This is a companion piece to III. Fallout

The Map Precedes the Territory

Have you ever found a song that you absolutely love and listen to constantly? And then for some reason, maybe after 30 listens, maybe after 100, it just stops hitting you the same way? You might even start to skip it when it comes up in your playlist.

What is it exactly that changes? Why do things “get old?”

I think part of it’s about efficiency. We get exposed to something enough, we start to think we know what’s there, and our brains stop spending as much effort to really investigate it. It starts to harden conceptually - becomes familiar.

You want this to some degree. The world would be overwhelming and incoherent if we didn’t do this at all, and our conceptual understanding enables us to do important things. It opens experience up to deeper degrees of possibility and meaning. But too much of it, and there are downsides. We stop really experiencing things for what they are - interacting with representations in our minds rather than the world itself. Things start to get old.

I am not the first to notice this –

If we start to examine the general laws of perception, we see that as perception becomes habitual, it becomes automatic … if one remembers the sensations of holding a pen or of speaking in a foreign language for the first time and compares that with his feeling at performing the action for the ten thousandth time, he will agree with us […]

By this "algebraic" method of thought we apprehend objects only as shapes with imprecise extensions; we do not see them in their entirety but rather recognize them by their main characteristics. We see the object as though it were enveloped in a sack. We know what it is by its configuration, but we see only its silhouette […]

Victor Shklovsky, Art as Technique (1917)

For most this process only tends in one direction as time goes on - towards more abstraction, more hardening of ideas, more habituation, and less reality.

I think it’s part of the yearning and nostalgia people have for their childhood - it may have been the last time things felt real and vivid, before the world was replaced by concepts and they could still see it in its fullness.

It seems to me that this problem is getting worse.

Too Many Ideas

Part of it I think is the sheer amount of information we are exposed to -

Concepts and simplifying abstractions are necessary to help us navigate the information chaos of our worlds. But every time we scroll our feeds, we’re undergoing a kind of training: our ideas are hardening, and the amount of the world we are able to see is being reduced.

Take for example this finding -

[R]ecent research suggests that people browsing social media tend to experience “normative dissociation” in which they become less aware and less able to process information, to such an extent that they often can’t recall what they just read.

Gurwinder, The Intellectual Obesity Crisis

What I suspect is actually happening here is this kind of conceptual hardening. After a lot of time online, my sense is people can only take in the words they’re reading enough to map them to an existing set of higher-level, simplifying concepts, and stop being able to process and really register the individual characteristics. They start to see only the silhouette and outward configuration before matching it to the nearest representation in their minds, no longer really able to take in any more.

In this way our digital feeds are like habituation engines - machines for callousing our perception.

But information overload is only one side of the coin. The other is the ideas themselves.

Synthetic Experience

Growing up, it seemed even to me like kids who were younger and younger were getting into riskier trouble. I went to a pretty tame boarding school, but in my 9th grade year, one of my friends was already smoking weed pretty regularly, and one night he snuck mushrooms in for him and another of my friends to try as they watched Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas. (I trip sat.)

This sort of thing may seem more commonplace now, and this isn’t nearly the most egregious example, but I wonder if kids weren’t a bit milder and more innocent a few generations ago?

I attribute at least part of the change to a feedback loop between media and culture. My friends and I had grown up with media that put these things forward as interesting and desirable activities for older teens who we took as role models and wanted to emulate. But then our generation, beginning these things at much younger ages, defined the next iteration of culture that new media took as influence - and the cycle intensified.

There’s a habituation with media that amplifies this loop as well. Because they lack the fullness of real experience, the things we see on screen are reduced to concepts quickly and easily, and they get old and unexciting fast. It’s why novelty rules media, and why the people writing our shows and movies go to further and further extremes to keep an audience. But, importantly, it’s not just that this stuff becomes boring on TV while watching: it also becomes boring IRL.12

I call this problem synthetic experience: we can develop such detailed expectations and structures for our experience through indirect means that we come to fit reality into these preconceptions, rather than experiencing it for what it actually is.

We’ve always had things that do this to some extent - old folktales and stories, plays and novels. But only in the last two or three generations have we had something as complex and immersive as a modern movie or television show, and we spend more time taking them in than we ever have.3

Think about how odd this really is:

On its face this sort of thing may seem pretty benign, but I think it’s actually a huge part of the difficulty people have with dating. There is just so much conditioning and preconception around it all, layered in since childhood, that it gets in the way of having any kind of genuine, open experience with another person that could actually lead to a real connection.4

And this process touches literally everything. We get models of how we’re supposed to socialize, argue, eat, dress, grieve, have a midlife crisis, find success and meaning. I’m not saying people can’t tell the difference between fiction and reality, or that we are endlessly suggestible and don’t have our own ideas. But we absorb at least some of this; and we end up subtly fitting our experience to it, rather than the other way around.

But what we pick up from movies is just a drop in the bucket compared to what we get from our peers.

Social Overlays

In the early 2010s there was this emerging folk-pop style that came to be known (and derided) as Stomp-Clap-Hey. You’ve heard it before - acoustic and repurposed instruments, community feeling, swelling crescendos, and, yes, stomps claps and heys. It played into a general cultural yearning for tradition, community, sincerity, optimism, and coming back down to earth in reaction to a broader culture more defined by superficial excess, ironic detachment, and growing atomization. It was short lived, but for a brief moment, it was everywhere.

And then it died quickly.

Almost overnight, all of this stuff that had so quickly ascended to total cultural dominance became embarrassing, and nobody would touch it with a ten-foot pole.

Coining the name to describe it - Stomp Clap Hey - was the kiss of death. Once there’s a way for everyone to collectively refer to something, the broader group can then coordinate against anyone participating in it, pushing those who took part to distance themselves and concentrating the shame on anyone remaining. It’s a vicious cycle; and wherever it gains a bit of traction, it tends to go to completion.5 Few will now admit that they ever liked anything in a wide neighborhood of this aesthetic that had once reliably taken the top spots in pop music charts and influenced most cultural trends.

It happens often. Thinking back, the broad disdain for the band Nickelback was probably the first instance of this that I encountered personally. But some more recent examples - would you mention liking The Office on your dating profile? Or the book Sapiens? Imagine Dragons? These things were extremely popular and then almost overnight became intensely shameful to the point where people might feel second hand embarrassment if you even mentioned them.

Here’s the thing: I think a lot of this stuff is actually pretty good. I like apothecarycore and trinkets. Ho Hey is a good song.6

But many of you reading are probably cringing when I say that. I actually found it hard to type without this reflex to caveat these things and show wait no I have good taste, I am trying to make a subtler point but of course I am aware of why these things are bad. And that exact thing is the problem, these layers of internalized shame and ego that we are all absorbing.7

And I’m not saying that there’s no basis at all to any of the criticisms of this stuff. But what I find is that these swings are often largely just capitulations to fickle tides of group opinion - allowing a thing to become completely defined by its least charitable connotations and examples, a hard and reductive inference made real by social fiat.8

It’s destructive, and increasingly it comes for everything:

We shouldn’t allow our worlds to be defined in the terms of niche status hypercompetition and toxic group dynamics. It’s nicer - better in every way - to be able to see things in their entirety; to see what’s good about them, rather than allowing them to be reduced to their social overlays.

But it’s genuinely hard. It makes you vulnerable to real reputational damage to go against the group like this, and it’s pushed on us at every turn.

Every time I open twitter, or instagram, or reddit, I am flooded with it:

sfchronicle

A post shared by @sfchronicle

ohhyoubetcha

A post shared by @ohhyoubetcha

lauren.cantrell

A post shared by @lauren.cantrell

Inevitably some of it slips through. Haven’t you ever caved to this kind of consensus in a way you’ve later recognized as unfair and regretted?

It’s all just extremely mean. You can say they’re just jokes (they’re not), and maybe some of it is calling out real stuff at the margin that’s a bit annoying. But I think people just have no sense of the collateral damage being done and how much it outweighs any other consideration. Once something becomes a consensus node for the broader group to shame, the dynamics are so overpowered that nobody will touch it, and everything near it gets destroyed.

It’s what’s made our culture so toxic. This stuff just has too much power.

And it’s deeply related to everything we are seeing:

Can you remember how things used to be?

We really did seem to be lighter and more open as a people not that long ago. I notice it often when I meet people from other countries who were not socialized in the same ways that most of us have been - this striking lack of self-consciousness and judgement, and a charitable, good natured openness and generosity that is obvious the second you meet them.

