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Comment by eat_veggies | Hacker News Reader

It's hilarious that this is standard self-help advice designed to make you a better worker, packaged up as something subversive or "anti-mimetic." I am reminded of Mark Fisher:

"Witness, for instance, the establishment of settled 'alternative' or 'independent' cultural zones, which endlessly repeat older gestures of rebellion and contestation as if for the first time. 'Alternative' and 'independent' don't designate something outside mainstream culture; rather, they are styles, in fact the dominant styles, within the mainstream."

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"To learn more about [anti-memetic counter-culture] my website and be notified when we release new content sign up here."

OK.

I'm going with Mark Fisher on this one. This is absolutely generic and unoriginal cut-and-paste Californian lifestyle advice trying to package itself as something deeper - which is something generic and unoriginal Californian lifestyle advice always does, as part of its own branding™.

But it does raise the question: what would a genuine online counter-culture look like?

I'm pretty sure going to museums and restaurants and playing golf at off-peak times wouldn't be part of it.

But what would?

Something like 4chan in the past

> I'm pretty sure going to museums and restaurants and playing golf at off-peak times wouldn't be part of it.

Why not?

That's the point of Fisher and those before him, isn't it?

Counter culture gets recuperated. New terrain becomes deterritorialized and reterritorialized. Edge becomes fashionable and popular.

Even if we knew what would, would that thing survive getting mentioned on HN?

> But it does raise the question: what would a genuine online counter-culture look like?

I can think of:

The short-live Boogaloo meme culture

The NRX movement

Fundamentalist religious communities

Note that none of these subcultures are ever likely to be history's protagonists. But they are (or were) arrayed against the dominant culture's contemporary beliefs, narratives, and trends.

100rabbits permacomputing work is worth looking into.

There are other pockets out there, typically left-leaning that are too multitudinous, heterogenous, and individually niche to be effectively categorized in a single sentence.

Mimetics aside, because I have no idea what anyone's talking about, those are 3 reactionary movements with edgy rebellion branding.

Lather, rinse, repeat.

I would argue that neither the Boogaloo movement nor the NRX movement (despite its name) can be considered purely reactionary.

The Boogaloo movement is/was composed primarily of hardline libertarians, and right-anarchists

The NRX movement makes reference to medieval texts and ancient political thought that has they are separated from by generations.

To the extent that either group has cohesive visions for the future, their visions are alien to anything we've seen in the past hundred years. They envision fundamental social, governmental, and economic transformations. Retrograde, but in part only just now enabled by new technologies.

They full-throatedly embrace change, but want a different kind of change.

They don't fit cleanly into either box.

But you don't need to be revolutionary to be counter culture. MAGA was counter culture in 2016. The Amish are counter culture, they're just not cool counter culture, or even necessarily desireable counter culture. They merely existed in opposition to cultural trends that dominant and prestige media outlets were embracing, and inspired their vocal opposition.

A blog about growing your own food or making your own necessities instead of ordering more disposable crap like most of the internet would have you do.

This piece is definitely haunted by the flood of self-help listicles that we've seen in the past decade or so, but also there are facets of it which are actually very effective ways for cultivating meaning in one's life outside the dominant styles. There is a film of fetishism going on here, but still some good parts. Outsideness is possible.

> It's hilarious that this is standard self-help advice designed to make you a better worker,

Are we reading the same article? This article doesn’t read at all about becoming a better worker. It emphasizes anti-consumerism and building diverse personal experiences and insists on not blindly following your peers and doing what others want you to do.

I think they meant that the same advice is presented in a different context as self-help/better worker advice.

I can see what they're saying, a lot of this also gets mentioned as productivity advice:

- Anti-Mimetic Scheduling: take advantage of the off-peak times

- Building a Deep Bookshelf: allocate 10% of your annual reading to books where you know you’re not going to ‘agree’ with the fundamental premise

- Don’t Participate in the Shark-Tankification of Worth

- Learn to Navigate without GPS: It kills the brain and it kills the wandering — the spirit.

- Stop Writing to Please

- etc.

It's for a specific kind of worker -- the neoliberal individual, the "entrepreneur of the self" who cultivates their personal value like a capital investment because they are human capital. "Building diverse personal experiences" is a nice euphemism for this. Although you are not doing what others want you to do, it's a freedom conditioned by the market. Being anti-memetic is already priced in.

Not all of the tips, like "be nice" and "forgive people" accord to this logic, but as a general through-line: Burgis is relentlessly focused on "the way great companies are built" (#23), worships the great innovators Henry Ford and Steve Jobs (#18), demands that everything has a purpose (#17, #13), in service of what he deems most important, "the calling" or personal vocation (#1).

