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.
Also, some aspects of the counterculture like the Manson family, Various Sex Cults, or Jim Jones Cult, massive drug use, the huge increases in crime were not good. However, now all the ugly parts have been ignored and idealized by the people who took the hippie culture mainstream.
Look at how whitewashed hippies are now.
If you trust a nine-year-old boy to tell us they're actually a girl, and you trust an eleven-year-old child who wants to inject puberty blockers, and you oblige a thirteen-year-old girl who wants to inject testosterone and cut off her breasts at fifteen, where is the logical barrier to other forms of sexual consent?
Hope moral people will never not be completely weirded out by the amount of tech oriented folk who look up to him or aspire to be like him.
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.
Then it’s worth considering why the prevailing culture at the time didn’t see it that way.
(I'd listen to a station that did that kind of thing, but that's not how it works presently.)
Reagan got his notepad out, and wrote "If you are the future, I'm selling all my stocks!" on a sheet of paper, and held it up to the window for them to read.
That's an interesting point I haven't heard of before, thanks :)
https://harpers.org/archive/2016/04/legalize-it-all/
> “You want to know what this was really all about?” he asked with the bluntness of a man who, after public disgrace and a stretch in federal prison, had little left to protect. “The Nixon campaign in 1968, and the Nixon White House after that, had two enemies: the antiwar left and black people. You understand what I’m saying? We knew we couldn’t make it illegal to be either against the war or black, but by getting the public to associate the hippies with marijuana and blacks with heroin, and then criminalizing both heavily, we could disrupt those communities. We could arrest their leaders, raid their homes, break up their meetings, and vilify them night after night on the evening news. Did we know we were lying about the drugs? Of course we did.”
No one is objectively good because they are human after all. Hippies had good values, but also bad ones such as: uncleanliness, irresponsible drug use, parasitism, thoughtlessness, and sometimes even vanity.
>The hippies were rooted in things that were objectively good: peace, [...]
>That contrasts sharply with 4chan’s demographics and motivations.
I know I shouldn't criticize the Current War lest I be accused of supporting the Current Enemy, but I just can't help but point out the irony here.
>bunch of closeted homophobic, racist, sexist, emotionally and mentally stunted
[italics mine]
Surely you must see the problem with this clause.
History is written by the winners.
Put yourself in the shoes of a WW2 veteran in the 60s. He sees his children get sucked into drug culture and protesting against the military that just 20 years ago saved the Pacific from tyranny. You turn on the news and see them making a nuisance of themselves in the streets. They're ungroomed, ugly, and do weird sex stuff.
You ask yourself where you went wrong raising them and lament the collapse of society and death of American values.
It is either incredibly ignorant or intentionally dishonest to pretend that the 1960s counterculture was some uniformly benevolent force for peace and love, and says a lot about the person claiming so's lack of ability to see anything outside their contemporary/status-quo perspective.
Makin’ your way if you can
Temporary layoffs
Good Times
Easy credit ripoffs
Good Times
Ain’t we lucky we got ‘em?
Good Times!
(Makes one wonder what chickens will come home to roost in Russia eventually.)
You could argue that it was attack on US values, but that was about it. Half around the effin world. In society where US was not welcomed in any way even in South Vietnam by almost nobody local (and for good reasons). Some continuous and serious mental gymnastics were required to keep feeling righteous in that war.
I know after-perspective is easy, but this is how history judges actions long term. Emotions of given heated moment are irrelevant and ignored.
4 Chan is rooted in things that are objectively good: free thought, satire and not taking anything too seriously.
That's not to make any judgement on the societal value of 4Chan vs. the 1960s counterculture. It's just that neither is/was a uniform group that can be defined as "rooted in X, Y, or Z," and people who claim they can are typically blind to the bias of their cultural perspective.
This is the counter-culture. The dominant culture opposes all of these things and makes obligatory the celebration of the opposite values. 4chan being one of the few lightly-restricted free speech zones allows for culture generation that would be censored anywhere else. Counter-culture is supposed to be edgy, just like jazz and rock were edgy, greasers/rockabilly were edgy, beatniks were edgy, hippies were edgy, disco was edgy, punks were edgy, LGBTQ was edgy, and so on. Every one of them were described by dismissive epithets just like the string you put together about how awful and contrary to decency they were.
Aside from monogamous gay people, queerness is very much still edgy and not particularly accepted by the dominant/mainstream culture.
