
Hippie Inc: how the counterculture went corporate - ohjeez
https://www.1843magazine.com/features/hippie-inc-how-the-counterculture-went-corporate
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mtraven
Old news and not very insightful. For a deeper look, Fred Turner is the one to
read:
[https://www.press.uchicago.edu/ucp/books/book/chicago/F/bo37...](https://www.press.uchicago.edu/ucp/books/book/chicago/F/bo3773600.html)

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montalbano
Frank Zappa said it best when discussing the decline of the music industry:

 _The young guys are more conservative, and more dangerous to the artform,
than the old guys with the cigars ever were!_

[https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=KZazEM8cgt0](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=KZazEM8cgt0)

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Animats
From the article: _" The advantage of mindfulness lies in the interiority it
encourages: it keeps your employees quiet and more inclined to accept
unreasonable demands on their time and energy."_

Union-busting has come so far since the goon squad era.

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8bitsrule
Lots of creative fact-ery in this article. Just for one, take the assertion:
"In any case, the counterculture was always a middle-class phenomenon." One of
the primary features of CC was rejection of middle-class values. See 'The
Graduate'. Listen to 'Crown of Creation'.

Reminds me of a PBS series called "Making Sense of the Sixties". It failed
miserably at that.

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mistrial9
ps- this is a media word, not a cultural word, and always has been.. those who
ascribe to common cultural practices do not refer to themselves this way, at
least in the Western USA.. it might be slightly derogatory, like the n-word,
also like the n-word, is used daily still.

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Stratoscope
I was part of the counterculture in the '60s and '70s. We called _ourselves_
hippies and freaks.

And we called people who were not hippies or freaks "straight". This did not
refer to sexual preference, but meant someone you should not share your dope
with.

"Dope" meant grass or ganja, which we might refer to as pot or cannabis today,
or as young people call it, "weed".

Some straights used "hippie" or "freak" as derogatory terms, but we took them
as a badge of pride.

Let your freak flag fly!

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rhoyerboat
... been dragging this acronym as a definition around since the 90's, of
course its probably way older. A hippie is a, "highly intelligent person,
pursuing infinite enlightenment."

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Stratoscope
With emphasis on "highly"!

Time to fill the Pax 3 vaporizer with some fresh Jack Herer flower. A lot
better than the awful joints we used to roll. Remember roach clips?

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forgetfulusr
What was the deal with those roach clips? I always felt a joint needs a small
filter, which I would roll up from harder paper(takes 10 sec). Was it just a
Cheech and Chong prop or did hippies really carry those around?

~~~
Stratoscope
Roach clips were all too real. Everyone I knew rolled the traditional joints
with both ends twisted, and we all had roach clips.

The roach was the strongest part of the joint, so it was highly prized and we
smoked it right down to the end. No matter that it tasted awful and burned
your lips and fingers even with a clip.

I did see a few people roll little filters into their joints, but it was rare.
You were wise to do that.

As for myself, I never smoked again after trying a flower vaporizer for the
first time a dozen years ago. So much better than burning it!

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ricc
I would suggest this article on how sub/countercultures become mainstream, and
why that’s detrimental to that culture: [https://meaningness.com/geeks-mops-
sociopaths](https://meaningness.com/geeks-mops-sociopaths)

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SyneRyder
Thanks for this link - never seen it before, but definitely worth the read.

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clouddrover
They are business hippies:
[https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=tMEKaMd-T28](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=tMEKaMd-T28)

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CryptoPunk
That's why I find anti-profit movements to be fundamentally disingenuous - the
tendency to act in one's own interest is too powerful to ever be sustainably
resisted by a broad movement. To preach against something one is very likely
to succumb to is manipulative.

I can trust someone who admits that self-interest motivates their actions more
than one who claims altruism does.

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carapace
[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rainbow_Gathering](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rainbow_Gathering)

Not a "broad" movement, maybe, but an existence proof of a sustained "hippie"
way of life.

Is this motivated by _mere_ self-interest or something greater than that?

Is it possible to construct or discover a way of life wherein the interests of
the individual and the group are in harmony?

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CryptoPunk
That's not really a movement though. It's more like an annual festival. It
doesn't make opposition to profit a way of life and ideology.

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carapace
It's really hard to make generalizations about the Rainbow family et. al. I
attended a couple of gatherings a while back, and that's it, so take my
anecdotally-derived remarks with that grain of salt...

It's not a movement in the organized political sense, but it could be
considered a kind of cultural movement. Many of the people who gather live
alternative lifestyles all year 'round, and many of them do eschew the profit-
motive as a way of life and ideology, AFAIK. Certainly the gatherings
themselves are _sans_ currency. People do some light bartering but it's mostly
what you might call (if you had to) a "gifting economy".

The gatherings are not festivals although they are festive. They're more like
religious gatherings but without the religion. Although you will religious
people there, of all kinds of religions, all getting along.

Referencing your original comment, one thing they're not is disingenuous but
they're also not promoting themselves. (No one pays to go to a gathering, all
prep and cleanup is done by volunteers.)

