Not at all. The weird stuff is well heard and has a large cultural impact. You'll have no problem finding countless examples of weird things that have been viewed and interacted with by hundreds of thousands or even millions of people. Compare that to say a punk band in the 80s that may have only had a few thousand people ever see it perform, or even the entire hippie movement which was only about half a million people at its peak.
Yeah, these things are still smaller and less impactful than the mainstream culture, but that's what it means to be a counterculture.
> You'll have no problem finding countless examples of weird things that have been viewed and interacted with by hundreds of thousands or even millions of people.
I don't think how widespread a piece of media is has a strong correlation with its impact. Yes, several billion people probably know who Grumpy Cat is. But it doesn't matter. Our awareness of Grumpy Cat doesn't change how we think about the world, how we live, how we relate to others. It's just a shared but otherwise mostly meaningless experience, like seeing a rainbow.
The Beat Generation was a relatively tiny subculture whose work at the time was consumed by a small number of people. But we remember them because the work they created mattered. It said something meaningful about the culture it was a reaction to and by doing that, it forced that culture to change.
Beats, hippies, punks, maybe early hackers were all countercultures because they in some way bent the arrow of history. There are no shortage of subcultures today, and they are great for finding people you share interests. But they don't have the same impact as a real counterculture.
Grumpy cat is mainstream culture. Yes, just because something has been widely consumed does not make it impactful, but that's a very different position from there are no impactful things widely consumed.
The impact of various past countercultures is only evident in hindsight. As you said, movements like the Beat generation were at the time tiny subcultures, of the exact same sort we have loads of today. To say that 80s hackers were a counterculture but modern biohackers are just a subculture is simply temporal chauvinism.
As a Gen-Xer, I can assure you capitalism was a dirty word for longer than that.
But that dislike has thus far had zero apparent effect on the complete domination of capitalism and corporatism over the public sphere.
Instead, what we largely see is huge capitalistic corporations draping themselves in an anti-capitalist aesthetic which consumers seem perfectly happy to accept. Every time you go to the store and buy a jar of "homestyle" marinara sauce or order a bo-ho wall hippie-esque wall decoration off Amazon that was made in a factory in China, you are demonstrating anti-capitalist style but profoundly capitalistic values.
> As a Gen-Xer, I can assure you capitalism was a dirty word for longer than that
In certain circles, but (assuming America) certainly not approaching a majority[1].
> Instead, what we largely see is huge capitalistic corporations draping themselves in an anti-capitalist aesthetic which consumers seem perfectly happy to accept.
I think it's too difficult to avoid this stuff as a consumer. Hell, even farmer's markets are mostly run by big corps now. But from the labor side, I think it's making a difference. Almost no one in their twenties is trying to climb the corporate ladder or put in effort at their big corp jobs. As soon as generations that were bought in to careerism retire, I think things will shift.
That's not a knife edge, counterculture is by definition not mainstream, and certainly today most people are not active participants in counterculture, but it has become easier to participate in countercultures if you so choose then ever before, and (while still being a very small minority) the absolute number of people participating has never been larger. The distinction between impact and mainstream impact is a very important nuance.
There are certainly creators today who are as influential to their groups as the Velvet Underground was to theirs, but just like plenty of people had never heard of them in the 60s, you're probably not going to know about them for another 20 years.
Yeah, these things are still smaller and less impactful than the mainstream culture, but that's what it means to be a counterculture.