themselves in life. The idea that conservatives are some sort of tiny suppressed minority is bonkers.

heavyset_go3• 5 years ago

your boss is probably left leaning

Where did you work where your boss thought worker-ownership and workplace democracy were the best ways to get work done?

twobitshifter2• 5 years ago

The left can lean much further. Someone advocating for socialist and welfare policies or even communism or anarchy would run afoul of HR departments and the powerful billionaires.

Corporations pay lip service to the left but they don’t really follow through. There’s no divestment from China, fossil fuels, or even Diversity and Inclusion that reaches the board level.

Can_Not• 5 years ago

Consider: your HR department is left leaning, your boss is probably left leaning, your teachers are left leaning, the government is left leaning.

Did you forget this is a US based website? Are you posting from China?

klyrs3• 5 years ago

LARPing with boffer swords is counterculture. Kink is counterculture. Church of the Flying Spaghetti Monster is counterculture. You don't need to brandish a tiki torch to be sufficiently different -- but that's the loudest counterculture, and they're getting all the attention. I know of an ancient forum related to a counterculture intentionally not listed here, and it's ticking along just fine, thankyouverymuch.

Of course, there's a difference between "unpopular" and "intentionally or callously offensive". All of my examples are of the former kind (so long as the kink happens in private spaces, I guess). Church of Satan is borderline in my mind, but I suppose that some Christians might put it in the latter category.

ALittleLight2• 5 years ago

I agree those things you mentioned aren't very popular, and possibly where you are the mainstream culture is different than where I am, but I don't see any of those things as counter-culture in the sense that none of them are opposed by the dominant culture. e.g. If it came out at work that you were a member of a group that fought with foam swords, had unusual sexual preferences, or were funny atheists, you wouldn't be fired. People might say "oh, that's weird" but they aren't going to hate you.

I'm not saying any of those things are bad (in fact, I like fighting with fake swords) but there's not hostility to them from the culture and they, in turn, are not hostile to the mainstream culture, so I just don't think they're countercultural at all.

By definition I think countercultural groups will strike you as weird and bad unless you belong to them specifically. Q-Anon, for example, which speculates that the leaders of society are <bad things>, is a countercultural group because they both hate and oppose elements of the main culture and are hated and opposed by it. The kind of antifa or anarchists who are attempting to burn down courthouses or police stations in Portland are another clear example.

Noos• 5 years ago

It's hard to say things like kink or spaghetti monster are counter culture when they were routinely held by people in high positions of power in the culture and used to destroy or attack the impediments to capitalism. Atheism is capitalism's best friend, because it completely defangs any spiritual argument against consumerism and productivity; kink is capitalism's best friend because it opens up many lucrative and well paying methods to commodify sex itself.

Ironically, both are disliked some because of that. The nofap rose as a real counterculture to commodified kink and porn; and the "i love fucking science" type of reddit atheist the FSM people were at heart are mocked.

heavyset_go3• 5 years ago

The bog standard opinions of CPAC, a recent President, nearly every straight-laced conservative, and the majority of Republicans aren't counterculture, they're just grievance culture. There are some grievances they like to complain about, but it is still part of mainstream, popular culture to do so, and plenty of people have ridden to fame and fortune repeating those grievances to mainstream audiences.

echlebek• 5 years ago

This self-indulgent rhetoric is so tiresome, and its aims are so blatantly transparent.

dariosalvi78• 5 years ago

funny to see how the term "counter culture" went from being associated to communists/anarchists to being associated to conservatives or even fascists.

krapp5• 5 years ago

When your "counter-culture" comprises the ideology of half of your country, is based on a traditional religious and cultural status quo, and is the doctrine one of your two political parties, it is not in any conceivable way counter-culture. It is simply the death-throes of the establishment desperately trying to maintain its credibility and relevance in the face of changing demographics.

SyzygistSix16• 5 years ago

No it isn't. (Sub)cultures are not the same thing as countercultures. Right wing vs. left wing is the same as choosing between Coke and Pepsi. There is no way to get to a modern counterculture when the focus is on Identity and Individual Consumer Choice.

helen___keller2• 5 years ago

I think this is the biggest takeaway for me:

We saw this dynamic metastasize in the wake of George Floyd’s murder, when well-intentioned claims of “silence is violence” (recalling the powerful 1987 ACT-UP “Silence = Death” campaign) spiraled into calling out individuals with even a small following who hadn’t come forward with a timely public statement of solidarity or remorse. Yet public posts were subject to popular scrutiny and judged based on sincerity, originality, and tone. Not surprisingly, many people defaulted to posting a somber plain black square. But this generated criticism of its own by clogging the feed with an informational blackout during a moment when community resource sharing was critically important. Amid a chaotic time, the platform functioned exactly as designed: amplification of emotions, uptick in user interaction, growth in platform engagement and data cultivation. Cha-ching, the platform cashes in.

In other words, any large movement or discussion on "clearnet" spaces gets subverted by the algorithms and profit motive of the platform they live on.

