Charles Taylor, the philosopher, covered much of this about twenty years ago with far less snark and buzzwords. I strongly recommend reading The Ethics of Authenticity. It’s all about the trend of individualism and how it precedes social media by...centuries.
I think the whole thing is bogus from the start, the 'social media' idea I mean. These are companies.. they're not here to make culture or societies.. they're parasite leeching on your human needs.
When a new trends starts organically, it's all impulsive and genuine, then people start to profit on it and the game is over.
> When a new trends starts organically, it's all impulsive and genuine, then people start to profit on it and the game is over.
I think I have seen the same argument about anime conventions. The idea is that a trend starts with a small group of passionate people, as things get bigger and more popular, followers arrive. Followers are not really passionate, they just jump on the bandwagon, but will leave and jump on another bandwagon as the thing gets less trendy. With the followers come people who will try to profit on them since they represent a sizable market. Among the "exploiters" are former members of the original group, who see a find a way to monetize their passion, taking advantage of their deep knowledge of the field.
So the idea that "people start to profit and the game is over" is mostly right, but the dynamic is more complex than just having a small number of people ruining it from everyone else.
And it is not all bad. While the community is less genuine, it is also more productive, if anything, just from the sheer numbers.
As someone who runs a small anime convention, there's a long tail of anime conventions that just barely sit in the black, unable to pay much to anyone. Those only really exist as passion projects.
I staffed several amateur anime conventions 10-20 years ago, as a volunteer. No one was paid, except when we needed licensed professionals, passion projects obviously. In the early days, we even showed fansubs (illegally of course). During that time, things became more professional, organizers started caring about copyright laws, I witnessed the rise of large, commercial events, and an explosion of small, amateur events followed by their gradual downfall.
I am among the ones responsible for that downfall. Simply, I moved on with my life, I stopped staffing, then I stopped attending, and so did the friends I made there, except for a few of them who somehow turned it into a job. The "new generation" is certainly passionate, but they have less to offer, simply because most of it is mainstream now. They don't have the budget for doing big things like the big commercial players, and they can't ignore copyright because owners actually care. As a result, their events are more like private clubs, for those that still exist.
On the bright side, we now have anime licensed and even produced in the west, we get to see major personalities, coming straight from Japan, and many things that were unthinkable when we started out.
> And it is not all bad. While the community is less genuine, it is also more productive, if anything, just from the sheer numbers.
And it’s basically just a natural and recurring cycle:
Phase 1: Novel thinker creates something new
Phase 2: Early adopters pick it up
Phase 3: General public joins in
Phase 4: Early adopters get crowded out by newcomers and turned off by lack of ‘authenticity’ and either retreat to obscure niches or leave in search of the next trend
I'm not sure the lack of 'authenticity' from newcomers is an actual phenomenon, or at least not as universal as people make it out to be. One can be authentic in joining a community after it's no longer a niche only hipsters know about. D&D, for instance, has gotten much greater visibility thanks to Youtube and Critical Role, but the new fans seem just as passionate and creative as the old fans.
The assumption seems to be that only the early adopters care, but that seems unnecessarily elitist.
It's probably nothing new either. Even on boards people complained about waves of newcomers... spirit comes and go. The thing is when the wrong part of society turns it into a regular materially beneficial event it loses it's edge.
>I think the whole thing is bogus from the start, the 'social media' idea I mean. These are companies.. they're not here to make culture or societies..
Nonetheless, they do. Medium is the message and all that.
That's kind of true. You obviously know the reasons why it should be true, but consider also (the "kind of" part) the fact that there's stuff like mastodon, like small hobbyist forums, unpopular telegram groups & channels that don't sell ads, imageboards with a couple hundreds of users. They appear because people (the users, not so much the owners) need them. And they are (at least sometimes) loosing to FB/reddit/twitter, because there's at least something (even if that "something" is the network effect) that these Companies are better at providing.
Which means, that even if they only want to be companies, they (unfortunately for all) indeed are the "social media" in some sense. Sometimes even borderline with "essential infrastructure".
> When a new trends starts organically, it's all impulsive and genuine, then people start to profit on it and the game is over.
What you describe is simply the nature of a trend, it's happened with everything from modern Occupy movements to the teachings of Jesus. Something original and authentic becomes stale after it's been repeated a million times over.
The problem is with trends themselves, the original idea is authentic, but then it passes like a wave in the frenzy of a "trend".
Don't forget Guy Debord who was writing about this in 1967.
"The spectacle presents itself as something enormously positive, indisputable and inaccessible. It says nothing more than "that which appears is good, that which is good appears. The attitude which it demands in principle is passive acceptance which in fact it already obtained by its manner of appearing without reply, by its monopoly of appearance."
"False choice in spectacular abundance, a choice which lies in the juxtaposition of competing and complimentary spectacles and also in the juxtaposition of roles (signified and carried mainly by things) which are at once exclusive and overlapping, develops into a struggle of vaporous qualities meant to stimulate loyalty to quantitative triviality."
JSTOR and the Harvard press needs to just go away. As someone who does IT for a university library in Germany JSTOR access is just ridiculous, even ignoring their fees.
I think it's genuinely ridiculous; academics working on really important topics for the current age, from society, to legal theory, to anthropology, to novel engineering are gatekept by publishers. I've wanted to read the full text to a paper I thought I will gain a lot from, something I can cite in an argument, something to enrich me and make me think. I can't do that, because I don't have access to the paper/book/whatever. At best, I have access to an inconvenient quarter of it on Google Books. I can't buy it for less than 60 euros, sometimes much more.
I genuinely think that the fact academic work is hidden inside ridiculously expensive books and publisher paywalls is a reason why some people have given up on trying to change the world. They literally can't afford access to the tools that will support them or they can argue against.
The independent researcher is at best five years behind current theories, and at worst dead.
In a sense some may find this more of a band-aid than anything else, but I've found 95% of the book I want to read are available through libgen[0] and close to 99% of papers through sci-hub [1]. Sure enough, the book referenced in the great-great grandparent to your post is on libgen and I now have a PDF.
It really is unfortunate though, that there are a great many books one can only get a physical copy of for many times what they originally cost.
I wonder if you could take payments in bitcoin to print out epubs/pdfs of books in high quality, bind them, and ship them to people. The bitcoin's to avoid the copyright ninjas; you could try to silk-road the whole operation. It'll be easier once we have better drones and automated cars.
Honestly, I'm more inclined to just mail someone some cash in exchange for their services printing/binding/mailing the book back. Seems a little more straightforward than transferring bitcoin and having a noisy drone drop a book on my lawn. Plus, why would I want all my transactions on a public ledger? ;)
I'm great with it! Thanks for pointing me, though my point was more general, I suppose - unfortunately libgen doesn't have everything, hence my 'five years' remark :)
Everything you say is true, but an additional part of the problem is that books/papers/whatever tend to lag behind thinking and discussion by 1 to 5 years too. If you’re not an insider, it can be extra hard to have a voice in the conversation.
I think anonymity or pseudonymity is the differentiator here. Things like Facebook have never been authentic because they're so welded to your personal identity, if your colleagues and family can find you then I think you're always going to be posting through a mask.
For me, the point of the original article wasn’t how to be authentic in theory or why people try to be, but how are people trying and what are some of the ways that seem noteworthy?
And I think it’s really interesting if there is really a social undercurrent, especially in new generations, that political and social engagement is futile, and instead people are trying to invent new disengaged futures.
I don't even like texting. Email is a letter replacement. Call me and pickup when I call, or GTFO.
Faceblock, Twatter, Instaglam, Discard, Snapper, TikTak, LinkedOut can all listen to the flushing sound of me deleting their advertising monetization. "Buh buh all of your Ivy and Pac12 associations that made you look important on a résumé." Too bad, I haven't talked to most of those people in years anyhow.
That's weird. I mean, you do you, but if this is a popular opinion, I had no idea. On the contrary, I'm mildly annoyed when someone calls me to say something that could've said over the text.
And I don't think of it as a personal preference: async information exchange is objectively less intrusive, which is why it should be preferred when possible (which isn't always the case, because it's also objectively less fluent). Unless you are some girl I'm mindlessly infatuated with, I'm probably not waiting for you call all day long, so when you are forcing me to interrupt whatever I was doing, because you are calling to say something as simple as "so, you asked me about X the other day, the answer is yes" or to ask a simple question without any follow up (or, my favourite: a courtesy call with no actual information exchange): I'll be polite, of course, but I'll hate you.
If you want to ask or tell me something short: send me a text, I'll read and respond in 5 minutes, so that I don't have to interrupt what I'm doing right now. If it isn't short and you are too lazy to type: no problem, send me a voice-message. If you just want some chit-chat: ask me to go grab a beer (via text). If it's complicated and we'll need some back-and-forth, we should call each other, but I'll appreciate if you'll send a text/voice first, asking me to talk over the phone about X. And only if it's URGENT you call me right away. And because it's just sensible thing to do, when you are suddenly calling me, I'm already assuming it's URGENT: in fact, that's the only reason to answer you when you are calling, and not to call back when I'm in the mood. So when it turns out that it really wasn't, you are already an asshole, even if I don't show it.
I think your multitier "How and When It's Okay To Talk To Me" document only seems like a good way to interact with others if you ignore that they are also people with preferences and time constraints, and that communication is _between_ two people, not just _to_ you. If you take those things into account, you start to sound like a person who thinks others should tailor their actions to your whims, and thinks other people are the assholes when they don't follow your unspoken rules.
Async communication by txt not only avoids interruptions to what Im currently doing (often difficult programming / analysis tasks) but also. with txt there's not the expectation of immediate answers like there is with voice. With txt I can reference material (code, results, calendar) and or think deeper about a response, consider angles and second order effects and THEN respond. This leads to much deeper conversations and more well thought out execution.
I see a call as rude generally, because what its saying is "Stop what you are doing, give me all of your attention and talk to me about my topic right now, and answer me right now" and 99.99999% of the time, nothing is that urgent
I have the same preference you do, but I recognize that efficiency is not the sole purpose of a conversation. Asynchronous text conversation lacks a direct interactivity that many people value, and it is often useful even when the topic isn't time-sensitive. For example, this conversation wasn't pressing, but imagine how much more smoothly it would have run if we were talking while waiting for a meeting to start. You get that interactivity from a call; you don't get it in text messages.
Your argument is that the conversation would have gone more smoothly had it been direct, but there's no way I would have been able to enumerate my position clearly without having a minute or two to think about it above, type it out, make it clear again, and then explain all my points of view.
So it's likely a direct conversation would have NOT been as smooth, because I wouldn't have been able to state my thoughts clearly all at once, trying to satisfy the immediate responses that direct, realtime voice calls require.
I have also found that by not taking immediate calls then I dont get those annoying, reactionary type phone calls of people asking me things they:
- Could have thought of themselves had they stayed inside their own head for a moment
- Could easily type into google and get a faster answer
- Stopped getting calls from those people that fill their calendars and days with pointless busy-work, convinced that they are productive because of the noise they generate.
- My friends can type basically as fast as they talk, so there's not really a speed issue, the only person that still voice calls me is my grandmother, because she's too blind to see the mini keyboard
By that same reasoning, you should probably avoid talking to people in person, too. Maybe you should carry around a copy of Krick's statement, shush people who try to talk to you, and give them a copy.
If you think that sounds rude and bad, maybe reconsider your approach to conversation when it's not face-to-face — because that's how it comes off to a fair slice of the population.
> On the contrary, I'm mildly annoyed when someone calls me to say something that could've said over the text.
And I'm just as annoyed when someone keeps sending me texts when a 5 minute call would have been far more efficient. If we have sent more than 3 back and forths in text, it's time to switch to a call.
For me, the twenty-somethings are terrible about this. They are just absolutely allergic to voice communication.
It really depends on the context. I like having a history of things that are important, and I got more than enough information to keep in my head already. Actively processing voice on someone else's tempo over a crappy mic often leads to mistakes, and the lack of history forces me to ask again when I inevitably forget. Also, the fast-paced nature of voice tends to make people neglect nuance which may be important.
Your idea of efficient may vastly differ from someone else's.
