You strike up a conversation with the girl picking mushrooms in the middle of nowhere or you go to an underground death metal concert or spend a bit of time on 4chan and you'll find countercultures alive and well that you're just not part of.
If you think a sense of sameness pervades the creative world then you must be looking at a woefully tiny portion of the creative world. It has never been easier to be weird nor easier to find weirdness.
Like in the 1960s how the mainstream culture would whisper under their breath and point in shock and horror at hippies and try to get them banned from various public venues, and send mobs to beat them up, we have that same situation now, but instead 4chan is treated like that.
BTW, just because it's not your counterculture, doesn't mean it's not counterculture. You guys are looking at this all 60 years after the fact and saying that hippies were awesome. That's not what people thought at the time. 4chan is generally anti-ukraine war and anti-vax. 60 years from now they might look like the good guys.
4chan is a case of being co-opted: there hasn't been meaningful countercultural activity on 4chan in over a decade, but there is ample reactionary activity masquerading as counterculture. Muddying the distinction between the two is the reactionary's objective.
What is hilarious is that by your definition it is concevable that the increasingly old men who continue to use 4chan could infact be the counterculture you seek... so in 60 years they will all be dead anyway (vax or no vax)
Forgive my ignorance, but do you mean 4Chan is against the war in Ukraine in principle (anti-war), sides with Russia in that conflict (anti-Ukraine) or against US/West involvement in that war (anti-war but with a catch).
most people are against the war in ukraine. I have a feeling the motivations are different though.
A culture is information collectively held across many minds. A counter culture is a culture with contradictory information to the dominant culture.
It's clear both the hippies and 4chan meet the criteria. I found your analysis cogent.
The hippies were rooted in things that were objectively good: peace, love, self discovery, acceptance, mutual aid, egalitarianism, free thought.
That contrasts sharply with 4chan’s demographics and motivations. I don’t think that anyone will look back with fondness or positivity toward a bunch of closeted homophobic, racist, sexist, emotionally and mentally stunted incels circle jerking themselves into a froth over who’s the edgiest edge lord.
You have to be a coddled kid to believe that 4chan and their racism, misogyny and xenophobia are not mainstream or challenge the status quo. I mean, yes liberalism tries to stick a smiley face on the grimm reality, but it’s stupid to think you’re challenging anything just because you draw a frown and a hitler mustache on said smiley face.
If they're anti Ukraine war, they already are.
There is "alive and well" counterculture, but 4chan is "automatic, boring, annoying, kneejerk" counterculture. It's like a sad shell of what it was, with all the fun sucked out of it.
It would be a mistake to think that counterculture is inherently a good thing, or that countercultures of the past did not have their own pockets of “obnoxious and brainless contrarianism.”
We have no counter-culture, because there is no longer a strong, central culture.
4chan is one of many siloed cultures, not a counter-culture.
Edit: downvoters should ask a punk or metalhead what he thinks about certain bands that went mainstream.
> But somewhere between your 38th Marvel movie and the millionth Heard-Depp trial rehash video, you might start to believe it. Even if it isn’t new, even if it’s easy to escape, and even if it’s not that bad, a cloying sameness occupies the cultural mainstream. It seems impenetrable, same as ever. But it’s especially surprising given how much creative work today exists outside the mainstream.
> It is a jarring contrast. At no point in history have people created so much with so few channels for consuming their work. Most consumers get their content through a narrow straw — TikTok’s “For You” page, the first page of Google’s search results, Instagram’s explore tab, miscellaneous streaming sites, and so on. Many lifetimes worth of creation get aggressively filtered down into a (very optimized) stream of content.
Completely agree. It has also never been easier to discover sameness, broadcast sameness, or replicate sameness. The Instagrammification of the world is why the hip local coffee shop in Thailand looks like it could be in Brooklyn or Amsterdam.
Even countercultures replicate sameness.
Find someone from any counterculture and everything from his/her ideas, to their music, to the perfume they stink from are probably all exactly the same. There's really nothing new that 99.99999999% of humans come up with. I mean a 4chan user in Poland spouts the same tired nonsense as a 4chan user from Argentina or the US. Same styles of dress. Same haircuts. Even uses the same wording in their posts. Try it for yourself, you'll find yourself reading the exact same comments and posts over, and over, and over again. There's literally nothing new there. Or, as another example, when was the last time you heard a genuinely new idea from a conservative? Or from a liberal? If we're being honest, I mean, we'd have to admit that we haven't heard any new ideas out there.
So you end up with 4chan users all having the exact same crap in their rooms, and political parties all having the exact same formats, colors, and even overall look to their "conventions". You only noticed the "sameness" with coffee shops. The reality is that cultures, and even counter cultures, thrive on sameness. Without sameness they don't exist.
Covered in the 14:
"Alternative voices exist-in fact, they are everywhere--but are rarely heard, and their cultural impact is negligible."
Yeah, these things are still smaller and less impactful than the mainstream culture, but that's what it means to be a counterculture.
If only that person could have known which of the umpteen million counter cultures was going to be successful! /s
Identifying counter cultures is trivial. Knowing which one will become mainstream in the always uncertain future is unimaginably difficult. Empires have fallen because people bet on the wrong counter culture.
There are some similarities of successful counter cultures through history. Loose organization. Ease of understanding. Low financial cost of participation. And extreme inclusiveness.
