The hippies were rooted in things that were objectively good: peace, love, self discovery, acceptance, mutual aid, egalitarianism, free thought.
That contrasts sharply with 4chan’s demographics and motivations. I don’t think that anyone will look back with fondness or positivity toward a bunch of closeted homophobic, racist, sexist, emotionally and mentally stunted incels circle jerking themselves into a froth over who’s the edgiest edge lord.
This is the counter-culture. The dominant culture opposes all of these things and makes obligatory the celebration of the opposite values. 4chan being one of the few lightly-restricted free speech zones allows for culture generation that would be censored anywhere else. Counter-culture is supposed to be edgy, just like jazz and rock were edgy, greasers/rockabilly were edgy, beatniks were edgy, hippies were edgy, disco was edgy, punks were edgy, LGBTQ was edgy, and so on. Every one of them were described by dismissive epithets just like the string you put together about how awful and contrary to decency they were.
No, it's not. The words explain themselves perfectly fine: an opposing culture.
What you describe boils down to being irrationally angry, stunted in various ways, and generally destructive... It's not a counter-culture but just counter-productive and essentially a defect. If anything, it is devoid of culture.
And just in case someone takes "counter-productive" and tries to argue that being against trying to make everything productive is counter-culture: that's not what I mean and you know it. If you were to find yourself not aligning with anything out in the world and you wish to alter that, there are a whole lot of things you could be doing to get there, but what people do on 4chan gets nobody anywhere, unless the digital version of sniffing glue is considered an alteration of the status-quo.
I don't like 4-chan but isn't that what they said about hippies? That they are stunted (e.g. they spend all their time smoking pot instead of cutting their hair, getting a job and being productive members of society. They are irrationally angry at society and refuse to recognize the grim realities of the real world. They are destructively brain washing our youths. Etc.)
Ultimately i think counter cultures can be good or bad and that is separate from if they are counter culture
Just because something isn't PC doesn't mean it isn't counter-culture. Hip-hop for example is riddled with extremely homophobic, violent, and sexist content but has become by far the biggest music genre in the world. That doesn't mean it isn't culture and it definitely was counter-culture (at least in the 80's and 90's).
Angry to be sure, but Irrationally? Take a closer look.
>stunted in various ways
To be sure. C’est la vie. But also undeniably brilliant on occasion.
>generally destructive
Not unlike the hippies then.
>If anything, it is devoid of culture.
Simply ignorant.
Like punks? Mods and rockers? Beatniks? Greasers?
I think what you are really referring to is a social movement, which often aligns with a particular counter culture that has decided to organize. But there can be many counter cultures and not all of them the deliberate goal of social change.
It appears to me that you are so angry at 4-chan for its perceived ideas that you cannot see things from their perspective.
IOW, reactionary
This is literally what was said about the hippies.
If you're betting that 4chan is the one that's going to stand out of "ahead of its time" you aren't doing it because "counterculture is always ahead" you're doing it because it's the one you personally focus on. Otherwise you'd have to be evaluating it against all the other counterculture things. And many of them are much less derivative and backwards-looking.
This list implies that "homophobic, racist, sexist, emotionally and mentally stunted incels" is destined to be normal and acceptable in the future. That sounds awful.
This may be unpopular topic, but I actually think having a non-traditional sexuality/gender is the new 'edgy'. I know that implies it's just a trend/fad and not a reality for some individuals. It seems to have increased in such a massive relative basis that I can't help but think it actually is a trend versus following some natural occurrence. Or perhaps, given significant hindsight I could see that the definitions around these things is just undergoing an accelerating foundational shift. We know ancient societies had massively different ideas for what was and wasn't normal. Hell, very recently ago our own society had very different norms for age of consent and age of "child".
Sorry if any of this is or sounds offensive, I look at it from a statistical mindset and what baseline seems to have existed. It's totally possible that societies around the world have used religion and such to suppress the baseline and it's starting to naturally come back - I wouldn't be able to observe things like that.
