Be Greater. [003]: Offline Is the New Counterculture

On dumb phones, vinyl records, and the human urge to push back.

Counterculture has always been simple at its core.

It’s groups of people looking at the dominant culture around them — sometimes the entire world — and saying: something about this feels off. Not always that it’s collapsing. Not always that it’s evil. Just that it’s incomplete. That something important is being traded away for something cheaper.

And if you look closely at history, you’ll see it appear over and over again — whenever the mainstream drifts too far in one direction, something rises up to push back.

Counterculture isn’t chaos. It’s correction.

The Pattern:

The 1950s looked stable on paper. Suburbs were expanding. Corporate jobs promised security. The television glowed in neat living rooms. The American Dream was clearly defined: work hard, fit in, accumulate, don’t question too much. It worked — for a lot of people. But beneath that prosperity, some felt spiritually suffocated. The “Beats” rejected suburban conformity and corporate ambition. They questioned whether climbing the ladder was the highest possible aim of a human life. They gathered in coffeehouses, wrote long restless poems, and hitchhiked across the country searching for intensity and meaning. They weren’t trying to destroy America, they were trying to feel alive within it. When success became the highest value, they went looking for depth.

By the 1960s the tension was no longer subtle. The Vietnam War escalated. Televised violence entered living rooms. The dominant culture said: this is progress. The “Hippies” disagreed. They opposed the war, rejected materialism, advocated for peace and connection in a world that felt militarized and hardened. It wasn’t just fashion — it was a moral protest. When society felt violent and mechanical, they leaned toward gentleness and meaning.

Then by the late 1970s something strange had happened. The counterculture of the 60s had started to feel aesthetic. Psychedelic rebellion showed up in advertising. The language of freedom became a marketing strategy, so the “Punk” movement emerged as a rejection of both the mainstream and the commodified version of rebellion. It was three chords, basement shows, DIY posters. It was raw and loud because culture felt too safe, too pre-packaged, too polished. It stripped everything down to something real and honest.

The pattern repeats every time. Counterculture emerges, influences the mainstream, gets absorbed, gets diluted, and then something new rises in response. Feminism. Gay rights. Meditation. Cannabis. Tech culture itself — all once considered fringe, now normalized, and in many cases monetized. The soul that once sparked the movement gets softened, and the edges get rounded off.

Counterculture is necessary. It prevents stagnation. It plays devil’s advocate. It keeps society from drifting too far in any one direction without someone noticing and pushing back. It’s like our culture’s immune system.

So what is the dominant culture today? And what is quietly rising up in response?

Culture Today:

To understand where we are, you have to understand how we got here.

In 2007, Steve Jobs stood on a stage and introduced the iPhone — a device that put the entire internet into your pocket. For the first time, the online world wasn’t something you visited at a desk and then left. It followed you everywhere. Into your bedroom, your commute, your dinner table, your last quiet moments before sleep.

For a while, this felt like pure expansion. New apps, new communities, new ways to connect and create. Small creators — artists, writers, YouTubers — were building real audiences from their bedrooms. People were meeting their future partners online. The world felt bigger and more accessible than it ever had.

But like everything eventually does, the online world fell victim to corporate takeover. The weird, diverse, human internet slowly became centralized. Platforms that once felt like open communities became advertising machines. Algorithms replaced discovery. Short-form content replaced long-form thought because it was more engaging, more addictive, easier to serve. Then in 2020 the global pandemic arrived and finished what the smartphone started — when the physical world shut down, we all migrated online full time. And when it reopened, most of us never fully came back.

Now the default state is online. Not as a choice — just as the water we swim in.

The dominant culture today is optimized for speed, engagement, visibility, and monetization. We stream instead of owning. We scroll instead of reading. We post instead of talking. We react instead of reflecting. We consume without digesting. Attention has become the most valuable commodity on earth, and an entire global industry exists to extract as much of it from you as possible — every spare moment, every idle minute, every quiet space that used to belong to your own thoughts.

