thirty!' In no previous society could such a slogan have caught on so quickly.
Carey explains this shift from spatial to temporal differentiation by calling attention to the advance of communications and transportation technology which spans great distances, and, in effect, conquers space. Yet there is another, easily overlooked factor at work: the acceleration of change. For as the pace of change in the external environment steps up, the inner differences between young and old become necessarily more marked. In fact, the pace of change is already so blinding that even a few years can make a great difference in the life experience of the individual. This is why some brothers and sisters, separated in age by a mere three or four years, subjectively feel themselves to be members of quite different 'generations.' It is why among those radicals who participated in the strike at Columbia University, seniors spoke of the 'generation gap' that separated them from sophomores.
Splintering along occupational, recreational and age lines, the society is also fragmenting along sexual- familial lines. Even now, however, we are already creating distinctive new subcults based on marital status. Once people might be loosely classified as either single, married or widowed. Today this three-way categorization is no longer adequate. Divorce rates are so high in most of the techno-societies today that a distinct new social grouping has emerged – those who are no longer married or who are between marriages. Thus Morton Hunt, an authority on the subject, describes what he terms 'the world of the formerly married.'
This group, says Hunt, is a 'subculture ... with its own mechanisms for bringing people together, its own patterns of adjustment to the separated or divorced life, its own opportunities for friendship, social life and love.' As its members break away from their married friends, they become progressively isolated from those still in 'married life' and 'exmarrieds,' like 'teen-agers' or 'surfers,' tend to form social enclaves of their own with their own favored meeting places, their own attitudes toward time, their own distinct sexual codes and conventions.
Strong trends make it likely that this particular social category will swell in the future. And when this happens, the world of the formerly married will, in turn, split into multiple worlds, more and still more sub-cultural groupings. For the bigger a subcult becomes, the more likely it is to fragment and give birth to new subcults.
If the first clue to the future of social organization lies, therefore, in the idea of proliferating subcults, the second lies in sheer size. This basic principle is largely overlooked by those who are most exercised over 'mass society,' and it helps explain the persistence of diversity even under extreme standardizing pressures. Because of in-built limitations in social communication, size itself acts as a force pushing toward diversity of organization. The larger the population of a modern city, for example, the more numerous – and diverse – the subcults within it. Similarly, the larger the subcult, the higher the odds that it will fragment and diversify. The hippies provide a perfect example.
In the mid-fifties, a small group of writers, artists and assorted hangers-on coalesced in San Francisco and around Carmel and Big Sur on the California coast. Quickly dubbed 'beats' or 'beatniks,' they pieced together a distinctive way of life.
Its most conspicuous elements were the glorification of poverty – jeans, sandals, pads and hovels; a predilection for Negro jazz and jargon; an interest in Eastern mysticism and French existentialism; and a general antagonism to technologically based society.
Despite extensive press coverage, the beats remained a tiny sect until a technological innovation – lysergic acid, better known as LSD – appeared on the scene. Pushed by the messianic advertising of Timothy Leary, Allen Ginsberg and Ken Kesey, distributed free to thousands of young people by irresponsible enthusiasts, LSD soon began to claim a following on the American campus, and almost as quickly spread to Europe as well. The infatuation with LSD was accompanied by a new interest in marijuana, a drug with which the beats had long experimented. Out of these two sources, the beat subcult of the mid-fifties and the 'acid' subcult of the early sixties, sprang a larger group – a new subcult that might be described as a corporate merger of the two: the hippie movement. Blending the blue jeans of the beats with the beads and bangles of the acid crowd, the hippies became the newest and most hotly publicized subcult on the American scene.
Soon, however, the pressures of growth proved too much for it. Thousands of teenagers joined the ranks; millions of pre-teens watched their television sets, read magazine articles about the movement, and undulated in sympathy; some suburban adults even became 'plastic' or weekend hippies. The result was predictable. The hippie subcult – exactly like General Motors or General Electric – was forced to divisionalize, to break down into subsidiaries. Thus out of the hippie subcult came a shower of progeny.
To the eye of the uninitiated, all young people with long hair seemed alike. Yet important sub-units emerged within the movement. According to David Andrew Seeley, an acute young observer, there were at its height 'perhaps a score of recognizable and distinct groups.' These varied not only by certain subtleties of dress but by interest. Thus, Seeley reported, their activities ranged 'from beer parties to poetry readings, from pot- smoking to modern dance – and often those who indulge in one wouldn't touch the other.' Seeley then proceeded to explain the differences that set apart such groups as the teeny-boppers (now largely vanished from the scene), the political activist beatniks, the folk beatniks, and then, and only then, the original hippies
Members of these subcultural subsidiaries wore identifying badges that held meaning for insiders. Teeny- boppers, for example, were beardless, many, in fact, being too young to shave. Sandals were 'in' with the folk set, but not some of the others. The tightness of one's trousers varied according to subcult.
At the level of ideas, there were many common complaints about the dominant culture. But sharp differences emerged with respect to political and social action. Attitudes ranged from the conscious withdrawal of the acid hippie, through the ignorant unconcern of the teeny-bopper, to the intense involvement of the New Left activist and the politics-of-theabsurd activities of groupings like the Dutch provos, the Crazies, and the guerrilla theater crowd.
The hippie corporation, so to speak, grew too large to handle all its business in a standardized way. It had to diversify and it did. It spawned a flock of fledgling subcultural enterprises.
Even as this happened, however, the movement began to die. The most passionate LSD advocates of yesterday began to admit that 'acid was a bad scene' and various underground newspapers began warning followers against getting too involved with 'tripsters.' A mock funeral was held in San Francisco to 'bury' the hippie subcult, and its favored locations, Haight-Ashbury and the East Village turned into tourist meccas as the original movement writhed and disintegrated, forming new and odder, but smaller and weaker subcults and minitribes. Then, as though to start the process all over again, yet another subcult, the 'skinheads,' surfaced. Skinheads had their own characteristic outfits – suspenders, boots, short haircuts – and an unsettling predilection for violence.
The death of the hippie movement and the rise of the skinheads provide a crucial new insight into the subcultural structure of tomorrow's society. For we are not merely multiplying subcults. We are turning them over more rapidly. The principle of transience is at work here, too. As the rate of change accelerates in all other aspects of the society, subcults, too, grow more ephemeral.
Evidence pointing toward a decrease in the life span of subcults also lies in the disappearance of that violent subcult of the fifties, the fighting street gang. Throughout that decade certain streets in New York were regularly devastated by a peculiar form of urban warfare called the 'rumble.' During a rumble, scores, if not hundreds, of youths would attack one another with flailing chains, switchblade knives, broken bottles and zip-guns. Rumbles occurred in Chicago, Philadelphia, Los Angeles, and even as far away as London and Tokyo.
While there was no direct connection between these far-flung outbreaks, rumbles were by no means chance events. They were planned and carried out with military precision by highly organized 'bopping gangs.' In New York these gangs affected colorful names – Cobras, Corsair Lords, Apaches, Egyptian Kings and the like. They fought one another for dominance in their 'turf' – the specific geographic area they staked out for themselves.
At their peak there were some 200 such gangs in New York alone, and in a single year, 1958, they accounted for no fewer than eleven homicides. Yet by 1966, according to police officials, the bopping gangs had virtually vanished. Only one gang was left in New York, and
