Comment by majormajor

> 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. )