The Counterculture Is Better in the Suburbs (opens in new tab)

You know, I grew up alienated in an awful suburb, so I think I feel qualified to say: that was fucking dumb.

Counterculture is indeed about rebelling against something, and it indeed dies on the vine when corporatized, mainstream culture has already absorbed it and there's no more cheap-and-easy rebellion to be had. But hey: suburbs are fucking alienating for everyone. If your only moral or political principle on which to take a stand is, "I feel alienated in suburbia", you're about as Homo Sapiens as it gets.

The real lesson is not, "counterculture should be preserved by having smart, rebellious, artistic kids grow up in the suburbs." The real lesson is, "This is why the overwhelming majority of people don't choose to live in suburbs when there's any kind of alternative available, but instead in either real cities or real countryside."

Also, for a bonus lesson: you can't spend your life rebelling against the suburbs, or in fact against anything whatsoever. At some point, you will either become just another hipster, or your "rebellion" has to be for something.

I wish people would just behave the way they want and allow everyone else to do the same (as long as no one is being hurt).

I've often thought that extreme liberals and extreme conservatives are far more similar to each other than they are to those in the middle. Both groups have a system of fixed, rigid beliefs. Their mind has been made up on an issue before you even begin discussing the topic, and the use of logic and reason fails spectacularly on them. The only difference between them all is that they just happened to be born into different environments, so their particular beliefs are mere manifestations of chance.

I'll ask my friends occasionally, "Why you believe that?", and I'm amazed when I realize that beyond a few brief soundbites, there's no real foundation beneath their viewpoints. Strong emotions but little rationale.

And the problem is that these same people always want to enforce their way of thinking on everyone else. I just don't know why. I'm unsure about almost all of my beliefs -- there's so many variables and so much data behind most of these subject that I'm perplexed about how anyone can be so certain they're right.

Quick tip for identifying people like this: if you are debating with someone and they quickly become emotional, angry, or start using a variety of logical fallacies (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_fallacies), then you're dealing with someone whose beliefs have no substance. The rules apply both ways though; this tip applies only if you didn't provoke them somehow. (For instance, I can become angry in a debate when someone starts attacking my character rather than my position.)

I noticed that a lot at hacker conventions (CCC). You might think that the guys in simple black t-shirts are tolerant about clothes and don't judge people by their appearance.

"In South Florida it is edgy to be against war. In San Francisco it is socially enforced to the point of banal conformity."

Banal conformity: that was a great summary of the article.

This article serves as a pretty clear cut example of the pejorative "hipsterism". She's essentially rejecting the very culture she identified with previously solely because of its perceived higher degree of popularity in metro areas.

She also has a wrong headed idea about metropolitan areas in general and about San Francisco specifically. These are not cities that have inherently normalized counter-culture, raising a generation of conformist non-conformists. They are centers of migration. The overwhelming majority of the population is not from San Francisco or even from California.

The reason you don't see many counter culture types amongst adults in the suburbs is because, by the very nature of conformity, it's difficult to get a job and making a living as an outsider. So as you grow up, you either conform or you move somewhere where there are like minded individuals. San Francisco didn't create counter culture...the counter culture moved there and created San Francisco.

She didn't move to S.F. and find out city kids are posers. She moved there and found 1,000's who moved there from the suburbs just like her. Confronted with the cognitive dissonance of discovering that she's not a unique snowflake and, in her own way, is just as conformist as "mainstream", she decided to declare herself "authentic" and every one else a poser.

She was counter culture _before_ it was cool. For real.

edit

I've seen this sort of reaction so many times it deserves its own logical fallacy.

The True Scotsman Fallacy.

The True Scotsman Fallacy is the assertion that oneself, or one's inner group, is the only true representation of a particular culture, viewpoint, or interest group. All other groups are rejected for various, seemingly arbitrarily selected, criteria.

Sure, countercultures have their own social norms that their members conform to, and can behave just as sheeply. The thing is, the regular guy from the suburbs who doesn't do anything 'different' can be the awesome, interesting person you think only your 'freak' friends were/are. The clothes and labels are all just junk. You got it right on the big city counterculture, but still getting it wrong when looking at the suburbs you grew up on.

The problem with counterculture is that it encourages people to uncritically accept that mainstream culture is horrible (e.g. boring, White, materialist, racist/sexist/homophobic) and must be rejected.

While everyone feels this way on some issues, counterculture encourages people to turn a dissatisfaction with some aspects of mainstream culture into a total rejection of it. And it does so not by rational argument, but by exploiting people's desire to feel special and enlightened.

This is actually a common feeling. You need only watch SLC Punk which addresses this issue.

I really became aware of anti-sheep-sheep in college. I had a pretty tame outside appearance. My hair was short. I shaved. I dressed in a way that was affordable in the town south western I grew up in (Old Navy, maybe some music tshirts from Hot Topic). Ironically I actually hung out with some real counterculture people (by the definition of this article) growing up. They accepted me although I didn't always dress like them. There was no way to dress like them because there was no one style.

My first summer job in college was working with a group that was basically a group of liberal hippies from the east coast, and I don't mean that in an insulting sense. We did backpacking and trail work for an americorps program. I initially didn't get the job, but my girlfriend did. When someone dropped out of the program I joined.

