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.
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 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.
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.
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.
The lead in gasoline hypothesis is certainly plausible, however, I blame the larger picture of car dependency as well as the Thatcher/Reagan revolution, when 'stranger danger' was the big fear.
The article does go into this aspect, with a map of Sheffield in the footnotes showing how far eight year old kids were able to travel over the different generations. There was a time when the child could go across to the other side of the city to go fishing, whereas now, a child is essentially imprisoned and not expected to be going very far.
The Thatcher/Reagan revolution created exceptional oppositional culture in the UK, with 'rave' being the thing. The last 'free range' children grew up to be the original ravers and they had considerable organisational ability, needed to put on parties and other events. Furthermore, the music of the rave scene was banned by the BBC and the government ('repetitive beats').
In time, most of the rave generation grew up, got day jobs, had kids and all of that fun stuff. They got old and moved on, however, there was nobody to fill their shoes. Instead of illegal rave events and lots of house parties, organised festivals and city nightclubs took over. The cost aspect meant going with a small handful of friends rather than just the closest two hundred friends.
A good party should be heard from a considerable distance away (sorry neighbours) and I am surprised at how few parties there are these days. I travel by bicycle on residential roads, often late at night. Rarely do I find myself stumbling across people having house parties. This doesn't mean that parties aren't happening, but, equally, it doesn't mean I am old and out of touch.
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)
Yeah, I still like doing "weird" things wrt music and experiencing art, but I am not posting about it anywhere or paying much for it. Most of the really interesting things I've been to in the last 5 years or so have been very local, small, and not really monetized.
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…?
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.
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.)
There's also the issue of gatekeepers squashing deviance. Payment processors killing payments to various legal adult websits. Information-discovery gatekeepers squashing discoverability of deviant material. Social media....has had a dual affect of being subject to the gatekeeper's restrictions and the risk of self-appointed moral busybodies searching for deviant content to threaten peoples' lives/livelihoods over.
Cultural gatekeepers are able to exert influence over more people now than they have ever had before in human history. In many cases the ability to be deviant is becoming more difficult to even attempt.
> 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.
Fifty years ago you had Soviet Union.
An entity which provided an alternative to the US and Western Europe vassals freemarketeering shenanigans.
With the Soviet Union gone, and the communists in retreat, the Capitalists can shove their ideologies down the populace's collective throat.
It has already been established that "what we have here is the best system" and any failure to ascend in said system is a failure of the individual rather than the system's.
"Here is a feel good story of an immigrant that learned python and made it big in America, why can't you do the same?"
It looks cyclical to me. The materialism of the postwar era led into the civil rights movement of the late 60s and 70s, which turned into the materialistic 80s, which was rejected by the countercultural late 90s and 2000s, after which there was a slight deviation in which transgression rather than anti-materialism was rejected, and now we're back to materialism.
My guess is that in a decade or two society will elevate an ideology that directly opposes material wealth again. If nobody has any damn money then they can't exactly use wealth as a measure of worth.
Mark Fisher describes this as precorporation in Capitalist Realism. The idea that at a certain point capital will anticipate and ahead of time incorporate the behavior, thus absorbing it into the overall mechanism.
no, the romantic narrative of Life was just a facade used by cynical boomers to club to the top, its true many were earnest in the way they focused on quality of their Jobs (doing that also lead you to money) so its not that now its about money, It always was It just the romantic layers were removed so even if you are passionated about something if you are not cold with money as the hard reality of everything you Will seem deluded
I don't really believe this explanation, it is too narrow (in the usual "the US is the whole world" sense typical for US-based forums), and the same trend seems to be happening in many countries and cultures at once.
My explanations would be:
a. A lot of your current life is recorded online and visible to others, and people in general behave more carefully when under de facto surveillance. Similar to self-censorship in authoritarian countries.
b. Personal contact has been supplanted by virtual contact over apps, especially among the young, and doing risky things, including sex and booze, faces a lot more obstacles when your main gateway to the rest of humanity, including friends, is a screen.
Quite a lot of my, uh, non-standard behavior in my 20s was initiated by an impulsive decision in company of others, who came up with some ...idea... This is what just does not happen when everyone is in their room alone.
There's a book "Against Creativity" by Oli Mould which is on this topic. The title is about the redirection of creativity into monetizing everything. It hypothesizes that any current counterculture gets bought out by the system and sold back to society while those creators effectively get golden handcuffs to not rock the boat meaningfully.
> Someone will probably say this is because current generations have less financial security, and I’m sure that’s a factor.
