[HN Gopher] A society without a counterculture?
___________________________________________________________________
A society without a counterculture?
Author : lycopodiopsida
Score : 69 points
Date : 2022-05-28 19:18 UTC (3 hours ago)
(HTM) web link (tedgioia.substack.com)
(TXT) w3m dump (tedgioia.substack.com)
| femiagbabiaka wrote:
| "The revolution will not be televised." Step outside of your
| comfort zone, visit cities, neighborhoods and people you might
| not normally. The counterculture never goes away.
| dragontamer wrote:
| One of my favorite musicians is NateLikesToBattle, who makes
| English renditions of anime openings.
|
| Hes got a ton of views, seems to be doing fine. A couple of video
| game scores too (River City Girls).
|
| I dunno if he does any traditional records, but he is certainly
| not mainstream.
|
| There are a ton of other YouTubers that come to mind (Wellerman /
| sea shanty memes for example) which became outrageously popular
| on YouTube, Tik Tok. How do we count these performances?
|
| -------
|
| Video wise, more and more kids are watching YouTube channels
| completely alien to me. I really can't keep up with them, but
| apparently they have millions of views.
|
| Dude Perfect, SloMoGuys, some various science channels come up
| for me a lot. Are these counterculture?
|
| I've also participated in some simpler foam-based HEMA combat. As
| others would call it: LARPing. Is this counterculture?
|
| Cause if its considered counterculture and considered dead... I
| dunno, I see it all over the place.
|
| The Age of Empires community rented out a castle and streamed
| their championship from it. https://youtu.be/2u3HupyXyKQ
|
| That's not mainstream at all. I guess Red Bull sponsored it but
| otherwise it felt quite natural: the long running members of the
| community all meeting up and honestly interacting with each
| other.
| HidyBush wrote:
| If you don't care enough about a certain art form then you'll
| never search deep enough (and most of the times it's not even
| that deep) to find the good stuff. This guy spent a few of his
| points talking about music. What does he listen to then? Is he
| passionate about music? Is he knowledgeable? Or does he just like
| music in general and listens to the radio and his Spotify
| library?
|
| Of course if you have a superficial interest you'll only get fed
| the mainstream bullshit. But is it seriously that difficult to
| peruse the cinema's pamphlet and choose some quirky movie near
| the bottom? Is it that difficult to peruse your radio spectrum
| and find a station that features more indie musicians? And how
| about doing some actual research on the internet once you find
| that quirky movie or that indie song? Maybe you search for the
| director or the singer, you discover a new genre, you find a
| forum somewhere and deep down the rabbit hole of incredible new
| stuff you go.
|
| This post screams Gell-Man amnesia to me, I'm sure that this guy
| is passionate about a topic and would cringe if I said that
| everything about his favorite passion is mainstream and indie
| content is disappearing.
| cbfrench wrote:
| > What does he listen to then? Is he passionate about music? Is
| he knowledgeable? Or does he just like music in general and
| listens to the radio and his Spotify library?
|
| I mean, Ted Gioia is probably the foremost jazz critic and
| historian in the country, so I'd warrant that his listening is
| fairly broad, and he's definitely knowledgeable. But it's
| likely broadest only within that particular sphere. I'd
| absolutely trust his opinions about jazz. I'd moderately trust
| his opinions about music more generally (except, probably, for
| pop). And I'd only marginally trust his opinions on culture as
| a whole. I'm sure he's generally "cultured," but that doesn't
| make one an astute critic, as this piece rather illustrates.
|
| The problem with the list of theses he's produced is that he's
| trying to parlay his expertise in a fairly sheltered part of
| culture into an expertise on culture generally. Some of his
| pronouncements aren't entirely off-base; they're just issued
| with a confidence that is probably unfounded. What's weird is
| that, as a jazz critic, you'd think he'd be more in-tune with
| forms of culture outside the mainstream, since he spends most
| of his time thinking about one of them...
| thomassmith65 wrote:
| I disagree with much of the essay (eg: 'Telling jokes becomes a
| dangerous profession' strikes me as a complete non-sequitur) but
| I credit the author for asking a fascinating question.
|
| I think the sense in which we live in a society lacking counter-
| culture is that counter-culture now _is_ most of our culture.
| civilized wrote:
| Reminds me of "Bobos in Paradise" by David Brooks (2000).
|
| Brooks is now "just another uncool Boomer" but he made this
| same observation over 20 years ago.
| wallfacer120 wrote:
| People have been making this observation since the late 60s
| because that's when it became true.
| deanCommie wrote:
| What a failure of imagination.
|
| Mainstream culture was always bland, safe, and predictible. We
| remember auteur cinema from the 1970s for example, because they
| stood the test of time - the great works of Coppola and Scorsese,
| but the top grossing films of the era were no better than the MCU
| of today. The same about TV. And music. Look at old Billboard
| charts, at old Grammy winners - none of them represent the "best"
| of any decade that we look back at with fondness.
|
| Are Alternative weekly newspapers disappearing. Of course. But
| that's not because there is no outlet for those alternative
| voices anymore - they are just not being expressed in a dead
| tree-based medium anymore. They're on YouTube, on blogs, and yes,
| on Twitter. Do they have the same amount of reach as late night
| show clips? Of course not, but that was always the case with
| alternative culture - it was never as big as the mainstream.
