My introduction to cyberpunk culture came from Mondo 2000. Aside from reading about William Gibson, they also had articles on music and movies and smart drugs!
The 90's are 30 years ago(??). I've often wondered if the people taking piracetam or whatever it was back then have had any long term effects, good or bad. It felt like dialing up your IQ and awareness was possible. You just had to figure out the right combination of substances to take.
I just spent 20 minutes looking over google results for nootropics and seems like little has changed.
Edit: Thought archive.org might have this magazine and, of course, they do!
It's a lot harder to read than I remember and the ads are better than I remember. There's also more nudity than I recall... so maybe don't open this at work.
Circling back to this story after 11 days, your Mondo link stirred up all sorts of stuff from my life in that era, I was 23 in 1995... I had no idea there was even a "Macintosh NY Music Festival" (from one of the awesome ads) lol wow. I was in California at the time and in the USAF, so I wouldn't have been able to make it, anyway, but was always a huge Apple fan, didn't realize they ran a music festival... RIP CBGB
Just finished flipping through Issue 14 you linked. Wow, that's a time I wish I'd been old enough to appreciate. I wonder if anything like Mondo 2000 exists these days. Or maybe it's a time that's just passed us by.
We just have to keep creating the culture. Hacker culture is everywhere. It's here now, you're experiencing it on HN. This board is the spiritual successor to the great BBNs of the 80s and 90s. It might not be at Wired - I think KK tried to dethrone R U Sirius once - but it's out there. Even Mondo is still around. Check out the blog Acceler8or. It's the next chapter of Mondo, and it isn't updated frequently, but it exists. It's gonna be at DNA for their yearly screening of Hackers. It's at your local pawn shop, when you pony up for a used laptop!
We might not have the great hacker collectives and hackerspaces of the past, but the culture is still out there. L0pht might be gone from Boston, sure. But these kids give me a ton of inspiration. [0]
Don't mean to 'go off', but life has no meaning beyond that which you give it. If you 'fictionalize' your existence in the context of cyberpunk, and great science fiction books, and compelling video games, you become a character in those stories. Life is richer for it.
I was 23 at the time and it was pretty awesome (and I'm pretty sure I subbed to that magazine). I was probably playing Burn:Cycle, which was one of the numerous high-concept cyberpunk-y CD-ROM games that came out around then https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Burn_Cycle (CD-ROM games, and their massive storage and video capabilities, were still new at that time)... You'll see how wild it was if you read the story summary lol, you can probably find playthroughs of it on YouTube, I'm sure the graphics haven't aged well but I remember "Sol Cutter" vividly... aaand yep, you can LOL https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=mMRggmXbJF4 Had a great techno soundtrack as well.
There was generally a ton of tech promise and a vibe of excitement, libertarian nonjudgmental sexuality that didn't demand both labeling AND acceptance as it seems to now (as can be seen throughout that magazine)... all of this at the cusp of the explosion of the Internet...
I don't see how anyone could consider it not a parody. I mean the main character himself is named Hiro Protagonist (a pun on the literary term "Hero Protagonist") and Hong Kong exists as a chain franchise nation.
Lampshading something is different than parody it’s goal is to push suspension of disbelief just a little bit further, where parody doesn’t try to maintain it.
You can’t watch “Are We the Baddies?” as a war story. It introduced such elements simply to establish who’s getting made fun of. They remain in character but that’s it, the war story plot doesn’t progress the skit just keeps hammering the parody. Some parody has a more complete story but “Scary Movie” progresses the underlying plot to make fun of different elements of the movies it’s making fun of.
Harry Potter on the other hand calls out many of the tropes it’s using. House of the lions vs house of the snakes, guess who’s supposed to be the hero and who the villain. Except the characters once introduced are telling an actual story.
Snow Crash is between those extremes but focuses too much on the underlying story and its characters to be an actual parody. Over the top elements exist in the world, but they are played straight more Gulliver's Travels than Spaceballs.
I forget the term for it but there is a thing in anime subgenres where something comes out that is a kid of rejection/critique of the previous genre and acts as a kind of pseudo parody that afterwards sets a new direction and redefines the genre. Often these are hard to understand unless one is already familiar with the trends and tropes that it is critiquing. A good example is neon genesis evangelion, it's a critism of the mecha subgenre that came before it, but changed the way the mecha subgenre was afterwards. I'm told hunter x hunter is the same kind of redefining pseudo parody with the battle shonen genre, but I'm less familiar with that.