(This is not a positive thing, but it is reality.)
do not lump lesbians with gay men, that was a temporary political tactic of the rainbow umbrella. The social concerns, risks, contributions, and damages of those groups are totally different.
Don't surprise pikachu that resentment builds and the world doesn't want to become your folsom fair
Being supported by advertising, movies, tv shows, signaled by major corporations and workplaces, and supported top-down by the government means its edgy and counterculture? We live in completely different realities I guess.
Where are all these ads, movies, and TV shows depicting non-monogamous queer relationships? How is the government providing this "top-down" support? Are there now tax breaks for people in poly relationships?
Are you kidding me?
https://www.hbomax.com/collections/lgbtq-voices
https://www.netflix.com/browse/genre/100010
https://joebiden.com/lgbtq-policy/#
Pathos, Logos, and Ethos
Our national institutions are very accepting of LGBTQ as well as the federal government. Looking at LGBTQ equality by state, https://www.lgbtmap.org/equality-maps the majority of the country, 29 states are fair or pro LGBTQ vs 21 that have negative policy or low equality.
Additionally, 71% of people support same-sexy marriages https://news.gallup.com/poll/393197/same-sex-marriage-suppor...
Is it still counterculture when it is accepted and embraced by the overwhelming majority of citizens, education and cultural institutions, and protected by laws in the majority of the country?
Despite the fact these current cultural trends and related ideologies are very much dominant on every major western social media platform and even more so among dominant traditional media platforms (and their executives and journalists). Yet they still pretend it's not the default culture in the west.
The existence of pushback from significant/influential parts of the population != you're not the dominant mainstream culture.
My aunt went from burning American flags and marching in support of interracial marriage and civil rights to clutching her pearls about Marilyn Manson ripping up bibles and gay marriage becoming legal, but even as she supports censorship and state mandated injustice, she will always view herself as the protestor that fought against censorship and state mandated injustice.
Even I find myself occasionally saying things about zoomers that sounds just like stuff my dad used to say about me and it’s a lot easier to rationalize it as “no, TikTok is actually hurting kid’s attention spans, it’s different this time” than admit that I might be acting just as silly as he was when he said exactly the same thing about my Game Boy.
There isnt really a default culture across america the way you are insisting. The place is fucking huge.
It could also be their outdated picture of "mainstream" culture is a fossil embedded in the self-justifications of the current mainstream culture.
Some people will forever pretend current-year is the 1950s, because, not because they want to live in the 50s, but because they see themselves as the people who are abolishing it.
It is an interesting thought.
Something that people advertise about themselves on their linkedin profiles in order to get better job offers is the opposite of edgy.
This list implies that "homophobic, racist, sexist, emotionally and mentally stunted incels" is destined to be normal and acceptable in the future. That sounds awful.
I'm not so sure about "emotionally and mentally stunted incels," but homophobia, racism, and sexism were all acceptable in the past, and given enough time will most likely be acceptable in the future.
Progress is a lie; change can go in all directions. It's a mistake to draw a line across living memory or the recent historical era and extrapolate whatever trend you find very far into the future.
This may be unpopular topic, but I actually think having a non-traditional sexuality/gender is the new 'edgy'. I know that implies it's just a trend/fad and not a reality for some individuals. It seems to have increased in such a massive relative basis that I can't help but think it actually is a trend versus following some natural occurrence. Or perhaps, given significant hindsight I could see that the definitions around these things is just undergoing an accelerating foundational shift. We know ancient societies had massively different ideas for what was and wasn't normal. Hell, very recently ago our own society had very different norms for age of consent and age of "child".
Sorry if any of this is or sounds offensive, I look at it from a statistical mindset and what baseline seems to have existed. It's totally possible that societies around the world have used religion and such to suppress the baseline and it's starting to naturally come back - I wouldn't be able to observe things like that.
Being LGBTQ is a lot more accepted today than it was 20 years ago. Fuck I could set my pronouns on my linkedin profile of all places.
If a man has long hair, it is looked as a style and is completely acceptable unless you are in the military.
Jazz and Rock was the music of african americans that became mainstream inwhite america just like rap did later. Punk was a reaction to rock becoming boring and stale. Disco was an outgrowth of the LGBTQ movement, and was repressed with the "disco sucks" mainstream through deeply-seated homophobic motivations.
None of these creative outlets were a result of anyone overtly TRYING to offend anyone. That they offended was a side effect of them changing the world, and the mainstream reaction to it, not the core motivation.
