We wracked our brains that night to produce an possible illustration of counterculture in our own generation. We live, we decided, in a culture that counters protest by capitalizing on that dissent and absorbing it into the mainstream. Ours is a time of subculture rather than counterculture. By subculture I mean a culture existing below the surface of the dominant current that does not flow in opposition to the mainstream. It quietly pulses on beneath.
Subcultures are small.
While subcultures equate themselves with smallness, invisibility, countercultures have dreams of greatness in opposition. A counterculture is a comprehensive alternative to the times as they are, with the breadth, the appeal, and the desire to overpower the existing dominant culture. Its strength is, to borrow a cliche, in numbers. But in the end, the desire to stimulate comprehensive societal change was not enough. The movement caved in on itself, dismantled at the organizing level by splinter groups, in particular African-Americans and women, interested in pursuing more focused aims, and destroyed at the popular level by the drugs and violence that were on display at Altamont.