No, he's just observant. Historical periods change how culture operates and what parts are relevant. There hasn't been a counterculture for some time, including there not being one when most of us here were young. The last throws were in the 80s.
There are structural and cultural reasons that make it difficult to have one now (the internet's total immediacy and transparency of everything, post-modernism which means nothing is ever really new now, just recombinations).
Disagree. The old version of (largely youth) counterculture died when the Internet happened and sped up the time to propagation and commodification of any given fashion or thought.
I agree that now counterculture sits with the deplorables. The old style stuff has been fully adopted by the mainstream.
Real estate matters. One of the prerequisites of a counterculture seems to be urban areas in which it is possible to live cheaply without working too hard. Those are hard to find in the US right now, but existed in the 1950s through the 1980s.
China now has a "lying flat" counterculture, where young people move to cheap third-tier cities where they can escape the rat race. The government is not happy about this.[1] (The term refers not to people lying down, but to crops flat in fields and not harvestable.)
Half and half. I think its true that old style counter cultures and the avant garde no longer exist but also that the "deplorables" is not counter culture. The global kind (versus but encompassing the USA specific manifestation) is a kind of reaction against progressivism based on tradition. The word "reactionary" might be used more by people hopefully without the 19th century let-them-eat-cake connotations! It's alternative.
Generally there may be some confusion of categories. There is a difference between alternative, sub and counter cultures. There are lots of sub cultures still around, and lots of groups doing their own alternative thing. I think previous counter cultures had sub cultural manifestations. Punk is a classic example with the "punk ethic". The sub culture got recuperated and commodified, and the ethic mostly but not completely died.
I'd say cyberpunk lives on in the critical take of hackers towards AI and technological capitalism for example but even if its not a subculture now and even if there's no real counter culture it still influences many counter cultural ideas. The spirit or ideas of cyberpunk hasn't been fully adopted by mainstream at the same time the aesthetic subculture was.
Interesting response, thanks. The definition of counterculture that I see most frequently is: "A culture whose values and norms of behavior differ substantially from those of mainstream society, sometimes diametrically opposed to mainstream cultural mores."
By that yardstick, I'd say the alt-right or whatever you want to call it is a reactionary counterculture rather than a progressive counterculture, largely as a result of progressive countercultural values from the 1950s-90s having been incorporated into mainstram culture.
A few months ago I asked ChatGPT to use the principal of the Hegelian dialectic to tell me what the synthesis arising from the current progressive culture and the alternative reactionary one would be. Naturally it was useless.
[EDIT: I just reframed the question for it today and the answer was actually reasonable, if a little uninspired, obvs]
Communications barriers slowed the inrush of the sociopaths into whatever was hip at internet speed they arrive on the scene faster than the normies do.
So for communities to form there has to be other barriers. The foundational ideas being distasteful batshit is one option, but it's probably not the only one.
You might be surrounded by interesting countercultures and not even know about it: whatever properties save them from instant commoditization also keep you out.
> Communications barriers slowed the inrush of the sociopaths into whatever was hip at internet speed they arrive on the scene faster than the normies do.
Ah. Crypto.
Relevant new book on crypto and influencers: "Easy Money", by Ben McKenzie and Jacob Silverman.
Rock was just blues recombined and hip hop was just drum solos recombined. Everything "counter culture" a generation comes up with becomes cultural business for the next, when the youth who created it gets mortgages.
But there's always subversive, alternative sub cultures out there. A world of 8 billion, where the Internet has been a thing for over 30 years, with literal hundreds of giant cities. And you think "there's no more counter culture because I ain't seeing any"? Really?
That's the problem: rock wasn't just blues recombined, nor hip hop just drum solos recombined.
And they didn't hit culturally like mere recombinations.
Blues were an "folk" art form from blacks, expressiving everyday problems, heartbreaks, poverty etc, in a speficic expressive and cultural context.
Rock even from its early days operated in a very different context (teen fun and rebellion initially), and developed into very different aesthetic and social spheres, from student protests and civil rights to anti-war and mind-expansion.
