so I think there’s some truth to that - but slightly different. its p rare that counterculture emerges from your day job, it usually comes from people using their commercial skills in other settings. but when most people are struggling to get by, who has the energy or time for that extra activity
if I was going to put a flag in the ground, I reckon slop overload/ type-beats/ rep culture/drop shipping can all be seen as a punk-style rejection of auteurship and meritocracy. the idea that anyone can make these artefacts if they have access to the tools and stimuli
I’m thinking of Federico Sargentone’s ideas around aura - that countercultural aesthetics get so quickly and easily appropriated that we’re rejecting the idea entirely 032c.com/magazine/it-...
maybe its just from where I’m sitting, but I think there’s a distinction now between countercultural ideas and countercultural aesthetics, whereas maybe pre-internet we assumed those things were integral to each other
haaah 100% to that. but for me its now just like dealing with an outsourced supplier, whereas in early versions it felt like collaborating with something that approached creativity in ways my mind simply can’t
In the Super Mario Galaxy games, the staff credits text is always loaded into RAM despite not being needed until the ending. While horribly inefficient, this is inadvertently heartwarming as the games appear to honor their creators by keeping them in memory at all times.
there’s also a lot of ways that cultural production (including non-commercial design) is very different now than in the 80s - and that’s had a huge impact on countercultural production. but I think that’s a conversation that has to happen in private channels
I was a kid in the 80s but my friends of that age just talk about the totality of conservative culture. I think its only in hindsight you can see which countercultural ideas resonate and later take hold of the mainstream
I feel like you could map periods of utility, marketing or activism being the predominant design narratives against the broader cultural vibe? like, designs role now is pretty similar to the 80s when conservatism was last this dominant
