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A big part of this IMO is that “money won”, for lack of a better phrase. There is no real concept of selling out anymore. Being shamelessly focused on wealth accumulation seems to be socially acceptable in a way it wasn’t fifty years ago.
Someone will probably say this is because current generations have less financial security, and I’m sure that’s a factor. But I think it’s a cultural shift that is much older and tracks better to the decline of traditional sources of values (community, cultural groups, religion, etc.) and their replacement by the easily understandable dollar. So it becomes harder and harder for a cultural definition of success to not mean financially successful. And being financially successful is difficult if you have deviant, counter cultural ideas (and aren’t interested in monetizing them.)
There's also the issue of gatekeepers squashing deviance. Payment processors killing payments to various legal adult websits. Information-discovery gatekeepers squashing discoverability of deviant material. Social media....has had a dual affect of being subject to the gatekeeper's restrictions and the risk of self-appointed moral busybodies searching for deviant content to threaten peoples' lives/livelihoods over.
Cultural gatekeepers are able to exert influence over more people now than they have ever had before in human history. In many cases the ability to be deviant is becoming more difficult to even attempt.
Labeling pornography as "deviance" is simply funny. It is one of the most prevalent things that exist right now.
Which imo is also an outcome of late stage capitalism (money won, as aptly phrased above). You body is a commodity to be monetised, sacrifice everything in the name of money.
compounding gains has also become the only strategy to stay afloat.
Look at the performance of broad index funds since 2008. You either dumped everything you had in the market over the last 15 years or literally lost out on 4Xing your money.
That kind of dynamic is pretty shitty for risk, why would I sink my money into any kind of risky venture when the market keeps spitting out 15% a year returns on safe investments.
All expenditures also get warped by this, move across the country? Buy a new car/house? Better to play it safe and keep the wheels spinning and watch the numbers go up and to the right.
> why would I sink my money into any kind of risky venture when the market keeps spitting out 15% a year returns on safe investments
If it returns 15% it isn't a safe investment. The rate of return for a safe investment is in the 1-3% real range. Someone is offering you 15% real that implies they think it is a risky enterprise to sign on with. 15% nominal isn't so hard to find (gold yields at 10% nominal - but that isn't actually coming out ahead as much as treading water). It isn't a very impressive nominal rate of return in that sense but it is still not all that safe.
That’s a good point too. You increasingly need to participate in the system or you get left behind and can’t afford the things you could 5-6 years prior. So doing something crazy like wandering the country in your car or working at a cafe to fund your artist lifestyle is a constant ticking clock.
Also you could wander much more easily in the past. These days digital surveillance has creeped in everywhere. Stay in one place over a day and you'll get a ticket. Pay is better monitored so you cant easily do under the table work. Your customers probably use cards so your transactions are monitored and will be taxed. It's a different world from what us older people grew up in.
Yeah; I was reading Kerouac recently and just thought to myself, this kind of wandering free existence just isn’t even possible anymore. Everything is mapped and reviewed, so you’d need to deliberately be counter-cultural and turn off your phone.
Turning off your phone just the easiest way to track you. With more AI based facial recognition cameras and data sharing between corporations you're still being tracked in public. The digital world has shrunk the analog world to a very small place.
Not that I'm pro being tracked or anything, but what difference does that make to your general existence and daily adventure if there is some sort of behind the scenes tracking going on. Why would that prevent you from wandering?
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It looks cyclical to me. The materialism of the postwar era led into the civil rights movement of the late 60s and 70s, which turned into the materialistic 80s, which was rejected by the countercultural late 90s and 2000s, after which there was a slight deviation in which transgression rather than anti-materialism was rejected, and now we're back to materialism.
My guess is that in a decade or two society will elevate an ideology that directly opposes material wealth again. If nobody has any damn money then they can't exactly use wealth as a measure of worth.
> It looks cyclical to me. The materialism of the postwar era led into the civil rights movement of the late 60s and 70s, which turned into the materialistic 80s, which was rejected by the countercultural late 90s and 2000s, after which there was a slight deviation in which transgression rather than anti-materialism was rejected, and now we're back to materialism.
The post has loads of graphs going back to the 50's, with trend lines continually going down, not cycling up and down during those time frames.
This isn’t true and hasn’t been true fifty years ago either. A handful of the most well-known books regarding getting wealthy and having a high status were written almost a century ago. The practice of wealth accumulation was already established by anyone who was above room temperature IQ for as long as we have existed.
Deviance is all around, the author is too trapped in a bubble to see it.
There used to be much more tension between creating culture (art, music, etc.) and making money from it. I think that tension has pretty much evaporated.
I don't think there was ever really such a tension in terms of making money from art, but rather how. The idea of "selling out" was that, say, selling the rights to your songs to advertisers was viewed as crass. That I agree has pretty much evaporated -- nobody calls musicians who allow their songs to be used in ads "sellouts" anymore.
There is a term for this, at least some people used to use it, I think it would appear as tied to certain kind of "ideology" to most though:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Culture_industry
I also guess it is just a wordy description of the combination of commercial entertainment and industrialization.
I like your point, although I feel that in some contexts, it was probably _easier_ for people to create something they feel is valuable as art and also can earn them money, a few decades ago.
I don't think the tension has evaporated, it's just the difference between "art" and "entertainment". Sure, you can always say that entertainment is art. No matter if you're Christopher Nolan or a street musician who knows what to play to get some money.
The tension is still there, there's just a mass-scale production of commercial art that hasn't been there before.
But I'd say that probably, with these products that have giant budgets and are feeding thousands of people, there are just a few people involved who consider themselves artists in a sense that isn't the same in that a baker or sewer is also an artist.
No coincidence we're discussing this in a forum that has software development as a main subject.
Christopher Nolan's movies are "art" the same way Microsofts UI design is art, IMHO.
I didn't bring Nolan into this in order to be smug about him, his work just feels like it symbolizes this kind of industrial cultural production well, especially because many people might consider him a top-notch _artist_.
How about Hans Zimmer and the gen-Z Swedish musician Nolan went with for Oppenheimer? Not dissonant enough?
I'm more curious if the periphery has declined in coherence thanks to "autocuration" as by TikTok & YouTube.
(creators of GangnamStyle or BabyShark have industrial funding to outdo themselves on their preferred axes just like Nolan but..?)
Opposite, less quantitative take:
https://contraptions.venkateshrao.com/p/the-new-systems-of-s...