However, where I disagree with the author is considering mainstream "dark forest" platforms like reddit or 4chan to be countercultural. In fact, I'd argue that mainstream social media can never be countercultural. While there may be no "algorithm" controlling the narrative you see on 4chan (or a straightforward and ostensibly fair one on a site like reddit), the content you see (and by extension, the narrative) is shaped by profit motive: From well-compensated marketing teams, to hordes of self-interested proselytizers (see: bitcoin), to propaganda teams looking to influence public opinion, mainstream dark forest sites simply shift the balance of power from the platform itself to the most motivated and well-funded members of the platform

retrac• 5 years ago

While there may be no "algorithm" controlling the narrative you see on 4chan (or a straightforward and ostensibly fair one on a site like reddit), the content you see (and by extension, the narrative) is shaped by profit motive: From well-compensated marketing teams, to hordes of self-interested proselytizers (see: bitcoin), to propaganda teams looking to influence public opinion

I've realized I have exactly one outlet free of this left. It's an IRC channel I've been in since the 90s. I thought about it and none of us are there for any reason other than that we have a common interest and like each other. No money involved, no names involved, and it's one of the more supportive and insightful communities I've ever found online. We've sometimes wondered why it's such a different community from the other places, and this article articulates why quite well, I think. We're old-timers holding out in a little pocket of what has been almost fully absorbed by corporate social media. I'm sure there are others. And I'm sure they won't tell you where to find them, either.

JakeTheAndroid• 5 years ago

I find plenty of these types of communities through Discord, and I think that is part of the equation that's left out here. I don't really like discord much, but the reason I get when I do is to go check in on those friends. Usually these communities are just people that I've met playing games.

I don't know that these would qualify as counter-culture or subculture, but they are free of marketing and advertising, and people are there because we have shared interests. The conversations are organic and not curated for us and we are isolated from anyone else we don't want to be part of that group.

So, my gut tells me that the younger generations are using Discord like people used IRC.

AnthonyMouse• 5 years ago

From well-compensated marketing teams, to hordes of self-interested proselytizers (see: bitcoin), to propaganda teams looking to influence public opinion, mainstream dark forest sites simply shift the balance of power from the platform itself to the most motivated and well-funded members of the platform

This is making the perfect the enemy of the good.

Also, voting systems take care of a lot of this, because naked propaganda spam gets downvoted by the users.

helen___keller2• 5 years ago

This is making the perfect the enemy of the good.

To be fair, I'm not saying that we should all ditch Reddit and only congregate on obscure message boards with maximum user limits; I'm simply saying that a place like a default subreddit should never be considered counter-cultural.

Also, voting systems take care of a lot of this, because naked propaganda spam gets downvoted by the users.

Strong disagree. Naked propaganda is downvoted, sure, but good propaganda is never naked. Add enough eyeballs and increasingly sophisticated and coordinated actors will find a way to get their message to the top.

drak0n1c• 5 years ago

Voting systems often amplify propaganda spam. Every day r/science has multiple posts upvoted to the top with titles exaggerating findings, and/or linking to shoddy studies.

Upvote/Downvote is very susceptible to headlines that exploit confirmation bias, and bot activity.

tablespoon3• 5 years ago

> From well-compensated marketing teams, to hordes of self-interested proselytizers (see: bitcoin), to propaganda teams looking to influence public opinion, mainstream dark forest sites simply shift the balance of power from the platform itself to the most motivated and well-funded members of the platform
Also, voting systems take care of a lot of this, because naked propaganda spam gets downvoted by the users.

I disagree: crowdsourced moderation can only really take care of the most obvious crap, so it doesn't really take care of this problem.

__blockcipher__2• 5 years ago

because naked propaganda spam gets downvoted by the users

This is simply not true, although I suppose it depends on the definition of naked. Here's some random examples - although like anything, whether it qualifies as propaganda depends on one's beliefs:

- When the previous US president wanted to pull out of Syria, or at least scale down the activities there, a bunch of headlines to the effect of "[President's name] abandons the kurds, leaving them to die" were written, and went straight to the top of Reddit. (This is a classic war propaganda technique where there's always an excuse as to why you can't end a certain war, while failing to account for the negative effects of continuing wars, or the facts that many of these "problems" only exist because of previous foreign policy blunders and doubling down on those blunders simply doesn't help)

- Without going down the COVID rabbithole too much, there would routinely be articles that either (a) spread Chinese-state-originated propaganda videos of stuff like "man randomly collapses in the middle of the street", (b) articles that would credulously take China's metrics at face values, (c) scientific publications that immediately denied the possibility of non-naturalistic origins of the virus, (d) articles intended to shame those who don't believe in masking as an intervention, etc

- (This is a fun one since many won't agree) Many articles raced to the top which made just completely wrong statements about the portfolios of firms like Melvin Capital and basically depicted the WSB gamestop fiasco as a classic david vs goliath narrative, instead of the reality which was for a brief period of time it was a real short squeeze and then almost immediately became a classic bubble/pump and dump scenario that had no connection to fundamental asset valuation. (To be clear, in a short squeeze stock prices can easily be pushed past the "intrinsic value", but so long as there's still a squeeze it is not irrational to buy the asset. However, once it's no longer actually a short squeeze and is now just a normal bull-run / bubble, an article selling the david v goliath narrative is now propaganda)

- Here's a headline that's #2 on /r/politics, which I just visited to find the first headline that counts as propaganda in my book: "Conservatives Are Furious Biden Delivered a Non-Insane Presidential Speech" (regardless of what you feel about the speech or conservatives, it should be trivially obvious that they are not furious about a "non-insane" speech)

- Any of the dozens of articles about the "Capitol Hill Insurrection" which grossly exaggerated what occurred as an attempted coup instead of the reality which was a bunch of (largely deluded) self-styled patriots who changed and prayed and took stupid selfies inside the capitol building (note: me saying that it was grossly exaggerated is not the same as saying that there was no wrongdoing, etc)

---

I do think it is true though that "articles which are clearly propaganda to the average user" i.e. one thats go against the status quo of a cite will be downvoted. But propaganda in the other direction won't because they will never think of it as propaganda

SyzygistSix16• 5 years ago

Social media sites with voting systems have a lot of bots. And they almost always are about expressing individual identity in the context of a unique combination of consumer choices, which is no longer countercultural, if it ever even was.

partyboat1586• 5 years ago

spiraled into calling out individuals with even a small following who hadn’t come forward with a timely public statement of solidarity or remorse.
timely public statement

Being a public figure sounds exhausting.

