[HN Gopher] Fashion, art cycles are driven by counter-dominance ...
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Fashion, art cycles are driven by counter-dominance signals of
elite competition
Author : hncurious
Score : 113 points
Date : 2021-12-17 17:34 UTC (5 hours ago)
(HTM) web link (royalsocietypublishing.org)
(TXT) w3m dump (royalsocietypublishing.org)
| d883kd8 wrote:
| Ugh they got j and k mixed up on page 3
| aszantu wrote:
| as an artist I just always think: okay I like this style, and I
| want something like it, but I absolutely don't want to copy, so I
| change it so it can't be recognized as "theft" later.
| analog31 wrote:
| I wonder if another factor is that the artists themselves
| eventually get bored with their own stuff. I've read that this
| is a factor in the evolution of musical styles.
| j-bos wrote:
| At the risk of touching a nerve, this concept reminds me of the
| crypto/nft hostility.
| eightysixfour wrote:
| I've been reading Graeber's final book, "The Dawn of Everything,"
| and in it he makes/repeats the observation that many cultures in
| contact with each other end up defining themselves as "not-the-
| other-culture," which he called (and I think others call)
| cultural schismogenesis.
|
| I think you can genericize it a bit and say humans are bad at
| defining themselves and need a reference point, and they often
| take the opposite stance of that reference point. I think this
| model fits in with that pretty well - there are groups who want
| to be "not-the-elite" which, if successful, the elite adopt.
| Classic "hipsterism."
|
| It also fits in with a lot of local, national, and global
| politics, market differentiation, etc.
| turdnagel wrote:
| See also Dr. Seuss' seminal "The Sneetches".
| crucialfelix wrote:
| As a former hipster (and music subculture producer) I can
| attest that what drove us is not the desire to differentiate,
| but that the mainstream elite were lifeless bullshit and we
| wanted to express something new that only we could sense. We
| were being us, not "not them".
|
| Decades later, it's what the mainstream now sounds like. It
| always percolates up.
| eightysixfour wrote:
| I won't suggest that you did not FEEL that way when you were
| doing it, but what you just wrote sounds exactly what I said
| in socially-coded language.
|
| > I can attest that what drove us is not the desire to
| differentiate, but that the mainstream elite were lifeless
| bullshit
|
| Here you state that the mainstream elite was "lifeless
| bullshit."
|
| > we wanted to express something new
|
| And you wanted to express NOT lifeless bullshit.
|
| > that only we could sense. We were being us
|
| This is what the mainstream elite couldn't see or make. It
| was NOT mainstream elite thought.
|
| > it's what the mainstream now sounds like
|
| The mainstream adopted it, and now there's a new generation
| of people who think that sound is mainstream lifeless
| bullshit and will create something that is NOT mainstream
| lifeless bullshit. This is not part of the Graeber thesis,
| but aligns well with the original post.
|
| I also want to be clear that I don't think this is supposed
| to be a conscious process - there are times when people are
| intentionally contrarian but there are also people and groups
| who are unconsciously contrarian simply by saying "I don't
| like this thing."
| oblak wrote:
| Exactly. OP is the poster child for lack of self awareness
| [deleted]
| anm89 wrote:
| very interesting point. It seems to be a useful model for
| thinking about this stuff.
|
| I still think Bullshit Jobs was a terrible read but maybe I
| need to give some of his other stuff a shot.
| eightysixfour wrote:
| Debt: The First 5000 Years and The Dawn of Everything are
| both better than Bullshit Jobs IMO. I'd start with "The Dawn
| of Everything." While I think Graeber makes the same "jump to
| conclusions based on your worldview" mistakes he criticizes
| others for, he present new (to me) evidence about the history
| of human organizations that I have found to be very
| interesting and, at least, opened me up to some new avenues
| of thought politically.
| crawfordcomeaux wrote:
| What are some of these political changes?
| eightysixfour wrote:
| Again, not finished with the book, but the central thesis
| of the book that large scaled human endeavors (and
| society as a whole following the agricultural revolution)
| does not require hierarchical organization. I do not
| believe I have made it to the meat of that thesis yet
| but, up to this point, I have not been convinced by his
| evidence that there were long-lasting, large-scale human
| organizations (think city scale and higher) that operated
| without some hierarchy.
|
| That said, there are some things that stand out that I am
| spending a lot of time contemplating as a result of the
| book so far:
|
| * I now agree with him that there were likely societies
| operating at a reasonable level of scale (larger than the
| Band/Tribe stereotype) that were significantly more
| egalitarian than current societies or any others in the
| Greco-Roman/Western civilization lineage.
