The web didn’t kill counterculture—you simply received’t discover it on Instagram
“To be actually countercultural in a time of tech hegemony, one has to, above all, betray the platform which can come within the type of betraying or divesting out of your public on-line self.”
Search Google Photos for ‘counterculture’ and it overwhelmingly returns black-and-white pictures of younger folks all now over 60. Within the footage, it’s so clear what they had been countering: The Man, in fact, who, together with his white collar, white pores and skin, and quick hair, singlehandedly symbolized dominant cultural norms. Within the age of social media, private expression has turn into essentially the most precious type of foreign money, but we nonetheless use the time period ‘counterculture’ to explain options to the hegemonic forces of yesteryear, as if dressing middle-class, white, and preppy nonetheless aligned with the foundations of energy at present.
In an period extra profoundly organized by Massive Tech than our personal elected governments, the brand new tradition to be countered isn’t singular or top-down. It’s rhizomatic, nonbinary, and contains all who dwell inside the Google/Apple/Fb/Amazon digital ecosystem (aka GAFA stack). With digital platforms reworking legacy countercultural exercise into worthwhile, high-engagement content material, being countercultural not means being counter-hegemonic. What logic might presumably be upended by punks, goths, gabbers, or neo-pagans when the web, a massively profitable area of capitalization, earnings off the non-public expression and political battle of its customers?
As just lately because the early ’90s, abjection and excessive profanity nonetheless labored fairly effectively to repel the large social threats of the time: pearl-clutching conservatives with their anti-progressive ideology and market recuperation. Take, as an illustration, musician GG Allin in an American-flag loincloth, preventing together with his viewers and shitting on stage earlier than launching right into a efficiency of “I’m Gonna Rape You,” or artist and noise musician Boyd Rice, in what he reviews was a prank, becoming a member of the founding father of the white supremacist group American Entrance in a 1989 Sassy picture shoot for an article the teenager journal was working on neo-Nazis. In context, these artists (just like the psychedelic hippies of yore) had been being actually countercultural—utilizing tradition in opposition to itself to violate the hegemonic push towards, in Allin’s and Rice’s case, neoliberal “responsibilization.”
In at present’s on-line area, nevertheless, this technique breaks down. Introduced again into the highlight in 2018 by way of a NYC gallery exhibition of visually innocuous summary work, Rice rapidly discovered himself on the heart of controversy as his decades-old Sassy look (amongst different such stunts) tripped present-day censors. An outdated punk, he smirked on the outrage. “I’m too harmful for New York Metropolis,” he instructed Artnet. But he wasn’t too harmful for the web. Excessive-tension dialogue of his work and life and the gallerist’s ethical compass raged on-line, which is to say Rice was attentionally profitable on-line. Regardless of being knowledgeable by billions, this new technological hegemony isn’t democratic; it’s a swarm-led type of para-governance programmed to maximise engagement whereas obfuscating accountability for the social and environmental harm it wreaks. Zuckerberg, Bezos, Thiel, and different tech behemoths are fast to remind us that they’re not in command of public legal guidelines or coverage; their empires had been constructed in accordance with the “peaceable mechanisms” of free-market capitalism—and that society has adopted their instruments and areas by means of its personal free will. If pressed, they’ll level out how their platforms replicate the countercultural calls for of earlier generations: eschewing massive authorities and vertical company tradition whereas encouraging private success and flat organizational buildings. Immediately you is usually a coder and a DJ, an Uber driver and a journey blogger, a Sand Hill Highway swimsuit and a Robotic Coronary heart Burner.
What logic might presumably be upended by punks, goths, gabbers, or neo-pagans when the web, a massively profitable area of capitalization, earnings off the non-public expression and political battle of its customers?
Equally slippery is the brand new look of energy. Removed from the parades, palaces, and outsize girths of present-day strongmen like Viktor Orbán, Kim Jong-un, and Donald Trump, essentially the most iconic tells you’ll discover among the many massive tech set usually tend to be a black turtleneck, a Patagonia fleece, and the absence of carrying baggage. It’s a flex to be visually indistinguishable from the group. The ability of at present is firmly located in minimalism, restraint, and ease—it’s solely energy beneath menace that turns to bodily shows of energy. Precise energy is controlling the means by which lesser energy may be displayed—i.e., congrats on the 500K likes in your polling numbers, @jack nonetheless owns all of your tweets. Precise energy retains a low profile; precise energy doesn’t want a social media presence, it owns social media.
