I wasn't considering music or TV, but you've just tickled what I thought OP was talking about. With social media taking off a lot of our culture is online now.

We had a lot of fun sharing jokes and songs and parodies of things etc on YouTube. This gave way to mini-cults as people started getting popular, and started sponsored content. Somewhere along the way people stopped doing it for fun, and it started being "game the system by any means necessary to make it big enough to sell shit".

Its hard to put into exact words my issue, but it makes my soul ache.

Its not that crass commercialisation is dominating music, because that's been the case longer than ive been alive. It just feels like its reached too far. Its in too much of what we do. Maybe its just this generation that will feel this way. The "old folks" are pretty much out of the game and dont understand this newfangled Internet thing, and the kids are growing up in this world and itll just be normal.

The next thing is "ignore it, get offline, touch grass, go to your local bar and meet real people" but even that is tainted now. People you meet have strong opinions that have been planted in them by targeted bots on the Internet. Theres big signs placed all over the walls "FIND US ON SOCIAL MEDIA" because you need an Internet presence for your business to survive, which means they need to be mindful of what they present themselves as to appease the algorithm, and suddenly they're not real places for real people, they're another extension of this near-singular will.

Its too big a concept for me to put into words, and i might be overstating it or missing a core concept, but it scares a tiny bit of me a whole lot.

You don't seem to understand what I mean at all. I mean people who try to make a living from their creative work. Do you think that's still possible?