|
| The controversial (for this site) reality is that Alt-right and
| ALt-left are the counter cultures. Mainstream American media is
| extremely centrist and safe, and always has been. The US
| political system and judicial system are extremely conservative
| and take very little action except to repress civil rights. The
| "cancel culture" the right freaks out about IS a counterculture.
| A perhaps overly left-leaning, but a counterculture to the
| mainstream nonetheless.
| olddustytrail wrote:
| > the top grossing films of the era (70s) were no better than
| the MCU of today.
|
| These are the top films, and second place, for 1970-74
|
| 70 Love Story, Airport
|
| 71 Fiddler on the Roof, Billy Jack
|
| 72 The Godfather, The Poseidon Adventure
|
| 73 The Exorcist, The Sting
|
| 74 The Towering Inferno, Blazing Saddles
|
| I only stopped because I got bored copying and pasting. I'm not
| convinced the MCU stuff really compares. And I love all that
| Marvel stuff! Maybe if they could do a decent soundtrack. .
| Ariarule wrote:
| The top grossing films of the 1970s? The original Star Wars,
| Jaws, The Exorcist, Alien, The Godfather? Rocky 2 and Jaws 2
| are also on the list so it's not like there weren't any sequels
| at all, but that group of films really _wasn't_ dominated by
| remakes and franchise films:
|
| https://www.imdb.com/list/ls026560159/
|
| By comparison, entries for the 2010s include MCU franchise
| films, Star Wars Sequels, Jurassic World (a sequel), The Lion
| King (Remake), etc:
|
| https://www.imdb.com/list/ls026040906/
|
| Going year-by-year doesn't really change things very much:
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_highest-grossing_films...
| jccalhoun wrote:
| Either this guy has a wrong definition of "counterculture" or I
| do. It seems that he is actually writing about a monoculture or
| homoginizing of mainstream media - both of which I could see
| making an argument for - but in my mind, a counterculture isn't
| going to produce a box office success or a top 40 song. If it
| does then it isn't counterculture any more. It has been
| assimilated and commoditized to become mainstream culture.
| jaqalopes wrote:
| More optimistically, everything now is counterculture. There is
| no consensus reality. Sure there are still big corporations like
| Disney making the same old formulaic stuff (which btw lots of
| people genuinely love). But it's not weird anymore to not keep up
| with the mainstream. Everyone used to read one of the same one or
| two local newspapers. Now you can choose from millions of blogs,
| podcasts, etc. In the past you simply couldn't publish a book
| without going through an established company, indie or otherwise.
| Today you can self-publish, or even give your book away online
| for free.
|
| These concepts are not zero sum. The world is not the same as 60
| years ago but rearranged, it's an entirely new world full of
| different people and possibilities. But that fact doesn't make
| for a good viral blog post.
| lambdasquirrel wrote:
| Have you gone to any major, "serious" performance where something
| felt like an artistic mistake?
|
| I'm not referring to mistakes of kitschiness, or excess, or
| technical incorrectness. If you're in any place where folks are
| exploring expression (or even technicality), then they will
| inevitably do something that may seem weird.
|
| In those places where culture and expression have peaked and got
| nowhere to go, where the gestalt has distinctly chosen
| predictability over possibility, things may feel out of place
| simply because they're e.g. displays of skill for the sake of
| displays of skill. Or even more tritely, production for
| production's sake.
|
| This may sound alternately cliche or obvious-after-the-fact, but
| when there is no counterculture, nothing will be weird, at all.
| And that is because nothing is being dared or played with.
| nmilo wrote:
| Of course there's no counterculture---(but not for the reasons
| given in the article)---the Internet has made it a part of
| mainstream culture. No matter how absurdly counter-mainstream you
| make a piece of music, film, etc., you will find an audience
| enjoying it online. There is no counterculture because almost
| everyone is a part of at least one niche subculture. The fact
| that you're posting this on a forum that would have undoubtedly
| been called "countercultural" 30-40 years ago is telling of how
| far culture has changed since the times when the Top 40 chart was
| relevant.
| seydor wrote:
| I disagree. The internet is its own culture and it is
| absolutist. It has perpetuated a lot of falsehoods like, e.g.
| that popularity equates with truth and that damages people. It
| is not possible to pay for counterculture because cash has been
| replaced by the visa-paypal-apple-google cartel. The internet
| needs to meet its counterculture
| gensym wrote:
| There's more to (counter) culture than entertainment, but you
| wouldn't know it from this article. Even just looking at
| entertainment, why would you look at the multiplexes or top music
| charts to find diversity?
| klyrs wrote:
| The author is defining "culture" as megacorp-owned content, which
| is absurdly reductive. It's an ivory-tower view, that he's
| seemingly railing against, but can't put his finger on because
| he's strictly of the tower. On the other hand, there is _so much
| derivative CRAP_ out there, good word.
|
| Problem is, good entertainment is still happening locally, but
| (hey author,) _you need to get off your ass to find it_. Bands,
| comedians, actors, etc. who you haven 't heard of unless you're
| actively attending -- with tens to hundreds of audience members.
