I cannot stomach David Brooks. It began with my attempt to wade through the heavy, self-important pop-pointlessness of Bobos in Paradise, and deepened with every simple minded, retrograde, apple-polishing neocon suckup article he published in the Times.

That said I still sometimes read him, if only to discover what new diabolical way he has concocted to infuriate me.

However his latest article in the IHT caught me by surprise. It caught me, not just because it gives hipsterism a well deserved jab, but because he addresses a trend I posted about a year-and-a-half ago.

This trend relates to the growing cultural importance of aggregation–the idea that not only does the thing produced have value, but there is also value in mixing it up with other things. So James Brown gave us great music–but so have the DJs who have sampled him and mixed him up with other artists.

Brooks disdains the aggregator. But regardless of anyone’s opinion this trend is here and growing. It is part of a larger cultural trend that blurs the distinctions between consumer and producer, and indeed between production and consumption. And this isn’t just slippery word play — it has very real implications for design and how the roles of designer and user relate to each other and to the people who adopt them.