Yes, There Can Be a Completely Digital Counterculture!
thought digest, 01.13.2025
I’ll keep today’s thought digest short.
Over on Notes, I’ve been having an interesting back-and-forth with Nicholas Carr about whether a digital counterculture can exist. I argue that it can and already does. In just the last decade, we’ve seen at least two examples of digital countercultures evolving, being discovered, and eventually getting absorbed into the mainstream. Edgy corners of both the Right and Left grew on imageboards, forums, and indeed, even social media—thriving on rejecting the norms of not just our dominant culture, but sanitized, corporate social media, only to eventually influence and be swallowed by it.
Carr makes a compelling point, though: maybe what I’m describing is better categorized as subculture rather than counterculture. He argues that a true counterculture would reject the Internet entirely, a “log-off” movement. While an offline resistance is growing—and, ironically, so is a profitable cottage industry to go with it—I think it’s too narrow to define counterculture solely as opting out of the medium altogether.
Resistance can and does take multiple forms.
The Internet today is split between what I call the normie Internet and the subterranean Internet. The normie Internet is the glossy, commercialized space where most of us spend our time: viral TikToks, Twitter discourse, and Instagram that eventually filter their way into mainstream culture. It’s the domain of Big Name Creators, mukbangs and viral challenges, and “nontent”—content that exists solely to exist.
By contrast, the subterranean Internet is built on an approximation of anonymity, or at the very least, the rejection of clout, and hostility to outsiders. This is a broad and maybe even vague term, but as far as countercultures are concerned it lurks beneath virality. Discord servers, obscure meme pages, forums. These spaces have high barriers to entry, and they reject the mainstream values of visibility and monetization. To enter these communities, you have to be fluent in their language, norms, and even humor. You have to be okay with cruelty or taboo topics. You have to be online in the right ways. They are, in many ways, the polar opposite of the commercial Internet.
Carr argues that these spaces aren’t countercultural because they’re not new—they’re a continuation of the anonymous, underground culture that defined the early Internet before it became commercialized. To him, this makes them more of a subculture that has gone underground rather than a counterculture. He also raises an, I think, useful question: does this Subterranean Internet pose any real threat to the Mainstream Internet, or does it just function as a hidden factory, producing content that eventually gets co-opted and commercialized?
This is where we disagree.
While it’s true that much of today’s underground culture shares DNA with early web culture, I don’t see it as mere preservation or retreat—it’s rebellion. These users grew up immersed in the sanitized, corporate Internet, and their rejection of it is a direct reaction to the environments they were raised in. These communities aren’t nostalgic, or at least not primarily nostalgic. They’re forging something new in response to an increasingly algorithm-driven, commercialized digital world wherein everyone is a “creator.”
The question remains whether these underground spaces can avoid the fate of their predecessors—being co-opted and commercialized. But even if they are absorbed, the cycle itself is significant. It’s proof that resistance to the corporate Internet is alive and evolving. Whether this rebellion can sustain itself or whether it will always be absorbed by the machine is an open question.
MISSED CONNECTIONS
Bill: we talked on gchat. I don’t remember where we met. You had a show on public access. I think you might be another Bill, one I’ve seen on Twitter, but I’m not sure.
ME AROUND THE WEB
For UnHerd, why I think we should care more about Meta’s AI pivot than Zuck’s new Libertarian persona. And not all for the worst, either.
Also for UnHerd, why I think social media might start to resemble CharacterAI.
Over at The Dispatch, why wokeness was never a religion.
And at The Spectator, the blight of virtual molestation.
A MESSAGE FROM THE DOLPHIN RELIGION
Draw a hot bath and turn off all the lights, letting darkness cradle you. Slip beneath the water and quietly listen for the gentle echoes of dolphin song. Keep any messages you received from the water’s embrace in a handwritten journal. Share them with me when you feel called to do so.
Submit missed connections, personals, and advice questions to me directly or by voice, on Telbee. I am also accepting submissions!
I'm EXTREMELY interested in all the multiple forms of counterculture forming, and the ways they might intersect with the one I come from (predating the 50's in which I was born). And because the mainstream is more than happy to monetize anything they can squeeze a dime from, all the countercultures run through there at one vector or another. Attacking and/or being subsumed from the inside AND out! (Sounds like life on the food chain to me!)
My 16-year-old son's use of the Internet is WAY closer to mine in the old BBS/Forum days than what it might have been ten years ago or so. What is different is that there is an electronic diaphragm now between those spaces and the mass Internet where as back when I was a kid they were wholly self-contained.