| Statistically, it isn't even a blip. But it's the "culture" the
| author finds missing. The revolution will not be televised.
| l33tbro wrote:
| The author makes your point that there are plenty of smaller
| voices out there. However the commissioners and platform owners
| are no longer so incentivised to find and promote those voices.
|
| While it's great to go out and see interesting local stuff - we
| also need mainstream entertainment for when we are not at those
| spaces during the other 99 percent of our time.
|
| This is the author's point: the revolution was previously
| televised. Original films, 'alternative' music, street press,
| small publishers, etc have all but vanished from the cultural
| landscape.
|
| This has lead to a kind of stagflation of shite. A cultural
| blight where the sameness of cultural product grows and becomes
| harder to break out of.
| [deleted]
| olivermarks wrote:
| The political supermajority in California is an interesting
| example of this. I'm a registered Democrat but having a single
| party dominate every aspect of society is increasingly narrowing
| Overton windows and creating homogenized monoculture views
| amongst those who don't think. Opposition and counterculture is
| as essential to liberal democracies as free speech imo
| astrange wrote:
| That means almost nothing. If the only party label that gets
| you elected is Democrat then everyone runs as a Democrat - it's
| still the same people. You don't live in the UK where the party
| can fire you. They literally have no control over anything.
|
| (Everything people blame on this is actually caused by having
| primary elections, but California uses jungle primaries, which
| have different incentives.)
| Barrin92 wrote:
| This kind of thinking can be misleading. Baudrillard made the
| interesting cold war observation that while the US and the
| Soviet Union might have seemed superficially like alternatives,
| they were both part of a meta-stable, static system of nuclear
| deterrence.
|
| In the US struggles between either party might seem fantastic
| to members of both parties, but anyone outside _that_ Overton
| window, often people with widely diverse views, dread nothing
| more.
|
| Another way of putting it is that sophisticated systems of
| control always incorporate their own opposition, which actually
| provides stability. Lone empires tend to topple over. Taking
| California as an example, not despite but because of its
| dominant culture it is more dynamic. Even its real opposition,
| which is forced to act outside of the system is more
| interesting, subversive, radical than what you'd find in a
| 'balanced' state.
| bergenty wrote:
| causality0 wrote:
| There's a lot of claims in here which are based on numbers but
| provide no numerical evidence. Without citations it just comes
| off as whining.
|
| _Every screen shows the same movie._
|
| How was this different ten years ago? Twenty? Fifty?
|
| _The banal word 'content' is used to describe every type of
| creative work, implying that artistry is generic and
| interchangeable._
|
| The greater the number of people interacting the more
| interchangeable any human output becomes. More people equals less
| granular. Five natural scientists five hundred years ago in a
| nation of 500,000 people have a much wider variety of capability
| and output than ten thousand engineers in a nation of fifty
| million today.
|
| _The dominant company in the creative culture views everything
| as a brand extension._
|
| There's no explanation as to why this is bad. I think it's pretty
| cool Disney is building Star Wars themed hotels when the
| alternative is hotel-themed hotels.
|
| _Indie music and alt music are marginalized._
|
| Again no citation. Show me that people today listen to less indie
| music than they did in 2000.
|
| _Telling jokes becomes a dangerous profession._
|
| There's not even a comment or a claim on this one, just a video
| of one rich guy slapping another rich guy. Are more comedians
| facing career-ending audience reactions than they used to?
|
| Overall this is an incredibly low-effort article and I'm
| disappointed it hit the HN front page.
| civilized wrote:
| I've found the criticisms it inspired interesting though.
| wallfacer120 wrote:
| Declaring that everyone (present company excluded) is
| conformist and everything sucks is the surest fire way to get a
| non-zero amount praise from any audience.
| kpennell wrote:
| you might enjoy this read 'The internet didn't kill
| counterculture--you just won't find it on Instagram'
| https://www.documentjournal.com/2021/01/the-internet-didnt-k...
| katmannthree wrote:
| Seems more like 14 signs that the author is living in a bubble,
| they've missed that the US is currently in the middle of a fairly
| nasty culture war.
| nerbert wrote:
| A bullshit culture war, that is.
| andrewclunn wrote:
| I mean, if you let "culture" be defined by corporate media and
| advertisements, then yeah the culture is stagnant. But at least
| half of the population (at least in the US) spends a non-
| insignificant amount of time outside of that and in other
| cultural spheres. It almost seems like the author is hoping for
| the same corporate sponsors to feed them a prepackaged
| "alternative" in the vein of the Coke Pepsi non-choice.
| micromacrofoot wrote:
| The American culture war is very boring and neither side is a
| counter-culture. They're both rather centrist corporatists.
| They largely consume the same mainstream media, the same
| products, the same music. No one's "fighting the power" they're
| just "fighting to be the power."
|
| They buy the same food from the same 5 megacorps, they watch
| movies and tv produced by another 5 megacorps...
|
| Americans can't ever be arsed to put together a general strike.
| astrange wrote:
| Those aren't the important differences in the culture war.
| There are real differences in 1. rural vs urban living and 2.