> Actively processing voice on someone else's tempo over a crappy mic often leads to mistakes
On the flipside, text-only conversation often simply doesn't include that nuance at all. I can't count the number of times I've completely misunderstood someone's tone over text when it would have been blindingly obvious over voice. Key and Peele even did a skit about it: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=naleynXS7yo
Voice and text have different strengths and weaknesses as communications media. Both are appropriate in different situations. I will admit, however, to being somewhat "allergic" (as another commenter put it) to voice, probably to an unreasonable extent, because I selfishly value my ability to focus on what I'm doing right now instead of giving it to someone else for a couple of minutes.
But at the same time, I've often found that someone older who didn't grow up with easy text-based communication will use a phone call when a text would have been more than sufficient, and this can be quite irritating at times. I suspect it's in reaction to this that younger people tend to avoid voice communication even when it would probably be a better choice.
> I suspect it's in reaction to this that younger people tend to avoid voice communication even when it would probably be a better choice.
The other problem is that "voice" is social interaction--text isn't.
So many people are stunned when I can call up someone professionally and ask for a favor and they're happy to oblige. To which my response is generally: "When was the last time you spent friendly time talking to your people?"
People are normally starved for interaction with people who give them friendliness and even a modicum of respect (Generation Text in particular is really bad about snark--newsflash: once you become 25 years old, only your buds think snark is funny--a lot of professionals just find it annoying. Funnily enough, if you're really good at returning snark, Generation Text finds it equally annoying.). Covid has made that hellaciously worse--people desperately want to bend my ear for an hour or more when I have a 5 minute request. And I'm normally happy to let them.
I don't regard this as a "waste of time" as so many in Generation Text do.
The argument against texting, for me at least, is that it’s more intrusive (constant interruptions for unimportant things) and interactions end up being less and less meaningful.
Turn off notifications. Text is inherently asynchronous letting you answer when you can. Phone calls that aren’t for a conversation are much more intrusive.
This is a generational thing. If you’re over 30-35, you treat texts as asynchronous. If you’re under 30, you assume someone who hasn’t responded within minutes is dead.
Exactly. Texting gives control to the receiver on how and when to respond. Calling takes away that control.
I wish voice messages were more common though. In iMessage you could simply place your phone near your ear and start talking to send a voice message. I don’t see many people use that or even aware of that.
It’s not feature full. It’s not easy to rewind or fast forward. You can’t change the speed of the memo. If your phone switches tilts - horizontal to vertical, usually the memo is lost.
Those aren’t what is keeping iMessage memos from being used however they frustrate me as I have gotten used to Otter.ai and Telegram years earlier.
Out of curiosity, do you even eschew notifications to yourself? Calendar reminders, todos, that kind of thing? I allow some notifications, and I find these quite valuable personally.
Messaging apps that were popular in the early 2000s had fairly sophisticated concepts about how available a user was at any given time. That seems to be absent or significantly degraded in most of what's popular now.
I want to be able to indicate my availability or lack thereof to any of my regular contacts before they send a message, indicate how urgent a message is when sending it, and control what level of urgency triggers a notification (with an option to put urgency limits on specific contacts if they misuse it).
Probably because they're mobile and disconnected most if the time, so they don't have to advertise your availability status periodically. In the 2000s they mostly advertised that the user was away from the terminal. Nowadays one has the terminal in their pocket. Some of the old IM systems have a mobile status now. The busy status was ignored successfully then as it is now.
The busy status, at least in some clients affected what sort of notification the recipient got. My phone does have a global do-not-disturb function, but it doesn't notify the sender, and the only real bypass for it is a voice call.
I want to be able to pre-notify all senders that I won't be replying quickly so there's no confusion. In an ideal world, I could set this in one place on my phone or desktop and the 8 different chat apps I use would all get respect it. Of course SMS can't support it, but nobody who has anything important to say to me would send me an SMS.
Would you be content with chatbots, a sex doll, and living in an undersea bubble? If so (I doubt it), great, go for it.
If not: don't answer, silent mode, or power off, or appreciate human contact when you do. If people are "calling too much," it's because you failed to train them how to interact with you. And, now you're resenting their assuming it was okay because you were too "nice" to be honest. Instead of mind-reading, communicate (edit: communicate your preferences of communication) perhaps. It's probably you, not them. Sorry, bud.
Edit: Let's inquire curiously rather than name-call or get snarky, because that degrades the site and discourages understanding.
You really didn't provide any objective reasons for why it should be your way (I did). You are just projecting your (quite questionable) preferences onto others.
I'll go again: there are 2 modes of interaction, sync for urgent stuff, async for everything else. If I'll go silent mode, I won't be answering ANY of your calls, even if you'll die when I don't pick up right now. You won't be able to choose between sync and async.
If I'm not in the silent mode: it's a courtesy to you, and you should treat it respectfully. Since I don't know if it's urgent when I pick up, I'm trusting you to make the right choice between urgent and non-urgent (because, again, if I don't trust you to make the right choice, you won't be able to interrupt me when you really-really, oh-god-please-make-him-to-pick-up, really need to interrupt me). If you abuse it, you are an inconsiderate asshole, and not a "cool social guy, who is fun to talk to: I must be, because I've never heard people say otherwise!" If you abuse it too much, I'll be forced to tell you that you are abusing it. Which is not a polite thing to tell, and can be considered an act of agression, which is why many (most, perhaps) people will be hating you with a smile, instead of telling you that. That's why they'll resort to a seemingly more polite, but actually less productive act of passive agression: they'll actually go into silent mode (maybe for your phone number selectively) and you won't have a choice between sync and async anymore.
And, let's be clear: everybody (me included) wants their emails, calls, texts, anything to be answered immediately. The fact is that it's not always convenient for the other guy because he has both other texts/emails/calls, and unless he is a sales agent, also has stuff to do besides talking to phone (actually, no: even sales agents aren't on the phone 24/7). Ignoring that simple fact is being an asshole, not a custodian of "nearly forgotten the true and only art of real™ human interaction". Sorry, bud.
Or maybe a text message is just a much more practical and less disruptive form of communication with, you know, another human being. You're being quite judgemental on other people and ascribing behavior just because they happen to communicate in methods that you find inappropriate. Not very constructive.
Not OP, but of course not. But the text message with that other person is not the end of the interaction. It is a coordination effort. "What time are you going to be here for dinner." "6:30." Then the actual human interaction in person happens.
I know you are downvoted, but what you said is 100% true. Maybe could do without the first sentence; but otherwise it’s spot on - if one doesn’t like talking on the phone for x queries, then they should be able to tactfully communicate this and others will appreciate it. Bottling it all and then getting frustrated that people don’t follow our preferred communication style is only our fault.
Good for you. I grew up in the eighties, and if I couldn’t remember your phone number you probably weren’t my friend. I’m okay with the same rules now. Twitter and Facebook are the Internet equivalent of Skid Row - a bunch of hobos fighting over a bottle of thunderbird. The only winning solution is not to play.
About 20 years ago, I used to say: "People are like dung beetles... fighting over balls of shit." Might've been live, pirated HBO George Carlin-inspired.
How about a nice game of chess?
I wouldn't demonize the very poor as addicts; drunks, sure. A dry hobo is likely to whip your ass and mine at chess. There are a good fraction of sane, teetotaling, drug-free hobos who are merely poor and itinerant without magical bootstraps.
Agreed - in fact the term hobo just meant a traveling worker back in the Great Depression and most hobos would take offense at being characterized as deadbeats - they were in fact out to make an honest living for themselves in the face of considerable economic hardships at the time. I was just being whimsical as to the mental picture I get whenever I think of all the craziness on social media.
I'm along this spectrum, but not nearly so far away.
I like chat programs used as email - that is, non-real-time. I have lowered my anxiety a lot by realizing that texts are not realtime in my life 98% of the time, and to treat them accordingly: Checked on upon occasion. Don't stress about whether the person on the other end will be upset if you don't get back right away.
Planning something? Need someone right away? Set the expectation of response beforehand or just call them.
Textual for details, and not for human clarification. It's often a terrible idea to wrestle in emotional or clarification contexts without hearing or seeing someone else in realtime.
Attention is a finite resource that ought to vary with actual urgency; hopefully, with fewest emergencies.
I don't exist at your beck and call. Text me and respect that I have a life beyond hanging on the telephone, or I don't care to distinguish you from the billions of autodialers who are the only ones still rude enough to make such demands on my time.
BTW, cute misspellings. Little jugs got big ears, I suppose.
Well, no... but depending on context you might have to deal with it. Privately people can do whatever they want, in business, the customer gets to decide. I work as a consultant, if a customer prefer a phone call, then I pick up the phone. If I'm busy a co-worker answers.
In a previous job I was the customer, and I refused to do Skype meeting, because I didn't want to spend 10 minutes figuring out why audio wasn't working. If you didn't want to call me, then I just took my business else where.
I found most of my business communications naturally moved to email. The few hangouts seem to mostly be time wasters, people that reach for the phone before they start thinking.
Love the line about calling. People in this thread dont get it - if you're going to triage me against your other priorities, and if you dont care enough about our friendship to try to pickup when I call - you're not really a friend. We can still be friendly, but you're too self obsessed and 'busy' (in the inorganic, modern sense) to really be a friend
When I'm very busy or focused, and then a friend calls, I don't want to sound short and perturbed, and I don't want to answer just to plead "I'm too busy right now". This is what voicemail is for, and so long as the call is responded to in relatively short time then no foul has occurred.
I'd be leery of "friends" who want attention and interaction on demand. Only my wife has that right.
'try to pickup' - totally hear you on the voicemail thing. If you're consistently too busy to take any calls from any social contacts, you're too busy to have a deep friendship anyway. We can still be friends, but never having real substantial conversations is going to he a limiting factor on how deep that goes.
If you're married, of course you should prioritize your immediate family - a lot of people get more distance on existing social relationships or lose track of friends at that stage of life for that reason. It's not really a bad thing, it is what it is - the loss of an active friendship.
I find talking on the phone to be excruciating. I'm fine in person but there's just something about the phone. It's like jerking off a quarter-inch dowel-rod with a pair of salad tongs. Cosmically awkward.
I love texting. And email is basically texting.
I'm thinking of getting one of those wrist phones so I can voice-text everything.
It keeps the spacetime continuum together with personal branding, consultant think-pieces and virtual cocktail hour networking while scanning the universe for a more important person to elevator.
Telemarketers have really ruined phone calls. No one under 40 is using them anymore unless they're expecting a call from a potential employer--the only reason in the past decade I've ever "waited" for a phone call--and I'm noticing more and more job postings will reach out to you via text or email first.
I really hoped that Clubhouse would corral all the hardcore narcissists away from all other social media, but it's made them worse, they spend all their time on Twitter bragging about how they're on Clubhouse now. Pathetic.
So far I only ever hear about clubhouse on hn. Though I'm not really on social media much. I just checked the about page and it actually sounds like a neat idea - voice based chat forums, where new people have to listen for a bit and be given permission to talk from those already talking. Doesn't sound like it's about gaining likes or showing off or inanely talking about yourself. I don't know if it's any good or if the world needs yet another social media platform but it sounds more suited to genuine conversation than quite a few of the current big social media services.
The problem is there’s no search or Filtering. You mostly just see the big rooms. Which means you’re never going to talk when there’s 1000 people in the room and Bill Gates is talking. Clubhouse unfortunately isn’t what you described thinking. It could be! But isn’t.
Also the initial roll out allowed certain people to become pseudo super users who are leaders of many clubs.
Also, the follower count is still a huge metric. Even more of one because there is no like.
The antisocial social club most def raises the Jolly Roger flag against "social" media. ;-]
At some point, I just want a private platform that is paid for using microcredits, no ads/data harvesting, requires verified named people with faces (improved communication quality), connections only stay alive if you actually interact with them IRL, doesn't automatically share everything with everyone in a single context, and doesn't promote dangerous behaviors for likes/shares. The only purpose of hidden rating tags (in lieu of likes and shares) should be that a viewer's own incoming content gets slightly prioritized. Oh and no instant notifications, no news link sharing/"retweeting", no messaging or chat (there's email), and a user only gets to look at it twice a day. Basically, solve many of the societal and social problems FB exploits and creates.
