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> In the old days, there was this idea of “selling out” and we as a culture decided that it was bad. Monetizing a thing immediately called into question its int

• adastra22 4y ago
  It did in the sense that kids these days don’t worry about selling out. It’s a generational change.
  • nickelpro 4y ago
    "Hustling" is viewed as an on-the-whole good, even if various archetypes associated with it (the Logan Pauls of the world) aren't viewed positively. Being able to monetize a personal brand is viewed as more than just benign, it's viewed as a societal endorsement of the individual and their ideas/perspectives/strategies.
    • tristor 4y ago
      To be fair, nobody dislikes Logan Paul due to his “hustle”, it’s that he’s arrogant and a d-bag. Hustling is almost universally seen positively be anyone under 35.
      • ghaff 4y ago
        Hustle is probably an overloaded word in this context. I don't think you'll find a lot of people who say "hustle" in the abstract is bad. What you will probably find--especially among older better-off people--is a certain distaste for trying to aggressively turn everything into a side-hustle and monetization opportunity.
      • RodgerTheGreat 4y ago
        Consider me from a different universe.
  • deng 4y ago
    > It did in the sense that kids these days don’t worry about selling out. It’s a generational change. I mean, I can understand that establishing a "brand" is more important nowadays, but it must still be important to carefully curate it and not mindlessly promoting anything that earns you money. When Tony Hawk promoted crypto.com, I immediately regretted any kind of respect I ever had for that man. Does the younger generation really not care at all?
    • adastra22 4y ago
      That’s not what the article is talking about. When I was growing up (mid 90’s) and earlier, ANY commercial success was selling out. Playing your guitar at the local cafe? Awesome. Signing your first album deal? You’re selling out, man. It was a weird remembrance of the punk movement, and maybe counterculture before it, where basically any capitalist interaction was working with The Man and considered selling out.
      • TheSpiceIsLife 4y ago
        I grew up around then, and definitely noticed the only people who weren't selling out where those who didn't have the opportunity to.
        • toto444 4y ago
          That's probably true but people were reminded that they were losing agency on their creation to businessmen. The creation was losing a bit of its soul. Nowadays most 'creations' are designed to make money from the very beginning. Very few people still create something for the sake of creating something great. If you are aware of some of them please share !
          • dotancohen 4y ago
            Not "art" per se, but SpaceX has a little cottage industry of followers who make terrific content, and successfully monetize it, while staying true to the ideals of producing the content for enthusiasts' sake. Marcus House, Tim Dodd, etc. Of course they cover other content too, and had established products before pivoting heavily towards SpaceX, but they certainly keep the sense of community.
  • hans1729 4y ago
    [citation needed]
  • ekianjo 4y ago
    Its not that they dont worry. They completely embrace selling out. Its almost as if everything they do is for the purpose of selling out.
  • simonh 4y ago
    I suspect the difference is that in the past the only way to go commercial was to work with a big corporation. Going to market with something was so hugely expensive, and required extensive marketing and distribution infrastructure, which was all internal to these big concerns. The problem was these companies expected a lot of invasive creative control and long term contracts to give access to those capabilities, which to be fair were hugely expensive to build and operate. Nowadays all of that infrastructure exists as generic services on the internet you can throw together in a few days, with costs that scale with your needs. I recently watched a Q&A Mark Zuckerberg gave to the Harvard CS50 class in 2005 [0]. He explained that what made Facebook possible to start with was cheap hosted servers running open source software, and the ways that had changed over the previous decade. Nowadays with AWS and Google Cloud its even easier and cheaper. The same applies to physical goods now with eBay, Amazon Marketplace, Etsy, Shopify, running your own one-person media empire on Youtube, etc. The negative connotations with "selling out" were the fact that you had to sell out creative control. You don't have to do that anymore. Dave Chappelle is rightly still sore about how he was cheated over the Chappelle Show. Nowadays you can build an audience independently, and that fact means that even if you do make a deal with big business, they know you're not as dependent on them anymore, so creatives have a much stronger hand than they used to. So I really don't think this is down to the generation themselves, the world they live in is just different. [0] https://youtu.be/xFFs9UgOAlE?t=935 https://youtu.be/xFFs9UgOAlE?t=935
    • bsenftner 4y ago
      It was hip hop, declaring "selling out" (specifically) to be propaganda. An entire decade and genre of music focused on this idea and the negative impacts of not selling one's work. "Getting paid" became the repeated mantra of many an artists' music. And that changed our culture.
