"These people were neither artists nor weirdos. They were normal folks who knew good deviance when they saw it, and they decided to let it live." This right here is the most important line of the essay. You can have, and we probably have many Arturos out there, but do we have "normal folks" who can tell what good deviance is and have the dog in them to let it be alive in the world?
One way to get more interestingness in the world is by showing more "weird people" examples, so for a third post, haha, I would love to see more of your favorite examples of deviance, stories, art, movies, essays, books, anything and everything.
I'll give you my favorite two: Carl Woese and Michael Milken.
Maybe a third and fourth, too: Matt Farley and Christopher Xu.
A theory that explains the decline of deviance should also be able to explain the increase of deviance 1960s to 1990s, right? I’m not sure that increasing prosperity can do that.
I love that William James passage! and his framing of poverty as the “moral equivalent of war” but without the casualties. The strenuous life brings forth the highest powers of the soul that would otherwise lie dormant. He goes on to say that "the prevalent fear of poverty among the educated classes is the worst moral disease from which our civilization suffers." - and that's in 1902..
Also that Komar & Melamid paper is super cool, thank you for surfacing it!
My take, which you cover here with the lawyer example, is that the default path is too comfortable, so there isn't the incentive to go and do the other thing, even if that is ultimately what would make you happier.
(Maybe I'm just projecting as someone who slid into a well paying tech job post college. I didn't start expanding beyond what I was doing until I got miserable enough to make a change)
I'm glad to hear people have more tolerance for deviance and perhaps that's part of the reason there's less "perceived" deviance.
I always find comfort in the fact that there will always be "weirdos" people who push the boundaries because they can't not push the boundaries. And not all of them will be co-opted by capitalism.
also about the arts, I find myself living among more artists today in my low income rural community than ever before, so yeah lack of resources isn't really a barrier to creativity.
about the music thing, I'm a Boomer, nearly a decade ago I divided all the music on my iPod (the classic kind that can hold your whole library) into playlists by time periods of my life, the play lists that I want to listen to the most are the two most recent ones (1996-2017 and 2017-present day) while those include artists that I became interested in in the 1970's and 1980's (like Springsteen, James Taylor) I prefer listening to their more recent albums, and most of those playlists are from groups/individuals that only appeared in the past 30 years. Rarely I'll go on a nostalgia kick - took a short driving trip recently where all I listened to was The Beatles at the BBC - but I don't really have much tolerance these days for the music that I loved in the 60's and the 70's.
For music: can it be that each generation prefers the whole body of music that was accessible to them when they were young? There was no medium revolution after streaming and basically all music is accessible in streaming in decent quality, so that might be the reason why GenZ are are so omnivorous.
Late capitalism baby. Anything and everything that can be sucked into the maw of commerce can and will (says this original punk). Your observations could be accompanied by a chart showing the consolidation of economic power over the decades. We appear to have more choice than every before, but as you point out, those choices have been flattened and homogenized so that we don't even realize what we've lost. For instance (this speaks to your poverty observation), I still am amazed at how many people don't flinch at the huge number of subscriptions they own (see cultural theory on techno-feudalism). Back in the day we balked at paying for monthly phone service. When everything is rented (streamed, etc), the only thing we own are fetish objects (vinyl, collectibles). This changed out emotional and intellectual relationship to culture, even before the advent of GAI. The rising cost of live performance is partly economic, partly a reflection of the yearning for authenticity.
> The lesson here is that when people can articulate exactly what they want, and when the marketplace can give it to them, most folks end up sucking down slop.
This doesn't feel right to me -- the evolution of media over the past ~decade has been away from anything rooted in people's _articulated_ wants, and towards algorithmic focus on the revealed preference of what makes you spend more time on the app/keep scrolling/keep watching/etc.
That feels like what drives the expedition to sloptown -- in a world where you saw tweets from the people you followed, or posts from the subreddits you, or the videos of creators you subscribed to, there were more opportunities to opt in to the friction. But now that we live in a world where platforms provide content based on the algorithm, we experience a (powerful! extremely well-optimized!) tide sweeping us endlessly away from friction and towards the path of least resistance.
Our articulated desire operates on some sightly higher level than our base instinct (which is good, and right.) We don't want to eat the bag of chips, but we will if it's open in front of us. We want to grow or learn, but we find the content that does so more challenging (and thus more likely to bounce off it) than well-optimized brainrot. If we are where "the falling angel meets the rising ape", our expressed desires are somewhat more angelic than our revealed preferences. It's a pity the time-spent metrics care only about the latter.
I had one of the top comments re: technological homogenization on the original post, and "the internet not showing us weird things" is definitely not what I meant by that. I'm not implying that this post's section was taking that comment into consideration, but in any case, technological homogenization is way older and goes way beyond anything that could be directly attributed to internet-connected devices.
The effects of technologization can't be reduced to the advent of the internet. Taking the internet as a stand-in for tech in order to suggest that forces related to tech (like the reduction of life to data & metrics) can't be an original cause because of timeline issues is an interpretive move that makes me pretty uncomfortable, whether that's going on here or not.
Mastroianni doesn't miss: somehow every one of his posts is an absolute banger, both fun to read and genuinely insightful.
"These people were neither artists nor weirdos. They were normal folks who knew good deviance when they saw it, and they decided to let it live." This right here is the most important line of the essay. You can have, and we probably have many Arturos out there, but do we have "normal folks" who can tell what good deviance is and have the dog in them to let it be alive in the world?