How many times have you googled an obscure error, to find no answers?
And then after some time... you solve it, and want to add a comment or make it easier for the next lost soul...and its non trivial.
I would argue for a large amount of problems that are interesting to people doing practical things, you want to allow drop ins to your community.
How you keep the riff raff out is then unsolvable.
I have this idea I’m rolling around and to make it non-capitalist it does need to be funded in some way.
Assuming this product fulfilled a human need what is the financial paradigm shift (I mean, who pays for anything these days?)?
Nawh, I always get permission before playing on grassy turf and never speculate if an incomplete course would still be playable. Next, I'd never win a beard-growing challenge. Finally, he has way, way more cash in his wallet; so if you ever need to break a 20.
> We saw this dynamic metastasize in the wake of George Floyd’s murder, when well-intentioned claims of “silence is violence” (recalling the powerful 1987 ACT-UP “Silence = Death” campaign) spiraled into calling out individuals with even a small following who hadn’t come forward with a timely public statement of solidarity or remorse. Yet public posts were subject to popular scrutiny and judged based on sincerity, originality, and tone. Not surprisingly, many people defaulted to posting a somber plain black square. But this generated criticism of its own by clogging the feed with an informational blackout during a moment when community resource sharing was critically important. Amid a chaotic time, the platform functioned exactly as designed: amplification of emotions, uptick in user interaction, growth in platform engagement and data cultivation. Cha-ching, the platform cashes in.
In other words, any large movement or discussion on "clearnet" spaces gets subverted by the algorithms and profit motive of the platform they live on.
However, where I disagree with the author is considering mainstream "dark forest" platforms like reddit or 4chan to be countercultural. In fact, I'd argue that mainstream social media can never be countercultural. While there may be no "algorithm" controlling the narrative you see on 4chan (or a straightforward and ostensibly fair one on a site like reddit), the content you see (and by extension, the narrative) is shaped by profit motive: From well-compensated marketing teams, to hordes of self-interested proselytizers (see: bitcoin), to propaganda teams looking to influence public opinion, mainstream dark forest sites simply shift the balance of power from the platform itself to the most motivated and well-funded members of the platform
> While there may be no "algorithm" controlling the narrative you see on 4chan (or a straightforward and ostensibly fair one on a site like reddit), the content you see (and by extension, the narrative) is shaped by profit motive: From well-compensated marketing teams, to hordes of self-interested proselytizers (see: bitcoin), to propaganda teams looking to influence public opinion
I've realized I have exactly one outlet free of this left. It's an IRC channel I've been in since the 90s. I thought about it and none of us are there for any reason other than that we have a common interest and like each other. No money involved, no names involved, and it's one of the more supportive and insightful communities I've ever found online. We've sometimes wondered why it's such a different community from the other places, and this article articulates why quite well, I think. We're old-timers holding out in a little pocket of what has been almost fully absorbed by corporate social media. I'm sure there are others. And I'm sure they won't tell you where to find them, either.
I find plenty of these types of communities through Discord, and I think that is part of the equation that's left out here. I don't really like discord much, but the reason I get when I do is to go check in on those friends. Usually these communities are just people that I've met playing games.
I don't know that these would qualify as counter-culture or subculture, but they are free of marketing and advertising, and people are there because we have shared interests. The conversations are organic and not curated for us and we are isolated from anyone else we don't want to be part of that group.
So, my gut tells me that the younger generations are using Discord like people used IRC.
They do use discord like we used IRC, but discord is centralized under one company. So, they will eventually do what companies do and try to find that sweet spot of "how much abuse can our users take" versus "how much money can we extract from our market position" as with all such free services. Discord is a trap, both in the latent monetization sense mentioned, and the sense that all your communications there are gobbled up with little to no privacy guarantee.
Discord is not equivalent. Discord is blatantly in with the current culture, including the prohibitive elements. They remove channels left and right, and monetize every bit that they can. Not a problem I've had on IRC, even on big ones like Rizon.
My son has a group of friends at the Uni, some of them in his same school, some of them in nearby schools, some of them are in the neighbourhood... half of them are from high school, the other half are from Minecraft discord groups.
They have a weekly meeting in a Uni cafeteria and use indistinctly Discord or Instagram as chat. Instagram has replaced WhatsApp as the regular phone chat.
All of them have wider net-only groups of acquitances.
Teens/young adults surely have far more opportunities to make real life friends than working age adults. They are at least required to attend school.
I would say that this is more the lifestyle of adults after being out of education for a few years. They are the group that can ignore all real life interaction if they want, Covid has increased the likelihood of this.
What you're saying is and isn't true. One example of a countercultural movement that's been in the news recently is the DDoSecrets leaks/hacks (they get upset if you aren't clear that they're hackers). They've got a strong Twitter presence that helps them get their message out, but they conduct no "real" business on Twitter.
So a counterculture can use the mainstream platforms, but they choose to do so only as a microphone, not as a gathering place.
Edit: That said, one of the members of a related group just (as in, after I wrote this but before editing was made unavailable) got banned from Twitter, so maybe they can't actually use the platform as a microphone for very long. It looks like the law is getting involved, specifically related to the Verkada hack.
I've thought a lot about what you're saying here, and I see no indication that's the case (corrupt/ulterior financial motivations related to their leaks/hacks). I am very curious how the members of DDoSecrets make their money, though (not that it's any of my business), mostly because the Twitter accounts I've been following seem to have a pretty strong disgust response to the idea of making money off of hacking in general.
My bad, I tought you were talking in general. I'm not familiar with DDoSecrets so I cannot say much about their case specifically.
What I can say though is that generally the threat model for attackers slightly more sophisticated than script kiddies suggests that the preparations involve a non negligible amount of time from highly specialized engineers and that somehow, someone has to pay for it.
Highly specialized engineers can be motivated by non monentary ideology just like everyone else.
Besides i think there are plenty of bored teens/uni students who fit between script kiddie and mafia/state actor on the sophistication scale - its a pretty wide step from script kiddie to professional malware writer.
DDoSecrets targeted the most vulnerable voices in society, people banished to Gab for their political beliefs. They literally work for the liberal ruling system.
Indeed. Being able to lose your source of income for posting something that contradicts the mainstream narrative counts as vulnerability in my book. I wanted to post a few examples of potential comments that would very plausibly get one removed from one's job, but that might risk becoming trollbait etc, so I won't give specific examples and just trust that we all have a decent pulse of the kinds of things that you can't say publicly without risk of losing employment or some other punishment.
Indeed, if someone can post their more-or-less unfiltered thoughts on a big social media platform like Facebook, Twitter, etc without ever getting banned, that's a great indication that that person is not part of a "vulnerable" faction, at least in the sense of being part of a counterculture.
So - I guess I'll risk giving one example - if you post a gross exagerration of the risks of SARS-CoV-2 with respect to death or serious illness, or recklessly speculate that recovery from infection does not produce immunity, you're allowed to do that as much as you want. But express the opposite opinion (even if you're literally echoing WHO recommendations such as [far too late] lockdowns being too blunt an instrument or that immunity passports shouldn't be a thing), and you'll be quickly suspended or banned with only a vague reference to "community guidelines".
And then of course you have the irony of platforms like Parler and Gab, which arise in large part due to the phenomenon of deplatforming voices of (primarily) a certain side, and then the mainstream will turn around and criticize these platforms for having a lot of "extremists" or supposed "crazy people", despite the fact that by definition such a platform is going to be populated by those who got booted explicitly or implicitly from the mainstream systems. As a further irony, it's commonly said that "nobody is preventing your ability to speak, you're just not allowed to speak on [insert platform]", and then when you go to that other platform that permits largely unrestricted speech, that platform is yanked from AWS and there's tons of news headlines about how they shouldn't be allowed to platform voice X or faction Y, etc.
So...yeah, the dismissive "how dare you declare these people vulnerable" is very naive and myopic IMO. I think we all know more or less what the current zeitgeist is and roughly what happens when you run afoul of it, and it's not pretty.
I hope I made something close to a coherent point there, I was mostly going stream of consciousness mode :)
Because you decide your political beliefs, and reactions to those decisions inform whether or not you continue to hold them.
Unlike a protected class, which you cannot choose to be a member of. Being of a political party is not a protected class, nor should it be.
The "most vulnerable people in our society" are the people who are discriminated on things they are, not things they do. Gab users are not the most vulnerable, because they choose to be who they're judged for.
It's viscerally insulting to see that point misunderstood, because it belies a fundamental misunderstanding of large portions of how society functions in practice. Because of what you said, and people who believe what you've said, people suffer. That's hard to confront on HN, because you don't expect it.
> you decide your political beliefs, and reactions to those decisions inform whether or not you continue to hold them
That's a really odd take. Throughout history, many of people have been prosecuted for what in retrospect many would agree are correct beliefs (eg: abolitionists, suffragists, believes in evolution, etc.)
Do you not feel sympathy for these people, who according to you could have just avoided all their troubles by changing their beliefs? Do you not understand how incredibly vulnerable AND critically important a minority belief could be?
First protected class is a legal construct that varies by jurisdiction and application. And a whole lot more than then handful enumerated deserve protection.
Veteran, family status and religion are protected classes you can choose to be in.
So you don't believe there's a moral backing for the concept of a protected class? And do you think "political views" fall into that category? Additionally, do you think it's "political views" themselves that are under threat here? Has anyone been banned from any social media platform entirely for speaking about cutting/raising taxes or growing/shrinking government?
Social media is the neighborhood bar, virtualized, with infinite seats at the bar, but no beer nuts (or beer). Truly one of the saddest places in the world -
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=GJW19nlzb3Q
Anyone can pull up a seat to the bar and many people do. Inmate conversations are drowned out by shouting matches over politics, sports, or whatever has raised passions that day. And there's constant yells of "What the #@$@ are you looking at?" coming from random patron to another. And hundreds of bar promotions for any and everything under the sun.
Doubt members of the countercultural are going to want to hang out at the largest Buffalo Wild Wings...
It is, but to be clear I think the point there was not about public figures per se but about everyday people. Everyday (albeit obviously left-leaning) people would post the black squares out of a sense of obligation, and then the responses would be split between praising them for standing up for "black lives", versus half the people criticizing the poster of the black square for making a silly symbolic gesture. (I view it as the latter - a stupid symbolic gesture - BUT the context of the whole "silence is violence" meme is why these NPCs were in a double-bind: damned if you do, damned if you don't)
>n fact, I'd argue that mainstream social media can never be countercultural.
I would say that is pretty much true by definition.
Online countercultural elements are open source software and other collaborative platforms like Bandcamp and similar sites where people are trading tracks and what they have created.
Torrenting is still countercultural.
What the counterculture has in common now is that while the individualism is still present in the creation of music/software and the political/social choice to collaborate, the collective action of collaboration is the focus of attention, not individual fashion and identity. That kind of individualism has been sold back to us ad nauseum and its apotheosis is Instagram.
> From well-compensated marketing teams, to hordes of self-interested proselytizers (see: bitcoin), to propaganda teams looking to influence public opinion, mainstream dark forest sites simply shift the balance of power from the platform itself to the most motivated and well-funded members of the platform
This is making the perfect the enemy of the good.
Also, voting systems take care of a lot of this, because naked propaganda spam gets downvoted by the users.
Voting systems often amplify propaganda spam. Every day r/science has multiple posts upvoted to the top with titles exaggerating findings, and/or linking to shoddy studies.
Upvote/Downvote is very susceptible to headlines that exploit confirmation bias, and bot activity.
> This is making the perfect the enemy of the good.
To be fair, I'm not saying that we should all ditch Reddit and only congregate on obscure message boards with maximum user limits; I'm simply saying that a place like a default subreddit should never be considered counter-cultural.
> Also, voting systems take care of a lot of this, because naked propaganda spam gets downvoted by the users.
Strong disagree. Naked propaganda is downvoted, sure, but good propaganda is never naked. Add enough eyeballs and increasingly sophisticated and coordinated actors will find a way to get their message to the top.
