Yeah I've seen this for a bunch of startups that weren't profitable and struggled to close a new funding round. They pay back the VCs, the employees get zeroed out, and the execs usually get a retention bonus in the 6 figure range.
This is such a superficial understanding of "support". They make their logo rainbow for a month. None of the groups you mentioned support police abolition, prison abolition, for instance. Police budgets still go up. Homeless encampments still get bulldozed. Black people are still killed by police.
Capitalists have co-opted the least disruptive demands of advocates in an attempt to draw attention away from the actual point. They think if they focus on saying words and not doing deeds, people will move on and forget.
If your culture is well-known enough and seen as desirable enough that you start having to no-true-scotsman to differentiate between the corporate poseurs and the true believers, it's a pretty strong sign that you're not a counterculture anymore. People don't try to fake having low cultural status.
imo that's the problem - everything gets corporate poseurs so quickly now
could just be i'm out of touch and the countercultures have successfully hidden from me tho
That's faking low financial or political status in order to obtain cultural status. If the rich and powerful are generally hated, you don't become popular by flaunting your wealth but by distancing yourself from it.
"The leftist of the over-socialized type tries to get off his psychological leash and assert his autonomy by rebelling. But usually he is not strong enough to rebel against the most basic values of society. Generally speaking, the goals of today’s leftists are NOT in conflict with the accepted morality. On the contrary, the left takes an accepted moral principle, adopts it as its own, and then accuses mainstream society of violating that principle.” --Theodore J. Kaczynski
Police budgets are up, but policing is down, killings by police are way down, and consequentially violent crime is way, way up. Protesters didn’t get everything, but they got a lot of what they asked for (reduction in policing, basically) and they seem content (no more major protests or riots since the precipitous drop in policing following the Floyd protests).
It seems hard to argue that there haven’t been disruptive changes considering violent crime levels (esp homicides), but I fully agree that “capitalists” (or maybe corporatists?) embraced BLM and other identity stuff because it’s a convenient distraction from substantial policy issues. A lot of folks made themselves into “useful idiots” over the last decade.
You're claiming that the US, unlike the rest of the civilized world, can't address crime without having death squads summarily execute people for trivial or imagined offences every other week?
Sure thing: "An event study design finds census places with early BLM protests experienced a 10% to 15% decrease in police homicides from 2014 through 2019, around 200 fewer deaths." - https://papers.ssrn.com/sol3/papers.cfm?abstract_id=3767097
> You're claiming that the US, unlike the rest of the civilized world, can't address crime without having death squads summarily execute people for trivial or imagined offences every other week?
The US obviously doesn't have "death squads" who "summarily execute people every other week". Lol I can't imagine asking for a citation about police killings and then tossing this claim out there.
I don't think it's that activists are content. Rather I think it's that a combination of people returning to work, the end of Covid financial support, and high inflation means that people can't protest anymore. There's probably also a lot of fatigue after protests were going on for months.
I'd also contest whether activists really got much of what they were asking for. They generally weren't asking for simply no-police. Rather they were asking for issues like poverty, mental illness, and homelessness to be addressed rather than just being policed.
People protested for half a decade before COVID. Even if they couldn’t get out and protest, they could still engage in social media, and yet it seemed like their enthusiasm for the subject largely evaporated, even on social media. Even the cheapest of symbolic stuff like “#BLM” in Twitter handles and bios seemed to largely disappear. It very much feels like they cut policing in the name of black Americans and then lost interest when policing drove up crime rates, particularly in black communities.
> Rather they were asking for issues like poverty, mental illness, and homelessness to be addressed rather than just being policed.
I’m sure some were asking for those things, but mostly this was a media retcon when it was becoming apparent that “abolish the police” was jeopardizing Biden’s election campaign (“when protesters say ‘abolish the police’ and ‘all cops are bastards’, surely they’re really advocating for more spending on social services, right?”).
That wasn't my experience. From the start I heard people saying that "defund the police" was a poor slogan because it didn't convey to most people what activists actually meant.
This is such a misunderstanding of the current situation. The demands were varied, but common ask was _not_ just a reduction in policing paired with a ballooning police budget. Ironically, the "defund" movement ended up causing an even more reactionary movement such that police actually got more funding.
Protesters wanted to re-allocate resources away from the police towards other services, so that cops are not the first responders to every situation, they often wanted fewer police with more training.
Crime goes up as a result of the material conditions of people. The more unequal society is, the more poor and desperate people get, the higher crime is going to be. Acting like it's merely a function of enforcement is silly.
Society did not get abruptly and dramatically unequal between 2013 and 2015 nor between 2019 and 2020. Socioeconomics doesn’t predict these crime surges.
Richard Rosenfeld speaking to The Guardian: “The only explanation that gets the timing right is a version of the Ferguson Effect”
Vox reporting on Travis Campbell’s research: “Campbell’s research indicates that these protests correlate with a 10% increase in murders in the areas that saw BLM protests”.
Harvard’s Roland Fryer and Tanaya Devi found that prominent BLM protests were associated with 900 excess homicides in the 5 cities they examined and 34k excess felonies. They report that the leading hypothesis is a change in policing activity, and the cities they studied had precipitous drops in the quantity of police-civilian interactions following the protests.