| family structure and relation to sex.
|
| (Conservatives have more children earlier in life, and
| despite talking about anti-sex more, aren't as successful at
| it as liberals.)
|
| Also, big companies are good and are more productive at
| agriculture. Though, the reason we have them is that family
| farmers intentionally sold their farms to corporations
| because their wives were in danger of making their own money
| from parts of them.
| chrisbrandow wrote:
| I agree with his point but many are kinda sloppy. For example, I
| agree with the point about comedians, but it has little to do
| with Will Smith and metal detectors.
| cmrdporcupine wrote:
| This is a bizarre take. Compared to the world of my youth,
| culture of today is far less homogenous. And alternative voices
| far easier to find.
|
| I lived in and near a city of a million people, but getting
| access to "alternative" music was difficult. My teenage daughter
| can find anything she wants on her phone.
|
| Radical politics was fringe and out there. I scoured the local
| used bookstore for anything I could find that. Easy to find
| whatever you want now.
|
| Publishing music or poetry or your opinions in general was a
| major endeavour. "Zine" culture was vibrant but marginal. Now you
| can easily publish whatever you want. (Doesn't mean you'll find
| an audience though.)
|
| As for AMC or whatever. I'll repeat what others have said: why
| are you looking there? Why would you expect to find diversity
| there? Or in print journalism? Or in music charts? These are
| artifacts of the past. I can hear my 14 year old through the wall
| cleaning her bedroom while listening to Baby Metal. She didn't
| get that from a chart. Or from me. Stop looking for the
| "abnormal" in "normal" places.
|
| That said, going to see Bob's Burgers in the movie theatre
| tonight with the family. It's not radical or subversive, to be
| sure, but something like that would never have made it to the
| screen in the 80s.
|
| Now, if your definition of "counterculture" is a) being an anti-
| social jerk and b) getting attention and getting paid for it on
| someone else's platform. Yeah, you might have a hard time now.
|
| Apart from the cultural rupture of the late 60s and early 70s,
| much of the entire second half of the 20th century was a wave of
| pretty aggressive mass media mass market conformity, so much so
| that our reaction as youths was similarily aggressive. Where do
| you think the anger in punk came from? Because everything kind of
| sucked.
|
| If there's a problem with "counterculture" today it's that it'd
| be very hard to pick one single culture to counter.
| rad88 wrote:
| Thank you. It's very easy to criticize mainstream media
| culture, many people make a career out of it now, but it's not
| in itself productive. To the degree that it's more than a cheap
| way for writers to gain influence, they'd do better by spending
| the same time either contributing to the "counter culture" or
| telling its stories.
| MrJohz wrote:
| There's a podcast from the British comedian James Acaster
| called "James Acaster's Perfect Sounds", and the premise is
| that he had a nervous breakdown in 2017 and dealt with it by
| buying/listening to every album that he could from 2016. He
| gets a guest on each week and they listen to one of those
| albums and discuss it. If you're into music and British
| comedians, it's a fun podcast.
|
| IIRC, the guy now has a few hundred albums, and the range is
| genuinely crazy. There's obviously names like Bowie and
| Beyonce, but there's also random albums produced by artists in
| their rooms, or punk bands releasing cassettes that have found
| their way onto the internet, or fusions of wildly different
| cultures and styles, or snippets of YouTube videos set to
| music, or whatever else you can come up with. Themes range from
| Ghanaian independence or the failures of the EU, through to
| gender identity and parenthood.
|
| If that's not counterculture, I don't know what is.
| [deleted]
| wallfacer120 wrote:
| bahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahaha, yeah, the
| disappearance of "alt weeklies" is a sign of creeping hegemony.
| Because how could subversive messages spread in 2022 without low
| quality print magazines with diy stencil art?
|
| Our culture is nothing but counterculture. The entire thing is
| copies of copies of copies of the author thinking that they and
| their friends are the first and only people to take a bold stance
| against power, or corruption, or whatever.
| mypastself wrote:
| Numerous cherry-picked and misleading examples here.
|
| The theater screening comparison is apples-to-oranges, as the
| second (older) image is of an arthouse theater, and many of the
| films were made in different decades.
|
| I don't doubt that there is less variety in theatrical releases
| nowadays, but that's in part because niche content has moved to
| other media. It's the same thing with the printed weeklies.
|
| "Content" is a superset of "cinema", not its reduction. It's been
| called "programming" on television for decades.
|
| Is this the first time a song topped the charts three years in a
| row?
|
| Netflix's library is shrinking due to the rise of other streaming
| services, not due to "homogenization".
|
| And the less said about the "slap" tweet linking to a _New York
| Post_ article, the better.
| seydor wrote:
| 15. You milk all your signs from twitter
|
| He's right, but a bit late to the party
| Ariarule wrote:
| This is reminiscent a bit of Ross Douthat's _The Decadent
| Society_, especially (but not only) in the discussion of the
| continuous stream of movie remakes.
| nil-sec wrote:
| It's funny because, for me, this was one of the major confusions
| when I moved from Europe to the US. In Europe, there are a lot of
| prominent subcultures, particularly in college. This was totally
| absent in the US in my experience. Even at places where you would
| expect it, e.g. underground, hard Techno warehouse raves in
| Baltimore. Instead the same mainstream people & opinions were
| there too.