(author sorta argued that we're deep in the Perma_weirdo_cene)
It's easy on HN where "votes have won".. evenso I've given up and have resorted to reviewing what 1-pointers PaulHoule and his machine deign coherent enough to respond to
For whom - for Taylor Swift? The average artist experience is pretty miserable: it's harder than ever to break through because there is more competition - two or three generations who looked up to rock and pop stars and imagined that this could be a viable career.
One in a thousand talented artists will get lucky, but I suspect the ratio is historically low. Everyone else more or less needs to find another job.
There are other things that probably push artists toward the cultural mean. You're no longer trying to cater to the tastes of a wealthy patron or even a record studio executive. Now, you gotta get enough clicks on YouTube first. The surest way to do this is to look nice and do some unoffensive covers of well-known pop songs.
The tension the parent referred to is the concept of "selling out" as a bad thing.
Your comment supports this. While you may talk about how it's harder to "break through" or "get lucky" than it was, it presents both of those as good things.
There used to be other measures of success for musicians other than financial.
I think you're missing that deviants have to interact with people in the normal sphere for them to count socially, and the fact that you're arguing that the author is in a bubble pretty much is making his case actually.
Deviance is all around, the author is too trapped in a bubble to see it.
Show me the modern counter-culture movement. Show me the modern Firesign Theater. Show me today's National Lampoon. Show me the modern Anarchist's Cookbook.
No, 2600 doesn't count. It's a toothless parody of what it once was that you can buy on the shelf at Barnes and Noble next to Taylor Swift magazines.
Heck, even the 2000's had hipsters.
Where are the protest songs? I think this is the first generation that doesn't have mainstream protest songs.
Other zines have filled the void left by 2600, one of my favorites being PoC||GTFO. (pocorgtfo.hacke.rs)
I think the author isn't considering that people's bubbles have gotten smaller and more opaque. There's still plenty of weird hackers innovating, they just do it with their chosen peers, not in mass-culture.
As predicted "The revolutions are not being televised."
Bo Burnham
You have a point. Deviance is tending not to stick its head above the parapet.
Mainstream protest songs?
Mainstream protest songs?
The last century was full of them. From Bob Dylan to Marvin Gaye to Crosby, Stills, Nash and Young to Sting to U2.
There were probably hundreds that made the Top 40 charts.
Hum... Have you not noticed the problem?
That's exactly the kind of stuff everybody is saying that doesn't count. It's not deviant if everybody is doing it.
Your meta-analysis is one degree too high. You were going to have the long tail anyway. It just shows there was an interest for the deviant.
Give me a break with this "where are the protest songs" stuff. I'm an old fart, but even I know stuff like Childish Gambino's "This Is America", a bunch of Kendrick Lamar songs (not to mention his Super Bowl performance), Beyonce's "Ameriican Requiem", etc.
And let's not forget that protest songs aren't usually promoted by those in power...
It's crazy to think that "This is America" was released 7 years ago.
2001 and 2016 have been unfortunately been very long years thus far
Also this kind of stuff is still happening, look at all the blowback to Bad Bunny performing at the next Super Bowl
> Deviance is all around, the author is too trapped in a bubble to see it.
Let's send the author to a furry con.
Furry conventions have been going for 40 years. There are more than 50 of them catering to a worldwide "furry fandom" of millions. Is there a boiling cauldron of innovation there that I'm not aware of? From the outside it looks almost mainstream at this point.
Right? When Spencer's Gifts is using the word "yiff" in advertising, you can't quite call it underground now lol
I wonder if you were to plot out the costume variations if they would be increasing or decreasing over time.
> The practice of wealth accumulation was already established by anyone who was above room temperature IQ for as long as we have existed
i can't tell if you're trying to make a point about people who don't practice wealth accumulation. probably because i have a room temperature IQ.
In Kelvin?
celsius
Twenty? SO PROUD OF YOU POSTING HERE.
Rough.
it's cold out here for us dummies. can i borrow a coat?
Wish I could help you but I don't remember where I put it.
no, the romantic narrative of Life was just a facade used by cynical boomers to club to the top, its true many were earnest in the way they focused on quality of their Jobs (doing that also lead you to money) so its not that now its about money, It always was It just the romantic layers were removed so even if you are passionated about something if you are not cold with money as the hard reality of everything you Will seem deluded
Mark Fisher describes this as precorporation in Capitalist Realism. The idea that at a certain point capital will anticipate and ahead of time incorporate the behavior, thus absorbing it into the overall mechanism.
Let's do the traditional thing and blame it on music! US hip hop videos of the early 2000s were full of garish displays of wealth.
But the people trying to show off weren't actually that rich it was a genuine counter-culture movement. Today they are rich af.
Being shamelessly focused on wealth accumulation seems to be socially acceptable in a way it wasn’t fifty years ago.
In the 70's the expression was "He who dies with the most toys wins."
Today, replace "toys" with "dollars."
People seem to be using raw money as some kind of measure of success, as if life was a big video game, trying to rack up the highest score.
It's part of the gamification of everything: Politics, dining, shopping. Everything is a game now, and everyone is expected to keep score.
I don't really believe this explanation, it is too narrow (in the usual "the US is the whole world" sense typical for US-based forums), and the same trend seems to be happening in many countries and cultures at once.
My explanations would be:
a. A lot of your current life is recorded online and visible to others, and people in general behave more carefully when under de facto surveillance. Similar to self-censorship in authoritarian countries.
b. Personal contact has been supplanted by virtual contact over apps, especially among the young, and doing risky things, including sex and booze, faces a lot more obstacles when your main gateway to the rest of humanity, including friends, is a screen.
Quite a lot of my, uh, non-standard behavior in my 20s was initiated by an impulsive decision in company of others, who came up with some ...idea... This is what just does not happen when everyone is in their room alone.
> A big part of this IMO is that “money won”, for lack of a better phrase. There is no real concept of selling out anymore. Being shamelessly focused on wealth accumulation seems to be socially acceptable in a way it wasn’t fifty years ago.
Fifty years ago you had Soviet Union.
An entity which provided an alternative to the US and Western Europe vassals freemarketeering shenanigans.
With the Soviet Union gone, and the communists in retreat, the Capitalists can shove their ideologies down the populace's collective throat.
It has already been established that "what we have here is the best system" and any failure to ascend in said system is a failure of the individual rather than the system's.
