This is a bizarre take. Compared to the world of my youth, culture of today is far less homogenous. And alternative voices far easier to find.<p>I lived in and near a city of a million people, but getting access to "alternative" music was difficult. My teenage daughter can find anything she wants on her phone.<p>Radical politics was fringe and out there. I scoured the local used bookstore for anything I could find that. Easy to find whatever you want now.<p>Publishing music or poetry or your opinions in general was a major endeavour. "Zine" culture was vibrant but marginal. Now you can easily publish whatever you want. (Doesn't mean you'll find an audience though.)<p>As for AMC or whatever. I'll repeat what others have said: why are you looking there? Why would you expect to find diversity there? Or in print journalism? Or in music charts? These are artifacts of the past. I can hear my 14 year old through the wall cleaning her bedroom while listening to Baby Metal. She didn't get that from a chart. Or from me. Stop looking for the "abnormal" in "normal" places.<p>That said, going to see Bob's Burgers in the movie theatre tonight with the family. It's not radical or subversive, to be sure, but something like that would never have made it to the screen in the 80s.<p>Now, if your definition of "counterculture" is a) being an anti-social jerk and b) getting attention and getting paid for it on someone else's platform. Yeah, you might have a hard time now.<p>Apart from the cultural rupture of the late 60s and early 70s, much of the entire second half of the 20th century was a wave of pretty aggressive mass media mass market conformity, so much so that our reaction as youths was similarily aggressive. Where do you think the anger in punk came from? Because everything kind of sucked.<p>If there's a problem with "counterculture" today it's that it'd be very hard to pick one single culture to counter.
I disagree, I think countercultures must still exist. They always do, even if we can't see them.<p>Part of the issue is that you can't look for the counterculture in the places you expect to find it. If you do, you're probably just looking at a different corner of the same culture.<p>The other part of the issue is that even if you happen upon a counterculture, you may not like what you find.<p>For something to be truly countercultural, it couldn't just stand for the things we already agree with, it would have to genuinely shock or offend us. Because we are the culture, a counterculture would by definition be outside our context, and we would just dismiss it as ridiculous, rather than a movement.<p>We would probably not share it virally, or like it on Instagram. Thus, you won't find actual countercultures on popular forums. If you do, they've probably already been banned.<p>I think when we imagine a counterculture, we're actually imagining an edgier but still palatable version of the culture we're in. We think back to the countercultural movements of the 1960s-200s which have become simply the culture itself, and we think "Well, I agree with those movements, so I must be pretty countercultural". But no, that's just your culture. A counterculture is the thing that disagrees with you. An actual counterculture would read to us as ridiculous, dangerous, or even evil.
In some areas I care about like gaming, the counter culture is as good as it’s ever been. So many of my top ten games of all time have been indie titles from the last 5 years. Disco Elysium, Slay the Spire, Edith Finch, Outer Worlds, Inscryption, Vampire Survivor. Just an almost unprecedented level of innovation in gameplay and storytelling and that’s just scratching the surface of a few sub genres I personally enjoy
There's a lot of claims in here which are based on numbers but provide no numerical evidence. Without citations it just comes off as whining.<p><i>Every screen shows the same movie.</i><p>How was this different ten years ago? Twenty? Fifty?<p><i>The banal word ‘content’ is used to describe every type of creative work, implying that artistry is generic and interchangeable.</i><p>The greater the number of people interacting the more interchangeable any human output becomes. More people equals less granular. Five natural scientists five hundred years ago in a nation of 500,000 people have a much wider variety of capability and output than ten thousand engineers in a nation of fifty million today.<p><i>The dominant company in the creative culture views everything as a brand extension.</i><p>There's no explanation as to why this is bad. I think it's pretty cool Disney is building Star Wars themed hotels when the alternative is hotel-themed hotels.<p><i>Indie music and alt music are marginalized.</i><p>Again no citation. Show me that people today listen to less indie music than they did in 2000.<p><i>Telling jokes becomes a dangerous profession.</i><p>There's not even a comment or a claim on this one, just a video of one rich guy slapping another rich guy. Are more comedians facing career-ending audience reactions than they used to?<p>Overall this is an incredibly low-effort article and I'm disappointed it hit the HN front page.
Of course there's no counterculture---(but not for the reasons given in the article)---the Internet has made it a part of mainstream culture. No matter how absurdly counter-mainstream you make a piece of music, film, etc., you will find an audience enjoying it online. There is no counterculture because almost everyone is a part of at least one niche subculture. The fact that you're posting this on a forum that would have undoubtedly been called "countercultural" 30-40 years ago is telling of how far culture has changed since the times when the Top 40 chart was relevant.