>> From well-compensated marketing teams, to hordes of self-interested proselytizers (see: bitcoin), to propaganda teams looking to influence public opinion, mainstream dark forest sites simply shift the balance of power from the platform itself to the most motivated and well-funded members of the platform
> Also, voting systems take care of a lot of this, because naked propaganda spam gets downvoted by the users.
I disagree: crowdsourced moderation can only really take care of the most obvious crap, so it doesn't really take care of this problem.
Right, crowdsourced moderation works for badly done spam, poorly coded bots, etc. It does nothing for pseudo-science, "self-interested proselytizers" or PR teams. I think there's a mentality that if we just "crowdsource" something, somehow the work just goes away. It's a little like hand-waiving "the cloud" or "serverless" -- just because it's not your problem doesn't mean it disappears. It's still work that still needs to be done by somebody
On top of that, moderation of anything sufficiently popular isn't easy -- e.g., dealing with trolls or PR teams targeting a forum can get extremely complicated sussing out who is who and figuring out where to draw the line -- and like many things is inherently subjective, which means it's the last thing you'll want to hand-waive, but is instead integral to whatever is being built.
> I think there's a mentality that if we just "crowdsource" something, somehow the work just goes away. It's a little like hand-waiving "the cloud" or "serverless" -- just because it's not your problem doesn't mean it disappears.
Yeah, and this has been proven time and time again over at least the past 20 years. Crowdsourced moderation is also usually founded on the fallacy that people who are popular contributors will also be effective moderators, which isn't true.
Though certain crowdsourced features, like flagging, can definitely be moderation force-multipliers.
Social media sites with voting systems have a lot of bots. And they almost always are about expressing individual identity in the context of a unique combination of consumer choices, which is no longer countercultural, if it ever even was.
> because naked propaganda spam gets downvoted by the users
This is simply not true, although I suppose it depends on the definition of naked. Here's some random examples - although like anything, whether it qualifies as propaganda depends on one's beliefs:
- When the previous US president wanted to pull out of Syria, or at least scale down the activities there, a bunch of headlines to the effect of "[President's name] abandons the kurds, leaving them to die" were written, and went straight to the top of Reddit. (This is a classic war propaganda technique where there's always an excuse as to why you can't end a certain war, while failing to account for the negative effects of continuing wars, or the facts that many of these "problems" only exist because of previous foreign policy blunders and doubling down on those blunders simply doesn't help)
- Without going down the COVID rabbithole too much, there would routinely be articles that either (a) spread Chinese-state-originated propaganda videos of stuff like "man randomly collapses in the middle of the street", (b) articles that would credulously take China's metrics at face values, (c) scientific publications that immediately denied the possibility of non-naturalistic origins of the virus, (d) articles intended to shame those who don't believe in masking as an intervention, etc
- (This is a fun one since many won't agree) Many articles raced to the top which made just completely wrong statements about the portfolios of firms like Melvin Capital and basically depicted the WSB gamestop fiasco as a classic david vs goliath narrative, instead of the reality which was for a brief period of time it was a real short squeeze and then almost immediately became a classic bubble/pump and dump scenario that had no connection to fundamental asset valuation. (To be clear, in a short squeeze stock prices can easily be pushed past the "intrinsic value", but so long as there's still a squeeze it is not irrational to buy the asset. However, once it's no longer actually a short squeeze and is now just a normal bull-run / bubble, an article selling the david v goliath narrative is now propaganda)
- Here's a headline that's #2 on /r/politics, which I just visited to find the first headline that counts as propaganda in my book: "Conservatives Are Furious Biden Delivered a Non-Insane Presidential Speech" (regardless of what you feel about the speech or conservatives, it should be trivially obvious that they are not furious about a "non-insane" speech)
- Any of the dozens of articles about the "Capitol Hill Insurrection" which grossly exaggerated what occurred as an attempted coup instead of the reality which was a bunch of (largely deluded) self-styled patriots who changed and prayed and took stupid selfies inside the capitol building (note: me saying that it was grossly exaggerated is not the same as saying that there was no wrongdoing, etc)
---
I do think it is true though that "articles which are clearly propaganda to the average user" i.e. one thats go against the status quo of a cite will be downvoted. But propaganda in the other direction won't because they will never think of it as propaganda
The GameStop thing was some trying to emulate the shitty behaviour of hedge funds and succeeding. The authorities had to intervene to stop these people. Even Robinhood had to disable trading for these people, otherwise who knows how long it could have gone on. The authorities are mum when the hedge funds do it.
'Changed, prayed, took stupid selfies' - let's not hide what they did. They had weapons. If an angry crowd with weapons come to my workplace and ransacked the place, making everyone flee for their lives, I would want them all to serve prison time. It's a no-brainer.
> (regardless of what you feel about the speech or conservatives, it should be trivially obvious that they are not furious about a "non-insane" speech)
I guess it could be implying that being furious about insane speeches is normal, and "non-insane" is what makes it news? Just for devil's advocate sake.
Still reading the article, but this is an interesting blurb if nothing else:
"To be truly countercultural today, in a time of tech hegemony, one has to, above all, betray the platform, which may come in the form of betraying or divesting from your public online self."
I hadn't thought of boycotting much of popular online space as being counter-cultural. It's an interesting thought.
> I hadn't thought of boycotting much of popular online space as being counter-cultural. It's an interesting thought
I think the interesting part is that it's kind of counter-culture but it itself is not really a culture at all. There are no groups (as far as I know) for people who eschew social media. They don't meet up at the pub and talk about it, they don't have any kind of organization, even a loose one. People just kind of decide to wash their hands of Facebook and Instagram and Twitter and such, then go about their lives. I don't think they generally feel a part of some larger culture (or counter-culture)
Maybe I'm wrong about that. To me though it almost seems like a stand-alone complex.
Eschewing social media is not a culture in and of itself, anymore than eschewing the telephone or TV is a culture. But it is an attribute that some cultures have. Cultures have to be based around the actual ways they do interact, whether in person meetings via church groups, in person hiking groups, bike riding, falconry, camping, whatever. Similarly many people prefer to use person-to-person communication such as text messages, email, telephone calls, rather than broadcasting an edited version of their own thoughts to the world all the time. To assume that if you are not constantly engaging in this type of one-to-many communication, then you must be absolutely alone is to have serious tunnel vision.
It seems somewhat counter-cultural to not have social media and tv, though rejecting those things doesn't define a culture. I've had visitors to my house that realize I don't have a TV and they assume I'm some kind of judgemental weirdo.
I own a computer monitor I can use for gaming, streaming TV shows or movies, or just a bigger screen for my laptop.
That's the only standalone powered screen I own, but honestly I don't see any difference between that and a regular TV. TV is about watching television shows regardless of whether they are downloaded from the internet, piped through a cable channel, or received with an antenna.
Similarly people that don't own stand-alone monitors but have laptop screens or iMac screens they use to stream TV shows have TVs in my opinion. To insist that they don't because they are using wifi instead of an antenna to receive the data seems a bit pedantic.
There is a big difference between selecting content and watching it; and having a selection of curated streams. Autoplay on youtube definitely hacks away at this difference, which is probably why youtube keeps turning autoplay on for me after I turn it off.
I don't own a TV and most people here don't seem to know how to react to this information. Often they don't seem to have considered the possibility that someone wouldn't own one. I haven't watched television for entertainment in a decade or so, so I only get references which I absorb through YouTube, Twitch. I wouldn't think of myself countercultural, but it shows just how conforming many people are without realizing.
Edit: by here, I'm referring to the Midwestern United States
Edit 2: would > wouldn't
What is television now? You're watching YouTube and Twitch, so what you're really avoiding is broadcast TV. The large and growing cord cutting movement is exactly that with people using their TV as a large screen for...YouTube and Twitch.
> I don't own a TV and most people here don't seem to know how to react to this information.
Really? We don't own a TV and it's very common within my friends group. I do watch occasional shows on my laptop and we streamed the superbowl on my husband's large computer monitor screen.
But I would say not having a TV is becoming more and more common.
I didn't have a TV for a long time out of spite towards the TV licencing system in the UK and the heavy-handed way it's enforced. I'd love someone with a background in RF engineering to explain how those TV detector vans are supposed to work with modern TVs and the massively higher electromagnetic noise floor!
I expect vegans get the same, I know getting rid of my car led to some people thinking I was the green police and they had to justify why they still owned theirs.
As one of these people, totally agree. I don't really have people I sympathize with over this stuff (except a few friends with whom its a minor topic of conversation) or anything I'd consider a culture. Mostly I just deleted my accounts and moved on. On the other hand, despite the lack of other people to commiserate with, it does feel a little countercultural insofar as I'm doing something different from most people, and it sticks out on occasion.
I've similarly ghosted social networks and other "platforms" some years back. A culture is usually formed around shared experience. In the case of social media escapists there are two sets of shared experiences:
The escapists themselves are simply living their lives as usual. This sort of baseline human experience is a rare thing these days, but it doesn't get much exposure because escapists aren't likely to go out of their way to broadcast their experiences - that would be antithetical to the idea of disconnecting from social media.
Other people are wondering where the escapists have gone. Did they die? Move to Mars? Get convicted of a major crime and sentenced to a long stint in state prison? This too takes places quietly: it's not as if anyone's mounting a nationwide search to locate the escapists.
These experiences to me form a kind of bifurcated culture.
> These experiences to me form a kind of bifurcated culture.
I think what the GP was pointing at is that culture tends to have community, and there is no community of people who have fled the larger platforms (until you consider groups on mastodon, secure scuttlebutt, etc).
That's been pretty much my experience. My wife thinks I'm crazy to have deleted my Facebook and Twitter but that's really about the only interaction I have on the topic.
> I think the interesting part is that it's kind of counter-culture but it itself is not really a culture at all.
It reminds me of a chapter from Kino's adventures, where she finds a city, which has a culture of cat lovers. When she leaves them, she meets their king, who tells the story of the land: people had decided they don't need the king and any culture, so they've decided to appear to every traveller with a different culture.
However, the king says, they are not aware that that is their new culture.
Yes, I think that's an important distinction - you need a critical mass of people sharing in countercultural behavior/practices in some way to get an actual counterculture. Many people have eschewed social media for one reason or another but not in some unified way that I know of.
A culture doesn't require that people meet up and agree on some way of doing things. Hence a counterculture does not need to be organized or even acknowledged while in process. It just happens and then gets written about a decade later.
I stopped taking pictures on vacation (and other events) quite a while ago because I realized I never look at them later. So I spend the time being more focused on the actual thing, and have better memories. I wouldn't like the memory erased thing.
Does "memory" include fundamental changes to the self and perception along with personal growth due to exposure to new experiences and situations and time away from the grind?
There’s 40% of the population you’re missing that doesn’t participate in social media because their ideas have been banned. Sure, they might have a Facebook or a Twitter but nothing substantive happens there. They believe in things like gun rights, freedom of speech and religion, and they often go to meeting places called a “church”, which these days could be considered “counter-culture”. Their values don’t come from TV or Hollywood movies but instead have been passed down from generation to generation.
From my experience people from US costal states seem to think these people are a small minority (5%) and tend to be shocked every time an election comes around.
> From my experience people from US costal states seem to think these people are a small minority (5%) and tend to be shocked every time an election comes around.
I'm from the Midwest and grew up going to church just like everybody else I knew. Much of my family and friends are conservative and I still have views that I might not readily share in NYSFLA but probably would after a couple of beers because I'm not going to get crucified over them. If you honestly think conservatism isn't anything but mainstream then you are the one living in the bubble. (We literally just had trump as president!)
I had a longer comment written out before chrome crashed but the gist is Hollywood and Silicon Valley don't dictate the entirety of mainstream culture.
I'm acquainted with people on social media who find that what they write on Facebook (say) is banned by the algorithmic being that reads before you post. Sometimes posts disappear. Sometimes they get sent to the naughty corner for 7 days.
The reason for a ban is sometimes a real head scratcher, as far as I can tell, but not always.
They've tried other places to have conversations. Some of those have also been torn down.
Some have gone away. I generally don't know where to, but some are setting up their own discussion spaces. (I've recommended that to those who've asked.)
Maybe a return to a former age where you controlled your own discussion spaces. A braai/BBQ in the back yard, a table in the corner of the pub, a ten day tramp through the mountains with four friends.
