One faces consequences when breaking the law, the other is tasked with breaking the law in the name of upholding it

> In either domain, you can select where you want to go and what you want to do.

In both cases, there was a time when both were exclusively people-powered and "the man" was entirely absent.

"There are some authentic nuggets if you know where to go" are the last kicks of a fast-gentrifying neighborhood, to use mixed metaphors. In the past anywhere/everywhere you could go was authentic.

The difference being that I don't think anyone in their right mind would declare the internet as a whole as counterculture in the first place anymore.

the internet isn't a single centrally planned social context, and it has five plus billion users, of course it isn't counterculture

Anyone who can't find the extremists in their own group should spend some time on self reflection.

It can also depend on where you are and who you know. The groups are not evenly spread through society. In the UK and one side in politics dominates all my social circles - colleagues, people I went to school with, people I meet locally (to be fair, that does depend on what you do and who you meet - but I tend to "cultural" activities), people who share stuff on FB that I know (as opposed to the stuff in the feed - is which often ridiculously extreme both ways).

it might not be true, and surveys and voting patterns say otherwise, but it can definitely feel like one side is dominant. It can definitely be true that a particular place/activity/group is dominated by one side, which is what GP seems to be claiming, rather than that the US in general has shifted to the left?

> but only noticing one means you're closer (by varying degrees) to the other.

Maybe if you're talking about culture in general it will exist as some sort of U shape in general terms no doubt, but any hyper online subcultures turned into an IRL organization/insular collection of people like defcon is liable to go hard in identifiable directions which is distracting to more disinterested parties there for the original purpose of the show.

Hacker culture is principally 'don't tell me what to do'.

Which in the US puts it somewhat orthogonal to the left-right divide.

It mirrors the divide on the public at large - a disappointingly large number of people are wildly ready to jump on the authoritarian bandwagon, because the alternative has a few leftist ideas that make them feel icky.

The left used to be more individualist in the U.S. (circa 90s most definitely) but it developed a toxic groupthink as it came to dominate pop culture and media in the 00s and 10s, and began to leverage that to employ censorship, deplatforming, doxxing, etc and it became incredibly dogmatic and if anyone diverged from a particular narrative (ie skeptical covid came from wet market), they would be ridiculed, shouted down, laughed off, shamed, kicked off social media platforms, ostracized, etc which is cult like behavior.

The left of the 90s would have never stood for that. They were the die hards for free speech then. Something shifted.

During Covid, many of the Hackers in the infosec community supported government-mandated vaccination (this was what I saw through Twitter). I think this changed my view of activists and hackers after this.

It's authoritarian-minded people that don't want to listen to anyone (and want to force you to do what they want through hacking). When they get want they want, they don't care about trampling on the rights of or oppressing the people that disagree.

I am not the person you are responding to, but I think the ground reality is nuanced. What follows is my opinion / perspective, which I do not assert as irrefutable fact, nor as the only opinion / perspective which should be considered.

Politics in the US have become more polarized, but a historical view shows this as more of a reversion to the mean than a novel phenomenon, as we are increasingly distanced from a period of greater economic prosperity for large swathes of the middle class, which seemed to have a (now disappearing) byproduct of a degree of psychological satiation with "big picture" concerns.

There is a documented tendency for the political left, at least in the US, to accept and tolerate a much narrower range of thought, that is to say, the left has a much smaller Overton Window, than the political right in the US, who mostly seem unified only around opposition to the policies of the political left. (https://bpspsychub.onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/10.1111/bjso....)

I suspect, but do not necessary assert as fact, that the above effect on the left may be partially explained by a rigid adherence to the paradox of tolerance, which itself demands an unwillingness to tolerate people who hold intolerant ideas, views, or beliefs, even if those people do not act on those ideas, views, or beliefs to meaningfully practice intolerance. The end result, from my perspective as someone who fits cleanly in neither political camp (I'm more of a libertarian than anything else) is that the left makes little to no room for allies and increasingly engages in litmus testing with an end goal of ostracizing and socially shunning even LGBTQ+ people who don't fit neatly into the smaller Overton Window. As an example, it is considered intolerable by many on the left to merely be vocally supportive of adult LGBTQ+ rights, while expressing discomfort with the idea of children being exposed to pride parades with fully naked adults embracing all manner of sexual diversity and kinks, or discomfort with the idea of irreversible chemical gender affirmation therapy for minors on grounds of bodily autonomy / age of consent considerations. Meanwhile, to the surprise of some of my friends on the political left, large swathes of the political right (though not the most extreme fringes), in my lived experience as an LGBTQ person in Texas (which to be fair, may not be entirely representative of the rest of the country), hold more of a "live at let live" philosophy that, paradoxically, is more tolerant of LGBTQ+ persons with nuanced views than the political left is. (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Paradox_of_tolerance)

I think as the emotional investment of typical political partisans increases, there is a widespread perception of hostility or outrage from the political left at nuanced positions that are nominally but insufficiently progressive, like the one in the example above. Anecdata for this might include the perspective of Bill Maher, who was once considered to be subversively progressive, then gradually seen as "center left", and is now perceived by many on the left as "right of center", in spite of a rock-solid track record of being notably left of Republicans on almost every issue.

To be clear, I'm not trying to assert normative views that either side is "right", morally superior or inferior to one another, just attempting to offer my perspective on what I think the underlying mechanisms driving the disconnect between perceptions of the political system itself (which is increasingly dominated by right-of-center figures in all three branches of the federal government, particularly at the SCOTUS level in the judiciary), and perceptions of cultural values. That cultural perception is probably further strengthened by widespread, rapid, and vocal adoption of DEI values across almost all institutional settings (academia, corporate America, public sector, even institutions that are traditionally conceptualized as right of center, like Wall Street firms) following the protests over the death of George Floyd; the relatively swift mainstream acceptance of LGBTQ+ rights (marriage equality went from fringe to mainstream in under two decades); climate change moved from "environmental issue" to a mainstream economic/social concern in roughly the same period; social media amplification of progressive voices and causes, including, at times; coordination between left-leaning administrations and social media companies to suppress right-leaning perspectives, some of which are now widely acknowledged to have likely been true (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Twitter_Files), to name a few large changes over both the last two decades and the last five years or so.

And again, I'm not asserting that any of these changes were good or bad (regardless of how I personally feel about any of the changes in question), nor am I trying to assert a normative framing one way or another, just attempting to dissect the mechanisms of the perception itself.

Not the GP, but I feel the same. The reason is that my views haven't really changed, yet somehow my political positioning went from quite liberal to something most people, below a certain age, would consider conservative. I value: free speech, equality of opportunity, antiwar, anti political correctness, anti megacorp, and view the liberty of the individual mattering vastly more than than dictates of authority/hierarchy.

More generally, I think politics has shifted such that left/right is no longer meaningful, as people tend to be much more split on libertarian/authoritarian world views - particularly on the degree to which accredited individuals ought be able to impose their views on society in an effort to 'tweak' people's behaviors. That nuance, more or less, immediately leads to the shifting winds on the issues I mentioned.