__blockcipher__2• 5 years ago

It is, but to be clear I think the point there was not about public figures per se but about everyday people. Everyday (albeit obviously left-leaning) people would post the black squares out of a sense of obligation, and then the responses would be split between praising them for standing up for "black lives", versus half the people criticizing the poster of the black square for making a silly symbolic gesture. (I view it as the latter - a stupid symbolic gesture - BUT the context of the whole "silence is violence" meme is why these NPCs were in a double-bind: damned if you do, damned if you don't)

toyg2• 5 years ago

With great power comes great responsibility.

TameAntelope2• 5 years ago

What you're saying is and isn't true. One example of a countercultural movement that's been in the news recently is the DDoSecrets leaks/hacks (they get upset if you aren't clear that they're hackers). They've got a strong Twitter presence that helps them get their message out, but they conduct no "real" business on Twitter.

So a counterculture can use the mainstream platforms, but they choose to do so only as a microphone, not as a gathering place.

Edit: That said, one of the members of a related group just (as in, after I wrote this but before editing was made unavailable) got banned from Twitter, so maybe they can't actually use the platform as a microphone for very long. It looks like the law is getting involved, specifically related to the Verkada hack.

satellite23• 5 years ago

It seems like a very strong stance to say that the publicly advertised leaks and hacks are not financially motivated.

throwitaway1235• 5 years ago

DDoSecrets targeted the most vulnerable voices in society, people banished to Gab for their political beliefs. They literally work for the liberal ruling system.

SyzygistSix16• 5 years ago

n fact, I'd argue that mainstream social media can never be countercultural.

I would say that is pretty much true by definition. Online countercultural elements are open source software and other collaborative platforms like Bandcamp and similar sites where people are trading tracks and what they have created. Torrenting is still countercultural. What the counterculture has in common now is that while the individualism is still present in the creation of music/software and the political/social choice to collaborate, the collective action of collaboration is the focus of attention, not individual fashion and identity. That kind of individualism has been sold back to us ad nauseum and its apotheosis is Instagram.

tonyedgecombe3• 5 years ago

Online countercultural elements are open source software

Open source is mainstream now, even Microsoft are doing it.

old_fart_dev• 5 years ago

Social media is the neighborhood bar, virtualized, with infinite seats at the bar, but no beer nuts (or beer). Truly one of the saddest places in the world - https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=GJW19nlzb3Q

Anyone can pull up a seat to the bar and many people do. Inmate conversations are drowned out by shouting matches over politics, sports, or whatever has raised passions that day. And there's constant yells of "What the #@$@ are you looking at?" coming from random patron to another. And hundreds of bar promotions for any and everything under the sun.

Doubt members of the countercultural are going to want to hang out at the largest Buffalo Wild Wings...

kart23• 5 years ago

I agree that you have to be essentially anonymous to take part in counterculture these days. But the author claims that Discord and Reddit are examples of counterculture. I wholeheartedly disagree, these platforms are overly sanitized, moderated by the company, not the community. On Discord, people get banned for empty mass reports, and they can delete servers as they please. Reddit is valuable for driving communities to self-hosted, private forums, where I believe that counterculture has and will be born from.

TimedToasts• 5 years ago

Reddit is the least countercultural site I can imagine. It's still Top 10 in sites visited, is it not? It's the very zeitgeist of the times.

Those examples weaken an otherwise good article.

twobitshifter2• 5 years ago

Maybe Reddit as a whole, but what are your thoughts on WallStreetBets? It seems that WSB has all of the elements of a counterculture, although maybe diluted after the wide spread GME interest.

redisman3• 5 years ago

It used to be fairly "counter-culture"ish back in the day before it was run like a corporation.

monocasa5• 5 years ago

Reddit is a meta site. The default subs are of course the default consensus, but you can find subs of nearly every other position under the sun.

edrxty5• 5 years ago

Further, reddit is built from the ground up to force consensus. Counterculture cannot exist on the site by definition, as anything prevalent on the site is there by consensus.

throwaway0a5e• 5 years ago

So is HN and any other platform with where upvote/downvote is the primary factor in the algorithm.

juststeve8• 5 years ago

Agree - and People should also be aware who funds these sites. Especially reddit.

monocasa5• 5 years ago

I'd argue that the way reddit is currently designed is to hold on to it's user base without them having consensus. The way that subreddits allow separation of their user base (but they're all still users and seeing ads, buying gold, etc) allows communities to exist in a way other social media sites don't really allow (except maybe facebook groups).

krapp5• 5 years ago

Counterculture cannot exist on the site by definition, as anything prevalent on the site is there by consensus.

That makes no sense - consensus must exist within a counterculture for it to be definable, therefore counterculture and consensus can coexist.

Being "prevalent" has no bearing whatsoever on being a counterculture. It's entirely possible for a counterculture to have a subreddit and not be prevalent. The vast majority of content on Reddit never even touches the frontpage.

You could say that a counterculture can't exist on Reddit that runs counter to the platform's terms of service, and that might be true, but it's also conditional.

ontekhunhsentuh• 5 years ago

I'll add that Discord does not support right-to-read. They will occasionally remove a server and ban everyone who had access to that server, regardless of whether or not they had posted or participated in that server or contacted any members of that server. They view the act of reading the server posts as a bannable offense.

