In Defense of Niche Culture

In case you haven't noticed, I'm a big fan of the niche culture opportunities being opened up by technology, as explained in Chris Anderson's The Long Tail. To me, the opportunity for people with unique and eccentric tastes to satsify them is a beautiful thing. Of course, some people don't like the fact that we all aren't mindlessly watching the same TV shows anymore, because that's what "binds us together". Now, I love pop culture. But this is the dumbest argument against decentralization I've ever heard. Jim Henley and Jesse Walker rightly bring Marc Gunther down a notch in his cry for the death of mass culture.

The unfounded fear of "too much choice" is debunked here and here by Radley Balko, a process he wittly refers to as "The Tyranny of Mustard" (due to complaints that too many brands of mustard were destroying us via choice overload).