I feel like snow crash it's kinda along those lines.
I think NGE as a critique or deconstruction of mecha anime is often overstated. For instance Shinji as a subversion of the typical macho teenage boy mecha protagonist... well there was already quite a lot of mecha anime with non-traditional protagonists, such as Patlabor's Noa Izumi who is neither a boy nor a teenager. Patlabor broke the mold in numerous other ways besides, more-so and better than NGE. Mecha (e.g. Labors) foremost as industrial tools instead of super-science weapons with mysterious powers. Pilots being professional young adults who mostly act like it. Most of life for the crew being mundane routine responding to DUIs instead of grand save-the-world plots (a few military coups notwithstanding.) I think in these regards, NGE stays closer to the traditional mecha formula that it ostensibly deconstructs.
I think where NGE really shines is the art, design, animation, which are all stunning. I have much respect for NGE, but specifically as a deconstruction of the mecha genre I've never been impressed.
Well said. The setup clearly was an (IMO schlocky) parody of the genre. The meat of it: neuro-linguistic hacking, the raft, the devastating gun called “reason” that was all superb and faithful to the genre.
And in the real world there's the Earth model that heavily influenced Google Earth, and the librarian's "intelligence without consciousness" conversational style is looking pretty damn prescient right now.
I found the main neuro-linguistic hacking plot to be incredibly campy; it certainly took some of the core concepts of the genre and dialed them up to the point where one could argue it was parody.
I found it deeper than most concepts in the genre, the core of that plot is one of the most impotant questions in contemporary philosophy - the realtionship between thought and language.
Then Sherlock Holmes is far too late to the game to be foundational in the detective story genre (first appearing in 1887, 46 years after The Murders in the Rue Morge).
the bulk of tech foresight - Metaverse, Gargoyles, Earth (Google Earth)... I think it's foundational. the fact it lagged several years behind the sprawl trilogy, mirrorshades, or schismatrix, etc isn’t relevant imo
Edited to be more polite - my intention was not to be rude or uncivil.
and microtransactions in Ubik.... *shrug*
I mentioned quintessential works rather than "origin stories" to avoid an inevitable "all work is derivative".
edit: True Names surely should have been added in my brief list.
I want to assume you're joking, but I've encountered people who earnestly think the essence of cyberpunk is the retro-80s neon aesthetic, so your comment is in Poe's Law territory for me.
I still play Shadowrun in Mednafen, but a hacked ROM (enhanced one), Shadowrun 2058.
It has all the vibe of cyberpunk except for the magick, but if you mentally replace magick with "quantum futuristic alien tech masked as godly one" it still fits with the lore.
cyberpunk in the 90s was a lived experience, particularly so in Eastern Europe. I read Neuromancer, watched johnny mnemonic and blade runner on pirated VHS tapes, and armitage and bubble gum crysis on pirate tv[0]. there were old grandmas selling cd releases from RAZOR 1911 and PARADOX all over the place. "ooh, little munchkin, you're into 3d modeling? here's a new cd I got lightwave 3d, 3d studio max and Maya, cracked[1], $3". there were dozens if not hundreds of BBSes, and your local friendly FIDO point administrator. there were several large markets where you would buy computer parts grand bazaar style[2], so you buy an AMD K6 (in a box? dude, it's back of the truck OEM in an anti-static bag, better pray it works when you bring it home) that runs at 166 mhz or whatever and overclock it to a whopping 300 mhz, which necessarily implies that your desktop box was in a constant state of messing around with. no amount of LEDs and glass covers of a modern gaming rig will give you the same feeling as a boring 90s beige box did, because inside the beige box you had a 3dfx voodoo 6 months after it got released, and it's the first time consumer grade 3 acceleration is within your personal reach. of course some Finn in the demoscene has already made a back of a napkin C program, that you can compile in your pirated copy of Visual Studio, that shows you how to draw a shaded rectangle using your voodoo. everybody was on the same page: scene releases, demos, themes, background pictures, music, bbs styles, nicknames and scene group names were all incorporating cyberpunk aesthetic and contributing the aesthetic at the same time. reality was providing cyberpunk, and cyberpunk authors were providing the way for us to see the reality.
