Comment by cmrdporcupine | Hacker News Reader

Comment by cmrdporcupine | Hacker News Reader

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.

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.

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.

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.)

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.

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.

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.

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.

If there's a problem with "counterculture" today it's that it'd be very hard to pick one single culture to counter.

There's a podcast from the British comedian James Acaster called "James Acaster's Perfect Sounds", and the premise is that he had a nervous breakdown in 2017 and dealt with it by buying/listening to every album that he could from 2016. He gets a guest on each week and they listen to one of those albums and discuss it. If you're into music and British comedians, it's a fun podcast.

IIRC, the guy now has a few hundred albums, and the range is genuinely crazy. There's obviously names like Bowie and Beyonce, but there's also random albums produced by artists in their rooms, or punk bands releasing cassettes that have found their way onto the internet, or fusions of wildly different cultures and styles, or snippets of YouTube videos set to music, or whatever else you can come up with. Themes range from Ghanaian independence or the failures of the EU, through to gender identity and parenthood.

If that's not counterculture, I don't know what is.

Thank you. It's very easy to criticize mainstream media culture, many people make a career out of it now, but it's not in itself productive. To the degree that it's more than a cheap way for writers to gain influence, they'd do better by spending the same time either contributing to the "counter culture" or telling its stories.

In the US maybe, but in Europe I feel that media has become increasingly dominated by US productions, in that sense it feels like it's more homogeneous than it used to be. Before covid I was working at an international company, I used to have lunch with many nationalities and the most common conversation topic when people of different places were on the same table was certainly Game of Thrones.

Game of Thrones, filmed all over Europe, and with probably at least a 1/3rd of the cast actors from all around Europe?

Is your problem that it's funded by US producers and the writers were American? Because almost everything else about it was pretty international.

I just think these distinctions are getting less and less meaningful.

Also an example that's a half decade out of date?

Frankly the French, German, etc. cultures and languages are under almost no threat. They have healthy domestic markets and great international influence. As a Canadian I find it almost laughable to hear Europeans complain about American cultural dominance; compare the situation in Quebec to that of France, Italy or Germany. Usually European complaints strike me as borne more out of elitism or essentialism than genuine grievance.

If anything the expansion of streaming services and the decentering away from cable services and Hollywood dominance has meant more exposure of North Americans to European productions.

As an American every subversive movement I've encountered in the arts is in its own way fighting against or offering updated tactics to temporarily cope with neoliberal capitalism

Reply on news.ycombinator.com