Thanks for this John. I wanted to comment as we used to occasionally converse on social media, but I decided to pull the trigger. Between AI content, misinformation and current affairs; it spurred me to delete my Instagram account and Facebook accounts outright, last November.
There's definitely something in the air. Since soon afterwards I saw published articles from the Guardian and the Irish Times about people abandoning platforms in droves. However, I need to follow up with this by applauding your advice of either setting up or attending some local social group. This is so important.
Personally speaking, the pandemic forced me to uproot and return to my hometown after years living in the capital. This has proved challenging to this day. As I don't know many people here. Like most of my cohort growing up, they had to move away for work. Even when I was participating in local clubs after a while they'd have to move out of the premises due to redevelopment or rising costs. So finding spaces willing to let you host events can get tricky.
The BBC recently screened Ken Loach's 'The Old Oak'. Although not his strongest film and he can be didactic in his approach, I found it inspirational. Particularly the aspect of a struggling pub owner using his premises to engage with locals and asylum seekers/refugees to start a dialogue and share their cultures, strifes and similarities. We need to return to fostering communities. Breaking down digital barriers that have monopolised our time and reconnecting with our outdoor spaces.
Thanks as always for your writing and thoughts. I will continue to champion it and recommend to others. I will chime in occasionally on your newsletters going forward. But now I need to put away my phone and step outside. Happy 2026 and I look forward to your next newsletter and book.
Good to hear from you Stephen. Yes I think your situation is probably a very common one. It's that old problem, as Timothy Leary used to say, of finding the others - and the others, we can be pretty sure, are no longer posting on Twitter/X. It does require an act of faith to believe that they are out there to be found. But as quests go, it's as noble as they come. Good luck!
I love this so much John, thank you. At the moment, I have my own tiny, household subculture where we study music, particularly classic Jazz, where me and my wife have an ongoing David Lynch season, while Tubi is enabling me to honour my brother, who passed last year, with my own season of all his favourite Hong Kong films (currently on the first of the A Better Tomorrow trilogy). All of these function as you mentioned. They make us feel things and we talk about how they make us feel and that’s that. Thanks for helping me frame the importance of that mate.
Two quotes spring to mind reading this John... my friend Noam Yuran most succinct definition of Capitalism - "an economy where priceless means expensive".
And something Jonathan Rowson posted yesterday "a prerequiste for transformative work is not being widely understood."
The poison pill metaphor is spot on. I've always been of the view that I want my project totally swallowed up by the Capitalist order and mainstream culture!
Great quotes Jon. In silicon valley there will be a lot of very rich, very mad people looking to abandon the AI bubble when it goes. These are the people you need, Jon! Who knows what would happen if there was a Palo Alto branch of the Church of Burn?
Food for thought. Or a prompt, as it might be called now.
I wonder, though. I wonder about another possible definition.
Counterculture is a movement(s) that actively 'counters' culture, works against the prevailing mood. Previous countercultures were actively and aggressively disowned by the media and larger cultural groups. Going to gigs, book groups, board game sessions and yoga classes are not having that happen to them.
Is that what people are missing?
Do we now see it in more obviously political reactions (anti-fascist movements against MAGA and Reform, eco-'terrorism' and much more). But are these producing any 'culture' (aside from frog memes)?
I do not know. And I'd be the first to admit that I may be too old to recognise a counterculture if it waved a fanzine under my nose. On the other hand, that might be for the best. Perhaps I'm not the target audience any more.
Great points John. I suspect that part of this is that, after something countercultural becomes swallowed by the mainstream culture, things are changed to the degree that its hard to see how those things were ever seen as being dangerously countercultural. So, for example, its hard for us to imagine the mad culture war over the Beatles' mop top haircuts now, because they were taken up by the mainstream and now long hair on men is normal. But before that, it went against deeply held beliefs about masculinity. Or the way that Eastern thought and practices were deeply countercultural in the 1960s, because they challenged Christianity in particular and Western superiority in general. The mainstream is very good at forgetting its earlier stances after absorbing countercultural ideas. Things like this this are not political in terms of power, but they are political in terms of culture. They are not an alternative to punching nazis, but they are still something
This is very interesting John, thanks. I honestly think it's singing folk songs that's kept it real for me over the last decade. Singing with other people, A++ antidote to online!
