Comment by iostream24

I'm in my mid-50's. I missed the 1950's and 1960's in the US, but I recall the 70's and onward vividly. It is hard to impart to today's generations just how subversive MTV was in the 1980's. Being different in school in the 70's was a mortal sin, so people who did it were either truly weird or had immense self-confidence. "Alternative radio" didn't exist in most of the country, let alone cassettes and albums: department stores only sold what big labels offered. Punk and alternative had to be sought out by college students or people in cities. MTV changed all that radically. "Nonconformity" was a big word for teens in the 70's and 80's. It is all but gone now, today my friends teen-aged kids are about fitting in, not sticking out.

Because there is no more "sticking out". Everything has been commodified and accepted. There is no longer a way to differentiate yourself from the pack, because the pack is so diverse. I think that has really shaken things up: there's nothing to rebel against, and Gen-X cynicism/nihilism has left an identity crises for Mil/GenZ. Although it appears these groups are going back to tradition and don't give a f*k about nonconformity.

Steve Albini (legendary producer) wrote an essay in "Commodify Your Dissent" from the Baffler magazine around the time of the Dead Kennedys. He hits on the ability to buy anarchy patches in department stores as fashion items when in the past they were signs of a true counterculture. I highly recommend it, it captures what you are feeling up to a point, because it refers mostly to the 80's and 90's, and not the utter weirdness of today.

https://www.amazon.com/Commodify-Your-Dissent-Salvos-Baffler...

Watch "Century of the Self" (and "Hypernormalization") by Adam Curtis. Pop culture, marketing, and advertisement are in many ways the products of wartime propaganda techniques being applied to civilians by corporations during peacetime. Also watch Zizek for his thoughts on how corporations like Starbucks get people to try and practice their morals through consumerism. And since you mentioned falsified democracy, might as well look into Chomsky and his thoughts on Manufacturing Consent. These are legitimate, calculated phenomena that it's worth being aware of.

The commodification of dissent. In the 50's, counter-culture was far more delineated from corporate squareness, which is why those old 50's ads are so funny to us now. Business evolved to where now it has the ability to coopt any emerging dissent and counter-culture almost immediately.

> Something I noticed was that being “underground” and “alternative” was considered “cool” when I was a youngster. Now, it seems all transgressive elements have been stripped from the mix and it’s all about “please like me, like my product, I’m desperate for your approval”

Not everybody considered those things cool - obviously they were specifically NOT the mainstream pop crowd, or else there was nothing to be "underground" or "alternative" against.

There's certainly still underground/alternative pop culture. More than ever before! In some ways its harder to find (e.g. your search bubble isn't going to pop it up to you if it doesn't think you want it), ironically!

But with that new bubble of being in your sub-community largely comes less need to "act out" against the rest of the crowd. This is largely good, except in cases of e.g. violent incel egging-on spiral-downward communities or your more "old fashioned" sorts of violent radicalism that continue to exist.

(Here's a trivially simple example: the author claims that a smaller and smaller group is claiming a larger and larger share of the market in TV. But then look at something like this from wikipedia's I Love Lucy page: 'The episode "Lucy Goes to the Hospital", which first aired on Monday, January 19, 1953, garnered a record 15.105 million homes reached, equivalent to 44 million viewers resulting from 71.7% share of all households with television sets at the time having been tuned in to view the program.[69] That record is surpassed only by Elvis Presley's first of three appearances on The Ed Sullivan Show, which aired on September 9, 1956 (82.6% share, 60.710 million viewers and a 57.1 rating ).[69] The overall rating of 67.3 for the entire 1952 season of I Love Lucy continues to be the highest average rating for any single season of a TV show.[70]' No show or musician commands anything close to that now. )

> it seems all transgressive elements have been stripped from the mix and it’s all about “please like me, like my product, I’m desperate for your approval”

I think you're just commenting from your bubble, and using the flawed argument from the article to rationalize it (not to mention the fact that the people you're most likely to see are the minority vying for your attention).

In 1977 the top 20 grossing movies were probably watched by over 50% of movie watchers because there were just so few options. What do you think that proportion is now? I'm willing to bet that if you sampled random movie watchers, fewer than 10% of them will have watched any of the top 20 movies this year. There's just so much content out there, I don't think the top grossing movies mean as much anymore.

People's attention is spread very thin across hundreds of thousands of small creators these days. And consider that if you're a small YouTuber with a few thousand core fans, you're roughly as successful as the most underground punk rock bands/indie film directors of the 70s. As I see it, the "alternative" culture is bigger than it's ever been. I could be a die-hard fan of a dozen different works that I consider very mainstream, and yet my next door neighbor will not be familiar with any of them.

> Now, it seems all transgressive elements have been stripped from the mix and it’s all about “please like me, like my product, I’m desperate for your approval”

It's all a matter of perspective, I don't see this trend as necessarily good or bad. There were some positives to the "underground" and "alternative" aesthetic, like being independent-minded and an emphasis on doing things that were new and original. There were some downsides too, like being jaded about everything, being too cool to show enthusiasm, and ultimately sometimes just blindly conforming to the "alternative" view for the sake of opposing the mainstream view.

Similarly I think there are positives to how I see young people behaving today, the flip-side to the negatives you mentioned. Being genuine and showing emotion is cool again, and, perhaps ironically, since there is less cultural pressure to be "alternative" people are arguably being more honest with themselves by openly seeking approval. We're all humans after all and we all seek approval from others, maybe it's good that there is no longer any stigma around that in the influencer age.

>Something I noticed was that being “underground” and “alternative” was considered “cool” when I was a youngster. Now, it seems all transgressive elements have been stripped from the mix and it’s all about “please like me, like my product, I’m desperate for your approval”

I think it's because anti-institutional cynicism has become the new norm with the rise of gen-x and the "ironic" hipsterdom of the early 2000s.

So much of modern culture is about operating in the negative space of the "normal" which takes significantly less effort than actively defining what you value and who you are.

Ah, the joy of being a snob. I mean this in a mildly self deprecating way. But to put it more mildly, it's the joy of being self confident in following one's own tastes.

The word you are looking for is "contemporary" and nobody is spending money to make contemporary things appealing to you anymore.

The collorary is your "counter culture" was bought and sold too. That one stung to find out, but alternative lifestyles have been manufactured for a long, long time

Punk got commodified pretty quickly, so did grunge, so much that the fashion part of grunge already got a second or maybe even third revival. Any subculture or trend that picks up steam gets commodified pretty much instantly, creating anything alternative or vaguely subversive into a cash cow for selling t-shirts pretty quickly.

most of it is the result of wealth inequality. no one can afford to be cancelled. if you want a vision of the future watch chinese youtube iq.com where everything is hollow and empty. every show just becomes a tool of the state, all entertainment is an arm of the MCI. we’re heading there slowly. every single creator today faces a black box known as “the algorithm”, on tiktok, instagram reels and youtube shorts. those are the only platforms you can get any views today. vertical videos. the things we all collectively said Rotate your phone and film in landscape mode, about. your videos didn’t get popular? they must’ve just been bad, now watch this 15 year old girl twerk in spandex. francis ford Coppola never had to compete with girls in spandex, but today’s entertainment does.

Honestly it just sounds like you’re no longer a youngster.