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Yeah, there was a "punk" documentary at some point that had all these modern artists going on about how influential the movement was to their music and how much they admired those artists, etc.

The punch line at the end of the movie was interviewing the original punk folks and seeing how angry they were that everybody missed the damn point. The point wasn't to imitate the "punks" well--the point was to stand against the mainstream any way you could.

> Anyone who looks at society and just sees the same dreary, banal wasteland of consumer garbage year after year is, themselves, far too mainstream to even be aware of counterculture.

I disagree. The counterculture very much ripped through to the normies in the 1960s and 1970s. So, much so that it terrified the mainstream.

Since then, the mainstream has made damn good and sure that won't happen again.

> Since then, the mainstream has made damn good and sure that won't happen again.

Sounds conspiratorial. The best you can say is psychedelics were banned, which is half of what made the hippies lose interest in their parents’ generation.

But the other half was improved communications technology, and it improved again after that so there’s no longer a way to have a single counterculture. Just because you’re into one thing about hippiedom doesn’t mean you need to sign up for all of it.

Since then there have been countercultures, but they were right-wing ones like the Moral Majority. You wouldn’t recognize those if you just think they’re being extra-normie.

> Sounds conspiratorial.

Not really. More like direct action by selfish actors.

The existence of Fox News is a direct reaction to the media being non-compliant about Vietnam. The union busting propaganda was a direct reaction to the strikes of the 70s and early 80s. And the police forces have always been the fascist tools of the moneyed class (see: Pinkertons).

No conspiracy is necessary. Elephants will sometimes trample things simply because they are in the way.

> The best you can say is psychedelics were banned, which is half of what made the hippies lose interest in their parents’ generation.

I would, in fact, reverse that statement. I posit the fact that drug usage (especially marijuana) going mainstream sapped a lot of energy from what people regarded as "counterculture".

> The punch line at the end of the movie was interviewing the original punk folks and seeing how angry they were that everybody missed the damn point. The point wasn't to imitate the "punks" well--the point was to stand against the mainstream any way you could.

I’ve been listening to a lot of 80s/90s post hardcore recently and Spotifies highly advance recommendation system has been stuffing my recs with modern post-hardcore.

so I decided to peak one of the more recent albums and remembered why I don’t listen to much punk genres past the early 00s.

The stuff from the 80s and 90s was new, different, and completely raw. Even if you don’t care for the music itself, it’s obvious that the artists were pouring themselves into the music and you could feel that.

Conversely, the modern stuff sounds “cleaner” and occasionally more technical but at the same time feels sterile and devoid of the emotional weight carried by the predecessors.

I’ve been wondering lately, there was a brief period in the 2010s when some punk derived genres (notably metalcore, deathcore and post-hardcore) were hitting mainstream charts and I kinda have to wonder if that helped kills those genres because modern charting music often is very boring.

Gaming broadly is not a counterculture, but it's generated plenty of counterculture. Gamemaking wasn't seen as a creative endeavor worth serious commentary by the mainstream culture, the effort to make it so was countercultural. A lot of indie games were (and still are) made 'in opposition to mainstream aesthetics' or mainstream concepts of narrative or play. It's harder to draw the distinctions as clearly because technology has massively sped up the cultural mixer. Youtubers and streamers have eroded what passed for mainstream game 'reporting' faster than we can decide whether that's counterculture or not. That's not something, say, zines did or could do.

Also, gaming is a heavily practiced substitute for Employment, Education and Training. For huge numbers of mostly men, it is their tune-in, turn on and drop out. It is also a nascent embrace of digital reality, a world that may quite literally end up being alternative to the real one.

If you want that kind of analysis I’m sure I could come up with one for all the things you mentioned. Music “counterculture” doesn’t really hold any special properties that other types of media can’t. Goth was basically just saying that it’s ok to be a sad teenager or it’s modern Xanax driven branches that say it’s ok to be numb. I don’t really see a difference in depth between let’s say liking violent video games as an outlet or choosing to smoke weed and play vidya in opposition to putting on a suit and getting a real job. Most cultures don’t really have a deep philosophical root - like the anti-war movement did.

