The world has become very expensive and everything is way more competitive than it was in the past.
To me, it feels like there is little room to make mistakes. If you get detailed it's hard to get back on track. That I think is the primary reason people are taking less risks (or being deviant).
A big part of this IMO is that “money won”, for lack of a better phrase. There is no real concept of selling out anymore. Being shamelessly focused on wealth accumulation seems to be socially acceptable in a way it wasn’t fifty years ago.
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.)
compounding gains has also become the only strategy to stay afloat.
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.
That’s a good point too. You increasingly need to participate in the system or you get left behind and can’t afford the things you could 5-6 years prior. So doing something crazy like wandering the country in your car or working at a cafe to fund your artist lifestyle is a constant ticking clock.
Also you could wander much more easily in the past. These days digital surveillance has creeped in everywhere. Stay in one place over a day and you'll get a ticket. Pay is better monitored so you cant easily do under the table work. Your customers probably use cards so your transactions are monitored and will be taxed. It's a different world from what us older people grew up in.
Yeah; I was reading Kerouac recently and just thought to myself, this kind of wandering free existence just isn’t even possible anymore. Everything is mapped and reviewed, so you’d need to deliberately be counter-cultural and turn off your phone.
Turning off your phone just the easiest way to track you. With more AI based facial recognition cameras and data sharing between corporations you're still being tracked in public. The digital world has shrunk the analog world to a very small place.
This isn’t true and hasn’t been true fifty years ago either. A handful of the most well-known books regarding getting wealthy and having a high status were written almost a century ago. The practice of wealth accumulation was already established by anyone who was above room temperature IQ for as long as we have existed.
Deviance is all around, the author is too trapped in a bubble to see it.
There used to be much more tension between creating culture (art, music, etc.) and making money from it. I think that tension has pretty much evaporated.
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 don't think there was ever really such a tension in terms of making money from art, but rather how. The idea of "selling out" was that, say, selling the rights to your songs to advertisers was viewed as crass. That I agree has pretty much evaporated -- nobody calls musicians who allow their songs to be used in ads "sellouts" anymore.
I think you're missing that deviants have to interact with people in the normal sphere for them to count socially, and the fact that you're arguing that the author is in a bubble pretty much is making his case actually.
Furry conventions have been going for 40 years. There are more than 50 of them catering to a worldwide "furry fandom" of millions. Is there a boiling cauldron of innovation there that I'm not aware of? From the outside it looks almost mainstream at this point.
Deviance is all around, the author is too trapped in a bubble to see it.
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.
Give me a break with this "where are the protest songs" stuff. I'm an old fart, but even I know stuff like Childish Gambino's "This Is America", a bunch of Kendrick Lamar songs (not to mention his Super Bowl performance), Beyonce's "Ameriican Requiem", etc.
And let's not forget that protest songs aren't usually promoted by those in power...
> 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.
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.
I disagree that people are less weird and deviant today. I believe they’re less weird offline, because weirdness is easier, safer, and less embarrassing to express online.
I also disagree that online has become less weird. It’s less weird proportionally, because the internet used to consist of mostly weird people, then normal people joined. Big companies are less weird because they used to cater to weird people (those online), now they cater to normal people. But there are still plenty of weird people, websites, and companies.
Culture is still constantly changing, and what is “weird” if not “different”? Ideas that used to be unpopular and niche have become mainstream, ex. 4chan, gmod (Skibidi Toilet), and Twitch streamers. I’m sure ideas that are unpopular and niche today will be mainstream tomorrow. I predict that within the next 10 years, mainstream companies will change their brands again to embrace a new fad; albeit all similarly, but niche groups will also change differently and re-organize.
(And if online becomes less anonymous and more restrictive, people will become weirder under their real ID or in real life.)
Weirdness isn’t really deviance. Punk was deviance, anti-system. Modern internet weirdness is mostly just having weird consumer tastes and sociopolitical opinions.
Others are saying the end of leaded gasoline, I’ll add that around 2008 when the trend accelerates schools started becoming more locked down and consequences for being a kid can now follow you into adulthood much easier due to social media.
I think we’re seeing a natural result of kids being scared of that one bad night being immortalized or that one fight turning into an arrest.
+1 for the Lead Hypothesis. Apart from negative health effects, lead exposure leads to more impulsive behavior and reduced inhibition - which kind of covers nearly everything here.
