On a metaphysical level I think Grant Morrison touched on conventional counterculture in The Invisibles. Counterculture is just another, essential part of The System expressing itself. Things happen because of The system you're inside The System, and your "individualism" is an emergent property of it. The example I think he used was the police. Was there ever a year when nobody decided to become a police officer? If society was made up of free people making free choices, there would always be catastrophic upsets like this, but it doesn't ever happen. So to that extent, I think the article is incorrect because while you may feel more "authentically counterculture" the further away you are from "conventional counterculture", you're still just a slightly rarer perturbation in the tank.
Your counterculture is only useful if it combats or shields you from a dominant paradigm that is offensive to your values, and if you're alone in the suburbs being hardcore, you're probably losing. Unless your real goal is to feel cool, I guess, then by its own standards yes you are more counterculture than "counterculture". Establishment countercultures may be hypocrites because they don't recognize they're establishment, but they may also be creating systems that ultimately comfort the people in them. But it's probably not sustainable because your primary definition for a culture cannot be one of contrast to something else. America is a nation that has was born in and has internalized rebellion. This is probably the worst value we have, because you can't actually build on that for very long, it's "meant" for the tearing down phase of a bloated bureaucracy. As a nation gets settled if it doesn't abandon that value it will start turning inward and attacking itself, which I think is exactly what is happening.
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On a metaphysical level I think Grant Morrison touched on conventional counterculture in The Invisibles. Counterculture is just another, essential part of The System expressing itself. Things happen because of The system you're inside The System, and your "individualism" is an emergent property of it. The example I think he used was the police. Was there ever a year when nobody decided to become a police officer? If society was made up of free people making free choices, there would always be catastrophic upsets like this, but it doesn't ever happen. So to that extent, I think the article is incorrect because while you may feel more "authentically counterculture" the further away you are from "conventional counterculture", you're still just a slightly rarer perturbation in the tank.
Your counterculture is only useful if it combats or shields you from a dominant paradigm that is offensive to your values, and if you're alone in the suburbs being hardcore, you're probably losing. Unless your real goal is to feel cool, I guess, then by its own standards yes you are more counterculture than "counterculture". Establishment countercultures may be hypocrites because they don't recognize they're establishment, but they may also be creating systems that ultimately comfort the people in them. But it's probably not sustainable because your primary definition for a culture cannot be one of contrast to something else. America is a nation that has was born in and has internalized rebellion. This is probably the worst value we have, because you can't actually build on that for very long, it's "meant" for the tearing down phase of a bloated bureaucracy. As a nation gets settled if it doesn't abandon that value it will start turning inward and attacking itself, which I think is exactly what is happening.
Did I read too much into this essay?