Reframing the Counter-culture
OK, OK. So, You Are Not So Smart has caught onto the Situationist-era idea that the mainstream feeds upon the oblique edges, which I suppose means that the idea is no longer new to anyone reading this. It’s accepted.
However, it bothers me that this is used as an excuse to give up on the counterculture.
There *is* a machine. It feeds on counter-culture, and it’s fairly resistant to subversion. It is also something worth subverting, insomuch as it is not perfect.
We live in an information ecosystem. There are particular memes that are much more widespread than others, and they constitute a threat to info-diversity. The dominant memes incorporate more fringe memes into themselves, and there is a turnover.
As much as mammalian hierarchies dominate various counterculture streams, the counterculture represents a novelty-aggregation mechanism that is necessary to the survival of the entire ecosystem. The backlash against mainstreaming is in of itself a useful impulse, not because rare memes are more authentic but because rare memes contain more information than common memes (in the sense that, were they pulled into the mainstream, they would cause a larger change in the world). Because the initial impulse toward counterculture is a dissatisfaction with the state of the world (and a greater satisfaction with the elements of some other memeplex), finding ideas that are much closer to your ideal than the current state of the world and spreading them is a very good way of optimizing the world toward your own tastes. Even the assimilation of extreme backlashes is positive, so long as the extremes even out to some non-extreme situation (it’s good for culture to have crazy nazis around, for instance, so long as there are enough hippies to balance them out, and so long as some external factor doesn’t cause a large and otherwise moderate population to act out the will of the crazy nazis or amplify their own actions). The counterculture typically largely represents a progressive or novelty-seeking counterpart to an embedded regressive or novelty-avoiding population, both of which radically alter the set of ideas broadcast to the large middling population that doesn’t care either way about information theory or traditional family values.
So, yes: everything you love will be sold out. That isn’t a reason to abandon it; just as the end goal of having a child is to have them grow up into a full person, the end goal of supporting some counter-cultural media or idea is to have the memetic payload synthesize with and infect the almost-ubiquitous set of memetic baggage force-fed to the apathetic and ignorant masses.
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John Ohno
http://firstchurchofspacejesus.blogspot.com/