• Standing desks became common because they rode the wave of a remote revolution. And they could be priced expensively with electric motors. Being healthy for posture as well as operating in a premium profitable niche.
• Bee pollen became a trend recently, riding the environmental movement and interest in people creating their own honey, whilst apparently there being anecdotal evidence of benefits for women. Plus there was a tonne of money to be made when it was marketed that way.
• Protein powder became commonplace because businesses wanted a use for a waste product from the dairy industry. So they were able to push a profitable product onto the consumer. And because people had less time during their 9 to 5s to prep a plate of proper protein. I suspect it won out because it both saved people time AND helped people with their health goals at the same time.
• Perhaps minimalist footwear hasn’t got critical mass, because there’s not much money to be made from telling people to go barefoot and most “barefoot-like” shoes look like you’ve developed Turkey feet. Not seeing another wave it could ride, unless it helped people run faster for example.

Are there other non-market inputs to culture we might be able to use to change it?

In 1920, for example, something like 3,500 different fraternal orders existed in the United States, and around 50 percent of the country’s adult population — counting both genders and all ethnic groups, by the way — belonged to at least one of them.

When the French nobleman Alexis de Tocqueville toured the newly founded American republic in the early years of the nineteenth century, he encountered plenty of things that left him scratching his head. The national obsession with making money, the atrocious food, and the weird way that high culture found its way into the most isolated backwoods settings — “There is hardly a pioneer’s hut which does not contain a few odd volumes of Shakespeare,” he wrote. “I remember reading the feudal drama of Henry V for the first time in a log cabin” — all intrigued him, and found their way into the pages of his remarkable book Democracy in America.

Still, one of the things de Tocqueville found most astonishing bears directly on the theme of this chapter. The Americans of his time, when they wanted to make something happen, didn’t march around with placards or write their legislators demanding that the government do it. Instead, far more often than not, they simply put together a private association for the purpose, and did it themselves.

De Tocqueville wrote: “The Americans make associations to give entertainments, to found institutions for education, to build inns, to construct churches, to diffuse books, and to send missionaries to the antipodes; and in this manner they found hospitals, prisons, and schools. If it be proposed to advance some truth or to foster some feeling by the encouragement of a great example, they found a society. Whenever, at the head of some new undertaking, you find the government in France, or a man of rank in England, in the United States you are sure to find an association. I met with several kinds of association in America of which I confess I had no previous notion; and I have often admired the extreme skill with which the inhabitants of the United States succeed in proposing a common object to the exertions of a great many men, and getting them voluntarily to pursue it.”

• making decoys imbued with high status for no reason ("celebrities")
• forcing everyone through brainwashing system ("education") where they're taught that the government has basically infinite status
• having missionaries of government worship ("journalists") bark at people with objectively high status (example: Elon Musk) to lower their status in the eyes of their flock

• preach to the Remnant, not the mob (see "Isaiah's Job")
• try our coordination culture online in increasingly realistic settings (see "The Network State")
• create parallel systems (see Paralelni Polis and their heritage from Czechoslovakian underground society parallel to the commie regime - a situation not entirely different from ours!)