Re:AI is killing some companies, yet others are thriving – l...
by dredmorbius on Tuesday March 04, 2025 @07:39AM
(#43253748)
Found that reference I was looking for, "Geeks, MOPs, and sociopaths in subculture evolution" by David Chapman, ~2015, <https://meaningness.com/geeks-mops-sociopaths>.
Before there is a subculture, there is a scene. A scene is a small group of creators who invent an exciting New Thing—a musical genre, a religious sect, a film animation technique, a political theory. Riffing off each other, they produce examples and variants, and share them for mutual enjoyment, generating positive energy.
The new scene draws fanatics...
I've mentioned that previously on HN as well as the Fediverse:
There's a description of the latter I've spent far too long trying to track down without joy.
There's a passage from Charles Perrow's book Complex Organisation giving several examples of organisational drift (not necessarily decline), posted previously: <https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=27415476>.
One of the more spectacular cases of organisational decline was the (formerly literary) magazine American Mercury, founded by amongst others H.L. Mencken. It eventually became an anti-semitic rag, now mostly or completely dead, though it seems to keep zombying annoyingly.
<https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_American_Mercury>
There's also video challen TLC, begun as a partnership between Nasa and PBS, now somewhat reduced as well.