I would also add things that are unprofitable and/or participating in them requires a high degree of personal investment which can't be substituted with money.
Which describes a lot of things if you think about it.
You'd think that e.g. dumpster-diving for food would be "unprofitable" and require "high degree of personal investment which can't be substituted with money", but freeganism already turned into aspirational hobby for many, and has its own little ecosystem of influencers selling books. It fits in nicely among its even more commercial cousins, like "minimalism", "healthy eating", "organic food", "zero waste", "frugal lifestyle", etc.; together, they form a larger "anti-consumerist"/"degrowth" market segment, which is happily growing as more people buy merch.
The irony. But as the old adage goes, the market can merchandise everything; it'll happily sell you a hi-vis vest, baclava, baseball bat and a chain you can use to cuff yourself to an utility pole as you camp in front of the supermarket to protest capitalism ruining the world.
I think GP meant something that takes a lot of your personal time to do, while staying unprofitable no matter the skill level. For example, ROM hacks and emulators: they're difficult and time-consuming to create, and they can't be monetized for legal reasons.
I'd say excessive commercialization so that the whole activity is centered around buying and selling, or most members are gearheads who rarely go out and do stuff, etc, is definitely unfortunately common. But I see it mostly as an individual failing, enabled and made worse by media environment. Tune out.
Playing an instrument (or being part of a band), being part of a writing club. Anything where the meat of the activity either requires genuine ability and/or effort, or enjoying skillful humans performing that activity for you.
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.
Musicians are notorious for fetishising gear ownership. Old synthesizers routinely sell for five or sometimes six figures. Some of the buyers are talent-free collectors, others are industry successes who have the cash to spare and both collect and use them.
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.
> Old synthesizers routinely sell for five or sometimes six figures
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?
I think it's important to distinguish between an act and a culture. I wholeheartedly agree that individuals can act in ways that aren't commodified.
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.
> so you buy their merch and go to their shows > sold themselves off as a commodity
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.
Dancing is a good example, though not perfect. It's hard to convince a club to have a salsa/bachata/tango/swing centered evening, because the interested crowd actually comes to dance and socialize. It is much more profitable and easy to turn down the lights and up the music and get customers that buy alcohol.
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.
I think it's important to distinguish Acts which individuals perform from the culture around those Acts.
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.
Not sure how mainstream furries are. Sure, they have conventions and whatnot but do you expect to see one on a box of cereal anytime soon? Probably not.
Do you mean Chip the Wolf is actually a human who wears a wolf costume? Because he looks like a cartoon character to me, so he doesn't qualify as a "furry" in my mind.
I think the charitable interpretation is that parent-poster meant it like how cereal boxes have featured famous athletes, as opposed to brand mascots.
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.
Funny that no one yet mentioned the elephant in the room given that this is HN: Hacker and FOSS culture. Of course there are attempts to commercialize it, but people are naturally resistant.
Hard disagree - even before the domination of Big Tech, the reason open source became the way it is - the domination of GNU/Linux - was because of the commercial interests of server vendors pushing Linux (a server OS) as a product.
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.
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.
I sort of disagree, as we've seen a significant increase in small scope tools like the FlipperZero, Arduinos, and Raspberry Pis. Each one has a slew of shields/extensions/whatever that subculture calls their plug and play option.
That isn't to say the groups are mindless sheep or naturally resistant; just pointing out that the space does have some commercialization happening.
The DIY-spirited software scenes were so thoroughly commercialized that appealing to their aesthetics is now in the past.
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.
> 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.
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.
I don't see why it would be mutually exclusive. It can be the case that a subculture was commoditized AND people still enjoy doing the stuff the subculture formed around.
From Thinkgeek to the BSL to megacorps from the military-industrial complex cosplaying rms (Microsoft shipping VSCode) while ignoring software freedoms, this seems to me to be plainly false.
Anything unsavory to associate a major brand with is generally actively ignored in mass media. Could be something weird or heinous or merely frowned upon like partying culture these days.
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.
But the participants need to have money on the side. People who are trapped in 9-to-5 jobs are too busy making ends meet to engage in activities which don't tie directly into their survival.
Which describes a lot of things if you think about it.