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This article went on to discuss the popular Alternate Reality Games (ARGs) Chasing The Wish and Perplex City, and the growing phenomenon behind them.

This in and of itself is in no way surprising. In recent years, ARGs have received funding from major corporations such as Audi and Microsoft, they have been used to promote shows such as Lost, and many major motion pictures. ABC has apparently even formed a division of their company which exclusively develops promotional ARGs. So MTV in their eternal quest for hipness are likely candidates to jump on the bandwagon.

Now comes the punchline. When I reposted this article in various blogs and web magazines, I was flooded with harassing emails from irate hipsters. In one way or another they were criticizing me for pissing in their counter cultural swimming pool with my MTV flavored urine. Some of them were also smart enough to recognize I had a vested interest in re-posting this article, and went for the jugular on that as well. Now, I'm not about to waste the next page and a half with moaning and complaining about my hurt feelings-- I save that for my Livejournal. (Truth be told, these emails just made me laugh. Mostly I told them to keep drinking the Kool Aid.)

Of course I had a vested interest in re-posting that article, as I am the creative director for the Chasing The Wish graphic novel. Bottom line, nothing happens without someone benefiting from it. But I also genuinely feel they are an interesting, potentially immersive form of entertainment.

This is where their knee-jerk response is interesting to me. The ideals the counter culture were based on, once upon a time, are close to my heart: self-expression, freedom, an element of egalitarianism, and most importantly, compassion. When did it become about toothless political movements, cool-points, and self-defeatism? Where does this negative reaction to anything popular come from?

To be honest, I don't know how to paint it clearer than I did with the title, but here goes.

The Matrix. For those who live under a rock or masturbate to QVC all day long, I will paraphrase the first movie. In the scenes where Keanu Reeve isn't desperately attempting to recall his lines, it is a smart, slick take on the alienation most suburban American youth feel. Taken out of the cubicle and into the underworld with the protagonist, we witness him “keeping it real” by eating mush, donning fetish fashion, and fighting an army of identical men in business suits in slow motion.

Wake up, Neo. Zak De La Rocha wasn't “fighting the man” when he made his ending credit soundtrack royalties. It's what he did with that potential energy that counts. (Hookers? A small island for “his people” and “their culture,” where everyone sings in falsetto about oppression?) As Yogi Bhajan put it, “money is as money does.” Hard nosed books on business such as Management: Tasks, Responsibilities, Practices say exactly the same thing, in a less epigrammatic, Yoda-like way: profit is not a motive, it is a means. Without profit, nothing happens. Game over.

Any element of punk, underground, beatnik, hippy, psychedelic, straight edge, or occult culture will be co-opted by the straight shooters the moment the shtick becomes profitable. It doesn't matter that these ideologies have little in common-- it is the fashion or mystique which gets sold. When all an ideology really boils down to is an easy to replicate aesthetic, how could they not? Psychedelic and straight edge can share the same rack in a store if the store owner can co-brand the fashions. Marketers are wily as hell. They are paid to be.

Don't get me wrong, I'm not pointing my finger here. As my fellow white suburban friends say, “this is how we roll, son.”

All you read and
Wear or see and
Hear on TV
Is a product
Begging for your
Fatass dirty
Dollar

--Hooker With a Penis, Tool.

You know it, I know it. But so many of us more-self-aware-than-thou-comma-dumbasses, through an act of inept transference, find anything with a dollar sign on it questionable. We demand free content, and all of the perks piracy can "buy." We mistake the means for questionable ends.

These frothing bulldogs of the counterculture are sitting ducks. They will wind up howling after the piece of meat on the end of someone's string. That is, unless they lock themselves in a cave or become such intolerable misanthropes that even Warren Ellis doesn't write you any more.

If your life revolves around what people think about you, how the shoes you wear define you as a person, or which line of body spray is most likely to get you laid, you've turned yourself into a patsy.

