Still reading the article, but this is an interesting blurb if nothing else:
"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."
I hadn't thought of boycotting much of popular online space as being counter-cultural. It's an interesting thought.
> I hadn't thought of boycotting much of popular online space as being counter-cultural. It's an interesting thought
I think the interesting part is that it's kind of counter-culture but it itself is not really a culture at all. There are no groups (as far as I know) for people who eschew social media. They don't meet up at the pub and talk about it, they don't have any kind of organization, even a loose one. People just kind of decide to wash their hands of Facebook and Instagram and Twitter and such, then go about their lives. I don't think they generally feel a part of some larger culture (or counter-culture)
Maybe I'm wrong about that. To me though it almost seems like a stand-alone complex.
Eschewing social media is not a culture in and of itself, anymore than eschewing the telephone or TV is a culture. But it is an attribute that some cultures have. Cultures have to be based around the actual ways they do interact, whether in person meetings via church groups, in person hiking groups, bike riding, falconry, camping, whatever. Similarly many people prefer to use person-to-person communication such as text messages, email, telephone calls, rather than broadcasting an edited version of their own thoughts to the world all the time. To assume that if you are not constantly engaging in this type of one-to-many communication, then you must be absolutely alone is to have serious tunnel vision.
It seems somewhat counter-cultural to not have social media and tv, though rejecting those things doesn't define a culture. I've had visitors to my house that realize I don't have a TV and they assume I'm some kind of judgemental weirdo.
I own a computer monitor I can use for gaming, streaming TV shows or movies, or just a bigger screen for my laptop.
That's the only standalone powered screen I own, but honestly I don't see any difference between that and a regular TV. TV is about watching television shows regardless of whether they are downloaded from the internet, piped through a cable channel, or received with an antenna.
Similarly people that don't own stand-alone monitors but have laptop screens or iMac screens they use to stream TV shows have TVs in my opinion. To insist that they don't because they are using wifi instead of an antenna to receive the data seems a bit pedantic.
There is a big difference between selecting content and watching it; and having a selection of curated streams. Autoplay on youtube definitely hacks away at this difference, which is probably why youtube keeps turning autoplay on for me after I turn it off.
I don't own a TV and most people here don't seem to know how to react to this information. Often they don't seem to have considered the possibility that someone wouldn't own one. I haven't watched television for entertainment in a decade or so, so I only get references which I absorb through YouTube, Twitch. I wouldn't think of myself countercultural, but it shows just how conforming many people are without realizing.
Edit: by here, I'm referring to the Midwestern United States
Edit 2: would > wouldn't
What is television now? You're watching YouTube and Twitch, so what you're really avoiding is broadcast TV. The large and growing cord cutting movement is exactly that with people using their TV as a large screen for...YouTube and Twitch.
> I don't own a TV and most people here don't seem to know how to react to this information.
Really? We don't own a TV and it's very common within my friends group. I do watch occasional shows on my laptop and we streamed the superbowl on my husband's large computer monitor screen.
But I would say not having a TV is becoming more and more common.
I didn't have a TV for a long time out of spite towards the TV licencing system in the UK and the heavy-handed way it's enforced. I'd love someone with a background in RF engineering to explain how those TV detector vans are supposed to work with modern TVs and the massively higher electromagnetic noise floor!
I expect vegans get the same, I know getting rid of my car led to some people thinking I was the green police and they had to justify why they still owned theirs.
As one of these people, totally agree. I don't really have people I sympathize with over this stuff (except a few friends with whom its a minor topic of conversation) or anything I'd consider a culture. Mostly I just deleted my accounts and moved on. On the other hand, despite the lack of other people to commiserate with, it does feel a little countercultural insofar as I'm doing something different from most people, and it sticks out on occasion.
I've similarly ghosted social networks and other "platforms" some years back. A culture is usually formed around shared experience. In the case of social media escapists there are two sets of shared experiences:
The escapists themselves are simply living their lives as usual. This sort of baseline human experience is a rare thing these days, but it doesn't get much exposure because escapists aren't likely to go out of their way to broadcast their experiences - that would be antithetical to the idea of disconnecting from social media.
