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.
"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.
Although personally, I think cyberspace means the end of our species."
“Yes? Why is that?”
“Because it means the end of innovation,” Malcolm said. "This idea that the whole world is wired together is mass death. Every biologist knows that small groups in isolation evolve fastest. You put a thousand birds on an ocean island and they’ll evolve very fast. You put ten thousand on a big continent, and their evolution slows down. Now, for our own species, evolution occurs mostly through our behavior. We innovavate new behavior to adapt. And everybody on earth knows that innovation only occurs in small groups. Put three people on a committee and they may get something done. Ten people, and it gets harder. Thirty people, and nothing happens. Thirty million, it becomes impossible. That’s the effect of mass media - it keeps anything from happening. Mass media swamps diversity. It makes every place the same. Bangkok or Tokyo or London: there’s a McDonald’s on one corner, a Benneton on another, a Gap across the street. Regional differences vanish. All differences vanish. In a mass-media world, there’s less of everything except the top ten books, records, movies, ideas. People worry about losing species diversity in the rain forest. But what about intellectual diversity - our most necessary resource? That’s disappearing faster than trees. But we haven’t figured that out, so now we’re planning to put five billion people together in cyberspace. And it’ll freeze the entire species. Everything will stop dead in its tracks. Everyone will think the same thing at the same time. Global uniformity…
“And believe me, it’ll be fast. If you map complex systems on a fitness landscape, you find the behavior can move so fast that fitness can drop precipitously. It doesn’t require asteroids or diseases or anything else. It’s just behavior that suddenly emerges, and turns out to be fatal to the creatures that do it. My idea was that dinosaurs - being complex creatures - might have undergone some of these behavioral changes. And that led to their extinction.”
“What, all of them?”
“It just takes a few,” Malcolm said. “Some dinosaur roots in the swamps around the inland sea, changes the water circulation, and destroys the plant ecology that twenty other species depend on. Bang! They’re gone. That causes still more dislocations. A predator dies off, and its prey grow unchecked. The ecosystem becomes unbalanced. More things go wrong. More species die. And suddenly it’s over. It could have happened that way.”
What’s interesting about the remarkable prescience of this passage is that it was so easy back then to imagine it might work the opposite way (and many people thought this at the time). I think there’s a certain sweet spot where more and faster communication can lead to greater diversity, and then beyond this it reverses. Or maybe, several different local maxima and minima depending on what’s happening. I also suspect a lot of diversity is increasingly driven underground or is otherwise harder to detect unless you know where to look.
Greetings from Iceland, the country that did not wait for the magic.
You write that the decline of deviance happened "by magic, for free", as unplanned byproduct of prosperity, and that nobody knows how to reproduce it. But in Iceland we actually did it on purpose. From the late 1990s the decline was engineered here: legal curfew for teenagers, agreements between parents, subsidized leisure cards, and organized sports and activities that fill every unsupervised hour. Teen drinking, smoking and drug use collapsed, one of the biggest drops recorded anywhere, and today this model is exported to many countries under the name Planet Youth. So there exists at least one proof that a society can eliminate deviance deliberately, not only inherit it from some long-lost aunt.
But here comes the uncomfortable part, and I think it supports your worry about innovation. Heavy metal came from factory towns that nobody planned. Punk came from unemployed kids that nobody supervised. Grunge came from bored teenagers in garages in Seattle. Every musical revolution grew from the same soil: boredom, no supervision, unstructured time. This is exactly the soil the Icelandic model removes, deliberately and with very good results. We saved the teenagers from the bottle. Maybe we also scheduled away the garage where the next revolution would have been born.
Really pumped for The Decline of Deviance: If You Catch My Drift, which will come out next, but actually takes place just before Deviance 7. Gonna be a wild ride.
