Trump and Big Tech Killed the Counterculture. Can It Rise Again?

O
N A COLD APRIL EVENING in 2025, I managed to get a ticket to a sold-out performance of George Clooney’s Broadway play, Good Night, and Good Luck. The week’s news had been filled with images of students being arrested by masked men and remanded to jail. The leaders of some of the country’s largest law firms and universities were cowering in fear from White House threats. As I crossed West 52nd Street on my way down to the theater, the words of W.H. Auden’s poem sprung into my head: “I sit in one of the dives on 52nd Street/Uncertain and afraid/As the clever hopes expire/Of a low dishonest decade.”

It had been a low, dishonest decade since Donald Trump descended his golden escalator and transformed our country, but Clooney’s play was set in 1954, when the CBS newsman Edward R. Murrow decided to take on another authoritarian demagogue, Sen. Joseph McCarthy.

There is a point midway through the play when Murrow (played by Clooney) turns directly to the camera and says, “We will not walk in fear, one of another. We will not be driven by fear into an age of unreason, if we dig deep in our history and our doctrine and remember that we are not descended from fearful men. Not from men who feared to write, to speak, to associate, and to defend causes that were, for the moment, unpopular.… There is no way for a citizen of the republic to abdicate his responsibilities.” The moment Clooney finished this speech, the audience burst into applause.

As I looked around the theater, I thought that many of us had found ourselves living in a democracy that was different from the one we grew up in. As the New Yorker reviewer wrote: “Look, Clooney seems to be saying. We did this before. We can do it again.”

The biggest question in America today: Is this still true? While politics swings between progress and reaction, culture usually goes one way — forward. Singers, artists, actors, and journalists have in the history of our country often comprised a counterculture, an opposing force that has continually arisen in times of political repression. It’s akin to the French concept of avant-garde — new, experimental, or innovative work. Charlie Parker, Dizzy Gillespie, and Miles Davis inventing bebop while hanging out with Jackson Pollock and Jack Kerouac amid the McCarthyism of the early 1950s — this is counterculture. So, too, is Henry David Thoreau and Ralph Waldo Emerson in the early 1840s, resisting the jingoism of a war against Mexico while influencing the political thinking of a young legislator named Abe Lincoln on the importance of ending that war and slavery. Mark Twain writing The Gilded Age in 1873, calling out the most corrupt period in U.S. history. Louis Armstrong voting with his feet to leave the Jim Crow South for 1920s Chicago, a trip mirrored by millions of other Black citizens in the Great Migration. Bob Dylan singing at a voting-rights rally in the summer of 1963 in Greenwood, Mississippi, not far from where Medgar Evers had been murdered by the Klan weeks earlier. Public Enemy, Ice T, or N.W.A rapping about police brutality and injustice.

But today, in the face of Trump’s wave of assaults, the counterculture as we have known it (with the possible exception of singular artists like Beyoncé or Bad Bunny) has largely gone missing. The powerful moguls who run our media companies cower in fear of the regime. I was lucky enough to spend some time with William Paley, chairman of CBS, in the 1980s. The contrast between Paley’s staunch defense of Ed Murrow and the cowardly behavior of the current CBS News management, which paid Trump $16 million to escape a phony charge against 60 Minutes, is extraordinary. During Trump’s second term, we have watched our culture grow coarser. As young Republicans gleefully claim “I love Hitler” on group chats, the president posts a meme of himself bombing No Kings protesters with excrement, and then writes that the director Rob Reiner was murdered because he had “Trump Derangement Syndrome.” This moral surrender degrades us all. The abandonment of universal values is no mere philosophical error; it is a quiet unraveling of the American spirit itself.

I TOUCHED BASE WITH a lot of people as I wrote this piece, asking, “Where is the counterculture of today?” The great music critic Greil Marcus wrote back, saying, “That’s a tricky question. It might be a mistake to think of counterculture following a ’60s model, what Robert Christgau called ‘mass bohemianism,’ a left-leaning, ecologically oriented, sexually open, drug-supported movement. The counterculture today might be white nationalism, in all its forms and groups, which are probably more linked with each other than might be apparent.”

This brought me up short. If the liberal cultural project had been so successful that it became the mainstream, then maybe the new counterculture was being directed online by the likes of Elon Musk, Curtis Yarvin, and Tucker Carlson. When I wrote the novelist Rachel Kushner, she had a similar thought in reaction to Greil’s reply, writing, “Doesn’t a counterculture require the production of art? Where is their music, their dance, their theater, their poetry?… It’s just a bunch of media wannabes who put out podcasts.”

But now, I wonder if my notion of culture being grounded in music or film has been eclipsed by the culture of the algorithm. For the past 10 years, in books like Move Fast and Break Things and The End of Reality, I have been writing about how a few tech billionaires have built unimagined fortunes by destroying our culture. The technocrats are well-known: Musk, Mark Zuckerberg, Peter Thiel, Marc Andreessen, Jeff Bezos, Sam Altman. The project of “disruption” these men championed at the dawn of the digital age has ended with the immiseration of musicians, journalists, and photographers.

