Above: Photograph by Lars Clove for the New York Times.

Rob Walker’s plain-spoken article on branding and the counterculture appeared in this week’s NYT Magazine to the interest of many readers, including this one. One question that Walker wrestled with—and did not quite resolve—is that of how you can claim to be rebelling against consumer culture while you’re manufacturing products for people to consume. One way of addressing it is to say that the entrepreneurs Walker describes aren’t rebelling against consuming, they’re rebelling against mass-market consuming. Everything they make is made in limited quantities, exchanged from one knowing party to the other. Theirs is a boutique economy; they want to consume small, not big.

In terms of these entrepreneurs’ claims of honesty and authenticity, they are virtually assured, first as a necessity for entering their chosen marketplace—their customers wouldn’t buy otherwise—and second because the ceaseless churn and craving of newness in that marketplace doesn’t give them the time to sell out anyway. No sooner have they made it when their customers are on to the next microbrand. Businesses such as those Walker describes face a fork in the road. Either get big and become what you don’t want to be; or stay small and true, fading gracefully into obscurity. The model does not embrace longevity, nor should it: all countercultures take youth as their primary fact, and youth, as we all know, is fleeting.