> 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 like your comment and agree with it but I think your initial criticism is mildly misplaced. I understand “people can articulate what they want” and “revealed preference” to be the same thing. And as you note: what we (think we) want is so often BAD. So much great innovative technology and so much great and memorable art is very often angering, perplexing and controversial at first. It is only later with the passage of time that we realize it stuck in our head and, in hindsight only, do we recognize its greatness. Think about how often, to use a trivial example, the Oscar winner from decades past seems middling and even laughable, and the truly great movie(s) that year did not win nor were even nominated. We aren’t very good at recognizing greatness in the moment. And if we articulated what we wanted in less satisfying seeming works…we would probably ruin them! For example, at risk of spoiling, almost everyone I know found the ending for one key character in No Country For Old Men very unsatisfactory. I feel sure that in 2007, even the most discerning audience member would have wanted to see a little more of that character’s story, and changed the ending if they could have. I would have! And almost 20 years later it’s universally acclaimed as a masterpiece and that characters fate still leaves me faintly wanting different…but I know I am wrong!
Algorithm designed storytelling and AI would absolutely give me the ending I want….and so much worse a movie. I do think that’s what our author is getting at here…and I thing that’s what you’re saying too, yes?
Anyway that’s what I think. I still liked your comment even if you disagree.
"And almost 20 years later it’s universally acclaimed as a masterpiece..."
Because I am a recalcitrant deviant, I think the movie is shit and that, in general, Cormac McCarthy, while sometimes brilliant at portraying isolated scenes, couldn't write a decent plot to save his life.
Having gotten that off my chest, I do agree with your general point.
Alluded to but not focused on: less boredom! Even before the internet, accelerating a trend since the 50s but really peaking in late 90s and early 2000s was just a much much bigger “content library” growing larger and more accessible every year. My dad did not have Perry Como, he had Beatles to Hendrix to Eagles et al. Nothing earlier. My CDs and mix tapes included 80s and 90s hits but also included lots of what my dad loved. My son’s playlists include all those plus Kendrick and Taylor et al. Did not have streaming in 2002 but DID start to see box sets of tv shows and you soon heard people embarrassed to admit they had binged the entire first season of 24 in a weekend…Or could BUY Star Trek original series AND next generation . In 1997 Star Wars trilogy was re-released (unheard of before then at that scaled. And basically everyone I knew owned it (plus prequel trilogy) on DVD by 2005. 24 hour movie channels. 24 hour sports channels. Culture came and … stayed. Who would ever find themselves on Saturday with nothing to watch or read? Happened all through my childhood that there was just nothing new to read and had to wait days or weeks for something to come to video store or a new episode of something or any sports event….wait wait wait. But I am bored NOW! What to do? Get drunk. Get high. Hang out with friends and get up to no good. But so much of that I probably would not have done if there was something to provide stimulation at home. Why go out?
I don’t know, pretty basic but I think binge culture or recycled culture or content library or however you want to describe it really started to take off in late 90s and early 2000s, and not with advent of streaming and social media and smart phones a decade later. This seems to coincide with your observed decline of deviance. And what drove people to take risks in “my day” was sheer boredom so much of the time! I haven’t had time to be bored since this millennium kicked off…maybe that’s just me!
(* I do not mean to imply this is good either. As you note: lot of great art and innovation comes from deviance. I think much of that is driven by boredom too. I wrote a lot of (bad) stories in my younger years, and took a stab at music, art, etc too. I really wasn’t driven by an artistic urge or creative energy so much as… you guessed it. Boredom! We need to bring back boredom in my opinion!!)
I think you're on to something. (Lack of) boredom is underrated as a possible causal factor.
Boredom can be a source of both destructive and creative behavior, and the "risk" of experiencing boredom has been steadily decreasing since the advent of VCRs, cable TV, and the Walkman.
1) I am middle aged and not particularly artsy or cool, but I know people in their 20s, doing arts, who accept perhaps not the level of poverty leading to rough sleeping/squatting in rat infested abandoned warehouses (we have welfare benefits on this side of the pond) but most certainly a level of poverty that would make flying to weddings completely prohibitive, and also never having a wedding to fly to. So while I'm not questioning OP's main point on rising affluence, I'm saying that the idea that anyone who is capable of doing art is also capable of earning a comfortable salary WITHOUT DRIVING THEMSELVES TO MISERY seems evidently false to me.