Other people are wondering where the escapists have gone. Did they die? Move to Mars? Get convicted of a major crime and sentenced to a long stint in state prison? This too takes places quietly: it's not as if anyone's mounting a nationwide search to locate the escapists.
These experiences to me form a kind of bifurcated culture.
> These experiences to me form a kind of bifurcated culture.
I think what the GP was pointing at is that culture tends to have community, and there is no community of people who have fled the larger platforms (until you consider groups on mastodon, secure scuttlebutt, etc).
That's been pretty much my experience. My wife thinks I'm crazy to have deleted my Facebook and Twitter but that's really about the only interaction I have on the topic.
> I think the interesting part is that it's kind of counter-culture but it itself is not really a culture at all.
It reminds me of a chapter from Kino's adventures, where she finds a city, which has a culture of cat lovers. When she leaves them, she meets their king, who tells the story of the land: people had decided they don't need the king and any culture, so they've decided to appear to every traveller with a different culture.
However, the king says, they are not aware that that is their new culture.
Yes, I think that's an important distinction - you need a critical mass of people sharing in countercultural behavior/practices in some way to get an actual counterculture. Many people have eschewed social media for one reason or another but not in some unified way that I know of.
A culture doesn't require that people meet up and agree on some way of doing things. Hence a counterculture does not need to be organized or even acknowledged while in process. It just happens and then gets written about a decade later.
I stopped taking pictures on vacation (and other events) quite a while ago because I realized I never look at them later. So I spend the time being more focused on the actual thing, and have better memories. I wouldn't like the memory erased thing.
Does "memory" include fundamental changes to the self and perception along with personal growth due to exposure to new experiences and situations and time away from the grind?
There’s 40% of the population you’re missing that doesn’t participate in social media because their ideas have been banned. Sure, they might have a Facebook or a Twitter but nothing substantive happens there. They believe in things like gun rights, freedom of speech and religion, and they often go to meeting places called a “church”, which these days could be considered “counter-culture”. Their values don’t come from TV or Hollywood movies but instead have been passed down from generation to generation.
From my experience people from US costal states seem to think these people are a small minority (5%) and tend to be shocked every time an election comes around.
> From my experience people from US costal states seem to think these people are a small minority (5%) and tend to be shocked every time an election comes around.
I'm from the Midwest and grew up going to church just like everybody else I knew. Much of my family and friends are conservative and I still have views that I might not readily share in NYSFLA but probably would after a couple of beers because I'm not going to get crucified over them. If you honestly think conservatism isn't anything but mainstream then you are the one living in the bubble. (We literally just had trump as president!)
I had a longer comment written out before chrome crashed but the gist is Hollywood and Silicon Valley don't dictate the entirety of mainstream culture.
I'm acquainted with people on social media who find that what they write on Facebook (say) is banned by the algorithmic being that reads before you post. Sometimes posts disappear. Sometimes they get sent to the naughty corner for 7 days.
The reason for a ban is sometimes a real head scratcher, as far as I can tell, but not always.
They've tried other places to have conversations. Some of those have also been torn down.
Some have gone away. I generally don't know where to, but some are setting up their own discussion spaces. (I've recommended that to those who've asked.)
Maybe a return to a former age where you controlled your own discussion spaces. A braai/BBQ in the back yard, a table in the corner of the pub, a ten day tramp through the mountains with four friends.
Churches (specifically Christian churches) can be dead center in the culture. Or they can be solidly Christian, and still be countercultural. They might say things like:
You're looking for social unity? Politics isn't going to create that, no matter which side wins. We can show you a real social unity.
You're looking for security? The government's Covid response isn't going to give you that, even if they do it perfectly. We can tell you where you can find real security.
You're looking for happiness (or, more deeply, for joy)? You're not going to find it on Facebook, or at Walmart. We know where you can find it.
Now, you may think that Christianity can't actually supply any of that. But it claims that it can. And the point is, that claim is very countercultural.
Some things that count as churches may have sprung up to make such offers, but I am assuming most churches have been standing since before Covid, before Facebook, before Trump and Obama and Bush.
If say 40% of people are attending these gatherings, it's a tough sell that they are so far from mainstream as to be countercultural.
People have been visiting churches in search of unity, security, and joy for thousands of years.
