Monday
Dec222008
The RAWstory Interview
Monday, December 22, 2008 at 11:32PM
Counterculture and Social Change
RU Sirius interviews Douglas Rushkoff
February 22, 2005
This is the third and final installment in a series on counterculture and social change that commentator RU Sirius has conducted for Raw Story. Over the last two weeks, Sirius has spoken with Tom Franks, author of What’s the Matter with Kansas, and Joseph Heath who wrote Nation of Rebels: Why Counterculture became Consumer Culture.
Douglas Rushkoff has emerged over the last decade or so as one of America’s most important and insightful media theorists. He has written and hosted two award-winning Frontline documentaries - The Merchants of Cool looked at the influence of corporations on youth culture, and The Persuaders, about the cluttered landscape of marketing, and new efforts to overcome consumer resistance. His 1993 classic Cyberia was an Electric Kool Aide Acid Test for the digital counterculture, and other books like Media Virus and Coercion look at the types of issues that I have been discussing wit the various guests in this series.
Rushkoff always comes at things from a unique angle, so I thought I would get him to help me wrap this thing up by telling me what we missed.
RU SIRIUS: For starters, you’ve read the first two conversations here on RAWStory. Tell me what we all missed.
DOUGLAS RUSHKOFF: Here’s the gist of the unacknowledged territory, as I see it.
There’s this unspoken effort in these discussions to figure out who is living in whose world. It’s an artifact of postmodernism, really: is the counterculture recontextualizing the overculture, or does the overculture contextualize the counterculture? Who is living in whose frame? And if we’re stuck in the other guy’s, can we quickly conceive a new frame that puts us on the outside and them on the inside?
So a culture jam is really that. This Marlboro ad, with my addition, become an anti-corporate ad. Hahaha. Or this airplane, crashed into your building, becomes a weapon of war and your building becomes a symbol of your vulnerability. It’s all a big symbolic argument, occasionally expressed through very real media, like blood.
The problem you guys are batting around all goes back to Marx’s critique of Hegel. The argument between left/right, counterculture and culture, means nothing if the on-the-ground humans (the workers, in his vernacular) aren’t taken into account. It’s no more real than an argument on Crossfire. The Enlightenment fucked us up in that it led us to believe that dialectics led to truth. Two people arguing honestly from opposing points of view are supposed to be able to resolve their debate to a synthesis. But that synthesis may not be connected to reality, at all. Two politicians can argue about whether the tax code should have 40 or 39 lines, while the child starves from lack of rice.
The “backlash dynamics” Frank is talking about falls into this category of false dichotomies. And the more we propel the pendulum of backlash, the more connected to the momentum of the arguments we become, and the less connected to reality. We all know that real purpose of rapid-fire extremism of this sort is to alienate what we call the middle. Making rhetoric extreme alienates regular people, keeps them from the polls, and tends to favor the right – who can get out their churchpeople.
But it’s much much bigger than that. It’s not just that the “middle” gets alienated. Reality gets ignored as the discussion rises above genuine stakes and into the realm of theory and fashion.
You and Frank get into the problems with communism, but again I’d argue that you’re looking at false content instead of the real and artificial context in which people’s lives and their conversations, respectively, are taking place.
You say the problem with communism is that it looked at people exclusively through their economic interests. Maybe so. But the real problem, as I see it, is that it treats the landscape as an economy. Reality is not an economy – a marketplace – but an ecology. A natural system with interdependencies. Yes, there’s violence. It’s not like everything green is nice. (Try cooperating with your athlete’s foot.) But it’s not a competitive marketplace with fixed resources and rules, either. The problem with communist movements is they still adopt the economic model of reality, and forget that money is put into circulation by fiat and all. But the bigger problem as we discuss all this is engaging with the content of people’s arguments as if they were the context of our lives and situation. It’s a classic medium/message confusion. And it serves those who would keep us flying around like iron filings between two magnets.
I love where you guys get into the counterculture being used as some sort of come hither for political activity. What an awful role for thinkers and artist: to be window dressing for a social movement, rather than intrinsic to the movement, itself. But, in case you can’t tell, I hate movements. They have implicit narratives that allow people to condone suffering for some future payday. The left does it as much or even worse than the right. Don’t get people to do this, for any disconnection with the here and now is going to serve the hypnotists, not the people. No movements. No revolutions. It all starts right now. There’s nothing but now. The minute they convince you there’s something other than now, you’re gone. Literally.
