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Comment by adamcharnock | Hacker News Reader

I'm pretty sure I've been existing in a number of counter-cultures for the last decade or two. These have been either linked to my identity or physical location, I couldn't have properly experienced them through consuming media on the subject. Certainly all required an active choice and/or lifestyle change on my part.

Maybe people mean something else by counter-culture, but here are examples from my life:

- Freelancing/contracting, and actively living substantially below my means. This has given me free time in a way that really changed my view on the world and allowed me to be around other people who were not in the 9-5 working world.

- Sexuality & ENM, plus living in a large city. There is a huge non-obvious culture of LQBTQIA people in this culture which often have very different outlooks on life to the mainstream.

- Communal living. Living in a warehouse with people from very different walks of life. I was exposed to so many fascinating ideas and people this way. It was a truly magical time of my life in which I also played a part in supporting the queer/ENM sub-culture of my city.

- Buying land and living off grid. There is a whole sub-culture of people doing this, both online and (more importantly) physically around me.

So I think counter-culture is available but – having written the above – I'm not sure if I am agreeing and disagreeing with the OP. On one hand it exists, but on the other hand I'm saying that it is very hard to access without making material changes to one's life.

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I agree with this, I had a friend who lived in a caravan in a forest in the north of England with a bunch of hippies. They'd throw parties now and again and there were tons of them. There are loads of people doing van life for various reasons or something similar like bike packing or living on a homestead. These people are counter culture but you won't hear about them because most of them aren't hustling to become social media influencers - they'll do some honest work to earn some money and then spend the year living out of a van and rock climbing or whatever. It's mostly word of mouth or messaging groups with them. At the party I went to, all the music played was mp3s on the guy's hard drive because he didn't want to pay for Spotify because he thought it devalued music. If you're looking for the counter culture on the mainstream platforms then you're not going to find it. The counter culture is 100% there they just don't really care about influencing you. You have to choose to break free of the mainstream yourself, they're not going to try and do it for you anymore.

Yup, people living it dont brag about it, gotta keep the poser johnny come lately herds away from ruining it. I have been living and crusing on a sailboat, mosty off anchor rent free when I can, surrounded by many other sailors who rather not see it ruined by Instagram.

The key here is the counter culture starts and ends in your heart. Get out and break out of the matrix.

honestly. how many months of rent was that boat? You are privileged ag

Used boats are (deceptively) cheap to buy.

Fiberglass hulls last forever. It’s everything else that needs repaired or replaced.

It seems you are out of touch with the liveaboard boat market. It's totally feasible to pick up a boat suitable for coastal cruising for a couple of people for $2,000. Budget another $2,000 for upgrades and you're good to go.

Any boat you pick up for $2000 will need $2000 just for new bottom paint. Then you can start addressing the rusted rigging and the broken inboard and the rotten sails and the failing mast step supports... why yes, I have been boat-shopping recently! :)

Having $4k to drop on a project is incredibly privileged.

Half of Americans don't have that in their account.

How is privilege or money relevant in any way?

Counterculture has nothing to do with either.

My understanding of counterculture is that it 'counters'. I.e. it inherently searches to change or influence the dominant culture.

Your examples do show that we are (thankfully) not a monoculture. But they place themselves outside of our culture, instead trying to influence.

A good example of counter culture is BLM, Extinction Rebellion or Occupy Wallstreet.

Only thing: those are movements, not cultures. And they are, IMHO, generally ephemeral.

google: coun·ter·cul·ture /ˈkoun(t)ərˌkəlCHər/ Learn to pronounce noun noun: counterculture; plural noun: countercultures; noun: counter-culture; plural noun: counter-cultures a way of life and set of attitudes opposed to or at variance with the prevailing social norm. "the idealists of the 60s counterculture"

Being not native, I googled before I posted. In the first page I saw some phrases that seemed to confirm for me. For example, Wikipedia, citing a book from 1991:

Counterculture may or may not be explicitly political. It typically involves criticism or rejection of currently powerful institutions, with accompanying hope for a better life or a new society.

But if I'm completely besides the mark, apologies

One big difference between the US and other countries: The US doesn’t look at counterculture as a fundamental threat or challenge to the government. The US citizens actually have freedom. The constitution went so far as to identify the sovereignty of the country with its citizens - thus no royalty.