These are professional criminologists and economists—I doubt they’re being “silly” as you suggest.
If you don't think there is any correlation between the material conditions of people and crime I don't know what to tell you. You're basically subscribing to essentialism. There are plenty of cranks with ivy league degrees in economics.
edit: You are cherry picking your data points. I spent literally 30 seconds looking up your first quote it's not even congruent with what you're saying.
Obviously no one in this thread ever disputed the relationship between socioeconomics and crime. This is a flimsy, transparent attempt to move goal posts.
Of course they're being silly if they decide the mere discussion of holding criminals accountable is responsible for a rise in crime, just because said criminals happen to be wearing blue.
The solution is obvious. Start rolling heads of Police Chiefs until they get their hierarchies of people in line. If it ends with the entire police union fired so be it, insubordinate lawless police are worse than useless.
This is just a recipe for chiefs that are good are juking stats or playing PR. You can't just fire the person at the top, the institution needs to change.
I do think Daniels are a great example of actual counterculture like this article is talking about. Swiss Army Man is weird as shit, and deeply affecting. EEAO has very much broken into the mainstream while preserving a lot of their style and sensibility. I think there will probably be a set of filmmakers in the future who saw their movies at a young age and thought "you can do that?"
What are the great creative works you identify with the alt-right? I know lots of great leftist artists, musicians, etc. but I don't see alt-righters making a lot of daring indie cinema for instance.
Thousands of sad frogs, wojaks and other memes. The fringe fashwave music videos. Greentext stories with their weird rules as whole new literary genre. It's obvious there are real artists spending days and hours making them, but posting any of these things on mainstream cultural outlets gets you banned. How this is any different from independent filmmaker being shunned out of cinemas for his extreme take on coprophilia in the 80'?
I'm strictly considering the definition as "an alternative to dominant [as opposed to popular] opinion and social mores".
I'd probably agree the bulk of indier-than-thou creations are produced by people on the left (not all of whom demand we also bow to their political interpretation of the world); some of the work excellent, most of it perhaps not.
That's not what the article is about. The article is about creative content, and how YouTube content is aesthetically all the same. Jordan Peterson videos have the same stupid thumbnails as all other clickbait.
People have said it in the thread, but counter-culture is really defined retrospectively. You look at the movements that existed on the periphery but later inspired the mainstream. Velvet Underground wasn't selling millions of records, but everyone who started a band listened to them. Lou Reed is pretty indier than thou.
> The article is about creative content, and how YouTube content is aesthetically all the same.
Yeah, but Youtube is mainstream now; it comes installed on almost every single consumer TV available for sale right now. You don't get more mainstream than that.
If you wanted to see counterculture, you'd have to use the youtube alternatives.
Well, it's no wonder since you're looking at YouTube which is basically a curated experience. Take a look at Rumble and other YT alternatives and you'll see plenty of counter-cultural video content. Plus there's other media like image macros, real-world social stunts etc. The counter-culture is quite real.
Like gays in the 50s, conservatives in Hollywood (and at big tech) are careful not to out themselves. Given that Hollywood has lots of wealthy, business oriented people much of the media you like was made by conservatives without you knowing.
In the recent layoffs I've seen some very senior high-performing engineers get the axe, because they were very expensive and the org could get two juniors grinding out CRUD for the same value as one super senior architecture astronaut.
Things brings about another question. Will the change in economic climate encourage these companies to ditch over-complicated Rube Goldberg machine stacks in favour of ones that allow Juniors to grind out CRUD. One can but hope
I can’t help but feel this misunderstands why systems become complex, and conflates simplicity with sanity.
Ditching an architecture also directly implies adopting a new one. If juniors are at the forefront of that, I don’t think the resulting architecture will somehow get magically simpler.
Architecture is a topic to be debated, no doubt. But if anything, I’d expect the departure of senior talent to solidify complexity, not enable some magical escape from it. The risk of changing a system goes up significantly the moment the people who understand the system walk out the door.
Based on the people I know who work at Confluent, the messaging at all hands meetings has been that the market conditions didn't affect staffing plans. Employees make decisions based on the expectation of ongoing employment - if the CEO keeps says "we won't do layoffs" and then you buy a house and get laid off, that seems like detrimental reliance.
It's also worth noting many places enshrine in law protections for layoffs because of the power imbalance between employees and employers.
> Employees make decisions based on the expectation of ongoing employment
Then again outside of visa holders they are naive.
I’ve been working professionally for 25+ years and there isn’t a day after my first year after I built up savings that I depended on my employer instead of my employability to support my addiction to food and shelter.
In the case of Confluent, who depends on a non profitable company to be a sustainable place of unemployment? You go in knowing that any given day that you are going to be laid off and save accordingly.
And no when I graduated from college I wasn’t making an above average salary. I started out making $30K and found the cheapest apartment I could until I saved money.
One should never assume anything about his employment status other than that it can end at any moment. Companies’ management might have empathy, but as a rule they absolutely don’t care about employees.