Fortunately for empires, princes, and presidents, counter cultures and movements with all those attributes don't come along all that often.
A big part of what has happened is a huge rise in basic bills (rent, health insurance, tuition) and that has forced the counterculture people to make more money. It's an economic transformation and it has narrowed our culture in many ways. Smell the desperation.
Part of that, in turn, is the slow death of the American working class. This is a much harsher society economically. That is why you step over bodies in San Francisco's Tenderloin. It wasn't like that when I moved here (early 80's).
The playbook of "criminalize any counterculture that threatens the status quo" is arguably in continuous use now, preventing any countercultural movement from gaining that kind of scale through a combination of negative press and prosecution threats.
Sure, the hippie movement was branded countercultural. But to what purpose? Note that during the period, the US government was engaged in a large scale remaking of America both domestically and internationally. Domestically, we saw the remaking of immigration policies to no longer bias towards those of European descent, and instead towards what favored macro capitalism (the import of cheaper and low skilled labor). Internationally the US was scaling up engagement in hot and cold wars and no longer considering itself bound to the constitutional provisions for war. Lo and behold, during this period, a "counterculture" arises which glorifies drug use, the dissolution of the nuclear family and pushes forward the vapid strain of hyper individualism that we see today. Suddenly the anti-war movement is associated with drug use and degeneracy, whilst the nation's racial consciousness is broken in time to welcome a new wave of immigrants to help improve the margins of big business. Note that the current "woke" counterculture follows the same pattern. Increased individualism, sublimated racial awareness, dissolution of family, and rampant degeneracy. Meanwhile the state continues its hegemonic march of constant international agitation.
that’s the point that sticks out to me. optimize aggressively for revenue, everywhere, and we get what you describe. the counter culture can’t always be productive in a way that the mainstream can capture. the counter cultures that try for that today are things like darknet/drug markets or just cryptocurrency broadly. the latter, for the time being, seems pretty widely viewed as a dishonest, selfish, destructive thing. the former seems much more in-line with existing systems of commerce than with a social movement: full of distrust, no interactions other than buy & click.
i feel that the counter-culture at this point has to be fighting for some alternative to that optimization process. was Occupy counter-cultural? were WTO protests counter-cultural? communist/anarchist ideals — presented as an alternative to that optimization — do seem more popular with the newer generations than the older ones, but almost entirely in dialogue form than in actual, physical ways of living. perhaps the counter-cultural streak is still here but the barrier for it to progress from a flare up to a sustained thing has risen.
The difference is that there is, and intentionally so, little legibility to how crypto "does" anything. Increasingly so as you go down the rabbit hole into less prominent projects that are untethered to traditional finance or venture capital. And if we're seeing like a state, that makes it a useless technology, ties it only to crime and the underground, because it can't be seen and controlled using men with guns or tattling gossips. And from a counter-cultural perspective, that should make one go, "hmm, that's interesting." Someone who is able to access state resources while being insulated fron state coercion could be seen as "useless parasite" or "bold counter-culturalist".
Right now it is highly inconvenient to adhere to a "crypto lifestyle", even more so than it was to be a hippie. As you say, buying drugs with it is a common entry point, and it's hard to use a crypto wallet for any kind of consumer activity. And everywhere you go, the discussion is unhinged speculation with an "exit strategy". The actual believers are quite a bit fewer in number, and are more likely to be along the lines of a Vitalik than an SBF - living relatively simply and focused primarily on intellectual concerns, vs a grand-scale dishonest charlatan.
And protest movements, while visually impactful, don't seem to terrify the mainstream like crypto. In many respects they have become co-opted, part of the show.
But why are you surprised? The hippies pushed free love and drug use. The inevitable end result was more children without stable families and drug addiction. When you step over those bodies you are stepping over the fruits of the hippy ideal.
1. Hippies were ~1960s. Children of hippies would then be adults in the ~1980s, and would be grandparents now. Tenderloin's median age[1] is 38, or 20 years too young
2a. Hippies pushed marijuana and psychedelics. Weed has a 10% addiction rate. LSD and psilocybin have no addiction rate.
2b. Drugs that are addictive (heroin) had complex, controversial and conspiratorial factors [2] (and that's aside from the complexity of "addiction" itself)
2c. Alcohol and alcoholism had (and has) way more impact.
3a. Family instability (re: divorce rates) occurs in far, far more places than the hippy movement.
3b. Just because a family is stable doesn't mean it produces healthy adults
[1] https://www.point2homes.com/US/Neighborhood/CA/San-Francisco... [2] https://www.vera.org/reimagining-prison-webumentary/the-past...
In the hippies case, as the movement became more mainstream the establishment funded efforts to emphasize those aspects over the other, more socialist and anti-war aspects that were the basis of the earlier counter-culture.
Just look at the evolution in the music of the movement: protest songs of the early to mid 60s (Dylan, Sam Cooke, Simon & Garfunkle...) gave way to the commercially produced, glitzy psychedelic music in the late 60s. From Surrealistic Pillows in 1967 to American Beauty in 1970 and beyond it was basically about sex, partying, navel gazing and spacing out.
The message clearly became much safer and, as it happens, more profitable.
I've even heard one conspiracy theorist say that the change in attitude for many bands was orchestrated by 3-letter agencies to influence the anti-war movement, though I don't know how much evidence there is of that.
