New Moon Letter 1

On Counterculture

(Note: This is the first of a series of essays called the New Moon Letters. Together with a physical book in the post, they make up the paid tier of my Substack - this post explains it all here. Regular subscribers still get the octannual updates and I’ll make the occasional one of these free to all when it seems appropriate. As this is the first, this is free for all.)

(this is the audio version of this letter - theme by &breathe)

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18 January 2026

Dear reader,

One of the things I am asked about most often at book events is the nature of counterculture and, specifically, what has happened to it. This is a big question that I often don’t have time to answer properly – hence this letter.

Typically, the assumptions behind the question go something like this: There used to be a thing called “the counterculture”. It was cooler, vital, and more imaginative than mainstream culture. If something like that was happening now, I (a cool person) would be aware of it, understand it and approve of it. However, I cannot see anything like that in the culture surrounding me. Does it still exist, or is it hidden from me? You can hear these same assumptions in Stewart Lee’s recent BBC Sounds series What Happened to Counter-Culture? – which is well worth a listen as it includes some terrific interviews.

The definition of a counterculture is in its name – it is something counter to the prevailing values, beliefs and ideas expressed in mainstream culture. The war in Vietnam gave us a peacenik counterculture, for example, just as the reaction against the hyper-individualism of the 1980s was the collectivist rave scene. Countercultures occur throughout history – in Ken Goffman’s book Counter Culture Through The Ages, his subjects range from Taoists and Sufis to troubadours to acid house. This point is worth stressing because people in the mid-to-late twentieth century talked about “the counterculture” rather than “a counterculture.” The name was in keeping with the individual-first thinking of that period, but it misleads us into thinking that this is the platonic form of counterculture, and that counterculture should always resemble what it was back then. But different cultures generate different countercultures, so today’s counterculture will not resemble that of fifty years ago.

All those countercultures throughout history were essentially a search for a better way to do things, even if the results of these searches weren’t always as positive as their intentions. They can be thought of as a research and development department for the mainstream. Much of what they created would be flawed, unpopular and impractical, but out of all that energy and experimentation came the occasional shining gem. When countercultures come up with an idea that has value, the mainstream happily appropriates it. This is why we have an aisle of vegetarian and vegan food in Asda, music festivals out in the fields all summer and yoga studios in most towns – all this appears unremarkable now, but it would have blown the minds of early 1960s counterculture activists.

From this perspective, the presence of a counterculture is good and healthy, because its contributions prevent cultural stagnation and decay. That counterculture seemed to disappear in the early twenty-first century, then, was troubling. A counterculture, by its very definition, requires a definitive culture to counter - and in those years there didn’t really seem to be one. The internet dissipated cultural energies and prevented new movements from growing to a point of critical mass. It was a time of atomisation, where people could become tourists in an uncountable number of subcultures. These can be wonderful things for community and self-expression, but subcultures do not challenge the mainstream in the way that counterculture does. They can also push us into defining our identities in very tribal terms.

Yet despite how that period differed from the decades before, there were still values and ideas that underpinned it. They were typically liberal and enlightenment values, which took for granted the importance of human life, democracy and the rule the law. That complex multicultural mix was underpinned with the assumption that we should be accepting of difference and try not to be too much of a dick to others – these were, very roughly, the Obama years. For people who did want to be a dick, however, and who wanted to be openly racist and abusive to others, this was a very difficult period. And naturally, a counterculture developed, which we can in broad strokes define as the movement known as the alt.right. Not all countercultures, it is worth stressing, are positive.

Many people feel that this movement is undeserving of the name counterculture because it failed to create art of any value. Its defining visual achievement is either the Cybertruck or Bored Apes NFTs, a situation which future historians will find incredibly funny. This creative impotence helps explain the extent to which this movement has embraced generative AI, seemingly oblivious to its hollow nature. Yet culture does not stay still for long, and these might-is-right monoculture-fetishists are a counterculture no more. With the help of some very rich people, that movement has gone from the margins to the pinnacles of power. It is now a tool for making the very rich even richer.

But I think that now there is a mainstream culture again. It’s the culture of the algorithm. This is a culture of metrics and optimisation, flattening out the atomised early internet into generic slop for all. Those who work in corporations and education will have long recognised the damaging impact of focusing on metrics above everything, but now this metric worship extends to all of culture – it decides what stories get told, what music gets heard and whose voice gets amplified, to a far greater extent than before. We have this culture forced upon us because, for a small group of people, it is unbelievably profitable.