"Here is a feel good story of an immigrant that learned python and made it big in America, why can't you do the same?"
> But I think it’s a cultural shift that is much older and tracks better to the decline of traditional sources of values (community, cultural groups, religion, etc.) and their replacement by the easily understandable dollar.
I think about that in the complete opposite direction. I think the dollar displaced traditional values. The cause I'd attribute would be our increasing reliance on "reason", especially short term cause-and-effect "reason".
Most of my perspective on this comes from "Dialectic on enlightenment", which I can recommend if you can stomach an incredibly dense and boring book.
I disagree that people are less weird and deviant today. I believe they’re less weird offline, because weirdness is easier, safer, and less embarrassing to express online.
I also disagree that online has become less weird. It’s less weird proportionally, because the internet used to consist of mostly weird people, then normal people joined. Big companies are less weird because they used to cater to weird people (those online), now they cater to normal people. But there are still plenty of weird people, websites, and companies.
Culture is still constantly changing, and what is “weird” if not “different”? Ideas that used to be unpopular and niche have become mainstream, ex. 4chan, gmod (Skibidi Toilet), and Twitch streamers. I’m sure ideas that are unpopular and niche today will be mainstream tomorrow. I predict that within the next 10 years, mainstream companies will change their brands again to embrace a new fad; albeit all similarly, but niche groups will also change differently and re-organize.
(And if online becomes less anonymous and more restrictive, people will become weirder under their real ID or in real life.)
Weirdness isn’t really deviance. Punk was deviance, anti-system. Modern internet weirdness is mostly just having weird consumer tastes and sociopolitical opinions.
The total opposite, large movements like punks or hippies weren't really deviance, it was choosing another large group to belong to. It's conveniently cellophane-wrapped rebellion for people who need an identity but can't bear to stand alone and truly think for themselves.
"The underground is a lie" was right then and still is: https://www.jimgoad.net/goadabode/issue%202/undergnd.html
I think it is useful to differentiate between transgressive and "deviance" in the sense it was used in TFA.
Punk was primarily transgressive from my POV (growing up in London as punk exploded there). It concerned itself with rule breaking, norms breaking and generally doing things you weren't supposed to do, all just for the sake of doing those things, and mostly because life fucking sucked.
The way "deviance" is used in TFA seems much more related to people making non-transgressive but neverthless uncommon choices, closer to ideas about statistical distributions ("standard deviation") than the sort of scream of anger that drove punk forward.
I should probably view that even though I don't like much if any real punk for its aesthetics, I think it was and is a really good thing, particularly in terms of its focus on a DIY model which spread beyond just music.
Punk is still strong. The internet destroyed Geek tho.
I initially thought not to post this because I think this is potentially flamebait adjacent for someone and I dont want to rock the boat.
But in the interests of attempting to not be so conformist and give us something interesting to discuss about this interesting article, I will try this anyways, and if you have a problem with me saying this then feel free to flag and move on, I don't care enough to get into a flame war about this, but I believe I'm not trying to troll or get a rise out of people.
Perhaps this is the feminization of society? As women have asserted themselves in the workforce and due to young women being the creators of mass culture for their generation, perhaps this is a partial driver for why everyone is so much less independent.
I dont know, this thought is not done and I'm already expecting incoming fire from someone somewhere, but perhaps this could help drive this.
Then again, it's more likely that this fits one of my conformation bias pet issues.
I'll reply here in good faith: I just don't see how you connect those dots, or why this has anything to do with gender.
> women have asserted themselves in the workforce
Agree.
> young women being the creators of mass culture for their generation
Citation(s) needed. I've never heard an argument for this or even seen someone suggest it before.
> partial driver for why everyone is so much less independent
Even if we take your previous statements as true, what does that have to do with peoples' independence?
To me (and my own confirmation bias pet issue), it seems much more likely that having recordings and visible online identities the way we do now with smartphones, ever present cameras, and social media causes people to think a lot more about how they're perceived by others.
And, the flip side, spending so much time seeing other people via tv, online videos, social media, etc constantly reinforces what "normal" behavior looks like.
People are also so absorbed in modern media that they just do way less interesting stuff overall imo.
I think the observed feminisation isn't a causal factor, but instead shares a causal factor - that every space must now accept everyone. This causes a few problems.
0. One of the ideas that has tagged along with inclusion has been changing from an input focus ("e.g. No girls allowed in treehouse!") to an output focus (Fewer girls than boys are in the treehouse). In the input focused model, you want to change the rule to stop excluding girls. In the output focused model you also need to change the treehouse to be more attractive to girls. From this, any 'deviant' interests that happen to be gendered (or racial, cultural, etc) get suppressed in the name of creating inclusive outcomes.
1. Most humans have a natural urge to conform to those around us, some just experience it stronger or weaker than others. When 'deviants' are included in a non-deviant space, their deviant tendencies face a subtle yet strong conformity pressure that wouldn't be felt if they were excluded entirely.
2. 'Deviants' being accepted more widely means they don't need to create or find their own spaces. Hence there are fewer spaces where the deviation is locally normal, which would allow the conformist pressure to enhance and refine the deviation.
Women fought for independence and feminists are the ones most despised by a lot in larger culture, lol.
Meanwhile, conservative male spaces tend to be all about being in group and forcing everyone to be like them. And about forcing women back to dependence.
Genuinely wondering why in the world this is your first intellectual instinct.
The fact that you felt the need for that long preface (rightly so, I might add) demonstrates the real root problem. If everything we’re doing is right and true, why can’t we even talk about it directly? The truth doesn’t really mind being talked about, because after you’re finished talking it’s still the truth.
(Which isn’t to say I agree with your take, I haven’t given it much thought. But anything to do with feminism potentially having negative effects is verboten).
I have this fondness for the old-school web of blogs and so on. And I thought perhaps that this decline of deviance was the reason for the perceived dip in blogs. But now I think it's actually different. All of us from then were the early adopters of this stuff. We were never going to be a lot. It's just that previously there were a thousand (metaphorically) of us with nine hundred of us like what we were, and now there are a billion with nine hundred of us like what we were, and the rest are what they were but now they're here.
I have this belief: if you don't know where the artist went, it's probably because you were a groupie rather than an artist and they eventually tired of you. After all, right now in San Francisco there are people like those in the circle of Aella (of Sankey chart fame) who had a "birthday gangbang" where each man had some limited time with her and then had to go to a fluffer. One of those fluffers married one of the men she met there.