      • simonh 4y ago
        That's actually a good point, I'm not sure how much broad influence that had but it's definitely an element.
    • coldtea 4y ago
  • willcipriano 4y ago
    The corporations won the culture war. I never realized it but looking at the cultural wasteland that we have now, they won.
    • mbg721 4y ago
      I don't know about that; the corporations certainly think they won, but I'm more inclined to believe they already killed the golden goose. There's no money in top-40 payola; the time to the grocery store soundtrack has never been shorter. The average age of cable TV viewers gets a year older every year, and there's much less patience for sitting around watching ads than in the 90s or 00s. Big corps are trying to win loyalty by loudly believing all the right things, only to find that they're alienating more of their customers than they thought. It's cool to be a foodie and do your own cooking, so fewer people are buying ever-shrinking prepared meals. Everyone's hugely cynical and expects a sales pitch around every corner. Culture is an incoherent wasteland largely because the big corps lost control.
      • coldtea 4y ago
        >I don't know about that; the corporations certainly think they won, but I'm more inclined to believe they already killed the golden goose. There's no money in top-40 payola; the time to the grocery store soundtrack has never been shorter They don't care. They do "hollistic deals", and sell Billie Eilish merchandize and Taylor Swift dog collars and barf bags. Music is just a byproduct of the whole thing...
        • mbg721 4y ago
          Sure, but they're only doing that because they're desperate and have no other ideas. They'd make way more money if they had a monolithic gaggle of 18-35 fans, and they don't.
  • avgcorrection 4y ago
    The only selling out buy-in I’ve seen is on HN with all the talk about being at “faang” or wanting to get into “faang”, all the while being very aware of how problematic big tech is.
  • watwut 4y ago
    They however care a lot about "shilling" as in trying to promote yourself on discussion forums.
• nabla9 4y ago
  The phenomenon is not new. The difference seems to be that there is no limit at all. Today nobody thinks "this is so tasteless that I don't want to work with it anymore". I think it's more honest. Art's and creative jobs have had the aura of being form of uncompromising self-expression, vehicle of social and political change and beauty. Pretending adds layer of deceit. That can't coexist with the goal of maximizing mass market popularity and income. I think this is the logical conclusion when something turns into pure commerce. Only thing valuable is visibility, recognizably, hype. What makes Bill Watterson look like mystical figure is that "having enough" and "shutting up after you have said what you wanted" is alien concept in business.
  • ghaff 4y ago
    There are a fair number of examples in cartooning (to greater or lesser degrees) where creators have partially or wholly walked away. Being engaging and funny day in and day out must be incredibly difficult and I imagine that many at the top of their field who aren't doing formulaic creations just burn out and--once out--don't really have the motivation to get back in again.
    • nabla9 4y ago
      Walking away when there is diminishing return from the effort is common. Walking away from opportunity to earn 1000X with little effort is not that common.
  • swayvil 4y ago
    Can't tell truth and lies at the same time. Or can you? I haven't actually given the idea serious thought.
    • ConceptJunkie 4y ago
      You can, but everyone starts assuming that it's all lies.
• stareatgoats 4y ago
  I remember way back when no real athlete would carry sponsorship messages - it would be "selling out". People who participated in sports for money were banned from participating in "clean sports" (and shamed). Maybe it wasn't like that in the US, but in Scandinavia it certainly was. In the good old days, in many ways. Kudos to Bill Watterson.
  • Rastonbury 4y ago
    I'm a millennial, I don't see how licensing IP would be selling out compared with carrying sponsorship messages. I understand how the latter can be seen as selling out
    • tsimionescu 4y ago
      If you saw Calvin in a Cola commercial, you wouldn't feel that lessens the artistic value of Calvin and Hobbes?
      • ConceptJunkie 4y ago
        Sure, but what if there were Calvin and Hobbes plushies, or something similar. Setting aside, of course, all the reasons Watterson gave for not wanting to do that sort of thing. There's licensing and there's licensing. You can buy an Opus doll, but he's not flogging soft drinks.