Now, I don't want to paint 4chan with one brush. I actually think a significant amount of internet creativity and beautiful creation occurs on it, and they never get enough credit for it. Most legendary memes - offensive or not - originate on 4chan. Internet memes are some of the most unique artistic creations of our generation.
But the parts that people get mad at 4chan for (the homophobic/racist/misogynistic parts) are not that. Those are creations intentionally made to get a reaction: "You tell me I can't say <blank>? Watch me!!"
There is a charitable interpretation of this that they are bucking against censorship and fighting for self-expression on principle. And some may draw comparisons to what they're doing to times in history when "blasphemers" criticized religious dogma. That making a homophobic or racist meme is the modern equivalent of proclaiming "There is no God" 200 years ago.
The difference comes down to the Paradox of Intolerance. Religion and the dominant culture associated with it, actively repressed everyone who didn't match their worldview. People were told you have to believe this in faith and act as if you do, or you will be punished. The modern "dogma" of LGBTQ/race acceptance is instead saying "You CANNOT tell others how to believe and act, and punish them accordingly. You cannot discriminate against those different from you by birth race/gender/sexuality."
It is highly childish to associate all "you cannot do <blank>" guidances as repressive and similar. And I meant that literally. Children can't tell the difference between "No, we can't have desert because i told you so" and "You can't touch the hot stove because it will hurt you".
So, no, THAT side of 4chan is not counterculture. It's at best children trolling on the internet (I know, I was one), and at worst hateful bigots angry that their acceptance is diminishing in the world and lashing out.
The problem is, young idiots were ordinary young idiots in the past. They didn't do much more than maybe snatch a car for a joyride or kick off someone of IRC by sending them a direct message with "DCC SEND" or whatever that caused middleboxes to drop the connection. Annoying, sometimes causing a bit of damage, but nothing too serious.
Nowadays? They radicalize each other into a spiral that often enough ends in real-world violence - or in bullying people to suicide, which is just as bad. And unfortunately, the importance of hateful bigots is not diminishing. Not at all. The Tea Party and, following it, the Trumpets are recently risen developments - and they're still rising.
Rock'n'roll, punk, etc were definitely trying to overtly offend. Many rockers claimed to worship Satan, mocking the older generation was widespread ('hope I die before I get old'). Look up the Sex Pistols.
Those counter-cultures were for something, for their identities at least. What is 4chan for?
...
>None of these creative outlets were a result of anyone overtly TRYING to offend anyone.
So when Sid Vicious (and other punks) wore a swastika, he wasn't trying to offend people?
Punk Rock the MUSIC genre changed rock n roll forever and made it better.
Punk Rock the Swastika Wearers didn't need to exist.
It's the same today with 4chan the Meme Factory vs 4chan the Swastika Wearers.
No, it's not. The words explain themselves perfectly fine: the opposing culture.
What you describe boils down to being irrationally angry, stunted in various ways, and generally destructive... It's not a counter-culture but just counter-productive and essentially a defect. If anything, it is devoid of culture.
Angry to be sure, but Irrationally? Take a closer look.
>stunted in various ways
To be sure. C’est la vie. But also undeniably brilliant on occasion.
>generally destructive
Not unlike the hippies then.
>If anything, it is devoid of culture.
Simply ignorant.
IOW, reactionary
I think what you are really referring to is a social movement, which often aligns with a particular counter culture that has decided to organize. But there can be many counter cultures and not all of them the deliberate goal of social change.
Like punks? Mods and rockers? Beatniks? Greasers?
I don't like 4-chan but isn't that what they said about hippies? That they are stunted (e.g. they spend all their time smoking pot instead of cutting their hair, getting a job and being productive members of society. They are irrationally angry at society and refuse to recognize the grim realities of the real world. They are destructively brain washing our youths. Etc.)
Ultimately i think counter cultures can be good or bad and that is separate from if they are counter culture
The fact that my views align much closer than theirs with many mainstream political parties, almost all of academia, most major media outlets and most major corporation’s stated values is because they all are also part of the counter culture now.
There’s literally no way that an awesome, too cool rebel like myself somehow became part of the mainstream instead of the hip and trendy counter culture movement.
Just because something isn't PC doesn't mean it isn't counter-culture. Hip-hop for example is riddled with extremely homophobic, violent, and sexist content but has become by far the biggest music genre in the world. That doesn't mean it isn't culture and it definitely was counter-culture (at least in the 80's and 90's).