Than the previous couple of generations, sure. But, in most places, far _more_ than those born late in the 19th century, say. That in itself isn't a great explanation.
This aligns fairly closely with one of the main theses of “The Technological Republic,” Alex Karp’s new book.
Basically, our abandonment of shared identities (national, religious, cultural) has allowed status and market forces to rush in to give people meaning and identity.
Obviously a take that will ruffle some feathers, but I found it fairly convincing.
Our culture is certainly commercialized - with the ancien régime out, the merchants began to dominate, and with it a cultural shift toward commerce. Commercialism embraces industrialization and industrialization produces homogeneity. Profit becomes the sole measure of "success", giving way to streamlining and predictability.
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.)
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".
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.
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.
>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 wonder how much of that is down to car culture. The amount of traffic I had to deal with as a child was tiny compared what my children faced.
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.
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.
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!
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
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?
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.
99 comments
[ 2.8 ms ] story [ 95.2 ms ] threadEdit: average is the wrong word - measuring outliers is hard.
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 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.
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.
The article does go into this aspect, with a map of Sheffield in the footnotes showing how far eight year old kids were able to travel over the different generations. There was a time when the child could go across to the other side of the city to go fishing, whereas now, a child is essentially imprisoned and not expected to be going very far.
The Thatcher/Reagan revolution created exceptional oppositional culture in the UK, with 'rave' being the thing. The last 'free range' children grew up to be the original ravers and they had considerable organisational ability, needed to put on parties and other events. Furthermore, the music of the rave scene was banned by the BBC and the government ('repetitive beats').
In time, most of the rave generation grew up, got day jobs, had kids and all of that fun stuff. They got old and moved on, however, there was nobody to fill their shoes. Instead of illegal rave events and lots of house parties, organised festivals and city nightclubs took over. The cost aspect meant going with a small handful of friends rather than just the closest two hundred friends.
A good party should be heard from a considerable distance away (sorry neighbours) and I am surprised at how few parties there are these days. I travel by bicycle on residential roads, often late at night. Rarely do I find myself stumbling across people having house parties. This doesn't mean that parties aren't happening, but, equally, it doesn't mean I am old and out of touch.
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)
Unfortunately it is not only a bad thing.
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…?
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.
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.)
Cultural gatekeepers are able to exert influence over more people now than they have ever had before in human history. In many cases the ability to be deviant is becoming more difficult to even attempt.
Fifty years ago you had Soviet Union.
An entity which provided an alternative to the US and Western Europe vassals freemarketeering shenanigans.
With the Soviet Union gone, and the communists in retreat, the Capitalists can shove their ideologies down the populace's collective throat.
It has already been established that "what we have here is the best system" and any failure to ascend in said system is a failure of the individual rather than the system's.
"Here is a feel good story of an immigrant that learned python and made it big in America, why can't you do the same?"
My guess is that in a decade or two society will elevate an ideology that directly opposes material wealth again. If nobody has any damn money then they can't exactly use wealth as a measure of worth.
My explanations would be:
a. A lot of your current life is recorded online and visible to others, and people in general behave more carefully when under de facto surveillance. Similar to self-censorship in authoritarian countries.
b. Personal contact has been supplanted by virtual contact over apps, especially among the young, and doing risky things, including sex and booze, faces a lot more obstacles when your main gateway to the rest of humanity, including friends, is a screen.
Quite a lot of my, uh, non-standard behavior in my 20s was initiated by an impulsive decision in company of others, who came up with some ...idea... This is what just does not happen when everyone is in their room alone.
https://www.amazon.com/Against-Creativity-Oli-Mould-ebook/dp...
Has anyone here had the chance to have a frank conversation which such types? Morbid curiosity...
Than the previous couple of generations, sure. But, in most places, far _more_ than those born late in the 19th century, say. That in itself isn't a great explanation.
Basically, our abandonment of shared identities (national, religious, cultural) has allowed status and market forces to rush in to give people meaning and identity.
Obviously a take that will ruffle some feathers, but I found it fairly convincing.
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
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.)
It was a lot more uncensored and anarchistic. It wasn't dedicated to consumerism and sold out to corporations.
We had personal websites, blogs and such. No, it has definitely changed for the worse in terms of personal freedom. Enshittification is real.
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".
> 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 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.
I wonder how much of that is down to car culture. The amount of traffic I had to deal with as a child was tiny compared what my children faced.
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.
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!
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?
I guess it's not deviant if it's a large percentage of the population.