      • jsymolon 4y ago
        I feel the same way about music licensed to shows or commercials. Due to the amount of airplay a show or commercial gets, the music becomes overused. The USPS use of "Fly like an Eagle", and overplayed CSI: X shredded The Who songs. Although, "Love and Marriage" used in "Married with Children" (90's) doesn't have the same tiredness, probably because that Sinatra really wasn't in my listening list.
        • hyperman1 4y ago
          I was wondering why I heared 'Running up that hill' from Kate Bush so much on the different radio stations. Then HN had an article about someone recreating the synth sound of it. Why the renewed interest? Yesterday I heard it got used on a popular Netflix show. Ah. It could be worse, I thought they were forcing interest in some new album from her.
• recursiveturtle 4y ago
  If the reader here can find it, Linklater's SubUrbia captures this sentiment on film.
• makeitdouble 4y ago
  We're on a forum that will celebrate independant companies getting bought by bigger entities. Going "major" is widely seen as positive. More generally artists will openly talk about trying to get financing, be more transparent about advertisement spots being open, or request sponsorship. Patreons and direct support also comes here. The "if you're not paying for it you're the product" quip at least cemented the idea that how money is made is something that can be discussed in the open, instead of just shunning "sell outs"
  • EnKopVand 4y ago
    I do think the “selling out” argument is still a thing in the modern world. Here in Denmark we’re going back and forth on how to regulate things like influencers, and I’m not sure there would be a push back against it if being forced to tell people that you’re advertising a company that pays you money to advertise them wasn’t still seen as negative. Even here on HN it’s not like the buy of Red Hat by IBM was revived with a lot of love. So I think user deng has a point about “selling out” still being a thing. That being said, I think there is a big difference between selling out and wanting to remain in control of your creation. I have no idea whether George Lucas likes what happens with Star Wars or not, and I hope I’m not going to start a debate over it either, but by selling it he lost the creative control in a way the Bill Watterson didn’t. My guess is that being “seen” as a “sell out” isn’t actually something that comes into play when people consider what to do with their creations very often. Because honestly, why would you ever care? So maybe there is less of it today, but to state that our public discourse has changed on the subject? I’m not convinced it has.
    • zamfi 4y ago
      > I’m not sure there would be a push back against it if being forced to tell people that you’re advertising a company that pays you money to advertise them wasn’t still seen as negative Hmm, is this really about “selling out” though? Or is it about trust, and the deception inherent in taking money to say something that people could reasonably believe are your own words?
    • mc32 4y ago
• locallost 4y ago
  There definitely was a time, and I noticed I myself let go of it. Recently I watched an old clip of Bill Hicks where he calls out Leno for doing a commercial! I can't imagine anybody calling someone out over a commercial today and having an audience. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=i8aj3BA3cGg https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=i8aj3BA3cGg
• bsenftner 4y ago
  For many of you, some older and some those who did not get into street music, the cultural event that ended the concept of "selling out" was hip hop artists declaring "selling out" to be white establishment propaganda, and "getting paid" is all that matters anymore. The 90's street music was all about "getting paid" and quite elaborate examinations of how the negative attitude toward "selling out" was the establishment suppressing the voices of the street.
• coldtea 4y ago
  >It did? I completely missed that, but it's probably because I'm old... Yeah, it totally did. Ever since the 90s. The majority of the mainstream youth don't even understand the concept.
• c3534l 4y ago
  I've not heard anyone seriously accuse someone of selling out in over a decade.
  • jasonladuke0311 4y ago
    It’s still prevalent in music, especially the hardcore and metal scenes. Changing your sound and/or finding commercial success are frequently met with accusations of “selling out” (see Turnstile or Deafheaven for examples).
• yyyk 4y ago
  "Old days" is a very relative term here. This attitude was common for Watterson's generation (b. 1958), but for example Schulz (b. 1922) had zero problems with monetization.
  • JKCalhoun 4y ago
    That may be when Peanuts, IMHO, went downhill. "Oh, the dog sells? I'll do more of the dog." Sigh, so kawaii.
