The New Counterculture

By R.U. Sirius

Attention, boomers. The forefathers of Woodstock Nation are dead. In the past 10 years, we've bid happy trails to Abbie Hoffman, Allen Ginsberg, Jerry Garcia, Jerry Rubin, William Burroughs and Timothy Leary. Of psychedelia's heavy hitters, only a tiny fragment of Ken Kesey remains.

Sorry to point this out. You're probably pausing right about now to wipe a tear from your Armani suit and thinking it's pretty much curtains for the counterculture. Maybe you're thinking that you were but a moment's sunlight fading in the grass, and epochs like the 1960s are rare in human history.

What happened? Where have all the flowers gone? Whither the revolution? Is it all just fern bars and stock options, breast implants and cappuccino frappes from here till eternity? Well, it's kind of like your parents (whom, thankfully, you did not kill, despite Jerry Rubin's urgings) tried to tell you: if you weren't so damned self-absorbed, you might learn something.

In fact, something's going on, but you don't know what it is. Look at TV advertising. The innocent kids with beads and flowers who once provided amusement have mutated into digital doods and tough grrls with nose rings and attitudes. Viewers recognize that today's teenagers aren't the young conservatives of the Reagan era. The kids are starting to seem countercultural again; we just haven't verbalized it yet.

The greatest signifier of youthful identity, pop music, was dominated throughout the '80s by the middle of the road. An undeclared countercultural youth trend first reared its spiky head at the start of the '90s with the mass popularity of "alternative" music. We see it in the ascent of neohippie raves and the creative anarchy that still holds its own on the Internet. Indeed, if thousands were identifying with small underground papers in the '60s, millions access eccentric, irreverent webzines in the '90s. And then there are those polls that show teenagers switching from cocaine or abstention to marijuana, the perennial favorite of visionary altered statesmen throughout history.

This new countercultural trend doesn't have any media-approved philosophical leaders. And while it seems to be mostly inchoate, there's a segment of it that's far more sophisticated and authentically nonconformist than Woodstock Nation ever was.

You can find it on the Net, where millions of youths log on to psychedelic bulletin boards. Read through the public conversations, and you'll start to wonder how many young psychedelic chemists conversant in biotechnology, comparative religion and visionary literature are hiding in the American heartland. Teenagers make up a near majority of the audience for DisInformation www.disinfo.com) a site that purveys antimainstream media politics and conspiracy theory to hundreds of thousands with a humor and skepticism that make Paul Krassner's Realist seem earnest and tame.

Meanwhile, rock festivals like Lollapalooza, H.O.R.D.E. and Lilith Fair bring out hundreds of thousands of kids we would have once called hippies. These kids aren't self-impressed enough to make a symbol of their mere existence a la Woodstock, but the festivals are far more multiracial and gender equal than the hippie fests of yore. And if the rock fests are too mainstream, there's always Burning Man, an annual festival in the Nevada desert that brings as many as 20,000 people together to engage in conscious acts of Dadaist performance art.

Philosophically, the simplistic pop Hinduism that was hippie spirituality has been displaced by bright young pagans: the computer-programming, anthropologically aware polymaths who have popularized the imaginative role-playing bulletin boards (MUDs and MOOs) of cyberspace. And the popular new dropout vision is Temporary Autonomous Zones, a rugged, realistic liberation doctrine that's completely purged of hippie naivete.

So, if the kids are smarter and hipper than the boomers in their prime, why aren't they changing the world? You already know the easy answers. AIDS, harder drugs, pocket-size weapons of mass destruction, global warming, economic scarcity--the world today doesn't lend itself to simplistic oppositions or easy optimism. But beyond that, the new counterculture is basically postpolitical and tribalized. The TAZ movement eschews changing the world in favor of finding some liberated space, or even a liberated moment, within it. And from goths to rastas to ravers to slackers, the focus of countercultural tribes is on evolving alternative identities. This apolitical tribalism is self-perpetuating. When you're trying to end a war or overthrow "Amerika," your cry is "Join us!" When you're trying to maintain a semioriginal identity, popularization is a threat to the purity of the tribe.

Blame it on the decentralization of media. The belief in a singular "system," and a "counterculture" in opposition to it, comes from a time when there was a consensus reality constructed of centralized media, personified by the three TV networks. We were all tuned in to the same narrative, one involving a war, a President, blacks vs. cops and narcs vs. hippies. Today's counterculturalists, raised on 60 channels of cable TV, the Net and the Web, have less impetus to fix their attention on the main event. Youths who pay attention to politics today form a subculture almost as small as boomers who are Tricky fans.

There's slim hope that this vast reservoir of alienated, alternatively minded youth will try to wrest political power from those old-fashioned enough to notice Election Day. They might unite in resistance if cultural warriors like William Bennett and Joseph Lieberman, who regularly denounce obscenity and bad attitudes in pop culture, were to foster some repressive legislation. (Imagine the headlines: HIP-HOP AND HEAVY METAL BANNED! SOUTH PARK CREATORS IMPRISONED!) But the revolutionists who would bring these skeptical tribes together would have to be able to combine political activism with an irony as thick as David Letterman's. They would have to avoid simplistic sloganeering and embrace the creative use of media and technology. Finally, they would have to appeal to their tribalized constituent elements one by one.

In fact, anyone with lots of cyberspace experience can imagine a future politician trying to balance out the two factions in her party: those who believe in everything--gray aliens, the Gnomes of Zurich and every other conspiracy theory that slithers across the Net--and those who believe in absolutely nothing unless you can tie it in to a snide quip about The Brady Bunch. Maybe Abbie Hoffman saw this coming and just didn't want to have to think about it.

R.U. Sirius is co-founder of the cyberculture mindstyle manual-magazine Mondo 2000.