This is beyond strange to me, but not in a disparaging way. It's just out of my zone of familiarity in a way where I feel I would not know what being in these people's presence is like. So I think the strange people are just finding the other strange people and enjoying their time together rather than what they would previously do: entice some normies to strangeness.
I also think many of these things have various causes. Apartment buildings have the same shape everywhere because they are all designed by committee and have the same schools of thought dictating "breaking up the massing" and all that. But even in that world, in the NIMBY capital of the world, there is a building like Mira SF which is pretty damned cool!
Others are saying the end of leaded gasoline, I’ll add that around 2008 when the trend accelerates schools started becoming more locked down and consequences for being a kid can now follow you into adulthood much easier due to social media.
I think we’re seeing a natural result of kids being scared of that one bad night being immortalized or that one fight turning into an arrest.
You’re just not allowed to be a kid really.
Interesting; for what it's worth, as a black person who grew up in a relatively privileged environment, the "one bad fight" rule was subconsciously our entire existence in a way that it wasn't for many people around us.
What does that mean? One is enought to ruin your reputation and chances later as an adult?
More likely to get hit with a Zero Tolerance punishment for a single isolated incident, which derails your entire trajectory through the school system.
https://www.reddit.com/r/lansing/comments/1no5rtl/lansing_pa...
+1 for the Lead Hypothesis. Apart from negative health effects, lead exposure leads to more impulsive behavior and reduced inhibition - which kind of covers nearly everything here.
Have to say, I am glad that the world is safer and less wild, but I do miss the creative energy and "real world" social engagement of 1980s-1990s
and in the 80s and 90s, we missed the creative energy and "real world" social engagement of the 60s and 70s ...
plus ca change, plus le meme chose ...
That generation were a bunch of mindless, selfish dicks. Free from poisoning, the new generations can think clearly about how to be selfish dicks, and plan it out more deliberately.
> I think we’re seeing a natural result of kids being scared of that one bad night being immortalized or that one fight turning into an arrest.
> You’re just not allowed to be a kid really.
I learned yesterday about the skull breaker challenge, where you and two friends line up and jump at the same time to see who jumps highest, except the outside two people conspire to kick the legs out of the middle one. Is that being a kid? If anything, the proliferation of social media is enabling the normalization of deviance in the form of these meme challenges. People are going around spraying bug spray on the produce at the grocery and posting it on TikTok.
> People are going around spraying bug spray on the produce at the grocery and posting it on TikTok.
One single person did this, and was sentenced to a year in prison for it.
Funnily enough not even a new phenomenon due to social media: remember to beware razor blades in candy this Halloween /s
Yeah I would be willing to bet serious money that this is a few kids and that the number is not even greater than a fractional fraction of a percent.
You're seeing point wise incidents, chosen to generate outrage, and trying to apply them like all kids are doing these things, which per all trends they are not.
Sorry some fraction of people will always be stupid, we shouldn't apply constraints on the many to save the few stupid ones.
How many of these trends are we seeing and how much of a fraction of a fraction do they represent in sum? The article discusses specific declines but doesn't look at data regarding increased incidences of social-media-driven acts of deviance. That's like pointing at the declining use of the saddle while ignoring the rise of the automobile. I guess I should revise my previous hyperbolic statement as I don't know if the deviance is made up for in other ways, I would just have appreciated a broader view.
> Is that being a kid?
Imo, it is being an asshole kid, potentially a bully. That totally existed when I was young.
I'm sure you never heard "if your friend jumps off a bridge would you?" question growing up. But it seemed to be very common saying in my family and in others at the time. So it seems like kids were making bad decisions based off of peer pressure well before social media. It's only that it goes "viral" that anyone pays attention at all. Just more ammunition for the "kids these days" type of people I guess.
I jumped off the bridge. Chicken if you didn’t. 27 feet, so a bit less than an olympic high dive.
Deep water Jetty's are way more fun - from the deck at a king high tide, barely ten feet, from the top of the service shack at a King low tide, fifty feet and more.
Plenty of time from primary school to junior high to work up to a proper jump.
Bonus salt water sharks and crocodiles.
I would suggest that another trend which contributes to this "one bad fight" is the growing personal disposable income in the US, which allows parents to be highly litigious, demanding things like arrests of kids their kids get in fights with:
https://fred.stlouisfed.org/series/DSPIC96
Anecdotally, teachers have been talking about fear of getting sued by parents for a long time now. I suspect this is a big driving force behind the "everyone gets a trophy" mentality and not at all liberalism. Teachers have been kowtowing to moneyed tiger/helicopter parents in ever more egregious ways.
My own pet theory anyways.
I, gen-x '79, was taught by Gen-z the reason we don't drink at the bars is cause someone'll make a video of us being weird and ruin us. Be weird at home. With the door locked. Fit in when the camera could be hiding and stay employed. Adequately satisfactory, A+.
I'm too old not to be weird. I get a lot of blank stares. I'm the only person I need the approval of. (For now. I worry the cameras find me more and more)
Yeah, I really think this is a big part of it: more control and harsher social punishment for less.
Unfortunately it is not only a bad thing.
A couple of generations ago, the majority of people transacted entirely in cash, and the only government ID they carried was a drivers license (and the women and children didn't even have that).
I can't help the feeling that everything in our lives and finances being tied to our permanent government-sanctioned identity has a chilling effect on deviance. No longer can one skip across state lines with a crisp hundred in ones pocket if one's deviance becomes widely known...
I'm not 100% sold on the direct relation, but just to brainstorm some more.
A society wide panopticon would not just decrease deviance, it would also increase overall stress, and disproportionally allow people who are shameless - willing to lie and bluster - to get relatively more attention.
The world has become very expensive and everything is way more competitive than it was in the past.
To me, it feels like there is little room to make mistakes. If you get detailed it's hard to get back on track. That I think is the primary reason people are taking less risks (or being deviant).
It used to be cool to be deviant and not to be accepted by society at large. Ravers, skaters, punk rockers, cross-dressers, all subcultures that did not care if they were accepted by the normies. Transgression of social norms was considered the cool thing to do.
Now everyone wants social norms to be changed so they feel included no matter what crazy ass thing they are into.
Feels lame to me but I am old so what do I know.
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The author using the 90s as a reference point strikes me as odd, as though that was a normal period.