And it makes sense when we are absorbing so much of this stuff - to come to see ourselves and each other and the rest of the world in such uncharitable and reductive terms, and the influence this has on every aspect of our being.

How can we return?

Seeing the Sky

If the engine whistles, let it whistle till it is hoarse for its pains. If the bell rings, why should we run? We will consider what kind of music they are like. Let us settle ourselves, and work and wedge our feet downward through the mud and slush of opinion, and prejudice, and tradition, and delusion, and appearance, that alluvion which covers the globe, through Paris and London, through New York and Boston and Concord, through church and state, through poetry and philosophy and religion, till we come to a hard bottom and rocks in place, which can call reality, and say, “This is.”

Henry David Thoreau, Walden (1854)

It’s hard to overstate how far the effects go.

I met a girl at a wedding some time ago, I forget her name, but she worked at Google and it was around the time of the controversy with James Damore. I guess most of the conversations she had turned to that subject, because when she said where she worked she was a little bit braced as if expecting me to bring it up. But I actually wasn’t online at all at the time, and didn’t even know who he was when she finally asked me if I’d heard about all of it. It was incredible - I have never seen a person light up more or be more interested in talking in my life.

It’s just a small example, but have you ever experienced this? How nice it is to relate with people who don’t already have so many ideas that they can actually take in new ones?9

I think it’s what connection actually consists of - this ability to have genuine openness with another, to actually see them rather than your own ideas and ego. It is one of the greatest kindnesses we can give. But I think we’re absorbing so much that it’s becoming harder and harder to do.

I find now I am almost never really open to anything. When I am interacting with someone, I am always catching myself reflexively mapping them or what they are sharing with me to some reductive concept I’ve picked up. It’s not truly mine, and I resist it, but it doesn’t matter - it’s already precluded connection.

And it touches everything -

And so life is reckoned as nothing. Habitualization devours work, clothes, furniture, one's wife, and the fear of war. "If the whole complex lives of many people go on unconsciously, then such lives are as if they had never been."

It’s just the total disenchantment of life. And at the far end, it is to be locked away in your own mind, separated from those around you, and ultimately separated from God.10

But I think it’s possible to go back.

A few places I would start:

• It’s obvious we need to change our relationship with social media. I have more ideas about this, but I think a few key steps are to limit scrolling in favor of more intentional use, and to not let it become the background condition to your life by checking it in every interstitial moment. Everyone struggles with this, including me, but I liked this idea and had pretty good success with it in the time I was following it.

• Culture should mostly be local. Grace and fairness do not scale, but outrage and cruelty do.

• True art is a weapon against everything I am describing,11 and we need to help create better conditions for it’s production.

• People absorb this stuff much more quickly when reputational stakes and group pressure are high and they don’t have much confidence in themselves or space to consider what they really think. Giving middle and high schoolers unfettered internet access is a genuine disaster for their well-being and personal development (as well as for the project of civilization), and something needs to be done about it.

• Meditation.12 It is the inverse motion of habituation, a way to resensitize yourself to the fullness of reality, and I don’t think it’s entirely coincidental that it’s popularity has grown so much in recent years. I don’t currently have a practice, but I was happier and a better person when I did.

But much more to come in IV - Depatterning.

We are not afraid to entrust the American people with unpleasant facts, foreign ideas, alien philosophies, and competitive values. For a nation that is afraid to let its people judge the truth and falsehood in an open market is a nation that is afraid of its people.

John F. Kennedy, February 26, 1962

Years ago I was traveling to New York Tuesdays and Thursdays to see a doctor a friend had recommended to me. She and I had similar health issues, and we kept in touch to let each other know about anything promising we came across in our search to get better.

The doctor’s practice was interesting because you’d sit there in this NYC apartment-turned-office and talk for hours with a half-dozen people twice a week for months, getting vitamin IVs and chelators, taking saunas or hooking up to oxygen, checking in with the doctor, etc. It was people from different walks of life - businessmen, teachers, moms, university students, etc - and I liked pretty much everyone I met. One day when the doctor was out around the holidays, we played UNO with the nurses (who were, for that day, very loud).

It was actually in the lead-up to 2016 at the time I was there - I only went for about 7 months. Sometimes politics would come up, though usually only to groan and shake our heads at the latest development before moving on to something else. But it was assumed everyone was against Trump - it was self-evidently the reasonable position among those who knew anything. I’m not sure I had at that point even encountered anyone in my day-to-day life who really supported him - the most was maybe a few of my uncles who watched Tucker and would sometimes share memes at Hillary’s expense.

So it was something of a shock when this woman who I’d spent a lot of time talking with and liked started to say that you know, she actually wasn’t sure who she was going to vote for and began to say what she liked about Trump.

My eyes widened and my jaw half dropped in a questioning surprise. I cut in - don’t you know what a loose cannon this guy is? I started rattling off the insane things I’d seen reported in the media about him. One of the nurses gave me a knowing smile but gently waved me off and I relented to give her space to explain her view, but the rest of the group moved on before she could. I’m embarrassed to think about it now, but I was proud in the moment to have been knowledgeable enough to push back against what everyone knew was insanity.

The night of the election, I stayed up into the early morning hoping for a Clinton win, and felt totally defeated as it became clear she’d lost. I am not even sure why - I had never really followed politics much at all. It was more this vague sense that the bottom of the world I was a part of had fallen out, and that it was changing in ways I did not understand.

It was. And I now believe it was deeply necessary.

I want to share my view of things as someone who started on one side and crossed over.

I think the first thing that started to change my view were the lies. Take Very Fine People - most of you have probably never seen this footage:

But even though the transcript and video has been out there since 2017, nearly every mainstream publication ran with this story, repeating it ad nauseam for years. Obama just repeated it to a group of voters in Milwaukee a few days ago:

Why would you place your faith in somebody .. who sat down for pleasantries with Holocaust deniers, who said that there were very fine people on both sides of a white supremacist rally?

And that’s not an exception. From Russiagate, to drinking bleach, bloodbath, suckers and losers, threatening Liz Cheney - every one of the controversies they’ve been pushing about Trump seems to completely fold under the tiniest bit of scrutiny. And as you watch all of this, it starts to become clear: the media that once loved him is now hellbent on destroying him, and they’ll use anything do it, no matter how dishonest. The question becomes why.

I think Eric Weinstein laid it out very well here -

There is something that I think Mike Benz has referred to as the rules based international order. It’s an interlocking series of agreements, tacit understandings, explicit understandings, clandestine understandings, about how the most important structures keep the world free of war, and keep markets open. And there has been a system in place whether understood explicitly or behind the scenes or implicitly that says that the purpose of the two American parties is to prune the field of populist candidates so that whatever two candidates exist in a face-off are both acceptable to that world order. …

And so Democracy was the illusion of choice, what’s called Magician’s Choice: pick a card, any card, but somehow the magician makes sure that the card that you pick is the one that he knows. …

So under that structure, everything was going fine until 2016, and then the first candidate ever to not hold any position in the military nor poisition in govt in the history of the republic to the enter the oval office, Donald J Trump, broke through the primary structure. And so then there was a full court press, okay we only have one candidate who’s acceptable to the international order, Donald Trump will be under constant pressure that he’s a loser, he’s a wild man, he’s an idiot, and he’s under the control of the Russians. …

This is an unsolved problem … And it is the job of the State Department, the Intelligence Community, and the Defense Department to bring this problem in front of the American people and say we have a problem, you don’t know everything that’s going on, and if you start voting in populist candidates, you’re going to end up knocking out load-bearing walls that you don’t understand.

I think this is the most generous explanation for everything that’s happened. In a world with nuclear bombs and where smallpox can be synthesized in a lab, giving the people the freedom to actually choose can perhaps seem to well-intentioned leaders like an impossible risk. And so instead we have democracy theatre - an illusion convincing enough to manufacture our consent and enclose us in a managed reality.

But even this best case is a repulsive inversion of everything this country represents and a total betrayal of its ideals. I would not make such a trade for a promise of safety, and I don’t think the rest of the country would either if they understood the choice.

Our leaders simply do not always know what is best for us - that is indisputable after Covid. And worse, our leaders do not always even have our interests in mind. We cannot have a system where they are not accountable to the public.

If it’s felt to you like things have gotten absolutely insane over the last decade, I think this is why. They cannot allow this debate to be had in the real terms, and so instead they need ways to shut it down - to tightly regulate the bounds of acceptable discourse, and punish those who stray outside those lines:

And it seems to me that as this regime loses its grip on power, its death throes have become more desperate and more visible to those watching. The people are catching on. I believe it’s what is at the heart of all the social turmoil we’ve seen over the last decade.