[0]you had to buy a descrambler to watch it
[1]she would never explicitly say it was cracked, because of course everything was cracked
[2]https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=VjDHhdx_tGY
Almost every significant character in the recent limited series Cyberpunk: Edgerunners was a Frankenstein's monster and there were multiple doctor Frankensteins, some corporate and some freelance, competing against each other.
I disagree: Frankenstein's monster is new life bereft of history or precedent, as opposed to a regular man converted into strangeness and exiled by acquired differences.
Most of those cyborg stories (Edgerunners, the newer Deus Ex's games, Ghost In The Shell) are more like... Hmm, perhaps Phantom of the Opera.
That's true for Project 2501, but not the cyborg protagonists of Section 9. They aren't Frankenstein's monsters, especially not in a society where some degree of augmentation is so normal.
That includes Motoko Kusanagi--even when it's been hinted she has relied on artificial bodies since childhood, that's still a very human form of alienation.
Agree on that, but my point is still that GitS isn't a good example because cybernetics are there because of setting, not necessary the "modern Prometheus" thingy.
GiTS creator Masamune Shirow's earlier works also feature androids or other sorts of synthetic life. Particularly Buaku's gang and Crolis in Dominion, and the military androids in Black Magic M-66.
I’m not really sure how you’d put the parts of Frankenstein that really matter into cyberpunk and come out with anything but a farce, unless you ditch all the awful-but-sympathetic-creature bits somehow. Motherhood (and an intertwined nigh-irresistible drive toward and revulsion of pregnancy and giving birth), responsibility for one’s works in the world, the nature of man, abandonment, revenge, sympathetic villains… it’s great stuff, but I think if you try to do that in cyberpunk and keep anything like the Creature you’re gonna be drawn into parody or some other unfortunate hole.
Blade Runner is pretty much THE gold standard when it comes to Cyberpunk cinema, and it's themes are pretty much everything you described. Blade Runner ain't no parody.
Good example. Yeah, it’s got most of that going on (plus some other things) and doesn’t obviously (though, a little, kinda, obliquely) feature either the plot or surface-level trappings of Frankenstein—so, it doesn’t look like parody.
My point was that if you want Cyberpunk’s “Frankenstein”, it’s probably not to be found in works that look too much like Frankenstein on the surface—those’ll just be borrowing tropes or tending toward parody, and won’t be Frankenstein-like in ways that matter.
I'm unconvinced that motherhood is a theme of Frankenstein? The subtitle ("The Modern Prometheus") suggests "a second, technological Creation" is more the intent. I'm hoping you're going to be able to convince me I'm wrong, though.
Alien/s, now that's SciFi about motherhood.
I guess if I was going to approach "cyberpunk Frankenstein" I'd end up somewhere adjacent to Michael Marshall Smith's Spares ("human clones, the ultimate health insurance").
The simultaneous nigh-unavoidable impulse toward creation (which takes some months, of course) coupled with body horror and more than a little revulsion, and sudden, transformative “birth” at the end (the monster isn’t intolerably, fundamentally, stomach-turningly repulsive until that spark of life enters it) is rather on the nose. It’s a man giving birth, more or less, and parental responsibility (which he whiffs at—he can’t tolerate the monster, especially at first, either) of a sort follows. Given that, and that particularly fatherhood-connected motifs and themes are not strong in the book, I think one would have to justify all that not having having to do with motherhood.
Given the author’s bio and stuff like her mom dying from giving birth to her, yeah, I’d say it’s there. A very particular point of view and concern with it, not exactly “ain’t pregnancy and motherhood beautiful?”, yes, but it’s there. “Death of the author”, sure, but it’s there in the book even if you don’t know Shelley’s bio.
Interesting, thanks. You make it sound like it's about postnatal depression ("the monster isn’t intolerably, fundamentally, stomach-turningly repulsive until that spark of life enters it"). Definitely food for thought.
Yeah, the protagonist’s a guy (Shelley was raised by her dad…) and the he-does-it-with-science thing is definitely there (though he’s nothing at all like the mad scientist from the films) but I do think the book leans much more strongly toward motherhood (and especially pregnancy and birth) than fatherhood, themes-wise, though it’s definitely not the only thing going on, either.
I enjoyed the whole thread that spawned off this comment. Back in the 90s I took a literature course that did the reverse angle. With a gothic theme, we compared Frankenstein and Neuromancer. And in between, I believe we also sampled Sigmund Freud and E.A. Poe.