The 90s was peak "binge", the West was on top of the world with no challengers. People felt they could relax. Perhaps they relaxed a bit too much.
I feel like a lot of this is breaking up of culture into a million shards. People are being weird in much smaller domains so if you look at the old bigger chunks of culture it seems like it's solidifying. Just because TV is largely boring doesn't mean online video isn't weird. You just might not like it so you don't pay attention to it.
> But wait, shouldn’t we be drowning in new, groundbreaking art?
We are.
I just watched a short Youtube clip of Corey Henry on organ accompanying a preacher's sermon. It's fucking insane-- he's doing two-handed Liszt-inspired cadenzas while the preacher is freely changing keys. I've never heard anything like it.
Also, some weirdo did what appears to be an accurate scrolling transcription that accompanies the clip.
Now Youtube is recommending a bunch more clips with scrolling transcriptions of out-of-this-world jazz performers doing deviant things.
Here's one now of Benny Benack scat-singing, showing an unbelievable vocal range. Now he's yelling the name "Phil Woods" as he quotes a fragment from Phil Woods' solo on Billy Joel's "Just the Way You Are."
Youtube will keep suggesting these things at me literally until I have to go eat food to survive. And that's just the scrolling transcriptions of deviant jazz solos.
In short, author is so wrong he thinks he's right.
Edit: clarification
Corey Henry is so loud in person I’m unable to bear being in the same venue. Maybe this is a more tolerable volume.
People are deeply concerned over their own wellbeing and that of their others’ while being bombarded by a collage of choices that indicate how to either preserve or compromise their lives and the associated consequences and as a result of this they are either reaching for things safe and familiar or leaping toward new ideals to a rough jingle of outcome and in truth there is such a surplus of “weird” going around and no one with the guts to determine the “good kinds of weirdness” from the bad kinds and all this guy has to offer us is countless links, fourteen footnotes and a glib call to action.
I made a comment related to this recently (https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=45486391) and I got a lot of helpful responses that I think help explain some of these trends:
1. With the Internet, things "converge to an optimum" much faster than before where you had more regional variation. Dominant design, https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dominant_design, explains part of this trend.
2. This article from earlier this year, "The age of average", https://www.alexmurrell.co.uk/articles/the-age-of-average, makes many of the same points but links to other good posts that help explain the change, particularly as it applies to business consolidation and risk aversion.
Great post from Adam Mastroianni as usual, lots to chew on -- but to treat deviance and risk as equivalent seems a bit of a leap. The graphs line up, but just about any wide-reaching measure was put on its current trajectory sometime in the 70s-80s (see [0]).
The hypothesis that lower 'background risk' leads to lower voluntary risks (drugs, unprotected sex, etc.) makes sense. But as far as arts go, I think the cultural homogeneity we see is more of a direct effect of globalization than anything else. In other words, the default state of highly interconnected societies is one of convergence; the variety of the 20th century can be attributed to growth in communication and exposure to new concepts. Now that media technology has somewhat stabilized, we see a return to the cultural stability that has defined humanity for most of its existence.
I'm wondering if this overlooks areas where we experience much higher levels of deviation today. Take music, for example. When I grew up, I was basically limited to whatever was playing on the radio or MTV—there was only so much airtime for a small set of popular songs. The mainstream was much more mainstream. Today, I can listen to obscure Swedish power metal bands with fewer than 5,000 monthly listeners on Spotify without any difficulty.
The same goes for fashion. I have a picture of my mom and her friends where everyone looks like a miniature version of Madonna. Today, fashion seems far more individualistic.
Streaming has given us a vast spectrum of media to consume, and we now form tiny niche communities rather than all watching Jurassic Park together. There are still exceptions like Game of Thrones, The Avengers, or Squid Game, but they are less common.
One of my friends is into obscure K-pop culture that has virtually zero representation in our domestic media. Another is deeply interested in the military history of ancient Greece—good luck finding material on that when there were only two TV channels.
Maybe deviance hasn't disappeared—maybe it's just shifted elsewhere…?
Consuming niche stuff isn't really deviance in any meaningful sense.
There's no risk-taking there, no producing something new for the world, and very little personal actualization beyond getting to consume a thing you like.
Maybe we're looking at this wrong. Maybe 'new' stuff just isn’t that interesting to people any more. I mean the amount of 'new' things out there are huge and we are constantly exposed to them lots of them. Then when you couple that with the massive amount of advertising that is everywhere on every surface and site, people start to brain adblock and focus on patterns they recognize.
I'd also argue the culture of "digital degeneracy" has permeated the internet and is no longer locked away in, say, the bastion of mid/late 2000s 4chan. What used to be violent NSFL liveleaks content is now easily accesible by anyone with a phone. Softcore content is completely widespread on "clean" apps like IG and Tiktok.
If we measure deviance only by the metrics that existed before social media, we will of course find what is expected.
personal theory is that it has to do with connectedness. everyone is much more aware of everyone else now, and how to act, so it's far easier to not act out. In the past there were many more isolated subcultures, people disconnected from mainstream culture, etc, and they could stay that way for a very long time. Now there's a strong normative pressure, so they become more 'normal', that is, boring.
Wow… an engineer making generalizations about the fact that he is in a tunnel… and not realizing for a second that he is in said tunnel. How new.
Definitely internet. When I’m not online, I goof out infinitely.
> we’re in a recession of mischief
I don't think this is true per se. It is more that a lot of things are censored or tailored into a specific direction now. The Trump administration shows this - see how recently the Python Software Foundation came to the conclusion that they could not ethically sign a grant proposal that was modified by the Trump administration seeking to manhunt down any LGBT supporter upon entry into the USA (once found they "abused" or rather misused US grants, which was the logical implication to follow-up on that clause the US government tried to sneakily add). Things became more uniform also because of Google search sucking now. How can we find alternative views? It is much harder than before. The world wide web has been turned into a nerfed variant by Google and co. All "AI summaries" show this - Google hallucinates to the user a variant of the web they control.
> Trump administration seeking to manhunt down any LGBT supporter upon entry into the USA
Am I misreading this, or are you saying the Trump administration has enacted manhunts on (foreign?) LGBT supporters on the basis of them being LGBT supporters? If that’s what you’re saying - how can I find out about this?
Weird that the article uses so many statistical averages, while trying to discuss outliers.
Edit: average is the wrong word - measuring outliers is hard.
