Basically a bunch of upper-middle-class people adopted the concept of "hustle" from its poor urban context, where it acknowledged that the drive to do anything to scrape by was hard to reconcile with strict ethical standards. You don't question someone's ethics when they're trying to make sure their siblings have something to eat for dinner that night.
Upper-middle-class people recognized that feeling -- hey, that's the desperation I feel when I realize that if I don't take this adtech job, I might not be able to maintain the same lifestyle as my friends that I met in the dorm at my highly selective university. If I don't found a startup and get monstrously rich, other people will never think of me the way I think of myself, and that would suck.
How convenient that there's a word for when your desperate circumstances excuse you from the ethical standards that we apply to normal people! No matter how privileged you are, when you do ethically questionable things, just call them "hustle" and everyone will know that it isn't because of entitled self-indulgence, but because of your plucky determination to survive everything the world throws at you.
When people can justify complex, bad behavior with simple, bad beliefs, bad behavior spreads like a fire. In the article, Bill Watterson calls out justifying as the first step for regulating bad beliefs:
> The world of a comic strip is much more fragile than most people realize. Once you’ve given up its integrity, that’s it. I want to make sure that never happens. Instead of asking what’s wrong with rampant commercialism, we ought to be asking, “What justifies it?”
How much of the negative connotations sometimes associated with that have been akin to propaganda to keep the rest of the people in line.
Going "major" is widely seen as positive.
More generally artists will openly talk about trying to get financing, be more transparent about advertisement spots being open, or request sponsorship. Patreons and direct support also comes here.
The "if you're not paying for it you're the product" quip at least cemented the idea that how money is made is something that can be discussed in the open, instead of just shunning "sell outs"
So I think user deng has a point about “selling out” still being a thing.
That being said, I think there is a big difference between selling out and wanting to remain in control of your creation. I have no idea whether George Lucas likes what happens with Star Wars or not, and I hope I’m not going to start a debate over it either, but by selling it he lost the creative control in a way the Bill Watterson didn’t.
My guess is that being “seen” as a “sell out” isn’t actually something that comes into play when people consider what to do with their creations very often. Because honestly, why would you ever care? So maybe there is less of it today, but to state that our public discourse has changed on the subject? I’m not convinced it has.
The whole concept of selling out is both particular to a person or in group and also cultural. A related concept is ‘poser’ or ‘poseur’. I think it’s more about fans thinking they’re losing their importance vis a vis the performer or artist. The artist is no longer “exclusive” to them, so to speak as well as no longer an idealized representation of them, the fans.
Was it his choice? I swear one of the introductions in The Complete Peanuts talks about how Charles Schulz spent much of his life trying to buy back the copyright to his strip.
(Which let them do things like "buy Heavy Metal and run it at a loss for a while" and "start a publishing company that became infamous for handing out huge advances to their comics buddies that let them spend a couple years on passion projects instead of turning the Superhero Crank for Marvel/DC", both of which I feel are perfectly delightful ways to deal with making the kind of money they made off the Turtles. The history of Tundra Press is a hell of a ride, if you can find it.)
https://lareviewofbooks.org/article/selling-newspaper-comic-...
Unlike what happened with Dr. Seuss. Of course, no one can totally control what happens with his or her creations after he or she passes away. Look at how the vultures descended the moment Christopher Tolkien passed away.
Hmm, is this really about “selling out” though? Or is it about trust, and the deception inherent in taking money to say something that people could reasonably believe are your own words?
Maybe your initial userbase was a bunch of hard core privacy people and post funding you start selling user data, or performing other actions which makes your original users or the people that supported you go, "wait, that's not the company I championed to success"
It's not exactly cut and dried when put like that, but there are a few companies that come to mind that effectively "sold out".
I dont think anyone really ever thought selling your company, particularly a speculative tech start up type company, is the same type of bad.
Food gets a few more preservatives and slightly worse ingredients until over time it tastes like cardboard. Video games become ever more blatant cash grabs. Clothing becomes more fragile, with cheaper materials and worse craftsmanship.
Trying to appeal to the widest possible audience means removing that which makes art interesting, but maximizing short term profit means taking the same shortcuts as everyone else in the industry.
And no one begrudges the punk band for selling t-shirts, albums. It's when they sell soft drinks....
If that's right, you could actually do a pretty funny American Express commercial with them.
It could show a montage of them dealing with shoddy consumer goods failing shortly after their warranties expire, which keeps pissing them off and keeps them in a constant state of rage which is reflected in their songwriting.
Then someone points out to them that they paid for all those things with their American Express card, and American Express provides extended warranties automatically.
They lose their anger over poor consumer products, and with that their songwriting too loses its anger.
Cut to them releasing a new album, and it is all slow acoustic ballads about true love and togetherness.
this... this is sarcasm, or irony, right?
The 'R' literally stands for rage.
Against the machine. to wit, the capitalist machine.
So, to put the finishing sauce on your story, 'Rage against the machine' with the rage taken out, would be just the Machine, exemplified by Amex.
I just wasn't sure if you knew quite how appropriate that scenario fits the schema.