This might sound quaint to some critical ears of the US, but that is the basis of the law and US systems. The US citizens only need to be reminded of this fact and decide whether they want to reinforce that fact with their personal choices - nonviolent protest, voting, etc.

Edit-That might not seem related to the definition of counterculture, but it absolutely is. The US has a culture of multiculturalism. It has the Amish and lets them largely have their culture within the larger culture. There are many such examples with gradients all over and within the US. Sure, sometimes some of those subcultures get political and exert themselves. But they do it within the peaceful political system as a strong trend.

I think this is a good point, and you don't deserve to be downvoted for it.

I think some of my examples do try to change wider society, but it is just more subtle and less overt/wholesale. I think there will be activists/evangelicals in any sub-culture.

>BLM

>LGBT

>counter culture

Endlessly supported by literally every news outlet, major tech company, big 5 sports league, F1000, university, and at least half of the political class. You’re not counter to any major institution, lmao. You’re not the resistance

This is such a superficial understanding of "support". They make their logo rainbow for a month. None of the groups you mentioned support police abolition, prison abolition, for instance. Police budgets still go up. Homeless encampments still get bulldozed. Black people are still killed by police.

Capitalists have co-opted the least disruptive demands of advocates in an attempt to draw attention away from the actual point. They think if they focus on saying words and not doing deeds, people will move on and forget.

If your culture is well-known enough and seen as desirable enough that you start having to no-true-scotsman to differentiate between the corporate poseurs and the true believers, it's a pretty strong sign that you're not a counterculture anymore. People don't try to fake having low cultural status.

imo that's the problem - everything gets corporate poseurs so quickly now could just be i'm out of touch and the countercultures have successfully hidden from me tho

> People don’t try to fake having low cultural status.

They do. One of the most successful directors of all time built his career telling stories about faking low cultural status.

Perhaps that’s too abstract. But if people don’t fake low culture, then what is Hillbilly Elegy?

That's faking low financial or political status in order to obtain cultural status. If the rich and powerful are generally hated, you don't become popular by flaunting your wealth but by distancing yourself from it.

> it's a pretty strong sign that you're not a counterculture anymore

The very opposite.

I don't think it's a "no-true-scotsman" to say that they would need to support the core goals of the movement in a meaningful way.

Police budgets are up, but policing is down, killings by police are way down, and consequentially violent crime is way, way up. Protesters didn’t get everything, but they got a lot of what they asked for (reduction in policing, basically) and they seem content (no more major protests or riots since the precipitous drop in policing following the Floyd protests).

It seems hard to argue that there haven’t been disruptive changes considering violent crime levels (esp homicides), but I fully agree that “capitalists” (or maybe corporatists?) embraced BLM and other identity stuff because it’s a convenient distraction from substantial policy issues. A lot of folks made themselves into “useful idiots” over the last decade.

I don't think it's that activists are content. Rather I think it's that a combination of people returning to work, the end of Covid financial support, and high inflation means that people can't protest anymore. There's probably also a lot of fatigue after protests were going on for months.

I'd also contest whether activists really got much of what they were asking for. They generally weren't asking for simply no-police. Rather they were asking for issues like poverty, mental illness, and homelessness to be addressed rather than just being policed.

People protested for half a decade before COVID. Even if they couldn’t get out and protest, they could still engage in social media, and yet it seemed like their enthusiasm for the subject largely evaporated, even on social media. Even the cheapest of symbolic stuff like “#BLM” in Twitter handles and bios seemed to largely disappear. It very much feels like they cut policing in the name of black Americans and then lost interest when policing drove up crime rates, particularly in black communities.

> Rather they were asking for issues like poverty, mental illness, and homelessness to be addressed rather than just being policed.

I’m sure some were asking for those things, but mostly this was a media retcon when it was becoming apparent that “abolish the police” was jeopardizing Biden’s election campaign (“when protesters say ‘abolish the police’ and ‘all cops are bastards’, surely they’re really advocating for more spending on social services, right?”).

That wasn't my experience. From the start I heard people saying that "defund the police" was a poor slogan because it didn't convey to most people what activists actually meant.

> killings by police are way down

[citation needed]

> consequentially violent crime is way, way up.

You're claiming that the US, unlike the rest of the civilized world, can't address crime without having death squads summarily execute people for trivial or imagined offences every other week?