The author is defining "culture" as megacorp-owned content, which is absurdly reductive. It's an ivory-tower view, that he's seemingly railing against, but can't put his finger on because he's strictly of the tower. On the other hand, there is <i>so much derivative CRAP</i> out there, good word.<p>Problem is, good entertainment is still happening locally, but (hey author,) <i>you need to get off your ass to find it</i>. Bands, comedians, actors, etc. who you haven't heard of unless you're actively attending -- with tens to hundreds of audience members. Statistically, it isn't even a blip. But it's the "culture" the author finds missing. The revolution will not be televised.
The political supermajority in California is an interesting example of this. I'm a registered Democrat but having a single party dominate every aspect of society is increasingly narrowing Overton windows and creating homogenized monoculture views amongst those who don't think. Opposition and counterculture is as essential to liberal democracies as free speech imo
Have you gone to any major, "serious" performance where something felt like an artistic mistake?<p>I'm not referring to mistakes of kitschiness, or excess, or technical incorrectness. If you're in any place where folks are exploring expression (or even technicality), then they will inevitably do something that may seem weird.<p>In those places where culture and expression have peaked and got nowhere to go, where the gestalt has distinctly chosen predictability over possibility, things may feel out of place simply because they're e.g. displays of skill for the sake of displays of skill. Or even more tritely, production for production's sake.<p>This may sound alternately cliché or obvious-after-the-fact, but when there is no counterculture, nothing will be weird, at all. And that is because nothing is being dared or played with.
More optimistically, everything now is counterculture. There is no consensus reality. Sure there are still big corporations like Disney making the same old formulaic stuff (which btw lots of people genuinely love). But it's not weird anymore to not keep up with the mainstream. Everyone used to read one of the same one or two local newspapers. Now you can choose from millions of blogs, podcasts, etc. In the past you simply couldn't publish a book without going through an established company, indie or otherwise. Today you can self-publish, or even give your book away online for free.<p>These concepts are not zero sum. The world is not the same as 60 years ago but rearranged, it's an entirely new world full of different people and possibilities. But that fact doesn't make for a good viral blog post.
"The banal word ‘content’ is used to describe every type of creative work, implying that artistry is generic and interchangeable." Amen to that. I can't stand that fucking word! Every instance of that corporate blandness could be replaced by something more specific.
It’s funny because, for me, this was one of the major confusions when I moved from Europe to the US. In Europe, there are a lot of prominent subcultures, particularly in college. This was totally absent in the US in my experience. Even at places where you would expect it, e.g. underground, hard Techno warehouse raves in Baltimore. Instead the same mainstream people & opinions were there too.
Back in the bad old days, the counterculture was more identifiable because the mainstream was so much more narrow than today, choices were fewer and counterculture weirdos huddled together for warmth, you could find clusters of them.<p>Now society has so, so much more choice, it becomes boring to see the same old hundreds of choices, we’d rather have one mainstream and one underground.<p>Source: lived through the bad old days.
What does the author mean by counterculture? They don't define what a counterculture is, or why it is either good or bad to have one, before listing their suspected symptoms of it.<p>Rather than one monolithic counterculture, there are lots of small signs of divergent movements I would call true counterculture. LGBT, veganism, youth culture like tiktok. There's also harmful ones like the alt-right, antivax, and conspiracy theory movements.<p>These two lines here:<p>"Creative work is increasingly embedded in genres that feel rigid, not flexible"<p>"Even avant-garde work often feels like a rehash of 50-60 years ago"<p>Convinced me the author is having a depressive episode after rewatching Friends on Netflix for the 4th time this year.
> A counterculture is a culture whose values and norms of behavior differ substantially from those of mainstream society, sometimes diametrically opposed to mainstream cultural mores.<p>I don't even know if we have a mainstream culture anymore. Going from 3 tv channels to millions on YouTube means most people aren't watching the same thing. Despite the population exploding, ratings are a fraction of what they were.<p><a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Counterculture" rel="nofollow">https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Counterculture</a>
I'd like to see technical diversity arise.<p>Right now so much digital existence/content/interaction/place is subsidized/exists on a small handful of massive planetary scale quasi-mainframes, big portals/silos. We use a small handful of mostly identical operating systems with little general customization/tailoring.<p>It's not monoculture but technical duo-culture or whatever leaves so much of existence in the hands of so few, is so undiverse, is a place where there's so little chance for new & original & different to get a start.
I disagree with much of the essay (eg: 'Telling jokes becomes a dangerous profession' strikes me as a complete non-sequitur) but I credit the author for asking a fascinating question.<p>I think the sense in which we live in a society lacking counter-culture is that counter-culture now <i>is</i> most of our culture.
