Your billing of it sounds wonderful, but in following the link you provide I found my eyes glazing over. I just dismiss the "counterculture" as an expression of the culture of journalism. Nothing more than a bunch of "dissenters" on TV railing against "the establishment" - when they were on TV precisely because the actual establishment - Big Journalism - wanted them (and not you or me) there.Establishment "dissent." You buy that, I've got some dry water to sell you.
I'm not sure what you took from the excerpt but Frank's overall point is almost identical to yours: That the "counterculture" was very much a creation and tool of the very establishment it pretended to oppose. He traces its roots to advertising strategies concocted at Doyle Dane Bernbach in the late 50s, especially the "illusion of distinction." This would be history except that Frank also documents the continued dominance of this fraudulent 60s counterculture in the internal culture of the media industry to this day. There are some striking examples in the book. One is an ad from about 1971. It has a stereotyped black radical; giant afro, tie-dyed bell-bottoms, dashiki, mirror-shades; punching his fist in the air and declaring, "The man don't control our music no more!" The ad is for CBS Records, "the man" himself by any reasonable standard. There is also a ridiculous outburst of radical rhetoric from a Nike ad executive circa 1990, along the lines of "what is the purpose of these ads if not to incite people to riot?" This was about the time Nike used "beat generation" drug advocate William Burroughs in its ads, an utterly bizarre juxtaposition when we remember that the product is nominally an athletic shoe. My summary of Frank's work: The "left" as we know it today is little more than an advertising gimmick run amok.