> [citation needed]

Sure thing: "An event study design finds census places with early BLM protests experienced a 10% to 15% decrease in police homicides from 2014 through 2019, around 200 fewer deaths." - https://papers.ssrn.com/sol3/papers.cfm?abstract_id=3767097

> You're claiming that the US, unlike the rest of the civilized world, can't address crime without having death squads summarily execute people for trivial or imagined offences every other week?

The US obviously doesn't have "death squads" who "summarily execute people every other week". Lol I can't imagine asking for a citation about police killings and then tossing this claim out there.

This is such a misunderstanding of the current situation. The demands were varied, but common ask was _not_ just a reduction in policing paired with a ballooning police budget. Ironically, the "defund" movement ended up causing an even more reactionary movement such that police actually got more funding.

Protesters wanted to re-allocate resources away from the police towards other services, so that cops are not the first responders to every situation, they often wanted fewer police with more training.

Crime goes up as a result of the material conditions of people. The more unequal society is, the more poor and desperate people get, the higher crime is going to be. Acting like it's merely a function of enforcement is silly.

Society did not get abruptly and dramatically unequal between 2013 and 2015 nor between 2019 and 2020. Socioeconomics doesn’t predict these crime surges.

Richard Rosenfeld speaking to The Guardian: “The only explanation that gets the timing right is a version of the Ferguson Effect”

Vox reporting on Travis Campbell’s research: “Campbell’s research indicates that these protests correlate with a 10% increase in murders in the areas that saw BLM protests”.

Harvard’s Roland Fryer and Tanaya Devi found that prominent BLM protests were associated with 900 excess homicides in the 5 cities they examined and 34k excess felonies. They report that the leading hypothesis is a change in policing activity, and the cities they studied had precipitous drops in the quantity of police-civilian interactions following the protests.

These are professional criminologists and economists—I doubt they’re being “silly” as you suggest.

Of course they're being silly if they decide the mere discussion of holding criminals accountable is responsible for a rise in crime, just because said criminals happen to be wearing blue.

The solution is obvious. Start rolling heads of Police Chiefs until they get their hierarchies of people in line. If it ends with the entire police union fired so be it, insubordinate lawless police are worse than useless.

This is just a recipe for chiefs that are good are juking stats or playing PR. You can't just fire the person at the top, the institution needs to change.

If you don't think there is any correlation between the material conditions of people and crime I don't know what to tell you. You're basically subscribing to essentialism. There are plenty of cranks with ivy league degrees in economics.

edit: You are cherry picking your data points. I spent literally 30 seconds looking up your first quote it's not even congruent with what you're saying.

Obviously no one in this thread ever disputed the relationship between socioeconomics and crime. This is a flimsy, transparent attempt to move goal posts.

"The leftist of the over-socialized type tries to get off his psychological leash and assert his autonomy by rebelling. But usually he is not strong enough to rebel against the most basic values of society. Generally speaking, the goals of today’s leftists are NOT in conflict with the accepted morality. On the contrary, the left takes an accepted moral principle, adopts it as its own, and then accuses mainstream society of violating that principle.” --Theodore J. Kaczynski

Based and Ted-pilled

Changing the colour of your logo on a certain date is not really "supporting". Corps gonna corp and if changing the logo and publishing some nice post brings more money, they'll do it. (While donating to Republicans at the same time)

But what you're describing is exactly where "counterculture" flips over to "culture". It may have been counterculture at one point, but once it's grabbed up by the mainstream canon, it is no longer counterculture.

This is an important element of "cool", which is essentially the ebb-and-flow of ideas between counterculture and mainstream culture.

Pretty sure BLM was a media darling from the moment it was discovered. Maybe I have a weird media bubble, but the content I saw was endlessly pro-BLM (even contortions such as the memorable CNN reporter wearing a gas mask against a burning Kenosha with the caption “fiery but mostly peaceful protests”) for most of the last decade.

I can’t think of a way that BLM was ever counter-cultural.

> from the moment it was discovered

Counterculture is a like a good stock tip - if you're hearing about it, that ship has already sailed.

> I can’t think of a way that BLM was ever counter-cultural.

Fighting the police is about as counter as you can get.

> Pretty sure BLM was a media darling from the moment it was discovered.

It was the polished, highly educated, upper-middle class version of the activists that sprang up around the Ferguson protests. BLM was the mainstream corporate replacement of a street level movement, whose leaders acquired a habit of being found executed in the trunks of burned cars. A rehearsal for #TimesUp.

