https://www.hup.harvard.edu/catalog.php?isbn=9780674987692
Social media is no longer authentic so you’re seeing a slowly growing backlash against it.
https://seoulphilosophy.wordpress.com/2015/06/19/charles-tay...
When a new trends starts organically, it's all impulsive and genuine, then people start to profit on it and the game is over.
I think I have seen the same argument about anime conventions. The idea is that a trend starts with a small group of passionate people, as things get bigger and more popular, followers arrive. Followers are not really passionate, they just jump on the bandwagon, but will leave and jump on another bandwagon as the thing gets less trendy. With the followers come people who will try to profit on them since they represent a sizable market. Among the "exploiters" are former members of the original group, who see a find a way to monetize their passion, taking advantage of their deep knowledge of the field.
So the idea that "people start to profit and the game is over" is mostly right, but the dynamic is more complex than just having a small number of people ruining it from everyone else.
And it is not all bad. While the community is less genuine, it is also more productive, if anything, just from the sheer numbers.
Nonetheless, they do. Medium is the message and all that.
Which means, that even if they only want to be companies, they (unfortunately for all) indeed are the "social media" in some sense. Sometimes even borderline with "essential infrastructure".
What you describe is simply the nature of a trend, it's happened with everything from modern Occupy movements to the teachings of Jesus. Something original and authentic becomes stale after it's been repeated a million times over.
The problem is with trends themselves, the original idea is authentic, but then it passes like a wave in the frenzy of a "trend".
"The spectacle presents itself as something enormously positive, indisputable and inaccessible. It says nothing more than "that which appears is good, that which is good appears. The attitude which it demands in principle is passive acceptance which in fact it already obtained by its manner of appearing without reply, by its monopoly of appearance."
"False choice in spectacular abundance, a choice which lies in the juxtaposition of competing and complimentary spectacles and also in the juxtaposition of roles (signified and carried mainly by things) which are at once exclusive and overlapping, develops into a struggle of vaporous qualities meant to stimulate loyalty to quantitative triviality."
Has it ever been? Well, maybe before it got called 'social'.
And I think it’s really interesting if there is really a social undercurrent, especially in new generations, that political and social engagement is futile, and instead people are trying to invent new disengaged futures.
It resonates with me, at least.
No, he just covered a general trend about authenticity and examples up to his time.
TFA covers the specifics of today and is about different aspects than what Taylor covered.
I don't even like texting. Email is a letter replacement. Call me and pickup when I call, or GTFO.
Faceblock, Twatter, Instaglam, Discard, Snapper, TikTak, LinkedOut can all listen to the flushing sound of me deleting their advertising monetization. "Buh buh all of your Ivy and Pac12 associations that made you look important on a résumé." Too bad, I haven't talked to most of those people in years anyhow.
And I don't think of it as a personal preference: async information exchange is objectively less intrusive, which is why it should be preferred when possible (which isn't always the case, because it's also objectively less fluent). Unless you are some girl I'm mindlessly infatuated with, I'm probably not waiting for you call all day long, so when you are forcing me to interrupt whatever I was doing, because you are calling to say something as simple as "so, you asked me about X the other day, the answer is yes" or to ask a simple question without any follow up (or, my favourite: a courtesy call with no actual information exchange): I'll be polite, of course, but I'll hate you.
If you want to ask or tell me something short: send me a text, I'll read and respond in 5 minutes, so that I don't have to interrupt what I'm doing right now. If it isn't short and you are too lazy to type: no problem, send me a voice-message. If you just want some chit-chat: ask me to go grab a beer (via text). If it's complicated and we'll need some back-and-forth, we should call each other, but I'll appreciate if you'll send a text/voice first, asking me to talk over the phone about X. And only if it's URGENT you call me right away. And because it's just sensible thing to do, when you are suddenly calling me, I'm already assuming it's URGENT: in fact, that's the only reason to answer you when you are calling, and not to call back when I'm in the mood. So when it turns out that it really wasn't, you are already an asshole, even if I don't show it.
