We moderns are status-drunk

I see status seeking as a constant activity of people around me. The article got me thinking how this is similar in a way to power dynamics in a band of primates, a pecking or dominance order.

I gave my car to my granddaughter a few years ago and decided to not replace it (I live in a small town and like to walk, I can borrow my wife’s car or ask friends to drive places). I often joke to people that I am poor and can’t afford a car. Recently an old friend got upset at this - she started lecturing me on how important maintaining status is.

The reason social media like Facebook is so harmful is that it enables people to paint pictures of their wonderful lives to impress other people rather than simply quietly living wonderful lives. One of the most freeing things in life is realizing that personally that we are not special, that we rely on other people. We don’t have to be great at what we do, just being kind to ourselves and other people is all we need for a happy life.

Has anybody read impro by Keith Johnstone?

He’s got a write up in there about status, and how before they “figured it out,“ the actors couldn’t make believable scenes of “everyday conversation”. Then, after some play or another he hits on the idea of everybody trying to make their status just a little above or below the other person’s status in conversation.

Suddenly the acted conversations became “authentic”.

This post seems to be a similar take at a different scale and perspective. Interesting stuff.

I think a better characterization would be "status is not necessarily reciprocal"; the person evaluated for status does not need to be aware of the evaluators, as long as they can leverage the evaluated status itself. I think this is exactly the property that allows for prosthetic status. But it also makes it much more game-able than the real, just-in-time, participatory status.

In the case of a lord, the carrier of status is actually the title than the person who happens to be the lord at that time. Lordship is the technology that attempts to scale the status across time and across a higher number of people. The problem of giving what is ultimately dead-matter so much power is that anyone who can capture it can also use it, regardless of legitimacy. This is a perennial problem woven into literature and philosophy for centuries.

The high-follower-count as a status technology is just a newer, planet scale version of this game, but it is not the ultimate status carrier either. The ultimate status is held by the tech company that can give the follower count its meaning. It is the immediate entity that can convince us to divorce status from its original, participatory meaning and to respond to its reduced form that is the number. It is the almost transparent medium where numbers and attention flow through, all of which it can ultimately can turn into money.