I think noir when I think about Neuromancer—the kinda-scumbag protagonist down on his luck, drawn not-wholly-willingly into a bigger plot and with various personal goals factoring in and intertwined with it; the prose style; the larger plot ultimately kinda coming to nothing (“forget it, Jake, it’s Chinatown”), et c.
I’ll have to read it with gothic literature in mind, next time.
Look more to the environments and secondary characters instead of just the protagonist. The English gothic horror is strong in the Tessier-Ashpool clan and the whole orbital scene.
But as I recall, we also sought goth in other places and characters. The whole metaverse with AI running amok, and the Corto/Armitage character being almost a reverse Frankenstein's monster, for example.
Move to LA? Everyone says they have squats and ineffectual policing. Not much work for shadowrunners yet that I've heard of, but then, I would would I?
No, he's just observant. Historical periods change how culture operates and what parts are relevant. There hasn't been a counterculture for some time, including there not being one when most of us here were young. The last throws were in the 80s.
There are structural and cultural reasons that make it difficult to have one now (the internet's total immediacy and transparency of everything, post-modernism which means nothing is ever really new now, just recombinations).
Disagree. The old version of (largely youth) counterculture died when the Internet happened and sped up the time to propagation and commodification of any given fashion or thought.
I agree that now counterculture sits with the deplorables. The old style stuff has been fully adopted by the mainstream.
Real estate matters. One of the prerequisites of a counterculture seems to be urban areas in which it is possible to live cheaply without working too hard. Those are hard to find in the US right now, but existed in the 1950s through the 1980s.
China now has a "lying flat" counterculture, where young people move to cheap third-tier cities where they can escape the rat race. The government is not happy about this.[1] (The term refers not to people lying down, but to crops flat in fields and not harvestable.)
Half and half. I think its true that old style counter cultures and the avant garde no longer exist but also that the "deplorables" is not counter culture. The global kind (versus but encompassing the USA specific manifestation) is a kind of reaction against progressivism based on tradition. The word "reactionary" might be used more by people hopefully without the 19th century let-them-eat-cake connotations! It's alternative.
Generally there may be some confusion of categories. There is a difference between alternative, sub and counter cultures. There are lots of sub cultures still around, and lots of groups doing their own alternative thing. I think previous counter cultures had sub cultural manifestations. Punk is a classic example with the "punk ethic". The sub culture got recuperated and commodified, and the ethic mostly but not completely died.
I'd say cyberpunk lives on in the critical take of hackers towards AI and technological capitalism for example but even if its not a subculture now and even if there's no real counter culture it still influences many counter cultural ideas. The spirit or ideas of cyberpunk hasn't been fully adopted by mainstream at the same time the aesthetic subculture was.
Interesting response, thanks. The definition of counterculture that I see most frequently is: "A culture whose values and norms of behavior differ substantially from those of mainstream society, sometimes diametrically opposed to mainstream cultural mores."
By that yardstick, I'd say the alt-right or whatever you want to call it is a reactionary counterculture rather than a progressive counterculture, largely as a result of progressive countercultural values from the 1950s-90s having been incorporated into mainstram culture.
A few months ago I asked ChatGPT to use the principal of the Hegelian dialectic to tell me what the synthesis arising from the current progressive culture and the alternative reactionary one would be. Naturally it was useless.
[EDIT: I just reframed the question for it today and the answer was actually reasonable, if a little uninspired, obvs]
Communications barriers slowed the inrush of the sociopaths into whatever was hip at internet speed they arrive on the scene faster than the normies do.
So for communities to form there has to be other barriers. The foundational ideas being distasteful batshit is one option, but it's probably not the only one.
You might be surrounded by interesting countercultures and not even know about it: whatever properties save them from instant commoditization also keep you out.
> Communications barriers slowed the inrush of the sociopaths into whatever was hip at internet speed they arrive on the scene faster than the normies do.
Ah. Crypto.
Relevant new book on crypto and influencers: "Easy Money", by Ben McKenzie and Jacob Silverman.
Rock was just blues recombined and hip hop was just drum solos recombined. Everything "counter culture" a generation comes up with becomes cultural business for the next, when the youth who created it gets mortgages.
But there's always subversive, alternative sub cultures out there. A world of 8 billion, where the Internet has been a thing for over 30 years, with literal hundreds of giant cities. And you think "there's no more counter culture because I ain't seeing any"? Really?
