About The Counterforce
What is this? The Counterforce is an initiative to push back against the corporate capture of hardcore punk. Social media apps and streaming platforms dominate how we interact online, including how we share and distribute our music and ideas. The corporations that run these platforms extract massive profits from us, which they use to fund and facilitate exploitation, war, and genocide. Meanwhile, our independent and underground alternatives have eroded.
The goal of The Counterforce is to strengthen and grow the hardcore punk underground that still exists outside of this corporate capture. Rather than funnel punk into profit-driven walled gardens, we want to foment and encourage a culture that is autonomous and independent. This is not just a nostalgic, backward-facing project – we want to explore new alternatives for spreading hardcore punk online and offline.
Read more about the motivations and goals of this project: Manifesto For The Counterforce.
Here you will find:
A web and print zine
This site publishes reviews, letters, scene reports, profiles/interviews, rants, and how-to guides, all with an emphasis on projects that try to exist outside of corporate platforms.
In part, we hope this will encourage human-driven curation, recommendation, and discovery. Find out about new bands that aren't on the streaming sites. Submit a review of your own band. Compile a scene report or show review and send it in. We also publish articles and DIY how-to guides to help empower other punks to build and participate in a scene that's less centered around evil apps.
All this is published online, but also compiled into regular print zine editions to bring paper back to the punk show.
A directory of similarly aligned projects
The Internet is breaking down. Websites outside of a handful of apps have slowly disappeared, and the ones that are still out there are harder and harder to find.
The Counterforce provides a directory of these websites: blogs, archives, distros, zines, radio shows and podcasts... anywhere hardcore punk can be found online (and maybe offline too!).
A place to experiment with and learn about alternatives
It's easy to shit on the corporate social media and streaming platforms, but what other options are there? There are alternatives and we try them out – public online show calendars, open-source social media, self-hosted music sharing – and encourage other punks to join us.
A digital zine distro
Major punk fanzines of the past fell victim to the rising costs of printing and shipping. We publish printable PDFs of our zines online for anyone to print and distribute themselves, and encourage other zinesters to submit their own.
What if instead of shipping zines around the world, any punk anywhere could log on, download some PDFs and scam some copies to have a fully stocked, PWYC zine distro at the next show? Print-It-Yourself!
A hard line against contributing to further corporate capture of our subculture
- No links to Instagram, Spotify, Linktree, Discord, or other corporate platforms.
- No coverage of releases that are on major labels, or only available digitally on corporate streaming platforms.
- Always independent and not-for-profit.
For expanding the hardcore punk mutual aid autonomous zone.
For facilitating human curation and recommendation.
For hardcore punk with context and politics.
Against celebrity, ladder climbers, clout chasers and influencers.
Against the algorithmic flattening of our subculture.
Against the capitalist death machine and the corporate capture of hardcore punk.