Just read the piece "The Colonization of Confidence" and it reminded me of a few things. What's interesting is that there are strong parallels to things that have happened before. The most immediate thing that leapt to mind is the 8-page '80s Alan Moore comic book story "In Pictopia", which you can happily read in full at Forgotten Awesome, a response to the commercialization of comics, in which the residents of a seedy comic Metropolis full of superheroes and cartoon animals are one-by-one either removed or replaced by slicker versions of themselves, as an ominous dark industrial mass closes in on the horizon.
The second is the work of someone you may not have heard of, anticonsumerist Rev. Billy (Wikipedia entry) of the Church of Stop Shopping. Billy's whole crusade—which I encourage you to check out for yourself, as I am a very poor messenger for his ideas—is that corporations like Starbucks and Disney are in the literal business of eradicating the messiness of local culture so they can replace it with a mass-produced, marketing-created, and focus-tested pseudo-culture they can sell more easily and with lower friction. One memory that stands out for me, a few years after I met Billy, is watching a Disney-made TV show in which the theme is that classic fairy tales characters come to life... and, tellingly, one of what they called "fairy tale" characters was Disney's private intellectual property Jiminy Cricket.