| astrange wrote:
| In the US only GenX and early millennials had subcultures,
| which is also why they're the only people in bands.
|
| Everyone after them thinks it's weird that they've confused
| listening to a single kind of music with an entire lifestyle.
|
| (Boomers, who had a single counterculture instead of
| subcultures, similarly thought that doing drugs at music
| festivals was somehow actively saving the world.)
| [deleted]
| DangitBobby wrote:
| Does this site make Firefox mobile crash for anyone else?
| jspaetzel wrote:
| As usual counterculture isn't part of mainstream media. Duh.
| Forge36 wrote:
| In a world dominated by connections and algorithms how would you
| find counter culture? It's not by visiting the largest movie
| theater chain in America (AMC has nearly 8000 theaters). I'm not
| sure it's going to be online (mail list maybe, but not likely an
| open forum)
| [deleted]
| wallfacer120 wrote:
| What do you think that the "algorithms" are hiding from you? Do
| you think that anti-corporate and ultra left wing content is
| censored on Twitter?
| widjit wrote:
| Maybe it isn't, maybe it is; the point is you would never
| know what you're not being shown.
| acover wrote:
| > A counterculture is a culture whose values and norms of
| behavior differ substantially from those of mainstream society,
| sometimes diametrically opposed to mainstream cultural mores.
|
| I don't even know if we have a mainstream culture anymore. Going
| from 3 tv channels to millions on YouTube means most people
| aren't watching the same thing. Despite the population exploding,
| ratings are a fraction of what they were.
|
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Counterculture
| throwamon wrote:
| > most people aren't watching the same thing
|
| I wouldn't say that. YouTube is happy to pick semi-random
| popular videos from 14 years ago and generic crap and
| [re]viralize them by shoving them into everyone's recommended
| feeds, so much so that comments like "the algorithm has brought
| us together again, see you in 10 years" have become a meme.
| tayistay wrote:
| "The banal word 'content' is used to describe every type of
| creative work, implying that artistry is generic and
| interchangeable." Amen to that. I can't stand that fucking word!
| Every instance of that corporate blandness could be replaced by
| something more specific.
| rufus_foreman wrote:
| >> Indie music and alt music are marginalized
|
| The culture that is marginalized is the counterculture.
| [deleted]
| noodleman wrote:
| What does the author mean by counterculture? They don't define
| what a counterculture is, or why it is either good or bad to have
| one, before listing their suspected symptoms of it.
|
| Rather than one monolithic counterculture, there are lots of
| small signs of divergent movements I would call true
| counterculture. LGBT, veganism, youth culture like tiktok.
| There's also harmful ones like the alt-right, antivax, and
| conspiracy theory movements.
|
| These two lines here:
|
| "Creative work is increasingly embedded in genres that feel
| rigid, not flexible"
|
| "Even avant-garde work often feels like a rehash of 50-60 years
| ago"
|
| Convinced me the author is having a depressive episode after
| rewatching Friends on Netflix for the 4th time this year.
| Crabber wrote:
| I think you should read
| https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=31543498
|
| You consider "true counterculture" things like LGBT and
| veganism, that are openly supported by every western government
| and corporation? Really?
|
| When you call other forms of counterculture "harmful" what
| you're really saying is "things that my culture has told me are
| harmful", or in other words "things that are counter to my
| culture".
| jl6 wrote:
| > ... tweets that capture the stale taste of life ...
|
| 1 warning sign the author may be trapped in a Twitter bubble of
| his own making.
| exploding_water wrote:
| [deleted]
| zmibes wrote:
| Thr counterculture of the 60s had won by the 90s and now
| represents the status quo. The counterculture that exists now is
| unpalletable to regular folk (somewhat by design), but
| nonetheless highly creative and politically radical (in the other
| direction)
| AddingValue wrote:
| This is what capitalism (at least in its current form) does: it
| kills creativity while driving up rents.
|
| Communism also killed creativity by educating people to think the
| same, but at least the jobs were secure and the rent was very
| cheap.
|
| Example: video games.
|
| Of course there were a lot of failures in the beginning, but at
| least there was loads of creativity.
|
| Then the "EA" system kicked in and killed creativity... because
| they did not want to take any risks with creative game design but
| rather "make a new" what sold in the past (NFL games, FIFA
| games...) but with shinier grafix, as if grafix was all of the
| fun (think about minecraft).
|
| So sooner or later money kills creativity PLUS human development.
|
| It really is that bad.
| cmrdporcupine wrote:
| I can go on Steam right now and find gazillions of game ideas
| and buy them.
|
| Buying a game for my Atari ST in the 80s was a) expensive b)
| hard <usually a trip to the mall>. The variety wasn't nearly
| what it is now.
|
| You have to differentiate between diversity and success. The
| market is much bigger now, and the selection broader. Within
| that large market there's only a few products that come to
| dominate. If you choose to just look at what's dominant, well,
| yeah, you'll get a negative opinion. But that's the thing. That
| stuff is popular because it appeals to the widest audience. By
| definition.