It appears to me that you are so angry at 4-chan for its perceived ideas that you cannot see things from their perspective.
I had heard she's playing Red Rocks in March but I couldn't get tickets.
Damned Ticketmaster!
Wait... dismissive epithets... contrary to human decency... is Ticketmaster...
counter-culture?!?
pays exorbitant ticket fee
breaks all of my devices in the style of the band "Who"
Oh Yeahhhh!
huffs leaded gasoline, punches hole through wall
Mom: We have a counter-culture at home.
The counter-culture at home: 4chan incels
This is a vile take. It is sickening to compare liking a genre of music or wearing a certain style of dress or being queer to hating people because they're queer, not white, not male, or because they're a woman who won't have sex with you.
The other half is a mix of the hateful or unstable.
But who knows, it's the internet, and it's completely anonymous over there.
And yet, not a single of the groups you listed was "edgy" at the expense of anybody's existence.
Today's "counterculture" however? Actual, literal Nazis spamming swastika emojis, bullying trans people into suicide.
Manson did a ton of stuff to piss off Christians and rightoids. While it might seem hilarious with modern day sensibilities, Rage saying fuck on BBC live did offend quite a lot of people. Hell, Sid Vicious and Siouxsie Sioux used to regularly wear literal Swastikas for the shock value.
None of this shit is new.
If you're betting that 4chan is the one that's going to stand out of "ahead of its time" you aren't doing it because "counterculture is always ahead" you're doing it because it's the one you personally focus on. Otherwise you'd have to be evaluating it against all the other counterculture things. And many of them are much less derivative and backwards-looking.
For example, in the current year vegetarianism is a sub-culture of mainstream lifestyle dieting while carnivorism is a counter-culture.
Racism is core to nearly every country in the world. It may seem bad in the US, but it's worse elsewhere. And while people won't admit they're racist in the US, racism itself is pervasive.
Sexism might be the most prominent and long lasting parts of the culture across the world for millenia. Just look up the rape stats, and then keep in mind that most rapes are not reported.
Homophobia, racism, and sexism are deeply ingrained in nearly every culture on the planet today.
Even as someone who favours liberal drug laws at this point, the social upheaval of the late '60s had objectively horrific consequences for the poor in particular. The massive drug epidemic that to this day kills more Americans than the entire Vietnam War every year, the unprecedented doubling of murder rates overall in nearly every Western country from 1965-1975, and collapse of the family unit seem like more tangible downsides than a small number of what you describe as edgelords jerking themselves into a froth on a forum read by other edgelords.
Nearly every major social issue of the late 20th century exploded as a direct result of hippie culture bringing drugs and hostility towards the family and social institutions into the mainstream. People often think of rising crime as the result of the 1980s crack "epidemic," but the explosion in murder rates occurred almost entirely from 1966-1975 and actually grew at a slower pace up to 1990 (outside the UK): https://datawrapper.dwcdn.net/uRI8Y/1/ The US murder rate in 1974 was exactly the same as it was at the peak of the "Crack epidemic" in 1990, and more than double the rate it was in 1964.
You can still argue the benefits outweighed the costs, but it's simply ignorant to pretend 1960s counterculture was some uniformly benevolent movement for peace and love, any more than the movement you identify with 4chan is merely a benevolent movement for "national pride" or "family values."
How 4chan specifically got designated the "counterculture" in this thread is questionable, but so is the inability to look beyond the status-quo, contemporary perspective of major media, academia and corporations.
Sources? Wasn’t the crack epidemic more related to Contra and the breaking of the family unit due to disproportionate incarceration of black males by the government in attempt to break their political power via the selective targeting of specific drugs by the govt, i.e marijuana and crack over cocaine?
The overwhelming majority of the rise in crime occurred between 1964 and 1974, in which time the murder rate in the US more than doubled and reached its all-time high in 1974.
Crack cocaine itself wasn't found in the US until the mid-1980s, i.e. well after the overwhelming majority of the rise in crime had already occurred. With no crack present in the US, it's clearly ridiculous to attribute the rise in crime to a drug-or laws targeting a drug-that didn't exist in the US until a decade later.
The crack vs. cocaine sentencing law you mention didn't exist until 1986, when it was pushed for primarily by black and progressive political leaders (notably the bill's author, then-senator Joe Biden) who believed it would address the rampant violence they associated with crack in their communities (https://www.npr.org/2017/07/17/537715793/how-black-leaders-u..., https://www.washingtonpost.com/politics/how-an-early-biden-c...).