2) This one is perhaps more controversial. While any INDIVIDUAL person is better not being a pregnant teenager with a drug problem and a stack of STIs, these are long tail costs to the benefits of low-level "deviancy" that consist of getting out of your house, meeting other humans, having intense and formative experiences including getting drunk and having sex. And that fewer young people are having sex or getting occasionally drunk is not in itself an obvious win to me. It seems more like a cost of the win consisting in less teen mothers and drug addicted burglars.
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.
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!
This is great. Has anyone mentioned to you the work on lead and behavior by the late journalist Kevin Drum? His cross-country graphs, showing the impact of outlawing leaded gasoline on crime ~18 years later, are hugely eye-opening. Ending the widespread lead poisoning of US kids born in the 60s and early 70s was hugely important; lowering lead exposure even more was a very underappreciated policy proposal by Hillary Clinton.
Re: increasing speed of carcinization … when recorded music began to proliferate, Irving Berlin complained that the hit song cycle was becoming too short. Before recording, “hit songs” would circulate for decades. It might take a year for a song to even get off the ground. 100 years later, a hit can be a day
On the topic of music: One example of carcinization is how the boundaries have blurred between various types of pop. Rap is more sing-song-y than ever, converging with what we used to call R&B. The boundaries between electronic and typical pop have collapsed thanks to EDM. Rock music has all but vanished from the top of the charts. Pop music, without question, seems far less diverse, less deviant, and far narrower in range than it was even 10 years ago.
The “best decade of music” graph seems to be largely explainable by (bad) survey design.
This survey makes the Silent Generation look monolithic by collapsing much of their range into a single category. They were born from 1928 to 1945, but the first option, “1950s or some earlier decade,” covers music released when they were anywhere from 14 to 31 years old. If we compress the other generations’ distributions the same way (beginning with the first decade after the youngest members were born), they cluster even more strongly: 72% of Boomers choose 1970s or earlier, 83% of Gen X pick 1980s or earlier, 73% of Millennials select 2000s or earlier, and Gen Z has only a single option, which 75% of them choose. (Interestingly, the total reported percentages also shrink by generation: 93, 92, 89, 83, 75. )
My guess is that this graph is actually measuring the availability of good-quality recorded music. People’s tastes tend to anchor somewhere in their teens and twenties, so what you hear before about age 30 often becomes your permanent musical home base. As recorded music became cheaper and easier to access, it’s easier to explore earlier decades.
I partly agree with Adam here—the more you age, the less you’re connected to the most interesting parts of culture. But I also think that there’s more to it than that: it’s easier to explore the music of previous decades than it used to be. In addition, we have additional decades of survivorship bias to help filter out the junk from the past. The Silent Generation respondents who picked the 1990s as the best decade had to listen to all of it—the good, the bad, and the ugly. Someone from Gen Z, however, is usually only hearing the survivors—the songs from before 2000 that are people still like enough to play. That makes those decades seem stronger than they really were.
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.
That might be due to lead (from gasoline and paint). In fact, I wonder if all of this rise and fall in deviance (murder, drugs, etc.) is just a story about how much lead (which evidently tends to muck up self-control, as well as make people more stupid) humans ingest.
Caffeine also evolved independently multiple times since it's an effective insecticide. It evolved in coffee beans, tea plants, chocolate/cacao, guarana, yerba mate, and citrus.
Mastroianni doesn't miss: somehow every one of his posts is an absolute banger, both fun to read and genuinely insightful.
Ha. Haven't heard anyone use the word banger in a while. This piece is that!
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.
"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.
May I suggest that you go check out the delightful substack Rabbit Cavern, which tends to spotlight such people?