That's the problem: rock wasn't just blues recombined, nor hip hop just drum solos recombined.
And they didn't hit culturally like mere recombinations.
Blues were an "folk" art form from blacks, expressiving everyday problems, heartbreaks, poverty etc, in a speficic expressive and cultural context.
Rock even from its early days operated in a very different context (teen fun and rebellion initially), and developed into very different aesthetic and social spheres, from student protests and civil rights to anti-war and mind-expansion.
Except from understanding that it had blues as part of its musical (and only musical) heritage, it wasn't perceived as a mere recombination of blues, and it didn't serve the same social role as blues did.
>But there's always subversive, alternative sub cultures out there. A world of 8 billion, where the Internet has been a thing for over 30 years, with literal hundreds of giant cities.
The recentness doesn't really change much about how fast something can spread. For example almost everybody of age in those 8 billions has a mobile phone now (even in the poorest African countries) and yet phones have really been a thing for 25 years.
If your point is "we might not see subversive, alternative sub cultures out there" but surely there must be some in some of those "literal hundreds of giant cities" all over the world, I think it makes my point. Countercultures were major impactful movements in the western world for decades. And your answer basically amounts to "just because you can't see them doesn't mean there's not some still going on in Cairo or Okinawa".
It's like saying "shoe cobbling isn't dead, there's some such shops in New York" or "Addis Ababa has quite a few".
You are jumping over a key step in the development from blues to rock. There wasn’t just black blues followed by white rock. There was nascent rock that was still a black art form, but a very sexually expressive one (whence the very name of the genre) – the folk art wasn’t just about expressing Black hardships, but also getting down and getting nasty. Once you consider that interim stage where some rebelliousness was already present, it isn’t hard to see a smooth evolution from one genre to another, albeit early white rock intentionally purged the sexual element.
The sexual element was there in the blues from the beginning, it wasn't something that developed later and became rock. It was there even in pre-1900 century black song, as they were less constrained from the white's puritanism.
In any case, it wasn't the crucial difference between the social function (and the aesthetic development) of blues and rock.
Some counter culture movements from the US had some mainstream impact. If having mainstream impact is your criterion for the existence or relevance of counter culture, you're defining it from the point of view of the establishment. It just reinforces my belief that someone defining counter culture by the mainstream cultural narrative built post hoc around some aspects of it wouldn't be aware of the current streams in the counter cultural depths.
There's a full generation of adults who grew up taking the Internet for granted is my point. There are many orders of magnitude of information flowing there than you can even imagine. Yet you claim to _know_ counter culture isn't a thing anymore because you don't see any mainstream cultural narratives describing any aspects of it. Do you see the problem in this logic?
"Rock" is a post hoc narrative packaging something that came organically from counter cultural movements. Same goes for "blues" or "hip hop". These labels and the packaging of counter cultural (i.e. subversive of the values of the establishment) manifestations for mainstream consumption, are where counter culture goes to die. That's why I said they're just a re-packaging of something that came before and appeared organically.
Once it has a widely known name and a section in the nearest media outlet, it's by definition part of the mainstream.
So if you look around and you can't see any grand narratives about new cultural artifacts from "the youths/the minorities", how impactful they are and where you can buy an album, and conclude there's no more counter culture. I guess you're just telling on yourself at this point.
>There's a full generation of adults who grew up taking the Internet for granted is my point. There are many orders of magnitude of information flowing there than you can even imagine. Yet you claim to _know_ counter culture isn't a thing anymore because you don't see any mainstream cultural narratives describing any aspects of it. Do you see the problem in this logic?
In this logic, yes, meaning your argument :)
Counter-culture doesn't mean obscure and indiscoverable. So "there's so much internet, there's bound to be some counter-culture in there you've missed" is not an answer.
Even if it was, it would be irrelevant. What made counter-culture relevant (as opposed to "what a very small bunch a people do for their own amusement"), was the interplay at the edges of established culture, and the influence it exerted over it. Until the next one came, and so on.
So, "once it has a widely known name and a section in the nearest media outlet, it's by definition part of the mainstream" is precisely what's not been seen happening (with insignificant exceptions).
In any case, it's not like this hasn't been covered a lot. See Mark Fisher's writings for an example.