And in between Sips of coke He told me that He thought We were sellin' out Layin' down, Suckin' up To the man Well now I've got some A-dvice for you, little buddy Before you point the finger You should know that I'm the man And if I'm the man Then you're the man, and He's the man as well so you can Point that fuckin' finger up your ass.
The effect of merchandizing at this point is pretty irrelevant.
Chuck Klosterman's recent book "The Nineties" talks about this a lot! And honestly it's spot on. I had forgotten about this, and not realized how much it disappeared as a cultural concept.
https://www.amazon.com/Nineties-Book-Chuck-Klosterman/dp/073...
We all used the phrase "selling out" frequently (on the east coast of the US), but I remember one high school friend who invoked it constantly. Calling people "sell outs" (i.e. lacking in authenticity) was a common insult.
Grunge bands and in particular Kurt Cobain had almost a pathological obsession with "selling out", to the point where it had some part in his death. Even popularity was seen as a sign of selling out -- it was better to be true to your indie roots.
There are some interesting quotes in the book from Cobain and contemporaries, and the author talks about influential movies at the time that dealt with the concept.
I was never a Calvin and Hobbes fan, but it's definitely interesting and notable that the creator avoided "selling out".
While I think we were too obsessed with it back then, I think a concept that probably needs more respect today. You could even talk coherently about Google "selling out", although that concept may now be foreign to many people. There was a notion of authenticity and that you cared about the mission, i.e. organizing the world's information. But that is long gone :-(
In retrospect the obsession with "selling out" in the 90's was a reaction to capitalist values affecting more and more parts of life. Though, being a teenager, I didn't realize that, and I just said what my friends said!
It was a way to keep your peers in check. But it's sad that people don't even notice it anymore. They would wonder why you did NOT "sell out".
"For the words of the PROFITS were written on the studio walls. Echoes with the sound of salesmen, of SALESMEN (sung with the highest levels of disdain)"
But it's almost guaranteed to come back in some form. A good word I learned from Graeber and Wengrow's "Dawn of Humanity" is "schismogenesis": the tendency of humans to define themselves by difference from their neighbors. It explains a lot about the left/right divide, why the most vicious wars are fought between neighbors like Iran/Iraq, etc.
So eventually there will be some youth culture that defines itself against "hustle" culture, etc.
BTW Klosterman has also written about Rush :)
[1]: https://conversationswithtyler.com/episodes/chuck-klosterman...
In the good old days, in many ways. Kudos to Bill Watterson.
making money as an athlete used to disqualify you from the olympics
If you were paid to be an athlete then you had a competitive advantage, or so was the thinking.
There's a good description of it here[1] but the TL;DR is:
In the South of England rugby was played by independently rich amateurs and in the North of England it was played by the working class men who needed to support themselves and their families and wanted it to become professionalised.
The groups couldn't agree and so split. With the rules of Rugby League supposedly changed to make it more appealing to paying crowd.
1. https://www.newstatesman.com/culture/sport/2019/10/split-bet...
Perhaps there should be separate channels in such a case: the wood-worker-reviewing-stuff channel and the making-things-from-wood channel.
The USPS use of "Fly like an Eagle", and overplayed CSI: X shredded The Who songs.
Although, "Love and Marriage" used in "Married with Children" (90's) doesn't have the same tiredness, probably because that Sinatra really wasn't in my listening list.
Yesterday I heard it got used on a popular Netflix show. Ah.
It could be worse, I thought they were forcing interest in some new album from her.
Can't un-hear.
Calvin and Hobbes was a massive part of my youth. It fed that creative and mischievous part of me that "regular" life just wasn't satisfying. I was smitten and still am.
Fast forward to my daughter's birth... At around 4 years old, I bought her the giant anthology of strips which includes everything Calvin and Hobbes ever printed. Like me, it shaped her in undefinable ways. It drove her drawing and reading off the charts. She very much grew as a person because of Bill's work and my influence in reading to her often. She took over very quickly! She latched on and studied those books with a fervor that I've not seen repeated in her yet.
Do you think the result would have been the same if there were T-shirts, TV shows, video games, and the like plastered all over? You can only shield a child from the world so much. They absorb everything.
Anyway, I think Bill absolutely made a most excellent decision. Not only for himself, but for us.
Especially for us. It has remained special all these years later as it hasn’t been supersaturated or made overrated by virtue of being commoditized.
I’m guessing whoever inherits his estate sells the license and rights for untold millions. You can only hope a billionaire super fan buys it and buries it.
At some point in the future it will all be public domain anyways. So enjoy it while you can.
I wouldn't be surprised if he sets up a trust to control the rights to prevent that from happening.
The philosophy of the strip is fundamentally incompatible with commercialization.
You can buy an Opus doll, but he's not flogging soft drinks.
It's to commercialise ideals, memories and anything that makes people human. It reduces the idea's value and by extension our own humanity.
Now imagine that the whole star wars franchising made more money by selling merchandise than everything else combined.
That's why new movies and shows are being produced ever more often: to sell toys and merch.
And that's also why the quality and the creativity went down compared to the original movies.
There's a price to pay when you start thinking your business is not the art itself anymore, but selling or licensing it.