MAGA was just early to all of it. They were people who had seen how the system treated other outsider candidates like Ron Paul. Or who experienced the ways you’d be branded a racist for expressing what were common positions five years prior. And they correctly intuited that Donald Trump, whatever his flaws, was the one - perhaps the only one - who could break through and stand up to it.

For that, I want to extend MAGA an apology, at least on my own behalf though I think the entire country owes it to you. I think you’re patriots who have suffered a great deal to stand up for common sense and American ideals against a socially-engineered, dehumanizing hellstorm. And I am not sure what path our country would be on if you hadn’t.

We are living through a time of great change. I don’t think it’s a stretch to say it is the second American Revolution. The risks the establishment is worried about are real. And I understand the concerns people have about Donald Trump, though I think it is very hard to get an accurate picture of the man through such profound and systematic distortion.1

But I think through him and those who have joined with his cause, we have a chance to put America back on its course towards something greater, something we last moved toward with JFK and which was taken from us by people obsessed with control in the name of safety. The America that Almost Was and Yet May Be.

I believe we’re up to the challenge.

We don't even know what our desire is. We ask other people to tell us our desires. We would like our desires to come from our deepest selves, our personal depths - but if it did, it would not be desire. Desire is always for something we feel we lack.

René Girard

Modern Love

I saw a post on Instagram a while ago, I can’t find it now, but I’m sure you’ve seen similar and will know what I’m talking about. It was a girl making a post with her boyfriend, a black and white photo of them embracing at the end of a dark hallway. They might have been newlyweds, and the caption was this long screed that was remarkable in that it did not particularly seem to be about their relationship at all.

It was more directed towards her peers. She spent about half of it vaguely calling out people who’d been disloyal to her, who’d doubted her, her haters; and the other half talking about how wonderful her husband is and how happy they are together and the amazing life they were going to have together. But even that wasn’t really about him. Down to the staging of the photo (you couldn’t see his face, and the pose was unnatural), he didn’t really factor in - reduced to playing a role, a mere accessory for use in her broader conflict with her social world.

This is of course standard on social media. The point tends to be less about connecting with others over something, and more about demonstrating something about yourself to them: shoring up some perceived weakness or flaw, dispelling some old criticism, proving your worth.

I think everyone does it at least a little bit - we’re wired to. It’s about social belonging; being enough be accepted by your tribe and defending your position among them. But it’s becoming an increasingly difficult problem to solve, and it’s swallowing the rest of our lives.

Take dating:

I think people would be surprised how much of what they think they desire romantically is actually at bottom about appearances and social prestige - the being vs. the having, metaphysical vs. physical in Girard’s terms.

There’s an amount of it that makes sense. We have egos for a reason, and it makes sense that our desires would align with and satisfy them. But our egos can work against us too, making us feel we need things that don’t actually serve us. And as the problem of Self and belonging gets more complicated, our egos are growing with it.

I remember in college after people would hook up after a night drinking, they’d often be absolutely mortified to run into each other later on and would take great pains to avoid it. Maybe part of it is just emotional immaturity, discomfort with intimacy and not knowing how to navigate it. But I think it was much more about social concerns - fear about about associating themselves with another in such a significant way, what they might reveal and how it might diminish them in the eyes of their broader social sphere.

I think it’s the major reason why people today are having trouble finding a partner: as our ego commitments grow, it gets harder and harder to find someone who can meet them. And it’s not serving us - most of what is good in love comes from transcending yourself, learning to care more about another. But we’re increasingly precluded from ever getting there.

The most insidious thing I think is that it warps the way we fundamentally see the world, and in ways we don’t tend to notice. For instance I don’t think our judgements of attractiveness or the weights we give them are entirely our own. There’s an aspect of it that we learn, this set of largely social concerns and associations that we absorb and layer over reality to the point where they crowd out and almost replace what’s underneath. I’m not saying beauty is entirely a social construct or that anyone should date someone aren’t attracted to, but can you remember how you saw the world as a child?

I think this is exactly what Girard is getting at when he says we learn our desires from others. Our egos are our way of holding on to everything we believe we need, and much of that is socially defined. And the desire that comes from it is inherently unfulfilling - it’s about protecting ourselves, shoring up vulnerabilities and the things we feel we lack, rather than about anything positive we really want. The more we come to orient to the world in terms of it, the more miserable we become.

Everything good is out beyond the Self, but the way we’ve set up our social world seems almost designed to keep people stuck in it.

Is there another way?

This is the third in the Culture Mechanics series. Here are parts one and two.

Heckler’s Veto

Perhaps you’ve had this experience: you find a new show that you like, or maybe a song or album or movie; you haven’t seen anyone else talk about it, and it just exists in your world. Then at some point you read a negative review, or see your peers criticize it, and afterward, somehow, you can’t quite see it the same way again?

It happened to me once in college: a girl I liked made an off-hand comment disparaging a show that I would sometimes watch with family. It wasn’t my favorite show, but I liked it okay. But from that moment on, I felt a reflexive distancing from it any time it was brought up. When a family friend who loved the show asked with excitement if I watched as well, I deflected: oh, my parents do. I’m still a little embarrassed by that cowardice.

It wasn’t just that I didn’t want to associate with it anymore - I experienced it differently. It began to feel too embarrassing to even watch; the aspects she’d touched on just became so salient and drowned everything else out.

I notice it everywhere in my life - this web of connotations around a thing slowly growing over and replacing reality.

Cringe

It’s a deep thing that’s happening. We’re social creatures. Having a place in society has historically meant a great deal for how we fared in life - and whether we survived at all.

We’re hardwired to track social norms and group opinion, and most of the time, unless we’ve really thought it through and feel confident in ourselves, we follow the herd. We never lost those instincts.

But our circumstances have changed, and I think they’re hurting us far more now than they help - individually and collectively.

You have this module too. It’s composed of the things you know instinctively not to say or do, and that make you cringe when you remember a time you did; tripwires you’ve learned not to cross even if you couldn’t really say exactly why. I think most of us can’t even consciously see the full extent of it, this training that we’ve absorbed so much of throughout our lives.

Hell is (Groups of) Other People

I don’t feel guilt at being unsociable, though I may sometimes regret it because my loneliness is painful. But when I move into the world, it feels like a moral fall like seeking love in a whorehouse.

Sontag, As Consciousness is Harnessed by Flesh

People have always had to worry about fitting in: to sacrifice some of who they are to instead conform to the well-worn identities, behaviors, and expressions acceptable to their social world.

It’s gotten worse.

Most of it owes to the internet and media: we’ve enabled social coordination and competition like never before in our history. It is competition that drives the group to want to tear individuals down; and the extreme ease with which consensus can be formed and enforced has given it an overwhelming advantage.

These are the results:

1. Nothing is safe. As groups compete to tear others down, everything comes to be implicated in the contest. Your identity and traits, your opinions, your taste and style - all of it comes to carry connotation about who you fundamentally are in ways that will be used against you. Even the most minute things can become an attack surface, a way to connect you to a more established node in the evolving consensus scaffolding that the group can use to bring you down.

2. Nothing is simple. More straightforward norms, oppressive as they can be, are comparatively easy - you learn them and make the adjustments to follow them, and that’s generally the end of it. But the nebulous, ever-shifting norms we have now are more insidious. The uncertainty has a multiplying effect, as people will tend to try to conform and self-censor in each of the many directions something could go, just in case. It’s ungrounding - it’s very hard if you grow up in such unstable social conditions to develop a robust sense of self that can stand up to the group.

3. Attacks cut deep. Have you ever thought about what’s happening when an insult really lands? It’s because it touches on something that has social power: it connects you to a salient consensus node, a type, in a deep way that you can’t easily deflect. As the consensus scaffolding develops and expands, there is more and more potent fodder for the group to use in targeting you.

4. There’s no escape. Group norms used to not only be more contained, but they were also more localized. Even if in some areas of your life there were the kinds of toxic dynamics I am describing, you could at least avoid them and choose better environments. But now our norms are more global, their presence felt to some degree in almost every context, and it’s increasingly hard to find true refuge.1

Most have learned to hide from it and adapt - to try not to stand out too much or give anything the group could use against them, a difficult challenge that is only getting harder.

Internet Poison

If I think of my early days on the internet as a teen, it was a bit like getting to hang out with the older kids. It felt exciting - realer than ordinary life in some way, more compelling. I feel the opposite way now, but back then it felt like it was where the real action was happening, where you could peek behind the veil and learn the truth about things.