The political aspect was really small. Except maybe the far right militia incursion in the european rave that made everybody wear kaki pants, get short hair and throw the colored stuff out, oh and the military style insignas of many of the collectives.
the idea of counterculture being gone was a feature of cyberpunk too though. I've heard the core theme of cyberpunk expressed as 'whither bohemia in a hyperconnected world?'.
There's not really a mainstream culture now. Even the biggest consent-manufactories like the 'mainstream media' are actually a minority in an overall fragmented and dissenting pseudoculture that's becoming more like an ecosystem than an expanding monoculture. What would have been 'the dominant culture' in the civil rights era, the domain of the Cronkites of that era, is now just another minority, perhaps the largest single minority but still distrusted or ignored by the majority.
Honey Boo Boo and rednecks with purple hair is over 10 years old [0].
What the counterculture movement of the 70s and 80s presented, at least externally through hair, clothes, tattoos, piercing, etc is now post mainstream.
It’s like this huge portion of society “rebelling” against a Nixon that no longer exists, or is a much smaller portion of the population than it was when it was an oppressive majority.
I remember in middle school I was paddled by the headmaster because my hair was too long. It touched my shirt collar in the back.
Take absurdism, or the deconstruction of gender for example. Or people using mastodon just to show the 12-ish friends that they repaired a their dirt cheap bike. I think also you could also argue that Meta-Irony is some form of counterculture.
I'd argue the trans and gnederfluid movement is counterculture in that it is a major shift in social norms, language and self-presentation and isn't yet sufficiently mainstream to be noncontroversial.
Aside from identity, is there no counterculture, or is everything so interconnected and observable via Internet and social media that nothing is in a "dark corner" anymore? I can see that argument.
> I'd argue the trans and gnederfluid movement is counterculture in that it is a major shift in social norms
Maybe twenty years ago, it’s hit a significant low single digits and had a chunk of prime shelf space to display mass produced merchandise at Target.
I think the change is that things are marketed as if they are cool and novel and rate, because that sells more. But it’s obviously not rare and counterculture if Walmart is ordering a million “Yas queen” t-shirts and selling them in 25k population cities.
Controversial doesn’t mean counter-culture. There’s just different preferences in the mainstream.
Some people liked Michael Jackson, some liked Garth Brooks. Neither were counter-culture. They were both very mainstream.
> But it’s obviously not rare and counterculture if Walmart is ordering a million “Yas queen” t-shirts and selling them in 25k population cities.
So, in a nutshell, counter-culture can't exist because of fast-fashion?
I believe we should separate the ability for commercial brands to provide products to increasingly small market segments, and acceptance of sub-cultures that these products are marketed to.
More likely, counterculture has decoupled itself from clothing fashion. If your counter-cultural uniform is being sold at walmart, then it's a farce. The real counter-cultures have moved on and no longer care about what kinds of clothing you wear. On the internet nobody cares if you have regular jeans and a tshirt, or an elaborate outfit of leather straps and metal chains, face tattoos and 50 nose piercings; such outward expressions of "counter-culture" have all gone mainstream and become corporate products. The real counter-culture, if in fact any still exists, is expressed through words and deeds, not what clothing or music you buy. People who try to buy their way into a counter-culture at a clothing store are simply mainstream posers, usually aping a style their parents' or grandparents' generation innovated with... and then commercialized.
In 2023, somebody dressing like a punk or a prep means nothing, they both buy their clothes from the same stores and probably have the same mainstream ideas and values. Their preference for clothing style is no more meaningful than somebody's preference for vanilla, chocolate or strawberry icecream. These kind of preferences don't indicate any kind of counter-culture.
Furthermore, niche subcultures aren't counter-cultures. Subcultures exist within some greater cultural context, they don't stand apart from and oppose that greater 'mainstream' culture. To be counter-culture, truly, you need to transgress against the mainstream culture. Simply having unusual niche tastes doesn't cut it. There is no average man, everybody is unusual when you consider enough factors[0]. Consider the intersection of all of your personal attributes you can think of, physical, emotional, historical, intellectual.. how many people exist in that set? Probably just you. It is this way with everybody. Possessing a very unique set of attributes isn't counter-cultural, it's the norm. Everybody exists in subcultures, even the counter-culturals have subcultures. Existing in a subculture is not what it means to be counter-cultural.