Have to say, I am glad that the world is safer and less wild, but I do miss the creative energy and "real world" social engagement of 1980s-1990s
That generation were a bunch of mindless, selfish dicks. Free from poisoning, the new generations can think clearly about how to be selfish dicks, and plan it out more deliberately.
Interesting; for what it's worth, as a black person who grew up in a relatively privileged environment, the "one bad fight" rule was subconsciously our entire existence in a way that it wasn't for many people around us.
More likely to get hit with a Zero Tolerance punishment for a single isolated incident, which derails your entire trajectory through the school system.
> I think we’re seeing a natural result of kids being scared of that one bad night being immortalized or that one fight turning into an arrest.
> You’re just not allowed to be a kid really.
I learned yesterday about the skull breaker challenge, where you and two friends line up and jump at the same time to see who jumps highest, except the outside two people conspire to kick the legs out of the middle one. Is that being a kid? If anything, the proliferation of social media is enabling the normalization of deviance in the form of these meme challenges. People are going around spraying bug spray on the produce at the grocery and posting it on TikTok.
Yeah I would be willing to bet serious money that this is a few kids and that the number is not even greater than a fractional fraction of a percent.
You're seeing point wise incidents, chosen to generate outrage, and trying to apply them like all kids are doing these things, which per all trends they are not.
Sorry some fraction of people will always be stupid, we shouldn't apply constraints on the many to save the few stupid ones.
How many of these trends are we seeing and how much of a fraction of a fraction do they represent in sum? The article discusses specific declines but doesn't look at data regarding increased incidences of social-media-driven acts of deviance. That's like pointing at the declining use of the saddle while ignoring the rise of the automobile. I guess I should revise my previous hyperbolic statement as I don't know if the deviance is made up for in other ways, I would just have appreciated a broader view.
I'm sure you never heard "if your friend jumps off a bridge would you?" question growing up. But it seemed to be very common saying in my family and in others at the time. So it seems like kids were making bad decisions based off of peer pressure well before social media. It's only that it goes "viral" that anyone pays attention at all. Just more ammunition for the "kids these days" type of people I guess.
I would suggest that another trend which contributes to this "one bad fight" is the growing personal disposable income in the US, which allows parents to be highly litigious, demanding things like arrests of kids their kids get in fights with:
Anecdotally, teachers have been talking about fear of getting sued by parents for a long time now. I suspect this is a big driving force behind the "everyone gets a trophy" mentality and not at all liberalism. Teachers have been kowtowing to moneyed tiger/helicopter parents in ever more egregious ways.
I, gen-x '79, was taught by Gen-z the reason we don't drink at the bars is cause someone'll make a video of us being weird and ruin us. Be weird at home. With the door locked. Fit in when the camera could be hiding and stay employed. Adequately satisfactory, A+.
I'm too old not to be weird. I get a lot of blank stares. I'm the only person I need the approval of. (For now. I worry the cameras find me more and more)
It used to be cool to be deviant and not to be accepted by society at large. Ravers, skaters, punk rockers, cross-dressers, all subcultures that did not care if they were accepted by the normies. Transgression of social norms was considered the cool thing to do.
Now everyone wants social norms to be changed so they feel included no matter what crazy ass thing they are into.
I feel like a lot of this is breaking up of culture into a million shards. People are being weird in much smaller domains so if you look at the old bigger chunks of culture it seems like it's solidifying. Just because TV is largely boring doesn't mean online video isn't weird. You just might not like it so you don't pay attention to it.
Great post from Adam Mastroianni as usual, lots to chew on -- but to treat deviance and risk as equivalent seems a bit of a leap. The graphs line up, but just about any wide-reaching measure was put on its current trajectory sometime in the 70s-80s (see [0]).
The hypothesis that lower 'background risk' leads to lower voluntary risks (drugs, unprotected sex, etc.) makes sense. But as far as arts go, I think the cultural homogeneity we see is more of a direct effect of globalization than anything else. In other words, the default state of highly interconnected societies is one of convergence; the variety of the 20th century can be attributed to growth in communication and exposure to new concepts. Now that media technology has somewhat stabilized, we see a return to the cultural stability that has defined humanity for most of its existence.