It was a kind of social superstimulus: a way to get in at the ground floor on the latest trends, norms, and values coming into vogue; to stand at the absolute cutting edge of culture. Particularly with the rise of social media, discourse online centered largely around attacks: individuals trying to tear each other and their outgroups down as they competed for status and the supremacy of their norms. The attacks weren’t always targeted at you, but you learned what the group valued, and what would make you vulnerable.

It’s almost impossible not to let this kind of exposure shape you - to push you to change the ways you express to be more aligned with the group, and to hide the parts of yourself you’ll be attacked for.

It’ll happen so gradually as to almost be imperceptible, but with time as you internalize more and more of it, it’ll shape how you perceive the world - what’s salient to you, how you see yourself and others, even what you value.

It’s ontological poison.2

I suspect it’s what people are getting at with phrases like 'terminally online’ and ‘brain worms.’ In the end you find yourself constantly looking out for and overloaded by attacks to identity and Self, and you come to parse the world in terms of them. With enough time it’ll be almost all you can see.

Self Beware

In fact, the consequence of the sexual quest is not the pleasure but, rather, the narcissistic reward, the prestige awarded by the desired partner for one’s erotic superiority

Houellebecq3

If you’re online, you’ve probably seen this video going around -

It’s funny, and I feel a bit bad posting it because I am all too aware of this impulse in myself, but the reason it went viral is because it speaks to something widespread in our culture: appearances becoming more important than reality. It looks ridiculous in person - the experience is not what she is making it out to be - but post-editing and on your feed it’d probably look amazing.

It’s an empty promise. But looking the part can almost feel more satisfying than actually being the thing - the actual, momentary experience separate from the knowledge of how you are appearing to others.

I had my own experience with it growing up. In my peer group in middle school, artistic taste was the high status thing - the kind of music you liked, the way you dressed and self-expressed, the art you created. It was the way you demonstrated your value; how you showed people who you fundamentally were.4

It was truly insane how totalizing and competitive it got. I still see vestiges of it even now, decades later, when I talk to others who grew up in it too - the reticence they’ll have to talk about the art they like; the way they’ll suppress and temper expressions of enthusiasm for fear of attaching themselves too much to something that could make them vulnerable.

I got so caught up in it that I actually mostly gave up music around my late teens and early twenties. These concerns about connotation and identity had just overshadowed the actual experience so much that I didn’t even know what I liked anymore.

The particulars of what connotes high and low status have shifted in the time since, but these dynamics seem even worse than I remember -

What exposure to the relentless competition and criticism of the online world does is like this, but along every dimension. And the result is to enlarge and aggrandize the Self, and make it ever more central to people’s experiences.

It hijacks our instincts, the inner workings of our social modules, and with time exposure wears on all of us, no matter how grounded and secure we otherwise are. People grow obsessed with eliminating vulnerability, and with validation and the tokens of identity resolution in all of the various forms they take.

The thing is none of it actually cashes out - the narcissistic reward Houellebecq talks about. Even the people who win that game end up miserable. It’s just empty promises.

I think this is the core spiritual sickness in our country - this preoccupation with Self and the way that we come to see the world in these terms as these dynamics intensify and spread.

Culture of Narcissism

i had a dream, recently. i was living in a wonderful house in Italy with many beautiful, famous women, and we showered outside and ate fruits from the vine and held lavish parties with our beautiful and famous friends, and every night a man would break into our house and try to kill me. he would chase me around the house grabbing at my hair and ripping off my clothes while i sobbed and sobbed and screamed for help. and here’s the crux of the dream: i would call 911 every night, but each time i called, a slick-talking Hollywood television producer would answer the phone instead. i kept calling the wrong number. i would scream into the phone anyway, desperate for an answer — i would say, help! i’m living in a house in Italy with many beautiful and famous women, and a man keeps breaking in and trying to kill me! and the woman on the phone would say, wow, you’ve really got an eye for a great pitch. we’d like to option this for a six-episode run.

and i would say, i’m not trying to entertain people, i’m trying to tell you there’s something wrong, i’m trying to tell you i need help, and she would say, well then why do you keep calling this number? 

rayne fisher-quann, standing on the shoulders of complex female characters

I see the suffering from these dynamics bearing out everywhere.

Anxiety, depression, self harm, and suicide among the young seem to be rising - it’s straightforward to me the way everything I’ve been discussing here ties in. How difficult the constant fear of falling afoul of the group and of not being enough can make life, and what it does to one’s sense of connection and belonging. How empty and oppressive life can feel as you come to see yourself and the world in the terms set by the group. And how if you ever do find yourself the victim of the group, taken apart for some weakness or embarrassing thing you did, it can feel permanent under these conditions - like there’s no way you could ever come back from it.

But the ripples extend all throughout our culture.

Art is one major casualty. I see it in myself and all of my creative friends: the amount of shame and self-reproach we have have to wade through as we try to create, this overloaded social module weighing us down at every step. And the preoccupation with Self takes away from anything you do create - there is no beauty, no awe or transcendence or wonder or meaning or love in the Self. It is merely a tool for navigating our social world; everything truly good is out beyond it.

These dynamics are also much of why our politics have gone off the rails. When you give as much power and capacity to group condemnation as we have, keeping with your tribe starts to become the dominant force shaping our discourse. Without a strong ballast of internal dissent and pushback holding factions to reality, extreme views that in another era might have been kept at the fringes can suddenly gain enough momentum to become group orthodoxy almost overnight.5

They explain things like cancel culture quite neatly I think, or the ridiculous forms of guilt by association that have become widespread. It’s about attack surfaces, competition, and the way the group has been empowered; and how it leads to an environment where concerns about Self tend to override any others that might work against bad norms and currents.

I think they’re what’s behind our obsession with identity in recent years as well. Your identity is how you are understood by the group - the reductive boxes and crude terms you fall into that determine how it will judge and treat you. As the group’s opinion weighs heavier and its attacks cut deeper, competition over its terms intensifies and becomes all-encompassing.6

but, oh, it feels so good to be understood, even when it’s only as a caricature. this feeling is real because i have something to compare it to. i am in my fleabag era. i am in my yellow wallpaper era. i am in my phoebe bridgers era. i am fiona apple, i am eternal sunshine of the spotless mind, do you get it now, do you get it now.

ibid

They change the way we experience things too. It’s another injury to art, this growing layer of self-concern separating us from reality; worrying about whether something is cool or sophisticated enough to associate ourselves with it (or whatever the ascendant value might be). But the worst effects are on our relationships. When we are so harshly judgmental about what we will allow in ourselves, we can’t help apply those rules to others as well, and it gets harder and harder to see the person underneath.

I think it’s a major part of why people have fewer friends. What else is connection but feeling unguarded in the presence of another? To truly see and be seen? The Self we come to develop under these circumstances can make it almost impossible.

I don’t actually like using narcissism as a pejorative. I see it as a sympathetic condition that we all have to some extent: for whatever reason, being stuck on the problem of Self.

And that’s what all of this is doing to more and more people, making this problem harder and harder to get past.

It’d be bad enough if it just affected those directly under these negative influences. But this kind of thing doesn’t even stay online. It tends to infect anything that touches it, spreading into and taking on a life of its own in the culture.

Depatterning

Everything good is out beyond the Self.

So much of what I hate about myself are just ways I’ve learned to self-protect in these conditions; trying so hard to feel worthy of love and acceptance that I become incapable of giving them to anyone else.

I see it everywhere in my life. Little things - the way I can’t take compliments. The way I preempt lines of critique when someone comes over to my apartment - I’m sorry it’s such a mess. My jealousy for others’ successes. The way, when a friend shows me art they made, what’s most salient to me are the things I am afraid to be rather than everything that it is.

I don’t think I’m alone. What’s the way out?

Thank you for reading. If you are interested in more, here are some related resources I’ve found (ongoing - please add more in the comments):

• What’s Become Of Us? by Freya India

• standing on the shoulders of complex female characters by rayne fisher-quann

• Oversocialization, the Shackles of the Millennial Generation by Freddie deBoer

• (tbc)

It’s not really good, but it could almost pass for it if you don’t look too hard.

Let me tell you why that is very bad.

First I will say that generative AI can do pretty cool things. These just look great:

They can also be really funny - they have a gift for greentexts in particular:

And there are many other good and exciting potential uses for them. But when it comes to art specifically, I’ve disliked the AI generations in my gut since I first saw them, and I don’t think it’s just about fearing a world where human creativity is obsolete.

There are many common lines of critique that won’t be new to you and which I won’t cover here.