Tech also has a lot of counterculture still remaining - open source being a notable one

Subcultures can have countercultures, though.

An example would be tabletop RPGs. D&D would be the mainstream within the and outside of the subculture. There's a counterculture that rejects that games should be a power fantasy (as in fantasize, not as in elves and dwarves) about killing people and taking their stuff.

I'm not sure D&D is actually that mainstream inside the subculture. It's a commercially successful brand, and it often serves as an introduction to tabletop RPGs. But other games and other styles have been popular since at least the 80s, and the games people buy are not necessary the games they play. A commercial RPG is essentially a framework for telling your stories. Even if you play weekly, you don't have to buy new products every year to continue playing.

People who play tabletop RPGs as a long-term hobby tend to focus more on the setting than on the ruleset. They choose a setting, which has implications on what kind of characters they will play, what kind of stories they will tell, and which ruleset is the most appropriate for that. Once a campaign is over, they often want to try another setting. Because there are only a few commercial D&D settings, the game after D&D is likely not D&D.

This is a bit of a tangent to my original point but picking up a different game because D&D doesn't do the setting you want isn't the counterculture I was talking about.

As an example, say your group decides they want to play a group of super-soldiers roaming around WW2 Europe killing ever bigger and badder Nazis while gaining more abilities and better equipment. You then pick up GURPS or D20 Modern or whatever. That's not counterculture, it's the same experience but reskinned and with different mechanics.

What I'd consider counterculture to be is something like Night Witches, which is still set in WW2 but is a very different play experience and tells a very different kind of story.

(It may be that I am missing your point and that we are actually somewhat in agreement.)

I meant that tabletop RPGs have "always" been more diverse than D&D, GURPS, and other games like that.

A kind of realism became popular in the 80s. Combat was supposed to be deadly, and even experienced characters could die due to bad luck in any routine fight. You were always expected to consider whether there were better approaches to the situation than fighting. Another variant of this trend was cosmic horror, where you might be able to fight the minions, but the actual villains were far beyond your characters. If you encountered them, your only choice was to flee, and the expected outcome of a campaign was a descent into madness.

In the 90s, (A)D&D started falling into obscurity due to poor business decisions. Many games of that time emphasized storytelling and role-playing over combat and other game mechanical considerations. Key D&D mechanics such as hit points, character levels, and extreme character progression were often considered obsolete. (But video games eventually brought them back to tabletop gaming.)

The 2000s saw the return of game mechanics, both in the form of D&D and the rise of experimental rule systems. Once common idea was that game mechanics should be used for resolving outcomes rather than actions. For example, you first discussed your plans for the battle, then resolved it with a few die rolls (or maybe with no dice at all), and then you narrated the events. Many designers explored games with an extremely narrow focus. For example, the rules would assume that you were playing minions of a villain who treated you badly. The situation got progressively worse, and you were eventually expected to try to overthrow the villain.

I'm less familiar with games from the 2010s, because life has taken me around the world and there have been fewer opportunities for gaming. But I'm still involved in organizing a largeish volunteer-run gaming convention. Based on what I see there, D&D-style games have not become that dominant.

I see. That's good then, because from where I sit D&D is the 800-lbs gorilla that dominates mind-share especially among newcomers. Nothing wrong with liking it, I guess I feel that more people should be aware that there's so much more.

Was that 'My Life with Master' you were referring to?

It looks like the game was My Life with Master. I was more familiar with the Finnish translation.

Then by your definition, here are some countercultures to the dominant globalist-corportate-captialist one:

Green/Solar Punk/Drawdown: deeply against the status quo of endless growth

Socialism/anti-work: alive and well and unsettling corporatists everywhere.

Tiny House/Van life/Minimalist/Homesteading: all variants on rejecting traditional consumerism.

Wokeness/anti-racism/Me too: gets a lot of visability, sure but a huge change in which groups hold and share power.

Trumpism/anti-globalist/nationalism: a giant challenge to the established order of the 21st century.