I saw a very good post- I THINK it was by @tanadrin or @multiheaded1793- that basically posited this:
At the start of any movement, all you have are your core of True Believers. These are the people your movement was built for. They're Your Kind Of Weirdoes. You're unlikely to have major ideological disagreements with them; the movement or culture or scene is built around what they need.
Next, you get a group of people who are close to your True Believers, but don't share all the same values or priorities. They might believe some things that are more mainstream than your True Believers, they might have slightly different goals or ideas, but overall, they gel with your scene.
If your movement speaks to enough people, you'll start to get what (if I remember correctly) the post called 'seekers' and 'tourists'.
Seekers are people who are looking for something, anything, to believe in- a lot of seekers will buy hard into a movement or ideology or subculture for, like, a month, and then jump to another movement just as hard next month. These are your teen witches and teen anarchists, your fad diet granola moms, etc.
Tourists are people who just want to be cool. They're interested mostly in aesthetics, with no real investment in any deeper meaning. They like the mystique and the cachet of being involved in The Next Big Thing and aren't picky about what that thing is.
(Everyone is a seeker at some point and most people will be a tourist eventually. They're pejoratives, but they're not condemnations.)
When you get enough seekers and tourists, people take notice. People who want to make a living and see your new niche market, specifically, take notice. Seekers and tourists want to show their new allegiance, after all, and any community has needs that are going unmet.
This is when you start getting what the post called entrepreneurs- people who may or may not be members of your community, but who want to sell stuff to you. Sometimes they genuinely exist to fill a community need- fursuit artists, queer outfitters like NerdyKeppie, binder makers, etc. Sometimes they're vultures who smell profit. Most are somewhere between the two.
By the time you get entrepreneurs who are not part of your community? Your movement is no longer Your Scene. But they are a symptom, not the cause.
Seekers and tourists bring mainstream ideals and mores to your movement. They're the ones who think subcultures full of weird sex should be less horny, that subcultures full of radical politics should move closer to the middle, and that subcultures explicitly rejecting a mainstream idea should be more charitable towards it.
Get a critical mass of seekers and tourists who don't assimilate into your subculture, and it will become mainstream. You will see more and more ~normal~ people join, more and more mainstream ideas and aesthetics absorbing your movement's vibes, and more and more of your movement's rough edges sanded down to fit the normies' needs.
This is inevitable unless you do things to stop it. All of the things you can do to stop it require effort and involvement in your local scene, and many of them (done poorly) can make your community toxic.
It's easy to blame megacorps for subculture osmosis, but it's a natural process. If you don't know how it works, and have a plan to help combat it without descending into toxicity? You're just gonna have it happen over and over.
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