So. Totally. This. As someone who is probably (only slightly) older than you, I couldn't help but read your post with an exponentially increasing sense of recognition. The Internet has been my ultimate refuge from the banal mediocrity that is popular "culture", and I really think things like Kickstarter are a wonderful, big part of that. "Disintermediation", while a cumbersome word, describes perfectly things like Kickstarter and forums (which were the recent focus of Discourse) where people can form communities that care about non-mainstream topics. 20 years ago, probably half the things on Kickstarter wouldn't have been possible, and if you wanted to discuss a non-popular topic in-depth, you had to travel to enclaves of like-minded people, or were out of luck.