One way to get more interestingness in the world is by showing more "weird people" examples, so for a third post, haha, I would love to see more of your favorite examples of deviance, stories, art, movies, essays, books, anything and everything.
I'll give you my favorite two: Carl Woese and Michael Milken.
Maybe a third and fourth, too: Matt Farley and Christopher Xu.
Ohhh, I have a few more, but I'll stop now.
A theory that explains the decline of deviance should also be able to explain the increase of deviance 1960s to 1990s, right? I’m not sure that increasing prosperity can do that.
Thinking of Anna Karenina's famous opening. Fracturing from collective massive trauma (bad) and culture shock (sometimes good) of WWII parents?
I love that William James passage! and his framing of poverty as the “moral equivalent of war” but without the casualties. The strenuous life brings forth the highest powers of the soul that would otherwise lie dormant. He goes on to say that "the prevalent fear of poverty among the educated classes is the worst moral disease from which our civilization suffers." - and that's in 1902..
Also that Komar & Melamid paper is super cool, thank you for surfacing it!
Brilliant!
2min into the voiceover and I just know I'm gonna love it !
My take, which you cover here with the lawyer example, is that the default path is too comfortable, so there isn't the incentive to go and do the other thing, even if that is ultimately what would make you happier.
(Maybe I'm just projecting as someone who slid into a well paying tech job post college. I didn't start expanding beyond what I was doing until I got miserable enough to make a change)
"One common retort to my argument was that I’m just an old fuddy-duddy."
Adam, is not yet 40 a fuddy-duddy?
What is the average age of everyone in the Science House?
I'm glad to hear people have more tolerance for deviance and perhaps that's part of the reason there's less "perceived" deviance.
I always find comfort in the fact that there will always be "weirdos" people who push the boundaries because they can't not push the boundaries. And not all of them will be co-opted by capitalism.
also about the arts, I find myself living among more artists today in my low income rural community than ever before, so yeah lack of resources isn't really a barrier to creativity.
See https://reflectionsofasociologist.substack.com/p/the-arts-and-artists-flourish-in
On the other hand, gig economy workers depend upon the existence of stable, if not necessarily highly affluent client base. See https://reflectionsofasociologist.substack.com/p/will-a-gig-economy-work
about the music thing, I'm a Boomer, nearly a decade ago I divided all the music on my iPod (the classic kind that can hold your whole library) into playlists by time periods of my life, the play lists that I want to listen to the most are the two most recent ones (1996-2017 and 2017-present day) while those include artists that I became interested in in the 1970's and 1980's (like Springsteen, James Taylor) I prefer listening to their more recent albums, and most of those playlists are from groups/individuals that only appeared in the past 30 years. Rarely I'll go on a nostalgia kick - took a short driving trip recently where all I listened to was The Beatles at the BBC - but I don't really have much tolerance these days for the music that I loved in the 60's and the 70's.
For music: can it be that each generation prefers the whole body of music that was accessible to them when they were young? There was no medium revolution after streaming and basically all music is accessible in streaming in decent quality, so that might be the reason why GenZ are are so omnivorous.
Late capitalism baby. Anything and everything that can be sucked into the maw of commerce can and will (says this original punk). Your observations could be accompanied by a chart showing the consolidation of economic power over the decades. We appear to have more choice than every before, but as you point out, those choices have been flattened and homogenized so that we don't even realize what we've lost. For instance (this speaks to your poverty observation), I still am amazed at how many people don't flinch at the huge number of subscriptions they own (see cultural theory on techno-feudalism). Back in the day we balked at paying for monthly phone service. When everything is rented (streamed, etc), the only thing we own are fetish objects (vinyl, collectibles). This changed out emotional and intellectual relationship to culture, even before the advent of GAI. The rising cost of live performance is partly economic, partly a reflection of the yearning for authenticity.
> The lesson here is that when people can articulate exactly what they want, and when the marketplace can give it to them, most folks end up sucking down slop.
This doesn't feel right to me -- the evolution of media over the past ~decade has been away from anything rooted in people's _articulated_ wants, and towards algorithmic focus on the revealed preference of what makes you spend more time on the app/keep scrolling/keep watching/etc.
That feels like what drives the expedition to sloptown -- in a world where you saw tweets from the people you followed, or posts from the subreddits you, or the videos of creators you subscribed to, there were more opportunities to opt in to the friction. But now that we live in a world where platforms provide content based on the algorithm, we experience a (powerful! extremely well-optimized!) tide sweeping us endlessly away from friction and towards the path of least resistance.
Our articulated desire operates on some sightly higher level than our base instinct (which is good, and right.) We don't want to eat the bag of chips, but we will if it's open in front of us. We want to grow or learn, but we find the content that does so more challenging (and thus more likely to bounce off it) than well-optimized brainrot. If we are where "the falling angel meets the rising ape", our expressed desires are somewhat more angelic than our revealed preferences. It's a pity the time-spent metrics care only about the latter.
I had one of the top comments re: technological homogenization on the original post, and "the internet not showing us weird things" is definitely not what I meant by that. I'm not implying that this post's section was taking that comment into consideration, but in any case, technological homogenization is way older and goes way beyond anything that could be directly attributed to internet-connected devices.
The effects of technologization can't be reduced to the advent of the internet. Taking the internet as a stand-in for tech in order to suggest that forces related to tech (like the reduction of life to data & metrics) can't be an original cause because of timeline issues is an interpretive move that makes me pretty uncomfortable, whether that's going on here or not.