I like chat programs used as email - that is, non-real-time. I have lowered my anxiety a lot by realizing that texts are not realtime in my life 98% of the time, and to treat them accordingly: Checked on upon occasion. Don't stress about whether the person on the other end will be upset if you don't get back right away.
Planning something? Need someone right away? Set the expectation of response beforehand or just call them.
I don't exist at your beck and call. Text me and respect that I have a life beyond hanging on the telephone, or I don't care to distinguish you from the billions of autodialers who are the only ones still rude enough to make such demands on my time.
BTW, cute misspellings. Little jugs got big ears, I suppose.
I love texting. And email is basically texting.
I'm thinking of getting one of those wrist phones so I can voice-text everything.
I really hoped that Clubhouse would corral all the hardcore narcissists away from all other social media, but it's made them worse, they spend all their time on Twitter bragging about how they're on Clubhouse now. Pathetic.
MMMMM
> We saw this dynamic metastasize in the wake of George Floyd’s murder, when well-intentioned claims of “silence is violence” (recalling the powerful 1987 ACT-UP “Silence = Death” campaign) spiraled into calling out individuals with even a small following who hadn’t come forward with a timely public statement of solidarity or remorse. Yet public posts were subject to popular scrutiny and judged based on sincerity, originality, and tone. Not surprisingly, many people defaulted to posting a somber plain black square. But this generated criticism of its own by clogging the feed with an informational blackout during a moment when community resource sharing was critically important. Amid a chaotic time, the platform functioned exactly as designed: amplification of emotions, uptick in user interaction, growth in platform engagement and data cultivation. Cha-ching, the platform cashes in.
In other words, any large movement or discussion on "clearnet" spaces gets subverted by the algorithms and profit motive of the platform they live on.
However, where I disagree with the author is considering mainstream "dark forest" platforms like reddit or 4chan to be countercultural. In fact, I'd argue that mainstream social media can never be countercultural. While there may be no "algorithm" controlling the narrative you see on 4chan (or a straightforward and ostensibly fair one on a site like reddit), the content you see (and by extension, the narrative) is shaped by profit motive: From well-compensated marketing teams, to hordes of self-interested proselytizers (see: bitcoin), to propaganda teams looking to influence public opinion, mainstream dark forest sites simply shift the balance of power from the platform itself to the most motivated and well-funded members of the platform
I've realized I have exactly one outlet free of this left. It's an IRC channel I've been in since the 90s. I thought about it and none of us are there for any reason other than that we have a common interest and like each other. No money involved, no names involved, and it's one of the more supportive and insightful communities I've ever found online. We've sometimes wondered why it's such a different community from the other places, and this article articulates why quite well, I think. We're old-timers holding out in a little pocket of what has been almost fully absorbed by corporate social media. I'm sure there are others. And I'm sure they won't tell you where to find them, either.
I don't know that these would qualify as counter-culture or subculture, but they are free of marketing and advertising, and people are there because we have shared interests. The conversations are organic and not curated for us and we are isolated from anyone else we don't want to be part of that group.
So, my gut tells me that the younger generations are using Discord like people used IRC.
So a counterculture can use the mainstream platforms, but they choose to do so only as a microphone, not as a gathering place.
Edit: That said, one of the members of a related group just (as in, after I wrote this but before editing was made unavailable) got banned from Twitter, so maybe they can't actually use the platform as a microphone for very long. It looks like the law is getting involved, specifically related to the Verkada hack.
Anyone can pull up a seat to the bar and many people do. Inmate conversations are drowned out by shouting matches over politics, sports, or whatever has raised passions that day. And there's constant yells of "What the #@$@ are you looking at?" coming from random patron to another. And hundreds of bar promotions for any and everything under the sun.
Doubt members of the countercultural are going to want to hang out at the largest Buffalo Wild Wings...
>timely public statement
Being a public figure sounds exhausting.