SMBC kind-of predicted this nine years ago: https://www.smbc-comics.com/comic/2014-01-23

If signalling support for X is good publicity then X is mainstream regardless of intentions.

Not for a second.

If the entire establishment is seeking to ally itself with your movement/culture/etc then that’s a strong indicator that your movement isn’t counter-culture or otherwise subversive. They don’t have to become True Believers IMHO.

And FWIW, lots of big companies have DEI departments that preach this stuff internally and market it externally (my wife is a marketing consultant with these big companies and they eat this shit up so much that their contracts are dependent on proving their commitment to DEI by centering their “diverse” employees, holding internal and external DEI ceremonies, etc). I’m sure there’s still a profit motive, but there’s quite a lot more than an annual profile photo update.

Not ally, but ingratiate.

When Coca-Cola embraced the flower children with its ads in the late 1960s / early 1970s, did that mean that the US counterculture of that time had become "the culture"?

Of course it did not. The flower children, the back-to-the-landers, the bikers, the free love communers all remained a tiny slice of the population (and a shrinking one by that time).

What the late 60s/early 70s US counterculture had going for it was a kind of credibility as "the new thing". It was not "the culture" (and it never really became it without mutating heavily), but it was interesting to many people who did not participate in it. It remained a counter-culture until it had changed so radically (and this was years after Coco-Cola first tried to ride the hippy chic train), and then, indeed, it was no longer subversive in any meaningful way.

As actor Peter Coyote noted of that era, that particular counterculture won the culture war in the long term - you can find yoga classes and wholewheat bread in almost every small town in the USA now, our attitudes towards sexuality and the environment and women and racism have been fundamentally altered - but it lost almost every political battle that it was concerned with. Wars continued, economic inequality, corporate control, the military-industrial complex ... all continued unabated.

> When Coca-Cola embraced the flower children with its ads in the late 1960s / early 1970s, did that mean that the US counterculture of that time had become "the culture"?

Surely you understand that Coca-Cola wasn't "the entire establishment"?

Thing about 60s/70s counterculture is, it didn't become the culture. Rather, its members were recruited by mainstream culture with the promise of wealth and the good life, to betray the values they espoused as youths.

Were Gramsci alive in the 80s, he would be like "See? See? This is EXACTLY what I was talking about!"

This is not really true. While there were a few hippies who moved to wall st., the reality is that only a tiny percentage of the population were hippies (or their cousins). The "older adults" who made up the 80's/90's culture were, for the most part, the "young adult" members of mainstream culture in the late 60s/70s.

It's just like the way that the 90s mainstream culture in the UK was not based on punks ... not because absolutely no punks "crossed over", but because, as a percentage of the population, there were hardly any punks to start with (just a lot of media noise).

I want to add that my final paragraph above really describes the fundamental flaw with countercultures if you believe they are a vehicle for political change. They are really premised on the idea that it is possible to make a set of personal, individual choices and that if enough other people make similar choices you can build a sort of parallel society to mainstream culture. If you believe in them as a mechanism of political change, you tend to imagine that parallel society serving as an example/lesson to mainstream culture and being adopted by it.

As Coyote's observations note, this can work for "culture" issues, which do indeed tend to be the result of individual choices about consumption, but it rarely works for issues rooted in the distribution of political and economic power. These require political movements demanding change from the mainstream.

> Changing the colour of your logo on a certain date is not really "supporting".

Meh. "really supporting it" or "poseur supporting it" is irrelevant, what's relevant is that it's mainstream, not counter[1] to mainstream.

[1] That's what the "counter" in counterculture means, dammit.

How about donating tens of millions of dollars, and employing the incorporated versions of these movements as consultants and trainers?

Imagine if F500 companies displayed the Christian cross to the extent they did the Pride colors, for one month. Would that signal "support" for Christianity?

Well... Hobby Lobby exists as an example of full on support https://www.newsweek.com/hobby-lobby-christian-july-4-advert...

On the other hand every Christmas/Easter thing happening at your local supermarket - it's not support, just seasonal reason to get more money.

> BLM > Endlessly supported

Black people are still being murdered by police every day in America.

That's happening in spite of BLM being endlessly supported. Doesn't negate the fact that BLM is supported by "literally every news outlet [save Fox News], major tech company, big 5 sports league, F1000, university, and at least half of the political class" AND the US government [0].