With the introduction of the “like” button on Facebook in 2009, the social media invasion came for us all. Now, between that and the rise of AI, people are reading less. Attention spans have shortened. Teenage anxiety has skyrocketed. A Northwestern University study published in the journal Intelligence in 2023 found that American IQ test scores dropped during a 13-year period, between 2006 and 2018. This decline after a century of steady ascent marks not just a statistical reversal but a spiritual diminishment — an erosion of the inner life that once flourished in reading and reflection.

For generations, the educated world held as self-evident that literature, learning, and the great works of the past were among the highest consolations of being human — a tradition grounded in the conviction, as Matthew Arnold wrote, that they preserve “the best which has been thought and said.” To dwell in these works was to enter other minds, to traverse time and deepen one’s grasp of existence itself. Yet the culture of the screen, which is fragmentary, has replaced depth with distraction. The AI-enabled smartphone, glowing in every hand, is both amulet and anesthetic, the algorithms serving up dross that severs curiosity, blunts imagination, and feeds an epidemic of anxiety and purposelessness that afflicts young and old alike. We are experiencing a kind of civilizational withdrawal.

If we are to find a way to heal a broken America, an optimistic cultural renaissance will have to precede political reform, because our current crisis is as much spiritual as it is political. The technologies foisted on us by the tech elite are making us less human. Social media has corrupted our souls, and AI holds the promise of making us irrelevant. At each key turning point in American history, the culture makers — writers, musicians, painters — pointed us in new directions that ultimately led to our salvation. It was the artists who, time and again, raised objections to the imperialist tendencies of the political class. Thoreau went to jail protesting slavery and the Mexican-American War. Twain was the vice president of the Anti-Imperialism League for 10 years. Dylan wrote “Masters of War.” Marvin Gaye’s “What’s Going On,” Rage Against the Machine, Marlon Brando, Spike Lee, Paul Newman, Nina Simone — musicians, actors, and filmmakers were constantly on the front lines of the struggles for civil rights and against imperialism.

A new group of young artists needs to step forward now to paint a vision of our future and stem the tide of authoritarian tyranny that plagues us. This new counterculture will need to be both a voice of political courage against an autocratic regime and a core of the resistance against the AI monopolies that seek to consume mass culture and replace the human genius with the machine.

But how does such an artistic renewal happen? For starters, physical proximity — a scene — not virtual community, is critical. As the great Americana singer Molly Tuttle wrote to me, “People find true authenticity and the spirit of counterculture extremely compelling in today’s world, in part because it’s so hard to come by and we are all so inundated with carefully crafted content. I think to have a counterculture movement today, people would need to gather offline and truly connect with one another.”

I was lucky enough to be in the middle of two such “scenes” when I produced concerts for Bob Dylan in the late 1960s and movies for Martin Scorsese in the 1970s. I have felt the power of a counterculture firsthand. So what can we do to restart that spirit of liberal optimism and innovation? Part of the mission is reviving what Renaissance scholars called the liberal arts. These 16th-century artists and philosophers peeled back medieval certainties, mining the texts and fragmented statuary of ancient Greece for a humanist language of balance, inquiry, and civic virtue that would redefine beauty and the very limits of individual potential.

However, swift action is needed, because Trump and his MAGA followers are not a conservative force, but a counterrevolutionary one. In The Republic, Plato saw the late stage of democracy not as the triumph of freedom, but as the beginning of chaos — a reckless celebration of appetites, where wisdom and virtue lose all value and the state turns into a circus, run by demagogues who seduce citizens with empty promises and unchecked desires. The people, exhausted by disorder, beg for a single strong ruler.

The shift from print to screen unravels the story modernity once told about itself: the myth of the rational citizen and the primacy of analytic reason as the organizing principle of society. The English journalist Mary Harrington contends, “The digital revolution is profoundly reactionary.” The long-form reading fostered by print was not simply a pastime but a mind-altering technology — a regime that bred attentiveness, interiority, and the capacity for dispassionate debate. In the digital present, pattern-based cognition, meme logic, and fraught symbolic exchanges displace deliberation. The digital citizen, reared now by the swarm, is less capable of forming judgments rooted in a reality predicated on objectivity and facts, and more driven by animal passions. The terminus of this tech-induced delusion is the politics of permanent suspicion, in which the only remaining institution is your own outrage.

THE INABILITY FOR A NEW counterculture to form must be blamed on the technocracy — the billionaire leaders who control social media and AI. We should keep in mind that the early claims of the digital revolution — it would enhance democracy, bring people together, and boost economic equality — have already proven to be false. Now, as the technocratic elites exercise monopoly power, we see our democracy roll over in passive acceptance — what the German fascist theorist Carl Schmitt in 1970 called “TV Democracy.” Trump’s second term is a TV Democracy, and we, and our representatives, are mere spectators.

