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Comment by neonnoodle | Hacker News Reader

The medium is the message dudes. At this point in history, what will qualify a true counterculture is NOT BEING ONLINE. Whatever the true counterculture will be, it won’t be subject to the Internet and its all-seeing eye. It won’t be made out of memes and flame wars. No matter what the political bent, we’re all very much a captive audience online. “Master’s house/master’s tools” and all that.

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People should read “Gravity's Rainbow” - or at least an analysis of it. A major point/theme is that no matter what you do, if it’s useful/profitable/empowering/etc then it will be co-opted by “the man” or whatever. There’s a never ending graveyard of counter culture artifacts that existed to spit on the mainstream that were nearly merged in, packaged, and sold back to the hordes of consumers that think they’re outside of it all. It’s hard to listen to Rage Against the Machine without laughing.

In essence, the message in the book is the only way to win is to not play. To live as far under the radar as possible. To just not participate. That you won’t change it because it will just co-opt you making it bigger and a more dangerous war machine where you’re a complicit participant.

This process has been called "recuperation"

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Recuperation_(politics)

Or maybe a little earlier,

“ the producer of mass culture has no use for experience, his own or another’s, which cannot be immediately shared. What is endured by one human being alone seems to him unreal, or even an effect of madness.”

Harold Rosenberg, 1948

https://www.commentary.org/articles/harold-rosenberg-2/the-h...

I've read Gravity's Rainbow and it's very melodramatic but a good read. What is "winning" in this case? A feeling of liberation through avoiding the main path can be useful for some, even if life is deterministic.

>It’s hard to listen to Rage Against the Machine without laughing.

People like music for all kinds of reasons...and I see what you're getting at, but this example is a little cheesy. "I think you're all sheep for thinking your not sheep and it makes me laugh." is essentially what I'm reading.

While counter culture does get co-opted, it's not like RATM was gonna actually do anything to help us socially since music had already been commodified for a long time. Counter Culture can even START co-opted e.g. Label Music/Industry Plants.

Where this book misses is the failure to ask the question: What is the purpose of viewing yourself or acting in favor of counter culture. To look cool? To feel powerful? If those things work in your life model who cares if it's not the most "punk" thing ever. Some people live their whole lives happy being "posers" and I would consider that successful for them.

Frank Zappa said that when he first heard Bob Dylans "The times they are a changin" on the radio, Frank believed that he didn't need to get into the music industry because the change in the world was already on its way. Frank quickly figured out that this was not how it was going to go down and that Dylan was very quickly absorbed into the main stream.

Credit to Frank, he managed to walk the fine line of being in pop culture but never fully embraced by it.

Bill Hicks on people who work in marketing:

Kill yourself.

Seriously. You are the ruiner of all things good.

Seriously.

No this is not a joke. You’re [going], “There’s going to be a joke coming.” There’s no fucking joke coming. You are Satan’s spawn filling the world with bile and garbage. You are fucked and you are fucking us. Kill yourself. It’s the only way to save your fucking soul. Kill yourself

Planting seeds.

I know all the marketing people are going, “He’s doing a joke…” There’s no joke here whatsoever. Suck a tail-pipe, fucking hang yourself, borrow a gun from a Yank friend – I don’t care how you do it. Rid the world of your evil fucking machinations. (Machi…) Whatever, you know what I mean.

I know what all the marketing people are thinking right now too: “Oh, you know what Bill’s doing? He’s going for that anti-marketing dollar. That’s a good market. He’s very smart.”

Oh man, I am not doing that, you fucking, evil scumbags!

“Ooh, you know what Bill’s doing now? He’s going for the righteous indignation dollar. That’s a big dollar. A lot of people are feeling that indignation. We’ve done research – huge market. He’s doing a good thing.”

Godammit, I’m not doing that, you scum-bags! Quit putting a goddamn dollar sign on every fucking thing on this planet.

“Ooh, the anger dollar. Huge. Huge in times of recession. Giant market. Bill’s very bright to do that.”

God, I’m just caught in a fucking web.