In a world dominated by connections and algorithms how would you find counter culture? It's not by visiting the largest movie theater chain in America (AMC has nearly 8000 theaters). I'm not sure it's going to be online (mail list maybe, but not likely an open forum)
What a failure of imagination.<p>Mainstream culture was always bland, safe, and predictible. We remember auteur cinema from the 1970s for example, because they stood the test of time - the great works of Coppola and Scorsese, but the top grossing films of the era were no better than the MCU of today. The same about TV. And music. Look at old Billboard charts, at old Grammy winners - none of them represent the "best" of any decade that we look back at with fondness.<p>Are Alternative weekly newspapers disappearing. Of course. But that's not because there is no outlet for those alternative voices anymore - they are just not being expressed in a dead tree-based medium anymore. They're on YouTube, on blogs, and yes, on Twitter. Do they have the same amount of reach as late night show clips? Of course not, but that was always the case with alternative culture - it was never as big as the mainstream.<p>The controversial (for this site) reality is that Alt-right and ALt-left are the counter cultures. Mainstream American media is extremely centrist and safe, and always has been. The US political system and judicial system are extremely conservative and take very little action except to repress civil rights. The "cancel culture" the right freaks out about IS a counterculture. A perhaps overly left-leaning, but a counterculture to the mainstream nonetheless.
One of my favorite musicians is NateLikesToBattle, who makes English renditions of anime openings.<p>Hes got a ton of views, seems to be doing fine. A couple of video game scores too (River City Girls).<p>I dunno if he does any traditional records, but he is certainly not mainstream.<p>There are a ton of other YouTubers that come to mind (Wellerman / sea shanty memes for example) which became outrageously popular on YouTube, Tik Tok. How do we count these performances?<p>-------<p>Video wise, more and more kids are watching YouTube channels completely alien to me. I really can't keep up with them, but apparently they have millions of views.<p>Dude Perfect, SloMoGuys, some various science channels come up for me a lot. Are these counterculture?<p>I've also participated in some simpler foam-based HEMA combat. As others would call it: LARPing. Is this counterculture?<p>Cause if its considered counterculture and considered dead... I dunno, I see it all over the place.<p>The Age of Empires community rented out a castle and streamed their championship from it. <a href="https://youtu.be/2u3HupyXyKQ" rel="nofollow">https://youtu.be/2u3HupyXyKQ</a><p>That's not mainstream at all. I guess Red Bull sponsored it but otherwise it felt quite natural: the long running members of the community all meeting up and honestly interacting with each other.
Numerous cherry-picked and misleading examples here.<p>The theater screening comparison is apples-to-oranges, as the second (older) image is of an arthouse theater, and many of the films were made in different decades.<p>I don’t doubt that there is less variety in theatrical releases nowadays, but that’s in part because niche content has moved to other media. It’s the same thing with the printed weeklies.<p>“Content” is a superset of “cinema”, not its reduction. It’s been called “programming” on television for decades.<p>Is this the first time a song topped the charts three years in a row?<p>Netflix’s library is shrinking due to the rise of other streaming services, not due to “homogenization”.<p>And the less said about the “slap” tweet linking to a <i>New York Post</i> article, the better.
it kind of depends on what we mean by culture. I go for the simple idea - the minimum set of cohesion forming ideas, norms and practises for an group to self identify as a group.<p>the smaller this set becomes the harder it is to "counter" it. And the stronger the culture has a grip on power the more counter-culture must fight.<p>the US led counter culture in 1960s took on enormous entrenched power in Western world - and mostly it "won".<p>With the advent of social media the idea of a common cultural set is broken - we don't all watch the same TV the same songs, but we have the same government<p>So our common culture battlefield is less over art and more over courts and legislation.
There’s more to (counter) culture than entertainment, but you wouldn’t know it from this article. Even just looking at entertainment, why would you look at the multiplexes or top music charts to find diversity?
If you don't care enough about a certain art form then you'll never search deep enough (and most of the times it's not even that deep) to find the good stuff.
This guy spent a few of his points talking about music. What does he listen to then? Is he passionate about music? Is he knowledgeable? Or does he just like music in general and listens to the radio and his Spotify library?<p>Of course if you have a superficial interest you'll only get fed the mainstream bullshit. But is it seriously that difficult to peruse the cinema's pamphlet and choose some quirky movie near the bottom? Is it that difficult to peruse your radio spectrum and find a station that features more indie musicians? And how about doing some actual research on the internet once you find that quirky movie or that indie song? Maybe you search for the director or the singer, you discover a new genre, you find a forum somewhere and deep down the rabbit hole of incredible new stuff you go.<p>This post screams Gell-Man amnesia to me, I'm sure that this guy is passionate about a topic and would cringe if I said that everything about his favorite passion is mainstream and indie content is disappearing.
This is reminiscent a bit of Ross Douthat's _The Decadent Society_, especially (but not only) in the discussion of the continuous stream of movie remakes.
