Modern times: The end of dissent?

Contemporary corporate fantasy imagines a world of ceaseless, turbulent change, of centers that ecstatically fail to hold, of joyous extinction for the craven gray-flannel creature of the past…

The new businessman quite naturally gravitates to the slogans and sensibility of the rebel sixties to express his understanding of the new Information World. He is led in what one magazine calls "the business revolution" by the office-park subversives it hails as "business activists," "change agents," and "corporate radicals”…

What we understand as "dissent" does not subvert, does not challenge, does not even question the cultural faiths of Western business… What’s happened is not co-optation or appropriation, but a simple and direct confluence of interest… The problem with cultural dissent in America isn't that it's been co-opted, absorbed, or ripped-off. Of course it's been all of these things… It is no longer any different from the official culture it's supposed to be subverting. The basic impulses of the countercultural idea… are about as threatening to the new breed of antinomian businessmen as Anthony Robbins, selling success & how to achieve it on a late-night infomercial.”

Source: The Baffler