Mainstream newcomers adopted internet subversion without its utopian ideology

Evidence

Nerds may have been the original settlers of the digital frontier, but by the mid-aughts, online tools had become simple enough to welcome the techno-illiterate as well. Most of these newcomers had neither heard of Stewart Brand nor were familiar with the techno-utopian ideals that shaped early internet culture. Yet they understood the medium’s unique power to circumvent traditional social norms—a technique that would quickly attract large audiences to be monetized. — W. David Marx, Blank Space, 170

Categorization

• XREF: This is the mechanism stage of the monoculture story — subcultures get diluted by monetized mass adoption, prefiguring ‘death of the sellout’. — connects to: The internet’s egalitarian founding promise hardened into corporate libertarianism — Jürgen Habermas, A New Structural Transformation of the…, 34; Hacker culture is the root of internet culture’s anti-mainstream stance. — Alice E. Marwick, Status Update: Celebrity, Publicity,…, 78
• QUESTION: When exactly does the subversive tool get separated from the utopian belief system — pre-monetization, or is the monetization itself the divorce?