11235813212• 5 years ago

What incident are you referring to? Having trouble searching for it.

juststeve8• 5 years ago

Yep, or self hosted sites

browningstreet• 5 years ago

My teenage son asked me the other day what "grunge" and "goth" were. I was then trying to explain "subculture" and "counterculture", and it was surprisingly difficult to explain.. or convey, especially in the context of what he's seen so far in his life.

I tried using examples of my own youthful adventures and communities -- still not easy.

pjc502• 5 years ago

Kpop stans are a live example of a subculture, if not a counterculture, that teenagers may be familiar with.

bena2• 5 years ago

I wouldn't call them a counterculture by any stretch of the imagination.

Kpop is deliberately manufactured culture. The personalities and music are meticulously curated by corporations. "Underground Kpop" is practically an oxymoron like a "married bachelor" would be.

And that's not to insult or knock it.

redisman3• 5 years ago

Try explaining next that computing and gaming used to be subcultures/countercultures. I remember how Mortal Kombat and DOOM were going to cause the fall of civilization.

Kelamir2• 5 years ago

I remember how Mortal Kombat and DOOM were going to cause the fall of civilization.

redisman, could you tell more about this?

juststeve8• 5 years ago

DOOM

Now we’re talking. Doom was a massive deal because of the violence (as you mentioned), but also because it moved entertainment revenue away from MSM and onto PC’s and the internet.

monocasa5• 5 years ago

You might be able to explain through an exploration of genz subcultures.

E-Boys/Girls, VSCO Girls, and cottagecore are some examples.

ArtWomb• 5 years ago

https://aesthetics.fandom.com/wiki/List_of_Aesthetics

rufus_foreman2• 5 years ago

I've heard it claimed that hardcore punk was the last American youth subculture, I think street skating qualified too. Those were pretty much the end of it though. You can't have a youth subculture that your parents drive you to in the car.

toyg2• 5 years ago

Some of those hardcore punks were driven around to the sound of Rolling Stones, Led Zeppelin, Lennon’s “Imagine”... Elvis was utterly scandalous in his time (“those hips, what filth!”), and I bet he was on a lot of radios when Malcolm McLaren and his protégés were growing up.

Any successful culture, be it sub- or counter-, will eventually be swallowed by the mainstream. That’s because a culture is such only if it gets transmitted from person to person. Denying transmission is not counter-cultural, it is anti-cultural: it denies its own validity. Which is why I laugh at the elitism and pretentiousness of articles like these, who want to be purer than pure then take their clues from the likes of MTV Unplugged. The search for purity in culture is a fool’s errand, one might as well burn every page one writes. In reality, culture has to be transmitted, and the purists are just another bunch of competitors desperately trying to elbow everybody else with what little leverage they have.

The modern lack of visible “alternative” cultures is simply due to the fragmentation and recombination that new media have allowed. Guthenberg has invented his press a few years ago, Luther just started writing his thesis, and we are all here wondering why amanuensis culture is not as vibrant as it was.

echoradio• 5 years ago

I signed on to the internet when everything was handled through terminals, so I’ve always viewed cyberspace — and the culture which developed there — as completely separate from IRL. People can take on different personas, customs, etc. So it’s no surprise to me the customs within this “new” world are mirroring how a physical world society spreads across a spectrum of ideology. (Granted, the ideas don’t always blend with what exists in the real world.)

I’ve often thought of the counterculture to online space as those who are breaking free of centralization and the digital “monopolies.” They’re the people who are homesteading on tildes, Mastodon, or their own self-hosted instance, for example. In cyberspace, FAANG are the new industrialists (the new informationalists?), so to me it makes sense that a portion of online society wants to separate or rebel from this establishment which controls a good portion of this cyberspace.

As IoT becomes more prevalent, I can see those who seek a break from connectivity in general as countercultural, too. Some of the ideas in Aldous Huxley’s “Brave New World,” or Ted Kaczynski’s* “Industrial Society and Its Future” reflect this.

* I do not condone Kaczynski’s actions. I’m merely stating the concern about technology’s negative impact on society has long been thought about. It makes sense that there would be those who seek to shun it entirely.

edrxty5• 5 years ago

I think this ties in well with all the recent discussion around advertising and its effect on internet discourse. To become counter-cultural now inherently means foregoing ad revenue supported platforms, which inherently means you lose audience.

keiferski7• 5 years ago

Charles Taylor, the philosopher, covered much of this about twenty years ago with far less snark and buzzwords. I strongly recommend reading The Ethics of Authenticity. It’s all about the trend of individualism and how it precedes social media by...centuries.

https://www.hup.harvard.edu/catalog.php?isbn=9780674987692

Social media is no longer authentic so you’re seeing a slowly growing backlash against it.

https://seoulphilosophy.wordpress.com/2015/06/19/charles-tay...

airhead96910• 5 years ago

"Antisocial media" would a truthful title.

I don't even like texting. Email is a letter replacement. Call me and pickup when I call, or GTFO.

Faceblock, Twatter, Instaglam, Discard, Snapper, TikTak, LinkedOut can all listen to the flushing sound of me deleting their advertising monetization. "Buh buh all of your Ivy and Pac12 associations that made you look important on a résumé." Too bad, I haven't talked to most of those people in years anyhow.

wussboy3• 5 years ago

I hadn't heard "antisocial media" before but I love it

cbozeman• 5 years ago

LinkedOut

That's the one that made me laugh out loud.

grillvogel• 5 years ago

rms is that you?

machinelabo• 5 years ago

I feel liberated after reading your comment.

krick4• 5 years ago

That's weird. I mean, you do you, but if this is a popular opinion, I had no idea. On the contrary, I'm mildly annoyed when someone calls me to say something that could've said over the text.