I think the Heath discussion falls into some of the same traps.
Does the counterculture co-opt itself? Well, sure – because it has emerged from the very thing it despises! Like there’s some separation between a counterculture and the culture in which it grows? This is life we’re talking about. There are no real walls between things.
Indeed, the problem with most countercultures is that they exist as parts of economies, or as miniature economies themselves. A counterculture cannot be defined by “buy less.” In a world where economics and markets define the culture, a counterculture would have to define itself – contextualize itself – quite differently. The real challenge, after that, would be to FUNCTION in that other way.
Most countercultures failed miserably. They weren’t co-opted, but began selling themselves. Look how our hacker friends did this. Innocently, hoping for approval from above, they accepted the money of AT&T and others who jumped onto the Internet bandwagon in the mid-90’s. It didn’t feel like selling out – it felt like turning the world onto this stuff. I mean, if Lily wanted to sell LSD over the counter, I’m sure 60’s radicals would have thought it was a cool idea.
What the hackers didn’t realize, however, was that the market would redefine cyberspace, as well as our roles within it.
The best resistance movement I’ve witnessed, in this regard, has been the rave movement. Rave kids always acknowledged that they were the offspring of industrial culture. They seem at pains to remind themselves of this. But their power was always in their effort to detach from the economy. Rave was free; that was the threat to the status quo. No one was buying alcohol or paying for admission. It starts that small. But it starts that real.
Heath is right in that culture jamming and consumer revolts only do so much; but at least they are a bit more connected to people’s hands and heads than some email letter to Moveon.org.
The real problem with culture jamming, like I say above, is that it’s just another game of Crossfire. I’m tired as hell of Adbusters, too. But it’s still an important thing for kids in high school, say, to be exposed to. Easier than Debord, anyway.
Yes, we’re living in a sea of ads, and it’s a competitive marketplace for our attention. But ads aren’t working so well anymore. They will go away, and be replaced by fully sponsored media, such as Seinfeld’s “webisodes” for Amex, and American Idol product placements. I don’t know that they’ll be more effective at making us consume, but they will tend to make the mediaspace less apparently crowded with messaging.
The other big unacknowledged fact in all this is that it’s a bit facile to say that the market and corporations brought down the state and the public sector. I think we did that. Starbucks isn’t evil for creating a place for people to socialize. They’re filling in a gap that was left behind by those of us who felt it was more important to get away from black folks and move to the planned suburbs than some corporation or advertisement. (Though you could argue GM did all this by closing the streetcar.)
Still, it’s not a symbol war, in that sense. If we want public space and community experiences, then we have to build them. The premise of American democracy – like even Bush says – is that if you want something then you are the government. Or like Nike says, “Just Do It.”
We’re stuck in some post-modernist’s dilemma, worrying about who is stuck in whose frame. I don’t care anymore. I’ve got a baby. I’m out building playgrounds in abandoned lots, and investing my money in alternative energy companies. And writing books designed to get people to wake up and experience a bit of traction with reality.
RU: I hate movements too, although I love strategic thinking (maybe I should play chess instead). And I pretty much hate the left, although I am also of it – or at least I share their concerns with US global domination, and economic policies that I believe serve the rich and hurt the poor. And, of course, we all exist in the now. But then, we also plant seeds in our garden so that we’ll have food tomorrow. And we contribute to the ACLU so that we’ll have civil liberties tomorrow. Or we invest in alternative energy so our children won’t be surfing in Kansas tomorrow, ad infinitum.
People who come here to the RAW STORY website generally don’t like living in a country ruled by Bush and his neocons, theocrats, and oil oligarchs. I think the main question that has been raised in these conversations is; does “counterculture” (and we know you don’t like the word, but you know what I mean) have anything in its bag of tricks for them, or does it make it harder for them to get rid of the far right, or is it just irrelevant to their political concerns? What shall we tell them?
DR: Well, to paraphrase your old pal Chairman Mao, there’s really nothing we can tell “them” at all. Whoever they are don’t need leaders or experts telling them anything. We should accept that, as intellectuals or writers or whatever we are, we’re in the entertainment business and, at best, artists. If we can stimulate new thought and emotion, cool.