In other words, neither crack laws nor significant crack use itself existed until the vast majority of the rise in crime had already occurred. Even the most outlandish theories of Contra involvement in drug trafficking (which they were involved to some extent like many South American guerrilla groups) would attribute a literal drop in the bucket of the cocaine trafficked to the US to the Contras. Again, this is only even relevant if you think crack caused the rise in violent crime that occurred decades before it was introduced to the US.
To address your third point, the incarceration rates you mention didn't actually start rising until 1973 and remained much lower than in the 1950s until the mid-70s (https://nap.nationalacademies.org/read/18613/chapter/4#35). Moreover, they didn't begin their rapid climb until 1980, at which point crime had begun declining. For reference, about 5 times as many people are in jail/prison today as in 1975: https://nap.nationalacademies.org/read/18613/chapter/4#35 When incarceration rates truly began skyrocketing in the late '80s-2000s, violent crimes were rapidly dropping.
This is quite reductive and ignores the role of dysfunction emerging from within families and institutional structures, including, but not limited to:
>The psychological and public health effects of widespread lead poisoning
>The psychological effects of family patriachs often being psychologically-scarred veterans, for whom drug use was sometimes prescribed by the military
>The artificial and contentious "community" of planned suburbs, which warped the character of family life while saddling local and state governments with debt traps which diverted funds from social services
>The intentional breakup of existing urban communities through "renewal", starting in the 50s
>The "benign neglect" of the remains of these communities following the King riots
Much like Reconstruction and TARP, the problem isn't that we did it, it's that we didn't do it hard enough.
Honestly, I think you're making the mistake of confusing your subjective view with "objectivity." Like saying your opinions and preferences are "objectively" the right ones.
Also, you appear to be describing your side in the most charitable way, those you oppose in the least charitable way, and unsurprisingly finding those you oppose wanting.
So in addition to them being homophobes, they are also closeted homosexuals?
Why is it that this is such a popular insult among people here on HN? It's like this strange and incoherent insult from lefties where they think they're being supportive of gay people by calling out homophobia as bad, but also calling the homophobe gay to hurt them in some manner, which would imply that being gay is an insult. I suppose your defense might be that being gay is an insult to the homophobe, but why specifically would you call a homophobe gay, without further information? It erodes any assumption I'd have that you genuinely respect gay people if you're willing to just toss around some claims that this person or that group is gay.
And if I thought someone was a gay homophobe, putting aside any argument with them I have otherwise, I'd probably feel somewhat bad for them to be in that position.
Anyway, we both know that you're an edgelord. That's why you wrote that sentence. So quit hating on people who are just like you. You're like a closeted homophobe, but for 4chan edgelords.
I tend to disagree that these are objectively good.
One argument against is that any society that holds these as ideals will quickly be over run by societies that don't.
Being disagreeable can have adaptive advantages.
> The hippies are rooted in things like naiveté, lust, drugs, immorality, communism, apathy, and atheism.
There is a sense in the more liberal communities that cultures are good-by-definition. They do mental gymnastics to ensure that any harmful cultural artifacts (e.g. slavery) are explained away as "not really culture, but a product of external forces" (e.g. imperialism).
I have never felt the need to do this: some cultures are on-the-whole bad, and that does not disqualify them from being cultures.
If that's your view of 4chan then the whole point of 4chan went over your head. 4chan is about irreverence of and rebellion against the current mainstream culture that if you're non-conformist in any way or hold a view that may be construed as offensive to anyone, your opinion (and person) has no value. It's a reaction to upvote/downvote culture on the Internet that rewards conformity. 4chan, famously, has a highly contemptuous opinion of Reddit.
What 4chan says, self-deprecatingly, is "I will offend all your sensibilities. Oh you're still here? Ok, here's what I have to say."
In my opinion (it's impossible to know for sure) most of it is pretense. There aren't actually as many racists, homophobes, sexists etc. It's satirically amplified as a form of gatekeeping.
It's a great example of how irony often doesn't really exist.
Oh you were only playing at being a total arsehole ironically? That's not actually a good thing, and you've helped give cover to actual arseholes, spread their message and hate, and all because you think it's fun to be edgy. Congrats.
not to defend 4chan, but this kind of categorical and imprecise summarization of a group of people is strongly similar to the things that my (very) hippy parents were told by their (very) straight-laced parents.