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.
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?
>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.
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.
I think you may be right. Counter culture today may simply be being offline.
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.
Federation, onion sites, unindexed sites, something new entirely that runs on TCP/IP
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.
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.
https://www.atariarchives.org/deli/cottage_computer_programm...
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.
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.
𝄞 "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)
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.
The key here is the counter culture starts and ends in your heart. Get out and break out of the matrix.
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.
The AP even has it on tests for college credit
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.
>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
Colour-blind antiracism, preparing for global warming instead of pushing green deal & capitalism are countercultures now.
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.
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.
Primary culture loves to pull from counterculture after the morsel has been thoroughly sanitized and monetized.
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.
You make it sound like a bad thing. I'm happy we don't throw people off buildings as often.
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 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?
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.
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.
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.
I'd say today's counter culture is people eschewing corporate life, sort of like it was before corporate culture took over.
Does the second Q stand for something else than the first? Or is it a typo?
When surfing around, it becomes clear there are several narratives (or competing narratives on some topics) that are present throughout our culture. The truth is that most of the media consumed is either owned by one of a few corporations, or is heavily inspired by their work. Now we are dealing with a many head hydra.
I would posit that in the current time, we have a wide variety of well established subcultures whereas for most of the 1900s we didn't. Today our subcultures can exist easily due to mass media, whereas for most of the 1900s they couldn't - the subcultures were more "underground" - underground in the sense that you really needed to be part of a community in person to be part of the subculture. The "counter culture" was a push back on the smotheringness of the monoculture. Now that the monoculture is not so smothering and the subcultures can breath, there's less pushback - there's less "counter".
We have traditional catholics in america who are going against the pope's relatively progressive positions on gay people.
We have aggressive de-institutionalize-the-cops people.
We have had (for a while now!) anti-prison people (this is far longer than "defund the police" and has roots in anti-racism) and I think they're pretty countercultural. (This is not "we should make better prisons" people, I mean "we should have no prisons".)
We have had monarchists, people who believe we should do away with democracy and go back to monarchist rule. IDK about them but I know they exist.
I think all counterculture is going against some aspect of a culture, not all aspects of all culture. But since we're aware of so much more cultures than before, the relative counter movements all seem small in comparison individually. I'm sure hippies were never that big, nor punks.
As an example, other people have mentioned furries. They do have a pretty easily distinguishable aesthetics which you’ll spot immediately when you look at their art or their fashion. They might all share a pro LGBTQI+ agenda, but that is as far as their politics will agree, and besides most people have the same political view about LGBTQI+ anyway.
These people are not counterculture, even if they are a minority, because they control the culture industry.
The "criteria" mentioned in that post assumes the importance of cinema, radio and television is static, but in fact all of traditional content mediums are just a small detail in the peripheral vision of a younger audience, and they are pushing their values and ideas harder than it was ever possible before. There's culture and counterculture online. It's just not taking place in the same space as before, leaving the old mediums to corporations trying to maximize profits.
Kids and teens don't dream about changing the world through cinema anymore, but rather Twitch, YouTube or TikTok, or if they're really ambitious, a game.
Edit: forgot to mention Discord.
I disagree. Can you expand on your claim?
YouTube and TikTok are not countercultural, even if some users are using those platforms for genuine countercultural creative acts. By definition, a social media "influencer" with millions of followers is not countercultural.
In his great book "the myth of digital democracy", Matthew Hindman pointed out what most people don't get: The web is becoming more centralized AND more spread out at the same time. Popularity is a scale-free distribution that gets more extreme over time.
So we have counterculture, it's just not the large homogenous blobs that we were used to.
It's not that it doesn't exist. There is no "dark corner of the room" dynamic like you had between punk and the nuclear family; more like, it's a different room altogether, and the other cultures don't get to see what's in that room. It's a society where the culture and the counter-culture don't share the "town square" together like they used to as much.
Alternatively, like you mention, it's existing in a different digital sphere to the mainstream. This can be intentional; using alternative forums like Mastodon instead of Twitter, Discord instead of Facebook, or whatever alternative it might be. IRC chats and email threads are still going to this day. It could also be unintentional; two people can be using YouTube but have completely and utterly different feeds and comments that they interact with due to an algorithm.
These alternate realities never really existed to the degree they do today. Previous cultures had the ruling and working classes, or ruling, working, and slave if you go back far enough. Stricter class boundaries, but within those classes things were more homogenous culturally. Less people, that meet in the same forum, pub, feast hall, or religious center. Now, the lines between classes are blurred and the classes themselves less homogenous. More people, more meeting places. More things to build an identity and culture around. That dilutes the predominant counter-culture enough for people to ask whether it exists at all.
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.
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 :-(
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 then it defines "counter-culture" has having a significant impact. This is a bit of a paradox to me: either you are mainstrean, either you are counter-culture. You can’t be both at the same time. Only history made us realize that a counter-culture movement had a strong impact when it became… mainstream! (and is not counter-culture anymore)
Yet, on the individual level, it would be nice if people could realize: "hey, I’m mainly consuming mainstream stuff. I should try to diversify."
You use Gopher, use an "alternative" OS, get your news from longform nuanced podcasts? Great, but 99% of people don't.
