It kinds of feels to me like everything is doomed to be co-opted. Punk is just a type of fashion and music now, to be bought and consumed and then thrown into the landfill like everything else. You can buy the Communist Manifesto on Amazon. Pride month is a bonanza for corporations trying to cash in on LGBT consumers, a growing demographic ripe for the plundering. It all makes me pretty unhappy.
On a personal level, I feel like I drank the kool-aid as an artist for this kind of thing from the very start. I wanted my art to sell, to be wanted by others, to be popular and shared thousands of times on social media. Basically, everything I wanted was around money, and self-improvement was just a road towards making my skill profitable.
To be clear, there's nothing wrong with wanting to be paid for your hard work and effort as an artist online. But in the modern day this usually means receiving a pittance after social media corporations such as Spotify, Facebook and Twitter (nobody is calling that shit x) have had their cut, and your data has been scraped to build their energy-hungry LLMs. I don't like that bargain at all. Nowadays, I mostly share my art for my friends and it feels freeing to know my art doesn't have to be profitable to be good. But that's an attitude that takes walking away from money and fame and basically everything I am incentivised to want as a human being. It's a decision reserved for the privileged who can afford to turn down money. Awesome!
Having become thus disillusioned with the capitalist millstone, I find myself more and more attracted to things that reject commodification as forcefully as they can, usually through being unpalatable. By that, I mean things that feature amateur skill levels, blatant LGBT content not prettified for mass consumption, that sort of thing. Films that barely ran the festival circuit. Games given out for free on itch.io that are ten minutes long and totally self-indulgent. Anything made without any desire to conform, and against the modern creed that everything must be designed to be maximally profitable.
'Vegas in Space' springs to mind, as do Kenneth Anger's short films. Basically the entirety of Archive of Our Own, too. itch.io has thousands of games no publisher would touch - a personal favourite game is 'Water Womb World'. 2003's strange little movie 'Nails' also comes to mind. Dramatically unmarketable, the weirdness and uniqueness of these games draws me to them. It makes me want to become as unpalatable as possible.
Again, making things like this is a privilege not everyone has. I just wish we lived in a world where the greatest creative dream is to create whatever YOU want, not what a buyer wants. A world where nobody feels compelled to publish ChatGPT-written slop onto Amazon, because nobody is a slave to capitalism. But right now we do live in that shitty world, so I feel immense solidatory with the people dedicated to creating unmarketable things, purely for the love of bringing life and colour into the world.