From The Lost World by Crichton:
Although personally, I think cyberspace means the end of our species."
“Yes? Why is that?”
“Because it means the end of innovation,” Malcolm said. "This idea that the whole world is wired together is mass death. Every biologist knows that small groups in isolation evolve fastest. You put a thousand birds on an ocean island and they’ll evolve very fast. You put ten thousand on a big continent, and their evolution slows down. Now, for our own species, evolution occurs mostly through our behavior. We innovavate new behavior to adapt. And everybody on earth knows that innovation only occurs in small groups. Put three people on a committee and they may get something done. Ten people, and it gets harder. Thirty people, and nothing happens. Thirty million, it becomes impossible. That’s the effect of mass media - it keeps anything from happening. Mass media swamps diversity. It makes every place the same. Bangkok or Tokyo or London: there’s a McDonald’s on one corner, a Benneton on another, a Gap across the street. Regional differences vanish. All differences vanish. In a mass-media world, there’s less of everything except the top ten books, records, movies, ideas. People worry about losing species diversity in the rain forest. But what about intellectual diversity - our most necessary resource? That’s disappearing faster than trees. But we haven’t figured that out, so now we’re planning to put five billion people together in cyberspace. And it’ll freeze the entire species. Everything will stop dead in its tracks. Everyone will think the same thing at the same time. Global uniformity…
“And believe me, it’ll be fast. If you map complex systems on a fitness landscape, you find the behavior can move so fast that fitness can drop precipitously. It doesn’t require asteroids or diseases or anything else. It’s just behavior that suddenly emerges, and turns out to be fatal to the creatures that do it. My idea was that dinosaurs - being complex creatures - might have undergone some of these behavioral changes. And that led to their extinction.”
“What, all of them?”
“It just takes a few,” Malcolm said. “Some dinosaur roots in the swamps around the inland sea, changes the water circulation, and destroys the plant ecology that twenty other species depend on. Bang! They’re gone. That causes still more dislocations. A predator dies off, and its prey grow unchecked. The ecosystem becomes unbalanced. More things go wrong. More species die. And suddenly it’s over. It could have happened that way.”
What’s interesting about the remarkable prescience of this passage is that it was so easy back then to imagine it might work the opposite way (and many people thought this at the time). I think there’s a certain sweet spot where more and faster communication can lead to greater diversity, and then beyond this it reverses. Or maybe, several different local maxima and minima depending on what’s happening. I also suspect a lot of diversity is increasingly driven underground or is otherwise harder to detect unless you know where to look.
It really is an incredible insight. Using evolutionary theory as a model of behavioral innovation is just so excellent
Greetings from Iceland, the country that did not wait for the magic.
You write that the decline of deviance happened "by magic, for free", as unplanned byproduct of prosperity, and that nobody knows how to reproduce it. But in Iceland we actually did it on purpose. From the late 1990s the decline was engineered here: legal curfew for teenagers, agreements between parents, subsidized leisure cards, and organized sports and activities that fill every unsupervised hour. Teen drinking, smoking and drug use collapsed, one of the biggest drops recorded anywhere, and today this model is exported to many countries under the name Planet Youth. So there exists at least one proof that a society can eliminate deviance deliberately, not only inherit it from some long-lost aunt.
But here comes the uncomfortable part, and I think it supports your worry about innovation. Heavy metal came from factory towns that nobody planned. Punk came from unemployed kids that nobody supervised. Grunge came from bored teenagers in garages in Seattle. Every musical revolution grew from the same soil: boredom, no supervision, unstructured time. This is exactly the soil the Icelandic model removes, deliberately and with very good results. We saved the teenagers from the bottle. Maybe we also scheduled away the garage where the next revolution would have been born.
Really pumped for The Decline of Deviance: If You Catch My Drift, which will come out next, but actually takes place just before Deviance 7. Gonna be a wild ride.