And it’s working… maybe even too well.

The result is a culture that feels thin. Not collapsed, not hopeless — just flattened. Conversations that don’t go anywhere. Content that disappears before you’ve had time to feel anything about it. A constant low-grade sense that you’ve been somewhere without really going anywhere at all. Everyone online, more connected than ever, yet somehow lonelier than before.

A Quiet Resistance Forms:

Then, quietly, something started pushing back.

Not a huge trend. Not a movement with a name or a leader. Just individual people, scattered across the world, making slightly different choices. Choosing to opt-out of pieces of the dominant culture in small, private, deliberate ways.

Vinyl record sales have been growing every year for nearly two decades — outselling CDs for the first time since the 1980s. Physical book sales have held strong even as every tech company told us print was dead. Film cameras are back. Disposable cameras are back. People are buying things they could easily stream — albums, movies, games — just to own them. To hold them. To have something real.

The dumb phone movement is real and growing. People are swapping smartphones for flip phones or basic devices that just call and text and do nothing else. Not because they hate technology, but because they want their attention back. They’re tired of the pull. They want their phone to be just a phone again. They want to be somewhere without being everywhere else at the same time.

Digital minimalism has become a legitimate lifestyle philosophy. People are deleting apps, setting screen time limits, taking weekend detoxes, building analog morning routines before they ever touch a screen. They’re reading physical newspapers. Writing in paper journals. Going to bookstores on purpose. Hosting dinners where phones stay in a basket by the door.

These aren’t coordinated. Nobody is organizing this. It’s just people, independently, arriving at the same conclusion: that the frictionless, always-on, infinitely optimized online life is missing something they need. That ownership feels different from access. That silence feels different from distraction. That finishing a book feels different from finishing a scroll.

When culture becomes too thin, people start craving texture again.

This is the counterculture of our generation. It doesn’t have a name yet. It doesn’t have a uniform or a sound or a scene. But it has a feeling — the same feeling the Beats had in their coffeehouses, the Hippies had at their festivals, or the Punks had in their basements. It’s the feeling that the dominant culture has drifted somewhere that doesn’t serve human beings very well, and that it’s time to build something different.

Outside Perspective:

I’ve spent most of my life slightly outside the mainstream current.

Montessori kid. Raised by grandparents. Skater in a private school. Buddhist in the American South. A punk fan, tech enthusiast who reads physical books and owns more vinyl records than most people my age have even held. Someone who grew up online and chose to step back from it.

I know what it feels like to go against the grain, and what I’ve learned is that being outside the dominant current gives you perspective on it. You can see when things drift. You can feel when something important is being lost.

Right now, what’s being lost is depth. Attention. Ownership of your own mind. The ability to sit with a thought long enough to actually finish it.

Punk showed me that the response to that isn’t to politely suggest that people slow down. The response is to build your own thing. Make your own rules. Own your own stuff. Show up without waiting for permission.

Being offline isn’t the absence of something. It’s the presence of something the algorithm can’t give you — silence, boredom, the slow satisfaction of finishing a book, the feeling of actually owning something instead of renting access to it until the platform decides otherwise. The experience of being somewhere without documenting it, or thinking a thought all the way through without reaching for a screen.

These things used to be ordinary. Now they’re almost radical.

You don’t need a movement, and you don’t need a tutorial. You just need to make a few different choices — privately, consistently, without performing them for an audience.

That’s how every counterculture actually starts. Not with a declaration, but with a person quietly deciding that the dominant way of doing things isn’t working for them anymore.

Resist the Current:

Choose one way to go against the mainstream this week.

Buy your favorite album instead of streaming it. Read the book instead of the thread. Go for a walk without your earbuds. Write something by hand. Sit with boredom for ten minutes and see what happens.

Not because technology is bad, but because your attention belongs to you.

And in an optimized world, deciding for yourself what deserves your attention might be the most countercultural thing you can do.

Log off, spread love, be greater.

— [gf]