Is Counterculture Undead? Digital Fatigue and the Post-Apocalyptic Imagination

Benjamin Haber • Wesleyan University

April 7th @ 6pm • Daniel Family Commons

The idea of counterculture emerged in the 1960s to describe an oppositional way of life marshalled towards radical social change. While popularly associated with experimental drug and music scenes, Fred Turner’s From Counterculture to Cyberculture shows that from its inception, counterculture has been intimately intertwined with computation, alternatingly as a grey bureaucratic foil and as a bright utopian horizon. However, as institutions, including countercultural institutions, have been hollowed out by the political economy of platforms, the digital now acts more as a political trap, with collective withdrawal and personal dissociation the only means of escape. This talk looks to situate the rising popularity of post-apocalyptic media in the context of an exhausting yet inescapable digital landscape.

Energy and Exhaustion
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