We were at the pub last night drinking real drinks talking to and dancing with real people and enjoying a great live band. The antidote to the algorithm is live music and a bit of alcohol. dunno how you convert that to the poison pill (or trojan virus?) though.
Great piece John. At The Cockpit we're doing an event adjacent to the digital silo-ing/isolation problem early next month, with Byline Times. IRL rules OK!
Love this, John, crystalises several of my own thoughts on the subject whilst stimulating many more. Loosening the grip of online addiction is paramount if we are to move forward, I locked my Twitter last year and found that replacing it with BlueSky did nothing for me so I rarely go there. The Meta apps are useful but becoming unusable with the constant bombardment of ads or suggestions, your point about the numbers on each post is spot on. I was hoping that the movement to decentralized social media would happen but it's either too early or that's not the answer, the answer most likely lays outside as you say.
Hey Kev! I suspect that for a lot of people social media just feels like something people used to do before we moved on, not something that we can fix - which is makes creating an improved version an uphill struggle. This is a shame because it was a source of information that you wouldn't get otherwise. From the BBC or newspapers, for example, I would have been left with the impression that the ICE shooting in Minneapolis was a grey area, not the state murder that was apparent from the footage on social media. Moments like that will be few and far between in this AI deepfake age, but there is the possibility of something valuable there
Fantastic piece John. I quit Meta last year and have given all of this a lot of thought but you articulate it brilliantly here. It’s slightly mad to think that by living a life and creating something offline you are part of the counterculture but that is where we are.
I appreciate this John. You articulate so well the importance of making something better, not bigger. I too a member of a small film club, also a drama group and an arts collective here in my small town. I started an open mic here about fifteen years ago, it’s got the simplest format, but those who come love it. I’m going to steal your phrase, ‘better not bigger’ ☺️. I’m away for a few days and disappointed to miss the drama group’s ’table reading’ of a play they are preparing to stage later in the spring. For those who haven’t experienced it, a ‘table reading’ means many of us sitting around a table and in turn reading aloud the text of the play - it’s v helpful for the director and it’s a really pleasurable thing to be part of.
Thanks again for your wonderful piece, helping us to better understand and appreciate why small communal and collaborative events are so vital.
Thanks for this Margaret - you and others commenting here are casting light on just how many valued gatherings and groups are going on around the country, and what they mean to people. Because they are invisible online it is easy to think that they don't matter, but that couldn't be more wrong. It's so great to hear of all these things
I've had to write in a special codeword, as if it's Def-Con 1 or something, just to post a little comment here. It's like 'The Prisoner' (etc.). Forgive the redundancy (if you can!), but it bears repeating. All good stuff, you write, of course. I miss the human race that was, pubs, etc, am ever the optimist, to a fault.
Two thoughts: one, I have a book by Saddleworth Witch, historian, poet Vera Winterbottom that mentions a hut with a roof bearing the painted legend 'Yoga' in the 1940s. (Could be thirties - will check - bookshelves not organised, apologies).
Two: wonder if it's all (or much or a significant some of it) in the Stars. Some magnificent clear nights recently - I know there are many here who will have gazed up in wonder at the limitless mystery and wondered ... E.g. - one makes great efforts, and for a spell they consistently end up in failure, if not disaster. Even simple things like enquiring 'how do you do?' concludes in fumbling awkwardness. 'Is this where it is?' met with 'It's his!' type affairs.
However, other times, you just can't lose. Even the most half-arsed efforts come up trumps. Now, what is all that about. I hope something is stirring in the waters of the human race, and spontaneously we simply slip off the shackles of the algorithms. It's supposed to be a tool, not an end in itself, and cannot offer any improvement over ourselves, for better and worse.
Remember the Chess-playing Turk, the supposed robot that delighted the rich, but was actually a man hiding in a box?
AI is simply a gimmick whose novelty will seem like a Victorian archaism in short order, like the 'groundbreaking' effects of T2: Judgement Day (which of course I love). But 'It's what's inside that count's, innit', as the Fopp toilet wall graffiti so succintly put it. Society as Driverless Car: put your hands on the wheel, strike out for fREE will, if it exists, YOU DRIVE.
