co-opt

present singular third person co-opts · participle present co-opting · participle past co-opted · past co-opted · alternative coopt · alternative coöpt

1. transitiveTo elect as a fellow member of a group, such as a committee.
2. transitiveTo commandeer, appropriate or take over.

   Artists' engagement with bleeding-edge tech will always have the potential to critique its destructive civil and military applications, as well as the potential to be co-opted by them—as propaganda or R&D—as the rise of the so-called knowledge economy has amply demonstrated.

   2009, chapter 2, in Josephine Berry Slater, Pauline van Mourik Broekman, editors, Proud to be Flesh, →ISBN

3. transitiveTo absorb or assimilate into an established group, movement, category, etc.

   In the resolution between the culture and the counterculture, it is impossible to tell who co-opted whom, because in reality the bohemians and the bourgeois co-opted each other. They emerge from this process as bourgeois bohemians, or Bobos.

   2000, David Brooks, Bobos in Paradise […] , Simon & Schuster, →ISBN, page 43

   1 more example

   Its opening track, Mastermind, offers one possible answer to a theoretical question about what prog rock might have sounded like in the highly unlikely event that it had co-opted Giorgio Moroder’s brand of electronic disco: nearly seven meandering, episodic minutes of unlikely chord changes […]

   2016 July 7, Alexis Petridis, “Roísín Murphy: Take Her Up to Monto review – still too strange for the bigtime”, in The Guardian