In the years that have elapsed since the 1960s, the negative effects of hyper-scale in the contemporary world have become more intense and afflicted more people.

Increasing numbers of local and small businesses have been driven out of existence by economic mega-entities, leaving more and more people toiling in vast corporate anthills whose ways of operating can make their employees feel like they’re trapped in a giant Dilbert cartoon.  At the same time, as we’ve chased career opportunities from one region of the country to another, people have further deprived themselves of roots and connections.

All the while, the bigger their wide screen TVs have gotten, the smaller people have come to feel in relation to a “media world” that is presumed to be the ultimate determiner of significance in our time.

Celebritocracy’s grip on our psychosocial order is becoming ever more pervasive. It doesn't much matter to us how celebrities have achieved their name recognition—it could have been through the cheesiest of reality TV shows, where they may have been chosen specifically for their ordinariness or crudeness.   Once they’re anointed as celebrities, the world hangs on their every word. 

Meanwhile, we’re all becoming less and less interested in what genuinely knowledgeable non-celebrity experts have to tell us about our world, and ordinary folks are finding themselves on the verge of becoming outright invisible.

At this point in our social history, the types of tribal behaviors and symbols that vented diminishment-based alienation in the 1960s tend not to be as broadly engaging as they once were.  As many former radicals’ main concerns shifted to raising and providing for families, the Counterculture’s anti-materialist mindset came to seem onerous and no longer appropriate.