I have really mixed feelings about this. Before the algorithm was even a thing, I did what I thought artists and intellectuals should do to find the counterculture and moved to a big city for undergrad. I didn’t find a scene—though the DIY culture had and has many charms—because there wasn’t any left, not in the way I’d been told as a homeschooler who learned about bohemians via reading and tales from Gen X I read online. I did, however, find a crystalline, vibrant social life that gave me plenty of artistic and intellectual material, and it was all analog, of course. So I’m not against what was being said. I was justly rewarded for my pursuit of real-life experiences, and for pursuing them in lieu of “a scene” that fit my expectations.
But I didn’t quite find people with the same drive, I think, to be part of a crucible for art and ideas. I have moved twice to be able to dedicate my life to intellectual pursuits (which involved leaving that city and the many wonderful experiences it gave me), and I will have to move again. We are too geographically dispersed for this to work. Many people I know here will have to move. And we will only have the internet to coordinate our relationships, and building trust in new places takes time. I think this approach underestimates how incredibly difficult it is to organize anything lasting when so many people are socially unmoored due to dispersement and everything is as fragmented as it is now. In the Gen X days, there were clear physical locations, bars and events and what have you, where you could go; finding out how to find out where those are can be unbelievably difficult. And when you get there, people default to being cliquely or on their phones, lol.
If you’re in a community that is already established and vibrant and this resonates as the way to live your life, power to you—I remember when coordination used to be effortless because we had social momentum and the organizing was already done. But that’s not where most of us find ourselves these days.
In a lot of ways, pursuing "countercultural" things in America has always been imperfect and fugitive if you don’t come to the pursuit with money (and even then, it often involves bucking expectations). It’s been about where you can find low rent or university patronage, where you happen to find a a place to gatehr, etc.. The online world isn’t going away, and it’s the only tool many of us in certain locations have.
I think the solution for the algorithm (besides organizing for new tech infrastructure) is to be tricksters about it. The 90s counterculture had a very vibrant, confrontational, guerilla attitude toward mass media, which was an existential crisis on the level of the algorithm from what I have read, and I think we need to adopt some of that stance. Being on social media will never be cool, but maybe we can use and undermine the algorithm to make something cool on it, or at least create some portals to facilitate the nourishing analog lives we all want.
Yes, these are all good points. I suspect part of why I didn't give these concerns sufficient weight in the above was my belief that instead of thinking in nationalistic or internationalistic terms, I think that it is the local that matters. This is down to Blake's belief that the numinous has to be here, in the moment, or it is nowhere, and that is something you create more than you find. But you are right, of course, it is much harder to build in some places rather than others. Which is not to say that it can't be done, it's just not going to be easy
I cannot thank you enough John for articulating so many aspects of contemporary life that I find troubling, invasive and corrosive. And wrapping them in flowing, cohesive prose. I am old enough to have lived through numerous countercultures and feel the loss of belonging to them very keenly, this for me is the key. Much to think about here, there is a wonderful pamphlet or book in this.
Fantastic article - I’m actually reading this in one of my two very local pubs which are full to the brim of people having a good old fashioned chin wag over a pint.
I’m a member of a gig club - basically a bunch of like minded music obsessives who have a WhatsApp group to organised trips to local gigs in the Bristol and Bath area - also includes a trip to some decent boozers before & sometimes afterwards - you can’t beat reality! 🤓👍
I too am a member of what we call the Old Man Gig Club - although admittedly the ratio between attending gigs and sitting around in pubs has been questionable of late
Thanks for this John. I wanted to comment as we used to occasionally converse on social media, but I decided to pull the trigger. Between AI content, misinformation and current affairs; it spurred me to delete my Instagram account and Facebook accounts outright, last November.
There's definitely something in the air. Since soon afterwards I saw published articles from the Guardian and the Irish Times about people abandoning platforms in droves. However, I need to follow up with this by applauding your advice of either setting up or attending some local social group. This is so important.
Personally speaking, the pandemic forced me to uproot and return to my hometown after years living in the capital. This has proved challenging to this day. As I don't know many people here. Like most of my cohort growing up, they had to move away for work. Even when I was participating in local clubs after a while they'd have to move out of the premises due to redevelopment or rising costs. So finding spaces willing to let you host events can get tricky.