I'm wondering if this overlooks areas where we experience much higher levels of deviation today. Take music, for example. When I grew up, I was basically limited to whatever was playing on the radio or MTV—there was only so much airtime for a small set of popular songs. The mainstream was much more mainstream. Today, I can listen to obscure Swedish power metal bands with fewer than 5,000 monthly listeners on Spotify without any difficulty.
The same goes for fashion. I have a picture of my mom and her friends where everyone looks like a miniature version of Madonna. Today, fashion seems far more individualistic.
Streaming has given us a vast spectrum of media to consume, and we now form tiny niche communities rather than all watching Jurassic Park together. There are still exceptions like Game of Thrones, The Avengers, or Squid Game, but they are less common.
One of my friends is into obscure K-pop culture that has virtually zero representation in our domestic media. Another is deeply interested in the military history of ancient Greece—good luck finding material on that when there were only two TV channels.
Maybe deviance hasn't disappeared—maybe it's just shifted elsewhere…?
I'd also argue the culture of "digital degeneracy" has permeated the internet and is no longer locked away in, say, the bastion of mid/late 2000s 4chan. What used to be violent NSFL liveleaks content is now easily accesible by anyone with a phone. Softcore content is completely widespread on "clean" apps like IG and Tiktok.
If we measure deviance only by the metrics that existed before social media, we will of course find what is expected.
Consuming niche stuff isn't really deviance in any meaningful sense.
There's no risk-taking there, no producing something new for the world, and very little personal actualization beyond getting to consume a thing you like.
Maybe we're looking at this wrong. Maybe 'new' stuff just isn’t that interesting to people any more. I mean the amount of 'new' things out there are huge and we are constantly exposed to them lots of them. Then when you couple that with the massive amount of advertising that is everywhere on every surface and site, people start to brain adblock and focus on patterns they recognize.
> Whereas now its all about RT scores, review megathreads, unboxing, reaction videos
Is that them or is that content and algorithms seeping into every possible nook and cranny of the human experience? Creators seeking to tap value off of popular brands and fans trying to find more content and falling into a long tail?
We're making more content, taking up more time, resulting in people who are stimulated all the time. Busy all the time.
For the most part, this seems to be measuring the same trends behind the violent crime rate - which some think is related to the introduction (and banning) of leaded gasoline.
Interesting to put these trends into the mix. It sort of tracks - but the teen birth rate was the one which stood out as really not tracking well.
Lots of deviant communities that are still quite active if you turn off your laptop/phone and go seek out the eccentric folks in the real world.
The internet has pushed towards homogeneity over the last couple decades. If you're confusing internet with the real world constantly (i.e. staying "plugged in"), its easy to come to the article's conclusion. But, you can always choose to just "turn it off".
The internet isn’t some PC sitting in your house these days. It's with you on your phone, and it's on every phone and device around you, pretty much everywhere in the world. Even if you 'turn it off' everyone else can make it your problem.
Try going on a hike in the sticks where there is no cellular service at all. The idea that you can't escape the internet is a fiction. This is so overblown.
I have an issue with the claim that the culture is stagnating. One of the arguments is this:
> fewer and fewer of the artists and franchises own more and more of the market. Before 2000, for instance, only about 25% of top-grossing movies were prequels, sequels, spinoffs, etc. Now it’s 75%.
I think the explanation isn't a decrease in creativity as much as the fact that in the 1980s, there just weren't that many films you could make a sequel of. It's a relatively young industry. There are more films made today because the technology has gotten more accessible. The average film is probably fairly bland, but there are more weird outliers too.
The same goes for the "the internet isn't as interesting as it used to be" - there's more interesting content than before, but the volume of non-interesting stuff has grown much faster. It's now a commerce platform, not a research thing. But that doesn't mean that people aren't using the medium in creative ways.
the author obviously has not seen one of the near daily protests lately, or the majority of videos posted to social media, or perhaps they just chose the wrong word ("weird") for what they are trying to express. everywhere I look, freak flags are on full and public display now more than I ever remembered them being
The word choice is strange. The author is listing the decline of risk-taking and experimental life choices like: pregnancies, crime, joining a cult etc. He is talking about people making safer / more conservative life choices. He also noticed that the monetary value assigned to people's lives has risen dramatically (over 12 million USD compared to 4 million USD a few decades ago). It is not the decline of deviance; it is decline of risk taking. That doesn't mean it is good or bad. It is just a fact.
