[Animats]

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.)

[1] https://www.brookings.edu/articles/the-lying-flat-movement-s...

[bpiche]

Gibson himself wrote about this in Distrust that Particular Flavor unless I'm gravely mistaken, cities need interstitial spaces for living and working