Churches (specifically Christian churches) can be dead center in the culture. Or they can be solidly Christian, and still be countercultural. They might say things like:
You're looking for social unity? Politics isn't going to create that, no matter which side wins. We can show you a real social unity.
You're looking for security? The government's Covid response isn't going to give you that, even if they do it perfectly. We can tell you where you can find real security.
You're looking for happiness (or, more deeply, for joy)? You're not going to find it on Facebook, or at Walmart. We know where you can find it.
Now, you may think that Christianity can't actually supply any of that. But it claims that it can. And the point is, that claim is very countercultural.
Some things that count as churches may have sprung up to make such offers, but I am assuming most churches have been standing since before Covid, before Facebook, before Trump and Obama and Bush.
If say 40% of people are attending these gatherings, it's a tough sell that they are so far from mainstream as to be countercultural.
People have been visiting churches in search of unity, security, and joy for thousands of years.
Traditionally, they say that because even when their outward trappings are all over popular culture, they know that their core message is difficult to live out in practice, and most of the people who show up aren't doing it.
I think there will be such a group but you won’t know about them because they won’t be on social media telling people about it. I don’t think their identity will be anti-social media, but an identity to strive for a slower way of life.
It doesn’t need to be a culture, or atomized in that way. It isn’t a statement of identity, either.
It is being intentional about one’s time, attention, and emotions. Me, I play a lot more guitar these days, and really enjoy having something that I can learn.
Social media just doesn’t work for me. I can’t deal with a constant stream of people dumping their emotions. I’m aware that most other people can. And that’s fine. But I’m happier just ignoring it and working hard on work, family life, and guitar.
>There are no groups (as far as I know) for people who eschew social media. They don't meet up at the pub and talk about it, they don't have any kind of organization, even a loose one.
Hacker News is basically that culture. A lot of people here spend their time complaining about how much they hate every aspect of social media, the web and modern culture (except for HN, of course) and make a point of virtue-signaling how unplugged, and detached from the mainstream they are, including their refusal to touch any form of social media.
I think it's fair to say that a part of the userbase here has built a cultural identity around its contrarianism.
Yet there are groups here that tend to downvote certain not necessarily evil views to oblivion. For example if you support capitalism and in context write your opinion in favour of some events, expect a rain of downvotes or if you dare to criticise Apple. Quite ironic.
I don't see any particular irony. Hacker News has always accepted that downvotes for any reason are allowed, because upvotes for any reason are allowed. It's not surprising that in a contrarian culture, casual downvotes would be commonplace.
The analogy to Cixin Liu's "dark forest" concept also seems apt and enlightening. (Basically: it's a game theoretic response to the Fermi Paradox that suggests that any sensible galactic civilization would avoid making contact with any other civilization and attempt to stay hidden.)
More and more over the past few years, I've seen my own social circles migrate away from public forums like Facebook and Twitter and into private WhatsApp group chats, Discord groups, and so on.
In some cases these are groups of people I know in real life, and in some cases everyone is anonymous or pseudonymous.
And there is definitely an unspoken rule of "don't unilaterally invite anyone, don't advertise that this group exists, stay hidden, we like what we have going on here."
It's in some ways a reversion to the style of older private Usenet/BBS/IRC channels, but in other respects it's a lateral move. For one, it's still mostly happening on centralized platforms.
What I think is interesting is how our media ecology (in the sense of media as means we communicate and express ourselves, not "mass media") is an interplay between these big public spaces and a proliferation of smaller private spaces. It's not _just_ a dark forest, there's also a bright canopy into which people emerge, forage, and carry back down into the forest.
The thing that I hate about what social media has done is that it is resistant to persistance of knowledge. I grew up in the heyday of forums (late 90s to mid-late 00s).
It seems like a lot of these groups have moved to facebook (or discord, or whatsapp), and now a lot of that knowledge for specialty stuff is unsearchable and behind a wall.
One of my hobbies is boatbuilding, and there is a LOT of good material that is still available on forums since they just happily sit there seemingly forever, and are easy to archive. But a lot of the new stuff is now done on FB, and it means that knowledge gets pushed to the bottom of the feed, and it is impossible to archive.
My feeling is that the switch to algorithmic feed-based discussion is a serious regression for a lot of interest groups.
An excellent illustration of this is Stack Overflow. They take after the forum model of preserving knowledge to the degree that they shut down discussions that have happened before. Stack Overflow's database of solutions brings literally billions in value to the world, and it simply would not work without persistance of information.
> But a lot of the new stuff is now done on FB, and it means that knowledge gets pushed to the bottom of the feed, and it is impossible to archive.
Are there any maintained Facebook scrapers, akin to youtube-dl? I think there's definitely a need for /r/datahoarder style archiving of certain parts of social media.
The Dark Forest analogy strikes me as apt as well. All of the best (most interesting, most active, most insightful) groups that I belong to are off of the public internet these days. Some of them are just small Discord servers, some are even more heavily encrypted groups on Signal, Mattermost, or Mastadon. But what they have in common is that not everyone is welcome, and we don't even advertise our presence.
I think there is something similar at work with decentralized platforms: they might never be as slick as their centralized counterparts, but it’s a kind of ascetic choice that opens new doors.
Do people perceive popular platform UI's as 'slick'? To me they always seemed like a mess that is insane to navigate because the company's massive org chart digests into a massive turd that gets smeared over the landing page. Facebook is the worst, but they all seem to have this problem.
One big problem with decentralized platforms is that, while technologically and conceptually fascinating, they offer a complex and not average-user-friendly UX.
Users are so inured by the down-to-earth, nanny-ready, repetitive and instant-gratification driven UIs of mainstream platforms that many of them have a hard time just understanding where to start with the decentralized ones.
What part of PeerTube's UX is complex compared to Youtube? You just click the videos and search in the search box. To leave comments you type them and click submit.
Uploading a video is also WAY easier than Youtube, because Youtube assumes you've used their interface a ton, so they don't have to try to make it as friendly. Dominant players tend to think that way - I'm the big guy so YOU should have to learn to think like ME
But to just open an account, average Joe (and his grandma) has to grasp the concept of an "instance", which is confusing because it's so different to his habit of just digit the letter y on his browser or tap the Youtube icon on his smartphone.
Also, he doesn't need to use the search box at all most of the time, because his feed is powered by algos that are programmed on the same lines of those found in slot machines. So he just keep scrolling, like a gambler keeps pulling the slot bar at a casino.
So, like I said, the fediverse is a fascinating concept, but, at least at this time, is for people who explicitly want a different kind of experience, because its UX can't compete with mainstream social media. And perhaps, this may be also a good thing.
I think there is something slick about them, if you just go with what they put in front of you. Don't try to navigate beyond a very high level, just take what it brings and hope for that momentary reward that comes from the likes and the comments.
I find this is a good way to learn. Comfortable mega-platforms don't really foster anything productive (generalizing, obviously) but when you start to play with the bleeding edge decentralized options it allows you see "what could be".
Trying to rid my life of google has opened all sorts of doors. If you're a tinkerer there are a plethora of options available for you to customize your experience and discover new capabilities.
The fact the contents are text and many prefer texting to voice calls for one? It may not be high art or even proper grammar but it is still literate.
Plus it demonstrates how vacuous defining something by what it is not really is - you can put anything in that hole.
To give a deliberately stupid as possible version - have you ever eaten toxic ocean snails? No? Then you are part of the not eating ocean cone snails hedgemony oppressing us all by their force of the not eating ocean snail ways.
I've been thinking exactly that. The problem is that the average internet user would have to:
- buy a ___domain name (and pay for it every year)
- rent hosting (cheapest provider is probably DO at 5$/month)
- setup your machine so that it's secure enough it doesn't end up hacked
- setup whatever is needed to publish content in your machine (could be as simple as HTML, but then the average internet user doesn't know HTML. It could be wordpress... But then you have to install it by yourself)
It's a lot of hassle for the average internet user. The worst case scenario: you end up paying ~70$/year for something you have no idea how to setup property. Beast case scenario: some startup takes over the hassle for you for "only" 50$/year... But that's not that different from Facebook (except that you would "own" a ___domain name and a host you have no idea how to "own").
I don't think it's that hard or expensive to build and host a static site. You could even use github.io if you're desperate.
Hard for the average person? Probably, because most people aren't good with technology. But there are a lot of tools and support out there, for anyone motivated enough to learn.
I don't think the article gets to the heart of the matter of why online platforms are not countercultural. The main reason, in my understanding, is that they still are selling the vision of the individual as rebel, and individual expression as our unique combination of consumer choices; Instagram is the perfect example and the logical conclusion of Individual Choice being our highest expression.
Nothing about that dynamic is countercultural any more.
There are still online interactions though. Communities trading tracks and collaborating musically online. Torrenting. Open source software projects.
I wouldn't call it counter-culture. Sounds more like taking a prominent cultural metanarrative about the evils of social media (which has been authored and perpetuated by many papers of record over the last several years), and embracing its implicit call to action.
It's play-acting rebellion in a pre-aproved manner
Well, if everyone is an attention seeker online trying to pitch their own line of BS and side hustling, then not using social media, or being genuine there, is counter to culture.
I run an independent film/animation/music/interactive studio- I have never owned any mobile phone and don't use any social media except for youtube. Our studio is not on any social media platforms. We are the counterculture.
Our studio has released torrents of media over the past 15 years that I would classify as counterculture but you would never know because we aren't hustling on Zuckerbergian platforms or playing the "please look at me" game on Youtube etc.
The "try too hard" stuff usually comes from weak people who are wannabe creators but lack the guts to do it, let alone stick with it for several decades while remaining original and independent.
YouTube is filled with so many interesting little channels. I wish the algorithms highlighted them more.
I remember one channel of an old guy just smoking a cigar for an hour. Said nothing, just sat there. There were thousands of videos of him doing this, going back years. I don’t remember the name of it, unfortunately.
I think you just have search for something, then go to the later pages of results.
Not sure I’d call it obscure, as Nick Knight is pretty well known as a photographer, but I really love the ShowStudio channel. They experiment with film and fashion in really interesting ways.
There used to be a televangelist that did something similar. He would light up his cigar and drink his whiskey, and yell at the audience he was not going to preach until a his audience called in with some donation threshold. He would then cut to footage of his/a horse running around in a field/pen.
Special sandboxes with purple sand surrounded in velvet ropes only the cool kids know about. And with unlimited fresh lemonade, chocolate milk, and warm chocolate-chip cookies. You can almost see one during the winter solstice.
You have to pull to find it- we live in a push world now and that's why all you see is the same old crap- because people aren't searching new works out- they are just sitting around letting curators and algo's push it to them.
Not the OP but I'll bite -- I've seen some incredible counterculture emerging out of what I like to term the IRC revival, or Discord communities. Discord and Roblox have fueled the communities creating a ton of the more interesting music I've discovered over the past year.
What is a protocol, really? In a literal sense, you can say only something that's IRC compatible is IRC. But in a more figurative sense, aren't Discord communities merely using Discord the way folks use to use IRC? Isn't Discord just centralized IRC, then, because that's how people use it and what they're using it for?
Centralization poses censorship and control risks that IRC doesn't, for sure. But it also adds ubiquity. That's key for a community.
Great sarcasm by the way- its going to inspire generations of smart asses with the smooth chill it was written with. Snarky and effortless.
Its like they were so confident in their sarcastic wit they had to include the parenthetical phrase- oh wait that was added out of fear of being misunderstood by the faceless crowd- quite the brave figure.
Eschewing a mobile phone has been pretty counterculture these recent years, but I think we are close to a point where it will no longer be sustainable, at least for anyone wanting to cross borders – or depending on the country, even enter a restaurant or concert. Several governments have announced that their vaccine passports will exist as mobile phone apps, because paper certificates are too easily forged.
I dont get why paper docs are still forgeable in this day and age.
Just put a qr code on it containing the same info plus a digital signature, and have verifiers scan it with an app. That sounds a lot more secure than the enduser having an app that the verifier just looks at with their eyes.