Chalk up one more nightmarish facet of modern life almost soley attributable to housing costs. I'd love nothing more than to work a part time job and practice the Sitar all day. But now that equals homelessness.
Mass culture is educating people to a level which it wasn't possible before, pruning really bad examples, and suggesting attainable relationships with self and the world. Lead is maybe a big reason why it succeeds, but even before the 192x when the lead started, people and craziness were wide spread. What happened with the maturation of all the media channels is that old religious and religion-derived psychoses were pushed out of fashion and being yourself wasn't opposed by centuries old norms. Being creative is often correlated with suffering and we are actually happy right now.
I don't mean that we don't have problems and the concentration of wealth and power in the hands of a few is maybe causing part of the uniformity, but generally, we call them creative solutions, because they are aimed at uncomfortable problems.
I do not remember high school students drinking alcohol being "weird". It was basically "normal". Most adults would pretend they do not see it, fair amount of them even facilitated it. It was only when things got noisy and too visible the rule was used.
Moving away was weird in America? I perceived economic mobility as something Americans were proud of and seen as superior over nations more likely to stay. It was not weird to move away, it was the expected action for quite a lot of people.
"Deviance" is probably the word to focus on here, as in "deviation" from the mean.
Drinking underage is a deviation from the norm of following the law.
Moving is a deviation from the norm of staying (as evidenced by the census data showing that in the 1950s ~20% of people lived somewhere different than they had the previous year, in 2023 it was 7.4%. In 1950 3.5% of the population lived in a different state than they had the previous year, in 2023 it was 1.4%)
I get the moving away portion, but if underage drinking was >50% of the population in the past, isn't that the norm, not the words on the law? That would mean now is more deviation not less. Of course, that's entirely down to how you want to frame it.
My point is, drinking was not deviation from the mean. It was "the mean". There was no real norm in following the law in that one. Like I said, adults would wink wink look away or directly give you alcohol.
If you was not drinking at all, you was the weird one. Literally.
The mean is shifting toward drinking less. But that does not say much about how many people are "weird".
Depends on where you grew up I suppose, and your personal views at the time. I don't think I ever got the idea that adults were ever pretending not to see it.
Millennials are really great parents and the result of that is that the kids are well rounded and less deficient. That results in conformity because the history nerd, also goes to the gym and the gym bro also strives to do well at school.
Seems to correlate with the increase and decline of lead poisoning. I guess the plus side of lead poisoning was an interesting world. We need more deviants than ever now, given the authoritarian push we are seeing. Too many obey.
I feel like there are so many factors here that it's hard to identify which thing have the greatest impact. Instead of attempting a coherent argument, I'll offer some further observations.
Taylor Swift is one of the most famous people in the world, yet I know quite a large number of people who could name only one or two of her songs. I would count myself a Taylor Swift fan even though I am in the group of knowing very little of her music. I admire her creativity, business acumen, legs, assertiveness, intelligence, and determination.
In the past, a performer at that height would dominate a much smaller range of media coverage leading to a more profound cultural impact. While being on fewer channels, they'd be on a greater proportion of the whole media landscape.
I think that pushes the dial in both directions. When something is targeted at all, they have to stay around the median to encompass the largest population.
Transformational change happens to a society when something that is targeted beyond the median becomes popular and drags the world with it.
You hear a lot of talk about the Overton window these days. I have heard it raised frequently as an argument for deplatforming. It strikes me as a profound misunderstanding of what the Overton window represents. People argue that you should suppress ideas you disagree with so that the measurement of the Overton window shows an opinion that is under-sampled against your adversary and consequently moves in the direction you prefer. This one of the most damaging examples of Goodhart's law that I know of.
To stick with the music analogy, I think if Guns 'n' Roses appeared before the Beatles there would have been a significant negative response from the public (although I would really like to pull an open minded musical expert out of history to capture their experiences of modern music). Some experts favour protecting the establishment, while others are the very first to realise the significance of a revolutionary new thing.
People are generally repelled by objectionable views and while the Overton window suggests that the notion of what is objectionable might change over time, suppressing objectionable views removes that repulsion from them while simultaneously being an act that many find objectionable. Both changes cause the dominant public opinion to move in the same direction, the opposite to what the people attempting to control the dialog desire. At the same time making the Overton window harder to measure, obscuring their failure.