> 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 like your comment and agree with it but I think your initial criticism is mildly misplaced. I understand “people can articulate what they want” and “revealed preference” to be the same thing. And as you note: what we (think we) want is so often BAD. So much great innovative technology and so much great and memorable art is very often angering, perplexing and controversial at first. It is only later with the passage of time that we realize it stuck in our head and, in hindsight only, do we recognize its greatness. Think about how often, to use a trivial example, the Oscar winner from decades past seems middling and even laughable, and the truly great movie(s) that year did not win nor were even nominated. We aren’t very good at recognizing greatness in the moment. And if we articulated what we wanted in less satisfying seeming works…we would probably ruin them! For example, at risk of spoiling, almost everyone I know found the ending for one key character in No Country For Old Men very unsatisfactory. I feel sure that in 2007, even the most discerning audience member would have wanted to see a little more of that character’s story, and changed the ending if they could have. I would have! And almost 20 years later it’s universally acclaimed as a masterpiece and that characters fate still leaves me faintly wanting different…but I know I am wrong!
Algorithm designed storytelling and AI would absolutely give me the ending I want….and so much worse a movie. I do think that’s what our author is getting at here…and I thing that’s what you’re saying too, yes?
Anyway that’s what I think. I still liked your comment even if you disagree.
"And almost 20 years later it’s universally acclaimed as a masterpiece..."
Because I am a recalcitrant deviant, I think the movie is shit and that, in general, Cormac McCarthy, while sometimes brilliant at portraying isolated scenes, couldn't write a decent plot to save his life.
Having gotten that off my chest, I do agree with your general point.
Alluded to but not focused on: less boredom! Even before the internet, accelerating a trend since the 50s but really peaking in late 90s and early 2000s was just a much much bigger “content library” growing larger and more accessible every year. My dad did not have Perry Como, he had Beatles to Hendrix to Eagles et al. Nothing earlier. My CDs and mix tapes included 80s and 90s hits but also included lots of what my dad loved. My son’s playlists include all those plus Kendrick and Taylor et al. Did not have streaming in 2002 but DID start to see box sets of tv shows and you soon heard people embarrassed to admit they had binged the entire first season of 24 in a weekend…Or could BUY Star Trek original series AND next generation . In 1997 Star Wars trilogy was re-released (unheard of before then at that scaled. And basically everyone I knew owned it (plus prequel trilogy) on DVD by 2005. 24 hour movie channels. 24 hour sports channels. Culture came and … stayed. Who would ever find themselves on Saturday with nothing to watch or read? Happened all through my childhood that there was just nothing new to read and had to wait days or weeks for something to come to video store or a new episode of something or any sports event….wait wait wait. But I am bored NOW! What to do? Get drunk. Get high. Hang out with friends and get up to no good. But so much of that I probably would not have done if there was something to provide stimulation at home. Why go out?
I don’t know, pretty basic but I think binge culture or recycled culture or content library or however you want to describe it really started to take off in late 90s and early 2000s, and not with advent of streaming and social media and smart phones a decade later. This seems to coincide with your observed decline of deviance. And what drove people to take risks in “my day” was sheer boredom so much of the time! I haven’t had time to be bored since this millennium kicked off…maybe that’s just me!
(* I do not mean to imply this is good either. As you note: lot of great art and innovation comes from deviance. I think much of that is driven by boredom too. I wrote a lot of (bad) stories in my younger years, and took a stab at music, art, etc too. I really wasn’t driven by an artistic urge or creative energy so much as… you guessed it. Boredom! We need to bring back boredom in my opinion!!)
I think you're on to something. (Lack of) boredom is underrated as a possible causal factor.
Boredom can be a source of both destructive and creative behavior, and the "risk" of experiencing boredom has been steadily decreasing since the advent of VCRs, cable TV, and the Walkman.
Two thoughts.
