The internet has led to an arms race of exclusivity, giving rise to such phenomena as hipsterism, un-google-able band names, private (offline mediated) online communities, etc. These are merely the growing pains of a culture which has not yet acclimated itself to total, ubiquitous access to information.
While I generally agree with your assessment, I suspect the phenomena of hipsterism emerged as soon as the development of agriculture allowed the rise of specialization. As an old man, seeing the kids these days unabashedly dressing like the Small Faces brings to mind Paul Valéry's old saw: "Everything changes but the avant-garde."
While I am not personally all that nostalgic about the passing of the cultural distribution channels that Gibson mentions in the OP's link, I wonder how the reduction of meatspace contact in cultural transmission will play out. Many of my long standing friendships were formed in prehistoric book and record stores. As a kid today, I might meet those people, even more of them, no doubt... but would the tight bonds that sustained those relationships over the years have formed in the absence of non-virtual presence?
I guess this problem, if it even is a problem (and not the distortion of my limited perspective), will sort itself. It could be that increasing arrays of relatively weak social bonds in conjunction with smaller sets of strong bonds are what the social meta-organism requires moving forward.
To paraphrase Gibson, "There have always been hipsters, they just weren't very evenly distributed." I offer up Jerry Lewis, Elvis Costello, Cosmo Kramer, Steve Urkel, et al.
And I may be going out on a limb, but googling anything before the Internet was pretty tough /jk