In recent times, customers have began to register this shift. But the time period counterculture nonetheless will get used to explain somebody like rapper Tekashi 6ix9ine, whose notoriety—first breaking society’s code (sexual abuse and homicide conspiracy, amongst different offenses) after which the omertà code of the streets (snitching on fellow gang members to minimize his personal sentence)—propelled him to superstardom: “Gooba,” a observe he surprise-dropped upon being surprise-released from jail, made YouTube historical past by changing into the most-watched rap video in a 24-hour span, frying the platform’s view counter. That very same day, 2 million simultaneous customers tuned in to his Instagram Dwell as he confessed into his telephone digital camera: “I snitched, I ratted. However who was I speculated to be loyal to?” After which with a sparkle of VVS diamonds, “I broke the YouTube. I’m at 5 million views in a single hour. […] A rat is doin’ extra numbers than you. Numbers don’t lie.” However behind 6ix9ine’s self-loyalty is an unwitting loyalty to the platform and, by extension, to the shareholders of Alphabet and Fb, Inc. And that is the place it will get tough. To be actually countercultural at present, in a time of tech hegemony, one has to, above all, betray the platform, which can come within the type of betraying or divesting out of your public on-line self.
To be actually countercultural at present, in a time of tech hegemony, one has to, above all, betray the platform, which can come within the type of betraying or divesting out of your public on-line self.
6ix9ine is subcultural, however he isn’t countercultural. Somebody like Edward Snowden, by comparability, isn’t subcultural however stands out as the closest we get to a countercultural determine within the postdigital age. A US authorities subcontractor with entry to categorised intelligence, Snowden noticed Massive Tech’s radically scaling energy and, in 2013, uncovered the NSA’s unlawful agreements with main tech platforms to intercept the personal e-mail, name information, and cache of “virtually something achieved on the web” by customers worldwide. Snowden’s whistleblowing focused a significant chakra of the brand new hegemony, leading to nice private compromise. However a single particular person isn’t a complete counterculture.
Counterculture requires a bunch. Us in opposition to the world. And the web is superb at bringing teams collectively round collective dissent. However similar to the web, there may be nothing inherently socially progressive about these instruments. Extinction Rebel is countercultural in spirit however so too are QAnon, the armed right-wing libertarian Boogaloo Boys, and Europe’s Reichsbürger, who deny the existence of present-day Germany, claiming to be residents of the Third Reich (which, they argue, technically by no means ended).
A fact particular to our time is that dissent in opposition to one degree of authority is now fairly often pushed by a deeper hegemonic pressure. Maybe that is why, amongst many youthful folks (Greta Thunberg however), there may be much less give attention to battling present leaders and extra curiosity in divining counter-futures. As a substitute of trying to dismantle the grasp’s home utilizing the grasp’s instruments, it’s extra one thing like: Let’s pool crypto to ebook the grasp’s Airbnb and use the instruments we discover there to forge a forest utopia that the grasp might by no means survive. Central to this counter-future crafting is a robust perception in impending ecological collapse, rendering all the prevailing methods of management out of date—which is a logical work-around for occupied with dissent in a time when the socially and ecologically corrosive methods are deemed too sprawling to successfully counter or boycott. One other key issue is Gen Z’s rediscovery of PoliticalCompass.org, a Internet 1.0 website that, by way of six units of prompts with which a consumer is requested to dis/-identify, generates an approximate place on the Political Compass’s X/Y axis of Left to Proper, Authoritarian to Libertarian.
Having spent the previous a number of years intensively learning the event of Gen Z’s on-line political expression, artist Joshua Citarella factors to the emergence of “e-deologies, radical politics as a type of area of interest private branding.” In his 2019 report 20 Interviews, Citarella underscores the affect of Political Compass and gaming extra usually on ideations of countercultural participation—or what he refers to as a “select your character / select your future” mode of “identification play that gained heightened relevance as American politics subsumed all of popular culture” throughout the mid-2010s.
Among the many political identities one finds on this area is, for instance: “Ted was proper” anarcho-primitivism (anprim), which, following Ted Kaczynski’s Industrial Society and Its Future manifesto, promotes a reactionary return to pre-agrarian occasions the place folks, reskilled as hunters and gatherers, are not alienated from their labor and search success by means of day by day survival. If you happen to assume this sounds fringe, take into account the ten.3 million customers at the moment subscribed to the Primitive Technology channel on YouTube, which has tutorialized constructing issues “within the wild fully from scratch utilizing no trendy instruments or supplies, […] seeing how far you may go with out using trendy expertise”—besides, in fact, the gadget you utilize to stream the video displaying you the way.