Immediately I stuck out like a sore thumb. These people weren't even close to being accepting of any ideas other than their own. They were conformists. I didn't have the right hair, it wasn't long enough. I didn't wear the right brand of shoes, Chacos were required. I didn't even drink the right kind of water because I refilled a cheap gatorade bottle rather than use a Nalgene. Even the things I did that happened fit in with the group were questioned. During our first team party I mentioned how much I liked "The Doors", and I someone had the balls to say I didn't look like I would like that kind of music.

I ate the wrong food because I wasn't vegan. The chain smokers told me: "don't you know the crap you're putting into your body?".

After 3 months of backpacking and working in national parks my appearance was quite a bit scruffier. The head of the program actually had the balls to say "I looked like a team member now".

I began to value people who had their own ideas, regardless of whether those ideas were or weren't mainstream. I'd rather see new culture than counter-culture. I'm suspicious of people who define themselves by being the disagreeing with mainstream because to me that seems just as restrictive as conforming.

It's extremely rare to find anyone who's not looking to be validated by their peers.

How narcissistic does one have to be to think that an important characteristic of being for or against "the war" is how alienated and edgy it makes you feel?

And while a sense of "not being a part of the crowd" does impact the subjective experience of culture, to put that at the center of one's appreciation of is hollow and empty. There's a reason why people view hipster "I liked it before it was cool" attitude with contempt.

This guy needs do some travelling. If you want to feel different, go some place where you really are different. Go live in Mongolia. Immerse yourself in the art scene in Milan. Move to a favela.

If you just want to be different for its own sake, then sure, being a goth in the burbs will work. But if there's any point at all to it—artistic, spiritual, practical or whatever-you'll get way more benefit from immersing yourself in a genuinely foreign culture.

There was a professor at school who considered monks, nuns, the Amish, DIY punks, etc to be countercultural.

The hipsters of the forties+50s,the beats, the hippies, etc he saw as seekers of higher, truer things to consume, and he didn't see that as significantly different from trying to consume the appliances/cars etc that the Joneses have.

Is there a temporal factor here the author's missing? The specific countercultural elements she's talking about are all the best-known artifacts from the countercultures of 30, 40 years ago. Listening to GG Allin in New York isn't subversive because in New York he's been old hat since around about the time that I suspect many of the people reading this article were still learning to read. Listening to GG Allin in the suburbs might be, though, because it would have taken years or decades for him to show up as a new thing in the suburbs of south Florida.

The Book of the SubGenius was also pretty darn subversive by the standards of the whitebread town I grew up in, but the cultural context in which I understood it sure changed a lot after I grew up, got a job, and found myself occasionally having drinks after work with a colleague who happened to help write it. She was nearly old enough to be my mom, and found my enthusiasm for what she considers to be a youthful lark to be rather adorable.

I bet my parents also thought it was adorable when I discovered the music they grew up on when I was a kid. Or rather, perhaps they were irritated because by then the psychedelic counterculture they belonged to had just become another puppet to use for selling processed cheese products.

I don't know that I can really judge the urban counterculture for the city I live in nowadays. I'm too busy being old and married and raising a kid and paying the bills to really notice it. And I'm in bed by the time the shows start, anyway.

On a metaphysical level I think Grant Morrison touched on conventional counterculture in The Invisibles. Counterculture is just another, essential part of The System expressing itself. Things happen because of The system you're inside The System, and your "individualism" is an emergent property of it. The example I think he used was the police. Was there ever a year when nobody decided to become a police officer? If society was made up of free people making free choices, there would always be catastrophic upsets like this, but it doesn't ever happen. So to that extent, I think the article is incorrect because while you may feel more "authentically counterculture" the further away you are from "conventional counterculture", you're still just a slightly rarer perturbation in the tank.

Your counterculture is only useful if it combats or shields you from a dominant paradigm that is offensive to your values, and if you're alone in the suburbs being hardcore, you're probably losing. Unless your real goal is to feel cool, I guess, then by its own standards yes you are more counterculture than "counterculture". Establishment countercultures may be hypocrites because they don't recognize they're establishment, but they may also be creating systems that ultimately comfort the people in them. But it's probably not sustainable because your primary definition for a culture cannot be one of contrast to something else. America is a nation that has was born in and has internalized rebellion. This is probably the worst value we have, because you can't actually build on that for very long, it's "meant" for the tearing down phase of a bloated bureaucracy. As a nation gets settled if it doesn't abandon that value it will start turning inward and attacking itself, which I think is exactly what is happening.

Did I read too much into this essay?

>In South Florida it is edgy to be against war. In San Francisco it is socially enforced to the point of banal conformity.

You can be against a war because that war is wrong or against a war because it's a fun novelty to be so. I would hope for the former because heaven help the people under the bombs when the hipness of opposing it wears off.

> If there is anything the nonconformist hates worse than a conformist, it's another nonconformist who doesn't conform to the prevailing standard of nonconformity.

- Bill Vaughan [0]

[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/William_E._Vaughan#Quotations

If ever there was a condemnation of the concept of a "counterculture" this is it.

I sort of agree here, but I think teen alienation is another factor. You don't feel like you fit in wherever you are, at times in your life. She was in SF after that period.

I think Freaks and Geeks made this argument pretty conclusively. It'd be interesting to see what happened to Lindsey after she joined the Dead Tour.