When the Mainstream is easy to shun

Julian Sanchez writes this, of Ta-Nehisi Coates’s pretty excellent New York Times essay on the ease of acquiring knowledge about your obscure tastes in music:

Developing non-mainstream tastes in almost anything used to be pretty hard.

The driver for this is a good thing, but I’m not sure this particular effect is. If you had non-mainstream tastes back in the day, it was a sign you were honestly committed to those beliefs as evidenced by all that effort you put into it. Maybe you became a bit close-minded as a defensive mechanism (otherwise all that work was wasted), but overall you were an interested person, and interested people are more likely to be interesting and do interesting things.

There are a large number of people these days who seem weird for weird’s sake, and I don’t find this particularly interesting.