|
| But it doesn't do that by squeezing other things "off the
| shelf."
| AddingValue wrote:
| but if u compare whats on steam... and what was available
| already as retro games for snes, sega... imho there is much
| more creative retro stuff
| the_only_law wrote:
| Eh, there are some fun retro games hit the absolute power
| of modern computers have allowed for some of the most
| enjoyable games I've ever played, particularly in certain
| genres. I'll pick a modern strategy game any day over a
| retro one, and I've played some weird one from both times.
| [deleted]
| FollowingTheDao wrote:
| I am seeing this in Photography. Which is why I got back into
| photography again. Seems ripe for creativity and I do not care if
| I "break through" to anyone but the people around me IRL.
| lifeisstillgood wrote:
| it kind of depends on what we mean by culture. I go for the
| simple idea - the minimum set of cohesion forming ideas, norms
| and practises for an group to self identify as a group.
|
| the smaller this set becomes the harder it is to "counter" it.
| And the stronger the culture has a grip on power the more
| counter-culture must fight.
|
| the US led counter culture in 1960s took on enormous entrenched
| power in Western world - and mostly it "won".
|
| With the advent of social media the idea of a common cultural set
| is broken - we don't all watch the same TV the same songs, but we
| have the same government
|
| So our common culture battlefield is less over art and more over
| courts and legislation.
| strstr wrote:
| -deleted-
| [deleted]
| pvg wrote:
| If you think it's not for HN, flag it, if you think it needs
| moderator intervention email the mods cause @dang doesn't do
| anything.
| [deleted]
| corazortez wrote:
| Yes this is just a list of things the author doesn't write. Not
| untrue but does nothing for the title itself.
| rektide wrote:
| I'd like to see technical diversity arise.
|
| Right now so much digital existence/content/interaction/place is
| subsidized/exists on a small handful of massive planetary scale
| quasi-mainframes, big portals/silos. We use a small handful of
| mostly identical operating systems with little general
| customization/tailoring.
|
| It's not monoculture but technical duo-culture or whatever leaves
| so much of existence in the hands of so few, is so undiverse, is
| a place where there's so little chance for new & original &
| different to get a start.
| vermarish wrote:
| The article focuses on dwindling creativity, but points 2, 5, and
| 9 are a symptom of good journalism being mostly financially
| unviable.
|
| Also, the Dune movie is not a reboot.
| pimlottc wrote:
| There was a previous Dune film, this is an unrelated retelling.
| Isn't that the definition of a reboot?
| Apocryphon wrote:
| They're both adaptations of the same source work. Not really
| a reboot unless one tried to significantly reinterpret the
| other.
| _0ffh wrote:
| Right, though Dune is arguably a remake and the article says
| "remakes or reboots".
| karaterobot wrote:
| I disagree, I think countercultures must still exist. They always
| do, even if we can't see them.
|
| Part of the issue is that you can't look for the counterculture
| in the places you expect to find it. If you do, you're probably
| just looking at a different corner of the same culture.
|
| The other part of the issue is that even if you happen upon a
| counterculture, you may not like what you find.
|
| For something to be truly countercultural, it couldn't just stand
| for the things we already agree with, it would have to genuinely
| shock or offend us. Because we are the culture, a counterculture
| would by definition be outside our context, and we would just
| dismiss it as ridiculous, rather than a movement.
|
| We would probably not share it virally, or like it on Instagram.
| Thus, you won't find actual countercultures on popular forums. If
| you do, they've probably already been banned.
|
| I think when we imagine a counterculture, we're actually
| imagining an edgier but still palatable version of the culture
| we're in. We think back to the countercultural movements of the
| 1960s-200s which have become simply the culture itself, and we
| think "Well, I agree with those movements, so I must be pretty
| countercultural". But no, that's just your culture. A
| counterculture is the thing that disagrees with you. An actual
| counterculture would read to us as ridiculous, dangerous, or even
| evil.
| cbfrench wrote:
| This seems like a very Ted Gioia take. I remember over a decade
| ago one of my best grad-school friends, a fairly sophisticated
| student and connoisseur of rock, getting into an extended
| Facebook argument with Ted because he'd made an off-handed-yet-
| overly-confident dismissal of a significant portion of the genre.
| Ted was unrelenting in defending a bad take, even though it was
| pretty clear he didn't know what he was talking about in that
| instance. The guy knows jazz and its history better than almost
| anyone, but he seems to sort of Dunning-Kruger his way through
| culture outside that rarefied sphere. He definitely shouldn't be
| setting himself up as some sort of oracular critical voice on
| culture.
|
| (Of the brothers Gioia, I've always preferred Dana, anyway.)
| Isamu wrote:
| Back in the bad old days, the counterculture was more
| identifiable because the mainstream was so much more narrow than
| today, choices were fewer and counterculture weirdos huddled
| together for warmth, you could find clusters of them.
|
| Now society has so, so much more choice, it becomes boring to see
| the same old hundreds of choices, we'd rather have one mainstream
| and one underground.
|
| Source: lived through the bad old days.