Contrast that with the counter culture of the 60s, or even 90s, where people were at least _aware_ that something else existed, even if they were violently against it.
Culture is broad, it is cohesive, and it extends and influences across many domains. There are absolutely countercultures out there, but most people aren't aware of them given how dominant the dominant culture is, which is generally the case but especially true today.
Today, YouTube and TikTok are channels which multiply and amplify this kind of culture worldwide.
“Trads”. Young people with super traditional values doing exactly the opposite of most of what you just listed.
No one would seriously suggest the trendiest most mainstream supported or glorified lifestyles (van life, queerness, gig work) are counter culture…that IS the culture; there’s very little cultural risk in living those glorified identities.
But say you’re an 18 year old with radically traditional values…that’s counter cultural now.
Not supporting either direction. Just observing.
Unlike the US of the 1950s, there is no apparent single pervasive monolithic culture — and thus there is no real “counterculture” that can exist in universal opposition to that dominant culture across the US.
But rest assured that to the people living lives incongruent with their communities — including perhaps any “trads” in SF, NYC, etc. — their lives will feel pretty countercultural.
Another point on trads being a counter culture: You can tell a counterculture is real by the presence of posers and wannabes. Trad culture has this too. Ex: men who hide behind marble statue pfps and are actually single dudes living in a big city.
Several US states are trying to make it illegal to be trans or even dress in a gender nonconfirming way. Queerness still carries a certain amount of real, physical risk; Norway Pride 2022 was cancelled because somebody shot up a gay bar and murdered two people.
Maybe I just need to stop taking public transportation and walking the city. Perhaps suburbs feel further from the precipice.
Long hn thread about it from some months ago: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=31886687
I want to be charitable but it's hard to interpret this attitude as anything other than willful ignorance of very obvious facts.
I nominate being an unapologetic white male as the counter culture of our current time. Just watch how many downvotes you'll get on any social media platform for having this position.
The thing is despite the media focus, it still is the actual case that such minorities do not have actual power in society in terms of actual statistics, but the media is just a mirage, the reality is that certain disparities still exist, despite media representation. This might be the slightly different aspect of modern culture, that it does not amplify the already existing power group explicitly.
All evidence points towards LGBTQ always existing but just becoming more open.
Trads being Counter Culture? That's the same double speak that gets us Citizens United and Right to Work. Where did these trads get their radically traditional values? From the majority.
Specifically I think the counter-cultural part in terms of the rise of like...young trad Catholics/religious people is the idea of not partaking in the world. Our current attention economy spends a lot of time trying to get people (including adolescents) to spend their time watching/consuming/interacting, be constantly available, etc. The idea that you don't have to participate is the counter-cultural part.
Letting the trads speak a bit more might shock us just as much as the past minorities shocked our forefathers, but look where are: we evolved have't we ? Maybe we can ditch some dictat we imposed on ourselves in our chase for ever deeper reactionary counter-traditionalism.
Consider the 'culture'. Whose side is the balance of power really behind? There are massive influences and money behind traditional christian and conservative values - they have a practical stranglehold on the politics of roughly half of America (by landmass). Is it really 'counter' the culture to embody those values in areas where they are the norm?
I think we don't have 'a' counterculture because we don't have 'a' culture, a unified one, in this country. Trad is as counterculture in California as radical queer/left ideology is in Alabama, and it gets muddier when you look at individual pockets of the opposite in rural areas or cities respectively.
If anything, this cultural split over core values would make anything else - 'radical centrism' for instance - a counterculture in and of itself; except, that tends to be the tack taken by a lot of media (NPR, Meet the Press, etc.). Can that be counterculture?
Alternatively, consider outside of mainstream politics. Co-op organizations, hacker/DIY circles, and protest movements are all certainly 'counter' the norm, but do they all have their own 'culture?' At best they have shared memes, no real ideological unity or even goddang clothing preferences.
Every person's TikTok feed is different, the first page of search results for every query is different, etc. Never have there been so many channels for consuming content.
In fact, the complaint I hear more often from people is that society has too many countercultures. Of course they don't call them that -- they call them "filter bubbles," "extremist groups," or more derogatory terms, but aren't they the same thing?
https://tedgioia.substack.com/p/14-warning-signs-that-you-ar...
I've watched the trend accelerate in my life and I wonder if we're reaching some sort of point (because of social media?) where there is very nearly no culture (counter or otherwise) unless it is commodified. Everything has been reproduced and divorced from it's meaning so we have this neutered insipid idea of culture that inspires nothing.
This process is called recuperation in sociology : https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Recuperation_%28politics%29?wp...
We are all princes of our own kingdoms.
Our gripes today are so minor previous generations would have largely found them laughable. It’s why so much of our decent media depicts the past. It’s hard to make a compelling story about social media addiction. It’s been done, but it’s difficult.
We’re approaching Brave New World much more quickly than I’d ever anticipated reading it in the 90s.
I don't understand this and by extension the entire article. Counterculture is by definition outside of mainstream. It would just be culture and not anti otherwise. This sounds like semantics but then that is what I think the entire article is, and imho it is wrong.
From Gioia's OC:
> A sense of sameness pervades the creative world ...
aka "Kids these days..."
I've been hearing this exact same criticism for as long as I remember.
