Reply #15: There's a new counterculture being born [View All]

[starroute]

I've been predicting this ever since the last one died. I've got complicated models of historical cycles that show countercultures coming up at regular intervals (the 1840's, the 1910's, the 1960's), and we're due for the next one any moment now.

According to my calculations, we're currently about at the equivalent of 1961. We've had several years of increasing political activism (equivalent to the civil rights and anti-nuclear movements.) We're coming up on a period of moderate reform and cultural flowering (equivalent to c. 1962-65.) And after that we get a full-fledged counterculture (equivalent to the hippies and anti-Vietnam War movement) as tensions within the culture that can not be resolved by simple reformism rise to the surface.

The most radical aspects of this counterculture will not depend on the issues of the culture wars like gay marriage -- which despite any fuss the fundies may put up is already being accepted by mainstream America. Instead, they will turn on intellectual property issues and the battle against corporate intellectual hegemony. Information wars fiercer than anything we can now imagine will be waged. New possibilities of social organization (distributed networks, a reclaiming of the commons) will become the subject of utopian idealism.

Beyond that schematic structure, I don't have a clue as to what all this will actually *look* like -- what new forms of music and dress and manners it will give rise to, what radical new ideas it will put in people's heads, and what sort of alternatives to our familiar way of life it will present. But it's going to be interesting to watch.