And I don't think of it as a personal preference: async information exchange is objectively less intrusive, which is why it should be preferred when possible (which isn't always the case, because it's also objectively less fluent). Unless you are some girl I'm mindlessly infatuated with, I'm probably not waiting for you call all day long, so when you are forcing me to interrupt whatever I was doing, because you are calling to say something as simple as "so, you asked me about X the other day, the answer is yes" or to ask a simple question without any follow up (or, my favourite: a courtesy call with no actual information exchange): I'll be polite, of course, but I'll hate you.

If you want to ask or tell me something short: send me a text, I'll read and respond in 5 minutes, so that I don't have to interrupt what I'm doing right now. If it isn't short and you are too lazy to type: no problem, send me a voice-message. If you just want some chit-chat: ask me to go grab a beer (via text). If it's complicated and we'll need some back-and-forth, we should call each other, but I'll appreciate if you'll send a text/voice first, asking me to talk over the phone about X. And only if it's URGENT you call me right away. And because it's just sensible thing to do, when you are suddenly calling me, I'm already assuming it's URGENT: in fact, that's the only reason to answer you when you are calling, and not to call back when I'm in the mood. So when it turns out that it really wasn't, you are already an asshole, even if I don't show it.

unethical_ban• 5 years ago

I'm along this spectrum, but not nearly so far away.

I like chat programs used as email - that is, non-real-time. I have lowered my anxiety a lot by realizing that texts are not realtime in my life 98% of the time, and to treat them accordingly: Checked on upon occasion. Don't stress about whether the person on the other end will be upset if you don't get back right away.

Planning something? Need someone right away? Set the expectation of response beforehand or just call them.

msla• 5 years ago

Call me and pickup when I call, or GTFO.

I don't exist at your beck and call. Text me and respect that I have a life beyond hanging on the telephone, or I don't care to distinguish you from the billions of autodialers who are the only ones still rude enough to make such demands on my time.

BTW, cute misspellings. Little jugs got big ears, I suppose.

rcurry2• 5 years ago

Good for you. I grew up in the eighties, and if I couldn’t remember your phone number you probably weren’t my friend. I’m okay with the same rules now. Twitter and Facebook are the Internet equivalent of Skid Row - a bunch of hobos fighting over a bottle of thunderbird. The only winning solution is not to play.

irrational2• 5 years ago

I definitely don’t agree with the picking up the phone comment. 99/100 calls I receive are spam. I’ll only answer if you are in my contacts.

swayvil2• 5 years ago

I find talking on the phone to be excruciating. I'm fine in person but there's just something about the phone. It's like jerking off a quarter-inch dowel-rod with a pair of salad tongs. Cosmically awkward.

I love texting. And email is basically texting.

I'm thinking of getting one of those wrist phones so I can voice-text everything.

throwawaygal72• 5 years ago

Love the line about calling. People in this thread dont get it - if you're going to triage me against your other priorities, and if you dont care enough about our friendship to try to pickup when I call - you're not really a friend. We can still be friendly, but you're too self obsessed and 'busy' (in the inorganic, modern sense) to really be a friend

tenebrisalietum2• 5 years ago

Telemarketers have really ruined phone calls. No one under 40 is using them anymore unless they're expecting a call from a potential employer--the only reason in the past decade I've ever "waited" for a phone call--and I'm noticing more and more job postings will reach out to you via text or email first.

34679• 5 years ago

Massively Manipulated, Monitored, and Moderated Media

MMMMM

goatinaboat• 5 years ago

Faceblock, Twatter, Instaglam, Discard, Snapper, TikTak, LinkedOut

I really hoped that Clubhouse would corral all the hardcore narcissists away from all other social media, but it's made them worse, they spend all their time on Twitter bragging about how they're on Clubhouse now. Pathetic.

alea_iacta_est• 5 years ago

I just read the first few chapters, what a great reference, thank you.

kilroy123• 5 years ago

How ironic you need to click on a link to Harvard.edu. What times we live in.

seniorgarcia2• 5 years ago

JSTOR and the Harvard press needs to just go away. As someone who does IT for a university library in Germany JSTOR access is just ridiculous, even ignoring their fees.

keiferski7• 5 years ago

https://www.amazon.com/Ethics-Authenticity-Charles-Taylor/dp...

lstodd• 5 years ago

Social media is no longer authentic

Has it ever been? Well, maybe before it got called 'social'.

AdmiralGinge2• 5 years ago

I think anonymity or pseudonymity is the differentiator here. Things like Facebook have never been authentic because they're so welded to your personal identity, if your colleagues and family can find you then I think you're always going to be posting through a mask.

agumonkey2• 5 years ago

I think the whole thing is bogus from the start, the 'social media' idea I mean. These are companies.. they're not here to make culture or societies.. they're parasite leeching on your human needs.

When a new trends starts organically, it's all impulsive and genuine, then people start to profit on it and the game is over.

GuB-422• 5 years ago

When a new trends starts organically, it's all impulsive and genuine, then people start to profit on it and the game is over.

I think I have seen the same argument about anime conventions. The idea is that a trend starts with a small group of passionate people, as things get bigger and more popular, followers arrive. Followers are not really passionate, they just jump on the bandwagon, but will leave and jump on another bandwagon as the thing gets less trendy. With the followers come people who will try to profit on them since they represent a sizable market. Among the "exploiters" are former members of the original group, who see a find a way to monetize their passion, taking advantage of their deep knowledge of the field.

So the idea that "people start to profit and the game is over" is mostly right, but the dynamic is more complex than just having a small number of people ruining it from everyone else.