| dougmwne wrote:
| We live in a world of algorithmically enforced bubbles and the
| author has found themselves in one. Subcultures and
| countercultures are fertilized by the internet and a keyword
| away. The long tail is healthier than ever. The world isn't
| boring, dear author is boring.
| [deleted]
| redisman wrote:
| In some areas I care about like gaming, the counter culture is as
| good as it's ever been. So many of my top ten games of all time
| have been indie titles from the last 5 years. Disco Elysium, Slay
| the Spire, Edith Finch, Outer Worlds, Inscryption, Vampire
| Survivor. Just an almost unprecedented level of innovation in
| gameplay and storytelling and that's just scratching the surface
| of a few sub genres I personally enjoy
| civilized wrote:
| Yeah, I'm having a hard time telling if this guy has a point,
| or if he lives in a bubble that I feel like I also inhabit.
|
| I hear a lot about comic book movies and those are getting
| extremely samey (or maybe they already were), but there are
| other things going on that I don't hear about.
|
| Also, Shape of You is a super good song, so it's not SO awful
| that people love it year after year.
| rootsudo wrote:
| Comic books are long gone counterculture. Look at all the
| marvel/DC movies as of late.
|
| No counterculture item is going to be front page news like
| the whole new "Doctor Strange" movie.
|
| Which, I get, knowing this makes me so not counterculture.
|
| It's also at the point where even recreational substances,
| which were the idealogy of what countercultre was - is now
| legalized. We see this now with Marijuana and Mushrooms
| (Denver, at least.) - For medical reasons or not.
| civilized wrote:
| I guess different patterns of mass media consumption were
| never quite a sustainable way to distinguish oneself from
| the mainstream.
| kelseyfrog wrote:
| Maybe I'm completely off base here, but 1950s counterculture
| wasn't in the public eye. On the Road, for example, served as a
| messenger which signaled the existence of such a counter
| culture 10 years earlier and served it to a broad public
| audience. In the same way, Bourdain's Kitchen Confidential
| primed an popular obsession with restaurant culture which
| resulted in the celebrity chef literally mediated by media.
|
| The point is that by and large counter/sub-culture isn't
| readily accessible by the greater public (if it was it would
| simply be culture). It takes effort and activity. Kerouac
| literally had to be 'on the road' for On the Road to exist. The
| public doesn't have access to the back of the house, etc.
|
| The author will never connect directly with counter culture if
| he doesn't find our present's roads and the kitchens. His
| connection to counter culture will always be mediated through
| second-hand accounts at best, or substantively diluted by mass
| media leaving the hollow husk of form at worst.
|
| This is a tale about what happens if one doesn't stray off the
| beaten path to seek out niche communities and untold stories.
| It's a feeling of suburban sameness, that there should be more,
| and that we're capable of being more. It's out there, friend -
| waiting for you.
| pvg wrote:
| I don't think 'out of the public eye' is really a requirement
| for something to count as counterculture. 60s counterculture
| was highly visibly, a zillion people showed up to Woodstock,
| etc. 'Successful' counterculture eventually bleeds into and
| is sometimes outright absorbed into mainstream culture but
| that doesn't really make it not-counterculture the moment it
| gains visibility.
| krapp wrote:
| I feel like a lot of the conversation here is confusing
| subcultures and countercultures.
|
| Like, goth (was) a counterculture, because it existed in
| opposition to mainstream aesthetics of beauty and fashion and
| gender performance. Punk rose in opposition to postwar British
| society. Counterculture is always transgressive, at least until
| it gets assimilated and commodified by capitalism, like goth
| and punk were.
|
| Gaming isn't a counterculture. What does it stand in opposition
| to? What is it rejecting from the mainstream, and what is it
| replacing that with? It's just a subculture. Like anime. Like
| D&D. Like being a fan of any commercial media. If you can buy
| it in a store, it isn't counterculture.
|
| Anyone who looks at society and just sees the same dreary,
| banal wasteland of consumer garbage year after year is,
| themselves, far too mainstream to even be aware of
| counterculture. FFS, OP is looking for signs of counterculture
| in the Oscars and the New York Times Book Review. No surprise
| they don't find it, given how little relevance those old media
| gatekeepers have, and how they literally exist to define the
| mainstream and maintain the status quo.
| pvg wrote:
| Gaming broadly is not a counterculture, but it's generated
| plenty of counterculture. Gamemaking wasn't seen as a
| creative endeavor worth serious commentary by the mainstream
| culture, the effort to make it so was countercultural. A lot
| of indie games were (and still are) made 'in opposition to
| mainstream aesthetics' or mainstream concepts of narrative or
| play. It's harder to draw the distinctions as clearly because
| technology has massively sped up the cultural mixer.
| Youtubers and streamers have eroded what passed for
| mainstream game 'reporting' faster than we can decide whether
| that's counterculture or not. That's not something, say,
| zines did or could do.
| dougmwne wrote:
| Also, gaming is a heavily practiced substitute for
| Employment, Education and Training. For huge numbers of
| mostly men, it is their tune-in, turn on and drop out. It
| is also a nascent embrace of digital reality, a world that
| may quite literally end up being alternative to the real
| one.
