Baldur Bjarnason

The Counterculture Switch: creating in a hostile environment

– Baldur Bjarnason

I’m not going to try to analyse what happened in the recent US presidential elections or why. The US has been heading in this direction for decades, so we already know it’s not down to a single cause or event. Nor will I try to predict what’s going to happen there over the next for years. Unpredictability is part of what makes these kinds of politicians harmful. Because you never know when they’re serious and when they aren’t, their actions are likely to catch people off guard.

But I do know this: much like the Brexit vote in the UK, Trump’s election victory confirms that right-wing culture is the new mainstream. Even if he had lost, again much like we saw with Brexit, that this was happening at all was evidence that the mainstream had shifted.

In this, the assholes crowing victory over the past few days are absolutely correct, even though they might not have phrased it this way. The backlash is the new status quo.

This has been a long time coming. Arguably it began as soon as queer representation in mainstream media stopped being limited to the token display of one-dimensional characters, but it’s been building up more and more momentum in recent years with mainstream US media steadily walking back what little queer representation it had.

It’s reached a point where the correlation between swift cancellations and removals and the positive depiction of LGBTQ characters or gender equality is starting to feel undeniable.

Kaos? I have not read anything about the series but the speed with which Netflix cancelled a Jeff Goldblum star vehicle – fucking Jeff Goldblum – makes me believe that it has queer representation.

Disney keeps making moves that seem designed to placate the right and strongly implies that whatever representation we’re seeing in works that have been in the pipeline for years (like Agatha All Along) won’t continue into the future.

The mainstreaming of queer culture hasn’t just been stopped in its tracks, but these companies seem to be actively walking it back.

It isn’t stopping there. It’s affecting our social media, political discourse, news, discussions of equal rights or bodily autonomy, and our software.

We have some clues as to what this is going to look like.

Queer culture has been here before #

Until very recently queer representation was firmly on the outside. Queer books and movies were frequently confiscated at the border in many countries for being “obscene” or “pornographic”. If you were lucky, your city had that one art house video rental that had a small corner with a sampling of queer cinema. It very much was not mainstream.

The 1999 movie Better than Chocolate – a middling but overall charming movie that, in hindsight, does a solid job of representing the vibes of the 90s queer community – has a queer bookstore’s ongoing struggles with customs as a running theme. Even just including the word “lesbian” or “gay” in a book’s or movie’s promotional material would be enough to block it from mainstream advertising, distribution, or display.

That’s what happens when media – and remember that software is both media and a tool, much like the pen and paper – gets pushed outside the mainstream, when it’s very existence is seen as a criticism of what’s normal and “right”.

And if said media is actually criticising what the mainstream considers normal and right? You’re lucky if you don’t end up in court or with a conviction.

Queer culture has, historically, been a counterculture.

That word has a complex history, but I like to focus on the practical aspect of labels – how they help us group together and think about specific tactics and strategies – so my definition here is going to be a little bit more straightforward than the academic version (academics are guaranteed to break out in hives from seeing my simplistic take on these):

Counterculture would be a culture that criticises – either overtly or just by existing – the norms, structures, and values of mainstream culture.

Related terms, again focusing on pragmatic definitions that help us think about approaches and actions:

A standard strategy for the reactionary right is to redefine anything outside the mainstream as obscene. That way, even if it isn’t outright illegal or banned, counterculture tends to be barred from access to the institutions, processes, platforms and infrastructure that make mainstream and indie productions viable.

It isn’t a coincidence that counterculture and pornography go hand in hand. Whether it’s Bruce LaBruce, I Am Curious (Yellow), or Shortbus, the history of counterculture and pornography are intertwined.

Based on what we’ve been seeing in tech and social media over the past few years and the tech industry’s wholesale embrace of Trump’s values, I think we have to expect that this counterculture switch will expand, not just in media, but also in software. Regimes around the world already have strong opinions about what software should and should not do for its citizens, and that pattern is likely to be repeated in the US.

We have an obligation as makers of software to provide, if we can, the tools that are safe for people to use, that won’t expose them to the risk of authoritarian police action, that help them survive in a hostile environment.

It isn’t without risk. The software that does this is going to risk being pushed out of the mainstream and mainstream platforms as well.

In fact, I think it’s more likely than not.

The “mainstream” continues to close down #

Barring a miracle, the right-wing takeover of the mainstream is likely to accelerate over the next four years.