One thing I've noticed with the younger generation is they are much more analytical and "in their heads"
They over-analyze and overthink everything a lot more than past generations which can be good and bad
Probably due to the internet and more access to information
For example when I was a kid you would watch a movie or play a video game and not think about it that much.
Whereas now its all about RT scores, metacritic, review megathreads, unboxing, reaction videos, video essay breakdowns/explainers , tv show podcasts
Analyzing/reviewing/meta-content has never been bigger
>They over-analyze and overthink everything a lot more than past generations
Maybe we're just used to past generations that were poisoned by atmospheric lead from gasoline making under thought decisions.
> Whereas now its all about RT scores, review megathreads, unboxing, reaction videos
Is that them or is that content and algorithms seeping into every possible nook and cranny of the human experience? Creators seeking to tap value off of popular brands and fans trying to find more content and falling into a long tail?
We're making more content, taking up more time, resulting in people who are stimulated all the time. Busy all the time.
Anyone displaying 'weirdness' these days gets diagnosed with a place on the 'spectrum' and prescribed some kind of medication to tamp it down.
the author obviously has not seen one of the near daily protests lately, or the majority of videos posted to social media, or perhaps they just chose the wrong word ("weird") for what they are trying to express. everywhere I look, freak flags are on full and public display now more than I ever remembered them being
Qualifying myself on this topic to say I've written websites with `<blink></blink>` in them.
Half of this reads like a reactionary grasping at straws, throwing together a bunch of unrelated things to try and bemoan a "return to weird, but my version of weird". When in reality, the explanation is more straight forward: you're old man.
The culture is a live and well. I've lived through ircs and Discord groups. It's out there, it's just better gatekept to match the existing community now. Berghain doesn't just let in any sex pest. Furthermore, this is incredibly English speaking limited view of culture. Chinese and Japanese web culture is alive and well, you just don't know the language and so you can't participate.
The other reason for a lot of these shallow complaints - architecture being samey, websites being samey, branding being samey - is capitalism, which always as a rule tends towards consolidation. Things become same and boring because they figured out how to make money with it.
And using mass shootings as some sort of logical counter factual is some of the wildest, most insane strawmanning I've seen on the internet.
What a garbage article, I feel dumber for having read it. How in the world this guy manages to command a veneer of intellectualism is hilarious.
I definitely think you are missing quite a bit of the overall idea. The author is foremost creating imagery with the statistics. The mass shooting thing tracks with what the point is. IMO it doesn't seem to be simply, "you're old man".
Yes culture is still going on many things are still happening, that's not being denied. The thesis is that deviance from societal norms is decreasing. The deviance that finds it's way into societal norms is what we look back at and consider new culture. Therefore the less the pot is stirring with deviance the less culture is evolving. Which I really think IS a valid point and reasoning. I don't think the author is wrong, at least not about what he is talking about.
BUT, I think the author is looking for deviance in some of the wrong places. I don't think it's age, but more of position, both societal, and geographic. Not unlike the accumulation of wealth, where the top percent has been increasing their share over time I think that deviance driven culture is accumulating in much the same fashion.
My guess is that the author lives somewhere in typical city-surrounded-by-suburbs-urban type area, where most people spend the bulk of their time in some sort of gainful employment that mostly benefits the wealthy. Typical weekends are spent paying attention to sports or music events and going out to eat at restaurants. Most people probably take a couple vacations to another area for a few days a year or maybe go on a cruise or something. Having a passport is common.
The examples and ideas he evaluates are deviance WITHIN that framework, but not deviance FROM that framework. In the past much of culture was spawned by that deviance, the deviance that exists within the idea of the typical urban/suburban worker.
Where deviance is abundantly evident today, that you could miss if you aren't in position is to be completely outside of that framework. That's the deviance today.
Some examples: The percentage of homeschooling children is rising rapidly. The number of SxS deaths annually is increasing at a huge rate. The adoption of eBikes, solar panels, off grid living, tiny homes, non-standard pets, lake culture, trail rides, guerilla playgrounds, CPNS, take-overs, pull up concerts, unlicnensed popups, dump truck beaches, etc. There's a TON Of deviance but it's concentrated around the same groups and it's coordinate but at the same time it ends up shutting people out that aren't in those groups, so it really is this sort of cultural accumulation that's not spread as evenly as it once was. And ultimately those situations ARE spawning new culture, trends, music, styles and products etc.
Do you have any recommendations of where to look for Japanese web culture as I have really struggled to find anything. Japanese tech blog websites like Qiita and zenn seem to just post bland tech articles
For the most part, this seems to be measuring the same trends behind the violent crime rate - which some think is related to the introduction (and banning) of leaded gasoline.
Interesting to put these trends into the mix. It sort of tracks - but the teen birth rate was the one which stood out as really not tracking well.
T-shirt:
No means no.
Maybe means no.
Yes means maybe.
Regret equals rape.
Fortunately, there's Pornhub.It's just the internet.
Lots of deviant communities that are still quite active if you turn off your laptop/phone and go seek out the eccentric folks in the real world.
The internet has pushed towards homogeneity over the last couple decades. If you're confusing internet with the real world constantly (i.e. staying "plugged in"), its easy to come to the article's conclusion. But, you can always choose to just "turn it off".
The internet isn’t some PC sitting in your house these days. It's with you on your phone, and it's on every phone and device around you, pretty much everywhere in the world. Even if you 'turn it off' everyone else can make it your problem.
Try going on a hike in the sticks where there is no cellular service at all. The idea that you can't escape the internet is a fiction. This is so overblown.
Just saying: https://starlink.com/business/direct-to-cell
Weirdness itself is no personal virtue to be admired, there is already an epidemic of Quirk Chungus type personalities to avoid. This guy too offers an erratic yet safe gish gallop article blaming no one for the loss of our something.
Johnathan Bi explains [1] the stagnant output of deviant/contrarian creatives better as a lack of respect for artistic foundations after being influenced by the rabid 3rd or 4th generation in whatever artistic movement.
Weirdness is necessary in every cultural bubble. Christianity was weird once, as was gayness, as was rationalism, market economy etc.
this post which mentioned in the OP has far broader examples
Not all of this is as straightforward as the author seems to suggest. In particular, I believe the massive increase in mass shootings is only in one country. Part of it is, I believe, the fear-mongering our glorious leaders and the media love so much.