[0] https://abcnews.go.com/Politics/us-embassies-authorized-hang...

Yup. The fact this person doesn’t see this is evidence for the article.

"Supported" in only the very thinnest sense. The Raytheon Pride flags are generally considered to be extremely "virtue signalling" even within the community; at best this means "we'll allow you to work here and prevent people using slurs openly in the office", not "we'll stop donating to politicians and parties pushing anti-trans legislation or increased police budgets".

The Tyre Nichols incident response shows some improvements, but those responsible have not yet been charged, and because US police are so fragmented it will be a very long time before standards are raised nationally.

That’s… factually incorrect? Unless you don’t consider Fox News a news outlet, among other examples.

Which (snarkily) I guess is fair.

I think their point was that BLM has flipped from counter cutler to mainline culture

It’s on flags at schools, supported by government, roads are named after it, they have an enormous foundation with staff, and it’s even in college course curriculum

Ehh. I dunno, if that's "mainstream", why is this the third+ time this has had to be fought for? (BLM, Civil Rights, Civil War).

We've had pictures of MLK in schools, Civil Rights has been "supported by government", roads were named after people, there were and are enormous foundations with staff, and it's definitely in college curriculums - and it's been that way for an entire human lifetime...

...and yet the same fight is being fought again.

I'd figure if something achieved "mainstream", it wouldn't have to happen again and again.

(edit: In my head, I'm compare/contrasting with suffragette and other aspects of women's rights)

This eternal fight is the culture.

BLM, Extinction Rebellion and Occupy Wallstreet are the culture.

Colour-blind antiracism, preparing for global warming instead of pushing green deal & capitalism are countercultures now.

Right, and ironically all are astro-turfed and embraced by the World Economic Forum.

BLM is literally on flags, in schools, it’s not counter culture

The AP even has it on tests for college credit

I'll believe BLM is mainstream culture when people of color aren't being disproportionately killed by police.

Until then, if police forces are upholding a mainstream concept of law and order resulting in said disproportionality, BLM is countercultural.

Otherwise, if acknowledging the aims of basically what's a human rights movement via flags and spots on AP tests constitutes inclusion into mainstream culture, then the mainstream culture is absurd and perverse.

This is like saying being "anti-murder" is countercultural because murders still happen.

Just because something occurs does not mean there is no mainstream opposition.

I would go further and say that the most basic elements of the BLM were never countercultural.

opposition to excessive police force has been mainstream since the 70s-80s.

The only part of BLM that is actually controversial and countercultural is the idea of abolishing the police. As a result, the majority of BLM supporters reject this aspect.

Note that by that measure, hippies were not counterculture.

>Maybe people mean something else by counter-culture, but here are examples from my life [...] I'm not sure if I am agreeing and disagreeing with the OP.

Your examples of counter culture are alternative lifestyles.

The author (Kirk Thaker) and his cited author (Ted Gioia) were talking about media and entertainment content. Basically, the "long-tail" of obscure/experimental content not being widely exposed and whatever content they do see all looks the same to them.

Those are orthogonal areas of counter culture. E.g. You have a digital nomad living 100% in a camping RV ... but watches the same popular Netflix shows as everybody else. Or, you have the person that ignores popular sports and tv shows and only reads obscure Japanese comics... but works at a conventional 9-to-5 office job.

The extent to which these kinds of lifestyles are astroturfed is always interesting. Not claiming it is necessarily the case, just that it does happen from time to time. Thomas Frank’s “The Conquest of Cool” is a good reference here.

> There is a huge non-obvious culture of LQBTQIA

Take a look at Twitter on pride month, even Raytheon changes their logo to a rainbow version. That stuff is so mainstream it hurts. It's a counterculture in Saudi Arabia where the logos don't change and they throw gay people off of buildings, but in the US/Europe it's part of the dominant culture.

Non-obvious means the things that you dont understand and/or see.

You make it sound like a bad thing. I'm happy we don't throw people off buildings as often.

There is the Walmartized rainbow culture that you’re talking about and then there’s the meat and potatoes queer culture that is and will always be counterculture for as long as human reproduction remains sexually binary. There is still a substantial amount of “queerness” that you don’t see on TV.

Primary culture loves to pull from counterculture after the morsel has been thoroughly sanitized and monetized.