I would say that is pretty much true by definition. Online countercultural elements are open source software and other collaborative platforms like Bandcamp and similar sites where people are trading tracks and what they have created. Torrenting is still countercultural. What the counterculture has in common now is that while the individualism is still present in the creation of music/software and the political/social choice to collaborate, the collective action of collaboration is the focus of attention, not individual fashion and identity. That kind of individualism has been sold back to us ad nauseum and its apotheosis is Instagram.
Open source is mainstream now, even Microsoft are doing it.
This is making the perfect the enemy of the good.
Also, voting systems take care of a lot of this, because naked propaganda spam gets downvoted by the users.
Upvote/Downvote is very susceptible to headlines that exploit confirmation bias, and bot activity.
To be fair, I'm not saying that we should all ditch Reddit and only congregate on obscure message boards with maximum user limits; I'm simply saying that a place like a default subreddit should never be considered counter-cultural.
> Also, voting systems take care of a lot of this, because naked propaganda spam gets downvoted by the users.
Strong disagree. Naked propaganda is downvoted, sure, but good propaganda is never naked. Add enough eyeballs and increasingly sophisticated and coordinated actors will find a way to get their message to the top.
> Also, voting systems take care of a lot of this, because naked propaganda spam gets downvoted by the users.
I disagree: crowdsourced moderation can only really take care of the most obvious crap, so it doesn't really take care of this problem.
This is simply not true, although I suppose it depends on the definition of naked. Here's some random examples - although like anything, whether it qualifies as propaganda depends on one's beliefs:
- When the previous US president wanted to pull out of Syria, or at least scale down the activities there, a bunch of headlines to the effect of "[President's name] abandons the kurds, leaving them to die" were written, and went straight to the top of Reddit. (This is a classic war propaganda technique where there's always an excuse as to why you can't end a certain war, while failing to account for the negative effects of continuing wars, or the facts that many of these "problems" only exist because of previous foreign policy blunders and doubling down on those blunders simply doesn't help)
- Without going down the COVID rabbithole too much, there would routinely be articles that either (a) spread Chinese-state-originated propaganda videos of stuff like "man randomly collapses in the middle of the street", (b) articles that would credulously take China's metrics at face values, (c) scientific publications that immediately denied the possibility of non-naturalistic origins of the virus, (d) articles intended to shame those who don't believe in masking as an intervention, etc
- (This is a fun one since many won't agree) Many articles raced to the top which made just completely wrong statements about the portfolios of firms like Melvin Capital and basically depicted the WSB gamestop fiasco as a classic david vs goliath narrative, instead of the reality which was for a brief period of time it was a real short squeeze and then almost immediately became a classic bubble/pump and dump scenario that had no connection to fundamental asset valuation. (To be clear, in a short squeeze stock prices can easily be pushed past the "intrinsic value", but so long as there's still a squeeze it is not irrational to buy the asset. However, once it's no longer actually a short squeeze and is now just a normal bull-run / bubble, an article selling the david v goliath narrative is now propaganda)
- Here's a headline that's #2 on /r/politics, which I just visited to find the first headline that counts as propaganda in my book: "Conservatives Are Furious Biden Delivered a Non-Insane Presidential Speech" (regardless of what you feel about the speech or conservatives, it should be trivially obvious that they are not furious about a "non-insane" speech)
- Any of the dozens of articles about the "Capitol Hill Insurrection" which grossly exaggerated what occurred as an attempted coup instead of the reality which was a bunch of (largely deluded) self-styled patriots who changed and prayed and took stupid selfies inside the capitol building (note: me saying that it was grossly exaggerated is not the same as saying that there was no wrongdoing, etc)
---
I do think it is true though that "articles which are clearly propaganda to the average user" i.e. one thats go against the status quo of a cite will be downvoted. But propaganda in the other direction won't because they will never think of it as propaganda
"To be truly countercultural today, in a time of tech hegemony, one has to, above all, betray the platform, which may come in the form of betraying or divesting from your public online self."
I hadn't thought of boycotting much of popular online space as being counter-cultural. It's an interesting thought.