I think it's more honest. Art's and creative jobs have had the aura of being form of uncompromising self-expression, vehicle of social and political change and beauty. Pretending adds layer of deceit.
That can't coexist with the goal of maximizing mass market popularity and income. I think this is the logical conclusion when something turns into pure commerce. Only thing valuable is visibility, recognizably, hype.
What makes Bill Watterson look like mystical figure is that "having enough" and "shutting up after you have said what you wanted" is alien concept in business.
Walking away from opportunity to earn 1000X with little effort is not that common.
Or can you? I haven't actually given the idea serious thought.
Yeah, it totally did. Ever since the 90s. The majority of the mainstream youth don't even understand the concept.
Nowadays all of that infrastructure exists as generic services on the internet you can throw together in a few days, with costs that scale with your needs. I recently watched a Q&A Mark Zuckerberg gave to the Harvard CS50 class in 2005 [0]. He explained that what made Facebook possible to start with was cheap hosted servers running open source software, and the ways that had changed over the previous decade. Nowadays with AWS and Google Cloud its even easier and cheaper. The same applies to physical goods now with eBay, Amazon Marketplace, Etsy, Shopify, running your own one-person media empire on Youtube, etc.
The negative connotations with "selling out" were the fact that you had to sell out creative control. You don't have to do that anymore. Dave Chappelle is rightly still sore about how he was cheated over the Chappelle Show. Nowadays you can build an audience independently, and that fact means that even if you do make a deal with big business, they know you're not as dependent on them anymore, so creatives have a much stronger hand than they used to.
So I really don't think this is down to the generation themselves, the world they live in is just different.
The way I remember, it was more about resisting the establishment than being against commercialization. The ideal was keeping organizations small enough that everyone would be doing "real" work. Dedicated managers and administrators were inherently suspicious. Any organization large enough to employ middle managers (managers and administrators working primarily with other managers and administrators) was part of the establishment. If you worked with them, you were selling yourself out.
Of course, that's always existed. By 'commercial' I meant mass market. It's always been possible to break through, in IT Apple and Microsoft both started out with two techies hacking stuff together. Richard Branson started out trying to grow Christmas trees. Those are all a very few extreme outliers compared to the tens of thousands that would only ever have a chance of making it big by reaching the mass market.
Back then, people still believed in a better future, and the struggle for money was not as central as it is today. There was this belief that if everyone contributed something valuable and focused on things that were inherently important, there would be enough for everyone in the future.
People today are more militant and more focused on money, because they have lost hope.
I'm not so sure. Even if you "hustled" with a small business, or sold stuff yourself for the money, you were considered a sell-out. Musicians weren't supposed to peddle t-shirts, for example.
I mean, I can understand that establishing a "brand" is more important nowadays, but it must still be important to carefully curate it and not mindlessly promoting anything that earns you money. When Tony Hawk promoted crypto.com, I immediately regretted any kind of respect I ever had for that man. Does the younger generation really not care at all?
The younger generation follows and idolizes social media stars and "influencers" that sell out 24/7, in the cheapest, corniest (late night tv informercial style) ways possible...
i.e., people who are based entirely on the "selling out" part without having created something to sell out in the first place.
It was a weird remembrance of the punk movement, and maybe counterculture before it, where basically any capitalist interaction was working with The Man and considered selling out.
The 90ies started with R.E.M. freshly signed on Warner instead of I.R.S. and ended with an absurd DAG of labels and sublabels and sub-sub-sub-labels (again, with the whole range from true grassroots independence to being part of one of the global media giants ten indirections deep), shortly before that entire monstrosity was put down by the onslaught of Napster, iTMS and so on.
Very few people still create something for the sake of creating something great. If you are aware of some of them please share !
They don't care. They do "hollistic deals", and sell Billie Eilish merchandize and Taylor Swift dog collars and barf bags. Music is just a byproduct of the whole thing...
Being able to monetize a personal brand is viewed as more than just benign, it's viewed as a societal endorsement of the individual and their ideas/perspectives/strategies.
Hustling is almost universally seen positively be anyone under 35.
IIRC, being a "social media influencer" is literally selling out, and it seems like it's what a lot of kids aspire to these days.
Once the cultural taboo was banished, it disappeared quickly. The idea that outside money pollutes art is not a concept most people under 20 would find intuitive or familiar, and relatively few under 30 either.
Now, whether this is good or bad, I can't say. It certainly feels like there is less art produced today that will stand the test of time. But there are a lot of reasons that might be true other than just this one, and in any case as a man in my 40s, I'm generally out of touch with culture, and not a suitable judge. Nor are teenagers the authorities in this matter, though for other reasons. It's something historians of the future will have to sort out.
Nobody says "congratulations on being a sellout" unless they are being sarcastic.
Sigh, so kawaii.
Personally my feelings on the subject are conflicted. I think that some degree of promotion is important so that others can discover great art and contributions, and so that artists and creators can make a comfortable living off of their work, but that “selling out” becomes bad when the pursuit of commerce overtakes and reduces the art.
[0] https://www.nytimes.com/2022/07/14/movies/janeane-garofalo.h...
It did? I completely missed that, but it's probably because I'm old...