Sell out without selling out

Like a band that is accused of selling out, there is an inevitable sense that a certain sharpness of flavor, of choice, has seeped out as more and more people join up and as a service loosens up and accommodates more more use cases. Another form of diseconomy of scale is behind the flight to Snapchat among the young, as outlined earlier.

In Rebecca Jennings’s Vox long read on the necessity of authorly self-promotion, she interviews William Deresiewicz, whose book The Death of the Artist breaks down the harsh conditions for artists seeking an income in the digital economy. Deresiewicz used to think “selling out”—using the most sacred parts of your life and values to shill for a bran... See more

it’s a directionally correct generalization, and it’s showing itself in where and how people interact online. Many young people prefer the facelessness of Discord, Reddit, a crypto pfp. With the rise of privacy online—both anonymity and pseudonymity—we’ll see more people express themselves through new personas that obscure their “real” identity.

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The ethics against commercial art set strong boundaries for "alternative" culture, which arguably allowed it to flourish as a separate entity. As that culture began to hit the mainstream in the early 1990s, the taboo against selling out spread into broader youth culture. As Chuck Klosterman writes in The Nineties, “The concept of ‘selling out’ — an... See more