On subcultures: This made me think of https://meaningness.com/, specifically the posts/sections on countercultre, subcultures, and atomization. It seems plausible that as a society we’ve already tried to go that route to counteract the effects of abundant productivity of goods and media, and exhausted it. Cheap communication and low production costs mean it’s basically impossible to prevent outsiders from overwhelming a small subculture, so anything more than a few people can care deeply about gets diluted by the mainstream and seems, to the original members, meaningless as a result.
Conversely, members of a subculture who really care about it may want to spread it so others can enjoy it, not realizing this oftenruins the separate-status-ladders benefit
On subcultures: This made me think of https://meaningness.com/, specifically the posts/sections on countercultre, subcultures, and atomization. It seems plausible that as a society we’ve already tried to go that route to counteract the effects of abundant productivity of goods and media, and exhausted it. Cheap communication and low production costs mean it’s basically impossible to prevent outsiders from overwhelming a small subculture, so anything more than a few people can care deeply about gets diluted by the mainstream and seems, to the original members, meaningless as a result.
Conversely, members of a subculture who really care about it may want to spread it so others can enjoy it, not realizing this oftenruins the separate-status-ladders benefit