Counterculture these days doesn't want to be seen, has a hunger for freedom, desires secret scenes and scarce objects. A dark forest, not a “clearnet’
Joshua Citarella, Choose Your Future, 2020. C-prints on Dibond, 65 3/4 x 57 5/8 in. Courtesy of the artist. Photo: Joshua Citarella.
As the first line of this brilliant essay from Document says, look up the word “counter-culture” on Google and the term returns often black and white photos of people who are now all aged over 60.
You’ll also see a movement of youth who could clearly identify the “powers that be” to resist - the sharp-suited and the uniformed. In 2021, radical dissent wildly expressed makes money for tech platforms (if the dissenters choose them as a medium): “What logic could possibly be upended by punks, goths, gabbers, or neo-pagans when the internet, a massively lucrative space of capitalization, profits off the personal expression and political conflict of its users?”
And never mind the suits, says the piece, “the most iconic tells you’ll find among the big tech set are more likely to be a black turtleneck, a Patagonia fleece, and the absence of carrying bags. It’s a flex to be visually indistinguishable from the crowd…Actual power keeps a low profile; actual power doesn’t need a social media presence, it owns social media.”
So is the idea of a counter-culture just over? The Document writer, Caroline Busta, startlingly outlines what might still be counter to this Matrix of the present. There are a few highlights in the extract - we’ll bold them below - which will chime with those of you who’ve been reading A/UK for a while:
Counterculture requires a group. Us against the world. And the internet is excellent at bringing groups together around collective dissent. But just like the internet, there is nothing inherently socially progressive about these tools.
Extinction Rebellion is countercultural in spirit but so too are QAnon, the armed right-wing libertarian Boogaloo Boys, and Europe’s Reichsbürger, who deny the existence of present-day Germany, claiming to be citizens of the Third Reich (which, they argue, technically never ended).
A truth specific to our time is that dissent against one level of authority is now very often driven by a deeper hegemonic force. Perhaps this is why, among many younger people (Greta Thunberg notwithstanding), there is less focus on battling current leaders and more interest in divining counter-futures.
Instead of attempting to dismantle the master’s house using the master’s tools, it’s more something like: Let’s pool crypto to book the master’s Airbnb and use the tools we find there to forge a forest utopia that the master could never survive.
Central to this counter-future crafting is a strong belief in impending ecological collapse, rendering all the existing systems of control obsolete—which is a logical work-around for thinking about dissent in a time when the socially and ecologically corrosive systems are deemed too sprawling to effectively counter or boycott.
Another key factor is Gen Z’s rediscovery of PoliticalCompass.org, a Web 1.0 site that, via six sets of prompts with which a user is asked to dis/-identify, generates an approximate position on the Political Compass’s X/Y axis of Left to Right, Authoritarian to Libertarian.
Having spent the past several years intensively studying the development of Gen Z’s online political expression, artist Joshua Citarella points to the emergence of “e-deologies, radical politics as a form of niche personal branding.”
In his 2019 report 20 Interviews [available on Patreon], Citarella underscores the influence of Political Compass and gaming more generally on ideations of countercultural participation—or what he refers to as a “choose your character / choose your future” mode of “identity play that gained heightened relevance as American politics subsumed all of pop culture” during the mid-2010s.
Among the political identities one finds in this space is, for example: “Ted was right” anarcho-primitivism (anprim), which, following Ted Kaczynski’s Industrial Society and Its Future manifesto, promotes a reactionary return to pre-agrarian times where people, reskilled as hunters and gatherers, are no longer alienated from their labor and seek fulfillment through daily survival.
If you think this sounds fringe, consider the 10.3 million users currently subscribed to the Primitive Technology channel on YouTube, which has tutorialized building things “in the wild completely from scratch using no modern tools or materials, […] seeing how far you can go without utilizing modern technology”—except, of course, the device you use to stream the video showing you how.
