I suspect the difference is that in the past the only way to go commercial was to work with a big corporation. Going to market with something was so hugely expensive, and required extensive marketing and distribution infrastructure, which was all internal to these big concerns. The problem was these companies expected a lot of invasive creative control and long term contracts to give access to those capabilities, which to be fair were hugely expensive to build and operate.

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.

[0] https://youtu.be/xFFs9UgOAlE?t=935

There was a vibrant community of independent publishers, volunteer organizations and other entities that were considered authentic. Working with them was not "selling out".

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.

>There was a vibrant community of independent publishers,....

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.

You were not supposed to try to break through, because that meant becoming part of the establishment. Doing cool things was what mattered. Success was tolerated when it arose organically, but it was not a positive thing in itself. People who were deliberately trying to be successful were branded mediocre and boring, because only mediocre and boring people wanted to be part of the establishment.

Realistically, that was only ever an extreme view held by a small minority even in the alternative lifestyle and arts communities.

I remember it more as the dominant left-wing ideology among university students, creative people and various subcultures. Extremists obviously had more extreme views, but some mild anarchism was mainstream.

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.

Whether or not the odds are actually all that better today, you have a whole culture of TikTok/YouTube/Instagram/etc. would-be influencers who at least think they have a real shot and, of course, that ends up pervading a lot of the medium.

It was hip hop, declaring "selling out" (specifically) to be propaganda. An entire decade and genre of music focused on this idea and the negative impacts of not selling one's work. "Getting paid" became the repeated mantra of many an artists' music. And that changed our culture.

That's actually a good point, I'm not sure how much broad influence that had but it's definitely an element.

>I suspect the difference is that in the past the only way to go commercial was to work with a big corporation.

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.

You could be right, insofar as in the 1990s, "selling out" was a discrete event and there was no denying that one had given creative control up. In the 2020s, the PR departments are so good at making their efforts look like things that happened organically that the difference between genuine success and packaging has blurred.

> It did in the sense that kids these days don’t worry about selling out. It’s a generational change.

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?

>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...

Yeah.. hem tiktok youtube facebook hem instagram snapchat twitch.. This whole thing being discussed in the thread is not some abstract destiny, it's just that the social media lobby, ie the mass advertisement and marketing lobby is crushing everything on it's path since 20 years because they are now tech giants and have data crunching tech. It's not "the spirit of the time" or some other naturalization or whatever, there are active forces behind this (and i absolutely don't mean this in the "evil hidden goverment" way, these forces are fuzzy are multiple, but still, it's a school of thought that recognizes itself).

It's complicated but it feels like there is a huge aspect of personal branding/influencer/side hustle/etc. culture that's about making money any way you can and that to disdain it is to be "privileged."

> social media stars and "influencers"

i.e., people who are based entirely on the "selling out" part without having created something to sell out in the first place.

That’s not what the article is talking about. When I was growing up (mid 90’s) and earlier, ANY commercial success was selling out. Playing your guitar at the local cafe? Awesome. Signing your first album deal? You’re selling out, man.

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.

Your cafe/album part makes it sound like a clear binary, but it was an enormous gradient spanning the entirety of pop culture and just about everybody seemed to rely on it for orientation. From the most pretentius "we would never" that was all top obviously more about getting an offer than about the claimed selling out, all the way to stadium rockers struggling to retain whatever the term "authenticity" meant to them or their audience.

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.

I grew up around then, and definitely noticed the only people who weren't selling out where those who didn't have the opportunity to.

That's probably true but people were reminded that they were losing agency on their creation to businessmen. The creation was losing a bit of its soul. Nowadays most 'creations' are designed to make money from the very beginning.

Very few people still create something for the sake of creating something great. If you are aware of some of them please share !

Not "art" per se, but SpaceX has a little cottage industry of followers who make terrific content, and successfully monetize it, while staying true to the ideals of producing the content for enthusiasts' sake. Marcus House, Tim Dodd, etc. Of course they cover other content too, and had established products before pivoting heavily towards SpaceX, but they certainly keep the sense of community.

The corporations won the culture war. I never realized it but looking at the cultural wasteland that we have now, they won.

I don't know about that; the corporations certainly think they won, but I'm more inclined to believe they already killed the golden goose. There's no money in top-40 payola; the time to the grocery store soundtrack has never been shorter. The average age of cable TV viewers gets a year older every year, and there's much less patience for sitting around watching ads than in the 90s or 00s. Big corps are trying to win loyalty by loudly believing all the right things, only to find that they're alienating more of their customers than they thought. It's cool to be a foodie and do your own cooking, so fewer people are buying ever-shrinking prepared meals. Everyone's hugely cynical and expects a sales pitch around every corner. Culture is an incoherent wasteland largely because the big corps lost control.

>I don't know about that; the corporations certainly think they won, but I'm more inclined to believe they already killed the golden goose. There's no money in top-40 payola; the time to the grocery store soundtrack has never been shorter

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...

Sure, but they're only doing that because they're desperate and have no other ideas. They'd make way more money if they had a monolithic gaggle of 18-35 fans, and they don't.

"Hustling" is viewed as an on-the-whole good, even if various archetypes associated with it (the Logan Pauls of the world) aren't viewed positively.

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.

To be fair, nobody dislikes Logan Paul due to his “hustle”, it’s that he’s arrogant and a d-bag.

Hustling is almost universally seen positively be anyone under 35.

Hustle is probably an overloaded word in this context. I don't think you'll find a lot of people who say "hustle" in the abstract is bad. What you will probably find--especially among older better-off people--is a certain distaste for trying to aggressively turn everything into a side-hustle and monetization opportunity.

Consider me from a different universe.

The only selling out buy-in I’ve seen is on HN with all the talk about being at “faang” or wanting to get into “faang”, all the while being very aware of how problematic big tech is.

They however care a lot about "shilling" as in trying to promote yourself on discussion forums.

Its not that they dont worry. They completely embrace selling out. Its almost as if everything they do is for the purpose of selling out.

[citation needed]