Instead I’ll focus on two things that I haven’t seen voiced elsewhere but which are I think importantly true:

1. the ongoing proxy arms race

2. the living energy in creation

I’ll start with the less weird one:

the ongoing proxy arms race

Part of why AI generators might not seem so bad is that their methods aren’t that different from what’s already happening.

Take Hollywood. From Sasha’s piece on Everything Everywhere All At Once:

I guarantee that [Hollywood execs] are going to do exactly the wrong thing like they always do. Sure, after this, the Daniels will probably get to make whatever they want to, which is fantastic. I am extremely happy for them. But also, writers like me will be called into Studio City offices, and told, forget the unique talent that got you here, we need something like Everything Everywhere.

But there will be nothing like that movie. No contrived attempt to generate something that riotously bizarre will work out. It’ll just be some hashed-up bullshit, with the kind of profundity/silliness feedback loop that EEAAO relies on, but without the deep structures of individual artistry that made it work in my new favorite movie. It’ll probably be totally awful. 

Imitation is the minimal risk, minimal talent, maximal defensibility-to-management approach to success. And so it’s what rules in our world:

The problem is this deep structures of individual artistry thing. When you’re imitating success rather than originating it, you’re just replicating the outward forms and markers of whatever made the thing great. But it won’t ever be the real deal - it can’t be. The core inspiration isn’t there.

And so the key is just to fake it well enough that it passes. If you don’t have real quality, what you have to do is layer on all of the things people associate with it - its proxies - and hope your audience doesn’t catch the difference.

For example: a script can make up for weak dialogue by leaning into the rhythms and affectations of snappy banter, and done well enough people will often go along without noticing a difference. Or a story can play to the sympathetic narratives and currents of a time, things people are accepting more or less at face value, to create a false sense of meaning and depth.

People have always done this kind of bullshitting. Think of the way people try to seem smart or sophisticated - shoehorning a reference to the latest trendy book in conversation, or speaking with certain affected tones and postures. These things bear little on whether you’re actually smart, but people fall for this stuff all the time.

Associations and heuristics like these are around because they help us make decisions about an overwhelmingly complex world in real time. But they’re imperfect by their nature, and there’s advantage to be had if you can find ways to game their weak spots - at least until people catch on and update them. This is the proxy arms race: the complex, ever shifting battle between the ways bullshitters try to game us and our strategies for catching them.

There was a time when it was a fairer fight. But large, organized, well-resourced interests like Hollywood came in and systematized this game. They have spreadsheets for how to key into every target demographic to make their movie a hit; formulas and algorithms and sophisticated frameworks for how to make you cry, or laugh, or feel deep hatred for a villain and satisfaction when they’re thwarted. The term tearjerker is telling - there’s something about it that isn’t fully motivated and natural, but you find yourself crying anyway.

Things are kinda bad already. I’m wondering to what extent the pervasive sense of atomization and meaninglessness in our culture could actually be the result of this process happening along many dimensions - to be surrounded by so much deceptively compelling culture and art with only finite depth, none of it cohering into some deeper structure of meaning because none grew out of one.

It seems to me that AI will shift all of this into overdrive.

It’s because of the way it works, its creative process. Generative AI is pastiche, imitative, unseeing - mere recombination guided by statistics and powerful learning models based on trial and error. And because of this I think what it’ll end up doing is just to get better and better at gaming us, exploiting proxies for the qualities we are looking for because it can’t actually do the real thing.

Good art I think is ontological: about reacquainting you with the reality underneath your concepts, showing you a way of parsing the world that preserves more of its beauty. It’s a way of seeing and being that’s conveyed, the imprint of someone’s soul; and I suppose my deep belief is that it’s far too complex a thing to be arrived at by chance methods, even if guided by humans. Their input is just at too high a level.

And even supposing it could - would it not be 1000000x more likely that it’d just end up figuring out ways to game us?

While people are sensitive to the discrepancy between the real thing and its mere outward forms, I expect AI art will get old quickly:

But as these models advance, the approximation might get so good that even the most sensitive never consciously realize the difference; its hollowness instead registering somewhere beyond our awareness, some nagging feeling of emptiness that we can’t quite place.

None of this is to say that AI art can’t be interesting or useful. It just won’t be beautiful, or meaningful, or any of the other deep qualities people are drawn to in great art.

And that what we could get instead is a world full of creation that merely passes for beautiful - where things can be cool or interesting for a moment, but nothing has any enduring value. A world that looks good, and sounds good, and seems good, but just isn’t quite right in some hard to place way…

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Now for the weird thing:

the living energy in creation

When I was younger I noticed in the car that when I’d look over at other drivers, they generally turned back - or at least seemed a bit disturbed and glanced around, even if the angles made it so that there’s no way they could have seen me.

I still do it sometimes, driving and in other contexts, and it’s uncanny - as if they’re feeling my attention through some sixth sense.

I don’t think it’s just me. People will say things like I could feel her eyes boring a hole in the back of my skull. Or the way people might think of each other at the same time and call - my ears were burning. There’s just some kind of strange energy involved in consciousness and attention, and people can often sense it coming from others even if they aren’t always aware of it.

I see confirmations of it everywhere:

There’s just something to this stuff.

So what might that mean for art?

I have a strong suspicion that this consciousness attention energy goes into the things people create. I don’t mean that it can merely influence the work and be seen in its subtleties - it’s more than that. I mean it’s imprinted there, directly, and registered by everyone who comes into contact with it whether they’re consciously sensitive to it or not. There’s life in the work.

It’s even true of something like a tweet, and it’s not just the subtle cues in the word choice or profile picture. It’s the person’s actual energy, the deep nuances of what they were thinking and feeling and being at the time, imprinted in the creation of the tweet and picked up as it enters your world.

And so you could have two works of art, perhaps sculptures, that are identical in every physical way. One is the original, the actual object that shared in the artists life and world; and the other an exact replica made by a machine.

The contention is that, on some level, the replica is not the same and would feel sterile in comparison.

I think it’s part of what’s behind the enduring mythos of a home-cooked meal. It’s not just that the ingredients or preparation or environment is better - it’s the energy put into it.

And maybe it’s also part of the appeal of live music. Not that recorded music doesn’t have this energy in it - it does - but it’s different. In a live show the artists are responsive to the energy of that moment in time, in that particular place and among that particular set of people; there’s a dynamic interaction between all of the elements, an energetic responsiveness and reciprocal amplification that can lead to really remarkable performances.

This energy is what I think people really yearn for most, to know and connect with others at these levels; and yet because it’s so subtle and requires such sensitivity to notice, we lose sight of it, instead pulled to think in terms of all the concrete, legible, repeatable, socially ratified things instead. And we forget what it’s like, or that it’s even possible, until something comes into our life and reminds us.

And so imagine if every little thing around you was a labor of love, full of the intention and care and spirit of another being:

Now imagine the opposite?

This is the second in the Culture Mechanics series. Here is a link to part one.

In my middle school, the nerds were the bullies. This wasn’t the case everywhere at the time - certainly not at the school I’d transferred from, and it was no longer the case for many of my classmates when they graduated. But for whatever reason, at that school, it was the sensitive, cerebral, artistic types who had caché; and the athletic and socially adept found themselves at a disadvantage, not quite knowing where they fit in.

I think it had something to do with the movies and television we’d grown up on. By the 80s and 90s, the high school jock bullying the nerdy introvert had become a ubiquitous trope in media. These movies created a common reference point; they made the bullies legible to the broader culture. And on the basis of that collective understanding, a negative type could emerge, and jocks were cast as bullies rather than the aspirational models they’d been prior. But, as often happens, the correction went too far - and the nerds took advantage.

In the distant past, it might have taken generations for enough common understanding and coordination to develop for a reversal like this to happen. But it could happen in a matter of years with mass media.

Typing dynamics were already pretty extreme by the time of television and movies. But with the internet - and especially social media - they exploded.

Instant Ratification

“Twitter (and the internet in general) is a massive machine for ratifying discrete chunks of social reality and creating common knowledge. Digital word of mouth moves faster than irl word of mouth. I feel like we're in a moment of Type Accelerationism, where the speed at which new Types can be minted and ratified is increasing, and the max-specificity/complexity of a viable Type is increasing.”

Hazard, THT #13

Types form around some shared experience — something salient enough for a group of people to begin referring to and discussing among themselves. Enough rural townspeople encounter fast-talking urbanites, and the city slicker type starts to germinate.

In the past, once a type began to form, it spread by word of mouth; and others only really understood a type if they’d already had some firsthand experience with what it referred to. This meant types only really took hold in the most pronounced and salient cases, and their emergence was slow.

