After reading this, I wrote a letter to send to Curtis White but couldn't figure out how to get it to him. So, here it is. I'll just call it an "open letter" now:

Greetings.

My name is Yupa. I’m writing to you regarding your book, Living in a World That Can’t Be Fixed. I became aware of you and your books upon seeing one listed in the notes for “Fandom: Identities and Communities in a Mediated World, 2nd edition”.

I want to write to you about the possibilities and difficulties of counterculture. As someone who rejects this society and wants to life to look very different, I have spent time think about this.

I’ve observed that rejection of the normative culture or form of life is no longer fashionable, but “political awareness” seems to be increasing. In the lingo of the Sixties (which I’m probably butchering), everyone is a politico rather than a dropout, even the radicals who previously tried mixing the two.

I’ll admit that “normative culture” is an imprecise idea. For the sake of keeping this letter short, I’m basically referring to elements of the society that could not exist if there was no state or capitalism. So, I view compulsory labor and everything that rests on it as part of the normative culture.

I don’t believe computers, automobiles, and extensive division of labor would exist in a sustainable society. If there was no rent to pay or cops to push us around, I doubt people would do most of the labor to keep producing these things. So, I imagine a counterculture trying to build a life with these ideas in mind.

It doesn’t seem like people my age feel the same except for some anarchists. Even the social struggles that erupt now are in opposition to mistreatment within this society. They do not call for a new way of life. It doesn’t seem like people dislike the world now, they just don’t want to be excluded from it. This is understandable of course. Nobody should be killed by police or subject to premature death and misery the way marginalized people are. But I am curious why there is so little rejection of the society from the root, and I believe this reason is related to the dearth of counterculture.

You wrote that younger people don’t want to write code for Google. In my experience, that’s not true, even among those not in tech. People my age are stoked to learn coding because it’s both a marketable skill and gives them a sense of power. Being able to code mimics the feeling of creating something in the real world. I’ve heard people jokingly refer to coding as their magical power.

Though radicals and progressives don’t like Google, I think most people do. Or, if they don’t like it, they never say anything and still use its search engine despite plenty of alternatives. Besides that specific example, I’m not seeing the anti-work critique offered by the Situationists and Bob Black embodied among most peers. Sure, liberals want Amazon and McDonalds workers to be unionized, but there’s not a glimpse of opposition to work itself except among the “underclass” who already lack prospects.

Additionally, professional work culture has changed. Work is increasingly team-based, which means that slacking and other forms of resistance are seen as harmful to one’s co-workers and not the bosses. Hierarchies are still there, but middle management becomes less of a thing as time moves on. At my job, I have a “team leader” who essentially bottom-lines that things get done, but we are treated as autonomous people who take work initiatives as we see fit. They assume we self-police rather than need orders given to us all the time. While I get that most work isn’t like this, I think this transformation of work culture for professionals makes them feel more autonomous and less alienated at work.

Moving on to leisure time, the various social media platforms and contemporary forms of entertainment (Netflix, podcasts, YouTube, video games) meets people’s needs in ways that the culture probably did not in the Sixties. For one, there is constant amusement and entertainment. There is a flood of memes, videos, and other content to keep one occupied at all times and in many contexts. The culture is no longer boring the way the Situationists described it.

Another reason people don’t turn away from entertainment media is how “woke” everything is becoming. More people see themselves in the people on TV and in movies and are thus less alienated from it. Additionally, The Sopranos and The Wire ushered in an era of “Good TV” where the medium is more reputable than ever before. The only thing about TV that people are dissatisfied with now is that they’ll never have enough time to watch everything they want to!

YouTube, reddit, and social media generally offer opportunities for people to have discourse, however impoverished it might be. And, given how disconnected and atomized this society had become at the turn of the century, the internet is seen as gifting us with human connection, especially among marginalized people. Even to radicals I have to explain there are more options for life than this social media hellscape or isolated Nineties ennui.

Turning to the economy, I think its financialization discourages people from considering dropping out. The welfare state has been gutted and people get by with debt now, which enslaves them to work. I know my student loans are only reason I am working full-time at the moment. I think people are less thinking of how to get free and more how to get debt-free, which means they embrace work.