“Ooh, the trapped dollar, big dollar, huge dollar. Good market – look at our research. We see that many people feel trapped. If we play to that and then separate them into the trapped dollar…”

How do you live like that? And I bet you sleep like fucking babies at night, don’t you?

The cited goal of counterculture has always struck me as utterly incoherent and inconsistent not only with its own actions but it itself. It always fell into the same self-contradictory hypocrisy with no self awareness.

Look at the "counter-culture archetype" and how well it fits. - Dress the same to express your individuality" paradox. - Don't follow the rules but follow the rigidly defined rules about what is real "foo". - Say that you want people to think for themselves and be themselves yet get steaming mad at "posers" for not matching up with your vision or becoming adopted. - Complain about it dying out after complaining about it being popular.

It becomes like any other bigot's ever greased high velocity goalposts for what it takes to be considered acceptable.

When I was young I thought I was missing something. As I get older I get the feeling that no I didn't, it really was that incoherent and unpleasable.

That sounds like an issue with mainstream counterculture. :-)

Another commenter mentioned off grid living. It reminded me of the bohemian communes of the 60's and I wondered if technology is destroying this concept as well by making it so easy for suburban chads to feel "off grid" with solar power and three-fuel generators and even cars now that don't require regular visits to a gas station. Easy to overlook how they're still using city water, sewage, trash collection, and shop for even basic things at stores though.

I think you may be right. Counter culture today may simply be being offline.

I was going to remark that people like myself that avoid (most) social media and avoid tracking via vpns and so forth are counter cultural right now. I'm still having to explain to people why I'm not on Facebook all the time.

I routinely get eyerolls for asking people to ask me first before putting pictures of me up on the internet.

I have cut contact with, and purposely avoid extended family functions for this reason alone. It is beyond me why people can't seem to respect you and your privacy.

I just had that conversation yesterday. The only pictures of me that exist are in relation to my current employer, and only because they post headshots of all new execs in the local paper (small towns are weird like that).

Otherwise, I flat do not exist online.

People are ASTOUNDED when I ask them to crop me out, or to ask my permission before posting with me in it. I'm always polite, but people act like I asked them to lick the bottom of my foot.

It's very strange.

People are ASTOUNDED when I ask them to crop me out, or to ask my permission before posting with me in it. I'm always polite, but people act like I asked them to lick the bottom of my foot.

Most people are happy to have photos with themselves in it. Like it or not, you're the strange one in this situation.

Most people are happy when their friends value their preferences and choices about when consent is given.

Yes, and it's still really, really weird to be upset that someone you know took a photo with you in it.

On this topic: part of counterculture used to be the ability to *signal* your identification with the group to other group members. Styles of dress, certain symbols or artifacts have all been commonly used. How does one signal to others their social media rejectionism in the age of social media communication ubiquity?

Socialize in person. I don’t even remember the last time I went somewhere with the intention of socializing but without any knowledge or plan about who would be there (e.g. in my small town, there was a specific place teenagers used to just go to hang out without specific plans to do so, meeting with whoever happened to also show up).

A dumb phone, an old walkman, etc. but also some of the following: second hand clothes, a second hand bicycle, a car from the 90s, a cheap second hand watch etc. The gathering spaces include your local library, your small local music venue/record store, and your local print shops and book cafés.

“ local library, your small local music venue/record store, and your local print shops and book cafés”

With the except of publicly funded libraries, it might be notable to suggest that, in many/most communities, everything else on this list is struggling to exist.

I guess that is a point in favor of this being a counter culture. It is my perception of history that venues that cater to counter culture tend to struggle financially, at least since the Reaganonics of the 1980s.

Gathering space: The Men’s Shed

The Signal: You do not carry a Phone.

You definitely do not carry a smartphone. You might be excused a flip phone, if only because you’re not likely to b super-connected with it, but honestly that’s pushing it; even the most primitive cellphone has sms.

I mostly agree although just because something uses the pipes doesn't mean they are subject to that.

Federation, onion sites, unindexed sites, something new entirely that runs on TCP/IP

Which I think signals a complete 180 from my lifetime.