And it is not all bad. While the community is less genuine, it is also more productive, if anything, just from the sheer numbers.

krick4• 5 years ago

That's kind of true. You obviously know the reasons why it should be true, but consider also (the "kind of" part) the fact that there's stuff like mastodon, like small hobbyist forums, unpopular telegram groups & channels that don't sell ads, imageboards with a couple hundreds of users. They appear because people (the users, not so much the owners) need them. And they are (at least sometimes) loosing to FB/reddit/twitter, because there's at least something (even if that "something" is the network effect) that these Companies are better at providing.

Which means, that even if they only want to be companies, they (unfortunately for all) indeed are the "social media" in some sense. Sometimes even borderline with "essential infrastructure".

coldtea2• 5 years ago

I think the whole thing is bogus from the start, the 'social media' idea I mean. These are companies.. they're not here to make culture or societies..

Nonetheless, they do. Medium is the message and all that.

calibas• 5 years ago

When a new trends starts organically, it's all impulsive and genuine, then people start to profit on it and the game is over.

What you describe is simply the nature of a trend, it's happened with everything from modern Occupy movements to the teachings of Jesus. Something original and authentic becomes stale after it's been repeated a million times over.

The problem is with trends themselves, the original idea is authentic, but then it passes like a wave in the frenzy of a "trend".

teawrecks• 5 years ago

I think that phenomenon has existed long before the internet, though.

perfectritone• 5 years ago

Don't forget Guy Debord who was writing about this in 1967.

"The spectacle presents itself as something enormously positive, indisputable and inaccessible. It says nothing more than "that which appears is good, that which is good appears. The attitude which it demands in principle is passive acceptance which in fact it already obtained by its manner of appearing without reply, by its monopoly of appearance."

"False choice in spectacular abundance, a choice which lies in the juxtaposition of competing and complimentary spectacles and also in the juxtaposition of roles (signified and carried mainly by things) which are at once exclusive and overlapping, develops into a struggle of vaporous qualities meant to stimulate loyalty to quantitative triviality."

irrational2• 5 years ago

TIL that I’m a social media hipster. And here I was thinking that I never got a Facebook, Instagram, etc. account because I am an old fart.

philosphyreply• 5 years ago

For me, the point of the original article wasn’t how to be authentic in theory or why people try to be, but how are people trying and what are some of the ways that seem noteworthy?

And I think it’s really interesting if there is really a social undercurrent, especially in new generations, that political and social engagement is futile, and instead people are trying to invent new disengaged futures.

It resonates with me, at least.

coldtea2• 5 years ago

Charles Taylor, the philosopher, covered much of this about twenty years ago with far less snark and buzzwords.

No, he just covered a general trend about authenticity and examples up to his time.

TFA covers the specifics of today and is about different aspects than what Taylor covered.

NotChina2• 5 years ago

Easy enough to identify that which the powers that be, deny a platform. The unaffiliated are generalized, and grouped together despite not being real bed fellows. What modern labels did not exist for the entirety of human discourse? Yet our modern generation is the first to recognize some condition that eluded all those previous generations. Persecution unifies, and becomes a self fulfilling prophecy. (e.g. the alienation of moderate Islam post 911)

NotChina2• 5 years ago

Nothing validates ones views more than a circle of like minded curmudgeons judging everybody else.

imaginationra7• 5 years ago

I run an independent film/animation/music/interactive studio- I have never owned any mobile phone and don't use any social media except for youtube. Our studio is not on any social media platforms. We are the counterculture.

Our studio has released torrents of media over the past 15 years that I would classify as counterculture but you would never know because we aren't hustling on Zuckerbergian platforms or playing the "please look at me" game on Youtube etc.

Trailerjacked trailer for counterculture game that makes animations https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vrMEQPtMO4c

Scene from a counterculture animated feature film in progress made in a game engine https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=bgMeIaqjRvY

Counterculture is not dead, its just not playing in the sandboxes everyone else is playing in, because those sandboxes are lame as fuck.

JumpCrisscross2• 5 years ago

its just not playing in the sandboxes everyone else is playing in

Where is it playing?

greenonions3• 5 years ago

Youtube apparently.

(This was sarcasm)

SuoDuanDao• 5 years ago

I too would like to know this. I realize there's a rule one of the internet issue, but it's worth asking all the same.

yowlingcat2• 5 years ago

Not the OP but I'll bite -- I've seen some incredible counterculture emerging out of what I like to term the IRC revival, or Discord communities. Discord and Roblox have fueled the communities creating a ton of the more interesting music I've discovered over the past year.

airhead96910• 5 years ago

Special sandboxes with purple sand surrounded in velvet ropes only the cool kids know about. And with unlimited fresh lemonade, chocolate milk, and warm chocolate-chip cookies. You can almost see one during the winter solstice.

lozaning• 5 years ago

Not OP, but I feel like I come across more and more art house style stuff thats only on Vimeo. Which to be fair is still pretty mainstream.

imaginationra7• 5 years ago

You have to pull to find it- we live in a push world now and that's why all you see is the same old crap- because people aren't searching new works out- they are just sitting around letting curators and algo's push it to them.

keiferski7• 5 years ago

YouTube is filled with so many interesting little channels. I wish the algorithms highlighted them more.

I remember one channel of an old guy just smoking a cigar for an hour. Said nothing, just sat there. There were thousands of videos of him doing this, going back years. I don’t remember the name of it, unfortunately.

the_duke• 5 years ago

Can you share a few?

