Cultural anorexia: The pursuit of thicker desires in a thinning world
read.lukeburgis.com
read.lukeburgis.com
At first I thought the article was merely vague and perfunctory, but the advertisement for his $1500 course at the end recast him in the light of a self-help guru. The thing is, he made what I feel could be some good points, but now I wonder whether it's just so non-specific that I'm reading my own anxieties and hopes for meaning into them, like a classic rube. The implication that I need to pay him money to really understand what the hell he's saying makes me wonder if his philosophy might be a little "thin".
>> petty rivalries dominate politics and Hot Take Artists sit in their cages, hungrier than ever while inducing hunger in others.
Another thin desire: porn.
>> Readers will know by now that I believe pornography is one of the primary scourges on our culture, particularly our youth.
Example of thick desire: searching for glory (?)
>> NATO is an institution that does not, for instance, seem able to withstand the thick desires of Vladimir Putin
More thick desire: strength + honor
>> "We make men without chests and expect from them virtue and enterprise. We laugh at honor and are shocked to find traitors in our midst. In a sort of ghastly simplicity we remove the organ and demand the function."
I stopped reading at this point, since it seems to be a reactionary rant. The author appears to want a return to our days of glory, when we laid down our lives for our country, and we righteously murdered all those we deemed wicked or too effete to withstand us, allowing us to take their wives and their daughters as our own, etc.
This is a common authoritarian sentiment, and it's the polar opposite of the ideas developed during the Enlightenment (espousing science, humanism, etc.). Steven Pinker talks about it in Enlightenment Now, an excellent book.
Additionally, how do you tell the difference between a hot take person on Twitter and someone who is deeply feeding their hobby? What if the hobby is spicy Twitter takes, because they are a YouTuber and so getting in on the controversy on one social media site gets you more audience for your platform on YouTube?
I have some concerns this essay is essentially dismissing other people as shallow out of the same influencer style posturing that it positions as shallow/thin. Doesn’t help that it ends with a $1500 thinking package, lol.
It is how people look back at the past and think that their life would be better in past times. They assume that either the lives of the well off were fairly normal or that they would be one of the well off.
Put another way, if I were an ascetic monk 500 years ago, I have no doubt that there would be a collection of people ready to tell me that only a fool would live in the woods when I could easily live in a village and have any type of straw mattress I wanted. We could discuss whether or not they had a worse life than us, but we don't really need to because they're just us, but earlier. 100 years from now some father will be explaining the exact life we live today to his daughter, and she'll never believe that we could be anything except miserable in our abject poverty because we what... didn't have a biobelt generated environment shield around us or something.
For the same reasons that it took a lot of convincing for people to believe that the entire universe didn't revolve around the Earth, it's almost impossible to take ourselves our of the time we live in and put us the continuum of history where we actually exist. But if you walk away for a little bit to a place where life works the way it used to a few generations ago (but with modern medicine of course, and free food, in historic terms), it makes it very very difficult to understand how people today could ever be happy living anonymous, isolated lives with social interactions mediated by software.
ps. I know that there are starving people somewhere, and of course their lives are actually miserable.
I love reading novels written in the late 18th/early 19th century; I give thanks that I was born in the late 20th century, because life as a middle class woman with an IT job now is far superior to life as a relatively wealthy woman then, to say nothing of life as a woman who actually did have to work outside her home (those were not fun, personally-fulfilling jobs).
I think the author's metaphor is better framed around nutritional value. Modern culture is rich in and dominated by junk. Consuming it builds junk values and junk ideas.
What the author (Luke Burgis) refers to as "thick" desires are, to me, simply the age old depth of human values - messy, complex, emotional. And he paints the countervailing ethos as "thin" - one dimensional man (to use Herbert Marcuse's term).
But I am not sure his food metaphor works as vibrantly as he would like, to describe culture, and in some places I think he gets it backwards. Also, one should more sensitive throwing around words like "anorexic" without thinking what that condition entails.
When I wrote Digital Vegan, it's original title was going to be something like "Digital self-defence" [1]. But I wanted to avoid too strong a combatative metaphor for that book. The Cody Brown quote that is the final title came late, in recognition of the hostility towards those wanting more control over their diet, whether digital or culinary, and the courage needed to take a principled stance.