The decline of deviance could be thought of as either a shrinking or expansion of the standard deviation of the Overton window. It depends upon your perspective and if you consider objective measures of variance to be more significant to subjective measures.
When the Overton window is much wider, there are a much broader set of opinions in the world, but also, by definition with the same level of acceptance as a compressed window. everything within the window is accepted. You could interpret that as a decline in deviance because you just don't consider the range of things accepted to be deviant.
When the Overton window is narrow, social pressures cause people to restrict their behaviour, which would also be considered a decline in deviance. On the other hand it would take much less to be considered deviant.
This makes me wonder if you need a second order Overton to measure the acceptability of opinions relative to their proportionate position on the Overton window. Would such a measurement measure polarisation? I would imagine that the ideal arrangement, no matter what the width of the Overton window was, would be a slower decline in acceptance of things that are disagreed with.
Once again though. If you started measuring this, would it become a target, and subject to gaming?
A number of comments have suggested lead poisoning, but I think that's far too facile an answer. Perhaps it explains a bit, but does lead poisoning make you prefer original movies to sequels or to have better musical taste? If so, I say bring back the lead! ;-)
The article author presents a life expectancy explanation, but I think that's even less plausible than lead poisoning. When I was a teenager, I wasn't thinking about how long I would live, and it would have made no difference whether life expectancy was 60, 70, 80, or 90. Does it make any sense at all that teens drink alcohol and smoke pot if they believe they'll live to 70 but not if they believe they'll live to 90?
One thing that has definitely changed is parenting styles. I was a stereotypical "latchkey kid". Between the end of school and the beginning of dinner, I was free to go anywhere and do anything with no adult supervision. This was very common among GenX. However, later generations suffered from "helicopter parents" who won't let their kids out of their sight and arranged "playdates" and other organized activities for their kids, not allowing them to spontaneously choose for themselves. I suspect a lot of that was inspired by fear, American's Most Wanted and similar fearmongering about stranger danger and child abduction.
There's probably not just one factor to explain everything. Corporate consolidation, for example, also explains many cultural changes, and such consolidation has been occurring and growing over the course of many decades, even before the internet.
The original movies thing probably had more to do with ownership of theaters and IP spread over a much larger number of companies, as you say with the corporate consolidation. A huge amount of consolidation has occurred and it's not something instantly noticeable.
For anyone saying bring back the lead, most of the problems there weren't obvious or out in the open. You're bringing back even more abuse and dark things.
I don't even know what to make of these replies. The "generous" interpretations are that you're trolling me, or you're a non-native speaker of English.
Either that, or you've personally suffered from severe lead poisoning.
Seeing a lot of comments disputing singular data points, but the author goes out of his way to provide as wide a variety of data points as he could find, and to try to disprove his own theory.
A couple anecdotal things I've noticed in my own life that align with his conclusions:
(1) I work in advertising. I've long bemoaned that my industry has turned to producing high-production low-creativity work for decades now. In the 60s, 70s, and 80s, people relied on creativity to get a message across. But today, it's all polish and no substance. I assumed it was because technology made it easier than ever to to do so, but maybe it's part of a wider trend.
(2) I used to love the variety of car designs. Every car was unique. Some were crazy. But today, take the logo off, and I'd be challenged to tell the difference between any two pickup trucks or any two sedans or any two vans. Every manufacturer has converged on the exact same design. (We see this in every industry, I just happened to be a fan of cars back in the day. But if you look at housing, clothing, computers, phones, tablets, etc etc, I can't think of any category that has real variety in design.)
(3) The author mentions book covers. Up until today, I was mistaking all those designs as meaning those books were part of the same series or something. I hadn't dug in to realize they were actually unrelated.
(4) My own kids have played it incredibly safe. I'm proud of them for being more responsible than I ever was. But I'm also worried they don't know how to take risks. I'm strongly of the belief that anything worth doing involves a healthy dose of risk. Could it really be that as a society, we've just abandoned risk?
I'm not saying the article is necessarily 100% correct. But I think it does pose what may be one of the most important questions of our era. Yeah yeah, I know that sounds bombastic: we have increasing global conflicts, a climate crisis, the apparent rise of neo-fascism, etc. But I don't know how we're going to solve those problems if we're all driving into the middle. How can 8 billion people be more homogenous than the 7, 6, 5, 4 billion that came before?