One observation (McLuhan? Warhol?), using the example of da Vinci's Mona Lisa, which made some sense to me:
Modern tech makes reproduction trivial. So any original content quickly becomes ubiquitous. Separating content from original creator. Thereby mooting any of original intention or meaning or esthetic or whatever.
In other words, everything popular becomes banal.
My example, from the 90s era new age fads, I always thought of the yin-yang symbol showing up every where. Especially as tattoos. Oh so original.
Further, I think this also helps explain the disappointment about "selling out". It's a rare thing for a creator to become popular, not wear out their welcome, and retain their original fan base.
> I don't understand this and by extension the entire article. Counterculture is by definition outside of mainstream.
Yes, that's what they said. The danger they are going on about is how heavily it is buried so that it never seeps into mainstream.
Your not understanding is confusing to me, especially since you quoted the bit "we have a counterculture", and then replied as if they said "we have no counterculture".
There are differing opinions, but those need to be kept private for fear of retaliation.
Artists are clowns hired by a small elite that has the disposable income to spend. Ofcourse we live in a society that idolises the arts for some reason but most people never go to ballet or buy a sculpture. In Europe the government has subsidized theatre productions for a hundred years and it hasn't made a dent.
Just because a lot of acts have been turned mainstream and whitewashed doesn't mean they don't represent a radical departure from the status quo. And this isn't just in the US, in latin america you have reggaeton, in UK you have Grime and the rest of EU also have their own underground street culture marked by Violence, Crime, Drugs, Sex, and social issues which is very similar to Rock and Punk from back in the day.
Just like previous movements they are born from a sense of resentment and ostracism from "normal" society and a lot of the music tell tales that are often ignored had they not been made into a catchy tune that kids around the world listen to.
The highest grossing tour of 2022 was Bad Bunny's world tour [1] beating out well established acts and pretty much all his songs are in Spanish which is very surprising considering you see a lot of bilingual artists on the list.
[1]https://news.pollstar.com/2022/12/12/2022-year-end-biz-analy...
Rap han't become "whitewashed," just mainstream. And that does make it non-counterculture. The truth is that counterculture died after 1960, to the extent monoculture ever even existed in the first place (in the US). The 60's eepresent the death of monoculture, and we never moved back to one (in the US). What you are reffering to is more like hipsterism.
But then, if a counterculture falls in a forest and nobody was around to hear it, did the counterculture really exist? Could be a valid argument too. Maybe
Contemporary society is distinct for having a global mainstream monoculture propagated by a universal media enterprise, which gives the impression of a uniform global culture. Former bastions of counter culture like universities, museums , art galleries, local theaters now parrot the mainstream cultural zeitgeist. Moreover, mainstream adherents denigrate any counter cultural movement as "extremism".
In the past we cultivated a diffused & distributed society with localized communities that were capable of sustaining & highlighting distinct cultural trends. Often
I think the counter culture can be sought out, but too many people find it convenient to tap into the mainstream culture and believe counterculture has been snuffed out.
Give it a shot.
>against gay marriage
>against illegal immigration, supported erecting physical barriers
>pro wars in Middle East
You surely do not need to go back two generations to get shrieked out of a room. Just dip back ~10 - 15 years into mainstream Democrat positioning.
Technology has made us a lot better at that, and therefore the process of incorporating and destroying counterculture has accelerated. It's like trawlers finding smaller and smaller fish every year - which they take anyway, even if they're not mature, because they want to meet quota. Even if this further destroys the stock.
Over the past couple of years lockdowns must have done damage to offline-only cultural spaces. This is difficult to quantify.
Another observation hinted elsethread is that of "dark" spaces. One way to protect your culture against commoditization is to make it spiky or poisonous, like an animal that doesn't want to be eaten. Culture that contains elements that are both toxic to the mainstream and hard to separate out can exist as a subculture.
It seems to me that there are (at least) two such "left" and "right" subcultures. One left one is too queer-NSFW to be mainstream; another is too tankie-communist to be mainstream. Similarly there's a "right" culture that exists between the "banned from Twitter, had to use Gab" and "arrested on Jan 6" zones.
I'd also add a "gentrification" angle. For subcultures to have a physical presence, it needs to be really cheap. The stock of cheap-central-but-nasty (dilapidated, crime infested) property in cool cities has largely been re-absorbed.
this feels accurate to me, it's definitely part of the appeal of music so deliberately unlistenable that it will never become corporate trash
https://paradiserecordshtml.bandcamp.com/album/music-for-7-j... https://chezmonplaisir.bandcamp.com/album/cellphone
On the other hand they are a very small group relative to, say, the hippies, and aren't really framed a being in direct opposition of the status quo. But I don't think the status quo has much support in popular culture. Our current state of affairs is the result of a stalemated tug of war between many different groups who all oppose the status quo.
The slow centralisation of the reins of culture into a handful of institutions goes beyond counterculture. You don't need to have a big countercultural movement to have culturally relevant movies from companies that aren't Disney, or popular songs that aren't by Ed Sheeran. It's a bigger problem than just "we don't have a 21st century hippy equivalent".
Today's counter-culture won't be identified somewhere on the left-right spectrum, or be found in the struggle for mass media attention. Which was basically the hippies.
The truly dominating force today is the weight of our technological environment. The actual physical things. The actual algorithms of the bureaucracies. The world doesn't "feel" the same. It actual "is" the same. To our senses.