But control, or the lack of it, and compensatory behaviours is at the heart of many problems. I had been reading Susie Albach's Bodies about dysmorphia, abuse and self-perception. The relation of these to technology had a big influence on me. However, reading about teen suicides, now linked to social media and having in some ways supplanted eating disorders in focus, led me to add this to the preface:
" Throughout this book I use the metaphor of food and consumption to talk about technology. In no way do I mean disrespect or to trivialise the serious conditions of anorexia, bulimia, avoidant eating, or obesity. Indeed, I believe that many forms of technological and material abuse share the same root causes. "
Whether we build ourselves and our culture "thin" or "thick" revolves around our ability to control what we take in, our knowledge of how it affects us, and our own extant self-image in relation to what we seek out.
[1] Thats phrase has been knocking around the cryptoparty scene since 2010, and Snowden uses it in "Permanent Record".
If I was going to try and prove the premise: that people are now shedding a wide cultural "diet" for one consisting of a few mass produced, single sourced things.
But I don't see evidence of that. If anything its the reverse.
What I will concede is that locality of the cultural "sources" have gone. You're not going to find your next life changing art exhibit at the local gallery, you'll find it online, and then seek it out in person.
Clay Shirky made the point that something like the Internet expands the total number of offerings available to one person while decreasing the total number of offerings available overall. He hints at this in his essay on powerlaws:
https://web.archive.org/web/20060208093032/http://www.shirky...
He went into greater detail in a later essay, but that later essay now seems to be offline.
This argument makes much more sense to me, and I like that the author has actual plotted their idea using some sort of data, which is much more convincing than hand waving.
But in the past the only reason you ever found your next life changing art exhibit at the local gallery was because the local gallery was your only option.
Looking back at my grandfather's living as a simple peasant, he did many things mimetically, yet there were long periods of nothingness where his internal desires sprung forth: one day I remember he just weaved basked because he wanted new baskets. There was no need for them, there was nobody among our neighbors that was doing this, he was free and decided to make some baskets.
That's why I'd relabel desires as internal or external originating instead of thick and thin. True internal desires come out best when there aren't any externally generated desires, and modern life seems to overload our capacity for generating internal originated desires. Internal desires now only seem to show up in times of crisis, and then we've got a much harder time to actually work with them.
Human nature is our species ability to transform nature. A cat, for example, is only doing hunting for immediate consumption. A pet cat is even more limited, just a furrring biological shell, he does not hunt.
So when a human is limited in all his potentials, thinking, planning, building, etc to something like a tool on the market, optimized for some task, when human relations limited to objects of consumption... this will reduce human to just one sided being.
May be this optimization was once necessary some time ago, since labor productivity was low and this high division of labor allowed optimized production, to feed everyone.
At the moment, the labor productivity is so high, that only 10-20% working on something necessary for living. But all work is still done as this optimized instrumental labor, as life depends on it. This is not required anymore.
The solution is obvious.. build more not as an optimized one sided "worker", but as an universal human being, as a free time activity.
Which politically means that the work day should be reduced.. and this is not easy to implement. But if you really want a social change, this is the way to go.
Or are you saying you already understand it better than anyone else writing about it?
I agree specialization has allowed the expansion to other fields. Fields like microcontrollers, biological development, energy research, etc.
This is why we see an exponential growth in development of new products and new science. If those same people were required to work in the fields to eat, we wouldn’t see the expansion.
... now ... how does this work In practice? How do we get these efficiency gains in agriculture and other necessary parts of life?
Cheap and transportable energy. Fuel, gas, etc. if we want to reduce the work week we need exponentially cheaper energy OR research into new forms of energy production. The later is currently happening and needs to continue to happen. In the mean time, we also need cheap and transportable energy.
For reference, I own a farm. I code professionally and as a hobby raise cattle and food. I can do that only because I have the fuel to run a tractor and the wireless internet provided from the satellites. To your point, in a 50-60 hour work week I can produce enough food for 20-30 families for the year AND be a highly skilled tech worker AND raise a family. All because of fuel.
Now to my point, in my opinion, specialization has less to do with it. Cheap energy is what allows it. Anyone could raise cattle or grow food with minimal training. But without fuel you can’t produce food for more than a few families per year.
So you could your 40 hour work week back to 4 hours, that would just pay for healthcare, and healthcare only.
But when you are twenty I suppose one sees health differently. When you are 60 and take a bunch of pills to keep yourself from dying it suddenly all makes sense...
If almost all of GDP was healthcare, with costs dramatically increasing with age, then that number climbs for each additional month and reaches into the thousands. I wouldn't make that trade, especially because I'd be spending so many of those hours in my early to mid life.