Because, there was a time when being online was the counterculture. If you habituated newsgroups, IRC, BBSes, etc, you were on the fringe. Now, all of that is commonplace in some fashion. Newsgroups are basically places like this, reddit, even Facebook to some extent. IRC has its analogs in Discord, Slack, etc. BBSes are any online game community.

"medium is the message"

That brought back grad school memories. The Internet is an excellent example of this. We're watching -- in real-time -- the medium challenge society (at all levels and across boundaries).

The Internet is still an infant; yet look at its impact.

Really? The internet looks old. A teenager in the 90s, aged fast in the 2000s, got a family in 2010s and now is seeking to police everyone through its retirement.

The medium hasn't changed. We're still on "Version 1".

We see versions but maybe there's a lifecycle to every medium. I m sure when TV was invented people made blue-sky predictions about how it would change the world for the better and not become the means that rich people use to rule over democratic audiences. The internet we know was the medium of one-to-all communication but it seems we -very soon- stumbled on the limits of such communication with all the censorship & tracking . Maybe the next medium will use some other mode, where one-to-all does not matter anymore

And while the internet changed societies, it did not "change societies", as in the western world democracies function pretty much as they did in the 80s, but with digital tools instead of analog. We did not see huge changes like when printing was invented: The world map is still the same

In terms of information history, we're still in the newborn stage. We don't even have a single generation that has been born and died with access to instant worldwide communication - that will happen when I and my cohort die. I was one of the first kids to be able to independently access information without my local community adults gatekeeping it. It's one of those little things that becomes a big thing in hindsight, like being able to read the Bible in the vernacular. Gen Z (and maaaybe some Millennials like myself but that's questionable) are the first generation to grow up with geographically-independent hobbies and subcultures. Even the old stodgy or corporatized Internet has this property.

It is starting to even have a shape. People just stopped giving up on service formats (how are you supposed to read instant messages again?) all the time because they like some other one better.

Society has mostly just discovered it exists.

You dredged up an old memory of a past HN article. Paul Lutus is this counterculture and his story is 40+ years old.

https://www.atariarchives.org/deli/cottage_computer_programm...

Bingo. I am not saying "Hey look at me, I am counter culture!" I am just being me. But usually, I am online only about once or twice a week nowadays and even then it is only for about 10-20 minutes at a time.

I suspect like folks going back to dumb phones, magazine subscriptions - the embrace of the analog world again to some degree. This is where the rejection of the mainstream will probably hit the road.

Absolutely. It is important to remember that consensus opinions on narrow internet forums like HN or even Twitter do not generally represent the default positions that people take on most issues. Often, they are not even in the same wheelhouse.

This extends readily also to the media spheres in which people immerse themselves. The consensus on cable news, for instance, hardly represents a good-faith analysis.

Or as a great person once said, "The Revolution will not be televised."

gil scott heron (such a good song)

𝄞 "you will not be able to stay home, brother... you will not be able to plug in, turn on and cop out"

as u/neonnoodle said " At this point in history, what will qualify a true counterculture is NOT BEING ONLINE. "

I've been lucky enough to spend long periods in such hehe (forest monasteries)

Yes, this - and especially as a parent. No judgement here, just observing that most parents around me don't think about what a phone/mobile device does to their kids and what it teaches them about what "normal" is. My 14 year old does not have a phone of his own, he uses one occasionally at home only, loosely supervised. He sees the difference, and he knows how to blend in. When he's on his own, he is on his own. I can only hope he won't be owned.

But "being online" is where millions of people find and engage in countercultures. You may be underestimating the vastness of online spaces and the communities that exist in those spaces (many of which you can't find by Googling).

I agree. It’s a privilege to be able to make a living without the internet.

I know what you are getting at, but just want to point out there are still plenty of offline jobs out there which are very much not privileged. For example, the independent recycler rummaging through your bin at night is likely all offline but they're not "privileged" by any means. From their perspective, those making money online are very privleged.

Different topic. It is a privilege to make a living without using asynchronous communication.

The class you describe is just as attuned to texting and collaborating with others using smartphones.

Excellent point, and Medium is the Message is an excellent book

perfect comment <3

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