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

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

#51

Post by eightysixfour »

jancsika wrote: post #49
eightysixfour wrote: post #34

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 bulls…

> 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…

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. 3 New generation of hipsters create music that is anti-mainstream... 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.

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

#52

Post by optimalsolver »

shadowgovt wrote: post #24
beebeepka wrote: post #12

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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…

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 support…

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

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

#53

Post by eightysixfour »

crawfordcomeaux wrote: post #48
eightysixfour wrote: post #22

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 a…

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 categor…

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.

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

#54

Post by jktogjfnn »

crucialfelix wrote: post #31
eightysixfour wrote: post #3

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…

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.

This is called "teenage rebelion".

It's a real psychological thing.

Some say it's an evolutionary feature to prevent societal ossification.

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

#55

Post by anm89 »

biomcgary wrote: post #44
PaulDavisThe1st wrote: post #33

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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" b…

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.

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

#56

Post by dekervin »

v_london wrote: post #41
optimalsolver wrote: post #4

Worth a read: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Circulation_of_elite

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 t…

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 !

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

#57

Post by anm89 »

yodelshady wrote: post #39
anm89 wrote: post #26

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 employe…

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 fa…

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

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

#58

Post by kelseyfrog »

eightysixfour wrote: post #3

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…

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

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

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

#59

Post by March_f6 »

eightysixfour wrote: post #3

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…

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.

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

#60

Post by PaulDavisThe1st »

anm89 wrote: post #55
biomcgary wrote: post #44

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 lik…

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.
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