| bsder wrote:
| Yeah, there was a "punk" documentary at some point that had
| all these modern artists going on about how influential the
| movement was to their music and how much they admired those
| artists, etc.
|
| The punch line at the end of the movie was interviewing the
| original punk folks and seeing how _angry_ they were that
| everybody _missed the damn point_. The point wasn 't to
| imitate the "punks" well--the point was to stand against the
| mainstream _any way you could_.
|
| > Anyone who looks at society and just sees the same dreary,
| banal wasteland of consumer garbage year after year is,
| themselves, far too mainstream to even be aware of
| counterculture.
|
| I disagree. The counterculture _very much_ ripped through to
| the normies in the 1960s and 1970s. So, much so that it
| _terrified_ the mainstream.
|
| Since then, the mainstream has made damn good and sure that
| won't happen again.
| astrange wrote:
| > Since then, the mainstream has made damn good and sure
| that won't happen again.
|
| Sounds conspiratorial. The best you can say is psychedelics
| were banned, which is half of what made the hippies lose
| interest in their parents' generation.
|
| But the other half was improved communications technology,
| and it improved again after that so there's no longer a way
| to have a single counterculture. Just because you're into
| one thing about hippiedom doesn't mean you need to sign up
| for all of it.
|
| Since then there have been countercultures, but they were
| right-wing ones like the Moral Majority. You wouldn't
| recognize those if you just think they're being extra-
| normie.
| the_only_law wrote:
| > The punch line at the end of the movie was interviewing
| the original punk folks and seeing how angry they were that
| everybody missed the damn point. The point wasn't to
| imitate the "punks" well--the point was to stand against
| the mainstream any way you could.
|
| I've been listening to a lot of 80s/90s post hardcore
| recently and Spotifies highly advance recommendation system
| has been stuffing my recs with modern post-hardcore.
|
| so I decided to peak one of the more recent albums and
| remembered why I don't listen to much punk genres past the
| early 00s.
|
| The stuff from the 80s and 90s was new, different, and
| completely raw. Even if you don't care for the music
| itself, it's obvious that the artists were pouring
| themselves into the music and you could feel that.
|
| Conversely, the modern stuff sounds "cleaner" and
| occasionally more technical but at the same time feels
| sterile and devoid of the emotional weight carried by the
| predecessors.
|
| I've been wondering lately, there was a brief period in the
| 2010s when some punk derived genres (notably metalcore,
| deathcore and post-hardcore) were hitting mainstream charts
| and I kinda have to wonder if that helped kills those
| genres because modern charting music often is very boring.
| dougmwne wrote:
| Then by your definition, here are some countercultures to the
| dominant globalist-corportate-captialist one:
|
| Green/Solar Punk/Drawdown: deeply against the status quo of
| endless growth
|
| Socialism/anti-work: alive and well and unsettling
| corporatists everywhere.
|
| Tiny House/Van life/Minimalist/Homesteading: all variants on
| rejecting traditional consumerism.
|
| Wokeness/anti-racism/Me too: gets a lot of visability, sure
| but a huge change in which groups hold and share power.
|
| Trumpism/anti-globalist/nationalism: a giant challenge to the
| established order of the 21st century.
| redisman wrote:
| If you want that kind of analysis I'm sure I could come up
| with one for all the things you mentioned. Music
| "counterculture" doesn't really hold any special properties
| that other types of media can't. Goth was basically just
| saying that it's ok to be a sad teenager or it's modern Xanax
| driven branches that say it's ok to be numb. I don't really
| see a difference in depth between let's say liking violent
| video games as an outlet or choosing to smoke weed and play
| vidya in opposition to putting on a suit and getting a real
| job. Most cultures don't really have a deep philosophical
| root - like the anti-war movement did.
|
| Tech also has a lot of counterculture still remaining - open
| source being a notable one
| jpmoral wrote:
| Subcultures can have countercultures, though.
|
| An example would be tabletop RPGs. D&D would be the
| mainstream within the and outside of the subculture. There's
| a counterculture that rejects that games should be a power
| fantasy (as in fantasize, not as in elves and dwarves) about
| killing people and taking their stuff.
| jltsiren wrote:
| I'm not sure D&D is actually that mainstream inside the
| subculture. It's a commercially successful brand, and it
| often serves as an introduction to tabletop RPGs. But other
| games and other styles have been popular since at least the
| 80s, and the games people buy are not necessary the games
| they play. A commercial RPG is essentially a framework for
| telling your stories. Even if you play weekly, you don't
| have to buy new products every year to continue playing.
|
| People who play tabletop RPGs as a long-term hobby tend to
| focus more on the setting than on the ruleset. They choose
| a setting, which has implications on what kind of
| characters they will play, what kind of stories they will
| tell, and which ruleset is the most appropriate for that.
| Once a campaign is over, they often want to try another
| setting. Because there are only a few commercial D&D
| settings, the game after D&D is likely not D&D.
| lioeters wrote:
| > Break the rules. Stand apart. Keep your head. Go with your
| heart.
|
| > -- TV commercial for Vanderbilt perfume, 1994
|
| From a book someone recommended recently:
|
| Commodify your dissent -
| https://openlibrary.org/books/OL687158M/Commodify_your_disse...
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