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Strategically coopting countercultures is how consumer-based capitalism has become unassailable. Humans will pay any price to feel like they belong.

• batch12 4y ago
  It is also how culture moves on. Nobody counterculture wants to be part of the mainstream 'underground'. The new, interesting stuff will move somewhere else and this area will be a vanilla shadow of what it once was. Especially cringeworthy to me were the pictures of mural-graffiti overlayed with a repeating hashtag.
• Spivak 4y ago
  > Strategically coopting countercultures Unless you actually think there's literal evil mustache-twirling going on there's a much simpler explanation -- the people who were a part of that counterculture are now the establishment and, like everyone else, romanticize when they were angsty in their teens and twenties. It's why Guns N' Roses is suburban backyard BBQ pasta salad music now. You're right that people will pay money to belong but this isn't a example of it, this is people paying money for nostalgia. All counterculture has an expiration date since you can't pass it down to your kids. If you could it would defeat the whole point.
  • toyg 4y ago
    It has little or nothing to do with age, "selling out" begins as soon as culture is packaged as consumable goods. You write a book, it sells well, you're now wealthy and invested in maintaining the system you railed against a minute ago. Meanwhile, others will want to be like you, so will start packaging and selling their output; and consumers will continue to pay for the feeling of belonging to your cultural sphere. Same for music and songs, video and film, and so on. Very few people really ever opt out of these mechanisms. At a macro level, consumer society will automatically fagocitate any cultural output - because to experience culture is to consume it, and guess what the system is specialised in? Producing, selling, and refining at infinitum, anything that can be consumed. Everything else is just the natural outcome of this phenomenon.