I think the interesting part is that it's kind of counter-culture but it itself is not really a culture at all. There are no groups (as far as I know) for people who eschew social media. They don't meet up at the pub and talk about it, they don't have any kind of organization, even a loose one. People just kind of decide to wash their hands of Facebook and Instagram and Twitter and such, then go about their lives. I don't think they generally feel a part of some larger culture (or counter-culture)
Maybe I'm wrong about that. To me though it almost seems like a stand-alone complex.
It reminds me of a chapter from Kino's adventures, where she finds a city, which has a culture of cat lovers. When she leaves them, she meets their king, who tells the story of the land: people had decided they don't need the king and any culture, so they've decided to appear to every traveller with a different culture.
However, the king says, they are not aware that that is their new culture.
It is being intentional about one’s time, attention, and emotions. Me, I play a lot more guitar these days, and really enjoy having something that I can learn.
Social media just doesn’t work for me. I can’t deal with a constant stream of people dumping their emotions. I’m aware that most other people can. And that’s fine. But I’m happier just ignoring it and working hard on work, family life, and guitar.
There is at least one group who (arguably in part) eschews political social media: the grillpilled.
Hacker News is basically that culture. A lot of people here spend their time complaining about how much they hate every aspect of social media, the web and modern culture (except for HN, of course) and make a point of virtue-signaling how unplugged, and detached from the mainstream they are, including their refusal to touch any form of social media.
I think it's fair to say that a part of the userbase here has built a cultural identity around its contrarianism.
More and more over the past few years, I've seen my own social circles migrate away from public forums like Facebook and Twitter and into private WhatsApp group chats, Discord groups, and so on.
In some cases these are groups of people I know in real life, and in some cases everyone is anonymous or pseudonymous.
And there is definitely an unspoken rule of "don't unilaterally invite anyone, don't advertise that this group exists, stay hidden, we like what we have going on here."
It's in some ways a reversion to the style of older private Usenet/BBS/IRC channels, but in other respects it's a lateral move. For one, it's still mostly happening on centralized platforms.
What I think is interesting is how our media ecology (in the sense of media as means we communicate and express ourselves, not "mass media") is an interplay between these big public spaces and a proliferation of smaller private spaces. It's not _just_ a dark forest, there's also a bright canopy into which people emerge, forage, and carry back down into the forest.
One of my hobbies is boatbuilding, and there is a LOT of good material that is still available on forums since they just happily sit there seemingly forever, and are easy to archive. But a lot of the new stuff is now done on FB, and it means that knowledge gets pushed to the bottom of the feed, and it is impossible to archive.
My feeling is that the switch to algorithmic feed-based discussion is a serious regression for a lot of interest groups.
An excellent illustration of this is Stack Overflow. They take after the forum model of preserving knowledge to the degree that they shut down discussions that have happened before. Stack Overflow's database of solutions brings literally billions in value to the world, and it simply would not work without persistance of information.
Trying to rid my life of google has opened all sorts of doors. If you're a tinkerer there are a plethora of options available for you to customize your experience and discover new capabilities.
balajis.com vs twitter.com/balajis
It's a lot of hassle for the average internet user. The worst case scenario: you end up paying ~70$/year for something you have no idea how to setup property. Beast case scenario: some startup takes over the hassle for you for "only" 50$/year... But that's not that different from Facebook (except that you would "own" a domain name and a host you have no idea how to "own").
The only winning move is not to play: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=MpmGXeAtWUw
There are still online interactions though. Communities trading tracks and collaborating musically online. Torrenting. Open source software projects.
It's play-acting rebellion in a pre-aproved manner
Our studio has released torrents of media over the past 15 years that I would classify as counterculture but you would never know because we aren't hustling on Zuckerbergian platforms or playing the "please look at me" game on Youtube etc.
Trailerjacked trailer for counterculture game that makes animations https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vrMEQPtMO4c
Scene from a counterculture animated feature film in progress made in a game engine https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=bgMeIaqjRvY
Counterculture is not dead, its just not playing in the sandboxes everyone else is playing in, because those sandboxes are lame as fuck.
