watching eureka seven has me thinking like. what's our "counter culture" right now? is there multiple? does it have a purpose? how does the acceleration of culture affect this? a lot of what comes to mind as the counter-culture is stuff we consider to be jokes; whereas stuff in the past that i see as the counter-culture of the time usually takes itself more seriously.
So I posit: What's today's counter-culture and what purpose does it serve?
a part of why i'm having trouble thinking of something specific is because cultural acceleration means what's Cool gets appropriated and commercialized much more rapidly than in the past. The pop music on the radio has clear influence from queer synthwave and vaporwave. Starbucks did a vaporwave ad. Official brand accounts shitpost about depression.
Another element is the "end of history effect." So much of our culture now is rooted in looking back at older eras and attempting to reclaim them
A lot of activism attempts to call back to activism of the 20s or 60s and utilize those aesthetics to call people to action. To create a "narrative moment" resembling the ones that have crystallized in history; in many ways I also see this in perhaps candidates for our current counterculture. A lot of DIY Punk scene stuff is all about harkening back to 70s zines and indeed a lot of the time we do more archiving of the Original zine culture and looking at the Original gay liberation movement etc.
Vaporwave has been described as "nostalgia for a time before you were born" and a lot of current counterculture seems to be looking at radical stuff from the 60s and 70s, the "original" stuff, and trying to recreate that feeling. People on Mastodon even often say it feels like logging into some secret Old Internet zone of hackers and radicals and we dress our instances up in faux-retro cybregarb to further perpetuate that feeling.
Is there something unique to the present and the present only?
I'm totally derailed now but I'm thinking about how so much of current technology is styled to evoke the feeling that we are "in the future" and achieving technology we saw in old sci-fi movies. Forward progress into the future is based on evoking a nostalgia for the vision of the future others had in the past before most of us were born.
Critically acclaimed movies and media intentionally evoke nostalgia for 90s anime and 00s video games.
Indeed our archives of the past are ultimately incomplete windows
Perhaps another way to think of this is like
What's the "bad crowd" a teen's conservative parents don't want them spending time with? What's the music genre that makes old people clutch their chest? What's the predominant counterculture? And is it the same as the culture trying to be counterculture?
a part of this also to me connects to how the internet has come to replace grungey dive bars and gay bars and the like as the center of community. the counterculture might be depressed ppl hanging out online
@shel it's rap tho.
@FStewartT you gotta be more specific than "rap" cuz like EVERY pop song has a rap verse now
@shel migos.
@FStewartT a lot of cultural styles etc. that come from black communities are counter cultures perhaps i just feel unqualified to make that assessment
@shel yes, for sure! I think that's part of the issue of doing cultural scholarship and/as speculation: one tends to be blinded by one's own embedded experience.
@shel or, even if not blinded, to frame 'culture' around that space one inhabits, which is inevitable but not adequate to 'culture'
@FStewartT history homogenizes what a time's zeitgeist looked like. in the present-day now more than ever there is a vast plurality of cultures and nobody can just Look and be like "which One of these is the zeitgeist"
@shel I don't think that's strictly fair to history.
@shel a lot of the academic practice of history is dehomologizing
@FStewartT hmmm I think I was using history as like popular conceptions of history rather than academic field of history
@shel okay but like....... just because lots of people are wrong doesn't make that a robust way to engage with the problems of the (counter)cultural
@shel idk as a pseduo-professional cultural studies person, i think it's worth sort of contextualizing the position from which u measure the zeitgeist and its discontents- and even how the countercultural informs, inflects, or defines the zeitgeist.
@shel like our understanding of the geist of the 60s is countercultural
@shel you might be more interested in subcultures per se than countercultures
@FStewartT no i'm specifically thinking of like, "counterculture" as a term I suppose
@shel then, uh, might wanna do some background reading.
@shel that was meaner than i meant to be,sorry- this kind of speculation about 'the internet changes culture' is specifically frustrating to me as someone trying to study 'internet cultures' thru comix and self-publishing, which makes me maybe more invested in 'scholarly' apparatuses of knowledge production- but, also, i think it's worth noting that cultural studies already has like resources for a lot of these questions which are worth looking at
@FStewartT Right. yeah I think i'm more trying to drum up casual community speculation and self-reflection rather than proper academic analysis but that does conflict with like... "but there actually is research on this that's valuable" which i could be researching instead.
@shel i think trying to get your community to identify itself as a counterculture or in relationship to other countercultures is potentially valuable, but still benefits from academic contexts or languages, even if in 'translation'
@shel anyway my /actual/ claim is that even while black cultural products are appropriated and sanitized, black cultural production is still 'frightening' to the character you posited there, or at least necessitates rejection- consider the whole taylor swift as white supremacist icon shit.
further, there's never been a 'the' counter culture, and, further further, punx not dead