The counter cultural movements are the ones that reject submission to technology. Cyclists stand up to the car (the actual thing). Homeschoolers threaten the processes of the school district (the actual bureaucracy). In the mainstream, the driver submits to the car, the redshirter submits to the bureaucracy.
All the rest; music you listen to, political opinions you hold, movies you see, books you read, sexual disposition. It is completely irrelevant because they do not challenge technological foundations. For the hippies, those were anchors since culture still attached much value to say e.g. artistic expression. But today, culture is not defined by those.
That is also why much of this discussion is actually about the premise, we can't even recognize counterculture. We're looking in the wrong places. A boomer certainly won't recognize it. Music is more diverse than ever, and the big networks don't define culture.
But to be sure: death metal is not counterculture. That just gets co-opted in a headphone ad or whatever. Instead, those cyclists who are now doing critical mass events, they are laying the foundations of a future in which the past will be unrecognizable. Death metal hobbyist lay the foundation for nothing but more niche consumption.
I'm somewhat joking with that last example, but even so. Look at dominant technology (physical or procedural), as concrete and specific as you can make it. What is in opposition of _that_, that is counter culture.
Private trackers Special interest forums Not using Mc-Social Media Off-grid.
What's dwindled - due to media consumption habits is the "appearance" of a counterculture. When huge popstars appropriate every square inch of wierdness - what's wierd/different now? Nothing really...
In the 90s, Reznor and Manson sold "edge by the pound"...that was a commonly consumed form of counter culture.
Life getting too expensive is killing real counterculture - specialised stores, quirky cafes which attract fringe dwellers and so on. Depending on where you live - this is either less or more sad.
Anecdotes aside, at least for independent artists it may be economical effects that constrain passion and make projects feel so for-profit. Which have always been a thing, unfortunately. Given technology, maybe there is so much art to consume that making art requires forgoing distraction and the general worry that the art will be bad (which is nonsense, because some art simply has a limited audience).
In today's era, stuff like EU art grants [0] can do some good, although I have the feeling that patronage-per-capita is considerably lower than it was in the past; it would be an interesting metric to look at and try best to increase.
[0]: https://culture.ec.europa.eu/funding/cultureu-funding-guide
I'm not saying I agree with or subscribe to the tenets of conservatism (I don't). But it's a natural process for the pendulum to swing as society advances. Liberal counterculture "won" and went completely mainstream. Which is great! Gay marriage is legal, we care about sustainability, and so on. But every system has gaps and blind spots, and movements which oppose the incumbent mainstream are, by definition, not liberal counterculture.
Some touchpoints - President Obama's failure to penalize banks in the Great Recession. One percenters and the new cathedral. Joe Rogan. The intellectual dark web (Jordan Peterson et al). The red pill. The alt right.
I feel many of the above are often stupid, but in the same way that there were a lot of stupid 60s counterculture movements. It doesn't invalidate the fact that valid ideas exist within both. Also, they aren't using your signaling channels. For example, music doesn't seem to be a relevant cultural rallying point any more.
Web2 and Web3 have been captured by the profit motive. Web2 with professional VCs and Web3 with everyone playing VC. Web1 was very much a countercultural movement.
I've been part of the IndieWeb, DecentralizedWeb, OfflineFirst movements, met with Tim Berners-Lee, just finished an interview with Noam Chomsky and David Harvey (raw video here: https://vimeo.com/795006182/31cdfcf335). I've written about what needs to happen on the Web for it to change (https://cointelegraph.com/news/how-a-web-that-lost-its-way-c...)
It's hard to have a counterculture when the dominant tools are all owned by huge corporations and governments. Here is some open source software to get you started if you're interested:
Web2: https://qbix.com
Yes, that is one of the problems (it is not only things that can be problems, though).
> Well, it seems that hacker culture and open source software would be the antidote to all these.
I think it will not cure everything, but I think that it will help. However, in addition to the software being FOSS, it also needs to be good. (Fortunately, FOSS can help a bit since it makes it possible to make improvements, but that doesn't automatically make it good.)
See, the issue here may simply be that the author isn't aware of the central limit theorem. It is not at all strange that as you increase the number of independent estimates of what culture is (using content creation as a proxy) you see less "counterculture" (proportionally) because there's a smoothish variation between the two extremes with a peak near "mainstream" simply because that's how statistics work. A few scores of people on TV will invariably have more obviously different (and known) opinions.
But I'm also staring at this essay in quite a bit of confusion generally. There's all sorts of stuff that's counterculture being pushed into law by the extremist right, the extremist right is also a "counterculture", that's not slang for "the left". Outlawing teaching kids about LGBT people's existence and banning books is counterculture.
>The Yippies planned to hold a Black Panther breakfast at Aunt Jemima's Pancake House, followed by a feminist liberation of Minnie Mouse, a barbecue of Porky Pig and the capture of Tom Sawyer Island in order to protest the American war in Vietnam.
The Yippies seem a bit like the ANTIFA and autonomous zone folks, but with a better sense of humor and optics.
[1] = https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Youth_International_Party
[2] = https://www.kcet.org/shows/lost-la/the-yippie-invasion-of-di...