Cuba's standard of healthcare is a reasonable compromise, and their total spending per capita is 2% of the USA's gdp per capita.
The internet as a tool for sharing information rather than an endless red queen's race of scammers is similarly cheap.
And yes please, let's get rid of the private automobile. Without it we can build dense enough that walking (or transit or bikes) will get you where you are going far faster than driving 5x as far at an average of 30km/h does now.
Sure! I like modern healthcare!
And then 4 more hours to pay for the rest of a 1920 standard of living.
And 4 more for extra disposable income.
Let's say that's two days a week for 6 hours each. Sounds pretty good.
But my choice isn't what's important here. What's important is that you don't have to give up the vast majority of modern amenities because those are usually very cheap.
Hopefully we can reach beyond both these erroneous socialisations.
Not that there's no innovation in niches, but those never reach the highlight. A friend of mine is a musician, and was fairly popular in his circles, but has almost a decade ago renounced all pandering to the audience, started playing incredibly complex music, polyrhythms, fractal melodies, uniquely tuned instruments - and has since lost almost all of his audience and the income which came from music. But - and this is important - he's never been both happier and more virtuosic as a musician, it fulfills him like more popular music never did.
Unfortunately, he'll probably never be as appreciated as before and must have other sources of income.
Edit: this is him and a single, weirdly tuned guitar: https://nikopotocnjak.bandcamp.com/
The moment you do stuff because you enjoy it and not to get paid or satisfy other people then your quality of life goes up.
This is why I get paid to do something I hate (software eng) and live a quiet existence doing what I love. Which I’m not even going to mention on here. Not even my family knows what I love.
...at least write a nice novel/biography/whatever to be found together with the bodies decades later :) Create some enjoyment opportunity for others too, don't keep it all to yourself :P
In the case of a musician one such way (besides teaching) is playing in "cover bands" ("playing everything": Top40, Classics etc.) which paid astonishingly well on a gig to gig basis (from weddings to little local fests) once you are a bit established and known (even locally).
I was very young (17) when I started to do that (as a drummer) mostly because I "needed" some money for "better" equipment ;) At first I hated it but after a while I appreciated the actual discipline it required and it taught me practical musical communication skills through my time playing with a lot of different musicians. So, that it in a unexpected way did not only helped me out financially but also in becoming a more well-rounded musician (i.e. "paradoxically" recognizing my own style/preferences/tastes/musicality in a more nuanced way in all that noise of hypes, genres and sub-genres ...).
So, yeah the best case scenario is doing what one loves and getting paid for it but it isn't black and white either, I definitely at some point could have "sold my soul to the devil" to make more money (professionalize it) but I was actually quite satisfied with just not being constantly broke :D Once I met my basic needs (after establishing what they actually are: e.g. not more and better equipment) everything beyond I tried to consider a luxury, a bonus which worked out well for me (still enjoying doing music and the community that this brought with it) in that turbulent time of youth/early adulthood.
Edit: What a lot of people don't recognize: a handful of the musicians I met, later went on to become "successful". Well, in hindsight they struck me as highly obsessive and obviously for everyone around them fighting with some serious inner demons (addiction, depression, childhood traumas ...). For them to finally "made it" can only worsen their situation. Imagine having achieved what you wanted all along, being financially independent, you now literally have no (outside) reason anymore to be unhappy this can just only further estrange you from your environment. I think we are all familiar with the excesses of fame. "To be not successful" is way easier to handle for some highly vulnerable artists (doing great music) because they at least have a better chance to stay "grounded". I mean those driven personalities by exploring boundaries become really fluid, that's what also attracts a lot of audience, unfortunately: We marvel at the sight of the end result: "pearl" (which got produced by an extraordinarly amount of stress).
This is probably more related to chasing fortune and fame, rather than objective exceptionalism in skill building that you see online.
I think the issue is more about the lack of true diversity. Look at music for example - to achieve global success, bands all over the world need to start using western rhytms and melodies, losing the very things that made them unique.
Not that there's no innovation in niches, but those never reach the highlight.
Starting with the 60s hippies who need a haircut got rather into Indian stuff. In the 80s you had an African wave with the likes of Paul Simon. Peter Gabriel was all over the map. Hardly niche. All of this comes and goes, and comes round again. A lot of the biggest stars at the moment are not from the US/West.
has almost a decade ago renounced all pandering to the audience, started playing incredibly complex music, polyrhythms, fractal melodies, uniquely tuned instruments - and has since lost almost all of his audience and the income which came from music
Now whether or not there is money in it is altogether a different question. Music has been devalued. You/Friend might enjoy Rick Beato ranting about this subject on Youtube.
