It's ironic that he describes social media as an own goal but there isn't the introspection accompanying it that would lead to the obvious point you've made so well.

Everyone in SV wants to be "up and to the right" in every quadrant map of anything. How comforting to simplify life to those terms, to exceptional winners and conventional deadweight. But if society takes your myopic vision and resulting creation and then eats itself and all its democratic institutions, to paraphrase Prinicpal Skinner:

"Am I so out of touch? No, it's the users who are wrong."

Absolutely! You can see it in this thread, even. There are folks excited by the prospect of using the phrase "aggressively non-conformist".

pg is providing memetic ammunition for the very "culture wars" he claims he's trying to sit out. No introspection (or at least no _evidence_ of introspection), exactly as you say.

If many people find agreements with a person's notions of conformity, by the evidence of the popularity of their writings, does that make these people conformists, and therefore engenders conformist attitudes towards the author's point of view on non-conformity?

Genuinely pondering.

I think the one-dimension "conformist" / "non-comformist" axis isn't useful.

We all participate in orthodoxies that we're blind to (or at least not fully aware of). The only questions are "Which ones?" and "What are the consequences of our participation?"

In that sense, we're all "conformists".

Society's only protagonist is the individual

Society isn't a story and therefore doesn't have a protagonist.

Did you just invalidate your own prior comment? Very meta…or maybe your comment was just about your own insecurities, relative to pg?