What do underground Estonian teens, twenty-somethings on the island of Sardinia, and aging rural communities in Galicia have in common?

Their cultures are at risk of being lost.

Here’s the thing: the tech and platforms we have right now don’t actually work for culture. Especially not subcultures, hyper-local communities, or heritage that lives outside of tourist brochures. They fail at documenting, supporting, and helping people actually find where these cultures are happening and how they can be part of them.

And the alternatives that do exist? They’re either impossible to use, impossible to scale, or way too obsessed with algorithms instead of actual human experiences. Some of them do great work locally, but can’t connect beyond their own geographic bubble. Basically: incredible intentions, not-so-incredible UX.

Enter CounterCult.
This is exactly why we came to Anceu Coliving to work with the brilliant Rural Hackers team, the WordPress community from Pontevedra and test CounterCult’s open-source platform as a region-wide case study. And we are starting with the 97 person village of Anceu, which (spoiler alert) has more cultural richness than most major cities per square meter.

The Exchange (aka: the wholesome part)

We were lucky enough to be invited to Anceu through a youth exchange program, and honestly… It feels like being adopted by the world’s most wholesome rural tech family.

The team here takes the community seriously in the nicest possible way. Every day is shaped by group responsibility: some of us wake up early for breakfast duty, others help with cleaning, cooking, or offering support in the house. Evenings are for reconnecting with our inner child through games, conversations, laughter, and that specific flavor of chaos that only happens when you put creatives and community builders in one room.

We go on walks.
And we build.

In between?
We cowork.We brainstorm.

And because nothing at CounterCult ever happens halfway, we somehow ended up assembling the most chaotically elite creative team imaginable. We had literal wizards working on our map and backend (the type of people who speak in code that sounds like spells). We had world-renowned underground filmmakers crafting our video. We had copywriters so good they could probably convince a village goat to subscribe to our newsletter. And we had artists, flow-keepers, and visual alchemists designing our landing page.

All of this, of course, in true CounterCult spirit:
collaboration, a bit of chaos, an unhealthy amount of talent in one house, the occasional rat sighting, and a lot of unexpected fun.

The vision is simple:
If culture is the soul of a place, then tech should help protect it not bury it.

CounterCult is here to make cultural knowledge findable, accessible, and human again. And this tiny village is just the beginning.