The BBC recently screened Ken Loach's 'The Old Oak'. Although not his strongest film and he can be didactic in his approach, I found it inspirational. Particularly the aspect of a struggling pub owner using his premises to engage with locals and asylum seekers/refugees to start a dialogue and share their cultures, strifes and similarities. We need to return to fostering communities. Breaking down digital barriers that have monopolised our time and reconnecting with our outdoor spaces.
Thanks as always for your writing and thoughts. I will continue to champion it and recommend to others. I will chime in occasionally on your newsletters going forward. But now I need to put away my phone and step outside. Happy 2026 and I look forward to your next newsletter and book.
Best wishes
Stephen.
Good to hear from you Stephen. Yes I think your situation is probably a very common one. It's that old problem, as Timothy Leary used to say, of finding the others - and the others, we can be pretty sure, are no longer posting on Twitter/X. It does require an act of faith to believe that they are out there to be found. But as quests go, it's as noble as they come. Good luck!
I love this so much John, thank you. At the moment, I have my own tiny, household subculture where we study music, particularly classic Jazz, where me and my wife have an ongoing David Lynch season, while Tubi is enabling me to honour my brother, who passed last year, with my own season of all his favourite Hong Kong films (currently on the first of the A Better Tomorrow trilogy). All of these function as you mentioned. They make us feel things and we talk about how they make us feel and that’s that. Thanks for helping me frame the importance of that mate.
I too love 'tiny, household subculture'! That is inspirational, Nico, and a beautiful way to honour your brother. Lovely to hear!
'tiny, household subculture', I love that.
Two quotes spring to mind reading this John... my friend Noam Yuran most succinct definition of Capitalism - "an economy where priceless means expensive".
And something Jonathan Rowson posted yesterday "a prerequiste for transformative work is not being widely understood."
The poison pill metaphor is spot on. I've always been of the view that I want my project totally swallowed up by the Capitalist order and mainstream culture!
Great quotes Jon. In silicon valley there will be a lot of very rich, very mad people looking to abandon the AI bubble when it goes. These are the people you need, Jon! Who knows what would happen if there was a Palo Alto branch of the Church of Burn?
Reminds me of Norma’s Double R when she turns down the business dude. Once again Lynch caught something. Lovely post - thank you!
Indeed, especially as Norma realising what is important led to that immortal scene with Ed
Food for thought. Or a prompt, as it might be called now.
I wonder, though. I wonder about another possible definition.
Counterculture is a movement(s) that actively 'counters' culture, works against the prevailing mood. Previous countercultures were actively and aggressively disowned by the media and larger cultural groups. Going to gigs, book groups, board game sessions and yoga classes are not having that happen to them.
Is that what people are missing?
Do we now see it in more obviously political reactions (anti-fascist movements against MAGA and Reform, eco-'terrorism' and much more). But are these producing any 'culture' (aside from frog memes)?
I do not know. And I'd be the first to admit that I may be too old to recognise a counterculture if it waved a fanzine under my nose. On the other hand, that might be for the best. Perhaps I'm not the target audience any more.
Great points John. I suspect that part of this is that, after something countercultural becomes swallowed by the mainstream culture, things are changed to the degree that its hard to see how those things were ever seen as being dangerously countercultural. So, for example, its hard for us to imagine the mad culture war over the Beatles' mop top haircuts now, because they were taken up by the mainstream and now long hair on men is normal. But before that, it went against deeply held beliefs about masculinity. Or the way that Eastern thought and practices were deeply countercultural in the 1960s, because they challenged Christianity in particular and Western superiority in general. The mainstream is very good at forgetting its earlier stances after absorbing countercultural ideas. Things like this this are not political in terms of power, but they are political in terms of culture. They are not an alternative to punching nazis, but they are still something
This is very interesting John, thanks. I honestly think it's singing folk songs that's kept it real for me over the last decade. Singing with other people, A++ antidote to online!
Absolutely! I mean, is there anything better?