And if it is true that our culture is basically the algorithm, then it logically follows that the resulting counterculture must be, by definition, not that. The algorithm’s goal is to maximise the amount of your attention it can devour, so the counterculture denies its right to do this. It knows that there are far better places where your attention can be. Your attention is, essentially, your experience of your life. It’s the most precious thing you have. The quality of your life is directly related to the extent that you focus that attention on your relationships, your vocation, your health and your happiness. To have great chunks of your precious remaining years lost to optimised addictive doomscrolling algorithms is a terrible thing.

The digital world was a counterculture once, of course, and it was one I had a lot of affection for. The early network as celebrated by magazines like Mondo 2000 in the 1990s was a direct challenge to the mainstream, promising to bypass gatekeepers and re-route information around the world in a way that was liberating and entirely new. Those values aren’t the driving forces of the digital world now, however. AIs and LLMs soak up all the existing human culture they can find, sift and weigh the connections between it, then guess what part of it is most likely to please users. It can never create something entirely new so it is, by definition, the opposite of a counterculture.

A counterculture is never a mainstream belief, and most people still accept and unquestioningly support this algorithmic mainstream culture. When Gen Alpha school children say that their dream job is to become a YouTuber or a TikTokker, they are accepting and reinforcing the values that these platforms are based on. A lifetime of engagement farming and data-driven growth hacks is seen as a fair price to pay for the attention such careers offer. Many think that a life spent as a TikTok influencer or a crypto-trader, where the importance of anything is the number attached, is as good as life gets. This is not true.

Today’s counterculture, in contrast, has no interest in the online world’s controlling metrics. This comes at a cost – or at least, what appears to be a cost if you accept the mainstream worldview. It means that this counterculture is intentionally invisible to the online world. The fact that you can’t see it in your online bubble is a feature, not a bug. It takes place in the real world, with people getting together and having the sort of experiences you don’t get online. It takes place in pubs and halls and fields, and involves community and relationships. The subjective experiences at the heart of it can’t be measured. Their value is judged not by metrics, but by how they make you feel.

Part of this is the recognition that real-world experiences matter in a way that online ones don’t. You can hear your favourite singer or band perform your favourite song at any time, at the touch of a button. This will be a technically perfect performance, spliced together out of many takes, smoothed over with autotune. Still, we are drawn to rougher performances, filmed at gigs on phone cameras and uploaded to YouTube. Even better would be being there in person, watching the live performance in a crowd, even when the artist is just a tiny dot in the distance. The prices of such experiences have become astronomical, but still the tickets sell, such is their appeal. To top that would take being in a small room next to your hero as they sang that song to you. Such an experience would be priceless, something you would never forget. What this tells us is that the distance between the creation of art and the experience of that work is important. The more layers there are between the thing and the experience of it – the more mediated it is – the less vital it is. This means that the attention-seeking algorithms of the online world can only offer a poor shadow of the things we love.

In my own small way, I help run something that can be seen as a countercultural event – the East Sussex Psychedelic Film Club, or ESP-FC. Once upon a time, it was the type of films that we screened which would have earned us the description of ‘countercultural’. Now, it is more what we don’t do that justifies that term. The event always sells out and mainstream thinking would advise us to move to a bigger venue, up the prices, and increase the frequency of events to ‘grow the brand’ and make more money – the ultimate metric of success. We don’t do this. Instead, our efforts go into the set and setting – the lighting, the music, the random nature of the merch table, the fanzine style programme, the special guests, the odd little gift on every seat. The seventeenth century chapel that we screen the films in is as much a part of the appeal as the people who come along. The bar area is intentionally as big as the hall, and the intervals are as important as the films. It’s not crowded, but there are enough interesting people around for you to naturally fall into conversations. It’s all geared to making the nights better, not bigger. If nothing else, it’s a bunch of people taking a night off from their phones, but I like to think it is more than that. Yet what’s great about those nights can never be found online. The only way to know what they are like is to go to one.