[0] In the 1950s, USAF researchers measured the physical attributes of their pilots, found the averages of those measurements, then found that not a single pilot was average across the board. Utterly average individuals don't exist.
When your country flies your flag over its embassies around the world, you are not the counterculture. And let's not even get started on how the Fortune 500 has embraced this faux counterculture.
If you get wide ranging corporate support, per cyberpunk traditions you are on the evil side. And actually the grass roots movements that are against that sort of messaging by corporations and big political parties are the counter culture.
Radical feminists are the counterculture here. They're fighting against both the prevailing male-dominated liberal and conservative cultures, on so many fronts, including this. Particularly this, right now, as a matter of urgency, before women are erased and replaced in law and policy.
Their messaging is grassroots - stickering, small-scale protests bringing together a network of like-minded women. They exist on the fringes of the internet, corralled off into their own online spaces after being forcibly removed from the mainstream.
By Radical feminists I assume you mean what the mainstream culture calls TERFs? If so I think that's a good point, and funny how both the DEI enforcement officers in HR and the countercultural elements putting stickers on bus stops call themselves the same thing.
There is a big difference between the association with the flag and actually living the culture. But to be fair you would only really know that if you were actually dipping a toe into the culture, for the rest the trick of companies works.
Is that your sole criterion? Removing all gender roles and minimizing the importance of reproduction and the family unit is a pretty big shakeup in the past 20-30 years.
Must the movement be struggling to be considered? If it is just "what the majority political parties agree is unpalatable" then I guess we could say actual socialism or anti capitalism is there.
Counter-cultures aren't counter to whatever was mainstream 20-30 years ago, they're counter to whatever is mainstream today. Actual socialism is not and will never be well represented by corporate media, but is actually fairly common in the general population. On the other hand, those who are called (but do not call themselves) 'TERFs' seem like the perfect example of a counter-culture.
I hadn’t been to the USA in quite a few years and assumed that transpeople in America were largely limited to loud voices on social media. Then I went and spent three weeks in the USA last year and repeatedly met transpeople, whether the cashiers at a CVS or fast food, or other cyclists I met on a popular bikepacking route I followed. Regardless of what controversy still exists, I concluded that this had already evolved from a counterculture into the general culture.
That's a very amicable framing of what basically amounts to an inability to judge sources and adequately process information, coupled with a taste for consequence-free, amoral behavior and an authoritarian mindset.
It's worth remembering, by definition the majority of people are. Our civilization (and if you're American, your nation) just happens to fetishize successful rebels. It's probably a very unusual attitude, historically speaking.
MAGA/militia/Qanon are conspiracist grifts that simply extend pre-existing societal wedge issues (god, guns, government). What cultural artifacts or innovations has this counterculture created? They appear to be entirely dependent on mainstream media and social platforms to carry their message.
Maybe militia, if you're talking about people who've more or less removed themselves from regular society to live in a compound, likely off the grid, similar to the group who took over the national wildlife preserve in OR several years back.
MAGA is way too mainstream to be a counter culture. QAnon is more like a belief in certain conspiracies than an ethos you live by, no?
The problem of militias in the US is that they are not removed from society. A lot of them were part or are still part of law enforcement and are keeping really close ties. They are a really strong culture and spreading fast. The thing is that they look so much alike and share so much with the "official" law enforcement, that could keep them in check, that not much is done to them or they even get support.
Unfortunately America is just getting ready for a coup (there was one attempt already) and forces are gathering for the next one. Almost half of the population wouldn't be opposed to it. That's the reality, and from my point of view that's a little scary.
Point to a period in time when things were perfect?
Go in semantic circles if you want, these things are displacing old cultural norms; they run counter to established culture
Maybe log off the fucking internet where you spin in circles in vain seeking a perfect solution and tackle those problems you called out? Nah, much easier to be an energy vampire from your armchair
Here’s let’s lean in:
So sad for Hollywood artists who covered for pervs and leches; if it’s about the art they can “slum it” in local theatre; capitalism never owed them glamorous lives as humanity never owed them deflating themselves for a handful of pretty people
Taxes are an option for dealing with corporations but you're keen to propagate mopey whiner on the internet rather than “tax the rich”
steam/proton undermines Windows market share, you know that thing produced by big corporate you so hate
wfh has people talking about QOL more than money and the shitshow that is hustle culture
…you’re crying about your chains, too unimaginative to see the bits and pieces around you that could serve as a lock pick
I never meant to imply Heaven on Earth was around the corner. Was responding to the idea there’s no counter movement to contemporary cultural norms
>Point to a period in time when things were perfect?
