Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

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

royalsocietypublishing.org

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

61–70 of 70 posts

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

#61

Post by crawfordcomeaux »

eightysixfour wrote: post #53
crawfordcomeaux wrote: post #48

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

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.

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

#62

Post by anm89 »

PaulDavisThe1st wrote: post #60
anm89 wrote: post #55

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

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

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

#63

Post by [deleted] »

eightysixfour wrote: post #53
crawfordcomeaux wrote: post #48

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

[deleted]

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

#64

Post by eightysixfour »

anm89 wrote: post #62
PaulDavisThe1st wrote: post #60

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

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

#65

Post by t-3 »

martythemaniak wrote: post #19
BoysenberryPi wrote: post #9

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

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

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

#67

Post by reducesuffering »

adamgordonbell wrote: post #2

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/

Yep, this is an intuitive explanation for it.

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

#68

Post by beebeepka »

wyager wrote: post #23
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…

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

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

#69

Post by shadowgovt »

optimalsolver wrote: post #52
shadowgovt wrote: post #24

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

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.

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

#70

Post by crucialfelix »

eightysixfour wrote: post #34
crucialfelix wrote: post #31

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 bulls…

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.

Post reply on HN