The thing is though, queerness is now “cool” so it’s not counter culture

Countercultures have always been "cool" - the rejection of the dominant culture is part of their cool factor. Some of the most memorable aspects of recent Western cultural history are counter-cultural: hippies, punks, slackers.

A counterculture isn't defined by whether or not it's considered cool, but by whether or not it is actively participated in and shared among the majority of people. Queer identities may have a lot of public support (and even that's debatable), but queerness is not part of most people's lives. Western societies are still cis- and heteronormative. Queer culture is an other, not the mainstream.

I don't know, I think it's much more complicated. On one hand Raytheon changes their rainbow to logo for pride month, on the other hand some states are trying to ban crossdressing or force crossdressing people to register as sex offenders. And the majority of youth who are homeless are homeless because their families kicked them out for being gay/trans. I don't think it's reasonable to say that LGBTQ people are completely mainstream/acceptable or completely counterculture/unacceptable. Maybe it's more like it's mainstream to appear accepting but its counterculture to actually accept the gay/trans/crossdressers in your own life.

> And the majority of youth who are homeless are homeless because their families kicked them out for being gay/trans.

People lie about anything they can get away with.

When only one side of the story is being heard, people claiming victimhood because of a singular external issue are almost always grossly misrepresenting the situation.

See also: "I got fired because my boss / my car / my dog / etc."

IDK, I don't think the majority of children who are homeless have much incentives to lie about being gay or trans. It's still legal in some states to claim panic when killing a gay or trans person, just because they're gay/trans and it shocked you into killing them. Homeless people are rarely looked for if they're murdered, so there's less incentive for you to claim to be gay/trans because it literally targets you for murder more than you already are as a homeless person.

In my experience, more often than not the "homeless" kids waving the gay flag are glossing over unrelated behavioral issues on their own part.

> It's still legal in some states to claim panic when killing a gay or trans person, just because they're gay/trans and it shocked you into killing them.

The idea that deceiving someone into having sex with you is considered "shocking" and not "rape" astounds me. You can't induce arousal in someone, lure them into a position of vulnerability and spring surprises on them in the dark-- unless you're trying to become a martyr and add to the body count.

We already had to outlaw "pozzing" since the gays couldn't be bothered to disclose minor things like positive HIV status to unsuspecting partners. Now we're supposed to be cool with "stealthing"/"surprise sex" from the trans? It seems there is a pathological dishonesty at play here.

The laws should be changed-- LGBTs should be held more accountable for deceiving others. Murder has never been an acceptable response to fraud, so that needs to change too. This is not an example of sympathetic behavior on either side. I don't understand why you even brought it up.

I don't think you understand what gay/trans panic defense is.

I think if you didn't know what a legal thing was, you could've googled it, instead of making up some crazy hypothetical. Sorry, I'm dipping from this convo.

There are peer reviewed studies on this subject and they confirm that trans people are significantly more likely to experience housing insecurity.

> even Raytheon changes their logo to a rainbow version

And you think weapon manufacturers are sincerely concerned about discrimination and human rights in general?

Mainstream culture has been co-opting countercultures since decades. There are even words like https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pinkwashing_(LGBT) and https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Greenwashing.

Music genres like punk, rock, rap etc have been watered down in the same way. And many other things.

That's the opposite of going mainstream.

I know they don't care about it. That's the point. They don't care about it but they do it, because it's socially expected that they do it, because it's mainstream. If being green was counterculture, greenwashing would have the opposite of the intended effect.

So co-opting something and making it truly mainstream is the same thing?

Then greenwhashing is real ecology?

As a corporation why would you co-opt something that the public in general isn't on board for? Ask several people on the street "Should companies be more green?" and they will mostly say yes, as that is a mainstream idea. If you wanted to be counter culture you could start a company that isn't green, "We pollute ten times what our competition does!", lots of people out in the culture would be very upset, they would protest, that's what being counter to the culture is like.

Having lived in some of those scenes, the environment or the identity or political affinities that lead to the creation of those groups are only indirectly linked to the cultural aspects that emerge from it. There very much is specific music, specific visual art, written art, zines, comics, software (!) that emerge when people live off the mainstream. As for lgbtqia cultures even, with the lip embrace or sometimes slightly more heartfelt embrace by mainstream media, is far from being culturally present, let alone politically. Just tally up the ratios in the comments here…

A rainbow flag is not techno/house/zines/novels, advertising is not culture. Advertising is by definition the antithesis of culture, adopting cultural norms. Ultimately it will be hollow and opportunistic because that’s its mission. An ad showing a leatherbear is not culture, and I don’t think you will ever see a leather show on prime time, if at all. Yet a culture it is (and possibly a lifestyle, but one doesn’t imply the other).

