Russian culture is still the playing out of the Russian Revolution. Chinese culture is the playing out of its…

Russian culture is still the playing out of the Russian Revolution. Chinese culture is the playing out of its revolution. Both populist movements. The West is the same, but refuses to see it. It’s living out the countercultural revolution of the 1960s, still today. /1 https://t.co/XNpK6Lpuxh

A culture where public life, created and maintained by public institutions, is replaced by gathered crowds as the only kind of ‘we’. Counterculture began with Beatlemania. Now every touring, trending act is a mania. It’s the same cultural model, on repeat, 70 years later. /2 https://t.co/qOAXVGSGDG

These aren’t musical performances. They’re a culture living its most foundational mechanism. Unifying the only way they know how. Teens of all ages, using rock stars to replace hierarchies of ‘establishment’ culture. Just as they did in the 1960s. /3 https://t.co/Z1ghb1hQgu

To this day Americans, in a culture with the weakest desire for any sort of public institutional life, still spill onto the streets in crowds when they’re unhappy, thinking this is ‘the people’. It’s not. It’s a gig. It’s Beatlemania, or Woodstock, again and again. /4

Countercultural life - kidult life - replaces the public sphere with what’s ‘trending’, usually for about 10 minutes. Hashtag culture. A public is made and maintained. It’s not a crowd at a gig. /5

All revolutions are populist movements. All destroy centuries of hard-won custom and tradition. They’re like brain surgery with a chainsaw. All of us are living the endgame of those 20th century wrecking balls. /end