This process was sometimes accelerated by media - types featuring in stories, books, plays, and then in movies and TV. But this was all small potatoes compared to what the internet brought.

It differed from older media in a few key ways:

• The internet is many-to-many. Anyone can post their take on something - a meme, an opinion - and the most compelling of them are selected and amplified.

• It’s low-threshold. You don’t have to write a book or a pilot episode for your ideas to get out there - you just have to share a meme or a hot take and others can see it.

• It’s competitive. Unlike broadcast media, the internet is peer-to-peer, and so much of what happens on it organizes around social competition - in particular the ways groups bolster and elevate their common identities and take down rivals.

• It’s high dimension. You can share memes like the ones below and instantly communicate ideas that are otherwise very hard to articulate (have you ever tried to describe a meme to a friend?) and people can refer others to the exact same thing. It means people don’t need firsthand experience to the same degree to understand and spread types - if at all.

• It’s non-local. Remember the city slickers? Types tend to be generated when a group of people who share some similarity encounter someone different and start talking about them. The internet is almost perfectly designed for this, enabling people to group by affinity and providing them ample fodder of people who differ.

• And everything on it happens very fast.

We’ve created what is effectively a machine for generating, selecting, and spreading compelling types.

You can see many hundreds of these a day online, and they’re internalized on some level, whether you agree with them or not. It’s what social consensus does to us. This one has been rattling me lately:

We’re dropped into this growing structure of rules and associations, and have to find a way to navigate it and protect ourselves in real time. As types increase in number and complexity, the harder it gets, and the more people look to the crowd. But types thrive in conditions of conformity and high perceived consensus, and it creates a vicious cycle.

There’s very little now that you can do or be that doesn’t touch on some negative type, and it’s only getting worse.

sighswoon

A post shared by gabi abrão (@sighswoon)

The Belly of the Beast

We’ve never had so dramatic an ability to create and leverage common references. In the fight between the group and the individual, it’s given the group a decisive advantage. It’s harder and harder to find safe ground:

The combined effect of these laws is an ecosystem in which people are ever on the run from their peers; trying to form and maintain a ‘safe’ identity within a shifting matrix of complex associations that is always looming in the background threatening to swallow them.

But at the same time expectations have also been rising.

Our entertainment apparatuses have made it so that the most extreme examples of beauty, humor, grace, style, charm, intelligence are before us at every turn; in movies, on TV, and in our social media feeds.

And we’ve been given more power than ever before to curate our social personas and how we present to the world. This used to be the purview of celebrity culture and fictional media - characters and personas written with impossible charm and wit, strength and courage, elegance and sophistication. But now your peers can do it too.

It’s hard not to let these examples influence the way we perceive ourselves and others. And as we try to compete in this context - or merely keep up as the case tends to be - we push our expectations higher and higher, driving and distorting them as far as our creativity and credulity allow.

These dynamics help create a strange circumstance in which almost everyone can feel behind.

And so from one side expectations ratchet up; from the other, a blooming complex of associations and connotations makes it ever more difficult to find a safe way to meet them.

And we’re all caught in between.

These kinds of miserable dynamics used to be more limited to rarefied circles - the suffocating norms and expectations of British high society; or the cutthroat status games among the American cultural and financial elite. But technology has made it so that everyone can be brought in.

Now we’re all in the belly of the beast.

Fallout

This TikTok is in the back of my mind every time I encounter a girl on a walk with my dog:

@theslappablejerk“Guys I’m telling you, this dog is a babe magnet!” - 🤡 #dogpark #poloshirtbaka #cringe #funny #foryou

Tiktok failed to load.

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I know I’m not that guy. But the sense of social consensus is very powerful, and every aspect of his behavior - what he says, his tone, facial expressions, demeanor - is burned in my subconscious as a new tripwire never to cross.

Humans are social creatures: we’re on some level helpless to track social expectations and what others think. The dynamics of connection and competition have created a raging ocean of cultural signifiers and associations, and we’re flooded with it every time we pick up our phones.

Our cognitive machinery wasn’t meant for the kind of social world we’ve created.

I think it could have something to do with why suicide rates are up 151% in girls aged 10-14 over the last decade. I think it’s also probably the right lens to understand our political dysfunction. And I think it’s a major part of why people are unhappy despite living in a material golden age.

But the fallout doesn’t stop there.

Note: I’ve focused on the effects driven by technology, but there were other factors driving the accelerating dynamics around identity and status that I may write about in the future. And they weren’t fully emergent either: there were well-resourced and highly competent groups stoking them in calculated, sophisticated ways to advance their political and economic ends - Adam Curtis’s Century of Self is an excellent resource describing this secret history.

Once, in a dry season, I wrote in large letters across two pages of a notebook that innocence ends when one is stripped of the delusion that one likes oneself.

Joan Didion, On Self-Respect

In college, my boss - technically my boss’s boss - came to see his daughter and invited me to have dinner with them. I didn’t know him very well, but I really liked him. He felt a lot more human and honest - vulnerable maybe - than the other people I’d worked for. Despite that, the evening was one of my worst nights in college.

I’d only met G a handful of times in the office during my internship. The first time, I didn’t know who he was, but understood that he was important by the way the energy shifted in the room when he entered. My immediate boss, normally fluid and self-assured, had become tense and borderline sycophantic, fully attuned to him and almost tripping over himself to carry the interaction. 

G didn’t seem to demand it though. In fact, he downplayed it – and lightly, so not to leave anyone feeling embarrassed.

It’s a strange thing, trying to be genuine in a relationship with someone whose approval you fully depend on. But he toed the line well: he invited you to be honest and to drop formality, but wouldn’t let personal dislike get in the way of working together. You’d probably never know if he disliked you.

A dinner like this tends to hang over me in the days (sometimes weeks) leading up to it. The night of, as I counted down the minutes before he arrived to pick me up, I’d paced around my apartment, doing deep breathing and making myself as large as I could in the mirror — it had been going around at the time as a tip to boost confidence before interviews.

We were in the car going to pick up his daughter. I’d significantly overdressed. I hope I hadn’t gotten into the backseat from the start - knowing me, some misplaced gesture of humility - but I remember sitting there as we waited for his daughter and her friend in the lot outside their dorm. The silences between G’s friendly overtures were taut, completely owing to me, and I knew it. I was on high alert as if defending from attack; looking for the signals to tell me what to do - which posture to assume, which module to engage – and working to do it with a convincing air of ease and warmth. It always felt like people were looking right through me.

Why was I doing this? I liked this guy! I’ve always cared a lot about being honest with people; I could see the narrow shortsightedness of ‘getting ahead’ with approval won through dishonesty, whether socially or professionally. This wouldn’t have even affected my employment, not even if I’d come off like a total ass. But it wasn’t about any of that.

His daughter got in the car and the conversation shifted to what she was thinking about studying. I remembered that he had this test he liked to give people: in that first time I’d encountered him, he’d invited me to brag about my major during a brief conversation in view of the rest of my team. “Wow, you studied math, difficult subject” There’d been a softness to the probe - he was testing me, but it wasn’t clear I’d be firmly ruled out of his good graces if I failed. I’d somehow parried it successfully - I said I’d probably have studied economics if I hadn’t nearly had to drop out of Econ 101. 

This time I failed. He’d gestured at the platitude that no major was harder or more rigorous than another in an absolute sense; some things were harder for some people, it was all relative and subjective. I’m not entirely sure why - it happened without much thought - but when he asked me if I thought so too, I was honest. I said that I definitely preferred problem sets to struggling with an essay, so it was true to an extent; but that the time commitment of, for instance, some of the engineering students I knew was insane: I’d seen their schedules and they had entire days blocked out with class and labs, and several hours of homework each night on top of it. 

I’m not sure it was really about being honest - maybe in part - but rather about fearing seeming servile, too agreeable. There was a slight hiccup in the conversation but nothing major.

As we walked to the restaurant, a hip Mexican place and one of my favorites, I balled up my sweater and untucked my shirt to try to look a little less formal. I’d been here a few times before, and recognized our waitress. My heart sank a bit - I didn’t want to interact with her in front of G. 

She was always a bit sharp and standoffish, jaded by the demand to perform friendliness to customers, most of whom were college boys trying to flirt with her. She was about our age, and was very attractive; she seemed annoyed that it was the case. I imagined I was better than the other guys, but I was playing more or less the same game, just with a different strategy; and the added layer of deception probably made me more odious to her than they were.

