The problem of a lot of subcultures is that they define themselves in large part by flashy externalities, and commodification is part of their DNA.
For example: You like an underground band's music, as you feel the message they broadcast through their music resonates with you, and you'd like to display your participation, so you buy their merch and go to their shows.
No matter how authentic they may seem, they've already sold themselves off as a commodity, and you've participated in the low effort transaction of buying a piece of identity, like you'd buy a share of a company's stock.
Now, if later the band gets popular, that share of identity gets diluted, and you get to be one of those annoying people who insist you like the band before they were cool.
Post your beat made on a $100 commodity synth, and everyone will be "Good effort.." no matter how good it is.
Writing on social media is a lifestyle activity. You'll see endless reels showing "My cute working space", which inevitably has trailing plants and a lovely perfectly arranged bookshelf, probably with fairy lights, and never looks like anyone's random messy office.
And so on.
These are both promotional activities that signify belonging to cultures that allow you to buy a lifestyle identity by spending money on the appropriate gang signs and uploading them to your chosen forums and accounts.
Original creativity and artistry are incidental to this. If someone doesn't show the gang signs and doesn't respect the standard tropes and genre signifiers, many consumers don't know what to do with them.
Well, if it's a CS-80, sign me up! Seriously though, the analog synthesizer renaissance has been very good to synth musicians, from Prophet and Oberheim reissues (and modern versions) to Behringer's clones to modular to inexpensive mini-synths, along with new keyboards reviving things like ribbon controllers and polyphonic aftertouch.
> Post your beat made on a $100 commodity synth, and everyone will be "Good effort.." no matter how good it is.
Lots of great (and sometimes very popular) music is made on free or inexpensive software synths, plugins and DAWs. Does anyone really care as long as the music is good?
If people like it, there's almost always someone packaging it and selling it. Now, I don't think that means you can't enjoy playing or listening to music. If someone stops listening or playing a genre of music because someone is commodifying it, that just means a big part of what they enjoyed was the idea of being underground, transgressive, or counter cultural for its own sake.
Also, some things can be more easily commodified without losing authenticity. Gutter punk music doesn't have the same impact when sung by a sold-out multi-millionaire. Inversely, it doesn't much matter how much money Yo-Yo ma has in the bank and that he's a guest at davos.
A bit unfair because bands are often not making any money on their merch or their shows. My experience is that they are pleased if they cover their incidental costs. They seem to get zero financial payoff for their time invested. They may get good non-financial benefits.
Not to say that dancing is not commodifiable. People make a living offering classes, outfits, shoes, and travels centered on specific dance genres. But as a participant, you can get pretty far for a lot less money than the price of the proverbial night on the town.
Commodification of a subculture is spoken about as if it is a binary a purity test but that isn't reflective of reality. You can pay $500 to watch some aged punk rockers perform in an arena, but that doesn't mean that there isn't an illegal Warehouse show going on at the same time in the same city.
For example, Frosted Flakes has "Tony the Tiger", but he is widely understood to be a fictional tiger, rather than an endorsement by a real human who got famous for wearing a tiger-suit.
It's the same reason Linux has had a limited success in other spaces (embedded, mobile, desktop) - as opposed to something like Windows, it's poorly engineered for the needs of these domains (lack of realtime, good IPC, binary compatibility, native audio, graphics capabilities etc.). If you think of early 2000s mobile hardware, which used to run a variety of mobile OSes, yet Linux was incapable of properly supporting this domain. All attempts to rally around Linux as a consumer OS in these domains failed, because it just wasn't really built for that. Yet Linux was powerful enough to suck the air out of the room and prevent the emergence of competitors.
(I don't really consider Android Linux.)
Why not? Obviously it's heavily modified, but it's not a hard fork: unless something's changed since I last checked, they re-apply their patches on top of upstream LTS releases -- so they very much depend on ongoing kernel development.
Cloud Services like AWS probably would not exist without the foundation that FOSS provided
That isn't to say the groups are mindless sheep or naturally resistant; just pointing out that the space does have some commercialization happening.
FFS, the "Hacker" in "Hacker News" is based on a venture capitalist co-opting a rebellious term to convince a bunch of impressionable youths that they can have this alluring label and that the cool kids software club is actually working for his vc firm.
All the subculture has been thoroughly power-washed out of any commercial useful corner of their online communities. You can encounter more pressure to be a milquetoast office-job persona in the open source space than your actual office job.
We're in so deep you can't even see how deep we're in.
Ok, I didn't see the forest for the trees there, which is quite funny. But I still get together with friends to build stuff for the sake of it, without any intention of commercializing the things we build, and there is still a very large corpus of FOSS software being maintained by people simply because they think it is cool, or because they are idealists who want free software to be free.
Corporate brands sell everything from footwear and clothing to water filters and backpacks targeted directly at that "Wildness Survival" subculture. In fact, "Wildness Survival" is actually one of the most profitable subcultures at the moment.