Even if all these "key indicators" were accurate, how do they are they indicative of a lack of "a counterculture?" This article might as well be titled, "14 warning signs of social decadence," "14 warning signs of corporate dominance," or whatever else. Making some claim and substantiating it with a list of arbitrary observations is not a coherent way to make an argument.<p>What is a counterculture? Isn't alt/indie music marginalized by definition? Why would the (dubious) assertion that joke telling has become dangerous be indicative of no counterculture? What's an example of a period/place with a vibrant counterculture? Can any of these "warning signs" be present in such a period/place?<p>What the author seems to be arguing is that pop culture has become boring and repetitive. For a more interesting take on why this might be the case, see Mark Fisher, Ghosts of My Past--he argues that a set of structural conditions (such as no cheap rent) has led to media industries recycling safe, nostalgic content.
I am seeing this in Photography. Which is why I got back into photography again. Seems ripe for creativity and I do not care if I "break through" to anyone but the people around me IRL.
Either this guy has a wrong definition of "counterculture" or I do. It seems that he is actually writing about a monoculture or homoginizing of mainstream media - both of which I could see making an argument for - but in my mind, a counterculture isn't going to produce a box office success or a top 40 song. If it does then it isn't counterculture any more. It has been assimilated and commoditized to become mainstream culture.
I agree with his point but many are kinda sloppy. For example, I agree with the point about comedians, but it has little to do with Will Smith and metal detectors.
The article focuses on dwindling creativity, but points 2, 5, and 9 are a symptom of good journalism being mostly financially unviable.<p>Also, the Dune movie is not a reboot.
> Break the rules. Stand apart. Keep your head. Go with your heart.<p>> — TV commercial for Vanderbilt perfume, 1994<p>From a book someone recommended recently:<p>Commodify your dissent - <a href="https://openlibrary.org/books/OL687158M/Commodify_your_dissent" rel="nofollow">https://openlibrary.org/books/OL687158M/Commodify_your_disse...</a>
There are numerous stories detailing the ways in which large companies don't give back to open source communities, and how devs in those communities risk becoming burned out on developing open source software.<p>If what the author claims is true then congratulations, independent OSS devs! You don't exist, therefore there is zero risk of burnout.
We live in a world of algorithmically enforced bubbles and the author has found themselves in one. Subcultures and countercultures are fertilized by the internet and a keyword away. The long tail is healthier than ever. The world isn't boring, dear author is boring.
Thr counterculture of the 60s had won by the 90s and now represents the status quo. The counterculture that exists now is unpalletable to regular folk (somewhat by design), but nonetheless highly creative and politically radical (in the other direction)
"The revolution will not be televised." Step outside of your comfort zone, visit cities, neighborhoods and people you might not normally. The counterculture never goes away.
you might enjoy this read 'The internet didn’t kill counterculture—you just won’t find it on Instagram'
<a href="https://www.documentjournal.com/2021/01/the-internet-didnt-kill-counterculture-you-just-wont-find-it-on-instagram/" rel="nofollow">https://www.documentjournal.com/2021/01/the-internet-didnt-k...</a>
This seems like a very Ted Gioia take. I remember over a decade ago one of my best grad-school friends, a fairly sophisticated student and connoisseur of rock, getting into an extended Facebook argument with Ted because he’d made an off-handed-yet-overly-confident dismissal of a significant portion of the genre. Ted was unrelenting in defending a bad take, even though it was pretty clear he didn’t know what he was talking about in that instance. The guy knows jazz and its history better than almost anyone, but he seems to sort of Dunning-Kruger his way through culture outside that rarefied sphere. He definitely shouldn’t be setting himself up as some sort of oracular critical voice on culture.<p>(Of the brothers Gioia, I’ve always preferred Dana, anyway.)
bahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahaha, yeah, the disappearance of "alt weeklies" is a sign of creeping hegemony. Because how could subversive messages spread in 2022 without low quality print magazines with diy stencil art?<p>Our culture is nothing but counterculture. The entire thing is copies of copies of copies of the author thinking that they and their friends are the first and only people to take a bold stance against power, or corruption, or whatever.
This is what capitalism (at least in its current form) does: it kills creativity while driving up rents.<p>Communism also killed creativity by educating people to think the same, but at least the jobs were secure and the rent was very cheap.<p>Example: video games.<p>Of course there were a lot of failures in the beginning, but at least there was loads of creativity.<p>Then the "EA" system kicked in and killed creativity... because they did not want to take any risks with creative game design but rather "make a new" what sold in the past (NFL games, FIFA games...) but with shinier grafix, as if grafix was all of the fun (think about minecraft).<p>So sooner or later money kills creativity PLUS human development.<p>It really is that bad.
Seems more like 14 signs that the author is living in a bubble, they've missed that the US is currently in the middle of a fairly nasty culture war.