I'm not so sure about "emotionally and mentally stunted incels," but homophobia, racism, and sexism were all acceptable in the past, and given enough time will most likely be acceptable in the future.
Progress is a lie; change can go in all directions. It's a mistake to draw a line across living memory or the recent historical era and extrapolate whatever trend you find very far into the future.
Being LGBTQ is a lot more accepted today than it was 20 years ago. Fuck I could set my pronouns on my linkedin profile of all places.
If a man has long hair, it is looked as a style and is completely acceptable unless you are in the military.
Mom: We have a counter-culture at home.
The counter-culture at home: 4chan incels
Racism is core to nearly every country in the world. It may seem bad in the US, but it's worse elsewhere. And while people won't admit they're racist in the US, racism itself is pervasive.
Sexism might be the most prominent and long lasting parts of the culture across the world for millenia. Just look up the rape stats, and then keep in mind that most rapes are not reported.
Homophobia, racism, and sexism are deeply ingrained in nearly every culture on the planet today.
Aside from monogamous gay people, queerness is very much still edgy and not particularly accepted by the dominant/mainstream culture.
(This is not a positive thing, but it is reality.)
Being supported by advertising, movies, tv shows, signaled by major corporations and workplaces, and supported top-down by the government means its edgy and counterculture? We live in completely different realities I guess.
Something that people advertise about themselves on their linkedin profiles in order to get better job offers is the opposite of edgy.
This is a vile take. It is sickening to compare liking a genre of music or wearing a certain style of dress or being queer to hating people because they're queer, not white, not male, or because they're a woman who won't have sex with you.
The other half is a mix of the hateful or unstable.
But who knows, it's the internet, and it's completely anonymous over there.
Jazz and Rock was the music of african americans that became mainstream in white america just like rap did later. Punk was a reaction to rock becoming boring and stale. Disco came out from the african-american AND LGBTQ community, and the eventual "disco sucks" mainstream backlash was at least somewhat motivated by racism/homophobia, not anything inherent with disco.
None of these creative outlets were a result of anyone overtly TRYING to offend anyone. That they offended was a side effect of them changing the world, and the mainstream reaction to it, not the core motivation.
Now, I don't want to paint 4chan with one brush. I actually think a significant amount of internet creativity and beautiful creation occurs on it, and they never get enough credit for it. Most legendary memes - offensive or not - originate on 4chan. Internet memes are some of the most unique artistic creations of our generation.
But the parts that people get mad at 4chan for (the homophobic/racist/misogynistic parts) are not that. Those are creations intentionally made to get a reaction: "You tell me I can't say <blank>? Watch me!!"
There is a charitable interpretation of this that they are bucking against censorship and fighting for self-expression on principle. And some may draw comparisons to what they're doing to times in history when "blasphemers" criticized religious dogma. That making a homophobic or racist meme is the modern equivalent of proclaiming "There is no God" 200 years ago.
The difference comes down to the Paradox of Intolerance. Religion and the dominant culture associated with it, actively repressed everyone who didn't match their worldview. People were told you have to believe this in faith and act as if you do, or you will be punished. The modern "dogma" of LGBTQ/race acceptance is instead saying "You CANNOT tell others how to believe and act, and punish them accordingly. You cannot discriminate against those different from you by birth race/gender/sexuality."
It is highly childish to associate all "you cannot do <blank>" guidances as repressive and similar. And I meant that literally. Children can't tell the difference between "No, we can't have desert because i told you so" and "You can't touch the hot stove because it will hurt you".
So, no, THAT side of 4chan is not counterculture. It's at best children trolling on the internet (I know, I was one), and at worst hateful bigots angry that their acceptance is diminishing in the world and lashing out.
Rock'n'roll, punk, etc were definitely trying to overtly offend. Many rockers claimed to worship Satan, mocking the older generation was widespread ('hope I die before I get old'). Look up the Sex Pistols.
Those counter-cultures were for something, for their identities at least. What is 4chan for?
...
