I read this recently and it got me thinking:
It’s from Ted Gioia’s article, “14 Warning Signs That You Are Living in a Society Without a Counterculture.”
It doesn’t seem true at first. Even though you could argue that mainstream culture is full of imitation, it’s not necessarily new. And we have more cultural variety today than ever before — more independent blogs and bloggers, more YouTube videos covering every possible interest, more podcasts for every political opinion, more great musicians on Bandcamp, and on and on. Every constituency is represented to a degree on some corner of the internet.
All this variety is a historical shift, at least in the United States, when you consider the suburban sameness of the 50s and 60s. From Paul Graham’s “The Refragmentation:”
One of the most important instances of this phenomenon was in TV. Here there were 3 choices: NBC, CBS, and ABC. Plus public TV for eggheads and communists. The programs that the 3 networks offered were indistinguishable. In fact, here there was a triple pressure toward the center. If one show did try something daring, local affiliates in conservative markets would make them stop. Plus since TVs were expensive, whole families watched the same shows together, so they had to be suitable for everyone.
But when I went looking for alternatives to fill this void, I found practically nothing. There was no internet then. The only place to look was in the chain bookstore in our local shopping mall.
Saying “we live in a society without a counterculture” sounds ridiculous the more you think about it. How could it possibly be true, especially when you consider the past? And a lot of the 14 “warning signs” are general enough that they’ve always been true to some extent.
But somewhere between your 38th Marvel movie and the millionth Heard-Depp trial rehash video, you might start to believe it. Even if it isn’t new, even if it’s easy to escape, and even if it’s not that bad, a cloying sameness occupies the cultural mainstream. It seems impenetrable, same as ever. But it’s especially surprising given how much creative work today exists outside the mainstream.
It is a jarring contrast. At no point in history have people created so much with so few channels for consuming their work. Most consumers get their content through a narrow straw — TikTok’s “For You” page, the first page of Google’s search results, Instagram’s explore tab, miscellaneous streaming sites, and so on. Many lifetimes worth of creation get aggress
