ysabetwordsmith | The Loss of Counterculture

Here's a post about the loss of counterculture.

I find this to be prevailingly true. I have no idea where all the freaks have gone, but I really miss them. Used to be, I could go into fannish or Pagan places and find people I resonated with. But now, it's just mundanes with elf ears or pentacles. The trappings are different, but the culture is the same -- the behaviors, the expectations, the backbiting, the shit I hate most about the mainstream has take over places that used to be very different. So there's no longer a reason for me to seek out those places; they don't give me anything I couldn't get everywhere else. That's sad and frustrating.

>> There is this despair... It seems that revolutions "don't work anymore." <<

Oh, they work all right. We just haven't had a real one in a while. You need serious pressure, you need people desperate enough -- who have nothing to lose -- that they're willing to break everything in reach to make room for building something that might suck less. The potential is absolutely there. I've seen some very real, concerning precursors to riot and ruin. Frex, a couple of very near misses where a person in power screwed over a bunch of poor people and just barely escaped. One day the fat bastard won't be fast enough, and they will tear him limb from limb.

>> Counterculture is weak and ineffective, maybe almost nonexistent. Anything radical or revolutionary will only be folded into the dominant culture, repackaged, and sold for consumption. <<

Prevailingly true. But since no previous society has managed to stomp out all the freaks, I doubt this one has managed either. They've just ... stopped congregating in the same places. Maybe even stopped congregating; after all "turn on, tune in, drop out" is a valid protest strategy. But it does mean that there isn't much of a counter culture left.

>> It's like... in the capitalocene age, they'll find a way to make a profit off anything.<<

Everything except for the record that breaks the record player. They cannot coopt and profit from things which are destructive to capitalism itself. And around the fringes of that are dangerous ideas that merely threaten capitalism and the mainstream by inclining people to make different choices.

>>Is counterculture really so feeble and infiltrated that it's ineffective, basically gone? Or is it just hidden from us thanks to the algorithm and dark patterns? Really makes me want to revisit the idea of going dumbphone again.<<

*smirk* Let's not forget the rising popularity of ribbon typewriters. You can re-ink and even repair them yourself. They can't be hacked. Everything you produce with them is Secure On Paper Only.

Current Mood: busy

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From:

acelightning73

For a while their, all the freaks were goths. If the Victorian romanticism of the macabre doesn't bong your gong, you can ignore it without blowing your cover. It's just a morbid kind of steampunk.

I don't understand the obsession with celebrities. Taylor Swift is probably a nice enough young woman, but I find nothing interesting in her music. The Kardashians are just famous for being famous - they don't act, sing, dance, write, or do anything but flaunt their wealth.

The freaks are congregating on TikTok and YouTube. Or maybe among the people who play MMORPGs. Or here on DreamWidth (after LJ stopped being weirdo-friendly).

I just wander around being freaky because I can't help it, and hope to meet other weirdos.

From:

ysabetwordsmith

>> For a while their, all the freaks were goths. If the Victorian romanticism of the macabre doesn't bong your gong, you can ignore it without blowing your cover. It's just a morbid kind of steampunk. <<

I don't mind it, but well, I'd probably scare them. The scenery would make me forget that most people are far less fluent with death than I am.

>>I don't understand the obsession with celebrities.<<

It seems to be a form of escapism favored by people whose own life is boring and unfulfilling, so they fantasize about other people's lives. Mine is more interesting, so I'm bored by celebrities.

>>The freaks are congregating on TikTok and YouTube. Or maybe among the people who play MMORPGs. <<

Ah, that would explain it; those aren't places I frequent or would be interested in. The most that catches my interest on YouTube is craft videos; I don't think of it as a social space, but as a reference library.

>> Or here on DreamWidth (after LJ stopped being weirdo-friendly).<<

I have had some good luck on DW.

>> I just wander around being freaky because I can't help it, and hope to meet other weirdos.<<

I used to do more of that. Now I don't go out much, because there is so little left that is worth going to do. Our last attempt at catching a street fair? They had canceled the Friday part and everyone in town was viciously unhappy about it.

There are still parts of my nature that I can't hide easily, especially in talking to people, but I no longer tend to advertise with the intent of attracting attention, and I'm less often inclined to stop and chat. Most of the people are just in a different world. Once in a while, someone will catch my interest and we'll talk and there's no distance just like it used to be -- but that's gotten rare enough that it's startling now.

