“The internet didn’t kill counterculture- you just won’t find it on instagram” by Caroline Busta goes into detail about the effects on social media and current political discussions and how counterculture has evolved from the early 90s until now. Busta insists that one cannot be countercultural in the present because of the forced expression of social media. More accurately, social media forces everyone on its platforms to express themselves, which is easier due to the lack of scrutiny that is offered when you express yourself online. Additionally, even if you aren’t lovingly accepted as you are, your existence and offer to the current political discussions are encouraged if “countercultural” because they engender those of all beliefs, which leads to more arguments, which lead to more sensational clicks. In short, they create more revenue for the platform hosted.
Personally, I thought the article was interesting at first. It does make some very valid points about social media and how people can often utilize utter minimalism for social currency, until it’s time to really “speak up” and “make a change”. There is a short section where Busta makes an analogy about the way counter cultural beliefs are used to further one’s persona on social media, saying “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.” (Busta). The analogy paints those social media users as idealistic who wish to make change, but believe their best tool is the platform that uses their own words against them. In another paragraph, Busta introduces and defines a term created by Joshua Citarella named “e-dologies”, which are “‘radical politics as a form of niche personal branding’”, (Busta). Busta then goes on to note how anarcho-primitivism, a political desire to return hunter-gatherer times, despite being fairly divisive in real life, has garnered a strong online community. Busta mainly refers to subscribers of the Youtube channel, Primitive Technology as followers of this belief and then criticizes how despite focusing on technologies made purely from nature, it was recorded on a phone and posted to social media.
Busta has some strong arguments but there are just some points that she makes that feel very dated. I do agree with the fact that counterculture can no longer exist on social media as social media uses political ideologies and identities to encourage clicks while simultaneously suppressing those same users, in the situation they are anything outside of “the norm”. For example, TikTok has a history of suppressing black, POC, queer, and fat creators while simultaneously encouraging “discussions” about these types of indentities and issues within these communities. TikTok, as a social media platform, encourages harmful political “discussions'' with those that exist outside of western cultural norms because it encourages countless more videos and clicks. I digress.
Some of the points Busta makes about counterculture seem to be more about points of shocking the general public in the act of making a statement, rather than actual movements or actions that encourage any type of positive change. Busta calls upon right-wing conspiracy theory QAnon as counter cultural in spirit, along with GG Allin as an icon of counter culture in the early 90s. In reference to the early 90s, she mentions counter culture focused on upsetting on “pearl-clutching conservatives with their anti-progressive ideology and market recuperation” (Busta 2021)
There are many other paragraphs I could touch upon but in short, Busta makes very strong points about how social media capitalizes upon those that believe they can use it to create a countercultural movement. Social media can encourage a hegemony of cultural ideas that in turn harm those they claim to support or users can claim to have beliefs that they truly do not feel as connected to as they say they do. However, many other points Busta makes feel counter-counter cultural and seem more focused on opposing others and the public majority, rather than creating something worthwhile.
This article, titled “From Cyber-Autonomism to Cyber-Populism: An Ideological Analysis of the Evolution of Digital Activism” by Paolo Gerbaudo discusses the effects of social media on cyber activism and how it being intensely available has affected politics. Mainly, Gerbaudo states that many debates involving techno-politics (the intersection of politics and technology, as it modernly known) typically end with the idea that technology has deeply affected politics and ideological movements in a way that never could have been possible before. However, Gerbaudo argues that the people behind these movements have experiences outside of the technological realm that influence their beliefs and values.
When Gerbaudo makes this statement, it kind of draws my mind to how some people are born into certain social situations that radicalize them from birth, mainly noting that it is a form of privilege to “become radicalized”, because it is the idea that you are someone on the outside looking in, learning about something “so awful and terrible!” (insert shocked emoji). Although, it isn’t the only type of experience that Gerbaudo is referencing. Later on, Gerbaudo mentions that “These were exemplified by the way in which cab drivers in Cairo facilitated the circulation of information via word-of-mouth, repeating to others what they had heard from passengers about “what Facebook was saying” on any given day (2012)” (Gerbaudo 2017). Despite this specific citation being used to exemplify how social media has aided in the circulation of information pertinent to political movements, it demonstrates how the experiences and the ideas that we hear outside of it, though a source of it, influence our thinking. Many of us relate to one another simply through “word-of-mouth” conversations about “Oh, did you hear about so-and-so?” or about “how xyz thing happened here”. While these short conversations may not be complex, in-depth political discussions about social implications of these current events, they are a way in which humankind connects to each other and illustrate points and beliefs that they have themselves.
I mentioned how Gerbaudo states that politics exists solely outside of technology but that statement is inaccurate. Social media does have an influence on how information is relayed and portrayed, however it does have an existence and driving force outside of the online sphere. The way he portrays techno-politics within this essay is much more nuanced than I am capable of explaining thoroughly (mainly due to a lot of the intellectual jargon used), but in short it is not solely online or solely in-person but a delicate mixture of both that both push forward important ideas.
This article was a lot harder to read compared to the last one due to the vocabulary and sheer amount of information on the page. However, I found it much more nuanced about itself than Busta’s article about counterculture and social media. I think the jargon it uses both enlightens and is to the detriment of the article, mainly with how inaccessible it is to more casual readers, I suppose.
I agree with him about how many discussions revolving around social media and the internet often fall flat into “the techno-deterministic bias of contemporary debates”. Or more simply, countless discussions about social media, the internet and how it relates to politics, discourse, and online discussion often stay in the lane of “phone bad. Burn phone” It is important that we view and accept all aspects of social media as a 3-dimensional entity.
Bibliography
Busta, Caroline. “The Internet Didn’t Kill Counterculture—You Just Won’t Find It on Instagram.” Document Journal, 14 Jan. 2021, www.documentjournal.com/2021/01/the-internet-didnt-kill-counterculture-you-just-wont-find-it-on-instagram/
Gerbaudo, Paolo. “From Cyber-Autonomism to Cyber-Populism: An Ideological Analysis of the Evolution of Digital Activism.” TripleC: Communication, Capitalism & Critique. Open Access Journal for a Global Sustainable Information Society, vol. 15, no. 2, May 2017, pp. 477–89, https://doi.org/10.31269/triplec.v15i2.773.