It's really unfortunate that the comment chain attached to the queer aspects of your comment, because it seems that the communal living/ off-grid aspects are more interesting. I think that the article is lamenting the idea that these sorts of things no longer appear to have runway to potentially enter "mainstream" culture in a way that, e.g., raisin bran did in the early part of the last century.

It's possible that maybe the reality is that there's some aspect of abiltity-to-be commercialized that has always limited counter cultures reach? Or maybe that's an alternate way of valuing culture - can it produce concepts that can be adopted by the majority.

Ironically, given the replies, it seems that Christian communities (i.e., Hudderites or Mennonites) had discovered what you discovered a century ago, but the very nature of the counterculture they express limits their impact on the mainstream?

I don't think that what you described counts as counterculture in what the people in general understand as the "societal" meaning of the term. All societies in all epochs had their share of people living off of the grid or in hedonistic and socially repproachable ways.

A counterculture is a set of social norms that clash with the establishment to the point of generating a credible threat of replacing it and creating a new cultural reality. LGBTQIA people living in warehouses and doing orgies is not a common way of living for sure, but it sounds more like a bout of isolated risky behaviour than a new cultural norm.

Yeah. the orgies aren't exactly what I would call culture.....more like vice.

Not to mention redpill, mgtow, incel etc. Counter culture aren't always rainbows and flowers.

I think it's clear that there is a dominant culture in the United States, one of consumption and competition, with a strong history of puritanical influence in our way of thinking; everything from how we view and treat 'others', to how we feel about our own actions.

The other clear thing to me, is that enough people find the dominant culture so objectionable that they are inclined to form other cultures, even when there are massive social barriers to doing so.

I think that one positive change, and this seems to be what TFA was really trying to say, is that it has become somewhat less punitive to seek out these other cultures and join them, largely because of our digital connections.

One thing I have found valuable in thinking about our culture, is living outside of it for a while. Experiencing another dominant culture and trying to gel with it gave me a lot of perspective on both how systems we take for granted can be different and work just fine, and on how hard it is for foreigners in our country to just exist here.

So yeah, I think counter-culture is alive and well, perhaps a bit too easy to access, but that's for the most part a good thing.

If you think LGBT is the counterculture, Raytheon advertising wants a word with you.

Raytheon's advertising employed "rainbow capitalism" on twitter, like most other American companies, is just following in the footsteps of Subaru and RJ Reynolds who realised gays have money in the 90s.

Rainbow capitalism isn't LGBT culture. It's attempts at getting our money.

The large majority of queer culture cannot be commercially re-packaged and will never be part of the dominant culture.

Also Raytheon can't limit its recruitment to just straight people if it wants to be competitive.

This is a great counterpoint, but you're missing the other half of the argument. The realm of subcultures that do not require one to change their material lives/location is far vaster than it has ever been. Perhaps the author is unaware of the seemingly endless array of niche blogs and forums and servers that cater to far-flung populations of people engaging in all manner of counterculture, some of it radically "counter", that did not and could not exist without the internet.

ENM/polyam is definitely a good example, and personally one I'm happy to see is slowly entering into public knowledge.

It's hard to call something countercultural if every major corporation pays lip service to it 24/7

Bingo! As soon as you get to define counterculture as something else but "a kind of bullshit you read on the Internet which is different from what normies read", you realise that there is plenty of it.

LGBTQ stuff is pretty mainstream now, in the sense that it is an omnipresent "other" though 20 years ago, it definitely wasn't.

I'd say today's counter culture is people eschewing corporate life, sort of like it was before corporate culture took over.

I think that's mainstream as well. People talk about digital nomadism x going off grid whatever all the time.

The real counterculture is showing up to work and feeding your kids

Hey you're right

All those are safe hipster options these days...

> There is a huge non-obvious culture of LQBTQIA

Does the second Q stand for something else than the first? Or is it a typo?

A counter-culture has to be at least a somewhat monolithic and unifying thing. If there are two dozen counter-cultures, then there aren't any.

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