"in the realm of leisure and pleasure, the danger is that people will reject culture altogether in the same way, for similar reasons. the nationwide rise of big-box stores, ubiquitous fast-food restaurants, giant chain bookstores and the like seem as though they efface personal taste, leveraging economies of scale against underground-empire culture - against small-press books, indie record labels, ethnic cuisines, unsigned bands, outsider artists, foreign films, fair-trade coffee, locally grown apples - all the things that for various reasons don't acquire strong enough constituencies to secure a place in the public square.

sometimes people just aren't aware of these things, sometimes bigger corporations stifle them to keep their own operations streamlined, sometimes their appeal is limited by sheer eccentricity. at any rate, rigged or not, when culture itself becomes a kind of democratic popularity contest, individuals eventually suffer from the same lack of incentives that keeps them politically illiterate. when the wal-marts and barnes and nobleses take over, people have no reason to develop an aesthetic literacy, to follow shifts in avant-garde culture, to understand art and have a stake in its being meaningful, challenging, moral, inspiring, and so on. we lose the will to be curious.

...

in a recent slate essay, economist tyler cowen argues that our attachment to independent bookshops is, in part, affectation -- a self-conscious desire to belong a particular community (or to seem to)'. independent bookstores cater to those who elevate the style of their shopping over the substance of it; the stores are far more inconvenient than chains or online options, with less stock and frequently arcane shelving methods. the real business of the clerks at these stores is not necessarily to help anyone but to police the fence around the ersatz community cowen mentions -- to essentially help the store shop for appropriate customers who will preserve the elite status of that community, presuming the hard-currency value of that status to community members remains sufficient to keep the store open.

in other words, the underground empire is designed to produce cliquish hipsters who finance the entire quasi-countercultural enterprise not from a sense of patronage or taste, but from insecurity over being just like everyone else."
-the underground empire-