> Brian: Look, you've got it all wrong! You don't need to follow me. You don't need to follow anybody! You've got to think for yourselves! You're all individuals!
To me, it feels like there is little room to make mistakes. If you get detailed it's hard to get back on track. That I think is the primary reason people are taking less risks (or being deviant).
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.)
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.
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 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.
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.
And let's not forget that protest songs aren't usually promoted by those in power...
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.
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.
I also disagree that online has become less weird. It’s less weird proportionally, because the internet used to consist of mostly weird people, then normal people joined. Big companies are less weird because they used to cater to weird people (those online), now they cater to normal people. But there are still plenty of weird people, websites, and companies.
Culture is still constantly changing, and what is “weird” if not “different”? Ideas that used to be unpopular and niche have become mainstream, ex. 4chan, gmod (Skibidi Toilet), and Twitch streamers. I’m sure ideas that are unpopular and niche today will be mainstream tomorrow. I predict that within the next 10 years, mainstream companies will change their brands again to embrace a new fad; albeit all similarly, but niche groups will also change differently and re-organize.
(And if online becomes less anonymous and more restrictive, people will become weirder under their real ID or in real life.)
I think we’re seeing a natural result of kids being scared of that one bad night being immortalized or that one fight turning into an arrest.
You’re just not allowed to be a kid really.
Have to say, I am glad that the world is safer and less wild, but I do miss the creative energy and "real world" social engagement of 1980s-1990s
https://www.reddit.com/r/lansing/comments/1no5rtl/lansing_pa...
> You’re just not allowed to be a kid really.
I learned yesterday about the skull breaker challenge, where you and two friends line up and jump at the same time to see who jumps highest, except the outside two people conspire to kick the legs out of the middle one. Is that being a kid? If anything, the proliferation of social media is enabling the normalization of deviance in the form of these meme challenges. People are going around spraying bug spray on the produce at the grocery and posting it on TikTok.
You're seeing point wise incidents, chosen to generate outrage, and trying to apply them like all kids are doing these things, which per all trends they are not.
Sorry some fraction of people will always be stupid, we shouldn't apply constraints on the many to save the few stupid ones.
One single person did this, and was sentenced to a year in prison for it.
https://fred.stlouisfed.org/series/DSPIC96
Anecdotally, teachers have been talking about fear of getting sued by parents for a long time now. I suspect this is a big driving force behind the "everyone gets a trophy" mentality and not at all liberalism. Teachers have been kowtowing to moneyed tiger/helicopter parents in ever more egregious ways.
My own pet theory anyways.
I'm too old not to be weird. I get a lot of blank stares. I'm the only person I need the approval of. (For now. I worry the cameras find me more and more)
Now everyone wants social norms to be changed so they feel included no matter what crazy ass thing they are into.
Feels lame to me but I am old so what do I know.
The hypothesis that lower 'background risk' leads to lower voluntary risks (drugs, unprotected sex, etc.) makes sense. But as far as arts go, I think the cultural homogeneity we see is more of a direct effect of globalization than anything else. In other words, the default state of highly interconnected societies is one of convergence; the variety of the 20th century can be attributed to growth in communication and exposure to new concepts. Now that media technology has somewhat stabilized, we see a return to the cultural stability that has defined humanity for most of its existence.
[0] https://wtfhappenedin1971.com/
The same goes for fashion. I have a picture of my mom and her friends where everyone looks like a miniature version of Madonna. Today, fashion seems far more individualistic.
Streaming has given us a vast spectrum of media to consume, and we now form tiny niche communities rather than all watching Jurassic Park together. There are still exceptions like Game of Thrones, The Avengers, or Squid Game, but they are less common.
One of my friends is into obscure K-pop culture that has virtually zero representation in our domestic media. Another is deeply interested in the military history of ancient Greece—good luck finding material on that when there were only two TV channels.
Maybe deviance hasn't disappeared—maybe it's just shifted elsewhere…?
If we measure deviance only by the metrics that existed before social media, we will of course find what is expected.
There's no risk-taking there, no producing something new for the world, and very little personal actualization beyond getting to consume a thing you like.
They over-analyze and overthink everything a lot more than past generations which can be good and bad
Probably due to the internet and more access to information
For example when I was a kid you would watch a movie or play a video game and not think about it that much.
