Counterculture is cool. But you won’t find it on X (formerly known as Twitter) or Facebook or Mastodon or Discord or anywhere else online.
Today we live in an era organized (and to some extent, governed) more by Big Tech than our own elected government. Back in “the day”, counterculture meant US against The Man — “The Man” being mainly the government and its (primarily) Conservative powers-that-were dictating societal and cultural norms. We stuck it to The Man by rockin’ out, doing drugs, wearing mohawks, piercing our ears, getting tattoos, having sex and all the other “cool shit” we did in the 70s, 80s, and even into the 90s that they frowned upon before Tech took over. Back then, the basic tenet of the counterculture was freedom. Free expression. Free speech. Free love. And whatever other “free” shit we wanted.
Today, the government is no longer “The Man.” And freedom has taken the backseat to vanity and profits and politics and pandering to fears on all sides. Conservatives, Liberals, Republicans, Democrats, Independents, not one of these groups, nor all en masse, wield the power of The New Man. (And no, Big Tech itself isn’t “The New Man”, either.)
Meet The “New” Man.
Same as the old man? No. The New Man is the Frankenstein internet ecosystem we ourselves have created. At MIT they might call it “The GAFA Stack,” (short for The Google/Apple/Facebook/Amazon Digital Ecosystem), but it also includes X (formerly known as Twitter) and Instagram and Reddit and Discord and so on…
The New Man is far more deceptive than the government. The New Man deceives you into believing you are indeed accepted, and above all, “free” — free to say what you want, free to express yourself however you want, free to roam the furthest reaches of the Internet in search of all your wildest fantasies… but you’re not free. Your actions are dictated. Your actions are monitored and tracked and policed and ultimately, dictated by the very thing you (and I, and all of us) have created.
There is no freedom in social media.
That’s why it’s “social”. Sure, you can post your alternative goth photos or your 2nd Amendment memes or your pro-life and pro-choice abortion propaganda; sure, you can share your thoughts, your hopes, your dreams, what turns you on, what pisses you off; but in the end, no matter what you say or do on here, you’re merely a cog in The New Cultural Machine. Nothing you say or do on a social media platform can ever be construed as counterculture no matter how “counter” to this culture you think it is.
Here’s a great analogy: if you go to a private school and are required to wear a uniform and you show up in sweatpants, that might be considered counterculture to the school’s culture. If you go to a public school with no dress code and show up in sweatpants, that’s not so “counter” to the culture. You’d have to show up naked. On the internet, you can show up in uniform, in sweatpants, or naked, and no one is gonna give a damn either way, because there is nothing to counter here.
Every single post you make on social media is simply a cog in The New Man’s machine — a massively lucrative place of capitalization, of profits. These platforms are fueled by your vanity, by your loneliness, by your angst, by your desire to be “accepted”, to be heard, to be seen, to be “cool” and so on… and The New Man’s powers-that-be are prodding you to participate and padding their pockets with your “free help” — your content — every millisecond of the day. The New Man wants you to believe you’re being counter to the culture when in fact all you’re doing is contributing to it.
There is no freedom online.
Yeah, you can say whatever you feel, and post whatever you want, but in the end, The New Man is watching and figuring out how to turn your posts into more profits for “him.” (Or “them” — The New Man identifies as “they/them”.) Sadly, that’s all you/me/we are — each of us, but one tiny grain of salt in the machine’s recipe for success and domination.
Our value is now measured in views and clicks.
Alas, the only way to stick it to The New Man, the only true counterculture to this internet ecosystem and the social media Frankenstein we’ve created, then, is to counter it entirely. That is, don’t participate. Counter the system. Counter the profits. Don’t feed into it. But you/I/we can’t do that because its digital heroin has you/me/us addicted.
Perhaps real-life, human interaction is the new counterculture?
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This week’s cover art is by Minjae Lee (aka GrenoMJ), a young, up-and-coming self-taught artist from Seoul, South Korea. His hand-illustrated portraits exude beauty and a subdued sense of innocence, blanketed by a looming sense of peril that is hard to ignore. His bold use of color (primarily markers and pencils) is a direct expression of mood and emotion.
To see more of Minjae Lee’s art, visit his website at www.grenomj.com.
—P.
Publisher
As a child my mother said to me, ‘If you grow up to be a soldier, you will become a general. If you grow up to be a monk, you will become the Pope.’ Instead, I grew up to be a degenerate, and now I’m publisher of SCREW.
