The internet didn’t kill counterculture
The internet didn’t kill counterculture—you just won’t find it on Instagram
In an era more profoundly organized by Big Tech than our own elected governments, the new culture to be countered isn’t singular or top-down. It’s rhizomatic, nonbinary, and includes all who live within the Google/Apple/Facebook/ Amazon digital ecosystem (aka GAFA stack). With digital platforms transforming legacy countercultural activity into profitable, high-engagement content, being countercultural no longer means being counter-hegemonic.
The core message is, that it doesn’t matter what you do online; As long as you do it on the GAFA platforms it will profit big tech.
What logic could possibly be upended by punks, goths, gabbers, or neo-pagans when the internet, a massively lucrative space of capitalization, profits off the personal expression and political conflict of its users?
The only way out is to skip the big platforms.
To be truly countercultural today, in a time of tech hegemony, one has to, above all, betray the platform, which may come in the form of betraying or divesting from your public online self.
Let’s pool crypto to book the master’s Airbnb and use the tools we find there to forge a forest utopia that the master could never survive.
The article then goes into the dissamination of e-deologies, which sound intregring. They spring out of the younger generations interaction with political future- as well as self-building. Personas and ideologies for the future. Nonetheless, they neither really know, what they are opposing.
Similiar to the privacy problem in voice assistant (know about the problem, kind of don’t care or can’t care), people have the same problem with the big platforms. They use them anyway, knowingly about the inherent problems.
What’s really messed up about this is that users, despite understanding that the platform’s mechanics are net-bad, still feel a moral responsibility to obey the platform-enabled-hive-mind’s rules.
This on is nice in terms of terms:
the internet bifurcated into what became known as the “clearnet,” which includes all publicly indexed sites (i.e., big social media, commercial platforms, and anything crawled by major search engines) and the “darknet” or “deep web,” which is not publicly indexed (due to being built on anonymized, encrypted networks such as Tor). There were also a number of sites that though officially clearnet, laid the groundwork for a sub-clearnet space that we might think of as a “dark forest” zone