Isn't that a tad bit arrogant to stick a flag in all of it? See also: https://youtu.be/uEx5G-GOS1k
Youtube is "lame as fuck." Release everywhere to not be arbitrarily silenced because anything good is controversial, by definition.
Why abuse the word "counterculture" so many times? It comes across like you're trying too hard.
Good luck and I hope you find an audience rather than make at obscurity for the point of staying in obscurity.
We've been doings like this for twenty years. We made Potato Phones in 2002 before a potato phone was a thing https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=lo3StA3INws
Youtube is lame- our work is also archived on Internet Archive and other places- this is a 172 gb master of one of our films https://archive.org/details/heartstringmarionette
Flag? I don't see a flag. I see text.
The "try too hard" stuff usually comes from weak people who are wannabe creators but lack the guts to do it, let alone stick with it for several decades while remaining original and independent.
No, it isn't.
I remember one channel of an old guy just smoking a cigar for an hour. Said nothing, just sat there. There were thousands of videos of him doing this, going back years. I don’t remember the name of it, unfortunately.
YouTube always seems to stick me in a bubble and never recommends any worthwhile new channels.
/r/artisanvideos
* pleasant guy talking for 45 minutes about his lifetime of experience using chains: https://www.reddit.com/r/ArtisanVideos/comments/lyvfzz/just_...
* man weaves a bed: https://www.reddit.com/r/EngineeringPorn/comments/978s2c/man...
Where is it playing?
Eschewing a mobile phone has been pretty counterculture these recent years, but I think we are close to a point where it will no longer be sustainable, at least for anyone wanting to cross borders – or depending on the country, even enter a restaurant or concert. Several governments have announced that their vaccine passports will exist as mobile phone apps, because paper certificates are too easily forged.
Just put a qr code on it containing the same info plus a digital signature, and have verifiers scan it with an app. That sounds a lot more secure than the enduser having an app that the verifier just looks at with their eyes.
That makes no sense - consensus must exist within a counterculture for it to be definable, therefore counterculture and consensus can coexist.
Being "prevalent" has no bearing whatsoever on being a counterculture. It's entirely possible for a counterculture to have a subreddit and not be prevalent. The vast majority of content on Reddit never even touches the frontpage.
You could say that a counterculture can't exist on Reddit that runs counter to the platform's terms of service, and that might be true, but it's also conditional.
Those examples weaken an otherwise good article.
- The network has some moderation, but bans are last resorts where on social media bans and temporary bans are part of the process.
- Much of the moderation is left to channel operators and guides are given by the network on how to moderate.
- Much of the network is apolitical and you can even be banned for talking about politics in many channels. This runs counter to pop-culture with encourages not only discussing politics but airing your politics with known dissidents.
- Nearly every channel is topic focused, where pop-culture and social media encourage broad, boundaryless discussion.
- Pseudoanonymity is still an option; in contrast to real identity policies in social media.
You can't tell me that's not culture, but maybe it's not a whole culture just yet. That said, keep poking the bear cub and see if it doesn't grow up.
The trick is to have specific interests you care about and track down that community. They're out there. The encouraging thing is my kinds have found their own communities online and among friends without my help. They use Discord, Twitch, a bit of instagram and such. They're tech savvy geeks though, if somewhat differently geeky to myself. They know what they're interested in and look for that because most of mass culture is just occasionally amusing background noise to them. I'm very encouraged.
I often see people bemoaning the passing of the old internet, but for me it's all still out there and thriving. Several new layers of it have developed too. It's just not the only, or 'biggest' internet anymore.
I'm happy to listen to the bemoaning, mainly because the newest and largest groups on the internet are the most problematic and most of them have no self-awareness to that end. Better that they hear the bemoaning and get a chance to change and choose not to.
How do you define counterculture? It is outside the mainstream, yes, but it does not need to be hidden. There are still individuals and groups who are "against the grain" in our society and always will be.