From:

acelightning73

My hair is dyed "extreme purple" and my clothing is almost all some shade of purple, and I wear metallic fabrics, tie-dye, and unfashionable shoes that I can actually walk in. I have a tendency to wear inappropriately sparkly socks.

From:

ysabetwordsmith

I have a lot of tie-dye, including socks.

I've become extremely fond of "walking shoes," which are very lightweight tennis shoes. My old pair died earlier this summer and I got new ones -- these are waterproof, which I greatly appreciate, because the old ones were mostly mesh that let in all the rain. I care fuckall how shoes look as long as they aren't pink. They have to be comfortable and safe to walk in.

From:

see_also_friend

Ah, but will you have interesting conversations with me about "...life, the universe and everything"?

;)

From:

ysabetwordsmith

We are literally discussing the best techniques for panspermia on another thread. :D

From:

see_also_friend

And a fun discussion it is!

^.^

From:

acelightning73

Why not? That's the main reason I'm on DW. Wandering conversations about atstronomy, science fiction, cooking, and sex and drugs and rock and roll.

From:

see_also_friend

Well, if you're looking for TV recommendations, Netflix has a good series called Explained! where they basically have twenty-minute documentaries about stuff.. They even have one on marijuana...though I'd recommend the pirates one, too.

Also relevant to assorted interesting topics, did you hear that Futurama has a new series out on Hulu?
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=aWmtcYvhj68

From:

acelightning73

I don't have Hulu or Netflix. All I have is basic cable tv, the minimum I had to sign up for to get internet access. I get the Weather Channel, the NYC broadcast channels, a few odd channels that play TV reruns from the Iron Age, and one I just found that shows one episode each or ST:TNG, ST:Nextgen, ST:DS9, ST Voyager, and Enterprise, every night between 8 PM and midnight. It also does a lot of reruns the rest of the time - "Gunsmoke","Hawaii 5-0", "The Rifleman", that sort of stuff. But I only watch them if there's nothing I want to see on any othr channel. (I do watch the Star Trek block.)

From:

see_also_friend

I like the optimism of Gunsmoke and The Rifleman, even though I find it rather unrealistic. A Wester written by a woman or POC would have a very different spin on the whole frontier justice bit.

If you like Westerns, have you ever seen Kung Fu? (Warning for period-typical racist obnoxiousness.)
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Aq-Hq62B8os

From:

ysabetwordsmith

I've seen part of Kung Fu and liked the contrast.

The Magnificent Seven is another Western with more diversity than the older stuff had. Looking back at it, you can see a lot of missed opportunities, but also the early signs of growth beyond what came before.

From:

see_also_friend

They have Kung Fu on those all-episodes-in-a-season DVD sets, if you are interested. You might have to order them online if you don't have a nearby shop that does special orders.

I haven't seen The Magnificent Seven; might be worth checking out.

By the way, Disenchantment has season 5 out now.

From:

acelightning73

Kung Fu, with the inimitable David Carradine, was one of my favorite old TV shows. And once I started learning t'ai ch'i I understood why.

From:

see_also_friend

Avatar: The Last Airbender is pretty good with martial arts stuff too (though it's popular enough, I suspect you've already heard of it.)

From:

acelightning73

I've heard of it, but I never bothered to see it. (I haven't seen Avatar, either. Or Barbie.

From:

see_also_friend

I haven't seen Barbie either, but some of the gender discussions it has sparked seem to indicate that it might be a worthwhile thing to watch.

Avatar [with the blue aliens] is basically Disney's Pocahantas movie with blue-cat aliens and a massive areal battle. Plus it's also a rehash of the White Savior leading everyone to solve the problems he and his people caused.

The soundtrack is pretty awesome (as is the animation tech), and the concept of a planet-wide neural network made up of all the life is cool, but the plot...eh, been done before. (I saw the 1st movie, but haven't seen the second. Second film...some of the clips look cool, but not enough to tempt me to the theatre yet.)

From:

acelightning73

I never saw Pocahontas either. The last movie I saw in a theater was Wakanda Forever, and before that "The Woman King". The WOman King showed an aspect of history I wasn't taught as a white kid in the suburbs. When they taught us about slavery, they said that Arab traders would kidnap black people and sell them as slaves to white people. I wondered whether the black Africans were just standing around in the jungle waiting for someone to kidnap them. But they had complex trade agreements between kingdoms, and they had the technology to copy the firearms the white folks sold them. So it wasn't just a bunch of savages carrying spears and wearing skirts of leaves, waiting for a white person to take them away to do agricultural jobs in a faraway land. This was not taught in middle school.