As far as whether the counterculture has anything in its bag of tricks for those (like me or you or anyone) hoping to deliver America from fascism (which, as we all know, Mussolini defined as “corporatism"), I kind of doubt it. The object of the game is to be able to develop thinking from outside the competitive corporate model. To be able to relate to our society as something other than an economy, so that we don’t surrender everything to the laws of the market.
The problem with counterculture is that it really doesn’t define itself consciously as an alternative to the market. Rave succeeded, when it did, because it was able to create an alternative economic model. But while kids enjoying a “countercultural” phenomenon have a good sense of when it has been “co-opted,” they don’t really know what that co-option is. They think it has to do with ‘cool’ ideas hitting the mainstream or getting on TV. When it really has much more to do with collaborative models of engagement being replaced with competitive ones. And that happens whenever money (our form of money) gets into the picture.
I think things may actually be a bit too serious right now for countercultural shenanigans in the political sector. Levitating the Pentagon didn’t work. The best way for the counterculture to serve the many people who want to break the hold of tyrants over the public sector would be to serve as something of a retreat. A USO for our troops. A safe haven for alternative thought and visions. But not to get too self-important.
RU: I agree, about every third day. The rest of the time, I think this is going to be an activist period with a lot of meanness and rigidity. The piece that’s missing is a coalition of anti-authoritarians left, right, and center (and over, under, sideways, down). That’s where I’m headed.
DR: Yes, I hear you. But I think that the “culture” aspect is only going to be a part of it. You want activists with a sense of humor. Sure - and that’s always nice. But there’s only so far that Adbusters satires and clever Flash movies are going to get us. I no longer believe that ‘culture’ describes the whole stew. We’re talking about developing and being part of a more intelligent, responsive, and responsible society. And this means taking part in or even re-conceiving economic, political, and other institutions. Countercultural activity from Woody Guthrie to Ken Kesey can be of great motivational importance. But it’s doesn’t account for the entirety of our side of the equation.
And the “anti-authorities” part still feels too defined by their agendas. They’ve gotten too smart for us to play it that way, or we end up spending our time making figures like Ward Churchill our cause, rather than go at the actual suspension of civil liberties. Don’t think they didn’t know exactly what they were doing by picking Churchill instead of a more defensible individual like Noam Chomsky or Mark Crispin Miller. Yet it is men like them whose rights we mean to be defending.
As for me, I’m working to change the way businesspeople conceive of their relationship to currency, markets, and the prevailing myth of scarcity. I’m doing it through a business book designed to shift people’s priorities and mental frames. And I’m teaching about the potential uses of interactive media, fulltime, at NYU. That’s not countercultural energy as we’ve been defining it, as much as education, public psychology, and a bit of de-programming.
My upcoming comic book reinterpreting the Bible, well, that might count as counterculture. But these days I see it as a sideline and a way to refuel. Maybe we all should.
RU: One thing I never really got to say in the previous two conversations is that I think the countercultural panic over co-optation and consumerism is blown out of proportion. Of course, any “ism” induces idiocy. I look at societies and identities built around production and consumption and – echoing the Democrats’ favorite phrase – think, “We could do better.” But we could also do worse. Consumer electronics can be profoundly liberating, particularly in totalitarian or puritanical cultures. The Taliban banned them. Some countercultural purists also abhor them. I see them both as manifesting the same impulse; they don’t want to be contaminated by “false” desires. Fine. But they also don’t want the rest of us to be contaminated by what they consider false desires. That’s when I reach for my hamburger.
Moreover, excessive worrying over cooptation and consumerism is trite and divisive. We’ve got perpetual war, a prison-industrial complex, a Patriot Act – I’m not going to worry about whether the latest hip subculture is reflected in a McDonald’s ad. We can’t get 50% of the country to vote against Bush – I don’t want to tell everyone who enjoys commercial media or going to the mall that they’re unhip and should bugger off.
Your thoughts?
DR: I think I addressed some of this above. You’re really talking about the calcifying effect of religion on almost any evolving society. Religions and other orthodoxies provide static templates that don’t permit the flexibility required of a living culture. The rules become the new structure, and then more energy is spent protecting the rules than evolving them. It’s great for children, but terrible for adults. Unless, of course, you have such a stupid, fearful population that they long for the rules you create for them. The so-called counterculture can be frightened into submission to rule sets just as easily as the overculture.
As for co-option, I think we sometimes have our cause and effect reversed. We get co-opted when we aren’t clear about what it is we’re really doing that’s alternative. Or when we try to repeat our last success rather than continue to develop. They can’t co-opt a moving target.