The names of those e-deologies are usually each fantastical and literal. A “post-civilizationist” may give attention to what optimum human survival would seem like had been civilization not attainable. A “voluntarist post-agrarianist,” in the meantime, may worth anarcho-primitivism abilities however see them as integral to realizing a civilization sustained by means of opt-in agrarian communes. Elsewhere on the compass, one finds the likes of “Absolutely Automated Luxurious Homosexual Area Communism” (the place a complete embrace of expertise delivers humanity from shortage, ecological volatility, and the reactionary social ills of useful resource competitors) and the defiantly neo-traditionalist “technocratic theocracy,” which places its religion in a machine-governed future that upholds Christian virtues. E-deologies are additional explored on message boards and social media by way of memes, TikTok posts, and livestreamed Twitch and YouTube debates, all of which may get fairly gnarly (requires “eco-fash international genocide” and “secession of white ethnostates,” and many others.) And possibly right here, we do have an aesthetic counter to the wallflower non-style of Massive Tech: a raging messy semiotic meltdown of radicalizing (if absurdist) meme tradition the place the one ideological no-go zone is the liberal heart. Key right here is that the majority of this exercise is going on beneath the guise of avatars, pseudonyms, and collectively run social media accounts the place direct strains between IRL topics and on-line personas are not often clear. The “area of interest private branding” is gamified—push an account to the intense, see what occurs. If the platform shuts you down, begin over.
Whereas local weather change is a shared concern for a lot of youthful folks, their responses could be extra precisely understood as competitive-futurist than countercultural. Because the significantly imaginative vary of Political Compass positions illustrates, there may be little consensus over who or what they’re particularly opposing. That is smart in an period when the complexity of world crises makes it exceedingly tough to successfully isolate accountable events. How would one even start to carry, say, Apple accountable for the entire externalities inside the lifetime of an iPhone? Who amongst us might simply quit our connectivity and nonetheless be economically and socially okay? It’s as if, having grown up on a completely networked Earth, Gen Z has bypassed counterculture, discovering it futile within the face of a hegemonic system that extra clearly resembles a Hydra than the monolithic forces that legacy counterculture was rebelling in opposition to. Intuiting that any exercise immediately opposing the system will solely make the system stronger, the following technology is as an alternative choosing radical hyperstition: establishing different futures that abandon our present infrastructure completely (the emergence of blockchain-based currencies, as an illustration, or calls to not merely reform however absolutely abolish the police).
Whereas Citarella’s analysis focuses on youngsters who started posting on-line round 2016 (and in 2020 are roughly 18 years outdated), it however distills the altering nature of latest countercultural exercise extra broadly. For one, anonymity, or a minimum of pseudonymity, is more and more essential if not elementary to being energetic on-line in counter-hegemonic methods. That is very completely different from, say, Nineties ideations of IRL counterculture, the place there was a premium on unmediated authenticity and “being actual” (assume MTV Unplugged). Now “promoting out” is tying your on-line identification to your IRL life and actual title. Partially, it is because one of many largest impediments to countercultural exercise is the truth that the web doesn’t suppress expression—it forces you to specific after which holds you accountable for no matter you say for years. On the platform, silence isn’t an choice, a minimum of not in order for you the community to recollect you exist. That is very true within the tradition sector, the place being seen means being stored in thoughts for gigs and collaborations. There’s a purpose why 6ix9ine is obsessive about breaking YouTube and why proficient younger rappers have to be equally proficient at social media advertising and marketing in the event that they ever hope to construct a profession.
It’s as if, having grown up on a completely networked Earth, Gen Z has bypassed counterculture, discovering it futile within the face of a hegemonic system that extra clearly resembles a Hydra than the monolithic forces that legacy counterculture was rebelling in opposition to.
We noticed this dynamic metastasize within the wake of George Floyd’s homicide, when well-intentioned claims of “silence is violence” (recalling the highly effective 1987 ACT-UP “Silence = Dying” marketing campaign) spiraled into calling out people with even a small following who hadn’t come ahead with a well timed public assertion of solidarity or regret. But public posts had been topic to widespread scrutiny and judged primarily based on sincerity, originality, and tone. Not surprisingly, many individuals defaulted to posting a somber plain black sq.. However this generated criticism of its personal by clogging the feed with an informational blackout throughout a second when neighborhood useful resource sharing was critically essential. Amid a chaotic time, the platform functioned precisely as designed: amplification of feelings, uptick in consumer interplay, development in platform engagement and information cultivation. Cha-ching, the platform cashes in. What’s actually tousled about that is that customers, regardless of understanding that the platform’s mechanics are net-bad, nonetheless really feel an ethical accountability to obey the platform-enabled-hive-mind’s guidelines.
