[browningstreet]

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.

[redisman]

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.

[juststeve]

> 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.

[giantrobot]

It didn't though. By the time of Doom's release video games (console and PC) were a multi-billion dollar industry. Only a quarter of households had PCs and none had Internet access. Even by 2000 only half of all households had a computer and only about 40% had Internet access.

Doom was not some watershed moment in entertainment. It was a trend setter, or at least a meme, in the industry but it didn't somehow change the trajectory of the game industry.

The PlayStation was vastly more influential on the industry on the whole than Doom. It was less expensive than PCs yet had a good selection of the sort of "mature" titles (or even ports) typically found on the PC. The PlayStation was not a platform that moved money from the "MSM" since it Sony which was the very definition of mainstream.

Doom was cool but it didn't even come close to doing what you suggest. It didn't even have Internet multiplayer until Kali (originally iDOOM) came up with their IPX/SPX bridging years after its release.

[juststeve]

Shareware and distribution of the game through the internet was a watershed moment that helped sell a lot of Wolfenstein and doom in 1992 and 1993. It is doubtful that a company like Nintendo would distribute a game like doom. PS was a few years after that. Are these statements correct, or hyperbole?

[giantrobot]

Wolfenstein and Doom's nature as shareware was much less about the Internet distribution but distribution by third parties on physical media. They were almost universally available on magazine cover discs and anyone else shipping CD-ROMs. IIRC even Blender magazine had at least one issue shipping a copy of Doom.

While id was certainly an Internet aware company in 1993 most consumers were not.

Keep in mind in 1993 a minority of households even had computers. A minority of those users even had modems. Even when they did have computers with modems connecting to a "local" BBS could still be a local toll call.

A copy of that month's PC Gamer was much cheaper than a modem and got you not just Doom but hundreds of megabytes of other crap. Cover discs were still a big deal even towards the end of the decade where home Internet access was more common.

As for the PlayStation, it was released in the Japan in 1994 and the US in 1995. Doom was released at the end of 1993 so it's contemporaneous with the PlayStation. The PSX had Doom-quality 3D games (including Doom itself) for a fraction of what a good Doom running PC cost.

[juststeve]

> While id was certainly an Internet aware company in 1993 most consumers were not.

Right, so you agree? This thread is about counter culture, and your talking about generic internet usage facts and % of playstation sales when it went mainstream. I played Wolf and Doom as shareware in Australia when they were released, including Kali.

[ogurechny]

Internet was neither the only computer network available to consumers, nor the first one. Users had been pretty connected even before they started having IP addresses. Also, Internet is not a synonym of World Wide Web.

[giantrobot]

Most consumers didn't have computers. Let alone modems or any online service. Consumers were not pretty connected when Doom was released and wouldn't be for until the end of the decade. Businesses and schools with Internet access were 1) decidedly not consumer systems and 2) not the target market for video games.

[Kelamir]

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

redisman, could you tell more about this?

[bcrosby95]

Probably referring to https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/1993_congressional_hearings_on...

Keep in mind when these games were released there was no rating system for video games. The ESRB came about because of these hearings.

[rchaud]

And yet by 1995 Bill Gates was appearing in a video promo for Doom on Windows, wearing a trenchcoat and carrying a shotgun. For obvious reasons, this kind of nerdy frivolity wouldn't really be palatable after 1999.

[pjc50]

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

[bena]

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.

[Mediterraneo10]

Listening to KPop in a country where it is not a major genre, might still be counterculture. Think back to the 1960s and 1970s: a lot of the American rock 'n' roll even then was curated, but those young people in the Soviet Union, say, or Morocco who started listening to it where definitely seen as a counterculture within their own country.

[pessimizer]

> Listening to KPop in a country where it is not a major genre, might still be counterculture.

Abstractly maybe, but in actuality an enormous amount of money and effort is spent to market K-Pop in the US by some of the largest media companies in the world.

[Nasrudith]

And it took an enormous amount of effort to get rock music into and distributed within the Soviet Union. It was produced through the systems of a leading power with organizations that would be illegal locally. I don't see how that changes that the counter culture goes against the general flow until it manages to become it.

[astrange]

They get pretty far by just allowing it to appear on YouTube. Japanese music companies spend all their effort on stopping anyone outside the country from listening by DMCAing all the music videos.

[dunnevens]

The product is most certainly manufactured. But the culture's response to it is not. The fandom has their own language, their own in-jokes, and will rally together for the causes they find important. They've created something real for themselves. "Counter-culture" may or may not be the right term for what they've made, but it is something independent of the corporations that own the music.

That's a distinction that should be noted because you can see it everywhere. For example: the MCU, Star Wars, and Star Trek are all corporate products produced for a mass audience. But the fandom is independent of that control. The number of good jokes, fan theories, and fan art I've seen for WandaVision has been immense. And the impact of the Star Wars & Star Trek fandoms is also enormous on the culture at large. That's something Disney or Paramount can possibly influence but never hope to control.

[monocasa]

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

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

[rufus_foreman]

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.

[toyg]

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.

[rufus_foreman]

>> Some of those hardcore punks were driven around to the sound of Rolling Stones, Led Zeppelin, Lennon’s “Imagine”.

I was one of those hardcore punks and I think you greatly overestimate both the level of parental involvement we had in our lives as well as our parents' musical tastes.

Hardcore as a youth movement didn't get swallowed by the mainstream, it just ceased to exist.

[ArtWomb]

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