Comment by screye
2 years ago
> to co-opt any emerging dissent and counter-culture almost immediately
It has to do with the nature of the dissenters themselves. Nowadays they are politics / social media wannabees. When corporates coopot your movement, they make you rich and famous. Nothing makes a 'ladder climber' more happy.
The nature of dissent in the 50s was more about the problems than the status assigned to the people. You couldn't easily lure them away with sneaky gifts.
Worst of all, the 50s-esque true believers do exist. But they get cannibalized and spit out by the exact cabal of milque-toast corporate activism. The ones that don't are so radical that they only serve as red-flags on the danger of true belief, because all the reasonable ones got squash under corporate America's feet.
The people who genuinely care about problems don't fit the "dissenter" stereotype, by and large. They speak with authority about the limited domain they're familiar with, and don't try to have an opinion about everything in pursuit of shallow popularity. Overall, their attitude might register as "fringe" and "unusual" to most but it's not going to be seen as unambiguously "dissenting" or oppositional.