Having ushered in this reality, the internet leaves the countercultural creator in a state of anomie — a kind of learned, cynical helplessness. The old institutions that once certified truth — courts, universities, and the press — have lost their authority to the algorithmic marketplace of attention. Profit-driven platforms turn virality into verification, elevating spectacle and fury over substance. In this bleak landscape of late American life, what prevails in much of the creative community is more than resignation — it’s a quiet surrender. The social machinery primes us all for frictionless consumption. Yet this training obscures the frayed paradox: As consumers, we re­spond, but as citizens, the labor of creation, contention, and responsibility slips out of habit. Artists have been replaced by influencers and content creators. Fans by followers.

Of course, the real beneficiaries of the digital revolution are not the artists, but the aforementioned technocracy — that handful of billionaires who control AI and social media. The immiseration of creative artists has become a self-fulfilling prophecy, and as nonprofit institutions (universities, museums, foundations) come under threat in the second Trump term, support for any form of an avant-garde has also begun to vanish. The rise of artificial intelligence has only compounded this problem, because it has meant the death of original thought. It also means that anyone can pretend to be an artist, pushing endless AI slop into our social media feeds.

Trump has proclaimed that we are entering a golden age. I want to propose another possibility — that the next 10 years could be the most chaotic and politically unstable in American history. What if Musk is right, and within two decades most work will be performed by the robots he is making? If so, we are headed for massive unemployment — a true dystopian nightmare.

Mercifully, a golden cultural age often arises out of a time of meanness and political repression. Nixon’s election in 1968 marked the beginning of one of those reactionary periods. But in that same year, the music and movie businesses began a period of extraordinary artistry and innovation. Recorded music revenues in the U.S. were $10.7 billion at the end of 1967. By 1978, they had almost doubled to $19.3 billion. The top-grossing movie in 1967 (The Graduate) earned $104 million. The top-grossing movie in 1977 (Star Wars) earned more than $307 million. Out of a political tragedy for liberals came some of the greatest music and movies ever made.

A counterculture is important for another reason. It provides the nation with soft power, a country’s ability to influence others without resorting to coercive pressure. Unlike the record of abject military failure in Vietnam, Afghanistan, and Iraq, America’s greatest foreign policy triumph of the past 50 years was the fall of the Berlin Wall and the end of Soviet domination of Eastern Europe. Not a shot was fired — but our cultural domination was ascendent. The strategic analyst George Friedman wrote that there was a secret to America’s Cold War triumph: “More important than money or guns [was] the technology that represents the future and the culture that speaks of being contemporary.”

In June 1987, at a concert in Berlin, David Bowie chose his song “Heroes” as his closing number. The song tells a story of two lovers who meet at the Berlin Wall and try, desperately, to find a way to be together. The stage was set up close enough to that wall that thousands of East Berlin kids could gather on the other side to listen. Later, Bowie said, “It was like a double concert where the wall was the division. And we would hear them cheering and singing along from the other side. God, even now I get choked up.”

A hundred miles south of Berlin, the Dresden station chief of the KGB heard reports of the crowd of Bowie fans. His name was Vladimir Putin. When Genesis came on later that night, the KGB ordered the police to crack down, attacking the East Berliners with water cannons. In early 1990, a few months after the Berlin Wall came down, Putin fled Dresden for the safety of Moscow. But he likely would never forget that week in June 1987.

Finding and building a new liberal counterculture will be a huge challenge, because the fact is, everyone sold out. In 1975, a serious actor or musician might have fired his manager if they had suggested doing a commercial. Today, Snoop Dogg will seemingly appear in an advertisement for any product if you pay his fee. He’s far from alone. As Nikki Glaser said at the 2025 Golden Globes, “The point of making art is not to win an award. The point of making art is to start a tequila brand so popular that you never have to make art again.”

As I was despairing about the lack of dissent from today’s artists in the fall of 2025, I went to see Paul Thomas Anderson’s One Battle After Another. The movie stands poised to become one of those rare films whose impact doesn’t just ripple out. It floods the collective psyche, disturbing the sediment that gathers when mass culture falls into fragmentation and digital distraction.

Anderson’s countercultural themes don’t offer easy paeans to resistance or starry-eyed revolution; instead, the script moves in and out of ambiguity, mapping what it feels like to live within the soft tyranny that seeps through daily American life. Anderson stages not just a conflict between ideologies, but also a confrontation with the emotional undercurrents — apathy, delusion, self-doubt — that shape life under would-be autocracy. But the film also shows the possibility of an intergenerational dialogue. It is the younger generation that provides the spark for Leonardo DiCaprio’s character to rise from his pot-addled fog to confront white nationalism. As it should be.

In its stripped-down visual language, refusal of quippy self-awareness, and willingness to leave conflicts unresolved, the film hints at a long-dormant counterculture still willing to fight — a small but growing cohort impatient with corporate pieties and nostalgic for an oppositional, risk-taking tradition that treats art as a site of resistance rather than the stale bromide of assimilation.

Jonathan Taplin is the director emeritus of the Annenberg Innovation Lab at the University of Southern California and the author of Move Fast and Break Things, The Magic Years, and The End of Reality.