The names of these e-deologies tend to be both fantastical and literal. A “post-civilizationist” might focus on what optimal human survival would look like were civilization no longer possible. A “voluntarist post-agrarianist,” meanwhile, might value anarcho-primitivism skills but see them as integral to realizing a civilization sustained through opt-in agrarian communes.
Elsewhere on the compass, one finds the likes of “Fully Automated Luxury Gay Space Communism” (where a total embrace of technology delivers humanity from scarcity, ecological volatility, and the reactionary social ills of resource competition) and the defiantly neo-traditionalist “technocratic theocracy,” which puts its faith in a machine-governed future that upholds Christian virtues.
E-deologies are further explored on message boards and social media via memes, TikTok posts, and livestreamed Twitch and YouTube debates, all of which can get pretty gnarly (calls for “eco-fash global genocide” and “secession of white ethnostates,” etc.)
And maybe here, we do have an aesthetic counter to the wallflower non-style of Big Tech: a raging messy semiotic meltdown of radicalizing (if absurdist) meme culture where the only ideological no-go zone is the liberal center.
Key here is that most of this activity is happening under the guise of avatars, pseudonyms, and collectively run social media accounts where direct lines between IRL [in real life] subjects and online personas are rarely clear. The “niche personal branding” is gamified—push an account to the extreme, see what happens. If the platform shuts you down, start over.
While climate change is a shared concern for many younger people, their responses might be more accurately understood as competitive-futurist than countercultural.
As the greatly imaginative range of Political Compass positions illustrates, there is little consensus over who or what they are specifically opposing. This is wise in an era when the complexity of global crises makes it exceedingly difficult to effectively isolate responsible parties.
How would one even begin to hold, say, Apple accountable for all of the externalities within the life of an iPhone? Who among us could easily give up our connectivity and still be economically and socially okay?
It’s as if, having grown up on a fully networked Earth, Gen Z has bypassed counterculture, finding it futile in the face of a hegemonic system that more clearly resembles a Hydra than the monolithic forces that legacy counterculture was rebelling against.
Intuiting that any activity directly opposing the system will only make the system stronger, the next generation is instead opting for radical hyperstition: constructing alternative futures that abandon our current infrastructure entirely (the emergence of blockchain-based currencies, for instance, or calls to not merely reform but fully abolish the police).
While Citarella’s research focuses on teenagers who began posting online around 2016 (and in 2020 are roughly 18 years old), it nevertheless distills the changing nature of contemporary countercultural activity more broadly.
For one, anonymity, or at least pseudonymity, is increasingly important if not fundamental to being active online in counter-hegemonic ways. This is very different from, say, 1990s ideations of IRL counterculture, where there was a premium on unmediated authenticity and “being real” (think MTV Unplugged).
Now, “selling out” is tying your online identity to your IRL life and real name. In part, this is because one of the biggest impediments to countercultural activity is the fact that the internet doesn’t suppress expression—it forces you to express and then holds you accountable for whatever you say for years.
On the platform, silence isn’t an option, at least not if you want the network to remember you exist. This is especially true in the culture sector, where being visible means being kept in mind for gigs and collaborations. There is a reason why talented young rappers must be equally talented at social media marketing if they ever hope to build a career.
We saw this dynamic metastasize in the wake of George Floyd’s murder, when well-intentioned claims of “silence is violence” (recalling the powerful 1987 ACT-UP “Silence = Death” campaign) spiraled into calling out individuals with even a small following who hadn’t come forward with a timely public statement of solidarity or remorse.
Yet public posts were subject to popular scrutiny and judged based on sincerity, originality, and tone. Not surprisingly, many people defaulted to posting a somber plain black square. But this generated criticism of its own by clogging the feed with an informational blackout during a moment when community resource sharing was critically important.
Amid a chaotic time, the platform functioned exactly as designed: amplification of emotions, uptick in user interaction, growth in platform engagement and data cultivation. Cha-ching, the platform cashes in.
What’s really messed up about this is that users, despite understanding that the platform’s mechanics are net-bad, still feel a moral responsibility to obey the platform-enabled-hive-mind’s rules.