And everything they taught us about the Pilgrims and the other colonists who established settlements in the Americas. The Pilgrims were religious fanatics who practiced a religion which commmanded them to forcibly convert everyone else on Earth. They got thrown out of England for being too Puritanical; they went to the Netherlands, where they were thrown out for the same reason. They came to the Massachusetts Bay Colony determined to build homes, farms, churches, schools, and a town. They originally hoped to convert all the "savage natives" in the New World to their form of Christianity. And all the differing sects who founded colonies were just as unholy as the savages. Anglicans, Catholics, Pagans, Quakers, - nobody's Christianity was as Christian as that of the Puritans. (And when the Pilgrims first set foot on land in New England, they looked for a place where the Native Americans had camped, because they knew there would be food stored there, and the Puritans stole the food because they had underestimated how long the sea voyage would take, and they were running out of food.

Edited Date: 2023-09-09 10:27 pm (UTC)

From:

see_also_friend

Pocahantas = love story across battlelines where the conqueror is 'civilized' by the noble savage and eventually takes the 'native's' way of life. (The Hork-Bajir chronicles from Animorphs basically does the same, only it genderflips the characters and adds a second army of conquerors to fight.)

>>So it wasn't just a bunch of savages carrying spears and wearing skirts of leaves, waiting for a white person to take them away to do agricultural jobs in a faraway land. <<

I have a whole monologue on "the history of slavery in the Americas," though it focuses more on the origins in the European and Western Civilization traditions that led to the rise of chattel slavery...I should write it down somewhere. (Also, while I am aware that many African people were participating in the slave trade in the age-old "wage war on your neighbors and enslave the survivors" way, I am not familiar enough with the histories and cultures to feel like an authority on them.)

>>The Pilgrims were religious fanatics who practiced a religion which commmanded them to forcibly convert everyone else on Earth. <<

They also rented to Shakespeare and refused to renew his lease because theatre was sinful, and during the brief time they were in charge of the English government they cancelled Christmas for being 'too pagan.' There's a reason I've described them as "thinking everything fun is sinful."

>>And all the differing sects who founded colonies were just as unholy as the savages.<<

That's actually why we have religious freedom - not because someone had this great idea of freedom, but because none of the oddball & extremist sects had enough power to force everyone else to convert. So everybody just ended up in the awkward standoff that we call religious freedom...

>>And when the Pilgrims first set foot on land in New England, they looked for a place where the Native Americans had camped, because they knew there would be food stored there, and the Puritans stole the food because they had underestimated how long the sea voyage would take, and they were running out of food.<<

Hunh. One of the stories I'd heard was that they found a village that had died out because of plague (brought by earlier settlers) and dug up some of the graves. Maybe that was a different group?

(To be fair, I can't really blame someone for stealing food when starving...but they don't have to be jerks about it too.)

From:

acelightning73

I happen to be a Mayflower descendant, and my grandmother and all my aunts were members of the Daughters of the American Revolution. I know that the grade-school Thanksgiving story is an outright fabrication, and nobody but the Quakers were in North America trying to build a nation based on mutual respect, tolerance, and cooperation. They Pilgrims and the Wampaoag did have a feast together, and the natives did teach the colonists what was good to eat and how to hunt it and prepare it. Thanks for turkey, you guys! It's my favorite meat. And popcorn, which I also enjoy.

I am not proud of my ancestors for trying to convert every living human being to their religious teachings. However, this patchwork of conflicting weirdo cults and Native customs grew up to be the United States of Fucking America. The richest and most powerful nation since the fall of the British Empire, and people are walking from the Panama Canal Zone to the Texas border to get put on a bus to NYC, where they might be given some bureacratic advice and a place in a homeless shelter.

From:

see_also_friend

I think I can trace my ancestry back to Salem on one side, and the royal land grants of the 1600s on the other.

>>...nobody but the Quakers were in North America trying to build a nation based on mutual respect, tolerance, and cooperation.<<

I think Rhode Island also tried for an accepting sort of society (though their idea of accepting vs ours might have been rather divergent.)