    • ghaff 4y ago
      It's hard to look at Peanuts with fresh eyes from such a distance of time. Halloween specials notwithstanding, I'm not sure I can say that I ever loved Peanuts--certainly not as an adult--but it was absolutely a cultural icon.
      • JKCalhoun 4y ago
        I think it was from reading the "Complete Peanuts" collections and seeing how brilliant the strip was in the earlier part of its run (certainly before I was old enough to either read or understand its depth as a child).
• foobarbecue 4y ago
  Came here to say this. AFAIK "selling out" has just as negative a connotation as it ever did. Maybe he means commercialism is more prevalent, but that's not what he wrote. Nobody says "congratulations on being a sellout" unless they are being sarcastic.
• tablespoon 4y ago
  > It did? I completely missed that, but it's probably because I'm old... IIRC, being a "social media influencer" is literally selling out, and it seems like it's what a lot of kids aspire to these days.
• starkd 4y ago
  To see evidence that Bill Watterson made the right decision, all you have to do is look at what happened to the Simpsons' brand. Matt Groenig unleashed any and all restraint on product merchandising. It used to be a clever and insightful commentary on American society. Now it's just sad.
  • ConceptJunkie 4y ago
    Perhaps, but its the show itself that has declined, not driven by the merchandising. "The Simpsons" as a show used to be razor-sharp satire and commentary, and rather counter-cultural. Now it's everything it used to mock, and worst of all, dull as dirt. The effect of merchandizing at this point is pretty irrelevant.
  • lancesells 4y ago
    Same as what happened to David Bowie after he died. His estate seemed to let everything of his be merchandised after he passed. Monopoly version of David Bowie, lunchboxes, etc... oof.
    • onionisafruit 4y ago
      I thought you must be exaggerating about the David Bowie Monopoly game, but you were not. Who is buying that?
• chubot 4y ago
  In the old days, there was this idea of “selling out” and we as a culture decided that it was bad. Monetizing a thing immediately called into question its integrity, and more importantly, the integrity of the artist. But then an interesting thing began happening in the late 90’s and early 00’s. The idea of selling out lost its negative connotation. Chuck Klosterman's recent book "The Nineties" talks about this a lot! And honestly it's spot on. I had forgotten about this, and not realized how much it disappeared as a cultural concept. https://www.amazon.com/Nineties-Book-Chuck-Klosterman/dp/0735217955 https://www.amazon.com/Nineties-Book-Chuck-Klosterman/dp/073... We all used the phrase "selling out" frequently (on the east coast of the US), but I remember one high school friend who invoked it constantly. Calling people "sell outs" (i.e. lacking in authenticity) was a common insult. Grunge bands and in particular Kurt Cobain had almost a pathological obsession with "selling out", to the point where it had some part in his death. Even popularity was seen as a sign of selling out -- it was better to be true to your indie roots. There are some interesting quotes in the book from Cobain and contemporaries, and the author talks about influential movies at the time that dealt with the concept. I was never a Calvin and Hobbes fan, but it's definitely interesting and notable that the creator avoided "selling out". While I think we were too obsessed with it back then, I think a concept that probably needs more respect today. You could even talk coherently about Google "selling out", although that concept may now be foreign to many people. There was a notion of authenticity and that you cared about the mission, i.e. organizing the world's information. But that is long gone :-( In retrospect the obsession with "selling out" in the 90's was a reaction to capitalist values affecting more and more parts of life. Though, being a teenager, I didn't realize that, and I just said what my friends said! It was a way to keep your peers in check. But it's sad that people don't even notice it anymore. They would wonder why you did NOT "sell out".
  • ethbr0 4y ago
    Google sold out when they bought DoubleClick. (Bought out?)
    • jleyank 4y ago
      Google came pre-sold out, given that the existed to sell ads.