In my experience these people are relatively private when it comes to their digital life (not absent!) but can be amazing storytellers in other mediums, through song, dance, writing, etc.
I think the biggest misconstruction is that the counterculture is a single shared idea or that it is freely accessible to the masses.
I tried using examples of my own youthful adventures and communities -- still not easy.
Now we’re talking. Doom was a massive deal because of the violence (as you mentioned), but also because it moved entertainment revenue away from MSM and onto PC’s and the internet.
redisman, could you tell more about this?
Kpop is deliberately manufactured culture. The personalities and music are meticulously curated by corporations. "Underground Kpop" is practically an oxymoron like a "married bachelor" would be.
And that's not to insult or knock it.
E-Boys/Girls, VSCO Girls, and cottagecore are some examples.
Any successful culture, be it sub- or counter-, will eventually be swallowed by the mainstream. That’s because a culture is such only if it gets transmitted from person to person. Denying transmission is not counter-cultural, it is anti-cultural: it denies its own validity. Which is why I laugh at the elitism and pretentiousness of articles like these, who want to be purer than pure then take their clues from the likes of MTV Unplugged. The search for purity in culture is a fool’s errand, one might as well burn every page one writes. In reality, culture has to be transmitted, and the purists are just another bunch of competitors desperately trying to elbow everybody else with what little leverage they have.
The modern lack of visible “alternative” cultures is simply due to the fragmentation and recombination that new media have allowed. Guthenberg has invented his press a few years ago, Luther just started writing his thesis, and we are all here wondering why amanuensis culture is not as vibrant as it was.
(Greg Egan proposed this technique in his novel, Quarantine)
Snarking off about the ubiquitous hypocrisy would be one level of that, of course. (Seen in much popular comedy.) But there are higher.
It's the exact opposite - arguably the pinnacle of the absurd logic of capitalism and its processes of commodification.
I’ve often thought of the counterculture to online space as those who are breaking free of centralization and the digital “monopolies.” They’re the people who are homesteading on tildes, Mastodon, or their own self-hosted instance, for example. In cyberspace, FAANG are the new industrialists (the new informationalists?), so to me it makes sense that a portion of online society wants to separate or rebel from this establishment which controls a good portion of this cyberspace.
As IoT becomes more prevalent, I can see those who seek a break from connectivity in general as countercultural, too. Some of the ideas in Aldous Huxley’s “Brave New World,” or Ted Kaczynski’s* “Industrial Society and Its Future” reflect this.
* I do not condone Kaczynski’s actions. I’m merely stating the concern about technology’s negative impact on society has long been thought about. It makes sense that there would be those who seek to shun it entirely.
The "I know I'll be downvoted for this brave opinion" bit is the icing on the cake.
Is this not polite company? Do you think adding an asterisk makes a significant difference?
I'm black myself, do I get to say it? Could the question be more complicated than you're making it out to be?
edit: I mean - MCNeil at the NYT was quite literally doing what you just did: discussing whether certain language was acceptable or should be punished. Imagine being fired for this post two years from now. I don't care about McNeil in particular (the US is an "At-Will" country, workers have no real rights, he's a privileged guy), but the state of free expression right now is bizarre. The fact that it comes when old (and most of new media) media is more consolidated than it's ever been is not coincidental.
> And who exactly has been fired for "believing male and female are real concepts"?
I recall some kind of minor debacle about a Stack Overflow moderator (or employee? details are vague) who got in trouble for something related to individual choice of pronouns. It seems to be what they're refering to.
Of course, there's a difference between "unpopular" and "intentionally or callously offensive". All of my examples are of the former kind (so long as the kink happens in private spaces, I guess). Church of Satan is borderline in my mind, but I suppose that some Christians might put it in the latter category.
I'm not saying any of those things are bad (in fact, I like fighting with fake swords) but there's not hostility to them from the culture and they, in turn, are not hostile to the mainstream culture, so I just don't think they're countercultural at all.
