There was once a robust counterculture in the US. This disappeared around the time that physical places capable of supporting counterculture disappeared. The early days of the internet saw a minor resurgence of counterculture develop online. The remnants of this are now hidden behind the search and social media algorithms that determine what people are and are not allowed to discover.
There are of course still people out there trying to stand up for what's right. Some are even willing to disobey authority in service to their ideals. They know something is very wrong and they're not afraid to say it. But their ideas about what exactly it is that's wrong and what specifically to do about it often appear misguided.
And then there are those with darker ideas about how to solve our problems. Think Luigi Mangione or Shamsud-Din Jabbar. Dissidents like these have legitimate grievances against some or all of our control regime. Also, literally anyone not at the top of the food chain had some of their money effectively stolen beginning in the COVID economy. Consciously or otherwise, everyone has hard feelings about that.
From a certain angle, it looks very much like risky bioweapons research produced a deadly global pandemic that was used as a pretext for robbing our dollars of their purchasing power while testing society's tolerance for technocratic authoritarianism. It also looks like we were lied to every step of the way by government agencies and big business working in partnership to mislead us about these events. If ever there was something to protest, it's this. Yet the only activists being given airtime are focused exclusively on matters of race, gender, a reality tv star, and a celebrity billionaire.
This is in no way accidental. What these protests all have in common is that they keep attention off of the obvious shortcomings of the system itself. They are sanctioned dissent, supported by a tremendously manipulated ecosystem. Anyone expressing unsanctioned dissent is quickly isolated online. Offline, their dissent goes unexpressed, with 77% of Americans self-censoring their political views at least some of the time.
One promising implication of this is the possible existence of a large population of people who all share the willingness to challenge the machine despite being kept socially and technologically separated from each other. In other words, whatever you believe, you're probably not the only one. And if you don't hear your perspective anywhere in public discourse, maybe it's because that perspective is being silenced.
When I was 18 I was involved in environmental activism. Full of energy and idealism, I tried to stop old growth trees from being logged. This ultimately proved futile. Despite our best efforts, the ancient trees we tried to protect were cut down and taxpayers subsidized the destruction. Things have not improved since then.
In 2016, the Dakota Access Pipeline protests temporarily brought a little attention back to the environment. These protests were brutally repressed and media coverage of them was heavily manipulated. At the end of the day, they didn't stop the pipeline. Recently, a judge even ordered Greenpeace to pay $660 million to the pipeline company to compensate them for the inconvenience caused by the protest.
Maybe environmental activism has fallen out of fashion because the destruction of our natural world is largely complete. The most prominent group on the scene now is Just Stop Oil and all they do is publicity stunts to make abstract points and promote unworkable ideas. Their dissent is allowed in part because it has no teeth. None of their actions has actually destroyed any art, they have merely defaced the protective cases housing the art.
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