1) I am middle aged and not particularly artsy or cool, but I know people in their 20s, doing arts, who accept perhaps not the level of poverty leading to rough sleeping/squatting in rat infested abandoned warehouses (we have welfare benefits on this side of the pond) but most certainly a level of poverty that would make flying to weddings completely prohibitive, and also never having a wedding to fly to. So while I'm not questioning OP's main point on rising affluence, I'm saying that the idea that anyone who is capable of doing art is also capable of earning a comfortable salary WITHOUT DRIVING THEMSELVES TO MISERY seems evidently false to me.
2) This one is perhaps more controversial. While any INDIVIDUAL person is better not being a pregnant teenager with a drug problem and a stack of STIs, these are long tail costs to the benefits of low-level "deviancy" that consist of getting out of your house, meeting other humans, having intense and formative experiences including getting drunk and having sex. And that fewer young people are having sex or getting occasionally drunk is not in itself an obvious win to me. It seems more like a cost of the win consisting in less teen mothers and drug addicted burglars.
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.
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!
This is great. Has anyone mentioned to you the work on lead and behavior by the late journalist Kevin Drum? His cross-country graphs, showing the impact of outlawing leaded gasoline on crime ~18 years later, are hugely eye-opening. Ending the widespread lead poisoning of US kids born in the 60s and early 70s was hugely important; lowering lead exposure even more was a very underappreciated policy proposal by Hillary Clinton.
Re: increasing speed of carcinization … when recorded music began to proliferate, Irving Berlin complained that the hit song cycle was becoming too short. Before recording, “hit songs” would circulate for decades. It might take a year for a song to even get off the ground. 100 years later, a hit can be a day
On the topic of music: One example of carcinization is how the boundaries have blurred between various types of pop. Rap is more sing-song-y than ever, converging with what we used to call R&B. The boundaries between electronic and typical pop have collapsed thanks to EDM. Rock music has all but vanished from the top of the charts. Pop music, without question, seems far less diverse, less deviant, and far narrower in range than it was even 10 years ago.
The “best decade of music” graph seems to be largely explainable by (bad) survey design.
This survey makes the Silent Generation look monolithic by collapsing much of their range into a single category. They were born from 1928 to 1945, but the first option, “1950s or some earlier decade,” covers music released when they were anywhere from 14 to 31 years old. If we compress the other generations’ distributions the same way (beginning with the first decade after the youngest members were born), they cluster even more strongly: 72% of Boomers choose 1970s or earlier, 83% of Gen X pick 1980s or earlier, 73% of Millennials select 2000s or earlier, and Gen Z has only a single option, which 75% of them choose. (Interestingly, the total reported percentages also shrink by generation: 93, 92, 89, 83, 75. )
My guess is that this graph is actually measuring the availability of good-quality recorded music. People’s tastes tend to anchor somewhere in their teens and twenties, so what you hear before about age 30 often becomes your permanent musical home base. As recorded music became cheaper and easier to access, it’s easier to explore earlier decades.
I partly agree with Adam here—the more you age, the less you’re connected to the most interesting parts of culture. But I also think that there’s more to it than that: it’s easier to explore the music of previous decades than it used to be. In addition, we have additional decades of survivorship bias to help filter out the junk from the past. The Silent Generation respondents who picked the 1990s as the best decade had to listen to all of it—the good, the bad, and the ugly. Someone from Gen Z, however, is usually only hearing the survivors—the songs from before 2000 that are people still like enough to play. That makes those decades seem stronger than they really were.
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.
That might be due to lead (from gasoline and paint). In fact, I wonder if all of this rise and fall in deviance (murder, drugs, etc.) is just a story about how much lead (which evidently tends to muck up self-control, as well as make people more stupid) humans ingest.
If so that would be the biggest environmental disaster ever!
Thinking of Anna Karenina's famous opening. Fracturing from collective massive trauma (bad) and culture shock (sometimes good) of WWII parents?
Caffeine also evolved independently multiple times since it's an effective insecticide. It evolved in coffee beans, tea plants, chocolate/cacao, guarana, yerba mate, and citrus.