Except from understanding that it had blues as part of its musical (and only musical) heritage, it wasn't perceived as a mere recombination of blues, and it didn't serve the same social role as blues did.
>But there's always subversive, alternative sub cultures out there. A world of 8 billion, where the Internet has been a thing for over 30 years, with literal hundreds of giant cities.
The recentness doesn't really change much about how fast something can spread. For example almost everybody of age in those 8 billions has a mobile phone now (even in the poorest African countries) and yet phones have really been a thing for 25 years.
If your point is "we might not see subversive, alternative sub cultures out there" but surely there must be some in some of those "literal hundreds of giant cities" all over the world, I think it makes my point. Countercultures were major impactful movements in the western world for decades. And your answer basically amounts to "just because you can't see them doesn't mean there's not some still going on in Cairo or Okinawa".
It's like saying "shoe cobbling isn't dead, there's some such shops in New York" or "Addis Ababa has quite a few".
You are jumping over a key step in the development from blues to rock. There wasn’t just black blues followed by white rock. There was nascent rock that was still a black art form, but a very sexually expressive one (whence the very name of the genre) – the folk art wasn’t just about expressing Black hardships, but also getting down and getting nasty. Once you consider that interim stage where some rebelliousness was already present, it isn’t hard to see a smooth evolution from one genre to another, albeit early white rock intentionally purged the sexual element.
The sexual element was there in the blues from the beginning, it wasn't something that developed later and became rock. It was there even in pre-1900 century black song, as they were less constrained from the white's puritanism.
In any case, it wasn't the crucial difference between the social function (and the aesthetic development) of blues and rock.
Some counter culture movements from the US had some mainstream impact. If having mainstream impact is your criterion for the existence or relevance of counter culture, you're defining it from the point of view of the establishment. It just reinforces my belief that someone defining counter culture by the mainstream cultural narrative built post hoc around some aspects of it wouldn't be aware of the current streams in the counter cultural depths.
There's a full generation of adults who grew up taking the Internet for granted is my point. There are many orders of magnitude of information flowing there than you can even imagine. Yet you claim to _know_ counter culture isn't a thing anymore because you don't see any mainstream cultural narratives describing any aspects of it. Do you see the problem in this logic?
"Rock" is a post hoc narrative packaging something that came organically from counter cultural movements. Same goes for "blues" or "hip hop". These labels and the packaging of counter cultural (i.e. subversive of the values of the establishment) manifestations for mainstream consumption, are where counter culture goes to die. That's why I said they're just a re-packaging of something that came before and appeared organically.
Once it has a widely known name and a section in the nearest media outlet, it's by definition part of the mainstream.
So if you look around and you can't see any grand narratives about new cultural artifacts from "the youths/the minorities", how impactful they are and where you can buy an album, and conclude there's no more counter culture. I guess you're just telling on yourself at this point.
>There's a full generation of adults who grew up taking the Internet for granted is my point. There are many orders of magnitude of information flowing there than you can even imagine. Yet you claim to _know_ counter culture isn't a thing anymore because you don't see any mainstream cultural narratives describing any aspects of it. Do you see the problem in this logic?
In this logic, yes, meaning your argument :)
Counter-culture doesn't mean obscure and indiscoverable. So "there's so much internet, there's bound to be some counter-culture in there you've missed" is not an answer.
Even if it was, it would be irrelevant. What made counter-culture relevant (as opposed to "what a very small bunch a people do for their own amusement"), was the interplay at the edges of established culture, and the influence it exerted over it. Until the next one came, and so on.
So, "once it has a widely known name and a section in the nearest media outlet, it's by definition part of the mainstream" is precisely what's not been seen happening (with insignificant exceptions).
In any case, it's not like this hasn't been covered a lot. See Mark Fisher's writings for an example.
The political aspect was really small. Except maybe the far right militia incursion in the european rave that made everybody wear kaki pants, get short hair and throw the colored stuff out, oh and the military style insignas of many of the collectives.
There are structural and cultural reasons that make it difficult to have one now (the internet's total immediacy and transparency of everything, post-modernism which means nothing is ever really new now, just recombinations).