On the darkish edges of the early web, hackers foresaw the enclosure of the general public commons lengthy earlier than the likes of 6ix9ine, Snowden, and teenage Gen Z. These customers developed an ethos that valued the unconventional freedom of a completely nameless, hyperconnected zone the place folks might talk unburdened by their bodily our bodies and authorities names. As on-line exercise started to centralize round search engines like google, corresponding to Netscape, Explorer, and Google, within the late-’90s and early-’00s, the web bifurcated into what grew to become generally known as the “clearnet,” which incorporates all publicly listed websites (i.e., massive social media, industrial platforms, and something crawled by main search engines like google) and the “darknet” or “deep internet,” which isn’t publicly listed (on account of being constructed on anonymized, encrypted networks corresponding to Tor). There have been additionally a variety of websites that although formally clearnet, laid the groundwork for a sub-clearnet area that we’d consider as a “darkish forest” zone—significantly message board boards like Reddit and 4chan, the place customers can work together with out revealing their IRL identification or have this exercise affect their real-name website positioning.
Taken from the title of Chinese language sci-fi author Liu Cixin’s 2008 ebook, “the darkish forest” area of the net is changing into more and more essential as an area of on-line communication for customers of all ages and political persuasions. Partially, it is because it’s much less sociologically demanding than the clearnet zone, the place one is topic to look, employer, and state publicity. It additionally now contains Discord servers, paid newsletters (e.g., Substack), encrypted group messaging (by way of Telegram, and many others.), gaming communities, podcasts, and different off-clearnet message board boards and social media. One forages for content material or shares in what others locally have retrieved moderately than accepting regardless of the platform algorithms occur to match to your information profile. Moreover, darkish forest areas are each minimally and straightforwardly industrial. There may be sometimes a small cost for entry, however as soon as you’re in, you’re free to behave and converse with out the platform nudging your conduct or extracting additional worth. It is usually fascinating to take into account that the darkish forest shares the identical cables and satellite tv for pc arrays as clearnet channels, is accessed by way of the identical gadgets, and basically all of its denizens proceed to concurrently take part in clearnet areas (as modern skilled protocol calls for). It’s subsequently not analogous to legacy countercultural notions of going off-grid or “dropping out.”
To make sure, none of those areas are pure, and customers are simply as susceptible to echo chambers and radicalization at the hours of darkness forest as on pop-stack social media. However when it comes to engendering kind of counter-hegemonic potential, the darkish forest is extra promising due to its relative autonomy from clearnet physics (the gravity, velocity, and traction of content material when topic to x algorithm). Not like influencers and “blue checks,” who depend on clearnet recognition for earnings, standing, and even self-worth, darkish forest dwellers construct their main communities out of clearnet vary—or offline in precise forests, parks, and gardens (e.g., cottagecore and associated eco-social traits)—after which solely very selectively and even absurdly/incoherently present themselves beneath clearnet gentle. The crux of Liu Cixin’s ebook is the creed, when referred to as by the clearnet: “Don’t reply! Don’t reply!! Don’t reply!!! However for those who do reply, the supply will likely be positioned straight away. Your planet will likely be invaded. Your world will likely be conquered.”
So what does at present’s counter-hegemonic tradition seem like? It’s not significantly considering being seen—a minimum of not in particular person. It will get no thrill out of sporting leather-based and a mohawk and strolling previous main-street retailers, that are empty now anyway. Nevertheless it does exhibit a starvation for freedom—freedom from the eye financial system, from atomization, and the extractive logic of mainstream communication. We are able to think about collectively held bodily areas reclaimed from empty retail or deserted venues internet hosting esoteric native scenes, a proliferation of digital gangs in darkish forests who maintain secrets and techniques expensive, and a brand new need for shortage in cultural objects—deeper and nearer connections made between folks even whereas rejecting the platform’s compulsion to “like and share.” Within the web period, true counterculture is tough to see, and even tougher to search out—however that doesn’t imply it’s not there.