Whereas now its all about RT scores, metacritic, review megathreads, unboxing, reaction videos, video essay breakdowns/explainers , tv show podcasts
Analyzing/reviewing/meta-content has never been bigger
Maybe we're just used to past generations that were poisoned by atmospheric lead from gasoline making under thought decisions.
Is that them or is that content and algorithms seeping into every possible nook and cranny of the human experience? Creators seeking to tap value off of popular brands and fans trying to find more content and falling into a long tail?
We're making more content, taking up more time, resulting in people who are stimulated all the time. Busy all the time.
Interesting to put these trends into the mix. It sort of tracks - but the teen birth rate was the one which stood out as really not tracking well.
I guess it's not deviant if it's a large percentage of the population.
Lots of deviant communities that are still quite active if you turn off your laptop/phone and go seek out the eccentric folks in the real world.
The internet has pushed towards homogeneity over the last couple decades. If you're confusing internet with the real world constantly (i.e. staying "plugged in"), its easy to come to the article's conclusion. But, you can always choose to just "turn it off".
Edit: average is the wrong word - measuring outliers is hard.
> fewer and fewer of the artists and franchises own more and more of the market. Before 2000, for instance, only about 25% of top-grossing movies were prequels, sequels, spinoffs, etc. Now it’s 75%.
I think the explanation isn't a decrease in creativity as much as the fact that in the 1980s, there just weren't that many films you could make a sequel of. It's a relatively young industry. There are more films made today because the technology has gotten more accessible. The average film is probably fairly bland, but there are more weird outliers too.
The same goes for the "the internet isn't as interesting as it used to be" - there's more interesting content than before, but the volume of non-interesting stuff has grown much faster. It's now a commerce platform, not a research thing. But that doesn't mean that people aren't using the medium in creative ways.
I don't mean that we don't have problems and the concentration of wealth and power in the hands of a few is maybe causing part of the uniformity, but generally, we call them creative solutions, because they are aimed at uncomfortable problems.
I do not remember high school students drinking alcohol being "weird". It was basically "normal". Most adults would pretend they do not see it, fair amount of them even facilitated it. It was only when things got noisy and too visible the rule was used.
Moving away was weird in America? I perceived economic mobility as something Americans were proud of and seen as superior over nations more likely to stay. It was not weird to move away, it was the expected action for quite a lot of people.
Drinking underage is a deviation from the norm of following the law.
Moving is a deviation from the norm of staying (as evidenced by the census data showing that in the 1950s ~20% of people lived somewhere different than they had the previous year, in 2023 it was 7.4%. In 1950 3.5% of the population lived in a different state than they had the previous year, in 2023 it was 1.4%)
If you was not drinking at all, you was the weird one. Literally.
The mean is shifting toward drinking less. But that does not say much about how many people are "weird".
Taylor Swift is one of the most famous people in the world, yet I know quite a large number of people who could name only one or two of her songs. I would count myself a Taylor Swift fan even though I am in the group of knowing very little of her music. I admire her creativity, business acumen, legs, assertiveness, intelligence, and determination.
In the past, a performer at that height would dominate a much smaller range of media coverage leading to a more profound cultural impact. While being on fewer channels, they'd be on a greater proportion of the whole media landscape.
I think that pushes the dial in both directions. When something is targeted at all, they have to stay around the median to encompass the largest population.
Transformational change happens to a society when something that is targeted beyond the median becomes popular and drags the world with it.
You hear a lot of talk about the Overton window these days. I have heard it raised frequently as an argument for deplatforming. It strikes me as a profound misunderstanding of what the Overton window represents. People argue that you should suppress ideas you disagree with so that the measurement of the Overton window shows an opinion that is under-sampled against your adversary and consequently moves in the direction you prefer. This one of the most damaging examples of Goodhart's law that I know of.
To stick with the music analogy, I think if Guns 'n' Roses appeared before the Beatles there would have been a significant negative response from the public (although I would really like to pull an open minded musical expert out of history to capture their experiences of modern music). Some experts favour protecting the establishment, while others are the very first to realise the significance of a revolutionary new thing.
People are generally repelled by objectionable views and while the Overton window suggests that the notion of what is objectionable might change over time, suppressing objectionable views removes that repulsion from them while simultaneously being an act that many find objectionable. Both changes cause the dominant public opinion to move in the same direction, the opposite to what the people attempting to control the dialog desire. At the same time making the Overton window harder to measure, obscuring their failure.
