Communications barriers slowed the inrush of the sociopaths into whatever was hip at internet speed they arrive on the scene faster than the normies do.

So for communities to form there has to be other barriers. The foundational ideas being distasteful batshit is one option, but it's probably not the only one.

You might be surrounded by interesting countercultures and not even know about it: whatever properties save them from instant commoditization also keep you out.

> The foundational ideas being distasteful batshit is one option, but it's probably not the only one.

Impenetrable jargon. Like that VM/protocol/cloud/blockchain mashup that gets mentioned occasionally. Um... Urbit. That's it.

> Communications barriers slowed the inrush of the sociopaths into whatever was hip at internet speed they arrive on the scene faster than the normies do.

Ah. Crypto.

Relevant new book on crypto and influencers: "Easy Money", by Ben McKenzie and Jacob Silverman.

Half and half. I think its true that old style counter cultures and the avant garde no longer exist but also that the "deplorables" is not counter culture. The global kind (versus but encompassing the USA specific manifestation) is a kind of reaction against progressivism based on tradition. The word "reactionary" might be used more by people hopefully without the 19th century let-them-eat-cake connotations! It's alternative.

Generally there may be some confusion of categories. There is a difference between alternative, sub and counter cultures. There are lots of sub cultures still around, and lots of groups doing their own alternative thing. I think previous counter cultures had sub cultural manifestations. Punk is a classic example with the "punk ethic". The sub culture got recuperated and commodified, and the ethic mostly but not completely died.

I'd say cyberpunk lives on in the critical take of hackers towards AI and technological capitalism for example but even if its not a subculture now and even if there's no real counter culture it still influences many counter cultural ideas. The spirit or ideas of cyberpunk hasn't been fully adopted by mainstream at the same time the aesthetic subculture was.

Interesting response, thanks. The definition of counterculture that I see most frequently is: "A culture whose values and norms of behavior differ substantially from those of mainstream society, sometimes diametrically opposed to mainstream cultural mores."

By that yardstick, I'd say the alt-right or whatever you want to call it is a reactionary counterculture rather than a progressive counterculture, largely as a result of progressive countercultural values from the 1950s-90s having been incorporated into mainstram culture.

A few months ago I asked ChatGPT to use the principal of the Hegelian dialectic to tell me what the synthesis arising from the current progressive culture and the alternative reactionary one would be. Naturally it was useless.

Real estate matters. One of the prerequisites of a counterculture seems to be urban areas in which it is possible to live cheaply without working too hard. Those are hard to find in the US right now, but existed in the 1950s through the 1980s.

China now has a "lying flat" counterculture, where young people move to cheap third-tier cities where they can escape the rat race. The government is not happy about this.[1] (The term refers not to people lying down, but to crops flat in fields and not harvestable.)

[1] https://www.brookings.edu/articles/the-lying-flat-movement-s...

Gibson himself wrote about this in Distrust that Particular Flavor unless I'm gravely mistaken, cities need interstitial spaces for living and working