Things getting worse is not refuted by things never having been perfect. There are periods of time when things were better and periods of time (including extended for centuries periods of time) that things were crap. Even more pronounced and evident regionally. We, in many countries, are getting on a crap slope.
>Maybe log off the fucking internet where you spin in circles in vain seeking a perfect solution and tackle those problems you called out? Nah, much easier to be an energy vampire from your armchair
Who said I don't "tackle those problems I called out" outside the internet? And who said I'm optimistic about the potential of my interventions, or the preventability of changing the outcomes in general?
Maybe not assume and make it personal with ad hominems?
The rest of the points I find either wrong or irrelevant. I'll give an example instead of bothering to answer to each:
"So sad for Hollywood artists who covered for pervs and leches; if it’s about the art they can “slum it” in local theatre; capitalism never owed them glamorous lives as humanity never owed them deflating themselves for a handful of pretty people"
The point wasn't about Hollywood actors or screenwriters, as if they're the only creatives (or even the ones more) threatened by AI. It was more about the rest of the already squeezed fields, illustrators, graphic designers, musicians, and so on.
But even staying at the "hollywood artists" here (which I didn't even have in mind in my argument), the counter-argument that AI taking their livelihood is fine because they "covered for pervs and leeches" is non seguitur BS.
First, if you work at a company and your boss or some higher executives are scumbags, do you also "cover for pervs and leeches"? Or you just work there, and words like "cover" should be constrained to those actually covering misdeeds?
And would the AI discriminate and only reduce the jobs of those that e.g. covered for Weinstein, and not those who called him out? Or will it only replace highly paid actors, and not eg. lowly VFX artists and other such jobs? This is more bile against "those rich Hollywood actors deserve what's coming at them" than an argument about the impact of AI on the film industry.
>…you’re crying about your chains, too unimaginative to see the bits and pieces around you that could serve as a lock pick
Yeah, let's see how this "AI will liberate us" work our for us. I've seen the same stuff play out when the web arrived and "information wanted to be free".
Those are just reactionary wackos. They want their old abusive status back. They'd love to lynch back the blacks, put women 'back' in the kitchen, beat up homosexuals, exclude Atheists...
Counterculture existes in libre gaming, distros, hackers, underground games such as Nethack, IF games from IF archive, niche electronica/rock/metal/blues from Jamendo (Revolution Void, Proleter, Helfervescent, Nanowar (ok, now is half-mainstream, but still...) and now saved back in archive.org thanks to James Scott...
That (also called "future noir") actually is a separate genre, related to cyberpunk, but not exactly it. A lot of works loosely called cyberpunk have noir tendencies with detectives, femme fatales, and an overall 1940s feel, but other works really do have the 1970s punk feel.
There's a common thread. Literary cyberpunk, and "future noir," are both centered around crime: Hackers, contraband-smugglers (from new nano-drugs to brain implants,) people who have found themselves caught between the gears of criminal conspiracies, etc.
The defining characteristic of 80s-90s cyberpunk is that it's about near-future crime. So it shares an awful lot -- if not absolutely everything -- with noir. The "punk" aspect is that cyberpunk stories are often told from the perspective of the criminal rather than the detective.
The r*dditors who go on and on about "i-it's all about urban dystopia and corporate conspiracies!" are dead wrong, because both elements don't always (-- indeed very rarely --) feature in the foundational literary works of the genre. Take Burning Chrome, for instance: All of the stories are about crime, but the features of the settings are rarely clear.
So much for literary cyberpunk. Cyberpunk in art -- e.g. www.cyberpunk.tech -- is its own thing, and just as old.
The 90's are 30 years ago(??). I've often wondered if the people taking piracetam or whatever it was back then have had any long term effects, good or bad. It felt like dialing up your IQ and awareness was possible. You just had to figure out the right combination of substances to take.
I just spent 20 minutes looking over google results for nootropics and seems like little has changed.
Edit: Thought archive.org might have this magazine and, of course, they do!
It's a lot harder to read than I remember and the ads are better than I remember. There's also more nudity than I recall... so maybe don't open this at work.
https://archive.org/details/Mondo.2000.Issue.14.1995