The decline of deviance could be thought of as either a shrinking or expansion of the standard deviation of the Overton window. It depends upon your perspective and if you consider objective measures of variance to be more significant to subjective measures.
When the Overton window is much wider, there are a much broader set of opinions in the world, but also, by definition with the same level of acceptance as a compressed window. everything within the window is accepted. You could interpret that as a decline in deviance because you just don't consider the range of things accepted to be deviant.
When the Overton window is narrow, social pressures cause people to restrict their behaviour, which would also be considered a decline in deviance. On the other hand it would take much less to be considered deviant.
This makes me wonder if you need a second order Overton to measure the acceptability of opinions relative to their proportionate position on the Overton window. Would such a measurement measure polarisation? I would imagine that the ideal arrangement, no matter what the width of the Overton window was, would be a slower decline in acceptance of things that are disagreed with.
Once again though. If you started measuring this, would it become a target, and subject to gaming?
The article author presents a life expectancy explanation, but I think that's even less plausible than lead poisoning. When I was a teenager, I wasn't thinking about how long I would live, and it would have made no difference whether life expectancy was 60, 70, 80, or 90. Does it make any sense at all that teens drink alcohol and smoke pot if they believe they'll live to 70 but not if they believe they'll live to 90?
One thing that has definitely changed is parenting styles. I was a stereotypical "latchkey kid". Between the end of school and the beginning of dinner, I was free to go anywhere and do anything with no adult supervision. This was very common among GenX. However, later generations suffered from "helicopter parents" who won't let their kids out of their sight and arranged "playdates" and other organized activities for their kids, not allowing them to spontaneously choose for themselves. I suspect a lot of that was inspired by fear, American's Most Wanted and similar fearmongering about stranger danger and child abduction.
There's probably not just one factor to explain everything. Corporate consolidation, for example, also explains many cultural changes, and such consolidation has been occurring and growing over the course of many decades, even before the internet.
For anyone saying bring back the lead, most of the problems there weren't obvious or out in the open. You're bringing back even more abuse and dark things.
Sigh. Nobody is saying that.
>but does lead poisoning make you prefer original movies to sequels or to have better musical taste? If so, I say bring back the lead! ;-)
Either that, or you've personally suffered from severe lead poisoning.
A couple anecdotal things I've noticed in my own life that align with his conclusions:
(1) I work in advertising. I've long bemoaned that my industry has turned to producing high-production low-creativity work for decades now. In the 60s, 70s, and 80s, people relied on creativity to get a message across. But today, it's all polish and no substance. I assumed it was because technology made it easier than ever to to do so, but maybe it's part of a wider trend.
(2) I used to love the variety of car designs. Every car was unique. Some were crazy. But today, take the logo off, and I'd be challenged to tell the difference between any two pickup trucks or any two sedans or any two vans. Every manufacturer has converged on the exact same design. (We see this in every industry, I just happened to be a fan of cars back in the day. But if you look at housing, clothing, computers, phones, tablets, etc etc, I can't think of any category that has real variety in design.)
(3) The author mentions book covers. Up until today, I was mistaking all those designs as meaning those books were part of the same series or something. I hadn't dug in to realize they were actually unrelated.
(4) My own kids have played it incredibly safe. I'm proud of them for being more responsible than I ever was. But I'm also worried they don't know how to take risks. I'm strongly of the belief that anything worth doing involves a healthy dose of risk. Could it really be that as a society, we've just abandoned risk?
I'm not saying the article is necessarily 100% correct. But I think it does pose what may be one of the most important questions of our era. Yeah yeah, I know that sounds bombastic: we have increasing global conflicts, a climate crisis, the apparent rise of neo-fascism, etc. But I don't know how we're going to solve those problems if we're all driving into the middle. How can 8 billion people be more homogenous than the 7, 6, 5, 4 billion that came before?
> Brian: Look, you've got it all wrong! You don't need to follow me. You don't need to follow anybody! You've got to think for yourselves! You're all individuals!
> Crowd: Yes! We're all individuals!
> Brian: You're all different!
> Crowd: Yes, we are all different!
> Man in crowd: I'm not...
> Crowd: Shhh!