> people don’t seem to be joining cults anymore
I think the shape of cults has changed. There is a vast army of social media influencers exploiting e.g. “new age” concepts to take advantage of vulnerable people, sometimes with devastating impact. Research just hasn’t caught up yet.
I have an issue with the claim that the culture is stagnating. One of the arguments is this:
> fewer and fewer of the artists and franchises own more and more of the market. Before 2000, for instance, only about 25% of top-grossing movies were prequels, sequels, spinoffs, etc. Now it’s 75%.
I think the explanation isn't a decrease in creativity as much as the fact that in the 1980s, there just weren't that many films you could make a sequel of. It's a relatively young industry. There are more films made today because the technology has gotten more accessible. The average film is probably fairly bland, but there are more weird outliers too.
The same goes for the "the internet isn't as interesting as it used to be" - there's more interesting content than before, but the volume of non-interesting stuff has grown much faster. It's now a commerce platform, not a research thing. But that doesn't mean that people aren't using the medium in creative ways.
The word choice is strange. The author is listing the decline of risk-taking and experimental life choices like: pregnancies, crime, joining a cult etc. He is talking about people making safer / more conservative life choices. He also noticed that the monetary value assigned to people's lives has risen dramatically (over 12 million USD compared to 4 million USD a few decades ago). It is not the decline of deviance; it is decline of risk taking. That doesn't mean it is good or bad. It is just a fact.
> Another disappearing form of deviance: people don’t seem to be joining cults anymore.
I guess it's not deviant if it's a large percentage of the population.
My theory is it all has todo with immigration, or rather the way we treat immigration since the 2000s. In order to accomodate everyone the culture gained new sensibilities, and the bubble burst. But idiosyncratic cultures can only grow in bubbles.
We ve seen that in Europe before the US, where the german, french, English culture lost their influence and originality, becoming touristic products being sold by people of all colors and cultures.
Words like 'spirit' and 'soul' have been replaced with 'content and money, and the media is being driven by people with a generic "global" culture and outlook
The article is using weird definition of "weird".
I do not remember high school students drinking alcohol being "weird". It was basically "normal". Most adults would pretend they do not see it, fair amount of them even facilitated it. It was only when things got noisy and too visible the rule was used.
Moving away was weird in America? I perceived economic mobility as something Americans were proud of and seen as superior over nations more likely to stay. It was not weird to move away, it was the expected action for quite a lot of people.
"Deviance" is probably the word to focus on here, as in "deviation" from the mean.
Drinking underage is a deviation from the norm of following the law.
Moving is a deviation from the norm of staying (as evidenced by the census data showing that in the 1950s ~20% of people lived somewhere different than they had the previous year, in 2023 it was 7.4%. In 1950 3.5% of the population lived in a different state than they had the previous year, in 2023 it was 1.4%)
I get the moving away portion, but if underage drinking was >50% of the population in the past, isn't that the norm, not the words on the law? That would mean now is more deviation not less. Of course, that's entirely down to how you want to frame it.
My point is, drinking was not deviation from the mean. It was "the mean". There was no real norm in following the law in that one. Like I said, adults would wink wink look away or directly give you alcohol.
If you was not drinking at all, you was the weird one. Literally.
The mean is shifting toward drinking less. But that does not say much about how many people are "weird".
Depends on where you grew up I suppose, and your personal views at the time. I don't think I ever got the idea that adults were ever pretending not to see it.
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Mass culture is educating people to a level which it wasn't possible before, pruning really bad examples, and suggesting attainable relationships with self and the world. Lead is maybe a big reason why it succeeds, but even before the 192x when the lead started, people and craziness were wide spread. What happened with the maturation of all the media channels is that old religious and religion-derived psychoses were pushed out of fashion and being yourself wasn't opposed by centuries old norms. Being creative is often correlated with suffering and we are actually happy right now.
I don't mean that we don't have problems and the concentration of wealth and power in the hands of a few is maybe causing part of the uniformity, but generally, we call them creative solutions, because they are aimed at uncomfortable problems.
It makes sense that everything would converge on the same time
When every company does the same market “research” to figure out what appeals to consumers, over time they are all going to arrive at the same conclusion
As this particular style becomes familiar to people, it only reinforces the preference and now you’re stuck in a cycle
This is why imo there will always be room for a startups - eventually someone deviates from the path and strikes gold, eventually a company is *actually* courageous, does something bold, and moves an industry forward
We are unfortunately getting to a point though where giant tech companies have a stranglehold on resources and it hinders innovation
Millennials are really great parents and the result of that is that the kids are well rounded and less deficient. That results in conformity because the history nerd, also goes to the gym and the gym bro also strives to do well at school.
^^^ Much less brittle nerds & ignoramo jock heads
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Chalk up one more nightmarish facet of modern life almost soley attributable to housing costs. I'd love nothing more than to work a part time job and practice the Sitar all day. But now that equals homelessness.
Housing cost itself is one more nightmarish facet of modern life largely attributable to wealth inequality.
Seems to correlate with the increase and decline of lead poisoning. I guess the plus side of lead poisoning was an interesting world. We need more deviants than ever now, given the authoritarian push we are seeing. Too many obey.
This is an interesting set of observations. One curious thing I've noticed is the moving thing. Frequently people online will say things like "You expect me to pick up my entire life and leave my friends and family behind to go somewhere just to find a job? People should be able to live where they want" or something of the sort. Leaving out the housing affordability part of that, I found the sentiment odd when reading it but with the context of this article I see it was that I was a blind man trying to figure out an elephant by holding his tail.
I've moved across continents so many times now in search of making it, and I feel like I have made it now. I could not have imagined the other way of doing things. But I suppose kids these days can make it wherever they are.
Some of these things do make sense, though, just out of accessibility. Once everyone can access everything, most will likely go watch 'the best'. That tends to a power-law now that access is cheap.
In some sense, web forums have also trended towards this. You'll get the exact same commentary on HN as on Reddit as on Digg. That kind of uniformity was hard in the old web forum days. We are all part of the same big community: the once hilariously-named 'netizen' is now real.
Seeing a lot of comments disputing singular data points, but the author goes out of his way to provide as wide a variety of data points as he could find, and to try to disprove his own theory.
A couple anecdotal things I've noticed in my own life that align with his conclusions:
(1) I work in advertising. I've long bemoaned that my industry has turned to producing high-production low-creativity work for decades now. In the 60s, 70s, and 80s, people relied on creativity to get a message across. But today, it's all polish and no substance. I assumed it was because technology made it easier than ever to to do so, but maybe it's part of a wider trend.