People in this thread are reducing all of 4chan to a board meant not to be taken seriously (/b/) and a containment board intended to keep far-right conservative discussions off of other boards (/pol/). Then they're somehow contorting the offensiveness of what goes on at those two boards as evidence that they can't be counter-cultural because "true" counter-culture apparently can't be offensive?
Not every single user, quiet majority still goes there for (some of the) content and discussions are ignored. But once you open them its the same mess. It wasn't dominant so much before but it is like that now. Sparks of sanity drowning in pitiful empty statements. I don't know user details but it feels like bunch of frustrated teenagers who are racing to show who is more depraved and depressed, mixed with adults who are failures in real life and ventilate their anger and hate on such places (I don't believe it works for more than few seconds but its probably as addictive as cigarettes mentally).
Counterculture is when most of your beliefs align with what the Raytheon PR pushes out. That's how you punk in 2020s.
“ At 75 I am in the baby boom and I was in the counter culture. Lets just say from 1965 to 1985. The counter culture was driven by the Vietnam war. Reciprocal to the war was the peace witness inspired by the Quakers. During this same period, instances of cheap real estate and low cost apartments and free places to live existed. Also developing the skills needed for living a counter culture life were helped along by, unemployment insurance. Unemployment irregularly functioned as a cost of living help when I went back to junior college to study film and sewing.”
If they're anti Ukraine war, they already are.
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).
Overall it's been more of an ideological bar brawl than a hive mind aligned in any particular direction.
You've basically described cultural art and music since at least the 1950s. Elvis dared to play black music and gyrate his hips. Madonna rolled around in a wedding dress talking about virgins. RAP broke a whole bunch of them. Cardi B sang about WAP. If a band just sings about relationship troubles and drugs like everyone else, their music / art probably isn't very remarkable.
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.
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 people who brought in the mainstream culture are now older; they are now the fuddy-duddies. Time to move over for the next generation; it's either complimentary or contradictory and sometimes both.
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)
most people are against the war in ukraine. I have a feeling the motivations are different though.
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.
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.
> Compare that to say a punk band in the 80s that may have only had a few thousand people ever see it perform
Or the Velvet Underground that sold only a few thousand records but "everyone who bought one went out and started a band."
There are certainly creators today who are as influential to their groups as the Velvet Underground was to theirs, but just like plenty of people had never heard of them in the 60s, you're probably not going to know about them for another 20 years.
I don't think how widespread a piece of media is has a strong correlation with its impact. Yes, several billion people probably know who Grumpy Cat is. But it doesn't matter. Our awareness of Grumpy Cat doesn't change how we think about the world, how we live, how we relate to others. It's just a shared but otherwise mostly meaningless experience, like seeing a rainbow.
The Beat Generation was a relatively tiny subculture whose work at the time was consumed by a small number of people. But we remember them because the work they created mattered. It said something meaningful about the culture it was a reaction to and by doing that, it forced that culture to change.
Beats, hippies, punks, maybe early hackers were all countercultures because they in some way bent the arrow of history. There are no shortage of subcultures today, and they are great for finding people you share interests. But they don't have the same impact as a real counterculture.
The impact of various past countercultures is only evident in hindsight. As you said, movements like the Beat generation were at the time tiny subcultures, of the exact same sort we have loads of today. To say that 80s hackers were a counterculture but modern biohackers are just a subculture is simply temporal chauvinism.
But that dislike has thus far had zero apparent effect on the complete domination of capitalism and corporatism over the public sphere.
Instead, what we largely see is huge capitalistic corporations draping themselves in an anti-capitalist aesthetic which consumers seem perfectly happy to accept. Every time you go to the store and buy a jar of "homestyle" marinara sauce or order a bo-ho wall hippie-esque wall decoration off Amazon that was made in a factory in China, you are demonstrating anti-capitalist style but profoundly capitalistic values.
In certain circles, but (assuming America) certainly not approaching a majority.
> Instead, what we largely see is huge capitalistic corporations draping themselves in an anti-capitalist aesthetic which consumers seem perfectly happy to accept.
I think it's too difficult to avoid this stuff as a consumer. Hell, even farmer's markets are mostly run by big corps now. But from the labor side, I think it's making a difference. Almost no one in their twenties is trying to climb the corporate ladder or put in effort at their big corp jobs. As soon as generations that were bought in to careerism retire, I think things will shift.
> 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.
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.
