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Comment by seydor | Hacker News Reader

The moment in which techies realize that they became the mainstream, and counterculture is elsewhere.

In the present moment, the counterculture is always hard to find and identify. That's what makes it the counterculture.

Now you can read and listen to the Beat poets anywhere, but that would have been challenging in the early '50s. You had to go to the right coffee shop on the right night and if you went and saw what was going on you might question if these were geniuses pushing the frontiers of expression or a bunch of degenerates exploiting impressionable young people.

You can still have that experience today, probably easier than ever.

> if you went and saw what was going on you might question if these were geniuses pushing the frontiers of expression or a bunch of degenerates exploiting impressionable young people.

To be fair, a lot of people still have this question about the Beat Generation.

The hippies were the counterculture, weren't they? Yet they weren't hard to find or identify. I guess it can get muddy, but what you're describing sounds more like underground culture to me. It can be happily compatible with the mainstream culture, it's not oppositional, it's just obscure and hidden because of it.

Hippies were until they weren't. Counterculture either becomes culture or dies off.

Naziism was counterculture in 1920's Germany, Mainstream in the 30s and 40's, and back to counterculture now.

An argument could be made that there is a lot of ideological overlap between current far right GOP/Qanon people and the tenants of Nazism. Considering the number of elections won by the GOP you cannot tell me they're not mainstream.

There's a lot of overlap between the Nazis and both major parties in the US. That said, I don't think it is fair to say that being a Nazi is mainstream because there is some ideological overlap.

It just means that some parts of their platform have become mainstreamed. A simple and non-controversial example is that the Nazis were extremely Progressive on animal rights. Just because modern political parties also endorse animal rights, that does not make them Nazis

Another example is that Nazi rhetoric relied heavily on utilitarian analysis of the greater good. I don't think it's reasonable to say that any party that promotes the greater good over individual freedoms is a Nazi party.

I would argue that a counterculture has to be oppositional and can't be happily compatible.

The hippies who were burning their draft cards, dropping out of school, and living as mendicants were a counterculture that could not truly coexist with the mainstream.

These dramatic characters inspired a youth culture that adopted more moderate signifiers (long hair, folk/rock music, nonviolent protest, maybe vegetarianism/meditation/yoga) that could coexist with the mainstream.

There is a mis-perception in your statement, in that :

1. "techies" are some uniform block of people.

2. "techies" as a whole were at any point an anti-mainstream counterculture.

Many/most techies throughout history have been employed by the rich and powerful - individuals, private corporations, government institutions, religious institutions (if we go back far enough). So, the extent to which they are part of a counter-culture is through a critical evaluation of their own roles. There are also "independent" techies, of course - but those too often from well-off social strata and do not have much of a mind to subvert dominant culture on the social level (as opposed to in their personal habits).

... and I personally can't read the article since the corporate firewall I'm behind is blocking it, so that's kind of ironic :-(

In my time hanging out on Mastodon, I feel like I’m seeing this play out.

Many people who openly identify as “tech” people asking for new features, more or less complaining about the resistance to such new features and arguing that the cultural resistance doesn’t make sense.

Now these tech people tend to also be new to mastodon. But they also seem pretty oblivious to the fact that they are the mainstream which many on the platform tried to avoid or establish a counter culture from. They don’t seem to realise that leaving Twitter in 2022 was a comparatively mainstream thing to do, and that the resistance they meet often has a point or perspective that they haven’t even thought of and is coming from people who are just as technically inclined and informed but just don’t tie that to their identity so tightly or openly.

Broad generalisations, but I think it’s definitely playing out to some extent.

But mastodon doesn't hate the mainstream, that's the difference, HN for example obviously isn't mainstream, and for one reason, the UI.

Its made on purpose to stop nontechnical people from joining

HN has a pretty large population of mainstream people. Bigger than ever I would say.

Compared to something like reddit? Its more like a subreddit of some sort

HN was made this way when Reddit looked this way.

Even if Mastodon had such currents beforehand, the influx of twitter users must have muddied the waters

I’ve been wondering for a few years… was Big Bang Theory the instigator or the indicator?

indicator

Same with 'The silicon valley'. When something becomes a movie, it's already ending its hype cycle

Oh that's a great example too. Big Bang was more about the hollywood nerd, but Silicon Valley is a great example of peak hollywood hacker.

Why is it taking till the 2020's for it to be so obvious though?

We're only two years in bro give it time.

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