(2) I used to love the variety of car designs. Every car was unique. Some were crazy. But today, take the logo off, and I'd be challenged to tell the difference between any two pickup trucks or any two sedans or any two vans. Every manufacturer has converged on the exact same design. (We see this in every industry, I just happened to be a fan of cars back in the day. But if you look at housing, clothing, computers, phones, tablets, etc etc, I can't think of any category that has real variety in design.)
(3) The author mentions book covers. Up until today, I was mistaking all those designs as meaning those books were part of the same series or something. I hadn't dug in to realize they were actually unrelated.
(4) My own kids have played it incredibly safe. I'm proud of them for being more responsible than I ever was. But I'm also worried they don't know how to take risks. I'm strongly of the belief that anything worth doing involves a healthy dose of risk. Could it really be that as a society, we've just abandoned risk?
I'm not saying the article is necessarily 100% correct. But I think it does pose what may be one of the most important questions of our era. Yeah yeah, I know that sounds bombastic: we have increasing global conflicts, a climate crisis, the apparent rise of neo-fascism, etc. But I don't know how we're going to solve those problems if we're all driving into the middle. How can 8 billion people be more homogenous than the 7, 6, 5, 4 billion that came before?
> Brian: Look, you've got it all wrong! You don't need to follow me. You don't need to follow anybody! You've got to think for yourselves! You're all individuals!
> Crowd: Yes! We're all individuals!
> Brian: You're all different!
> Crowd: Yes, we are all different!
> Man in crowd: I'm not...
> Crowd: Shhh!
I feel like there are so many factors here that it's hard to identify which thing have the greatest impact. Instead of attempting a coherent argument, I'll offer some further observations.
Taylor Swift is one of the most famous people in the world, yet I know quite a large number of people who could name only one or two of her songs. I would count myself a Taylor Swift fan even though I am in the group of knowing very little of her music. I admire her creativity, business acumen, legs, assertiveness, intelligence, and determination.
In the past, a performer at that height would dominate a much smaller range of media coverage leading to a more profound cultural impact. While being on fewer channels, they'd be on a greater proportion of the whole media landscape.
I think that pushes the dial in both directions. When something is targeted at all, they have to stay around the median to encompass the largest population.
Transformational change happens to a society when something that is targeted beyond the median becomes popular and drags the world with it.
You hear a lot of talk about the Overton window these days. I have heard it raised frequently as an argument for deplatforming. It strikes me as a profound misunderstanding of what the Overton window represents. People argue that you should suppress ideas you disagree with so that the measurement of the Overton window shows an opinion that is under-sampled against your adversary and consequently moves in the direction you prefer. This one of the most damaging examples of Goodhart's law that I know of.
To stick with the music analogy, I think if Guns 'n' Roses appeared before the Beatles there would have been a significant negative response from the public (although I would really like to pull an open minded musical expert out of history to capture their experiences of modern music). Some experts favour protecting the establishment, while others are the very first to realise the significance of a revolutionary new thing.
People are generally repelled by objectionable views and while the Overton window suggests that the notion of what is objectionable might change over time, suppressing objectionable views removes that repulsion from them while simultaneously being an act that many find objectionable. Both changes cause the dominant public opinion to move in the same direction, the opposite to what the people attempting to control the dialog desire. At the same time making the Overton window harder to measure, obscuring their failure.
The decline of deviance could be thought of as either a shrinking or expansion of the standard deviation of the Overton window. It depends upon your perspective and if you consider objective measures of variance to be more significant to subjective measures.
When the Overton window is much wider, there are a much broader set of opinions in the world, but also, by definition with the same level of acceptance as a compressed window. everything within the window is accepted. You could interpret that as a decline in deviance because you just don't consider the range of things accepted to be deviant.
When the Overton window is narrow, social pressures cause people to restrict their behaviour, which would also be considered a decline in deviance. On the other hand it would take much less to be considered deviant.
This makes me wonder if you need a second order Overton to measure the acceptability of opinions relative to their proportionate position on the Overton window. Would such a measurement measure polarisation? I would imagine that the ideal arrangement, no matter what the width of the Overton window was, would be a slower decline in acceptance of things that are disagreed with.
Once again though. If you started measuring this, would it become a target, and subject to gaming?
A number of comments have suggested lead poisoning, but I think that's far too facile an answer. Perhaps it explains a bit, but does lead poisoning make you prefer original movies to sequels or to have better musical taste? If so, I say bring back the lead! ;-)
The article author presents a life expectancy explanation, but I think that's even less plausible than lead poisoning. When I was a teenager, I wasn't thinking about how long I would live, and it would have made no difference whether life expectancy was 60, 70, 80, or 90. Does it make any sense at all that teens drink alcohol and smoke pot if they believe they'll live to 70 but not if they believe they'll live to 90?
One thing that has definitely changed is parenting styles. I was a stereotypical "latchkey kid". Between the end of school and the beginning of dinner, I was free to go anywhere and do anything with no adult supervision. This was very common among GenX. However, later generations suffered from "helicopter parents" who won't let their kids out of their sight and arranged "playdates" and other organized activities for their kids, not allowing them to spontaneously choose for themselves. I suspect a lot of that was inspired by fear, American's Most Wanted and similar fearmongering about stranger danger and child abduction.
There's probably not just one factor to explain everything. Corporate consolidation, for example, also explains many cultural changes, and such consolidation has been occurring and growing over the course of many decades, even before the internet.
The original movies thing probably had more to do with ownership of theaters and IP spread over a much larger number of companies, as you say with the corporate consolidation. A huge amount of consolidation has occurred and it's not something instantly noticeable.
For anyone saying bring back the lead, most of the problems there weren't obvious or out in the open. You're bringing back even more abuse and dark things.
> For anyone saying bring back the lead
Sigh. Nobody is saying that.
Dear sir, surely you jest! You were the one saying bring back the lead
>but does lead poisoning make you prefer original movies to sequels or to have better musical taste? If so, I say bring back the lead! ;-)
He is jesting... and stop calling me Shirley.
I don't even know what to make of these replies. The "generous" interpretations are that you're trolling me, or you're a non-native speaker of English.
Either that, or you've personally suffered from severe lead poisoning.
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