Why didn’t she like me? What was I doing wrong? In retrospect, it was merely my attention; the fact that I cared at all whether she liked me. She just wanted to be left alone. Unfortunately, it was like a finger trap: the most annoyed she seemed, the more my attention would move to her, only to further annoy her. But none of that was clear to me then.

It was made better by the fact that we were four at the table - less need to interact directly with her. It was Halloween and she was wearing cat ears. I saw an opening; maybe I could finally get out of this weird dynamic with her: “nice costume by the way, much better than his,” I said, making a slight gesture over to a waiter who had taken a dish towel and put it over his head with wayfarer sunglasses. But she’d have none of it: “do you know what it is?” she said, her eyes turning to the rest of the table a hair too quickly before I’d answered no. “Old devil,” she said, pulling out her hair which she’d dyed gray; up close I could see the cat ears were actually devil horns.

I hadn’t yet learned that when a person is signaling for you to back the fuck off, you probably should rather than trying to coerce them to like you.

The rest of dinner had gone well. I’m a good listener, and was able to keep my discomfort and anxiety mostly hidden. I’d asked G in a sidebar conversation about his son, and he’d spoken about him with a warmth and guileless pride that felt genuine. I’d seen a lot of the fake kind – empathy and emotional depth had become ascendant virtues even in business – but his didn’t seem to demand anything from me the way theirs did.

After dinner we’d gone to an art exhibit hosted by one of the local hotels. Few things surface pretensions and insecurities like art - not that G was trying to. 

As we walked there, he’d asked me how I was feeling - ostensibly a question about my health issues, which he’d known about - but I gathered he was asking because something seemed off. I was glad to be able to provide an alternative explanation for my behavior. I hated for people to think my discomfort was about them - that was always the worst part of it by far.

I wasn’t sure how to act in the gallery. I’d been socialized well around dinners with my parents’ friends so things like that came more easily, but this was fairly new to me. I’d forced conversation, for instance pressing for gossipy details as the rest of the group tried to be delicate about a woman who’d drunkenly passed out in the bathroom. G was reluctant, but out of his uncommon and increasingly undeserved kindness, gentle and almost deferential, he whispered to me as little as he could to sate my curiosity.

This wasn’t me - fuck - but I just didn’t know what else to do, and felt immense pressure to do something, be something. And it just kept building on itself the more I felt like I was failing, a vicious cycle, and I stopped being able to think.

At the mercy of those we can not but hold in contempt, we play roles doomed to failure before they are begun, each defeat generating fresh despair at the necessity of divining and meeting the next demand made upon us.

I remember this one exhibit in particular, a grid of metal boxes taking up most of a wall hanging under the title The Last Real Men. The boxes each had a name on the front, mostly celebrities. You’d read a few and begin to get a sense for what the artist might have had in mind - “Quentin Tarantino” “Clint Eastwood” “James Dean” - only to come across a name that didn’t fit the pattern like “Michael Jackson”. In retrospect, I think it was meant to get you to question your beliefs about masculine virtue; to enable you to watch yourself searching in real time for ways to square the contradicting data, and so begin to see the contours of your ordinarily implicit beliefs and assumptions.

G noticed we were both looking at it and caught my eye with a gesture. “What do you think?” he said with a soft humor. I was tense, terrified of embarrassing myself while trying to put on a collected affect. It was impossible to get a read on what he thought from his expression - I tried to match but stumbled, falling slightly on the side of aloof ridicule. “Yeah, I don’t know, I don’t really get it,” I said with a tone that suggested there might not be anything meaningful to get. 

I notice this often when people speak about art: this guarded enthusiasm that retains a trap door, keeping some distance to prevent others from ever being able to really attach it to them.

“I think it’s saying they all are, so there’s no rule, no better way of being,” G said after a moment. I joined his position immediately, nodding and trying to complete his thought. It may have even been what I actually thought - I think it was - but my focus wasn’t really on that.

This happened at a few more exhibits - in the most embarrassing instance, I’d flip flopped at least once and maybe twice trying to match his sentiment - but eventually we left to go to an ice cream shop. 

G was still being kind to me for some reason. His daughter seemed to think I was a bit weird. We’d had lunch earlier on in the term and it had gone similarly; I’d apologized via text afterwards for seeming eager to leave, saying I hadn’t felt quite right because of a medication I had started - which was true.

When we got there, I recognized someone in line - I led recruiting for my team and they’d at one point been interested - and was relieved to be able to engage that mode in front of G. Who I could be seemed to always depend so heavily on what others already believed about me.

“You okay, you having a good time?” G asked, politely but with a hint of concern and confusion. He’d asked at the gallery as well. “Yeah, yeah this has been great, thanks for having me out.” I really tried but wasn’t convincing.

He’d dropped me off and I was back in my apartment. There was a small relief that it was at least over, but I sat at the edge of my bed staring beyond the wall in the silence, as I had many times before. Why am I like this? Why do I do this to people?

I don’t think growing up means not liking yourself, but Didion was onto something. There is a particular self you have to surrender, and this night had been so difficult for me, each perceived failure so devastating, because I hadn’t yet let go.

Adolescence is about challenging your upbringing: finding out what you think about the world and how you want to relate with it independent of your parents and your conditioning. There’s a similar phase, often in one’s 20s but earlier for some and later for others, where your notion of self is challenged. The structure that had gotten you to that point no longer suffices.

The wires holding your world together become more visible. You realize you had been in a safe harbor: one of effortless significance despite the unhappiness you may have felt; of clear goals and paths to success and meaning despite the ways you may have failed to measure up; of fundamental connectedness despite the dislike you may have had for those around you. You’re forced out by no one and nothing in particular – the track just runs out.

It was this self, the self of the safe harbor, that was being challenged. A self built up of simple beliefs and strategies, load bearing fictions and protective armor keeping you at a comfortable arms length from reality and until that point largely unexamined. X behavior is bad, I am not like the people who do X; the people who do it are bad and deserve punishment, the people who don’t are good and deserve rewards.

It was easy enough to reconcile yourself to it when it was all imaginings, before choices had to be made. But as you make choices, as you become and reality forecloses on imaginings, you start running up against its boundaries and contradictions.

If not outgrown, it becomes a self that can’t stand to be disliked; to be wrong in any way touching its interior. The self that doesn’t ‘make mistakes’, but is them. Underneath it all, it grips ever more tightly to a notion it can no longer believe: that it’s one of the good and deserving and special few.

In the later stages it is the self that doesn’t know how to say no; that can’t stop thinking about the people it hates; that feels a hot rush of confused shame as it repeatedly rewrites a text message - shit, did they see that I was typing? - feeling the tone was too hostile, or not quite right, or that the joke wouldn’t go over.

The one that can’t experience let alone enjoy much of anything at all.

To have that sense of one's intrinsic worth which, for better or for worse, constitutes self-respect, is potentially to have everything: the ability to discriminate, to love and to remain indifferent. To lack it is to be locked within oneself, paradoxically incapable of either love or indifference.

I think it can be understood as the result of outsourced agency, of looking to others to know if what you’re doing is right. It’s closely tied up with this sense of an imposing other; the nameless, faceless collective you have in mind in the moment you feel embarrassed; nebulous yet coherent, an overpowering felt consensus that withers wherever it is scrutinized.

It’s this sense that there are Right Answers, Right Ways of Being that the wise, the mature, the intelligent, the savvy - this faceless other - have arrived upon. Who are you to say otherwise?

Some fears loom larger the less you know about them. I think in some ways we’ve gotten too good at protecting ourselves; too good at insulating ourselves from reality.

People don’t say “I don’t like you.” Instead it comes in hints and subtle indications - an odd tone, strange body language, the felt sense there’s something they’re not saying - and we almost never really know for sure. And it makes it far worse: we’re tormented by its shadow but never come in direct enough contact with the thing to know on a deep level - to feel - that it’s not actually that bad.

I think this is why we outsource agency: we’re so afraid of some negative outcomes that we trade it for the guarantees and order we believe a stronger, wiser, smarter Other can offer.

And that’s what the faceless other does, really - it is to the world at large what the parents were to the local environment growing up. It seems like maybe there’s a stage of development some of us miss, one in which you move from the self of the safe harbor with its external sense of authority to a less fragile self with an internal one.

Knowing the price of things, Didion calls it; having the courage of your mistakes. Moving on from a life guided at every level by a sense of inadequacy and looking over your shoulder, a world framed by your fears, toward one in which you can make mistakes rather than become them.

