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Another reading is that there is no more counterculture because it won and became the culture.


I get where you are coming from but in my mind, when mutating into the dominant culture it loses vital, essential characteristics.

Counterculture, modified by the relentless shameless drive to "make it", and the acceptance of operating within existing systems, is no longer a counterculture.

My point being a question; did counterculture truly win or was it subsumed and perverted?


"And that, I think, was the handle - that sense of inevitable victory over the forces of old and evil. Not in any mean or military sense; we didn't need that. Our energy would simply prevail. We had all the momentum; we were riding the crest of a high and beautiful wave. So now, less than five years later, you can go up on a steep hill in Las Vegas and look west, and with the right kind of eyes you can almost see the high-water mark - that place where the wave finally broke and rolled back." - Hunter S Thompson


Over the past ten-ish years I've often wondered what HST would make of our current society... not much good, I'm afraid.


arguably, no. counterculture ceases to exist when it becomes dominant culture, but it's not that "it won" - countercultural concepts are either adopted into mainstream culture through a widespread genuine desire for change (no longer countercultural, simply cultural), or they're vapidly recuperated (see chain stores like Hot Topic or Zumiez, if you're in the US) into commodity goods.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Recuperation_(politics)

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Society_of_the_Spectacle




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