Traditionally, they say that because even when their outward trappings are all over popular culture, they know that their core message is difficult to live out in practice, and most of the people who show up aren't doing it.
I think there will be such a group but you won’t know about them because they won’t be on social media telling people about it. I don’t think their identity will be anti-social media, but an identity to strive for a slower way of life.
It doesn’t need to be a culture, or atomized in that way. It isn’t a statement of identity, either.
It is being intentional about one’s time, attention, and emotions. Me, I play a lot more guitar these days, and really enjoy having something that I can learn.
Social media just doesn’t work for me. I can’t deal with a constant stream of people dumping their emotions. I’m aware that most other people can. And that’s fine. But I’m happier just ignoring it and working hard on work, family life, and guitar.
>There are no groups (as far as I know) for people who eschew social media. They don't meet up at the pub and talk about it, they don't have any kind of organization, even a loose one.
Hacker News is basically that culture. A lot of people here spend their time complaining about how much they hate every aspect of social media, the web and modern culture (except for HN, of course) and make a point of virtue-signaling how unplugged, and detached from the mainstream they are, including their refusal to touch any form of social media.
I think it's fair to say that a part of the userbase here has built a cultural identity around its contrarianism.
Yet there are groups here that tend to downvote certain not necessarily evil views to oblivion. For example if you support capitalism and in context write your opinion in favour of some events, expect a rain of downvotes or if you dare to criticise Apple. Quite ironic.
I don't see any particular irony. Hacker News has always accepted that downvotes for any reason are allowed, because upvotes for any reason are allowed. It's not surprising that in a contrarian culture, casual downvotes would be commonplace.
The analogy to Cixin Liu's "dark forest" concept also seems apt and enlightening. (Basically: it's a game theoretic response to the Fermi Paradox that suggests that any sensible galactic civilization would avoid making contact with any other civilization and attempt to stay hidden.)
More and more over the past few years, I've seen my own social circles migrate away from public forums like Facebook and Twitter and into private WhatsApp group chats, Discord groups, and so on.
In some cases these are groups of people I know in real life, and in some cases everyone is anonymous or pseudonymous.
And there is definitely an unspoken rule of "don't unilaterally invite anyone, don't advertise that this group exists, stay hidden, we like what we have going on here."
It's in some ways a reversion to the style of older private Usenet/BBS/IRC channels, but in other respects it's a lateral move. For one, it's still mostly happening on centralized platforms.
What I think is interesting is how our media ecology (in the sense of media as means we communicate and express ourselves, not "mass media") is an interplay between these big public spaces and a proliferation of smaller private spaces. It's not _just_ a dark forest, there's also a bright canopy into which people emerge, forage, and carry back down into the forest.
The thing that I hate about what social media has done is that it is resistant to persistance of knowledge. I grew up in the heyday of forums (late 90s to mid-late 00s).
It seems like a lot of these groups have moved to facebook (or discord, or whatsapp), and now a lot of that knowledge for specialty stuff is unsearchable and behind a wall.
One of my hobbies is boatbuilding, and there is a LOT of good material that is still available on forums since they just happily sit there seemingly forever, and are easy to archive. But a lot of the new stuff is now done on FB, and it means that knowledge gets pushed to the bottom of the feed, and it is impossible to archive.
My feeling is that the switch to algorithmic feed-based discussion is a serious regression for a lot of interest groups.
An excellent illustration of this is Stack Overflow. They take after the forum model of preserving knowledge to the degree that they shut down discussions that have happened before. Stack Overflow's database of solutions brings literally billions in value to the world, and it simply would not work without persistance of information.
> But a lot of the new stuff is now done on FB, and it means that knowledge gets pushed to the bottom of the feed, and it is impossible to archive.
Are there any maintained Facebook scrapers, akin to youtube-dl? I think there's definitely a need for /r/datahoarder style archiving of certain parts of social media.
The Dark Forest analogy strikes me as apt as well. All of the best (most interesting, most active, most insightful) groups that I belong to are off of the public internet these days. Some of them are just small Discord servers, some are even more heavily encrypted groups on Signal, Mattermost, or Mastadon. But what they have in common is that not everyone is welcome, and we don't even advertise our presence.
I think there is something similar at work with decentralized platforms: they might never be as slick as their centralized counterparts, but it’s a kind of ascetic choice that opens new doors.