The cost of real estate is also a hindrance if we’re talking about living off the land. During the Great Recession, it was easy for me to live in a city with a bunch of friends in a house where most didn’t work. Now, housing prices have skyrocketed. This means people have more pressure to work full-time and land higher-paying jobs. Looking at past subcultures in contrast: the German Autonomen and NYC Lower East Side squatters in the eighties and nineties thrived when real estate prices were low and urban vacancy was high. (Discovering that a real estate market crash took place in the late Eighties gave me a new context to appreciate Linklater’s 1990 film “Slacker”)

It’s possible that, with the rich and middle-class flocking to the cities, some suburbs will see falling home values, and thus more vacancy and affordable rent. But since houses are many people’s primary asset, I think lingering homeowners will resist this pretty hard. Also, it’d be difficult to get away with experimental living there due to zoning regulations and more uptight neighbors.

Rural areas host possibilities but if there are no urban enclaves for people to meet and develop ideas and practices, I don’t see an actual counterculture developing. Or, if it does, it will probably involve the internet to connect like-minded countercultural dropouts. Personally, I would only want to live rurally only if it was relatively close to a city, since I can imagine going nuts only being around the same group of friends.

Another impediment to counterculture is how neoliberalism affirms people’s hobbies and interests in a way that I don’t think society did in the Sixties. People can be and look as kooky as we want now as long as we work and stay connected to the machine through phones and social media. If anything, society now encourages people to speak up constantly and “be ourselves.” With the internet, we live in an attention economy where everyone is trying to be noticed the most. It seems like, in the Sixties, people were discouraged from self-expression, which is partially what the counterculture reacted against.

Now, I’m no cheerleader for neoliberalism’s promises of individual freedom. They are not only limited, they actually produce a new, more insidious conformity. We can express ourselves, sure, but we become irrelevant, lonely, possibly without a job, and out-of-touch with our peers unless we have smartphones and social media. This society nudges us into conforming and using these technologies. The more invasive these technologies become, the more our activities are logged and monitored, creating a panoptic effect at minimum. The more connected we are, the more invasive the systems of control become. For example, when I have my phone on me at all times, my boss can always reach me. I know all that, I’m just pointing out the ways that culture preempts people from looking for something new.

All of this is to say, I agree with your call for counterculture, but there are barriers. Hopefully not insurmountable ones. Since you were around in the Sixties, I’m curious what you make of all of this.

Thanks,
Yupa ( )

The most important concept in Living in a World That Can’t be Fixed is that of counterculture. Curtis White says counterculture is an ongoing process, not a Utopian state, endpoint or even goal. That it pops up differently in different eras is its signature. Its value is in keeping the stodgy middle way from stifling creativity in thought and in art. Far from the false camaraderie of social media and professional life, White quotes John Ruskin from 150 years ago: “There is no wealth but life.” That’s what counterculture understands best, White says.

This is a straightforward book of the Left, unabashedly so. White quotes all the usual suspects like Zizek, Badiou and Marx. Unfortunately, that means it is often simply more of the same. In particular, I did not appreciate his analyses of pop culture products – semi-recent films like Black Panther and television series for example. I had recently read Zizek’s (2019) autopsy of the film, and didn’t need to see it again here, this time from White’s perspective. Black Panther seems to be a goldmine for the Left to fill out books. Similarly, White’s ruminations over a little-known Netflix series is hardly proof of anything, much less anything profound or even true.

The most engaging section was on stupidity, which White has broken into flavors for the reader’s enjoyment. There’s convenient stupidity, sacrificial stupidity and inconvenient stupidity. All of them are arguable, cruel, and wrong, but White’s presentation is direct and challenging.

Wisely, White plays down his own role. He says his job is not to provide solutions to the banality, strictures and trappings of western life: “The critic’s job is to bring readers to the point where they are free of certain familiar errors about what is real or true or necessary, and where they are free to make their own way forward through an openness to possibility.”

From that safe space, White can ruminate at will. And while he does so well, it is not the most dramatic or thought-provoking book on the subject though it Is among the more passionate.

David Wineberg ( )