YouTube always seems to stick me in a bubble and never recommends any worthwhile new channels.

dylanblanchard• 5 years ago

might you be thinking of Adolfo Mateo? https://www.youtube.com/user/SMOKERSOFCIGARSPIPES/videos

pope_meat• 5 years ago

That's a sex thing. People are jerking off to videos of people smoking. The more you know.

dylan6042• 5 years ago

There used to be a televangelist that did something similar. He would light up his cigar and drink his whiskey, and yell at the audience he was not going to preach until a his audience called in with some donation threshold. He would then cut to footage of his/a horse running around in a field/pen.

newsbinator• 5 years ago

Recommendation for those looking:

/r/artisanvideos

* pleasant guy talking for 45 minutes about his lifetime of experience using chains: https://www.reddit.com/r/ArtisanVideos/comments/lyvfzz/just_...

* man weaves a bed: https://www.reddit.com/r/EngineeringPorn/comments/978s2c/man...

airhead96910• 5 years ago

We are the counterculture.

Isn't that a tad bit arrogant to stick a flag in all of it? See also: https://youtu.be/uEx5G-GOS1k

Youtube is "lame as fuck." Release everywhere to not be arbitrarily silenced because anything good is controversial, by definition.

Why abuse the word "counterculture" so many times? It comes across like you're trying too hard.

Good luck and I hope you find an audience rather than make at obscurity for the point of staying in obscurity.

bobthechef• 5 years ago

"anything good is controversial, by definition."

No, it isn't.

imaginationra7• 5 years ago

Its not arrogance- it is confidence.

We've been doings like this for twenty years. We made Potato Phones in 2002 before a potato phone was a thing https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=lo3StA3INws

Youtube is lame- our work is also archived on Internet Archive and other places- this is a 172 gb master of one of our films https://archive.org/details/heartstringmarionette

Flag? I don't see a flag. I see text.

The "try too hard" stuff usually comes from weak people who are wannabe creators but lack the guts to do it, let alone stick with it for several decades while remaining original and independent.

Mediterraneo106• 5 years ago

I have never owned any mobile phone

Eschewing a mobile phone has been pretty counterculture these recent years, but I think we are close to a point where it will no longer be sustainable, at least for anyone wanting to cross borders – or depending on the country, even enter a restaurant or concert. Several governments have announced that their vaccine passports will exist as mobile phone apps, because paper certificates are too easily forged.

dmitrygr3• 5 years ago

Wait till they see how easy it is to make a lookalike app :)

JasonFruit6• 5 years ago

At that point, countercultural starts looking like the only game in town, at least that is worth playing.

bawolff3• 5 years ago

I dont get why paper docs are still forgeable in this day and age.

Just put a qr code on it containing the same info plus a digital signature, and have verifiers scan it with an app. That sounds a lot more secure than the enduser having an app that the verifier just looks at with their eyes.

imaginationra7• 5 years ago

We work just fine without mobiles. The plus is that we aren't enslaved to a handheld device ruled by rich guys.

JacobSuperslav2• 5 years ago

how is youtube counterculture?

dylan6042• 5 years ago

The fact that you can post pretty much any video you make for people to watch is totally counterculture the media studio TV programming culture that has lost viewers to platforms like YT. It has become so big itself that it is now pretty much the defacto culture.

imaginationra7• 5 years ago

It's just a platform and for now we can put things like this on it https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=V3SDNrxe-1M

everdrive3• 5 years ago

I was originally going to write a more thoughtful response, but then I got to this section:

"The names of these e-deologies tend to be both fantastical and literal."

"post-civilizationist"

"voluntarist post-agrarianist"

"Fully Automated Luxury Gay Space Communism"

I've really never heard of categories like these. It makes me think the author has delved into subcultures I really have no experience in. In that sense her descriptions may or may not be valid. But, she makes no attempt to bring specificity to a lot of her claims. Who are these people in these subcultures? How many people are in them, and how many people are out of them?

In this sense, it reads a lot like a "cultural studies" piece; there is some great individual insight, but the overall essay makes claims it hasn't supported.

chordalkeyboard2• 5 years ago

post-civilizationist

http://www.johnzerzan.net/articles/why-primitivism.html

voluntarist

https://voluntaryism.info/

post-agrarianist

https://yalebooks.yale.edu/book/9780300182910/against-grain

Fully Automated Luxury Gay Space Communism

I can’t help you there, sorry :)

KineticLensman• 5 years ago

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fully_Automated_Luxury_Commu...

markandrewj• 5 years ago

It's sort of ironic that the photographer for this article is on instagram.

kodah2• 5 years ago

There's definitely an old internet culture that eschews social media and it has seemed to grow (again) over the years. One example is Freenode:

- The network has some moderation, but bans are last resorts where on social media bans and temporary bans are part of the process.

- Much of the moderation is left to channel operators and guides are given by the network on how to moderate.

- Much of the network is apolitical and you can even be banned for talking about politics in many channels. This runs counter to pop-culture with encourages not only discussing politics but airing your politics with known dissidents.

- Nearly every channel is topic focused, where pop-culture and social media encourage broad, boundaryless discussion.

- Pseudoanonymity is still an option; in contrast to real identity policies in social media.

You can't tell me that's not culture, but maybe it's not a whole culture just yet. That said, keep poking the bear cub and see if it doesn't grow up.

simonh• 5 years ago

You just described the internet I've been using for almost 30 years, split across various online forums, including this one. Couldn't agree more. I've managed to find a good handful of very high signal to noise Reddit topics too. G+ was good while it lasted.

The trick is to have specific interests you care about and track down that community. They're out there. The encouraging thing is my kinds have found their own communities online and among friends without my help. They use Discord, Twitch, a bit of instagram and such. They're tech savvy geeks though, if somewhat differently geeky to myself. They know what they're interested in and look for that because most of mass culture is just occasionally amusing background noise to them. I'm very encouraged.

