It's infantilizing, though. Compared with marketing copy of old. Much of which can just be laid at the feet of a corporate nanny state that infantilizes everyone. Which is ultimately a political point.
Oh I mean, everything from the Marlboro man to "Just Do It" to Apple's "Think Different" was basically a corporate hook carefully crafted to be an appeal to individualism - although Apple threaded a needle with respect to exactly whom they chose to glorify as exemplars. The marketing pablum of the past decade that appeals to tribal identity, or a lack of sense of self searching for identity, (socially conscious identity or its opposite number), and which talks down to people, is bad marketing plain and simple. It's also corrosive to a state of affairs in which people learn to take responsibility for their own decisions, as it places the onus or impulse on external structures. I'd much rather hear that I'm a rugged individual for smoking Marlboros than that I'm joining a burgeoning herd by "exploring" some new NodeJS framework. But hey, I was conditioned to reject authority in the age when rejecting authority was genuinely difficult and not a paved road. And my generation's ad agencies had to write campaigns that contended with that, which as deceitful and devious as they were, reflected a reality about our society's impulse to rebuff control which largely no longer exists.
Rejecting authority is never "a paved road" or easy otherwise it would not be authority.
The world has moved on since the 60s and individualism has had disastrous effects on society and nature (even if it also brought great advances and freedom to some parts of the world)
Compared to what? Maybe if some true communitarianism had existed in the modern, mechanized world, outside a few small pockets, and had proven it was beneficial to society and nature over an individualist paradigm, we could say that. But the only large-scale organization of people we've seen other than one based on individual liberty is authoritarianism. And if you want to talk about environmental wreckage and social inequality, the former USSR and the current growth model in China are hardly models to aspire to. I suppose the closest we've seen to an eco-friendly, communitarian autoritarianism would be Nazi Germany, which only came at the price of, you know, the mass murder of every individual within reach who was different from their model or disagreed with the leader.
