25 Hour Watch

The speakeasy exists in American culture as a wonderful relic of the Prohibition era, when gathering together under the same roof as a bunch of other people in order to get sauced was completely illegal unless you all happened to be drinking wine and having little crackers to go with it.

It’s a relic of a time when not every piece of information was archived and easily searchable, as it is today. Except for some minor exceptions, where venue owners want to either create that exclusive atmosphere or are engaging in actual illegal activity, that sort of thing simply doesn’t exist anymore. It’s only possible to be obscure through an act of will in the Age of Google; thirty years ago that was the default condition. This is not a judgment — it’s merely an observation. Perhaps this state of affairs is better than the alternative, perhaps it’s ruined our sense of proportion. It’s hard to tell when we’re in the middle of it.

In any event, with the death of obscurity, the counter-culture lost its ability to be underground in any real sense. This isn’t a new problem for the counter-culture. After all, accusations of selling out have dogged those arrayed against popular culture for as long as there has been a division between what the masses enjoy and what the elite, self-selected seekers enjoyed. (Did ancient tribes, sitting around the campfire, accuse their shaman of ‘dumbing down’ the esoterica of the rites for mass consumption? Might rivals have risen up as ‘purists’, claiming to be closer to the ‘source’, where yet more esoteric mysteries awaited for the striving seeker?)

“Counter-culture” is a neologism, really. It sprang into existence in the late 1960s to try and apply a name to the social upheaval that was marked as anti-war, pro-sexual-freedom, and most definitely interested in toppling the dominant culture of the time, that of the growing bureaucratic technocracy of JFK and Johnson. Subculture, although an older word (originally used to simply describe, in a technical sense, the various currents within a society), also took on the somewhat negative connotation of something illicit at this time.

The counter-culture existed for a deeper reason than giving the disaffected of every generation a refuge, where they could meet other alienated citizens and try and figure out how to combat what they saw as structural rot. It stood as the challenge to a consensus — any consensus, be it a political one, or an economic one, or even simple broad cultural agreements. When that vanished, and the counter-culture merged with mainstream culture, that dialectic was lost; there is no longer any large-scale systematic way of seeking truths that the mainstream does not accept or recognize. Worse, there is no longer a way to speak Truth to Power from an ‘uncorrupted’ position — everything has been touched by the mainstream now, and there is no hiding place from its reach. No one has the moral high ground.

So there is no counter-culture anymore. Fine. Good riddance to bad rubbish, as generic British characters say on the television. I don’t need a counter-culture; I have my niche grouping, where everyone already gets me, and likes the same bands that I do, and reads the same blogs, and we all follow each other on twitter. The echo chamber is complete, total, and suffocating. And if we don’t consider the deeper meaning of our acceptance of the mainstream, well, that’s alright. I’m sure somebody’s thinking about this stuff, right?

Right?

Part 1: Whose Monoculture Is It, Anyway?
Next: Discontents; or, Handle With Care