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We may live in a society without a counterculture. We have many, but not one dominant one.


I’ve definitely been part of a musical counterculture my entire adult life (maybe you might omit the last 3 years though). I’ve easily seen more than 1000 performances in that time, from cave shows to pickle factories to stadiums. You’d probably identify it as punk/garage/indie, but there is a subculture there. I’m usually amazed that it’s larger than I expect, at least in the bay area.

I also worked in physics most of that time, which is probably a subculture there as well (some overlap I suppose with a broader subculture of non-profits workers).

I also lived in Utah (Salt Lake City), where you are effective a subculture (counter culture) almost by virtue of living there and not being LDS.

None of those are homogenous, but all are counter to the prevailing culture - which is the much harder thing to define.

Which is my point - we don’t even have a prevailing culture, and we never really did, not a universal one anyway.

That said, it’s likely that white/christian/suburban/nuclear family was considered the prevailing culture though. That’s a subculture today - albeit an unusually powerful one.




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