|
| * There was likely significantly more experimentation
| around social structures in early human history than I
| had thought of or imagined.
|
| * There were societies which operated with different
| types of governance based on the time of year and
| activities associated with that time of year. This is
| interesting to me since I believe there is no "best"
| political system, but I had not considered how to take
| advantage of multiple types without trying to recombine
| them in some way. I particularly want to think about this
| more in the context of corporate organizations, since
| they already do this in some ways without being as
| explicit about it. For example, I have worked with an
| organization that operated like a collective of empowered
| product teams for large portions of the year but operated
| more like a standard hierarchy during annual planning
| season or when there was inter-organizational conflict.
| At the time I perceived it as a faux front for a top-down
| organization, but now I'm not sure that's fair.
|
| * This one is probably more philosophically obvious, but,
| there is an opportunity for me, personally, to rethink
| the version of "freedom" I value. In doing so I think I
| will reconcile some conflicts I have between my social
| and economic views. The book didn't give me a new
| definition for freedom that I want to use, but it
| presented at least one alternative definition that I
| think is valid and interesting.
| BoysenberryPi wrote:
| Out of curiosity, what did you not like about Bullshit Jobs?
| anm89 wrote:
| The whole premise is broken to me so the more he tries to
| dig in it just feels like deeper and deeper bs to me.
|
| Jobs don't exist for the employee, wages exist for the
| employee. Jobs exist because the employer feels that the
| wage is a good trade for the person's time. The employee's
| perception of their contribution has essentially 0
| importance in this interaction. A better definition of a
| bullshit job from the employee's perspective is one where
| the wage isn't worth it for the bullshit they have to put
| up with. In that case they should find a new one. If they
| can't, than putting up with that specific bullshit is still
| their best choice. If they keep showing up to work and
| taking that trade, apparently they don't think it's
| bullshit. And if the employer keeps thinking that the money
| is a good trade for their time, they apparently also don't
| think it's bullshit, otherwise they'd fire them.
|
| So if two people freely engage in the same trade of time
| for money everyday for years on end, then simply calling it
| bullshit isn't that profound. It starts to sound a lot like
| some way to intellectualize whining about not liking your
| job.
|
| So yeah, no amount of writing is going to save a totally
| broken premise.
| yodelshady wrote:
| I'm a little surprised at that reading, but fair enough.
|
| I admit I only skimmed it, but I thought the point was
| "the employer" is not a homogeneous entity. "The
| employer" therefore doesn't make the wage decision.
| Managers with some extreme perverse incentives do.
|
| What's bullshit is the idea that as soon as an enterprise
| does something inefficient, boom, they'll be outcompeted.
| They might, _eventually_ , if no market failures or
| regulatory capture exists. So in reality, large and even
| small/medium organization with a successful pattern can
| tolerate a lot of bullshit.
| PaulDavisThe1st wrote:
| > Jobs don't exist for the employee, wages exist for the
| employee.
|
| This is a handwaving assertion. It happens to be strongly
| correlated with the way our society(ies) allocates labor,
| but is not something inherent to the labor/wage
| relationship. It's not hard to imagine a world in which
| people do things because those things matter to them, or
| are interesting to them, or both.
|
| Graeber didn't call them "Bullshit Jobs" because the jobs
| required dealing with bullshit, he called them "Bullshift
| Jobs" because the actual stated purpose of the job was at
| best deeply suspect and at worst, well, bullshit.
|
| There is a better fundamental critique of "Bullshit Jobs"
| which is a little more sophisticated, I think. That
| critique says that the reason people get confused about
| the meaning and importance of their job is that our
| economic system has grown too complex for them to really
| understand the role they play. The division of labor has
| reached such extreme levels that it is very difficult for
| many individuals to grasp how their "apparently
| meaningless aka bullshit" jobs could be contributing
| anything at all to the world. But their inability to
| understand or visualize this does not mean that their
| work is, in fact, meaningless or without value.
| biomcgary wrote:
| Unfortunately, in some cases, the "value" is things like:
| keeping headcount up, not dealing with a problem
| employee.
| martythemaniak wrote:
| I thought "Debt" was absolutely fantastic and "Bullshit
| Jobs" was err.. complete bullshit. To best honest, the very
| premise of that view - that the only thing that matters is
| people's own opinions of their job - is one of the dumbest
| things I've ever read and it's probably downright harmful
| to people that adopt it.
