Counterculture Is Over--Is a Backlash Next?

The “digital counterculture” revolution appears to be over. What’s next?

Wired magazine, the fervent oracle of this “counterculture,” has been sold to Conde Nast, one of the “old media” empires Wired once railed against and a conglomerate built on fashion and celebrity worship. Wired will now join Vanity Fair and GQ magazines in the Conde Nast stable, certainly the harbinger of a tamed editorial voice.

The Internet has rapidly gone from being a “revolutionary” technology to a conventional staple of middle-class homes. Author Bruce Sterling has said, “Web-surfing is a genuinely popular enterprise--it’s like Monday Night Football or country line-dancing.” Homemakers are trading Beanie Babies on the Net, and kids are checking their homework assignments online.

Revolutionary zeal about the digital age seems, at best, two or three years out of date now--at worst, laughable. The Internet, while still transforming the economy, is fading into the cultural background, a communications medium that, for most people, simply supplements TV and the telephone.

There are still people clamoring to make money off the Internet, of course. The high-flying stock market, driven by high tech, and the quick fortunes that are legendary in the industry have made the Internet symbolic of a “new economy” that is attracting hustlers and visionaries alike.

Remember the famous scene in the movie “The Graduate,” in which the young college graduate, played by Dustin Hoffman, is taken aside by a family friend at a party and told the one word that will ensure his future? “One word,” says the guest. “Plastics.”

That word, a metaphor for everything artificial and oppressive about that era, was meant to strike terror into the hearts of all baby boomers confronting a future of dull conformity and plodding careerism.

These days, we could reenact the scene, with the word “Internet” substituted for “plastics.” The digital counterculture revolution is truly over.

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What will be the Next Big Thing? This is the gnawing question that keeps young entrepreneurs and venture capitalists awake at night, wondering what the next killer app is going to be and how they can discover it before anyone else.

But the next big thing may be a popular rejection of the high-tech lifestyle altogether. A growing number of people are fed up with the stress of modern life, the financial burdens of competitive consumption, empty politics, the uniformity of suburbanization, the commercialization of every aspect of our culture, pointless gadgets and the overwhelming, ubiquitous feeling that significant problems in our country are neglected because of a suffocating, indifferent status quo.

The ‘90s increasingly resemble a speeded-up version of the ‘50s. The ‘50s, of course, produced the ‘60s, a genuine, full-blown counterculture era. Is another backlash building now?

There are comparatively few signs of such a backlash, I admit. One early warning signal: The July issue of Fast Company magazine, the monthly bible for workaholics caught up in the “total dedication” ideology of Silicon Valley, is titled “I Gotta Get a Life!” And some new books and movies are beginning to paint the outlines of an emerging popular disaffection with consumerism and commodity fetishism, a combination that Harvard University professor Juliet B. Schor calls “the national religion” of the United States.

Schor has just published the book “The Overspent American,” a sequel to “The Overworked American.” The subtitle of the new book is “Upscaling, Downshifting and the New Consumer.” She describes the frenzied effort on the part of a majority of Americans to “keep up” with their peers, their “identity group,” typically incurring the costs of maxed-out credit cards, financial precariousness and stubborn, relentless envy.

But a good portion of her book is about a growing class of “downshifters,” people who are voluntarily opting out of the “new economy,” with its stress, long hours, neglect of parental responsibilities, competitive consumption and persistent financial demands. These are people who are trading higher wages for time, peace of mind and a sense of balance in their lives.

Another new book, “Turning Away From Technology,” published by the Sierra Club, contains a series of dialogues between thinkers asking hard questions about where technological trends are taking us.

Two new movies also represent the ambivalence Americans have with our current, one-dimensional model of progress. Robert Redford’s “The Horse Whisperer”--with its admitted shortcomings stemming from a mediocre novel--attempts to portray the balance of mind one acquires from living in harmony with nature.

In the liner notes for the movie’s soundtrack CD, Redford writes, “As we race madly toward the end of the century, our lives dictated by e-mail, cell phones, faxes and other indispensable but mind-numbing contrivances, let’s take a moment to unplug the computer, sit back quietly and imagine a simpler place.”

The other movie is Warren Beatty’s “Bulworth,” the polar opposite of “The Horse Whisperer.” “Bulworth” is an angry rant about political spin, sound bytes, Ken-doll politicians groomed for TV, and the merging of our two political parties into a faceless, gutless mush. While Redford’s movie is a prescription for the affluent--you need his money to retire to Montana--Beatty’s new movie is a scream on behalf of the urban underclass.

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One difference between the ‘90s and the ‘50s may be that we’re now beyond the point at which books and movies can jolt us out of a hyperactive somnambulism. In our media-saturated world, all pleas for resistance may be merely absorbed into the noise.

But the growing ranks of a “lost generation”--those people who look at the contemporary model of progress with sorrow and dismay--will be an enduring source of friction for high tech and its accompanying high-stress life style. The deep human desire for balance, peace of mind, justice, democracy, privacy and, most of all, authenticity will compete, persistently, with the desire for rapidly obsolescent technological wonders. When we get exhausted with special effects, computer upgrades, information glut, 70-hour workweeks, jargon and acronyms, bland politicians and all the rest, we will have lots of company.

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Gary Chapman is director of the 21st Century Project at the University of Texas at Austin. He can be reached at gary.chapman@mail.utexas.edu.