The real counterculture is on the edges and in the shadows, as it always has been, but it's cultural form does not take the form you'd expect if you're looking for it that way. It's not wearing all black, it doesn't have nose rings, it doesnt listen to edgy music, there is no consumerist element to it being exploited by corporations yet, that's actually a cultural cornerstone of it. It looks a lot like business as usual from the outside, but it isn't.
Please supply some context! You (We) all live in bubbles and you have to be clear about where you are coming from before you spout off your observations and thoughts.
ChatGPT can never wander past its training data. If anything, chatGPT encourages a convergent monoculture. It has no creativity or problem solving skills.
Vs back in the good old days of movies where hollywood cast all types of actors and not just young hot ones /s
I feel this is mostly just glamourizing the past. Kids these days, etc. The defining feature of counter culture is that it is not mainstream.
If you only consume mainstream media you won't consume non-mainstream media is as tautologically true now as it was in the past.
One example: People who deliberately avoid social media, tape over webcams, use non-android, non-ios phones, who value their privacy. These people scrub the internet of their info, make aggressive use of GDPR/CCPA deletion requests. They do not want to be part of mainstream society for whatever reason. They are routinely marginalized by people around them, labelled as "weird", unjustly suspected (and accused) of all sorts of criminal activity under the premise that "privacy is for people with something to hide" - a train of thought that is concerningly common among younger generations.
Another example is anticonsumerism. People who do not use any streaming services nor purchase media. They don't blow money like there's no tomorrow on fast fashion, pointless trinkets from Amazon, exorbitant vacations that will be forgotten as quickly as they happened, or routinely eating out. These are the people with high 6 and low 7 figure net worths in their 30's driving cars that they paid $5k cash for that look like trash. These people avoid conspicuous consumption like the plague - why throw away so much money while painting a target on your back for criminals just for the approval of others, most of whom you don't even know? Screw a gym membership, exercise is free. These people are relentlessly mocked as cheapskates in spite of the fact that it's more about values than financial concerns.
Look for the hated, the despised, the mocked, and the belittled in mainstream culture to find counterculture. The counterculture movements of the 1960s went with those labels like peanut butter goes with jelly when described by the prevailing culture of the time.
You give two good examples of counterculture. Both of those go against the values of most people these days, especially most young people.
When it comes to avoiding social media or excessive use of "smart" technology for example, many people still seem to associate this with some crazy religious people who think that the TV was invented by satan himself. While in reality, some people have entirely different and even rational reasons for it.
However, as the recognition of that unpleasant latter tendency has become mainstream and everybody and her grandma now knows what "woke" means, I can see a new counter, hopefully genuinely less partisan and not tipped the other (ie right wing) way as the old guard is kicked out (as we have seen with Twitter etc).
In Germany they had the Green party, once upon a time that was a gathering point of those who were against 'the establishment'. Now the Green party is a major political party, and pretty much part of that same establishment.
I guess that something similar happened with the techies. Some of those weird nerds became very rich - and that's quite popular with the general public.
And then came twitter, that one killed both the radio star and the TV presenter. And than came Elon - the king of the nerds - and he is killing twitter :-)
The only true counterculture would be about changing the circumstances enabling the neo-colonial system, and this is the fear of the neo-colonialists and their enablers who benefit from status-quo. Everything else is window-dressing, distraction, and detours, made up to look like change.
Tattoos, leather jackets and motorcycles used to be cool counterculture. Now they’re trendy.
It does feel like we’ve descended into monoculture.
Though, maybe that’s because those in the counterculture aren’t showing off and are hard to spot, unlike hippies and bikers.
Counterculture is still alive and well I’m sure. Just hidden amongst the noise of our hyper signal to noise ratio reality.
Just one of a number of things wrong with the overuse of this word. I can’t be the only one who gags everytime someone mentions “content” or worse, the phrase “consuming content” which is just gross and stupid
Now it seems that we have a mainstream "culture", which doesnt actually exist, atleast noone identifies by it, then we have a mainstream "counterculture", which considers themselves as "alternative", but (atleast with younger people) is a majority, which occupies themselves by issues such as racism, sexism, trans-, and other -isms and more recently ecology.
It has gone so far, that you have "protests" for equal rights for some of those groups, or other 'mainstrea' issues where people actually in charge of laws are parading next to the "protesters"/"paraders" (in our, slovenian case, our prime minister at a protest for a healthcare reform).
And the rest? Those are invisible. Hippies and anti-war people? Nope.. now we have everyone cheering for more weapons and a longer war in ukraine. People complaining about housing prices... sure, a lot of them... people actually wanting more housing to be built.. a minority. Preppers? Just weirdos... even after quite a few events where prepping actually helped people.
Ok, i might be exaggerating a bit, but there really seems to be a lot of overlap between the current "counterculture" and what is being served from the people/groups/organizations that historically would have been seen as the "bad guys" by those counterculture groups. But again.. stuff like this is talked in "conspiracy circles", and again, shunned by the mainstream counterculture - eg https://i.redd.it/yj3vs93bi7691.jpg
I think it's happened a few times already, I'd say it's mostly a PR move & nothing more. Meanwhile I think there have happened a few protests at the very same place (Trg republike) yet the "mainstream" media didn't cover it.
It's a question I've been interested in for a while but never explored. How common is it, historically, to have significant cultural shifts from one generation to the next?
Case in point, it's time to log back out of HN and ignore it for another few months.