>None of these creative outlets were a result of anyone overtly TRYING to offend anyone.
So when Sid Vicious (and other punks) wore a swastika, he wasn't trying to offend people?
The problem is, young idiots were ordinary young idiots in the past. They didn't do much more than maybe snatch a car for a joyride or kick off someone of IRC by sending them a direct message with "DCC SEND" or whatever that caused middleboxes to drop the connection. Annoying, sometimes causing a bit of damage, but nothing too serious.
Nowadays? They radicalize each other into a spiral that often enough ends in real-world violence - or in bullying people to suicide, which is just as bad. And unfortunately, the importance of hateful bigots is not diminishing. Not at all. The Tea Party and, following it, the Trumpets are recently risen developments - and they're still rising.
Honestly, I think you're making the mistake of confusing your subjective view with "objectivity." Like saying your opinions and preferences are "objectively" the right ones.
Also, you appear to be describing your side in the most charitable way you can, those you oppose in the least charitable way, and unsurprisingly finding those you oppose wanting.
Then it’s worth considering why the prevailing culture at the time didn’t see it that way.
(I'd listen to a station that did that kind of thing, but that's not how it works presently.)
Even as someone who favours liberal drug laws at this point, the social upheaval of the late '60s had objectively horrific consequences for the poor in particular. The massive drug epidemic that to this day kills more Americans than the entire Vietnam War every year, the unprecedented doubling of murder rates overall in nearly every Western country from 1965-1975, and collapse of the family unit seem like more tangible downsides than a small number of what you describe as edgelords jerking themselves into a froth on a forum read by other edgelords.
Nearly every major social issue of the late 20th century exploded as a direct result of hippie culture bringing drugs and hostility towards the family and social institutions into the mainstream. People often think of rising crime as the result of the 1980s crack "epidemic," but the explosion in murder rates occurred almost entirely from 1966-1975 and actually grew at a slower pace up to 1990 (outside the UK): https://datawrapper.dwcdn.net/uRI8Y/1/ The US murder rate in 1974 was exactly the same as it was at the peak of the "Crack epidemic" in 1990, and more than double the rate it was in 1964.
You can still argue the benefits outweighed the costs, but it's simply ignorant to pretend 1960s counterculture was some uniformly benevolent movement for peace and love, any more than the movement you identify with 4chan is merely a benevolent movement for "national pride" or "family values."
How 4chan specifically got designated the "counterculture" in this thread is questionable, but so is the inability to look beyond the status-quo, contemporary perspective of major media, academia and corporations.
This is quite reductive and ignores the role of dysfunction emerging from within families and institutional structures, including, but not limited to:
>The psychological and public health effects of widespread lead poisoning
>The psychological effects of family patriachs often being psychologically-scarred veterans, for whom drug use was sometimes prescribed by the military
>The artificial and contentious "community" of planned suburbs, which warped the character of family life while saddling local and state governments with debt traps which diverted funds from social services
>The intentional breakup of existing urban communities through "renewal", starting in the 50s
>The "benign neglect" of the remains of these communities following the King riots
Much like Reconstruction and TARP, the problem isn't that we did it, it's that we didn't do it hard enough.
Sources? Wasn’t the crack epidemic more related to Contra and the breaking of the family unit due to disproportionate incarceration of black males by the government in attempt to break their political power via the selective targeting of specific drugs by the govt, i.e marijuana and crack over cocaine?
The overwhelming majority of the rise in crime occurred between 1964 and 1974, in which time the murder rate in the US more than doubled and reached its all-time high in 1974.
Crack cocaine itself wasn't found in the US until the mid-1980s, i.e. well after the overwhelming majority of the rise in crime had already occurred. With no crack present in the US, it's clearly ridiculous to attribute the rise in crime to a drug-or laws targeting a drug-that didn't exist in the US until a decade later.
The crack vs. cocaine sentencing law you mention didn't exist until 1986, when it was pushed for primarily by black and progressive political leaders (notably the bill's author, then-senator Joe Biden) who believed it would address the rampant violence they associated with crack in their communities (https://www.npr.org/2017/07/17/537715793/how-black-leaders-u..., https://www.washingtonpost.com/politics/how-an-early-biden-c...).
In other words, neither crack laws nor significant crack use itself existed until the vast majority of the rise in crime had already occurred. Even the most outlandish theories of Contra involvement in drug trafficking (which they were involved to some extent like many South American guerrilla groups) would attribute a literal drop in the bucket of the cocaine trafficked to the US to the Contras. Again, this is only even relevant if you think crack caused the rise in violent crime that occurred decades before it was introduced to the US.
To address your third point, the incarceration rates you mention didn't actually start rising until 1973 and remained much lower than in the 1950s until the mid-70s (https://nap.nationalacademies.org/read/18613/chapter/4#35). Moreover, they didn't begin their rapid climb until 1980, at which point crime had begun declining. For reference, about 5 times as many people are in jail/prison today as in 1975: https://nap.nationalacademies.org/read/18613/chapter/4#35 When incarceration rates truly began skyrocketing in the late '80s-2000s, violent crimes were rapidly dropping.
Put yourself in the shoes of a WW2 veteran in the 60s. He sees his children get sucked into drug culture and protesting against the military that just 20 years ago saved the Pacific from tyranny. You turn on the news and see them making a nuisance of themselves in the streets. They're ungroomed, ugly, and do weird sex stuff.
You ask yourself where you went wrong raising them and lament the collapse of society and death of American values.
It is either incredibly ignorant or intentionally dishonest to pretend that the 1960s counterculture was some uniformly benevolent force for peace and love, and says a lot about the person claiming so's lack of ability to see anything outside their contemporary/status-quo perspective.
(Makes one wonder what chickens will come home to roost in Russia eventually.)
Makin’ your way if you can
Temporary layoffs
Good Times
Easy credit ripoffs
Good Times
Ain’t we lucky we got ‘em?
Good Times!
You could argue that it was attack on US values, but that was about it. Half around the effin world. In society where US was not welcomed in any way even in South Vietnam by almost nobody local (and for good reasons). Some continuous and serious mental gymnastics were required to keep feeling righteous in that war.
I know after-perspective is easy, but this is how history judges actions long term. Emotions of given heated moment are irrelevant and ignored.
4chan is another place you mischaracterize due to the mainstream media. Social rejects go there. Of every kind. You probably ignored the fact that there's been an LGBT board for more than a decade since you don't go there.
4 Chan is rooted in things that are objectively good: free thought, satire and not taking anything too seriously.
That's not to make any judgement on the societal value of 4Chan vs. the 1960s counterculture. It's just that neither is/was a uniform group that can be defined as "rooted in X, Y, or Z," and people who claim they can are typically blind to the bias of their cultural perspective.
If that's your view of 4chan then the whole point of 4chan went over your head. 4chan is about irreverence of and rebellion against the current mainstream culture that if you're non-conformist in any way or hold a view that may be construed as offensive to anyone, your opinion (and person) has no value. It's a reaction to upvote/downvote culture on the Internet that rewards conformity. 4chan, famously, has a highly contemptuous opinion of Reddit.
What 4chan says, self-deprecatingly, is "I will offend all your sensibilities. Oh you're still here? Ok, here's what I have to say."
In my opinion (it's impossible to know for sure) most of it is pretense. There aren't actually as many racists, homophobes, sexists etc. It's satirically amplified as a form of gatekeeping.
It's a great example of how irony often doesn't really exist.
Oh you were only playing at being a total arsehole ironically? That's not actually a good thing, and you've helped give cover to actual arseholes, spread their message and hatred, and now people have died. And all because you think it's fun to be edgy. Congrats.
History is written by the winners.
No one is objectively good because they are human after all. Hippies had good values, but also bad ones such as: uncleanliness, irresponsible drug use, parasitism, thoughtlessness, and sometimes even vanity.
So in addition to them being homophobes, they are also closeted homosexuals?
Why is it that this is such a popular insult among people here on HN? It's like this strange and incoherent insult from lefties where they think they're being supportive of gay people by calling out homophobia as bad, but also calling the homophobe gay to hurt them in some manner, which would imply that being gay is an insult. I suppose your defense might be that being gay is an insult to the homophobe, but why specifically would you call a homophobe gay, without further information? It erodes any assumption I'd have that you genuinely respect gay people if you're willing to just toss around some claims that this person or that group is gay.
And if I thought someone was a gay homophobe, putting aside any argument with them I have otherwise, I'd probably feel somewhat bad for them to be in that position.
Anyway, we both know that you're an edgelord. That's why you wrote that sentence. So quit hating on people who are just like you. You're like a closeted homophobe, but for 4chan edgelords.
That's an interesting point I haven't heard of before, thanks :)
https://harpers.org/archive/2016/04/legalize-it-all/
> “You want to know what this was really all about?” he asked with the bluntness of a man who, after public disgrace and a stretch in federal prison, had little left to protect. “The Nixon campaign in 1968, and the Nixon White House after that, had two enemies: the antiwar left and black people. You understand what I’m saying? We knew we couldn’t make it illegal to be either against the war or black, but by getting the public to associate the hippies with marijuana and blacks with heroin, and then criminalizing both heavily, we could disrupt those communities. We could arrest their leaders, raid their homes, break up their meetings, and vilify them night after night on the evening news. Did we know we were lying about the drugs? Of course we did.”
not to defend 4chan, but this kind of categorical and imprecise summarization of a group of people is strongly similar to the things that my (very) hippy parents were told by their (very) straight-laced parents.
People in this thread are reducing all of 4chan to a board meant not to be taken seriously (/b/) and a containment board intended to keep far-right conservative discussions off of other boards (/pol/). Then they're somehow contorting the offensiveness of what goes on at those two boards as evidence that they can't be counter-cultural because "true" counter-culture apparently can't be offensive?
> The hippies are rooted in things like naiveté, lust, drugs, immorality, communism, apathy, and atheism.
There is a sense in the more liberal communities that cultures are good-by-definition. They do mental gymnastics to ensure that any harmful cultural artifacts (e.g. slavery) are explained away as "not really culture, but a product of external forces" (e.g. imperialism).
I have never felt the need to do this: some cultures are on-the-whole bad, and that does not disqualify them from being cultures.
>The hippies were rooted in things that were objectively good: peace, [...]
>That contrasts sharply with 4chan’s demographics and motivations.
I know I shouldn't criticize the Current War lest I be accused of supporting the Current Enemy, but I just can't help but point out the irony here.
>bunch of closeted homophobic, racist, sexist, emotionally and mentally stunted
[italics mine]
Surely you must see the problem with this clause.
Not every single user, quiet majority still goes there for (some of the) content and discussions are ignored. But once you open them its the same mess. It wasn't dominant so much before but it is like that now. Sparks of sanity drowning in pitiful empty statements. I don't know user details but it feels like bunch of frustrated teenagers who are racing to show who is more depraved and depressed, mixed with adults who are failures in real life and ventilate their anger and hate on such places (I don't believe it works for more than few seconds but its probably as addictive as cigarettes mentally).
“ At 75 I am in the baby boom and I was in the counter culture. Lets just say from 1965 to 1985. The counter culture was driven by the Vietnam war. Reciprocal to the war was the peace witness inspired by the Quakers. During this same period, instances of cheap real estate and low cost apartments and free places to live existed. Also developing the skills needed for living a counter culture life were helped along by, unemployment insurance. Unemployment irregularly functioned as a cost of living help when I went back to junior college to study film and sewing.”
I tend to disagree that these are objectively good.
One argument against is that any society that holds these as ideals will quickly be over run by societies that don't.
Being disagreeable can have adaptive advantages.
Counterculture is when most of your beliefs align with what the Raytheon PR pushes out. That's how you punk in 2020s.