Also, don't fawn over Quakers too much - we participated in chattel slavery up until the 1700s, I think we were involved in reservation schools in the 1800s, and we spent a decent amount of our history ostracizing people for being fancy [wearing dyed clothing, singing, dancing at weddings...]

I think we are fairly decent people overall, but we have done horrible things and even today we are still not perfect.

>>The richest and most powerful nation since the fall of the British Empire, and people are walking from the Panama Canal Zone to the Texas border to get put on a bus to NYC, where they might be given some bureacratic advice and a place in a homeless shelter.<<

Real conversation, paraphrased:
"Well, if they [refugees] don't like it, why don't they go back where they came from?"
[drily] "Because somebody bombed their house."

Personally, I figure that just because we are better than somewhere else, that doesn't mean that we are automatically good.

From:

acelightning73

<font color=purple.The southern border of Pennsylvania, bordering on Maryland and West Virginia, is the Mason-Dixon Line, separating the South from the North. And many of the inhabitants of Southern Pennsylvania can be described as "hillbillies" and "rednecks" - rural farmers barely eking out a living, and many of them are Old Order Amish, huge beards on the men and long dresses and bonnets on the women. A friend of mine lived in that part of PA when he was going to college, and I used to drive out to visit him as often as I could. He had a problem with an electrical outlet in his house, and he asked me to help him fix it. I walked into the hardware store in town, and an Amish woman tied her wagon to the rail outside the store and walked in and bought a sack of chicken feed, had the hardware guy help her put it in the wagon and she rode off down the street.

Edited Date: 2023-09-10 09:40 pm (UTC)

From:

greghousesgf

I get along fine with goths.
I find some celebrities extremely interesting but a lot of them seem to me to be very boring and very mainstream.

From:

ysabetwordsmith

I used to get into random conversations with Big Name Pros at conventions because I was happy to talk about something other than The Latest Book. I started to wonder why I kept getting picked out of a field of 400, so I asked. One of them explained, "Because you treat us like people."

From:

see_also_friend

I seem to keep doing this, usually accidentally (and not with famous people!)

From:

siliconshaman

Counterculture hasn't gone away... as you note there's always been freaks. The problem is, lame-stream culture is viciously unfriendly to being a freak nowadays, if they don't try to stomp you out of existence, they co-opt everything about your existence except the spirit of counter-culture and turn it into another variety of blah commercialism.

No, the freaks and counter-culture are still around, we're just running silent nowadays. Stealth mode freaks, for safeties sake.

Same as always...

From:

zeeth_kyrah

I've been introduced to The Korps. Definitely counterculture. Literally people writing/arting-up supervillains dedicated to breaking the harms around them and giving more power to the people... while being utterly queer, kinky, diverse, weird, and occult.

But try to find the writing without help? Nearly all of it is hidden among Google Docs and you need carefully hand-crafted indices to find it if someone doesn't volunteer their own works. The rest is mostly drawings/paintings and character design, found on various art-focused websites (but often buried or affiliation not always mentioned)

Heck, I attended DVS this year via Discord and Picarto... decent number of people, but definitely still underground despite already expanding past its origins.

From:

ysabetwordsmith

That sounds like stuff I'd enjoy reading, and indeed, not that different from what I write. But I'm not up to dredging the whole net for it. :/

From:

see_also_friend

Someone could start a collective fan space...if there's anyone who wants to do all that work until it become popular enough to generate its own free editing!

From:

ysabetwordsmith

That would be awesome. We need more fan-run spaces. But looking at the constant political wrangling at places like AO3, it's easy to see why not many folks want to volunteer for that.

From:

see_also_friend

Not for me, at least not right now. But hey, maybe somebody else will see this thread and give it a try?

From:

zeeth_kyrah

After thinking about it - here ya go: The KEU Public Index

From:

acelightning73

When you can buy tie-dyed t-shirts manufactured in Bangladesh, cannabis is being more widely legalized, and LSD is being investigated as a treatment for PTSD. Hip-hop expresses a sense of rebelliousness, but not as widespread as protest songs. When my son was placed in a special school for children with behavioral problems, the psychologists tried to blame my unconventional parenting for my son's outbursts. So I had to make sure my pagan jewelry and my tattoos weren't visible when I had a meeting with the teachers. (My son went to university, and has a good job as a clinical psychologist himself. His wife works organizing things financially for Broadway shows. And my husband and I celebrate our 50th wedding anniversary this past June, so we must have been doing something right. I worked as a radio engineer when i got out of college, and I think I was one of the first women radio engineers in NYC (one of the broadcasting centers of the world) I'm not going to stop dying my hair purple - so much of it is grey it won't really make much difference. But I keep "letting my freak flag fly" because seeing people react to it is entertaining.