I wonder what the logic is for this 'flamewar bait' being unmoderated (is there anything more primed for a 'flamewar' than arguing about which cultures are mainstream and which are not?)
I'm an older (60) programmer. Have over 35 years' experience in software.
As a result, my approach tends to be fairly ... heterogenous ...
In today's tech scene, that makes me "counterculture." Judging from some of the reactions that I get, you'd think I was a punker at a royal wedding.
This leaves us in a state of utter confusion about what is important, what isn't and what it all means.
So the networks systematically demote controversial content.
And political and cultural biases, that's something not really mentioned enough when talking about algorithmic goals.
Edit: after reading another comment I think digital disconnection is the new counter culture
too many misnaming of subculture as counterculture
I know it's kind of tipping the debate on the head to suggest that the counterculture is not the "future left" but the "3rd way right" but there is nothing in the mechanics of mainstream to counterculture that suggest that the challenge to the mainstream have to come from the traditional left.
And like the Hippies of the(mostly post civil rights movement) counterculture the maga trumpets are only tangentially linked to any concrete actionable goals as it's about a return to the past that never was without any real clear idea of what that's supposed to look like only that they personally will be bigshots once it happens.
What is however increasingly clear is that the traditional left have been hunted into extinction by both the radical centrist mainstream and the right-wing counterculture as neither of those movement's have any real appetite for the old optimistic "Liberté, Egalité, Fraternité" values of the enlightenment, but prefers stability through authority as a response to an world they mostly don't understand.
I also worked in physics most of that time, which is probably a subculture there as well (some overlap I suppose with a broader subculture of non-profits workers).
I also lived in Utah (Salt Lake City), where you are effective a subculture (counter culture) almost by virtue of living there and not being LDS.
None of those are homogenous, but all are counter to the prevailing culture - which is the much harder thing to define.
Which is my point - we don’t even have a prevailing culture, and we never really did, not a universal one anyway.
That said, it’s likely that white/christian/suburban/nuclear family was considered the prevailing culture though. That’s a subculture today - albeit an unusually powerful one.
Yes, because there is no longer a central, shared culture.
Note that what isn’t different is its dependence on telecommunications. I tried to think of legitimate countercultures before the late 1880s US populism but couldn’t. Regency fops didn’t count, nor did know-nothings.
Maybe the counterculture today is the few people left who practice critical thinking and make up their own minds about things. Who congregate at places like here on HN?
I'm not sharp on the definition of counter culture, but just by the feeling of "counter", I'd argue that the pickup artist community has some aspects of it. I think about game obsessively for both genders, though mostly my own (male). The following that I'm writing is true for both, but in the pickup artist community it seems that almost exclusively men are practicing it (but women could too).
A few things that feel counter:
1. You can take pro-active charge of your dating life by consciously/intentionally approaching people: on the street, in a book store, on the train, in a club, in a night club, in a bar, more or less anywhere. Especially the first 10 seconds to 2 minutes need to be scripted as you're basically talking to the autopilot of a person and not the actual person (my opinion). In normal culture, you just "naturally" meet people through friends or "it just happens". When I'm on the street and approach someone, it doesn't just happen. When I'm on Tinder even, it's optimized. The way I approach people is pre-meditated, the improv side comes out after 10 seconds to 2 minutes (there are also schools of seduction that use a fully scripted approach, I've never done that, can't talk about that. I started out with improv all the way and came to the sad conclusion that you can't do that for the first seconds to few minutes).
2. Sex with tens to hundreds to thousands of people is fine. There are a few other cultures that do this, but not the mainstream one. Note, it's not fully counter cultural here as having a GF as a goal is almost as admirable (I say almost because everyone says it is just as admirable, but the high lay count seduction guys don't care about what you have to say if your lay count isn't high because they believe you lack experience).
3. A fairly strong belief [1] that men should be dominant, leading, winning and powerful. Women are inherently submissive, caring, supporting and seen as weaker. This "seen as weaker" is even true when it comes to cognitive abilities. I don't think anyone would say it that way, but I can see it in the behavior. Such as the phrase a "girl is shit testing you." I've thought deeply about it and realized that men test as well and some tests by women are actually quite good (and others indeed utter nonsense, but that goes for both genders IMO). The thing is, I've met quite a few very appealing looking women in the US that come across as dumb, I can't put it any other way. I'm from Europe and it makes the dumb women from Europe look sophisticated (for example, they are aware of other European countries so know more about language than their US counter parts). But I personally find this whole view nonsense as my strategy is focused on finding intelligent women that are amazingly attractive as well (discussing the Bhagavad Gita on minute 3 in Florida? Yep, been there, done that :) Or what about Austrian politics and geopolitics on minute 1 in Vienna? Definitely). People exist on a distribution, but the strong polar image that the seduction community tries to create, it feels counter.
I'm a hardcore fan of 1. I'm a fan of 2, no one should be slut shamed but slut celebrated. I disagree with 3, but I'm one of the few or so it seems. With that said, all these 3 things feel "counter" to the current culture (with perhaps not 2, in a sense because when you think about it, any form of sexual expression that doesn't harm others is worthy of celebration according to feminism).
[1] Not by all, not by me anyway but I'm a complicated cookie in general for many cultures :) Careful with mapping the seduction community to me 1 to 1, it doesn't work.
The answer is obviously no.