The apps being discussed will generate QR codes that the verifier will scan. But these codes are meant to be limited-time codes, so that if a new COVID strain appears and the old vaccines don’t protect against it (or it turns out that annual boosters are necessary), the person will no longer be able to report as vaccinated but will go back to the unvaccinated category.
Does limited time codes really get you anything that putting a date or which vaccine you got wouldn't? Besides, seems a bit overengineered for something that might happen in theory but hasn't yet.
Officers at passport control aren't trained health officials. It can be hard for them to make sense of certificates and understand what vaccinations are valid and which aren't, or which no longer are. That is why governments want to present an app where trained officials at the health ministry have already decided if the person is safe for travel or not, and just show border control officers a green check mark or no.
What is irrelevant again, because those officers will read the QR code with a computer. The computer can summarize to them how valid the vaccine still is.
There is no reason at all why a paper printed QR code can't tell exactly what vaccine you have taken, when you took it, who exactly are you, and what authority is authenticating the data. From there, any extra data is only needed at the time of reading.
The apps are expected to generate limited-time QR codes with the respective country’s digital signature (just like the biometric data in your passport), so no, your suggestion won't work.
Yup, because lowest-bid contractors are well known for producing bulletproof code, never copying bad samples from StackOverflow, and never rolling their own crypto instead of using proper libraries.
States’ already turned to contractors to design the system of digital signatures on their biometric passports, but these passports remain secure, so your sarcasm is unfounded.
Unless they somehow figured out a flaw in thr crypto that allowed for spoofing countries in which case holy shit why are you using it to fake vaccine certificates?
The fact that you can post pretty much any video you make for people to watch is totally counterculture the media studio TV programming culture that has lost viewers to platforms like YT. It has become so big itself that it is now pretty much the defacto culture.
I agree that you have to be essentially anonymous to take part in counterculture these days. But the author claims that Discord and Reddit are examples of counterculture. I wholeheartedly disagree, these platforms are overly sanitized, moderated by the company, not the community. On Discord, people get banned for empty mass reports, and they can delete servers as they please. Reddit is valuable for driving communities to self-hosted, private forums, where I believe that counterculture has and will be born from.
Further, reddit is built from the ground up to force consensus. Counterculture cannot exist on the site by definition, as anything prevalent on the site is there by consensus.
>Counterculture cannot exist on the site by definition, as anything prevalent on the site is there by consensus.
That makes no sense - consensus must exist within a counterculture for it to be definable, therefore counterculture and consensus can coexist.
Being "prevalent" has no bearing whatsoever on being a counterculture. It's entirely possible for a counterculture to have a subreddit and not be prevalent. The vast majority of content on Reddit never even touches the frontpage.
You could say that a counterculture can't exist on Reddit that runs counter to the platform's terms of service, and that might be true, but it's also conditional.
I'd argue that the way reddit is currently designed is to hold on to it's user base without them having consensus. The way that subreddits allow separation of their user base (but they're all still users and seeing ads, buying gold, etc) allows communities to exist in a way other social media sites don't really allow (except maybe facebook groups).
Maybe Reddit as a whole, but what are your thoughts on WallStreetBets? It seems that WSB has all of the elements of a counterculture, although maybe diluted after the wide spread GME interest.
I’m really not sure “diamond hands” and “retard” count so much as another language. I think the big gap between there and other places on the same subject is on “gambling logic”, not right or wrong, I’ve seen more people there admit that than “Wallstreet Types” who would be trillionaires if they actually knew how to win.
WSB seems like the definition of a smart hedge fund that managed to manipulate the market transparently. Everything there reeks of fake, manufactured and engineered "counter" culture
No. Most "radical" subs will be suppressed or otherwise banned by selectively enforcing the rules. For every rule broken in r/thedonald or r/chapotraphouse you could find dozens of similar examples in r/news and r/politics.
Wait for them to grow up to even a modest number of subscribers. First they will be brigaded (with no action from the admins), then they will be quarantined and lastly they will be outright banned.
I'll add that Discord does not support right-to-read. They will occasionally remove a server and ban everyone who had access to that server, regardless of whether or not they had posted or participated in that server or contacted any members of that server. They view the act of reading the server posts as a bannable offense.
There are multiple occurances of that. They do that when they fail to identify the actual offender or they ban for a non-existent reason ("just to ban it"). If they find the actual offender, things differ and actual offender gets banned.
There's definitely an old internet culture that eschews social media and it has seemed to grow (again) over the years. One example is Freenode:
- The network has some moderation, but bans are last resorts where on social media bans and temporary bans are part of the process.
- Much of the moderation is left to channel operators and guides are given by the network on how to moderate.
- Much of the network is apolitical and you can even be banned for talking about politics in many channels. This runs counter to pop-culture with encourages not only discussing politics but airing your politics with known dissidents.
- Nearly every channel is topic focused, where pop-culture and social media encourage broad, boundaryless discussion.
- Pseudoanonymity is still an option; in contrast to real identity policies in social media.
You can't tell me that's not culture, but maybe it's not a whole culture just yet. That said, keep poking the bear cub and see if it doesn't grow up.
You just described the internet I've been using for almost 30 years, split across various online forums, including this one. Couldn't agree more. I've managed to find a good handful of very high signal to noise Reddit topics too. G+ was good while it lasted.
The trick is to have specific interests you care about and track down that community. They're out there. The encouraging thing is my kinds have found their own communities online and among friends without my help. They use Discord, Twitch, a bit of instagram and such. They're tech savvy geeks though, if somewhat differently geeky to myself. They know what they're interested in and look for that because most of mass culture is just occasionally amusing background noise to them. I'm very encouraged.
I often see people bemoaning the passing of the old internet, but for me it's all still out there and thriving. Several new layers of it have developed too. It's just not the only, or 'biggest' internet anymore.
It is still out there, you just have to work to attain it.
I'm happy to listen to the bemoaning, mainly because the newest and largest groups on the internet are the most problematic and most of them have no self-awareness to that end. Better that they hear the bemoaning and get a chance to change and choose not to.
Counterculture will never die, it always adapts. While it is hard to find there are aspects of counterculture ideas on mainstream platforms like Instagram but they are obstructed.
How do you define counterculture? It is outside the mainstream, yes, but it does not need to be hidden. There are still individuals and groups who are "against the grain" in our society and always will be.
In my experience these people are relatively private when it comes to their digital life (not absent!) but can be amazing storytellers in other mediums, through song, dance, writing, etc.
I think the biggest misconstruction is that the counterculture is a single shared idea or that it is freely accessible to the masses.
I'm going to have to read this again to see if it's brilliant or just pretentious. But I'm going to print it and read it again more carefully, which suggests to me that it may lean toward the former.
Got about halfway through and feels like it’s taking a lot of words to say very little, the author seems to think it’s hard to be an anarchist today and that’s sad.
My teenage son asked me the other day what "grunge" and "goth" were. I was then trying to explain "subculture" and "counterculture", and it was surprisingly difficult to explain.. or convey, especially in the context of what he's seen so far in his life.
I tried using examples of my own youthful adventures and communities -- still not easy.
Try explaining next that computing and gaming used to be subcultures/countercultures. I remember how Mortal Kombat and DOOM were going to cause the fall of civilization.
Now we’re talking. Doom was a massive deal because of the violence (as you mentioned), but also because it moved entertainment revenue away from MSM and onto PC’s and the internet.
It didn't though. By the time of Doom's release video games (console and PC) were a multi-billion dollar industry. Only a quarter of households had PCs and none had Internet access. Even by 2000 only half of all households had a computer and only about 40% had Internet access.
Doom was not some watershed moment in entertainment. It was a trend setter, or at least a meme, in the industry but it didn't somehow change the trajectory of the game industry.
The PlayStation was vastly more influential on the industry on the whole than Doom. It was less expensive than PCs yet had a good selection of the sort of "mature" titles (or even ports) typically found on the PC. The PlayStation was not a platform that moved money from the "MSM" since it Sony which was the very definition of mainstream.
Doom was cool but it didn't even come close to doing what you suggest. It didn't even have Internet multiplayer until Kali (originally iDOOM) came up with their IPX/SPX bridging years after its release.
Shareware and distribution of the game through the internet was a watershed moment that helped sell a lot of Wolfenstein and doom in 1992 and 1993. It is doubtful that a company like Nintendo would distribute a game like doom. PS was a few years after that. Are these statements correct, or hyperbole?
Wolfenstein and Doom's nature as shareware was much less about the Internet distribution but distribution by third parties on physical media. They were almost universally available on magazine cover discs and anyone else shipping CD-ROMs. IIRC even Blender magazine had at least one issue shipping a copy of Doom.
While id was certainly an Internet aware company in 1993 most consumers were not.
Keep in mind in 1993 a minority of households even had computers. A minority of those users even had modems. Even when they did have computers with modems connecting to a "local" BBS could still be a local toll call.
A copy of that month's PC Gamer was much cheaper than a modem and got you not just Doom but hundreds of megabytes of other crap. Cover discs were still a big deal even towards the end of the decade where home Internet access was more common.
As for the PlayStation, it was released in the Japan in 1994 and the US in 1995. Doom was released at the end of 1993 so it's contemporaneous with the PlayStation. The PSX had Doom-quality 3D games (including Doom itself) for a fraction of what a good Doom running PC cost.
> While id was certainly an Internet aware company in 1993 most consumers were not.
Right, so you agree? This thread is about counter culture, and your talking about generic internet usage facts and % of playstation sales when it went mainstream. I played Wolf and Doom as shareware in Australia when they were released, including Kali.
Your original point was that Doom was some huge watershed moment for gaming where PCs and the Internet gained prominence. I'm saying you're wrong.
1. Doom's distribution was (to consumers) largely CD-ROMs.
2. Doom didn't even support Internet multiplayer, only modem-modem or LAN (IPX/SPX).
3. The game industry was a multi billion dollar industry by the time of Doom's release. Doom didn't somehow accelerate growth of the industry.
4. Instead of being a shareware-only title like Doom, it's sequel was sold in big boxes like all other games.
5. Doom didn't influence people getting online (BBSes or Internet) as there was no sudden uptick in modem sales, account signups, or BBS growth associated with the game.
Doom was a fun game and got media attention for being popular and violent. It was not however some major inflection point in the game industry or Internet.
> Your original point was that Doom was some huge watershed moment for gaming where PCs and the Internet gained prominence.
No, someone mentioned that mortal kombat and doom were examples of counter culture, and as someone living in rural Australia in the early 90s, I agreed.
Internet was neither the only computer network available to consumers, nor the first one. Users had been pretty connected even before they started having IP addresses. Also, Internet is not a synonym of World Wide Web.
Most consumers didn't have computers. Let alone modems or any online service. Consumers were not pretty connected when Doom was released and wouldn't be for until the end of the decade. Businesses and schools with Internet access were 1) decidedly not consumer systems and 2) not the target market for video games.
And yet by 1995 Bill Gates was appearing in a video promo for Doom on Windows, wearing a trenchcoat and carrying a shotgun. For obvious reasons, this kind of nerdy frivolity wouldn't really be palatable after 1999.
I wouldn't call them a counterculture by any stretch of the imagination.
Kpop is deliberately manufactured culture. The personalities and music are meticulously curated by corporations. "Underground Kpop" is practically an oxymoron like a "married bachelor" would be.
Listening to KPop in a country where it is not a major genre, might still be counterculture. Think back to the 1960s and 1970s: a lot of the American rock 'n' roll even then was curated, but those young people in the Soviet Union, say, or Morocco who started listening to it where definitely seen as a counterculture within their own country.
> Listening to KPop in a country where it is not a major genre, might still be counterculture.
Abstractly maybe, but in actuality an enormous amount of money and effort is spent to market K-Pop in the US by some of the largest media companies in the world.
And it took an enormous amount of effort to get rock music into and distributed within the Soviet Union. It was produced through the systems of a leading power with organizations that would be illegal locally. I don't see how that changes that the counter culture goes against the general flow until it manages to become it.
They get pretty far by just allowing it to appear on YouTube. Japanese music companies spend all their effort on stopping anyone outside the country from listening by DMCAing all the music videos.