|
| There are essential jobs that need doing regardless of the
| opinions of the workers who perform them. In fact, if
| people focused on the value their so-called "bullshit" jobs
| provide other people, rather than on their own assessment
| of how meaningful their job is, they would likely end up
| much happier.
|
| It's an incredibly condescending and self-centered way to
| look at the world.
| [deleted]
| throwaway894345 wrote:
| > I think you can genericize it a bit and say humans are bad at
| defining themselves and need a reference point
|
| I don't think the error is in defining ourselves by what sets
| us apart--it's fine and good to acknowledge our differences. I
| think the bad thing is leaning into those differences due to an
| aversion to the outgroup, which is the very essence of
| tribalism (or nearly so).
| eightysixfour wrote:
| Apologies, I was too soft at that point when I wrote it. He
| does not suggest we merely acknowledge our differences, he
| suggests we literally define ourselves as opposites of
| others.
|
| He also does not assign a property of good or bad to this
| observation, just that we do it.
| belugacat wrote:
| Oh wow, super fascinating reference, thank you for posting it!
| I'll have to check it out, I've been prototyping game concepts
| with many thousands of agents who all do interesting things for
| the player to investigate (the key here is that they don't have
| to be particularly complex or meaningful, they just have to
| overlap in enough thought provoking ways to keep the player
| engaged), and I've had a similar insight ("make agents identify
| a position and adopt the opposite stance") that seems to yield
| interesting early results.
|
| (sorry, nothing concrete to share and likely won't for a long
| time)
| crawfordcomeaux wrote:
| I feel excitement over reading this. Would you be open to
| trying out some ideas to experiment with? I've been wondering
| if a framework for amplifying/accelerating evolution in
| bacterial cultures that's based in graph theory holds for
| culture in general. Also, trying to identify a sustainable
| model for a gift economy that can outperform debt economies.
| eightysixfour wrote:
| If you're looking for a playground for this kind of thing
| (and can code), check out https://hash.ai/
| sdwr wrote:
| Sounds interesting! I see games in a similar way, as
| collections of simple mechanics that overlap/intersect/stack.
|
| I think one of the keys to a complementary bundle of
| mechanics is that they're distinct. Acting on different time
| scales, different reward structures that tug the brain
| around, creating choices that feel meaningful and don't ever
| repeat exactly.
| shadowgovt wrote:
| As the old line goes, "Revolution is never justified... Unless
| you win."
| waingake wrote:
| This is Hegel's Thesis-Antithesis-Synthesis. Not a new idea!
| https://link.springer.com/referenceworkentry/10.1007%2F978-1...
| adamgordonbell wrote:
| Slate star codex has a very fun and nerdy explanation of fashion
| cycles. Let's explain fashion using cellular
| automata. This isn't going to be cringe-inducingly nerdy at all!
|
| https://slatestarcodex.com/2014/04/22/right-is-the-new-left/
| ineptech wrote:
| I also thought of this; this explanation is like a more
| complicated and nuanced, but probably less empirically
| testable, version of the "CDS" mechanism proposed by the
| study's authors. I scrolled to the bottom half-expecting to see
| Scott get an acknowledgement.
| optimalsolver wrote:
| Worth a read:
|
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Circulation_of_elite
| beebeepka wrote:
| > Changes of regime, revolutions, and so on occur not when
| rulers are overthrown from below, but when one elite replaces
| another. The role of ordinary people in such transformation is
| not that of initiators or principal actors, but as followers
| and supporters of one elite or another.
|
| Easy to say duh to this in 2021 thanks to education, internet,
| and everything. Must've been a breakthrough a few hundred years
| ago. For various reasons
| wyager wrote:
| A lot of people still have trouble with the fact that
| successful popular protest movements are usually just part of
| the legitimating process for some political shift which has
| already occurred, and not a significant causal factor in that
| shift occurring.
| shadowgovt wrote:
| It's an interesting idea but I'm seeing whispers of No True
| Scotsman fallacy.
|
| It's true, of course, that the end result will be a subset of
| the people leading and most not (which is an outgrowth of
| basic specialization theory: if everyone's in charge of
| coordination and leadership, nobody has time to do the work
| that needs coordination and leadership). But was the new
| elite always apart from the followers and supporters, or are
| the rulers overthrown and during that process some subset of
| the overthrowers become a new elite due to the needs of
| specialization? Or, to say it another way: would the "new
| elite" have ever been an elite if they hadn't won?
|
| George Washington was never commissioned in the British army.
| Fidel Castro was the bastard son of an immigrant. Had their
| revolutions not succeeded, would history remember them as
| elite?