This isn't a new thing, if he wants to make money he needs to look cute, even the Beatles started by getting a makeover and going the boy band route. Such is life.
Metaharmony - https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=JNKBF8Phj3M
The Labyrinth of Limitations - https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=86XSsHlJSrc
Synthase / Midnight Oil Collective - https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-gWMW1Hkdik
If you haven't seen this Victor Wooten clip you should give it a glance: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=dLCOwgbEO4o
Globalization kills a lot, look at Khao San Road in Bangkok, in 20 years it changed from small street stalls to big global chains. And the great homogenization will continue. In the first Ringworld, this process is also described, transport booths (in a flash you walk to any destination on earth) made every city the same. The internet and cheap flights have already started this process.
Edit I also remember this being posted here once: "The same damn avocado toast" or something (can't find it anymore), about a traveler that got the same damn avocado toast everywhere he went.
Also this one: https://www.theatlantic.com/technology/archive/2020/08/why-e....
This phenomenon is why I ended up moving back to my hometown of ~100k after living in a couple of different countries + several different regions of the US/different big cities. They're all the same after a while. I missed a place that was unabashedly itself.
What we call art is the manipulation of these common patterns. When it's most successful, it often regurgitates patterns that have proven successful. When it's most meaningful it modifies the old pattern to make new patterns that people can appreciate.
The question then becomes, how much modification can you engage in before your work because meaningless to everyone but yourself.
Imagine if your friend was a writer who got tired of the spoken languages and began writing novels in his own custom language. Would you lament the fact that no one reads his books?
Btw, I took a (very) brief listen to your friends music and it seemed kinda interesting, but I can certainly see why he lost all of his followers.
The first sentence should read:
"We communicate with the most detail using words, but body language, facial expressions, touch and other [actions] act as [forms] of communication as well."
I chuckled. Then I hesitated. Is the author suggesting cultural veganism?
I'm not sure how anyone can actually be in denial about how bad social media, and constant notifications are for the brain.
Not endorsing a specific religion or philosophy here, but how is one to aspire to something more meaningful and deeper when they cannot even distinguish what that is?
> NATO is an institution that does not, for instance, seem able to withstand the thick desires of Vladimir Putin because it scarcely recognizes that he has any.
As a Polish citizen I have to say that the initial reaction to Putin's invasion, aside from shock, was a feeling that this could have been us hadn't we joined NATO over 20 years ago.
Still no guarantee that he won't do it(there was a major scare in 2014), but it's obvious that he's picking non-NATO members first.
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On to another topic: Sex. That paragraph is the most out of touch in my view, because it's deeply rooted in the "war on drugs" mentality. I was of the impression that nowadays vices are seen as more of a symptom of a deeper problem than the problem itself. Or is it just my bubble?
Also pornography is not any more the pinnacle of degeneracy the author thinks it to be[0]. With the advent of curated content, platforms with safe, functional payments and performers increasingly securing their rights - especially to privacy, it has become somewhat of a mainstream thing. Case in point: OnlyFans is essentially a household name now.
[0] I suppose the author only wrote this because he's unaware of the existence of the furry fandom or anime waifus. Those two phenomenons went where traditional pornography can't and won't go.
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As for art: most of modern art doesn't happen in galleries or closed meetings with expensive wine and other cartoonishly stereotypical attributes.
Modern art is chiefly memes produced and shared by the public for the public - anonymously at that. It even went through a series of trends, each spanning a few years, like the enigmatic, surreal "E" memes, with their characteristic "deep fried" art style. To this day it isn't clear how did this achieve mainstream adoption, what were they actually expressing and for what purpose. There probably wasn't any and people just collectively decided to make it so, which makes this the purest manifestation of art possible.
If this article made you feel bad, perhaps you could examine why it makes you feel that way.
Instead of thin criticism (e.g. grammar issues, non-obvious definition of thick/thin) maybe try going a little thicker.
Today poor people are fat but kids in rich families get anorexic because it is a way they can control the agenda. (Being ‘thin’ looks like it is mirroring the high-achieving attitude of the parents which makes them unresponsive for the children, but it ultimately creates a crisis which forces attention to be given.)
See now I think this wasn’t proofread.
Not entirely sure this belongs on HN either. Maybe if it was written more coherently?