[sublinear]

> As influencers and haute couture have firmly established in years prior, the Internet made it trivially easy to data-mine subcultures. By re-enacting their idiosyncrasies in shallow-yet-sufficient detail, they expand and reconfigure them, diluting their special meaning, washing away surrounding ecosystems.

For those who didn't or aren't going to read it, this is the point.

[virtualritz]

> [...] the Internet made it trivially easy to data-mine subcultures [...] diluting their special meaning, [...]

It is a curious coincidence that the birth of the WWW (the part of the internet that enabled this) is temporally close to the collapse of the alternative system and thus the establishing of the "only viable alternative" (capitalism):

> This malaise, the feeling that there is nothing new, is itself nothing new of course. We find ourselves at the notorious ‘end of history’ trumpeted by Francis Fukuyama after the fall of the Berlin Wall. Fukuyama’s thesis that history has climaxed with liberal capitalism may have been widely derided, but it is accepted, even assumed, at the level of the cultural unconscious.[1].

[1] Quoted from https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Capitalist_Realism p. 6.

[JenrHywy]

I think this is broader than "the Internet". Parts of the fringe get absorbed into the mainstream. Capitalism is particularly good that this - look at companies monetizing social movements in various ways for the last 100 years.

I don't necessarily think this is a bad thing. I understand the feeling of having your niche diluted, but that's what happens whenever a niche is "good enough" to be influential. The mainstream isn't static, and would be worse for everyone if it were.