The only way out of this cycle is to create, and forget about trying to be original. People don't set the trends by trying to set the trends. They are genuine to what really gets them in the vitals. Fight long enough and it will find its market, or you will die trying. Even if only one other person reads and really absorbs your words, you haven't lost. You only lose if you give up, and let your identity get co-opted because it's easier that way.

Back a step. Where did this “bulldog mentality” come from?

I'm sure it could be traced back to Mesopotamia if you tried hard enough, (and were high enough.) But I think a more recent example is enough: the second that psychedelic culture gained a certain momentum, Madison Avenue chewed it up and spit it out in 7up ads. This was used to sell these “psychadelic clothes” to a wider market. When people bought those hip clothes to “make a statement,” whose pockets were they lining? It's a revolving door of product tie ins, and it all feeds on culture.

Fashion embodies a state of mind, a culture. But it is not that culture. An example of this can be seen in Harley Davidson driving lawyers in their 40s. Harley Davidson meant something because of what it was, and that became a shtick that was re-marketed to people that needed not an alternate form of transportation, but instead what Harley Davidson had come to “mean.” The bottom line here: we live in a culture where appearances count for a lot more than reality.

Despite popular opinion within this “counter-culture,” effective marketing is not about manipulation. It is about meeting people halfway. For example, Yoga was boiled down from a very demanding esoteric practice with a rich and complex ideology behind it into something any housewife can do. These housewives were looking for a lifestyle change, a way to stay healthy and feel good. This was provided to them in an effective, albeit diluted, package. They wouldn't have been able to meet Yoga halfway if it was presented in its true form. Yet, at least at the moment, those more rich and intricate ideologies exist, and they can be sought out. You can approach your own work with the same mentality.

I agree with you in spirit, vicious hipster kids. Of course MTVs programming is vapid and retarded. Of course it's incredibly depressing that the market has supported their ride down the slippery slope of Herculean atrocities against brain cells. But if I had a way to use that colossus to my own ends... I'd do it without batting an eye. And keep on going.

I'm not just pulling a Lewis Black here. You want to call MTVs programming vapid? Make Something Better. I know you can do it. But you're going to have to sweat blood. It's easier to throw stones.

The problem I see is that when we work for the 'Invisible Masters' that run the multi-national conglomerates, we serve their purposes instead of our own. We put our time and energy into creating morally, ecologically, and even economically bankrupt products and services for them simply because they can pay us in the short term, and ten other companies are beating down our door because we owe them. We're all robbing Peter to pay Paul. If we in the “counter-culture” were a little more prone to organize and accomplish and a little less prone to argue, we might recognize that your labor can serve another master: yourself.

Word in the counter culture grapevine is: the poorer you are, the cooler you are. You stick to your ideals. People take pride in it because it's all they have. Word in the mainstream culture is: the more money you have, the cooler you are. You know how to get things done. You have to consider the cost to your dreams a tax write-off. This is where I do a 360, guzzle a bottle of whiskey, and stagger into the tall grass. I don't buy any of it, anymore.

I want to get my work out there to people, and eat at the end of the day. I'd shoot myself in the face if I was driving an Aston Martin with $30,000 spark plugs, but I'm sipping on a pretty good 2004 Riesling right now, and I prefer it to Pabst Blue Ribbon, thank you very much.

Finding “them” halfway sounds good on paper. But can you make it profitable? That's our Achilles heel, here in the underbelly of the whale. I don't know a single person who can do everything well, and this is the reason we have to work together towards common goals and split the booty accordingly, or wallow in our meaningless flame wars and postures of significance.

I do have a suggestion, though it's only preliminary:

When any counter culture gets big enough, it gets co-opted by a "Major." If there is any value in a "counterculture" it is in a core ideology which cannot be replicated, cannot be sold. As I said, it is the trappings and mystique which get marketed and sold. So if you have it in you, and shooting from the hip is getting old: make a shtick. Make it huge. Sell it off to the highest bidder. Sell out without “selling out.”

And use that to build something wonderful.