Image credit 我 - @iimememe

You’ve probably seen the stats. Anxiety and depression are up significantly among young people, especially teen girls. They’re making fewer friends too - five times as many now say they have no close friends as did in 1990. Suicides are rising even among children.

It’s not just them. Reported happiness has been declining since 1988, even as our existence has become more comfortable (and despite the implicit pressures to lie about happiness that such privilege entails).

Something’s changed.

There are many ways people try to explain these trends - smart phones and social media, algorithms, poor diets and declining health, atomization and a crisis of meaning - and I think there’s something to them.

But I have a theory you probably haven’t heard before.

It relates to a broad set of factors – the interconnectedness of the digital age, the democratization and globalization of status, the feedback loop between culture and media, and more – and how they have impacted culture and individual psychology. There’s been an orders of magnitude change in the factors underlying how individuals see themselves and others and how they relate to one another, and the process is only accelerating.

This series is in four parts:

I - Culture Mechanics, wherein I discuss the dynamics around status, identity, types, and illegibility, and how they fit together to form the three laws of culture;

II - Acceleration, in which I discuss the factors driving runaway acceleration of these dynamics;

III - Fallout, which covers their far reaching effects; and

IV - Depatterning, in which I discuss means for moving past these dynamics, and a positive vision for a life and culture without them.

I - Culture Mechanics

Status Games

The central problem for the individual is to find a safe way to be in the world. In the social sphere, this is about identity and status.

Your identity is an approximation of who you are in the terms of your culture, the result of an ongoing negotiation between how you understand yourself and how others do. It is based on your traits, values, preferences, abilities, social roles, and more; and it is something you both derive and construct in order to understand and present yourself favorably. Its significance is in enabling you to know both where and how you fit in and to actually do it.

Status is the end achieved through the means of identity. Status can be thought of as a rank ordering: how individuals in a given milieu stack up relative to one another. Your status is determined based on the esteem others have for you and their level of desire to ally with you; or from the other side, how unlikely it is that others will turn against you. Humans are a social species, and much turns on our prospects for cooperation with and support from those within our groups.

As a result, status is fiercely contested. (Note: it is low status to seek status – you wouldn’t need to seek it if you had it, and it’s considered unbecoming to be concerned with status at all - and so people find ways to camouflage these efforts.) In fact, status considerations impact nearly every choice people make, if in ways that are instinctual and largely beyond conscious awareness. 

Status used to be largely determined by the luck of your birth and simple capacities and characteristics; and there tended to be strong barriers to competition, in physical and informational separation of the different social classes as well as in stricter norms regulating interactions between and among them. With all the many downsides of this arrangement, roles within it were for the most part at least relatively stable and straightforward — at least, outside of and beyond the cultural influence of the most centralized, incestuous arenas of power and wealth, where some degree of status hypercompetition has existed in every culture and era that enables them.

We’ve traded a society in which status was largely predetermined and unmerited but simple for one in which it is democratized and (more) meritocratic but extraordinarily complicated, and increasingly so. This was not without tradeoffs. Status has become central to every feature of our lives as people have searched for ways to differentiate themselves and outcompete others against a backdrop of mounting pressure, complexity, change, and uncertainty.

Even merely fitting in has become an extraordinarily difficult task, more so than people commonly recognize because it’s come to feel normal to them. In what follows, I am going to try to show you what the air you’ve been breathing is actually like.

The Three Laws of Culture

People are familiar with stereotypes, for instance based on race, where you grew up, what kind of job you have, etc. But that is just the tip of the iceberg. In our society, everything connotes a type: the minute details of how you speak, like your word choice and intonation; your style, taste in music, the tv shows you watch; and deeper qualities like your opinions, philosophy, politics, sense of humor – and on and on.

Here are a few popular examples from the StarterPacks subreddit:

I’ve deliberately chosen examples unlikely to apply to readers (currently, at least) because I hate how reductive and mean these can be. But they should give some insight into how specific, subtle, and strangely powerful types can be, and why people would take pains to avoid fitting them. What the types in these images are fundamentally doing is to associate traits, and imply that if a person has one, they have many. Generally, types are rules that connect the ways you express yourself and present to society to who you are at your core.

This is the first law of culture: 

1. Status is negotiated through identity, and identity is negotiated through types.

The choice of beard for instance has regrettably come to connote something about a person’s values and character. And even more unfortunate is that these kinds of types are often accurate and useful in helping us navigate the world. There really are ‘spiritual’ guys like that, and you can save yourself a lot of trouble by seeing through their bullshit upfront. Types help us to make decent judgements in real time about who we’re likely to get along with and who we are not; and, as I discuss later, they also enable the group to reign in the bad behavior of individuals.

What makes types different from standard associations is their social dimension. Natural Hazard put it well in his post on the subject: “Types are more than patterns. Most patterns we observe never get reified with a phrase or a handle, and most patterns that we individually reify never get ratified by a social network.” Types are patterns that are broadly understood and easily deployed in communications with others. They are the prevailing conceptual vocabulary of a culture, and the means by which its members tend to understand one another. Put another way, types make the individual legible to the group.

Legibility in ordinary usage relates to being literally readable, as in the context of deciphering the worn pages of a tattered manuscript. In the social context, legibility means that others can understand you in terms of a shared conceptual vocabulary by slotting you into types; and precisely because it is shared, this understanding can be weaponized against you. Being legible means being vulnerable to deconstruction by your peers into connotation laden, broadly understood boxes, and this is a genuinely deep vulnerability.

If you can remain illegible, you avoid two problems: at one end, you are afforded a layer of protection from unfair, reductive stereotypes and connotations; at the other, you are enabled to gain status through bullshit and pretense. Conversely, if others in a group are able to make you legible, they are able to prevent you from gaining unearned status, but also to increase their status by reducing yours.

These incentives lead to the second law of culture: 

2. Individuals strive to remain illegible to the group, and the group strives to make individuals legible.

It’s not that there aren’t ever advantages to being legible. For instance, people trying to build a following want to be legible in certain ways – you have to have something associated with you that people can grab onto. And as I was getting feedback on this post from close friends, one mentioned this:

I think I find myself trying to lean into a few types - accepting the good with the bad - to avoid the stress of constantly needing to identify and cultivate illegible elements for my identity. It’s helping! But it comes with a certain amount of giving up on being strictly cool and embarrassment.

In other words, he is forgoing the marginal rewards of niche status hypercompetition in favor of a sturdy, reliable, no-hassle identity. Most of the benefits of type status competition are in the social spheres of dating and friendship, and so I don’t think it’s a coincidence that this is happening after he’s developed a strong network of friends, and is in a long term relationship approaching marriage. The social trends of fewer friends and less dating and marriage among the young would suggest people are aging out of this status competition later and later - and perhaps increasingly not at all.

It’s also not that there aren’t ever positive types either - they just don’t tend to last long. There are two ways this happens.

Case #1: The positive type is only ‘positive’, and is in reality based on bullshit and pretense yet to be decoded by the broader culture. Other individuals in the culture seeing this bullshit unfairly rewarded then have an incentive to work out what exactly is happening; and as they come to understand it bit by bit and communicate this to others, a shared understanding begins to emerge. This takes the form of a type. 

It is a type that is being leveraged when a young woman at a bar feigns enthusiasm with thinly suppressed amusement as a guy brags to her about where he went to college, his job, or who he knows; when your friend in academia impersonates his pretentious colleague in philosophy; or when a mother introduces her brooding and recalcitrant teenage son to neighbors and says with a wink, “he’s too cool to say hello”, and they knowingly smile.

A personal example from my childhood involves Harry, far and away the coolest kid in my middle school. His friends were mostly in high school; he listened to music that none of us had heard of, had good style, and even played shows with legitimate bands. And he had many other genuinely positive qualities - he was very funny, and had real charm and dynamism. We all wanted to be like him and felt inadequate by comparison. But a band we all liked – in part because of his influence – released a song that laid it all bare:

Despite your pseudo-bohemian appearance

And vaguely leftist doctrine of beliefs

You know nothing about art or sex

That you couldn’t read in any trendy New York underground fashion magazine

Prototypical non-conformist

You are a vacuous soldier of the thrift store Gestapo

You adhere to a set of standards and tastes

That appear to be determined by an unseen panel of hipster judges (bullshit)

Giving a thumbs up or thumbs down to incoming and outgoing trends and styles of music and art

Go analog baby, you’re so post-modern

You’re diving face forward into a antiquated past

It’s disgusting, it's offensive, don’t stick your nose up at me

Say Anything, Admit It!!!

I didn’t really get any of this at the time, but some of my friends did. And as the culture shifted over the ensuing years, