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).
I agree that now counterculture sits with the deplorables. The old style stuff has been fully adopted by the mainstream.
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.)
[1] https://www.brookings.edu/articles/the-lying-flat-movement-s...
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.
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]
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.
Impenetrable jargon. Like that VM/protocol/cloud/blockchain mashup that gets mentioned occasionally. Um... Urbit. That's it.
Ah. Crypto.
Relevant new book on crypto and influencers: "Easy Money", by Ben McKenzie and Jacob Silverman.
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?
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".
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.
It's just that the internet has allowed them to form communities.