The product is most certainly manufactured. But the culture's response to it is not. The fandom has their own language, their own in-jokes, and will rally together for the causes they find important. They've created something real for themselves. "Counter-culture" may or may not be the right term for what they've made, but it is something independent of the corporations that own the music.
That's a distinction that should be noted because you can see it everywhere. For example: the MCU, Star Wars, and Star Trek are all corporate products produced for a mass audience. But the fandom is independent of that control. The number of good jokes, fan theories, and fan art I've seen for WandaVision has been immense. And the impact of the Star Wars & Star Trek fandoms is also enormous on the culture at large. That's something Disney or Paramount can possibly influence but never hope to control.
I've heard it claimed that hardcore punk was the last American youth subculture, I think street skating qualified too. Those were pretty much the end of it though.
You can't have a youth subculture that your parents drive you to in the car.
Some of those hardcore punks were driven around to the sound of Rolling Stones, Led Zeppelin, Lennon’s “Imagine”... Elvis was utterly scandalous in his time (“those hips, what filth!”), and I bet he was on a lot of radios when Malcolm McLaren and his protégés were growing up.
Any successful culture, be it sub- or counter-, will eventually be swallowed by the mainstream. That’s because a culture is such only if it gets transmitted from person to person. Denying transmission is not counter-cultural, it is anti-cultural: it denies its own validity. Which is why I laugh at the elitism and pretentiousness of articles like these, who want to be purer than pure then take their clues from the likes of MTV Unplugged. The search for purity in culture is a fool’s errand, one might as well burn every page one writes. In reality, culture has to be transmitted, and the purists are just another bunch of competitors desperately trying to elbow everybody else with what little leverage they have.
The modern lack of visible “alternative” cultures is simply due to the fragmentation and recombination that new media have allowed. Guthenberg has invented his press a few years ago, Luther just started writing his thesis, and we are all here wondering why amanuensis culture is not as vibrant as it was.
>> Some of those hardcore punks were driven around to the sound of Rolling Stones, Led Zeppelin, Lennon’s “Imagine”.
I was one of those hardcore punks and I think you greatly overestimate both the level of parental involvement we had in our lives as well as our parents' musical tastes.
Hardcore as a youth movement didn't get swallowed by the mainstream, it just ceased to exist.
I think platforms like onlyfans will end up bringing back counterculture, especially if more platforms emerge outside the uber-censorious US and esp, if they can embrace new forms of payments. porn is showing the way once again
I'm sorry, but I had to reply to this. People paying or receiving money for every single thing they say to each other and/or even access to do so is countercultural?
It's the exact opposite - arguably the pinnacle of the absurd logic of capitalism and its processes of commodification.
No it's people not needing to pander to the mood and whims of the crowd or the majority for every single thing they say , but being paid directly by their niche audience. I believe onlyfans is already too restrictive for them but it shows how it's done; we ll probably need something more anonymous
I signed on to the internet when everything was handled through terminals, so I’ve always viewed cyberspace — and the culture which developed there — as completely separate from IRL. People can take on different personas, customs, etc. So it’s no surprise to me the customs within this “new” world are mirroring how a physical world society spreads across a spectrum of ideology. (Granted, the ideas don’t always blend with what exists in the real world.)
I’ve often thought of the counterculture to online space as those who are breaking free of centralization and the digital “monopolies.” They’re the people who are homesteading on tildes, Mastodon, or their own self-hosted instance, for example. In cyberspace, FAANG are the new industrialists (the new informationalists?), so to me it makes sense that a portion of online society wants to separate or rebel from this establishment which controls a good portion of this cyberspace.
As IoT becomes more prevalent, I can see those who seek a break from connectivity in general as countercultural, too. Some of the ideas in Aldous Huxley’s “Brave New World,” or Ted Kaczynski’s* “Industrial Society and Its Future” reflect this.
* I do not condone Kaczynski’s actions. I’m merely stating the concern about technology’s negative impact on society has long been thought about. It makes sense that there would be those who seek to shun it entirely.
I think this ties in well with all the recent discussion around advertising and its effect on internet discourse. To become counter-cultural now inherently means foregoing ad revenue supported platforms, which inherently means you lose audience.
Easy enough to identify that which the powers that be, deny a platform. The unaffiliated are generalized, and grouped together despite not being real bed fellows.
What modern labels did not exist for the entirety of human discourse? Yet our modern generation is the first to recognize some condition that eluded all those previous generations. Persecution unifies, and becomes a self fulfilling prophecy. (e.g. the alienation of moderate Islam post 911)
The truth is that today the counter-culture is the right wing dudes (and ladies) who won't be beholden to trigger warnings, won't treat particular words as if they have magical powers and won't try to get you fired if you openly believe that male and female are real concepts. If your cursor is hovering over the downvote button right now then that's natural - counter culture isn't popular. By definition.
That's precisely the irritating image people like that have of themselves, which does not correspond to reality. What does it mean "beholden to trigger warnings"? I'm not sure in which sense you are beholden to something which you likely haven't even encountered outside of internet posts making fun of trigger warnings. What magic words are those? Not saying n*gger in polite company isn't censorship, it's just good manners. And who exactly has been fired for "believing male and female are real concepts"? This is some borderline delusional shit.
The "I know I'll be downvoted for this brave opinion" bit is the icing on the cake.
> Not saying n*gger in polite company isn't censorship, it's just good manners.
Is this not polite company? Do you think adding an asterisk makes a significant difference?
I'm black myself, do I get to say it? Could the question be more complicated than you're making it out to be?
edit: I mean - MCNeil at the NYT was quite literally doing what you just did: discussing whether certain language was acceptable or should be punished. Imagine being fired for this post two years from now. I don't care about McNeil in particular (the US is an "At-Will" country, workers have no real rights, he's a privileged guy), but the state of free expression right now is bizarre. The fact that it comes when old (and most of new media) media is more consolidated than it's ever been is not coincidental.
That is ridiculous. Newscasters are far less polite and far more openly partisan, combative, and opinionated than they use to be. Comments on articles and videos, and in social media, are far less polite than people replying with letters to the press in the past.
I guess you should be considered lucky for not being exposed to the Freeper comments section 20 years ago, or Fox News comments sections, or Patch.com comments sections. They've always been bad.
I'm pretty sure if you ask anyone they would say there was nothing polite about that exchange.
By what definition was that exchange polite? None that are based in reality or relevant.
I'm not interested in arguing about the definitions of words.
I think you are saying that mainstream culture has adopted rude behavior, while I am saying that any behavior adopted by mainstream culture is, by definition, not rude.
I've worked at at least one place where if I stated "male and female are real concepts" I would have raised eyebrows at min and received some official reprimand at max
Well yeah if I said "bacon was made to be eaten" in disdain to vegetarians, Hindus, Muslims, and Jews that would get essentially the same reaction because it is essentially wrongly invalidating others by deliberate exclusion.
well, he was downvoted. but not overwhelmining so; let's call it controversial.
> And who exactly has been fired for "believing male and female are real concepts"?
I recall some kind of minor debacle about a Stack Overflow moderator (or employee? details are vague) who got in trouble for something related to individual choice of pronouns. It seems to be what they're refering to.
LARPing with boffer swords is counterculture. Kink is counterculture. Church of the Flying Spaghetti Monster is counterculture. You don't need to brandish a tiki torch to be sufficiently different -- but that's the loudest counterculture, and they're getting all the attention. I know of an ancient forum related to a counterculture intentionally not listed here, and it's ticking along just fine, thankyouverymuch.
Of course, there's a difference between "unpopular" and "intentionally or callously offensive". All of my examples are of the former kind (so long as the kink happens in private spaces, I guess). Church of Satan is borderline in my mind, but I suppose that some Christians might put it in the latter category.
I agree those things you mentioned aren't very popular, and possibly where you are the mainstream culture is different than where I am, but I don't see any of those things as counter-culture in the sense that none of them are opposed by the dominant culture. e.g. If it came out at work that you were a member of a group that fought with foam swords, had unusual sexual preferences, or were funny atheists, you wouldn't be fired. People might say "oh, that's weird" but they aren't going to hate you.
I'm not saying any of those things are bad (in fact, I like fighting with fake swords) but there's not hostility to them from the culture and they, in turn, are not hostile to the mainstream culture, so I just don't think they're countercultural at all.
By definition I think countercultural groups will strike you as weird and bad unless you belong to them specifically. Q-Anon, for example, which speculates that the leaders of society are <bad things>, is a countercultural group because they both hate and oppose elements of the main culture and are hated and opposed by it. The kind of antifa or anarchists who are attempting to burn down courthouses or police stations in Portland are another clear example.
I think that FSM does satisfy your stricter definition of counterculture. Like the Church of Satan, one of the stated goals is to force legal examination of whether or not "freedom of religion" actually means "freedom to practice Christianity".
LARPing and kink also have some opposition by fairly mainstream religious-types. They're seen as counterculture, even if they don't define themselves that way. Sorry. Changing my mind on kink -- that's a really big umbrella. Some people get off on being shamed for whatever it is they're into. Those folk are only satisfied when seen as counterculture.
Maybe the FSM is counter cultural but only in the way that housecats and lions are both felines. There is a very large difference between trying to hang Mike Pence or kill police and believing that established religions are illogical. Maybe it's slightly countercultural in the areas where Christianity or other religions predominate (which is not where I live).
I have family that literally think that Harry Potter turns children to Satanism, and think that the books should be banned on that basis (JKR was cancelled on the right long before she was cancelled on the left). You might consider those folks to belong to a counterculture in your context, but Evangelical Christianity is extremely popular in large swathes of the US.
And yes, both lions and housecats are felines. There's gradients and degrees. I'd call the folks you're talking about as "extremists" not a mere counterculture.
It's hard to say things like kink or spaghetti monster are counter culture when they were routinely held by people in high positions of power in the culture and used to destroy or attack the impediments to capitalism. Atheism is capitalism's best friend, because it completely defangs any spiritual argument against consumerism and productivity; kink is capitalism's best friend because it opens up many lucrative and well paying methods to commodify sex itself.
Ironically, both are disliked some because of that. The nofap rose as a real counterculture to commodified kink and porn; and the "i love fucking science" type of reddit atheist the FSM people were at heart are mocked.
Consider: your HR department is left leaning, your boss is probably left leaning, your teachers are left leaning, the government is left leaning.
How on earth could the "counter culture" be the hegemonic culture of the most powerful billionaires on earth, and the people who have the most power over the most people in their daily lives (HR departments for adults, school administrators for children)?
The people who you instinctively dislike, and who society counts as something that needs to be corrected are by definition the counter culture.
That doesn't necessarily need to be seen as a bad thing, btw. It just means that the hippies basically won and have all of the power now.
Look at California Prop 16 for a concrete example. It was universally supported by left-wing groups, endorsed by the Chamber of Commerce broadly and by many of the state's biggest companies individually, passed the legislature with 75%, but failed at the ballot box with only a touch above 40% in favor. When policies left-wing groups favor are that much more popular among business and government leaders than among the general public, I dunno what to call that other than "left leaning".
I don’t know about that specific legislation. The effect you describe makes me think that business and government are, in fact, right leaning.
When left-wing groups agree with right-leaning govt and business, perhaps the general public is a bit wary of bipartisan policies. An argument like: If it’s popular among partisans of both parties, then it must be particularly exploitative of the general public.
Prop 16 was a repeal of a previous amendment to the state constitution that effectively banned Affirmative Action in the state for public positions.
Basically, if Prop 16 passed, various public sector jobs would be able to consider race/sex/whatever when looking to hire.
That's technically a double-edged sword. As while it allows for things like Affirmative Action, it also allows for discrimination based on those attributes as well.
So I can see a perfectly reasonable reason while progressives would also be wary about passing Prop 16.
> Consider: your HR department is left leaning, your boss is probably left leaning, your teachers are left leaning, the government is left leaning.
You are doing an awful lot of generalizing from your own experiences. I have met a LOT of conservative managers and business owners, including more than a couple openly sexist and racist ones, who are doing just fine for themselves in life. The idea that conservatives are some sort of tiny suppressed minority is bonkers.
The left can lean much further. Someone advocating for socialist and welfare policies or even communism or anarchy would run afoul of HR departments and the powerful billionaires.