RU Sirius interviews Douglas Rushkoff
February 22, 2005
This is the third and final installment in a series on counterculture and social change that commentator RU Sirius has conducted for Raw Story. Over the last two weeks, Sirius has spoken with Tom Franks, author of What’s the Matter with Kansas, and Joseph Heath who wrote Nation of Rebels: Why Counterculture became Consumer Culture.
Douglas Rushkoff has emerged over the last decade or so as one of America’s most important and insightful media theorists. He has written and hosted two award-winning Frontline documentaries - The Merchants of Cool looked at the influence of corporations on youth culture, and The Persuaders, about the cluttered landscape of marketing, and new efforts to overcome consumer resistance. His 1993 classic Cyberia was an Electric Kool Aide Acid Test for the digital counterculture, and other books like Media Virus and Coercion look at the types of issues that I have been discussing wit the various guests in this series.
Rushkoff always comes at things from a unique angle, so I thought I would get him to help me wrap this thing up by telling me what we missed.
RU SIRIUS: For starters, you’ve read the first two conversations here on RAWStory. Tell me what we all missed.
DOUGLAS RUSHKOFF: Here’s the gist of the unacknowledged territory, as I see it.
There’s this unspoken effort in these discussions to figure out who is living in whose world. It’s an artifact of postmodernism, really: is the counterculture recontextualizing the overculture, or does the overculture contextualize the counterculture? Who is living in whose frame? And if we’re stuck in the other guy’s, can we quickly conceive a new frame that puts us on the outside and them on the inside?
So a culture jam is really that. This Marlboro ad, with my addition, become an anti-corporate ad. Hahaha. Or this airplane, crashed into your building, becomes a weapon of war and your building becomes a symbol of your vulnerability. It’s all a big symbolic argument, occasionally expressed through very real media, like blood.
The problem you guys are batting around all goes back to Marx’s critique of Hegel. The argument between left/right, counterculture and culture, means nothing if the on-the-ground humans (the workers, in his vernacular) aren’t taken into account. It’s no more real than an argument on Crossfire. The Enlightenment fucked us up in that it led us to believe that dialectics led to truth. Two people arguing honestly from opposing points of view are supposed to be able to resolve their debate to a synthesis. But that synthesis may not be connected to reality, at all. Two politicians can argue about whether the tax code should have 40 or 39 lines, while the child starves from lack of rice.
The “backlash dynamics” Frank is talking about falls into this category of false dichotomies. And the more we propel the pendulum of backlash, the more connected to the momentum of the arguments we become, and the less connected to reality. We all know that real purpose of rapid-fire extremism of this sort is to alienate what we call the middle. Making rhetoric extreme alienates regular people, keeps them from the polls, and tends to favor the right – who can get out their churchpeople.
But it’s much much bigger than that. It’s not just that the “middle” gets alienated. Reality gets ignored as the discussion rises above genuine stakes and into the realm of theory and fashion.
You and Frank get into the problems with communism, but again I’d argue that you’re looking at false content instead of the real and artificial context in which people’s lives and their conversations, respectively, are taking place.
You say the problem with communism is that it looked at people exclusively through their economic interests. Maybe so. But the real problem, as I see it, is that it treats the landscape as an economy. Reality is not an economy – a marketplace – but an ecology. A natural system with interdependencies. Yes, there’s violence. It’s not like everything green is nice. (Try cooperating with your athlete’s foot.) But it’s not a competitive marketplace with fixed resources and rules, either. The problem with communist movements is they still adopt the economic model of reality, and forget that money is put into circulation by fiat and all. But the bigger problem as we discuss all this is engaging with the content of people’s arguments as if they were the context of our lives and situation. It’s a classic medium/message confusion. And it serves those who would keep us flying around like iron filings between two magnets.
I love where you guys get into the counterculture being used as some sort of come hither for political activity. What an awful role for thinkers and artist: to be window dressing for a social movement, rather than intrinsic to the movement, itself. But, in case you can’t tell, I hate movements. They have implicit narratives that allow people to condone suffering for some future payday. The left does it as much or even worse than the right. Don’t get people to do this, for any disconnection with the here and now is going to serve the hypnotists, not the people. No movements. No revolutions. It all starts right now. There’s nothing but now. The minute they convince you there’s something other than now, you’re gone. Literally.