I often see people bemoaning the passing of the old internet, but for me it's all still out there and thriving. Several new layers of it have developed too. It's just not the only, or 'biggest' internet anymore.

kodah2• 5 years ago

It is still out there, you just have to work to attain it.

I'm happy to listen to the bemoaning, mainly because the newest and largest groups on the internet are the most problematic and most of them have no self-awareness to that end. Better that they hear the bemoaning and get a chance to change and choose not to.

cblconfederate2• 5 years ago

I think platforms like onlyfans will end up bringing back counterculture, especially if more platforms emerge outside the uber-censorious US and esp, if they can embrace new forms of payments. porn is showing the way once again

thelettere• 5 years ago

I'm sorry, but I had to reply to this. People paying or receiving money for every single thing they say to each other and/or even access to do so is countercultural?

It's the exact opposite - arguably the pinnacle of the absurd logic of capitalism and its processes of commodification.

cblconfederate2• 5 years ago

No it's people not needing to pander to the mood and whims of the crowd or the majority for every single thing they say , but being paid directly by their niche audience. I believe onlyfans is already too restrictive for them but it shows how it's done; we ll probably need something more anonymous

reilly3000• 5 years ago

From what I see on TikTok, GenZ are coming out as low-key marxists in droves. As a millennial I grew up through a process that started with believing in free-market ideals and slowly seeing them shattered with each passing atrocity of monopolists. I'd mark Enron/Worldcom times as a coming-of-age for my economic cynicism, and its been exponentiating ever since, especially through my journey as an entrepreneur and employer. These kids have had cynical humor and class struggle as mother's milk, and have little interest in repeating history. That isn't to say that conservativism doesn't have a place among today's youth, but its largely promoted with billions of dollars being poured into targeted influence campaigns. Bullshit has a tiny half-life these days as fact-checking anything is a matter of moving one's thumbs in a small incantation.

swayvil2• 5 years ago

One way to rebel without rebelling is to pursue the exact same ideals as those pushed by your culture, except better.

(Greg Egan proposed this technique in his novel, Quarantine)

Snarking off about the ubiquitous hypocrisy would be one level of that, of course. (Seen in much popular comedy.) But there are higher.

ret2plt• 5 years ago

This is a minor nitpick, but I think claiming that anarcho-primitivism is less fringe than it seems because the youtube channel "Primitive Technology" is popular is seriously reaching.

mensetmanusman• 5 years ago

Counterculture completely aligns with corporate America now, it’s fascinating.

The punk manifesto could be written by McDonalds.

JacobSuperslav2• 5 years ago

no it doesn't. true counterculture means these corporations would be dead. they are just choosing few parts that make for nice ads.

SyzygistSix16• 5 years ago

That was the former counterculture. Countercultures often get co-opted by mainstream culture; the trappings of the counterculture even more so.

foolofatom• 5 years ago

The kids are alt-right.

narrator• 5 years ago

I think the closest thing to counterculture today would be the world of cryptocurrency. It is the least connected thing to the rest of whole mainstream ecosystem that has serious unstoppable vitality.

Btw, reading about Boyd Rice reminded me of Russian experimental electronic band GameBoydRice who makes music using a hacked gameboy and a mixer. https://youtu.be/lxzpatLthxE

Just one of the billions of random little market segments and sub genres out there. The mainstream had much less hold on the world than it used to. The platform censorship though constrains it. Crypto doesn't have those constraints though. One is reminded of how Wikileaks, getting locked out of every bank, took cryptocurrency donations and became hugely wealthy as a result.

real_counter• 5 years ago

You will find it on 4chan. /pol/ more precisely.

The counter-culture that goes against all political, media, financial and corporate institutions.

scubazealous2• 5 years ago

Counterculture will never die, it always adapts. While it is hard to find there are aspects of counterculture ideas on mainstream platforms like Instagram but they are obstructed.

How do you define counterculture? It is outside the mainstream, yes, but it does not need to be hidden. There are still individuals and groups who are "against the grain" in our society and always will be.

In my experience these people are relatively private when it comes to their digital life (not absent!) but can be amazing storytellers in other mediums, through song, dance, writing, etc.

I think the biggest misconstruction is that the counterculture is a single shared idea or that it is freely accessible to the masses.

laser• 5 years ago

"We can imagine collectively held physical spaces reclaimed from empty retail or abandoned venues hosting esoteric local scenes" Where is this happening?

SyzygistSix16• 5 years ago

One aspect of present-day counterculture that differentiates it from the past is the lack of focus on individualism. Individualism as culture has been sold back to us so often its relevance is necessarily less important now. Which may be another reason why it is difficult to find. It's also genuinely more scary than a loner in a leather jacket, in front of his car, selling rock and roll, hamburgers and Coke. In the past it was easier because the the counterculture was easy to find - follow the well-worn path of individualism to the last corners of censored culture. Now that those paths are almost entirely explored, finding a different, more inspired counterculture is much more difficult.

lanevorockz• 5 years ago

We are moving into a brave new world. Take your digital soma, stay at home, follow the rules and only speak the approved propaganda.

kjrose• 5 years ago

His definition of counterculture sorta seems limited. When punk and being a rebel is fully co opted by those in power, doesn't that kinda defeat the whole image part of being counter culture.

Like in a fashion counter culture could be the Amish if the culture is extremely anti Amish.

rayrrr• 5 years ago

If counterculture has changed in this context, so has détournement.

The internet didn’t kill counterculture – you just won’t find it on Instagram

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