Do people perceive popular platform UI's as 'slick'? To me they always seemed like a mess that is insane to navigate because the company's massive org chart digests into a massive turd that gets smeared over the landing page. Facebook is the worst, but they all seem to have this problem.
One big problem with decentralized platforms is that, while technologically and conceptually fascinating, they offer a complex and not average-user-friendly UX.
Users are so inured by the down-to-earth, nanny-ready, repetitive and instant-gratification driven UIs of mainstream platforms that many of them have a hard time just understanding where to start with the decentralized ones.
What part of PeerTube's UX is complex compared to Youtube? You just click the videos and search in the search box. To leave comments you type them and click submit.
Uploading a video is also WAY easier than Youtube, because Youtube assumes you've used their interface a ton, so they don't have to try to make it as friendly. Dominant players tend to think that way - I'm the big guy so YOU should have to learn to think like ME
But to just open an account, average Joe (and his grandma) has to grasp the concept of an "instance", which is confusing because it's so different to his habit of just digit the letter y on his browser or tap the Youtube icon on his smartphone.
Also, he doesn't need to use the search box at all most of the time, because his feed is powered by algos that are programmed on the same lines of those found in slot machines. So he just keep scrolling, like a gambler keeps pulling the slot bar at a casino.
So, like I said, the fediverse is a fascinating concept, but, at least at this time, is for people who explicitly want a different kind of experience, because its UX can't compete with mainstream social media. And perhaps, this may be also a good thing.
I think there is something slick about them, if you just go with what they put in front of you. Don't try to navigate beyond a very high level, just take what it brings and hope for that momentary reward that comes from the likes and the comments.
I find this is a good way to learn. Comfortable mega-platforms don't really foster anything productive (generalizing, obviously) but when you start to play with the bleeding edge decentralized options it allows you see "what could be".
Trying to rid my life of google has opened all sorts of doors. If you're a tinkerer there are a plethora of options available for you to customize your experience and discover new capabilities.
The fact the contents are text and many prefer texting to voice calls for one? It may not be high art or even proper grammar but it is still literate.
Plus it demonstrates how vacuous defining something by what it is not really is - you can put anything in that hole.
To give a deliberately stupid as possible version - have you ever eaten toxic ocean snails? No? Then you are part of the not eating ocean cone snails hedgemony oppressing us all by their force of the not eating ocean snail ways.
I've been thinking exactly that. The problem is that the average internet user would have to:
- buy a domain name (and pay for it every year)
- rent hosting (cheapest provider is probably DO at 5$/month)
- setup your machine so that it's secure enough it doesn't end up hacked
- setup whatever is needed to publish content in your machine (could be as simple as HTML, but then the average internet user doesn't know HTML. It could be wordpress... But then you have to install it by yourself)
It's a lot of hassle for the average internet user. The worst case scenario: you end up paying ~70$/year for something you have no idea how to setup property. Beast case scenario: some startup takes over the hassle for you for "only" 50$/year... But that's not that different from Facebook (except that you would "own" a domain name and a host you have no idea how to "own").
I don't think it's that hard or expensive to build and host a static site. You could even use github.io if you're desperate.
Hard for the average person? Probably, because most people aren't good with technology. But there are a lot of tools and support out there, for anyone motivated enough to learn.
I don't think the article gets to the heart of the matter of why online platforms are not countercultural. The main reason, in my understanding, is that they still are selling the vision of the individual as rebel, and individual expression as our unique combination of consumer choices; Instagram is the perfect example and the logical conclusion of Individual Choice being our highest expression.
Nothing about that dynamic is countercultural any more.
There are still online interactions though. Communities trading tracks and collaborating musically online. Torrenting. Open source software projects.
I wouldn't call it counter-culture. Sounds more like taking a prominent cultural metanarrative about the evils of social media (which has been authored and perpetuated by many papers of record over the last several years), and embracing its implicit call to action.
It's play-acting rebellion in a pre-aproved manner
Well, if everyone is an attention seeker online trying to pitch their own line of BS and side hustling, then not using social media, or being genuine there, is counter to culture.
"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."
I hadn't thought of boycotting much of popular online space as being counter-cultural. It's an interesting thought.