From:

see_also_friend

There are some stirrings in the labor movement - see r/antiwork, the lying down movement, and any unionizing arguments, though admittedly the news coverage has died down a bit with the pandemic. I could also lump hikkomori into this group too - while not a movement, it is a similar feel of helplessness. Overall, pandemic activism was very interesting, along with some of the cultural shifts.

In order to socialize...well, a lot of interesting people hang out /here/. If looking for people in RL there are some groups that historically have been very inclusive and prone to activism - though you will want to pay attention to a) if the members are willing to put out some real effort, and b) if the group-and-associates has a nice balance of diversity.

Online I hang out here, and in RL I tend to do the Jesus thing* and spend time with people I like who need and appreciate my skills.
*I mean actually acting like the guy, not running around being all preachy.

From:

see_also_friend

>>Everything except for the record that breaks the record player. They cannot coopt and profit from things which are destructive to capitalism itself. <<

Actually now that I think of it...might there be a way to hack a society where you disguise the record long enough for most people to pick it up, and then it activates? Examples:

- cell phones, so useful that even the most privacy-minded people don't complain about carrying around a tracking chip and recorder on our persons

- Christianity in Ancient Rome, where people kept getting arrested and converting the guards

for a fictional example, wouldn't this have been the logical conclusion of the Yeerk invasion in Animorphs? I mean, you drop a bunch of body-snatching soldiers from a culture that makes the Soviet Bloc look cheerful into 1990's America with all the emphasis on freedom and personal indulgence, and a bunch of them are going to want to party it up. Also factor in that the mind-to-mind connection of the body snatching and the need for a stealthy invasion (which requires pretending to be a member of the local culture)...I am surprised there were not more attempted defections. Plus, at least in some cases, the human host might actually befriend the Yeerk (there are two examples in the books but there would have had to be more.)

I'd actually like to see that story: "Yeah, so, y'all don't need to blow up the planet. We already stopped the alien invasion with TV and pot brownies." And then you invite the Andalites to the barbecue and watch them flip out over chocolate and barbecue sauce.

From:

we_are_spc

This is why wie like the filk com to some degree. If there is that stuff-it's raare, and we barely hear anything about it.

While there are still those who are comfused about how we present, the majority take me, and us, in stride, and it's also the only place we know of that outr other-ness (Other than being multiple) is taken without an eyelash bat without engaging in the otherkin communities which seem to be ful of nastyness these days.

It's harder for us to find counter culture unless we talk to people though-being nonsighted means we miss a lot of visual stuff that would point out the other freaks and weirdoes that we could otherwise meet. Not to mention, the birth-family trilled into us that being that sort of 'different' wasn't the best thing to do. amd we disabled folks already seem to have unrealistic expectations piled on us so...

-T~

From:

ysabetwordsmith

>> This is why wie like the filk com to some degree. If there is that stuff-it's raare, and we barely hear anything about it.<<

I'm happy to hear that.

>> otherkin communities which seem to be ful of nastyness these days.<<

That's sad. It used to be a great place to find freaks -- even farther out than regular F&SF fandom, because that's where went with most of the folks who could only pass as human because that's what everyone expected to see.

>> It's harder for us to find counter culture unless we talk to people though-being nonsighted means we miss a lot of visual stuff that would point out the other freaks and weirdoes that we could otherwise meet. <<

Yeah, that is limiting.

>> Not to mention, the birth-family trilled into us that being that sort of 'different' wasn't the best thing to do.<<

My family was mostly accepting, but I got a lot of that crap from other people. I just shrugged and said, "It's better than being like YOU." If they were dumb enough to push the point, I'd elaborate, "Well, you're an asshole, and that's not how I want to be." Only rarely would someone push to the point where I started listing all the fuckups in their "great society." Most people don't like being stabbed in the reality tunnel, so they quickly decide to avoid me.

>> amd we disabled folks already seem to have unrealistic expectations piled on us so... <<

That's true.

Mine were different -- people had unreasonable expectations of gifted folks, or mistook me for a girl. I just concluded that they were stupid, since they were trying to deal with a delusion in their heads instead of the actual person in front of them. Creepy, but not my problem.

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