Michael, Dwight and Andy: The Three Aesthetics of the Creative Class | Hacker News Reader

Michael, Dwight and Andy: The Three Aesthetics of the Creative Class

alexdanco.com

52 pointsjger1527 comments

This kind of analysis was all the rage in the 1970's, when articles were written about how the type of car you drove advertised your inner sexual feelings and how he Edsel failed because the front grill looked like a vagina.

This might be somewhat accurate for people over 35, but it doesn't sound like any younger people I know. The complexities of the younger generations raised on the internet is something new and difficult to pin down.

The internet allows a person to escape the moderating influence of peer pressure and social norms by allowing one to anonymously be part of many different social groups simultaneously and be a different person in each one. There is no friction in mixing and matching your tribes, allowing a fluidity of identity that carries over into real life. I don't think this is captured by the article.

> This kind of analysis was all the rage in the 1970

Is it any worse than classifying people as Boomer, Millennial or Gen X?

Or Buzzfeed "We Know Your Best Quality Based On How You Drink Your Milo" (a quiz on Buzzfeed AU right now).

No, it's all fun bar stool conversation. I'm not sure anyone actually talks about another as a "Michael Scott" or a "Dwight Schrute" for reals. I just wish young people talked about Boomers in a more nuanced way. We used to be known as the "Me Generation," which I think that is more apt.

It's easy to be snobbish about it if you want to point out that it's not a scientific study published in a journal with Very Serious People as gatekeepers...

...but I think this one is onto something, and I wouldn't be surprised to see significant correlations between the behaviours described and social class as defined by relatively recent work e.g. https://journals.sagepub.com/doi/pdf/10.1177/003803851348112...

(The above takes into account social and cultural activities and classifies Brits as elite, established middle class, technical middle class, new affluent workers, traditional working class, emergent service workers, precariat)

The BBC used to have an interactive version of the above, but it's broken (again!) - if you report it they'll probably fix https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/magazine-22000973

Not to mention, The Office is a pretty old show at this point for tortured sociological metaphors. Especially since the Gervais Principle came out a dozen years ago.

Did you read the article??

> As tidy as this characterization might be, it won’t last. The creative aesthetic is already getting transformed again, through a peaceful merger just like with the BoBos. There’s a new aesthetic in town with outsize influence: Very Online people.

> it’s democratized opportunity to learn and rehearse popular aesthetic.

> As the internet becomes not only where we draw our cultural and aesthetic cues from, but more importantly where we go practice them and rehearse them throughout our adolescence, our emerging aesthetic as adults will have a lot less to do with our parents and our inherited social standing, and a lot more to do with where we happened to have spent time on the internet frontier growing up

I didn't make it to the conclusion. I didn't make it past:

> So there you have it: the three aesthetics of the creative class. Some people are playing Dwight, some people are playing Michael, and some people are playing Andy.

I only have so much time left in my life to waste

But I'm glad the author and I came to similar conclusions. The author takes a turn I agree with at the end, which I didn't see coming from the prior paragraphs (copied the line again for emphasis):

> I only have so much time left in my life to waste

So does everyone else. Which is why we don’t get PhDs in psychology, but instead use in-group memes to communicate information about each other.

I’ve absolutely been in conversations—in work, politics and play—where we assigned people we knew to characters in a book, movie or TV show we shared. Ignoring this overlooks a fundamental way people communicate.

We all know a ‘Lennie’ from ‘Of Mice and Men’.

> So does everyone else

Unless you are over 60, I doubt you feel time running out acutely enough to let that feeling guide your daily actions. If you are younger and those feelings do guide you, congratulations, you are doing it right.

> but instead use in-group memes

in-group memes are useless to anyone not in the group, but they are useful to signify that one is in the group. I'm don't believe The Office characters rise to the level of being generally useful for communication. It's like "Friends" which I know is popular and been in the news recently. If you said "Oh she is so blah-blah (Friends character name)" I wouldn't have a clue.

> This is the group of people that keep the advertising industry in business, for they are both highly anxious and impressionable, but also convinced that ads don’t work on them.

I dunno… Seems to describe some group I know very well.

In my experience the “Bobos” were never really subsumed by the creative class - and I’d wonder if the creative class even has the top rung on the ladder - or jumps into The Office at all - it is a paper company after all.

We know that the office does a great job of recreating the type of people you find in a boring office job so it’s no surprise that they match up with these different sociological profiles somewhat well - but there’s other personalities too in the show, which match up with people you may find in your own office. Do Jim, Pam, Kelly, Meredith, Toby, Jan, Stanley, Kevin, and Angela fit into each of these three buckets? Or are they simply “Proles”?

It's a modern spin on (or ripoff) of The Gervais Principle - https://www.ribbonfarm.com/2009/10/07/the-gervais-principle-...

Im leaning towards ripoff because he basically copied it down to the same TV show and same kind of analysis

> the bohemians, who commanded significant cultural capital despite having no money.

If only this was *really* true.

It's true in the sense that they are the precursors to gentrification, which is significant both culturally and economically.

Actually, also fashion and music trends, lots of things. The bohemians just suck at capitalism.

> The bohemians just suck at capitalism.

So it's not true, since the point was about capital.

social capital

Is social capital not a necessary and root component of capital?

Capital in capitalism refers to the means of production, ie tools, machines, real estate, etc. While it can include some less tangible assets like intellectual property, its still stuff that allows you to more easily produce stuff. Economic capital is used up in the spending of funds and the depreciation of assets.

Social capital refers to networks of relationships, sway over the opinions of others, and institutional clout. While it could certainly be used to help acquire the means of production, it isn't itself a means of production. Social capital is not expended when utilized.

While there may be cases where you need both, it is common to have one without the other, and social capital by no means a necessary and root component of capital. A person who builds a useful machine in his garage creates economic capital without drawing upon any social network. A socialite rubbing elbows with the right people at a cocktail party builds social capital without drawing upon any economic capital.

Most use capital to refer to power/wealth, so Bohemians still are not terrible at capitalism in that regard.

Sure, if you use incorrect meanings of capital, capitalism, and terrible, then that statement can be true.

> The Upper Middles always find a way to come out on top. The Chapo guys were Ivy League, after all.

Were they, though? From what I could find online:

Felix Biederman - University of St Thomas in Minnesota

Matt Christman - Carroll College in Wisconsin

Will Menaker - Skidmore College

> They celebrate open-concept renovations as great for entertaining, but fail to recognize that the best spaces for throwing parties are actually houses with many divided rooms.

This is so annoying about gatherings in many people’s homes today. You basically have to custom build a new home or do some major revisions to any home built in the last 20 to 30 years to get a decent non open layout.

I like open layouts.

Having spent most of my life in the UK where there's not a vast amount of space, in houses with smaller, divided rooms, the wide open feel of (say) Australian houses and the larger American ones is a breath of fresh air.

Many British houses have very small rooms that are too small, but there is a happy medium where separate rooms can allow for a group of people to watch a game, and another group to cook, and another to do something else, rather than all of that happening in one space with voices getting louder and louder to compete with each other and the echoes.

One space is not a problem with a 4 to 6 person gathering, but it can get untenable after that.

> untenable

Not able to sustain a 10 person gathering? ;)

Where does HN fit into this classification scheme?

The technical posts seem pretty neutral, but the more philosophical ones give off real Michael vibes.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com