I think the Heath discussion falls into some of the same traps.
Does the counterculture co-opt itself? Well, sure – because it has emerged from the very thing it despises! Like there’s some separation between a counterculture and the culture in which it grows? This is life we’re talking about. There are no real walls between things.
Indeed, the problem with most countercultures is that they exist as parts of economies, or as miniature economies themselves. A counterculture cannot be defined by “buy less.” In a world where economics and markets define the culture, a counterculture would have to define itself – contextualize itself – quite differently. The real challenge, after that, would be to FUNCTION in that other way.
Most countercultures failed miserably. They weren’t co-opted, but began selling themselves. Look how our hacker friends did this. Innocently, hoping for approval from above, they accepted the money of AT&T and others who jumped onto the Internet bandwagon in the mid-90’s. It didn’t feel like selling out – it felt like turning the world onto this stuff. I mean, if Lily wanted to sell LSD over the counter, I’m sure 60’s radicals would have thought it was a cool idea.
What the hackers didn’t realize, however, was that the market would redefine cyberspace, as well as our roles within it.
The best resistance movement I’ve witnessed, in this regard, has been the rave movement. Rave kids always acknowledged that they were the offspring of industrial culture. They seem at pains to remind themselves of this. But their power was always in their effort to detach from the economy. Rave was free; that was the threat to the status quo. No one was buying alcohol or paying for admission. It starts that small. But it starts that real.
Heath is right in that culture jamming and consumer revolts only do so much; but at least they are a bit more connected to people’s hands and heads than some email letter to Moveon.org.
The real problem with culture jamming, like I say above, is that it’s just another game of Crossfire. I’m tired as hell of Adbusters, too. But it’s still an important thing for kids in high school, say, to be exposed to. Easier than Debord, anyway.
Yes, we’re living in a sea of ads, and it’s a competitive marketplace for our attention. But ads aren’t working so well anymore. They will go away, and be replaced by fully sponsored media, such as Seinfeld’s “webisodes” for Amex, and American Idol product placements. I don’t know that they’ll be more effective at making us consume, but they will tend to make the mediaspace less apparently crowded with messaging.
The other big unacknowledged fact in all this is that it’s a bit facile to say that the market and corporations brought down the state and the public sector. I think we did that. Starbucks isn’t evil for creating a place for people to socialize. They’re filling in a gap that was left behind by those of us who felt it was more important to get away from black folks and move to the planned suburbs than some corporation or advertisement. (Though you could argue GM did all this by closing the streetcar.)
Still, it’s not a symbol war, in that sense. If we want public space and community experiences, then we have to build them. The premise of American democracy – like even Bush says – is that if you want something then you are the government. Or like Nike says, “Just Do It.”
We’re stuck in some post-modernist’s dilemma, worrying about who is stuck in whose frame. I don’t care anymore. I’ve got a baby. I’m out building playgrounds in abandoned lots, and investing my money in alternative energy companies. And writing books designed to get people to wake up and experience a bit of traction with reality.
RU: I hate movements too, although I love strategic thinking (maybe I should play chess instead). And I pretty much hate the left, although I am also of it – or at least I share their concerns with US global domination, and economic policies that I believe serve the rich and hurt the poor. And, of course, we all exist in the now. But then, we also plant seeds in our garden so that we’ll have food tomorrow. And we contribute to the ACLU so that we’ll have civil liberties tomorrow. Or we invest in alternative energy so our children won’t be surfing in Kansas tomorrow, ad infinitum.
People who come here to the RAW STORY website generally don’t like living in a country ruled by Bush and his neocons, theocrats, and oil oligarchs. I think the main question that has been raised in these conversations is; does “counterculture” (and we know you don’t like the word, but you know what I mean) have anything in its bag of tricks for them, or does it make it harder for them to get rid of the far right, or is it just irrelevant to their political concerns? What shall we tell them?
DR: Well, to paraphrase your old pal Chairman Mao, there’s really nothing we can tell “them” at all. Whoever they are don’t need leaders or experts telling them anything. We should accept that, as intellectuals or writers or whatever we are, we’re in the entertainment business and, at best, artists. If we can stimulate new thought and emotion, cool.
As far as whether the counterculture has anything in its bag of tricks for those (like me or you or anyone) hoping to deliver America from fascism (which, as we all know, Mussolini defined as “corporatism"), I kind of doubt it. The object of the game is to be able to develop thinking from outside the competitive corporate model. To be able to relate to our society as something other than an economy, so that we don’t surrender everything to the laws of the market.