| v_london wrote:
| This concept is important to the way I think about crypto. It
| feels like a war between two elites (TradFi vs Crypto insiders
| and VCs), if crypto wins it it will not "democratize finance"
| when 90% of all Bitcoins have been mined in the first decade of
| the project's lifespan.
|
| (This is not an attack against crypto in general, there are
| ways to design a cryptocurrency so it's equal to all
| participants regardless of the time they buy in, it's just that
| they fail to gain adoption because of a lack of VC funding and
| support from the crypto community, as neither can make a quick
| buck out of it)
| zbendefy wrote:
| This is also nicely illustrated in CGP Grey's rules for rulers:
| https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=rStL7niR7gs
| crawfordcomeaux wrote:
| This tracks with how I'm changing the art I embody/make. A
| driving intention I carry is to bring about a future where all
| people have the 0-payment option of living in a community where
| everyone's committed to meeting all needs while denying none,
| practicing a culture that's learned from and let go of cultural
| components of debt, capitalism, imperialism, colonialism,
| preferentialism (a culture of catering to preferences),
| democracy, domination, violence, punishment/reward, racism,
| sexism, rape, adultism, ageism, and maybe all the other isms.
|
| Any government, including human beings who identify as nations,
| can signal they've shifted to practicing such a culture by
| adopting the following symbol and integrating it into their
| symbology:
|
| [?]
|
| This is the mathematic notation for the phrase "for all." A
| government that's operating on a model to meet all needs while
| denying none can signal this by including this symbol in their
| art, like flags, seals, etc.
| canadaduane wrote:
| There is a bumper sticker that spells out "Coexist" with
| symbols from each of the major religions [1] and I liked it at
| first, because I identified strongly with the idea. But the
| more I thought about it, the more I realized that there are
| people who see that symbol, and they don't see themselves in it
| --they don't see the Cross for example, and think, "Oh, a
| Christian like me!". Rather they see "Hippie-everything-and-
| nothing-ism," and other it immediately. I think there is a deep
| resistance to "foreign inclusion" in our human psyche. Trust
| goes slow.
|
| [1] https://www.theodysseyonline.com/why-hate-coexist-bumper-
| sti...
| crawfordcomeaux wrote:
| I think this is due to cultures normalizing trauma denial, as
| opposed to trauma healing. In the US, most mental health
| options cost money. Locking away healing behind money will
| always make thriving harder.
|
| We need systems that are fun, healing, and don't caretake for
| trust trauma.
| v_london wrote:
| Hey crawfordcomeaux, I noticed you've shared some interesting
| ideas about communities in Hacker News! I wonder if you have an
| opinion on whether remote working will change where and how
| people choose to live?
|
| Cities still have a lot going for them by providing the best
| access to services (especially after covid is over), but one
| thing I see happening in the future is the establishment of
| "remote working villages" in smaller towns. Price and quality
| of housing will be the main selling point, but they'd also have
| access to nature and a good sense of community (in fact the
| projects could be self-organised and funded by the residents if
| you find the right people).
| germinalphrase wrote:
| There's a lot of "not this" in your statement, but can you
| provide an example of your work that helps me understand what
| "this" remains?
| crawfordcomeaux wrote:
| "Meet all needs while denying none" to me means we need to
| first identify all of our needs (not wants, strategies, or
| rights, except to use them as signs pointing to underlying
| needs). I suspect applied category theory and constructor
| theory are two recent developments that could be useful for
| proving the needs of the human system.
|
| "This" could be considered a culture of freely giving to meet
| people's needs, including the needs of the environments they
| live in.
|
| Satisfying All Needs Through A narchogiving (SANTA)
|
| I want a network of SANTA communities, offline and online,
| dedicated to meeting people's needs. The SANTANet.
|
| Another example: I'm helping my hair to mat into [?].
|
| I've legally changed my name to Peacefully Revoking Consent
| To Be Governed For You And For All. My signature is "<peace
| sign> [?]" I'm also running for president on a platform of
| founding a new government to replace this one. The logo will
| include [?]
|
| I'm nurturing a 3yo by empowering them to do whatever they
| want that won't kill them. This requires facing down and
| releasing old traumatic conditioning. I'm not perfect and
| need more people in my life to help them revolt against me
| when I slip into choosing from trauma mode. So a community
| where it's normal to run around naked in cold weather,
| regardless of age, is something I'm working toward.
| [deleted]
| beebeepka wrote:
| This was a surprisingly good read, even if a bit long.
|
| Their observations align with my own - it's all about standing
| out. Me different because me better. Or vice versa. Same thing
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