Deviance is all around, the author is too trapped in a bubble to see it.
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_.
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
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.
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 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.
Let's send the author to a furry con.
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.
And let's not forget that protest songs aren't usually promoted by those in power...
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.
That's exactly the kind of stuff everybody is saying that doesn't count. It's not deviant if everybody is doing it.
The only thing that this may say is that in USA the regime fights dissent in mainstream media. Like, if you want to catch signs of a product made out of popular discontent, you can't e.g. find in UK charts the Sleaford Mods or Kneecap?
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."
Which is why this Jesse Welles's stuff hits me like a freight train
it’s your own damn fault you’re so damn fat / Shame shame shame
All the food on the shelf was engineered for your health / So you’re gonna have to take the blame
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.
Absent mass automated surveillance, the state's ability to do so at scale was limited.
Once implemented (and processed and stored), norms on use erode over time... and then anyone anomalous is being auto background-checked when showing up in a new area.
Or do we think someone won't find a use for all the dark datacenter GPU power after AI pops?
That is the historical norm. Is it supposed to be a new concept?
Even the most closed societies (say, East Germany, the USSR, and the DPRK) only accomplished a fraction of what's now technically possible, and that historical analogue through a massive human labor force.
The norm is that you're born somewhere and you stay there forever. Everyone there knows you and they've known you since you, or they, were born. If a traveler happens to show up, everyone can recognize immediately, by looking at their face, that they're from somewhere else. Strangers get low levels of trust.
It has changed a lot about my life, and I am so much happier. And have so much more privacy, given I also only use cash in public. I am mostly invisible when away from home, digitally.
Yet here you are. Oops.
Turns out you do not need to be reachable or stay connected with the lives of far away people every second of every day.
That said, while wandering off jobless is a ticking clock, it is easier than ever to work remotely while wandering. And if you have property rented while you're away, you can get some of the deviance without digging too much of a hole for yourself.
That used to be support, graphic design, and writing, but all are being offshored or replaced by AI. Marketing more broadly probably is one of the few career paths I can think of that is still viable remotely, excluding the groups I mentioned before.
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.
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.
It may be a game for someone who's already rich, but it's not for most people, and if you add kids to the equation, well, that's much more difficult because it requires time which we don't have, or if we have it then it means we don't have money.
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.
Cultural gatekeepers are able to exerti 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.
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.
See every content producer following the posting schedule exactly, because the Algorithm punishes deviance from the schedule. Not everyone can be Captain Disillusion.
That’s my favorite John Mayer song
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?"
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.
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.
I agree that there's a general decline in criminality (which is good) and general risk-taking (which is mixed). I don't see that this is strongly connected to wealth-seeking, given that overall wealth has increased for the majority of people and offset some of the risk involved when sacrificing income and wealth for other values.
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.
https://www.amazon.com/Against-Creativity-Oli-Mould-ebook/dp...
Has anyone here had the chance to have a frank conversation which such types? Morbid curiosity...
Than the previous couple of generations, sure. But, in most places, far _more_ than those born late in the 19th century, say. That in itself isn't a great explanation.
If you were totally destitute in 1900 or 1800 you might starve. But the costs incurred on your way back up were more like steps than cliffs.
"Back up?" Ever heard of workhouses, or debtors' prisons? There wasn't a 'back up', generally.
Basically, our abandonment of shared identities (national, religious, cultural) has allowed status and market forces to rush in to give people meaning and identity.
Obviously a take that will ruffle some feathers, but I found it fairly convincing.
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.)