The modern authoritarian nationalist playbook is that in order to hold onto power, first you need to control the media. Viktor Orbán learned this in Hungary after first being ousted as Prime Minister in 2002. Upon returning to power in 2010, his takeover of the media was more forceful and puts Trump’s association with tech industry oligarchs and the threats of suspending the licences of on-compliant broadcasters in a more worrying light:

According to press watchdog Reporters Without Borders, Orbán has used media buyouts by government-connected “oligarchs” to build “a true media empire subject to his party’s orders.” The group estimates that such buyouts have given Orbán’s party control of some 80% of Hungary’s media market resources. In 2021, it put Orbán on its list of media “predators,” the first EU leader to earn the distinction.

(From How Hungary’s Orbán uses control of the media to escape scrutiny and keep the public in the dark.)

I think it’s likely that Trump and his allies will, in very short order, end up effectively controlling most of the US’s large media conglomerates and social media, if not directly, then through willing compliance, intimidation, or suppression. It might not happen in the first year, but it’s extremely likely to happen before the next election because it’s their key to holding onto power.

(And if you think that people in US media who outright called Trump a fascist won’t find ways to getting into his good graces I’ll just let you browse through the results for the search phrase “Viktor Orban Arnold Schwarzenegger” at your leisure.)

Note also that Orban couldn’t control Facebook or YouTube. He relied on them maintaining their existing right-wing and conservative bias, but mandating the compliance of large multinational tech companies isn’t in the power of even the largest European nation. The EU as a block can assert some control, but since the EU is, for the most part, a liberal pro-market entity, that control is mostly about preserving the single market and protecting the market from external influences.

Trump doesn’t have that limitation and the ties he and JD Vance have with tech oligarchs mean we have to assume that a bargain will be struck between tech and the incoming US government: less regulation and increased limitations on labour power in exchange for compliance and surveillance.

Facebook won’t help you. They’ve been outright complicit in genocide in the past. If they’re capable of that, they’re capable of anything.

Apple won’t protect you. They have a long history of collaborating with authoritarian regimes to preserve their access to markets.

Given Google’s recent search engine issues it’s not a stretch to imagine that not fixing those issues might end up working in Google’s favour – unintentional incompetence might curry them favour. A large number of sustainable smaller media outlets are harder to control, so by effectively dropping them from search engine results and favouring larger companies, you implicitly promote outlets that are more controllable by an authoritarian.

Apple, Google, Microsoft, and Facebook have effectively total control over every customer acquisition path for any software company that hopes to reach a large user base. These monopolies are likely to be strengthened by deregulation, which in turn strengthens their control over who succeeds and who doesn’t in the tech industry.

Unfree societies tend not to be free markets, so being a cold-hearted capitalist won’t help you here.

The US’s existing police powers can easily become weapons in the hands of authoritarians. Any data you keep on your customers can retroactively become incriminating as laws and norms are changed. Any organisation or individual whose values conflict with that of the authoritarian norms will have a hard time: less access to resources, cut off from infrastructure and payment systems, and their use of the infrastructure they have access to exposes them and their customers to constant risk.

For a sense of how this might play out, just have a look at how artists making comics or art with even fairly innocuous nudity now get treated by payment providers and online services. Artists who thought they were operating within the mainstream suddenly realised that, no, they and their work has been redefined by the authorities as counterculture or anti-establishment. What used to be tolerated has now been ousted from major tech platforms. What used to be considered an acceptable mainstream product either gets dropped by a payment processor or only handled by expensive and hard-to-use “high risk” processors. Expect to get blocked by anything and everything at every turn, even your preferred word processor.

The collapse of counterculture with the obscene and criminal is intentional. Independently produced queer content that has about as much nudity as was practically mandatory in an eighties comedy (boy do those age badly) gets lumped in with hardcore pornography. Anything on the “outside” becomes by definition obscene and borderline criminal. Artists find themselves operating in a hostile environment.

Unfortunately, we’ve been here before.

Thankfully, we’ve been here before. We can steal earlier ideas for how to survive, as a practice, when the world considers you obscene.

Counterculture and activist history has a wealth of ideas for us to borrow. Some of them will work in a modern context. Many will not.

Web and software developers haven’t had to think about these issues or approach our work this way, at least not in the recent past.

But we owe it to ourselves to be building on history and on what others have learned instead of just blindly repeating the mistakes of the past.