When I describe anti-algorithmic attitudes as countercultural, I’m not arguing for an anti-tech, back-to-the-earth movement that lives doggedly offline. The demands of earning a living make engaging with the digital world a necessity for all but the most privileged. LLMs aren’t going to be uninvented, and careers such as coding and further education will be forever changed by them. Various platforms are useful for connecting, spreading the word, selling tickets and so forth, and offline media is still not sufficient for keeping you informed about what is going on. This is disappointing for those who desire counterculture to be a badge of personal identity and a refuge from mainstream culture – somewhere you can put yourself and live a separate life. I have not seen evidence that such a ‘black and white, all or nothing’ counterculture exists at the moment, but of course, that invisibility may be the whole point. Instead, what I see is more of a matter of degree. We may still be stuck online, but there is a difference in the extent we give it our attention. The aim is to give it less and less. We do this because we recognise how limited, toxic and delusional the digital world has become.

There’s a commonly held belief that the online world reflects the real world. It may be a slightly distorted dark reflection, but it is still a representation of something real. The countercultural view, however, sees that this connection has long been broken, even before you factor in the AI deepfakes and disinformation bot networks that render social media unusable. The online world has become its own creation, free from any links to reality or what physically happens in the world. It wasn’t that long ago that if you heard someone described as being “very online”, you’d think that they were well informed and knew what was going on. That’s really isn’t how people interpret that phrase any more.

Online algorithms optimise for extremes because this increases engagement metrics - regardless of the fact that it also moves us further and further away from reality. One way to picture this process is to imagine algorithm-based social networks reacting to the existence of a giant pie. It would not be long before all it talked about were the extreme edges – which, in this example, are the crust. The meat of the pie would be forgotten, invisible to anyone online. And this matters, because the meat is kind of the point of the pie. If you don’t know about the meat, you don’t really know the pie well enough to say anything useful about it at all. It’s like Elon Musk’s delusional view of London, informed as it is by extreme edge case examples and not by walking around London. The online world has become so disconnected from reality that the extent to which politicians and journalists still live in it is incredibly troubling.

The first step into modern countercultural thinking, then, is that eye-opening moment when you see clearly that the online world is total bollocks. Obviously, most people suspect this, and joke about it, but they do so under the belief that there is no alternative – that no counter is possible to that culture. Yet when you truly see just how delusional, small and pitiable that world is, you can’t unsee it. It is such bollocks that there has to be an alternative, somewhere, because whatever this world is – it’s not that.

It is probably easier for someone of my vintage to dismiss this world of algorithms and metrics. Those of us in Generation X still remember the analogue world when we encountered books, records and films without any numbers next to them. Back then, numbers did not factor into how we judged things. All that mattered was how that piece of culture made us feel, or what it made us think. It was entirely normal for something to mean the world to you and your group of friends, but for you to never see it referenced in the mainstream media. To a generation that has grown up with numbers prejudging the worth of everything, in contrast, listening to those numbers will be a hard habit to break. I sometimes wonder how different the world would have been if Twitter had launched without the numbers of likes and retweets visible to everyone, so there was no system to game and all you could do was use the platform to communicate.

If you are lucky, there will be people around you who share these views, who meet up and put on gatherings that you can attend. I can guarantee they will be glad to have you in the room and will reward the gift of your attention far more than ChatGPT ever can. If you are less lucky, then it might fall on you to start something yourself. A counterculture is not something laid out for you to consume, after all, it is something that you have to create.

You won’t know in advance what ideas emerge from the collision of people you gather together, or what value they will have. The likeliness is that the result of your efforts will be more of a subculture, precious to you but not the wider world. That would still be worthwhile, of course. Every bit of your attention that the algorithm doesn’t control is a good result for you. Every experience you have that you judge positive because of how it makes you feel, rather than what the numbers say, is evidence of a life well lived.

But somewhere, some gathering might come up with a shining gem of an idea, a perspective or thought strong and undeniable enough to threaten the spell of the algorithmic metric culture in the wider world, and give hope that the economic structures that stop us from flourishing will not always be seen as inevitable.

Such an idea would work like a poison pill. AIs appropriate all the culture they can find. They have absorbed all the countercultures of the past, and claimed them as their own. They are hungry for more. Unable to come up with something new themselves, they are desperate for all those things they cannot see, the gatherings that occur in their blind spot. They want the ideas that those in the shadows come up with. If we could imagine a poison pill, it would swallow it without a second thought. And that notion, surely, is something worth leaving the house for.

jhx