We were at the pub last night drinking real drinks talking to and dancing with real people and enjoying a great live band. The antidote to the algorithm is live music and a bit of alcohol. dunno how you convert that to the poison pill (or trojan virus?) though.
I don't know either Nick, but I'm prepared to sit with friends drinking Harvey's in the pubs of Sussex on the off chance that something occurs to me
Great piece John. At The Cockpit we're doing an event adjacent to the digital silo-ing/isolation problem early next month, with Byline Times. IRL rules OK!
https://www.thecockpit.org.uk/show/the_lure_of_loneliness
Big love Michelle! My next Octannual goes out the day before that, I'll give it a late plug!
Love this, John, crystalises several of my own thoughts on the subject whilst stimulating many more. Loosening the grip of online addiction is paramount if we are to move forward, I locked my Twitter last year and found that replacing it with BlueSky did nothing for me so I rarely go there. The Meta apps are useful but becoming unusable with the constant bombardment of ads or suggestions, your point about the numbers on each post is spot on. I was hoping that the movement to decentralized social media would happen but it's either too early or that's not the answer, the answer most likely lays outside as you say.
Hey Kev! I suspect that for a lot of people social media just feels like something people used to do before we moved on, not something that we can fix - which is makes creating an improved version an uphill struggle. This is a shame because it was a source of information that you wouldn't get otherwise. From the BBC or newspapers, for example, I would have been left with the impression that the ICE shooting in Minneapolis was a grey area, not the state murder that was apparent from the footage on social media. Moments like that will be few and far between in this AI deepfake age, but there is the possibility of something valuable there
Thanks so much for this reminder of what I find valuable .
Cheers Richard!
Fantastic piece John. I quit Meta last year and have given all of this a lot of thought but you articulate it brilliantly here. It’s slightly mad to think that by living a life and creating something offline you are part of the counterculture but that is where we are.
I quite like the idea that anyone still posting on X is by definition not part of the counterculture - how Elon would hate that!
I appreciate this John. You articulate so well the importance of making something better, not bigger. I too a member of a small film club, also a drama group and an arts collective here in my small town. I started an open mic here about fifteen years ago, it’s got the simplest format, but those who come love it. I’m going to steal your phrase, ‘better not bigger’ ☺️. I’m away for a few days and disappointed to miss the drama group’s ’table reading’ of a play they are preparing to stage later in the spring. For those who haven’t experienced it, a ‘table reading’ means many of us sitting around a table and in turn reading aloud the text of the play - it’s v helpful for the director and it’s a really pleasurable thing to be part of.
Thanks again for your wonderful piece, helping us to better understand and appreciate why small communal and collaborative events are so vital.
Thanks for this Margaret - you and others commenting here are casting light on just how many valued gatherings and groups are going on around the country, and what they mean to people. Because they are invisible online it is easy to think that they don't matter, but that couldn't be more wrong. It's so great to hear of all these things
I rarely mention these happenings in my posts here - maybe I should. Also, for info, I’m in rural Ireland.
I've had to write in a special codeword, as if it's Def-Con 1 or something, just to post a little comment here. It's like 'The Prisoner' (etc.). Forgive the redundancy (if you can!), but it bears repeating. All good stuff, you write, of course. I miss the human race that was, pubs, etc, am ever the optimist, to a fault.
Two thoughts: one, I have a book by Saddleworth Witch, historian, poet Vera Winterbottom that mentions a hut with a roof bearing the painted legend 'Yoga' in the 1940s. (Could be thirties - will check - bookshelves not organised, apologies).
Two: wonder if it's all (or much or a significant some of it) in the Stars. Some magnificent clear nights recently - I know there are many here who will have gazed up in wonder at the limitless mystery and wondered ... E.g. - one makes great efforts, and for a spell they consistently end up in failure, if not disaster. Even simple things like enquiring 'how do you do?' concludes in fumbling awkwardness. 'Is this where it is?' met with 'It's his!' type affairs.
However, other times, you just can't lose. Even the most half-arsed efforts come up trumps. Now, what is all that about. I hope something is stirring in the waters of the human race, and spontaneously we simply slip off the shackles of the algorithms. It's supposed to be a tool, not an end in itself, and cannot offer any improvement over ourselves, for better and worse.