We might read this through the lens of 20th century German sociologist Max Weber, who traces the spirit of capitalism to the Protestant ethic [1]. As a very short summary, it's an ethic defined by the very same vocational calling [Beruf], where labor acquires a religious significance and produces values that then become secularized. From my copy of his book:

> One of the constitutive components of the modern capitalist spirit, and, moreover, generally of modern civilization, was the rational organization of life on the basis of the idea of the calling. It was born out of the spirit of Christian asceticism [...] The Puritan wanted to be a person with a vocational calling; we must be.

Whether or not you believe the historiography, the function of the vocational calling is to produce a subject who works and disciplines themself automatically.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Max_Weber#The_Protestant_Ethic...

Sure, and it's hard to detach from the idea we must have a purpose - which I would even argue predates and exists outside the christian sphere. I'm an atheist and I still think life should try to expand outwards in space for the sake of structuring the chaos...

Look having no goal, purpose or calling seem to work now that we organized process-heavy societies where one dilletante wouldnt hurt too much. But let me remind you not so long ago we did what our father did and his father before. And also, that if we jump back into natural nihilism to live as free of purpose as animals, we'll miss many of the intellectual wonders that the group managed to accomplish, maybe through the illusion it has no alternative, I concede.

Probably not important to you, after all, since there's no inherent rule nor purpose, but sad a bit to me.

No one is suggesting having no goal. But if you have exactly the same goals as everyone else - build a business, become an executive, do executive things - while persuading yourself that you are somehow different because you read a few extra books and don't use a GPS etc, you are very much not operating outside of your culture, never mind being counter to it.

And you are at least metaphorically - and possibly also literally - "doing what your father did."

What goals are genuinely countercultural in 2022?

>What goals are genuinely countercultural in 2022?

Undermining or opting out of society: Crypto, neo-reactionism, antiwork, anti-capitalism, even alternets like Gemini to a degree.

Undermining societal norms or rejecting status quo reality: incels, anti-vaxx, flat earthers, pro-pedophilia. QAnon and BLM are both explicitly against society, albeit for vastly different reasons.

> Undermining or opting out of society: Crypto

In 2021, everybody and their dog is trying to make money by speculating on crypto... It might have been countercultural in 2012.

>In 2021, everybody and their dog is trying to make money by speculating on crypto... It might have been countercultural in 2012.

I meant using crypto for its original political purpose - sustaining an anarcho-capitalist economy and providing a means to opt out of the state.

I don't think anyone is actually doing that, but yeah. Fair point.

> Undermining or opting out of society: Crypto, neo-reactionism, antiwork, anti-capitalism, even alternets like Gemini to a degree.

Most of these exist as negative reactions against existing ideologies and as such aren't really countercultures. Antiwork, anti-capitalism, they only exist because the thing they oppose (c.f. work and capitalism) exist. These cultures only exist as long their opposite cultures exist, no longer. They are just as mimetic as the dominant culture they oppose.

Gemini is a fun one because despite it having lots of people who want to participate in a counterculture, it uses the same infrastructure as the corporate internet they want to oppose.

A genuine counterculture would be orthogonal from the original culture, not the negative of it.

>A genuine counterculture would be orthogonal from the original culture, not the negative of it.

Counterculture always runs contrary to an existing culture, in rejection of its ideals and values, it's right there in the name. I think you're making an argument that counterculture can be just as mimetic as culture, which I might agree with. It's all part of the same cycle of assimilation, transformation, rejection and rediscovery.

> I think you're making an argument that counterculture can be just as mimetic as culture, which I might agree with.

Fair enough I might be looking for too much in "counterculture".

Had exactly this thought reading it. Here's a list of platitudes to make you a subversive independent thinker!

I'm surprised they haven't yet sold them as NFTs.

And they said it would be easy to start a cult. Not with all these other assholes copy/pasting Oprah's book into GPT-3!

Yes, surely the main ‘anti-mimetic’ strategy to adopt is not adopting lifestyle affectations from a blog post that claims that that will make you a better person.

That's exactly what they want you to say. Now you can level up and understand this advice is just for the weak-minded. For a few thousand bucks you can go to a special seminar.. etc

WHY the fuck did this rank on HN?

This is exactly the kind of post that ranks on HN. It seems intelligent but is not very challenging.

> Being “anti-mimetic” does not mean being a ‘contrarian’ or refusing to imitate one’s peers. That’s what every hipster thinks he’s doing, too. “Everyone leaves the beaten path only to fall into the same ditch,” wrote the social theorist René Girard, the father of mimetic theory. This kind of naive rejection of the culture is not what we’re talking about here.

I'm a big fan of Mark Fisher's work but I must say that I didn't read this piece in this sort of light. Seems like quite different to the usual co-opting of wisdom in the service of capitalist hegemony. At the very least, more insightful and wiser than a lot of listicles.

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