• dkarl 4y ago
  "Selling out" still has negative connotations, but "hustle" became a positive word that we use for a lot of behavior that previously would have been labeled "selling out." Basically a bunch of upper-middle-class people adopted the concept of "hustle" from its poor urban context, where it acknowledged that the drive to do anything to scrape by was hard to reconcile with strict ethical standards. You don't question someone's ethics when they're trying to make sure their siblings have something to eat for dinner that night. Upper-middle-class people recognized that feeling -- hey, that's the desperation I feel when I realize that if I don't take this adtech job, I might not be able to maintain the same lifestyle as my friends that I met in the dorm at my highly selective university. If I don't found a startup and get monstrously rich, other people will never think of me the way I think of myself, and that would suck. How convenient that there's a word for when your desperate circumstances excuse you from the ethical standards that we apply to normal people! No matter how privileged you are, when you do ethically questionable things, just call them "hustle" and everyone will know that it isn't because of entitled self-indulgence, but because of your plucky determination to survive everything the world throws at you.
  • hattmall 4y ago
    It used to be that people lived life for the acts of life and a material things generally had a negative connotation. Now for a tremendous amount of people life is almost exclusively about material wealth and even many life experiences have a material quality because if you don't post pictures at certain landmarks did you really even go.
    • majormajor 4y ago
      Rich and powerful people have had gaudy things for centuries. Life was about power and material wealth was included in that. How much of the negative connotations sometimes associated with that have been akin to propaganda to keep the rest of the people in line.
  • hitekker 4y ago
    Solid comment. The word "hustle" conceals face-saving under the lip-service of survival. A careerist use it to cover up their wrongdoing. Like you said, they also believe in "hustle" because they're desperate; they've confused their face with their character. They believe "I needed to cheat and steal to get ahead because if I didn't, I won't be who I need to be, who I am." The belief in hustle masks and resolves an identity crisis, easily & selfishly. When people can justify complex, bad behavior with simple, bad beliefs, bad behavior spreads like a fire. In the article, Bill Watterson calls out justifying as the first step for regulating bad beliefs: > The world of a comic strip is much more fragile than most people realize. Once you’ve given up its integrity, that’s it. I want to make sure that never happens. Instead of asking what’s wrong with rampant commercialism, we ought to be asking, “What justifies it?”
• calvinmorrison 4y ago
  Well, it's also happened to the music market. Songs are worthless so you play a show and then hit the merch tent to sell LPs, hoodies, VIP passes etc. How many full time cartoonists are employed by papers vs 100 years ago?
• clsec 4y ago
  That's exactly what happened to San Francisco's culture. It started the during the first tech boom when all the artists started leaving for the East Bay and PDX.
• karaterobot 4y ago
  It did. Partly this was a change in economics: it got harder to make a good living as an artist in a digital, networked environment, where your art wasn't worth as much. So, artists started doing a lot more commercials, selling their art or their image to advertisers, and later using their access to fans to sell their own consumer products directly to them. Once the cultural taboo was banished, it disappeared quickly. The idea that outside money pollutes art is not a concept most people under 20 would find intuitive or familiar, and relatively few under 30 either. Now, whether this is good or bad, I can't say. It certainly feels like there is less art produced today that will stand the test of time. But there are a lot of reasons that might be true other than just this one, and in any case as a man in my 40s, I'm generally out of touch with culture, and not a suitable judge. Nor are teenagers the authorities in this matter, though for other reasons. It's something historians of the future will have to sort out.
• I-M-S 4y ago
  There's an episode of "Decoder ring", an excellent podcast devoted to decoding cultural mysteries, on this subject: https://slate.com/podcasts/decoder-ring/2021/08/selling-out https://slate.com/podcasts/decoder-ring/2021/08/selling-out
• systemvoltage 4y ago
  "Selling out" is basing your morality on someone's well deserved accomplishment and whether they should be rewarded for that or not. That seems complete opposite of how I see morality ought to be. Seems incredibly contemptious and anything but moral.
• maxutility 4y ago
  There was a really interesting NYTimes piece [0] about Gen X comedy icon Janeane Garafolo earlier this week that touched on similar themes of “not selling out.” I have often wondered over the years what happened to her. It turns out that she really walked the walk of not selling out and the obscurity that comes with avoiding publicity and promotion. Personally my feelings on the subject are conflicted. I think that some degree of promotion is important so that others can discover great art and contributions, and so that artists and creators can make a comfortable living off of their work, but that “selling out” becomes bad when the pursuit of commerce overtakes and reduces the art. [0] https://www.nytimes.com/2022/07/14/movies/janeane-garofalo.html https://www.nytimes.com/2022/07/14/movies/janeane-garofalo.h...