I wish the people on 4chan had the stupid childish fun that I did 15 years ago.
You and I did not use the same 4chan in 2007...
I learned new slurs there, ways to insult people that I could have never imagined.
I read posts from a schizoid that claimed to have evidence that the government was influencing his life through the ratings of popular animes on My Anime List.
I saw child porn get posted regularly.
I saw extremely hateful posts about women, extremely hateful posts about people that aren't white, extremely hateful posts about literally anyone.
I believe you're looking back with rose tinted glasses.
Yeah, the disgusting stuff today always was there, but it was a relatively small part of the site, and now it's the vast majority of it. I'm not going to pretend that it was ever "good", but you can't pretend that it hasn't changed at all.
I think your ability to tolerate shit to get to the lulz has changed.
I'm downloading it now to look. I have a strong feeling that 2007 /v/ will look strikingly different from modern /v/.
I don't think that it would be any less hateful, though. It's just that most of the hate was ironic early on...
There's just this weird thing about how if you perform a ritual ironically, you're still performing the ritual.
[0] https://web.archive.org/web/20221128150706/https://www.mondo...
[1] https://www.politico.com/magazine/story/2017/03/memes-4chan-...
[2] https://knowyourmeme.com/memes/meme-life-cycle-charts NB the presence of _digg_ in the lifecycle; 4chan has been accepted as the spawning-pool of memery for a long time
And other lies 4chan users tell themselves to feel important.
It wasn't even true back in the day, a lot of stuff came from SomethingAwful and Newgrounds... Then came Twitter!
This was called trolling for the lulz, you fell for it, & seem to have not realized even 15 years later.
Schizoposting as a fun pasttime has been a thing for users of 4chan/online forums forever. Go watch some South Park episodes centered on Gerald Broflovski trolling. Can’t remember which season off the top of my head. It may help you to understand if things don’t click.
Anecdotally, actual schizophrenics tend to post endlessly into their own little void on traditional social media, often not slightly being aware of or caring that they have either absolutely zero engagement or anybody seeing their profiles at all.
You realize you've just confessed you've grown old (and likely cranky)?
I also don't think there's a "getting out of touch" aspect of holding the opinion that silly stupidity is not the same thing as angry paranoia.
Have a kid and the walls move in fast. Used to live in alternative shelters, backpacking in the outdoors for months on end? Yeah child services says that's substandard housing and abuse. Hell there were child abuse investigation just for a family backpacking the Appalachian trail, and that's a boring ass well planned thing that even old square fuckers can relate to.
Used to psychedelics or other drugs? Yeah the kid is trained at a very young age by police officers at the school to snitch you out, and they get them young enough they won't have a filter. DCS and/or criminal charges incoming.
Used to go overseas and do super dangerous stuff? Suddenly any family or friends that tolerated that say you're a piece of shit for risking your when a kid relies on you and the judge is gonna say even if you earn enough doing that to support the kid it's still not enough because the kid needs 20% of the imputed income you could make as a conservative working stiff no matter if they were fine before during the times you were making less, don't agree well then off to jail.
Your life is surrounded now by mandatory reporters. The doctor, the teacher, the therapist. Yeah, all mandatory reporters. Say something they don't like as a child-free and nobody gives a shit. Have a kid, fuck nah their alternative views are signs of abuse. Send in the investigators and let them sort it out.
And the people making these judgement calls are judges, lawyers, DCS workers. People plugged into the system. Not necessarily politically conservative but conditioned to fall within the norms of the system. Hell even SBF (the guy that never wears a suit even for billion dollar investment meetings) wears a suit in front of a judge, that's how conservative that system is.
You learn to keep your mouth shut. You learn to living in the boring ass house that has occupancy certification. You espouse the most boring views that will not anger a mandatory reporter. You diligently pay the taxes the government uses to drone strike brown people ovrseas. You refrain from drugs. You don't take risks that will result in not being able to make 20% of the imputed income you need to stay out of jail. Wait 18 years and you can be old young again.
Two thirds of black families in my county are investigated. My family have coworkers that explicitly state they will mandatory report things like a parent seeking health care to reduce their substance use.
As a 47 year old, I'm glad to know I will be forever young.
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.
We're now lacking both, mostly due to the transformations of the information age and how that has split many homogeneous cultures into numerous segregated identity clusters. For what it is worth (which is nothing) in 1992 I predicted what we see now; it has unfolded exactly as I expected.
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.”
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.
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.
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.