The problem with counterculture is that it really doesn’t define itself consciously as an alternative to the market. Rave succeeded, when it did, because it was able to create an alternative economic model. But while kids enjoying a “countercultural” phenomenon have a good sense of when it has been “co-opted,” they don’t really know what that co-option is. They think it has to do with ‘cool’ ideas hitting the mainstream or getting on TV. When it really has much more to do with collaborative models of engagement being replaced with competitive ones. And that happens whenever money (our form of money) gets into the picture.
I think things may actually be a bit too serious right now for countercultural shenanigans in the political sector. Levitating the Pentagon didn’t work. The best way for the counterculture to serve the many people who want to break the hold of tyrants over the public sector would be to serve as something of a retreat. A USO for our troops. A safe haven for alternative thought and visions. But not to get too self-important.
RU: I agree, about every third day. The rest of the time, I think this is going to be an activist period with a lot of meanness and rigidity. The piece that’s missing is a coalition of anti-authoritarians left, right, and center (and over, under, sideways, down). That’s where I’m headed.
DR: Yes, I hear you. But I think that the “culture” aspect is only going to be a part of it. You want activists with a sense of humor. Sure - and that’s always nice. But there’s only so far that Adbusters satires and clever Flash movies are going to get us. I no longer believe that ‘culture’ describes the whole stew. We’re talking about developing and being part of a more intelligent, responsive, and responsible society. And this means taking part in or even re-conceiving economic, political, and other institutions. Countercultural activity from Woody Guthrie to Ken Kesey can be of great motivational importance. But it’s doesn’t account for the entirety of our side of the equation.
And the “anti-authorities” part still feels too defined by their agendas. They’ve gotten too smart for us to play it that way, or we end up spending our time making figures like Ward Churchill our cause, rather than go at the actual suspension of civil liberties. Don’t think they didn’t know exactly what they were doing by picking Churchill instead of a more defensible individual like Noam Chomsky or Mark Crispin Miller. Yet it is men like them whose rights we mean to be defending.
As for me, I’m working to change the way businesspeople conceive of their relationship to currency, markets, and the prevailing myth of scarcity. I’m doing it through a business book designed to shift people’s priorities and mental frames. And I’m teaching about the potential uses of interactive media, fulltime, at NYU. That’s not countercultural energy as we’ve been defining it, as much as education, public psychology, and a bit of de-programming.
My upcoming comic book reinterpreting the Bible, well, that might count as counterculture. But these days I see it as a sideline and a way to refuel. Maybe we all should.
RU: One thing I never really got to say in the previous two conversations is that I think the countercultural panic over co-optation and consumerism is blown out of proportion. Of course, any “ism” induces idiocy. I look at societies and identities built around production and consumption and – echoing the Democrats’ favorite phrase – think, “We could do better.” But we could also do worse. Consumer electronics can be profoundly liberating, particularly in totalitarian or puritanical cultures. The Taliban banned them. Some countercultural purists also abhor them. I see them both as manifesting the same impulse; they don’t want to be contaminated by “false” desires. Fine. But they also don’t want the rest of us to be contaminated by what they consider false desires. That’s when I reach for my hamburger.
Moreover, excessive worrying over cooptation and consumerism is trite and divisive. We’ve got perpetual war, a prison-industrial complex, a Patriot Act – I’m not going to worry about whether the latest hip subculture is reflected in a McDonald’s ad. We can’t get 50% of the country to vote against Bush – I don’t want to tell everyone who enjoys commercial media or going to the mall that they’re unhip and should bugger off.
Your thoughts?
DR: I think I addressed some of this above. You’re really talking about the calcifying effect of religion on almost any evolving society. Religions and other orthodoxies provide static templates that don’t permit the flexibility required of a living culture. The rules become the new structure, and then more energy is spent protecting the rules than evolving them. It’s great for children, but terrible for adults. Unless, of course, you have such a stupid, fearful population that they long for the rules you create for them. The so-called counterculture can be frightened into submission to rule sets just as easily as the overculture.
As for co-option, I think we sometimes have our cause and effect reversed. We get co-opted when we aren’t clear about what it is we’re really doing that’s alternative. Or when we try to repeat our last success rather than continue to develop. They can’t co-opt a moving target.
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