By definition I think countercultural groups will strike you as weird and bad unless you belong to them specifically. Q-Anon, for example, which speculates that the leaders of society are <bad things>, is a countercultural group because they both hate and oppose elements of the main culture and are hated and opposed by it. The kind of antifa or anarchists who are attempting to burn down courthouses or police stations in Portland are another clear example.
Ironically, both are disliked some because of that. The nofap rose as a real counterculture to commodified kink and porn; and the "i love fucking science" type of reddit atheist the FSM people were at heart are mocked.
Consider: your HR department is left leaning, your boss is probably left leaning, your teachers are left leaning, the government is left leaning.
How on earth could the "counter culture" be the hegemonic culture of the most powerful billionaires on earth, and the people who have the most power over the most people in their daily lives (HR departments for adults, school administrators for children)?
The people who you instinctively dislike, and who society counts as something that needs to be corrected are by definition the counter culture.
That doesn't necessarily need to be seen as a bad thing, btw. It just means that the hippies basically won and have all of the power now.
.. if you think this, your definition of left leaning is completely broken and your Overton window is in a very strange place.
Where did you work where your boss thought worker-ownership and workplace democracy were the best ways to get work done?
You are doing an awful lot of generalizing from your own experiences. I have met a LOT of conservative managers and business owners, including more than a couple openly sexist and racist ones, who are doing just fine for themselves in life. The idea that conservatives are some sort of tiny suppressed minority is bonkers.
Did you forget this is a US based website? Are you posting from China?
Corporations pay lip service to the left but they don’t really follow through. There’s no divestment from China, fossil fuels, or even Diversity and Inclusion that reaches the board level.
TBH I think you got downvoted just for mentioning it, I don't think what you said is actually that controversial unless you're making a lot of assumptions about _your_ intent in sharing this, which doesn't seem fair.
Btw, reading about Boyd Rice reminded me of Russian experimental electronic band GameBoydRice who makes music using a hacked gameboy and a mixer. https://youtu.be/lxzpatLthxE
Just one of the billions of random little market segments and sub genres out there. The mainstream had much less hold on the world than it used to. The platform censorship though constrains it. Crypto doesn't have those constraints though. One is reminded of how Wikileaks, getting locked out of every bank, took cryptocurrency donations and became hugely wealthy as a result.
The punk manifesto could be written by McDonalds.
"The names of these e-deologies tend to be both fantastical and literal."
"post-civilizationist"
"voluntarist post-agrarianist"
"Fully Automated Luxury Gay Space Communism"
I've really never heard of categories like these. It makes me think the author has delved into subcultures I really have no experience in. In that sense her descriptions may or may not be valid. But, she makes no attempt to bring specificity to a lot of her claims. Who are these people in these subcultures? How many people are in them, and how many people are out of them?
In this sense, it reads a lot like a "cultural studies" piece; there is some great individual insight, but the overall essay makes claims it hasn't supported.
http://www.johnzerzan.net/articles/why-primitivism.html
> voluntarist
> post-agrarianist
https://yalebooks.yale.edu/book/9780300182910/against-grain
> Fully Automated Luxury Gay Space Communism
I can’t help you there, sorry :)
The counter-culture that goes against all political, media, financial and corporate institutions.
Like in a fashion counter culture could be the Amish if the culture is extremely anti Amish.
Arguably, the most effective counterculture in recent times was QAnon. That didn't end well.
The far right isn't tolerated as they're dangerous to advertisers sensitivities. Meanwhile the far left individuals are mostly tolerated but they're also all very aware that if the far right were to disappear overnight, they'd be the next target.
Yes. A real problem is that the US has no consensus on how society should work. It did, in, say, the 1950s. People were expected to get jobs, and work, and the spectrum of available jobs was matched, roughly, to the range of human capabilities. That was a generally stable situation. That's the US from 1945 to 1975 or so.
That's changed, leaving behind a huge number of unemployed and under-employed people. More education doesn't help; about half of US college graduates are doing jobs that don't need a college education.
Nobody really has a good answer to this. Which is why conservative populism looks to the past.