Remember the Chess-playing Turk, the supposed robot that delighted the rich, but was actually a man hiding in a box?
AI is simply a gimmick whose novelty will seem like a Victorian archaism in short order, like the 'groundbreaking' effects of T2: Judgement Day (which of course I love). But 'It's what's inside that count's, innit', as the Fopp toilet wall graffiti so succintly put it. Society as Driverless Car: put your hands on the wheel, strike out for fREE will, if it exists, YOU DRIVE.
Great words William! Yes the mechanical Turk is such a great analogy for the AI hype, I'm going to have to use that myself. Hope you are well sir!
I have really mixed feelings about this. Before the algorithm was even a thing, I did what I thought artists and intellectuals should do to find the counterculture and moved to a big city for undergrad. I didn’t find a scene—though the DIY culture had and has many charms—because there wasn’t any left, not in the way I’d been told as a homeschooler who learned about bohemians via reading and tales from Gen X I read online. I did, however, find a crystalline, vibrant social life that gave me plenty of artistic and intellectual material, and it was all analog, of course. So I’m not against what was being said. I was justly rewarded for my pursuit of real-life experiences, and for pursuing them in lieu of “a scene” that fit my expectations.
But I didn’t quite find people with the same drive, I think, to be part of a crucible for art and ideas. I have moved twice to be able to dedicate my life to intellectual pursuits (which involved leaving that city and the many wonderful experiences it gave me), and I will have to move again. We are too geographically dispersed for this to work. Many people I know here will have to move. And we will only have the internet to coordinate our relationships, and building trust in new places takes time. I think this approach underestimates how incredibly difficult it is to organize anything lasting when so many people are socially unmoored due to dispersement and everything is as fragmented as it is now. In the Gen X days, there were clear physical locations, bars and events and what have you, where you could go; finding out how to find out where those are can be unbelievably difficult. And when you get there, people default to being cliquely or on their phones, lol.
If you’re in a community that is already established and vibrant and this resonates as the way to live your life, power to you—I remember when coordination used to be effortless because we had social momentum and the organizing was already done. But that’s not where most of us find ourselves these days.
In a lot of ways, pursuing "countercultural" things in America has always been imperfect and fugitive if you don’t come to the pursuit with money (and even then, it often involves bucking expectations). It’s been about where you can find low rent or university patronage, where you happen to find a a place to gatehr, etc.. The online world isn’t going away, and it’s the only tool many of us in certain locations have.
I think the solution for the algorithm (besides organizing for new tech infrastructure) is to be tricksters about it. The 90s counterculture had a very vibrant, confrontational, guerilla attitude toward mass media, which was an existential crisis on the level of the algorithm from what I have read, and I think we need to adopt some of that stance. Being on social media will never be cool, but maybe we can use and undermine the algorithm to make something cool on it, or at least create some portals to facilitate the nourishing analog lives we all want.
Yes, these are all good points. I suspect part of why I didn't give these concerns sufficient weight in the above was my belief that instead of thinking in nationalistic or internationalistic terms, I think that it is the local that matters. This is down to Blake's belief that the numinous has to be here, in the moment, or it is nowhere, and that is something you create more than you find. But you are right, of course, it is much harder to build in some places rather than others. Which is not to say that it can't be done, it's just not going to be easy
I cannot thank you enough John for articulating so many aspects of contemporary life that I find troubling, invasive and corrosive. And wrapping them in flowing, cohesive prose. I am old enough to have lived through numerous countercultures and feel the loss of belonging to them very keenly, this for me is the key. Much to think about here, there is a wonderful pamphlet or book in this.
Just read the recent Octo email that explains it all. Another subscriber incoming!
This is lovely to hear - much appreciated sir!
Fantastic article - I’m actually reading this in one of my two very local pubs which are full to the brim of people having a good old fashioned chin wag over a pint.
I’m a member of a gig club - basically a bunch of like minded music obsessives who have a WhatsApp group to organised trips to local gigs in the Bristol and Bath area - also includes a trip to some decent boozers before & sometimes afterwards - you can’t beat reality! 🤓👍
I too am a member of what we call the Old Man Gig Club - although admittedly the ratio between attending gigs and sitting around in pubs has been questionable of late