Sometimes the goal is to scale at exactly the size of the group doing it, and stay there. If everything is mass market then there's no individualism or culture.
If everything is mass market then there's no individualism
or culture.
I ask in the context of the larger debate of who deems a commercial establishment - a place of commerce - culturally relevant and which ones culturally distracting.
Does the neighborhood take a poll on a NextDoor bulletin board as to whether let a Wine bar set up shop, down the street but not a Gastropub, because you know it attracts a culturally misfitting crowd? So the majority wins? As simple as that?
Then what's stopping a billionaire buying up some four blocks and instilling his own brand of culture, you know cigar shops, vintage firearms shops and a boutique golf shop, through a bunch of proxies and trusts?
These are very valid questions that need answering if we want to meaningfully advance the debate of who gets to manufacture "individualism" and what is vended as "culture".
The constitution of a thing is partially dependent on the infrastructure behind it.
For instance, I have a local grocer who owns the grocery shop. I have asked the grocer to stock things I'd like to buy which aren't there. The grocer has stocked them. I buy them so predictably that the grocer sets a quantity aside for me individually.
These patently obvious social courtesies at a corporate level become policy decisions with a marketing campaign. If some big chain did it, they'd give it some stupid name like "YouChoose" and then have a jingle and some commercial to go along with it. The idea of engaging with the customer in this way would be commoditized an shoved down our throats.
If some entrepreneur thought of it, they'd turn it into some consumerist share-style phone app backed by $10 million in VC capital.
The first one is totally different from the last two. It's not the same thing. Quantifying a value is not the same as Qualifying an experience.
Starbucks has done this recently - trying to fight independent coffee shops, not with hiring competent people and giving them liberty to make purchasing decisions and take control of the means of producing coffee, no. They have introduced a new machine called the "clover" that supposedly makes better coffee. They are going up against local roasters and people trying to take food service seriously with yet another shitty little product from corporate america. big fucking whoopdie doo - that's all they do.
so when you have a distant billionaire try to come up with a new variation of westfield and then structure it like a process based corporation, it simply won't work.
people are sick of being characterized as consumers, the culture of consumption, sick of being advertised to where everything becomes a product with a sanitized, transactional exchange of goods and money, to go about some soulless mechanized existence. Capitalism and community are enemies.
The classic structure of neo-liberal consumer capitalism is completely incompatible with this movement - it's a fundamentally different constitution of culture, control, and capital.
I remember all the cool coffee shops used to have a Clover machine 5 or 6 years ago. I also remember it making pretty great coffee. Then they kind of disappeared and everybody went back to espresso based coffee drinks.
I actually kind of miss the Clover and the french press style coffee it made, and would be happy to frequent any coffee shop that reintroduced it.
I am clean cut, drug free, and have a regular job.
Desiring a substantive community is becoming a mainstream thing - just like community-based open source free software is now in use, well, everywhere.
This is just a total misunderstanding of what culture is.