Corporations pay lip service to the left but they don’t really follow through. There’s no divestment from China, fossil fuels, or even Diversity and Inclusion that reaches the board level.
The bog standard opinions of CPAC, a recent President, nearly every straight-laced conservative, and the majority of Republicans aren't counterculture, they're just grievance culture. There are some grievances they like to complain about, but it is still part of mainstream, popular culture to do so, and plenty of people have ridden to fame and fortune repeating those grievances to mainstream audiences.
That's a fun and interesting way to look at it, thanks!
TBH I think you got downvoted just for mentioning it, I don't think what you said is actually that controversial unless you're making a lot of assumptions about _your_ intent in sharing this, which doesn't seem fair.
I'm not surprised by the downvotes haha. I never said I agreed with the things I mentioned - I am by no means one of those right wing people - but it's clear which way the cultural winds are blowing today.
What side of the counter culture position would you have been while MLK was pushing for reform? Would your line "its clear which way the cultural winds are blowing today" align with the prejudice side? I think so. Do you look back and see that movement as an evolution and betterment for all of mankind or do you see it as "winds were blowing the wrong way"? Change is hard and change requires you to acknowledge your line of thinking, beliefs, ethics, all of it may be out dated or no longer the form. Imagine how folks born at the turn of 1900's felt when MLK was popular.
I'm not really sure what you're trying to get at here, but I will always side with human rights. I am not American BTW so this little piece of cultural trivia is not especially relevant to me.
> Would your line "its clear which way the cultural winds are blowing today" align with the prejudice side?
When your "counter-culture" comprises the ideology of half of your country, is based on a traditional religious and cultural status quo, and is the doctrine one of your two political parties, it is not in any conceivable way counter-culture. It is simply the death-throes of the establishment desperately trying to maintain its credibility and relevance in the face of changing demographics.
No it isn't. (Sub)cultures are not the same thing as countercultures.
Right wing vs. left wing is the same as choosing between Coke and Pepsi.
There is no way to get to a modern counterculture when the focus is on Identity and Individual Consumer Choice.
In your original comment, and to a lesser extent here, you seem to be saying that counterculture necessarily has negative connotations.
I listed some counterexamples in another comment, but take "bronies" for another. Does the notion (grown men obsessing over a kids show) make people uncomfortable? Yeah, kinda... but is that because dominant culture says only girls should like ponies? Or is it because we assume men who like stuff meant for kids are pedophiles? I find both of those viewpoints to be intolerant of diverse expressions of masculinity.
Many countercultures are pretty much neutral (LARPing, for example -- which offends only the most religious and closed-minded). But, like the bronies, they make space for folks who fall outside social norms in harmless ways. They make space for diversity of thought and expression -- that is generally seen as a positive thing.
Contrast to the rally in Charlottesville, where self-described nazis showed in force. Sure, folks who desire a white ethnostate tick the "diversity of thought and expression" box at a surface level (it certainly is different), but their stated desire is to eradicate (or evict) all other such diversity. So I don't see that particular counterculture as a positive thing.
Comparing to my comment[0], I think we're seeing a divergence in the meaning of "counter-culture" as either:
a. Counter or opposing the dominant culture
b. An uncommon or rare culture
I argue in [0] that (a) is increasingly likely to be negative as society grows more just. However, as you mention, (b) can include all manner of neutral cultures, which are of course not necessarily negative.
I largely agree with you, but for another example: sportsball. I went to a school that was real big on it. We had a Rival Team, with an annual The Big Game. I had family and friends at the Rival School. I can imagine a reality wherein I give a shit about sportsball. In that reality, I might find myself rooting for the Rival Team: I'd belong to a counterculture. Maybe I'm already in the counterculture because I don't give a shit about sportsball. I don't see sports disappearing should society become more just; I don't see such a counterculture being inherently negative.
> By the way, a lot of people here seem to think that the term "counter culture" has positive connotations. It doesn't, necessarily.
I would expand on this to say:
If society and culture are unjust, then to be moral and just necessitates dipping into counterculture. Example: Participating in the underground railroad would be counter-culture in a society built on slavery.
If society and culture are truly just, then the counter-culture is perhaps necessarily unjust.
Of course, real life is never so clear-cut (we will never live in a truly just society), but I would argue that society now is substantially more just than it was for most of human history, and consequently this reflects back on the sort of counter-culture that exists.
> "I would argue that society now is substantially more just than it was for most of human history, and consequently this reflects back on the sort of counter-culture that exists."
that's a pretty broad claim, implying that the current counterculture is necessarily unjust because our current society is so relatively just. it's really difficult, likely impossible, to show how the justice delta is irrefutably positive now (not to mention the cutural-to-countercultural delta is negative). this instead likely merits an examination of perceptions and biases, especially of dichotomous reasoning, leading to that belief.
Counterculture should also be against the mainstream culture. Neither Right nor Left wing as defined by Republicans and Democrats, or the NYT and Fox News, are against mainstream culture.Nor are the increasingly smaller subcultures on the margins of either side.
The difference is that our norms promote an expansive view of human rights, both in terms of what counts as a "right" and who counts as "human". The conservative Christian norms... did not.
Freedom of speech, religion, conscious and the right to bear arms are all vigorously opposed by the modern left. I cna also think of a group of people who the right fight for who the left don't even consider people.
No, neither of those mainstream models of living are countercultural.
The LGBTQ+ was countercultural, but is no longer. It's nice that a person's individual choices, whatever they may be, are no longer controversial.
But that also means we have to look beyond individual expression to find the present day counterculture, something that a lot of people in this thread seem to miss.
I think the closest thing to counterculture today would be the world of cryptocurrency. It is the least connected thing to the rest of whole mainstream ecosystem that has serious unstoppable vitality.
Btw, reading about Boyd Rice reminded me of Russian experimental electronic band GameBoydRice who makes music using a hacked gameboy and a mixer. https://youtu.be/lxzpatLthxE
Just one of the billions of random little market segments and sub genres out there. The mainstream had much less hold on the world than it used to. The platform censorship though constrains it. Crypto doesn't have those constraints though. One is reminded of how Wikileaks, getting locked out of every bank, took cryptocurrency donations and became hugely wealthy as a result.
One aspect of present-day counterculture that differentiates it from the past is the lack of focus on individualism. Individualism as culture has been sold back to us so often its relevance is necessarily less important now.
Which may be another reason why it is difficult to find.
It's also genuinely more scary than a loner in a leather jacket, in front of his car, selling rock and roll, hamburgers and Coke.
In the past it was easier because the the counterculture was easy to find - follow the well-worn path of individualism to the last corners of censored culture. Now that those paths are almost entirely explored, finding a different, more inspired counterculture is much more difficult.
This is a minor nitpick, but I think claiming that anarcho-primitivism is less fringe than it seems because the youtube channel "Primitive Technology" is popular is seriously reaching.
I was originally going to write a more thoughtful response, but then I got to this section:
"The names of these e-deologies tend to be both fantastical and literal."
"post-civilizationist"
"voluntarist post-agrarianist"
"Fully Automated Luxury Gay Space Communism"
I've really never heard of categories like these. It makes me think the author has delved into subcultures I really have no experience in. In that sense her descriptions may or may not be valid. But, she makes no attempt to bring specificity to a lot of her claims. Who are these people in these subcultures? How many people are in them, and how many people are out of them?
In this sense, it reads a lot like a "cultural studies" piece; there is some great individual insight, but the overall essay makes claims it hasn't supported.
His definition of counterculture sorta seems limited. When punk and being a rebel is fully co opted by those in power, doesn't that kinda defeat the whole image part of being counter culture.
Like in a fashion counter culture could be the Amish if the culture is extremely anti Amish.
"We can imagine collectively held physical spaces reclaimed from empty retail or abandoned venues hosting esoteric local scenes" Where is this happening?
It's been very interesting to see counter culture swing to the (arguably far but that part is up for interpretation) right. Terrifying, but nonetheless interesting.
In a way this makes sense, the mega platforms have become a highly uniform slightly left leaning milquetoast walled city. That leaves being either a raging socialist (guilty) or a raging....bigot.
The far right isn't tolerated as they're dangerous to advertisers sensitivities. Meanwhile the far left individuals are mostly tolerated but they're also all very aware that if the far right were to disappear overnight, they'd be the next target.
I'm hesitant to even admit that far-left politics are more accepted; I've seen harsher rejection of socialist ideals than legitimate, objective fascism. But I agree with your general point - if the far right was gone overnight, the far left would be next up on the chopping block.
> highly uniform slightly left leaning milquetoast walled city.
This is absolutely true, though. It's become their immediate point of mockery for any right leaning people. They get to call us robots, NPCs, brittle snowflakes, etc... and the left doesn't have a good retort. :shrug:
It's frustrating, because I think that the left should chill out with the identity politics and at least start trying to focus on larger issues and really drive those points home - healthcare, income inequality, etc... those are issues that have overwhelming public support but are constantly able to be derailed by republican talking points because of the identity politics.
> I'm hesitant to even admit that far-left politics are more accepted
Yea, I should have been more specific, it depends heavily on the circles you run in.
> It's frustrating, because I think that the left should chill out with the identity politics
It seems to me like this is not uncommon. There's a lot of oneupmanship in politics where whoever is the most rigid and unyielding to complexity in their belief system is the most worshiped because people can't distinguish a rigid ideology from an internally consistent one. On the left this results in constant twitter mobs and on the right it results in capitol mobs.
That said, while it makes an easy target for the right to rally around, if that were to go away, the reality distortion field would just target the next-lowest hanging fruit.
> the reality distortion field would just target the next-lowest hanging fruit.
social media in a nutshell, unfortunately.
> people can't distinguish a rigid ideology from an internally consistent one.
I think this is one of the things people like about Bernie, tbh. I think his consistent and reliable world view (and voting record to match) is why he's been so successful. It's just sad that he's not the standard.
It feels like even when we "win" (air quotes are doing a lot of work ehre) e.g. Joe Biden or something, the goal posts get pushed and somehow all of a sudden it was catching an L when Biden won?
The recurring theme in American politics, to me, is that the right falls in line and votes, the left eats their own. I keep seeing it right now and I'm worried we won't hold it together in 2022 or 2024.
A lot of qanon came from flat earth and now have moved on to vaccines and other conspiracies. I wonder what they'll be doing next year but I am sure they will find something. There is a significant part of the population who are deeply uncomfortable with the state of the world and look for an explanation that comforts them. This used to be mainly religion but it's spreading out into things like qanon. Extreme partisanship probably has the same origin because it explains that the world is bad because of "others".
There is a significant part of the population who are deeply uncomfortable with the state of the world and look for an explanation that comforts them.
Yes. A real problem is that the US has no consensus on how society should work. It did, in, say, the 1950s. People were expected to get jobs, and work, and the spectrum of available jobs was matched, roughly, to the range of human capabilities. That was a generally stable situation. That's the US from 1945 to 1975 or so.
That's changed, leaving behind a huge number of unemployed and under-employed people. More education doesn't help; about half of US college graduates are doing jobs that don't need a college education.
Nobody really has a good answer to this. Which is why conservative populism looks to the past.
Your first observation regarding clicks was right on but QAnon is just another consumer choice for people to add to their Identity.
As a general rule, if there is advertisement and sales around a space, it isn't countercultural.
From what I see on TikTok, GenZ are coming out as low-key marxists in droves. As a millennial I grew up through a process that started with believing in free-market ideals and slowly seeing them shattered with each passing atrocity of monopolists. I'd mark Enron/Worldcom times as a coming-of-age for my economic cynicism, and its been exponentiating ever since, especially through my journey as an entrepreneur and employer. These kids have had cynical humor and class struggle as mother's milk, and have little interest in repeating history. That isn't to say that conservativism doesn't have a place among today's youth, but its largely promoted with billions of dollars being poured into targeted influence campaigns. Bullshit has a tiny half-life these days as fact-checking anything is a matter of moving one's thumbs in a small incantation.
https://www.hup.harvard.edu/catalog.php?isbn=9780674987692
Social media is no longer authentic so you’re seeing a slowly growing backlash against it.
https://seoulphilosophy.wordpress.com/2015/06/19/charles-tay...