On the dark edges of the early internet, hackers foresaw the enclosure of the public commons long before the likes of Snowden and teenage Gen Z. These users developed an ethos that valued the radical freedom of a fully anonymous, hyperconnected zone where people could communicate unburdened by their physical bodies and government names.
Joshua Citarella, Instagram post featuring Jogging, Bravo’s Gallery Girls’ Angela Pham as Lululemon Yoga Mom holding up ‘Doritos Locos Taco Masterlocked Shut’ (2012) during yoga routine inside of a California forest fire (Part 1), 2013, August 15, 2020. Courtesy of the artist.
As online activity began to centralize around search engines, such as Netscape, Explorer, and Google, in the late-’90s and early-’00s, the internet bifurcated into what became known as the “clearnet,” which includes all publicly indexed sites (i.e., big social media, commercial platforms, and anything crawled by major search engines) and the “darknet” or “deep web,” which is not publicly indexed (due to being built on anonymized, encrypted networks such as Tor).
There were also a number of sites that though officially clearnet, laid the groundwork for a sub-clearnet space that we might think of as a “dark forest” zone—particularly message board forums like Reddit and 4chan, where users can interact without revealing their IRL identity or have this activity impact their real-name SEO.
Taken from the title of Chinese sci-fi writer Liu Cixin’s 2008 book, “the dark forest” region of the web is becoming increasingly important as a space of online communication for users of all ages and political persuasions. In part, this is because it is less sociologically stressful than the clearnet zone, where one is subject to peer, employer, and state exposure.
It also now includes Discord servers, paid newsletters (e.g., Substack), encrypted group messaging (via Telegram, etc.), gaming communities, podcasts, and other off-clearnet message board forums and social media. One forages for content or shares in what others in the community have retrieved rather than accepting whatever the platform algorithms happen to match to your data profile.
Additionally, dark forest spaces are both minimally and straightforwardly commercial. There is typically a small charge for entry, but once you are in, you are free to act and speak without the platform nudging your behavior or extracting further value.
It is also interesting to keep in mind that the dark forest shares the same cables and satellite arrays as clearnet channels, is accessed via the same devices, and essentially all of its denizens continue to simultaneously participate in clearnet spaces (as contemporary professional protocol demands). It is therefore not analogous to legacy countercultural notions of going off-grid or “dropping out.”
To be sure, none of these spaces are pure, and users are just as vulnerable to echo chambers and radicalization in the dark forest as on pop-stack social media. But in terms of engendering more or less counter-hegemonic potential, the dark forest is more promising because of its relative autonomy from clearnet physics (the gravity, velocity, and traction of content when subject to x algorithm).
Unlike influencers and “blue checks,” who rely on clearnet recognition for income, status, and even self-worth, dark forest dwellers build their primary communities out of clearnet range—or offline in actual forests, parks, and gardens (e.g., cottagecore and related eco-social trends)—and then only very selectively or even absurdly/incoherently show themselves under clearnet light.
The crux of Liu Cixin’s book is the creed, when called by the clearnet: “Do not answer! Do not answer!! Do not answer!!! But if you do answer, the source will be located right away. Your planet will be invaded. Your world will be conquered.”
So what does today’s counterculture look like?
It’s not particularly interested in being seen—at least not in person. It gets no thrill out of wearing leather and a mohawk and walking past main-street shops, which are empty now anyway.
But it does demonstrate a hunger for freedom—freedom from the attention economy, from atomization, and the extractive logic of mainstream communication.
We can imagine collectively held physical spaces reclaimed from empty retail or abandoned venues hosting esoteric local scenes
a proliferation of digital gangs in dark forests who hold secrets dear
and a new desire for scarcity in cultural objects—deeper and closer connections made between people even while rejecting the platform’s compulsion to “like and share.”
In the internet era, true counterculture is difficult to see, and even harder to find—but that doesn’t mean it’s not there.
More here. Joseph Citarella’s work is further explored in this feature.