Fashion, art cycles are driven by counter-dominance signals of elite competition | Hacker News Reader

Fashion, art cycles are driven by counter-dominance signals of elite competition

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144 pointshncurious63 comments

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.

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.

Out of curiosity, what did you not like about Bullshit Jobs?

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.

If the "bullshit" jobs were valuable to anyone, they wouldn't be bullshit, they would be highly coveted and celebrated positions.

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.

> 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.

Unfortunately, in some cases, the "value" is things like: keeping headcount up, not dealing with a problem employee.

Sure but if both parties freely decide to engage in this time money trad what do you propose to do?

Do we want some congressional committee to sit around and decide which jobs are bullshit? I sure don't.

It turns out the Nash equilibrium of the world is that some people have jobs that seem silly on the surface but end up being the optimal move for everyone involved. Out of all the problems in the world this seems like a weird one to fixate on.

Graeber didn't fixate on this. He saw it as a sad reflection of what the supposedly "best economic system in the history of man" had ended up creating in terms of meaningful work for actual human beings.

I'm not sure what activity involves fixating on a point more than writing a feature length book on the topic.

Graeber believes that our current state is a local minima (or maxima depending on your perspective) and there are social, political, and economic options that result in systems without these "bullshit" outcomes. His underlying beliefs are anarchist, he believes people can self-organize without many of the concerns we have in modern society.

The reason he is interesting is that his underlying views of society are of those from way outside of the Overton Window, so he sees some things more clearly than those with more "normal" viewpoints. While I do not agree with him on many things, all his books are critiques of the entirety of the modern socioeconomic system.

> Do we want some congressional committee to sit around and decide which jobs are bullshit? I sure don't.

The suggestion that he thought the government should decide which jobs are real and which are bullshit is antithetical to everything he believed. He would argue that the fact that you can only see it as a question of either "free market" or "government managed" is a part of the oppressive system itself.

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.

I will also admit I gave up on it and frustration and didn't make it in the end. Maybe there was some magical nugget of wisdom on the last page.

Your evaluation seems fair to me but it's still not clear to me what he's saying should be done or even why this is a problem.

My suspicion is that people find it exciting to read a book with a curse word in the title that tells them they are right for hating their job

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.

What are some of these political changes?

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.

I haven't finished reading your reply. I got to this point:

"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."

There exists a natural hierarchy between the category of needs for humans to survive and the category of needs for humans to thrive. Nature provides enough.

I honestly don't know what you're trying to say or how it relates to what you quoted from me. What I am saying is that I don't think you can have a large scale population of humans sharing resources cohesively without some sort of sociopolitical heirarchy forming. Graeber argues this is not true and that, as a result, inequality is unnecessary.

I'm trying to say there exist natural hierarchies. If we explicitly acknowledge and account for them in the cultures and the governance models we choose to carry forward, it may be enough hierarchy. There'll also, for a time, be people who choose to realign with nature in such a way and those who'll prefer to not. One of those will be better at meeting needs and a natural inequality will emerge between those factions. I'm thinking inequality might be unavoidable if a culture is going to shift from being largely disconnected from nature to well-aligned with it.

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)

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.

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.

If you're looking for a playground for this kind of thing (and can code), check out https://hash.ai/

Thanks! How's what you're doing different?

I'm not the gamedev above, just thought you may be interested.

See also Dr. Seuss' seminal "The Sneetches".

> 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).

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.

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.

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."

Exactly. OP is the poster child for lack of self awareness

> 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.

That doesn't follow.

1. a blues singer listens to mainstream

2. a blues singer hears a variety of blues influences on the mainstream

3. a blues singer says, "Hey great, we got some blues influences in the mainstream, let me try to add some more"

What? I think we're talking about different processes and different time frames. The blues musician who just wants to be popular/mainstream isn't really what I'm going for, because they stop at step 2:

1. "Hipster" creates music that is anti-mainsteam, becomes popular for doing something different (and doing it well, at the right time/place, etc.)

2. Over years, mainstream music adopts unique thing hipster did. <- this is where you stop

3 New generation of hipsters create music that is anti-mainstream... <- this is what is relevant to this discussion

You can find examples of the above in any modern genre of music and I would argue is a part of a bigger pattern that happens to any sub/counter culture.

I agree, its a different framing of the same process.

On further reflection there was a lot of deliberate removal of pop or mainstream rave signals. We were excluding their signals to create our own space. Minimal Techno is pretty much defined by it's rules of what isn't allowed. So that's conscious differentiation.

Is that simply one aspect of cultural dialectics[1] or am I missing something?

1. https://textbooks.whatcom.edu/duttoncmst101/chapter/intercul...

Mimetic theory, while not entirely complete, seems to cover the common impulse behind dominating trends. Whether it accounts for the initial spark of “anti” I guess is another question.

Worth a read:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Circulation_of_elite

> 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

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.

Agreed. I think it's an ego problem. You know, the most common one with us humans

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?

Despite getting obliterated, the upper strata of Confederate society are probably still remembered as being elite.

I would call that the exception that proves the rule because of the "Lost Cause" myth.

There are enough people who think the losing side wasn't the wrong side to keep the legend alive for the Confederate leadership.

This is also nicely illustrated in CGP Grey's rules for rulers: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=rStL7niR7gs

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)

Well it is not really a war, so much as a rebalancing of power dynmics within Tradfi circles. You can look at the impact of computer on capital markets since the early eighties through the evolution of the social structure of investment banks labor force. It slowly became less and less blue blooded thanks to the need for quantitative skills.

But there was still a massive moat for institutions due to the need for trust, backed by a regulatory framework. And entrenched institutions means entrenched elite. What crypto provide is a temporary workaround for a faction of the financial elite to build rival institutions.

But the crucial thing is member of the new "crypto" elite are for the most part "junior" (in the status sense) members of the Tradfi elite. So for the rest of us peons, it will stay business as usual !

This is Hegel’s Thesis-Antithesis-Synthesis. Not a new idea! https://link.springer.com/referenceworkentry/10.1007%2F978-1...

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

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.

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.

At the risk of touching a nerve, this concept reminds me of the crypto/nft hostility.

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/

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.

Yep, this is an intuitive explanation for it.

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.

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?

"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.

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...

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.

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).

Ugh they got j and k mixed up on page 3

As the old line goes, "Revolution is never justified... Unless you win."

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