I suspect the difference is that in the past the only way to go commercial was to work with a big corporation. Going to market with something was so hugely expensive, and required extensive marketing and distribution infrastructure, which was all internal to these big concerns. The problem was these companies expected a lot of invasive creative control and long term contracts to give access to those capabilities, which to be fair were hugely expensive to build and operate.
Nowadays all of that infrastructure exists as generic services on the internet you can throw together in a few days, with costs that scale with your needs. I recently watched a Q&A Mark Zuckerberg gave to the Harvard CS50 class in 2005 [0]. He explained that what made Facebook possible to start with was cheap hosted servers running open source software, and the ways that had changed over the previous decade. Nowadays with AWS and Google Cloud its even easier and cheaper. The same applies to physical goods now with eBay, Amazon Marketplace, Etsy, Shopify, running your own one-person media empire on Youtube, etc.
The negative connotations with "selling out" were the fact that you had to sell out creative control. You don't have to do that anymore. Dave Chappelle is rightly still sore about how he was cheated over the Chappelle Show. Nowadays you can build an audience independently, and that fact means that even if you do make a deal with big business, they know you're not as dependent on them anymore, so creatives have a much stronger hand than they used to.
So I really don't think this is down to the generation themselves, the world they live in is just different.
There was a vibrant community of independent publishers, volunteer organizations and other entities that were considered authentic. Working with them was not "selling out".
The way I remember, it was more about resisting the establishment than being against commercialization. The ideal was keeping organizations small enough that everyone would be doing "real" work. Dedicated managers and administrators were inherently suspicious. Any organization large enough to employ middle managers (managers and administrators working primarily with other managers and administrators) was part of the establishment. If you worked with them, you were selling yourself out.
>There was a vibrant community of independent publishers,....
Of course, that's always existed. By 'commercial' I meant mass market. It's always been possible to break through, in IT Apple and Microsoft both started out with two techies hacking stuff together. Richard Branson started out trying to grow Christmas trees. Those are all a very few extreme outliers compared to the tens of thousands that would only ever have a chance of making it big by reaching the mass market.
You were not supposed to try to break through, because that meant becoming part of the establishment. Doing cool things was what mattered. Success was tolerated when it arose organically, but it was not a positive thing in itself. People who were deliberately trying to be successful were branded mediocre and boring, because only mediocre and boring people wanted to be part of the establishment.
I remember it more as the dominant left-wing ideology among university students, creative people and various subcultures. Extremists obviously had more extreme views, but some mild anarchism was mainstream.
Back then, people still believed in a better future, and the struggle for money was not as central as it is today. There was this belief that if everyone contributed something valuable and focused on things that were inherently important, there would be enough for everyone in the future.
People today are more militant and more focused on money, because they have lost hope.
Whether or not the odds are actually all that better today, you have a whole culture of TikTok/YouTube/Instagram/etc. would-be influencers who at least think they have a real shot and, of course, that ends up pervading a lot of the medium.
It was hip hop, declaring "selling out" (specifically) to be propaganda. An entire decade and genre of music focused on this idea and the negative impacts of not selling one's work. "Getting paid" became the repeated mantra of many an artists' music. And that changed our culture.
>I suspect the difference is that in the past the only way to go commercial was to work with a big corporation.
I'm not so sure. Even if you "hustled" with a small business, or sold stuff yourself for the money, you were considered a sell-out. Musicians weren't supposed to peddle t-shirts, for example.
You could be right, insofar as in the 1990s, "selling out" was a discrete event and there was no denying that one had given creative control up. In the 2020s, the PR departments are so good at making their efforts look like things that happened organically that the difference between genuine success and packaging has blurred.
Nowadays all of that infrastructure exists as generic services on the internet you can throw together in a few days, with costs that scale with your needs. I recently watched a Q&A Mark Zuckerberg gave to the Harvard CS50 class in 2005 [0]. He explained that what made Facebook possible to start with was cheap hosted servers running open source software, and the ways that had changed over the previous decade. Nowadays with AWS and Google Cloud its even easier and cheaper. The same applies to physical goods now with eBay, Amazon Marketplace, Etsy, Shopify, running your own one-person media empire on Youtube, etc.
The negative connotations with "selling out" were the fact that you had to sell out creative control. You don't have to do that anymore. Dave Chappelle is rightly still sore about how he was cheated over the Chappelle Show. Nowadays you can build an audience independently, and that fact means that even if you do make a deal with big business, they know you're not as dependent on them anymore, so creatives have a much stronger hand than they used to.
So I really don't think this is down to the generation themselves, the world they live in is just different.
[0] https://youtu.be/xFFs9UgOAlE?t=935