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Counterculture is probably happening around the corner from me. But I’m not there and actively seeking it out. I’m out of touch. I’m out of touch for all the reasons that many “grown-ups” are and maybe that’s what’s changed. Maybe it’s not that there’s no longer a counter culture, but that I’m no longer “in the know”.
I think about this a lot. I suppose it’s a natural part of the aging process to realize that identifying and experiencing couterculture takes extra effort. It’s easy to trend to the mean and organize around comfort.
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But it’s been a long time since I’ve felt that way. I grieve that loss: a great number of my closest friends are people I met in the halcyon days of Twitter, and I find I still often long for that kind of connection, the ambient awareness of people in whose company I felt at home. But I know that longing to be a kind of nostalgia, an unrealizable wish to return to a past that never was quite as I remember it.
OG Twitter came up in conversation recently with a friend, and in particular how it potentially worked so well because our brains are already wired for short, pithy statements. The advertising industry latched onto this optimization long before the invention of Twitter.
I admitted to the friend that I still find myself forming thoughts as Tweets, even though I haven’t actively contributed to a Twitter-like platform in 9 years. I keep a list of thoughts in an app on my phone. They won’t ever be published, but it’s still cathartic to express myself this way, even if only to myself.
And I too still grieve the loss of the version of these platforms that no longer exists, while abhorring the way the medium has made it that much harder to actually communicate with each other in any honest sort of way.
It’s exhausting. It is, at this point in my life, unsustainable. I cannot dip into the stream, even briefly, and also maintain the awareness and focus needed to do my own work, the work that is uniquely mine.
Mandy’s essay is about much more than my small moment of recognition with a friend. It’s worth your time, your consideration, and our collective effort to find ways of communicating that aren’t “beholden to either the advertising industry or the brittle egos of billionaires.”
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The look that jolted tens of millions is not a costume whipped up for a museum trip. Pedro began dressing this way less than a year ago, inspired by 20th-century history and black-and-white images of suited statesmen and fictional detectives.
“I like to be chic,” he said. “I go to school like this.”
Sometimes the internet still gives us a treat.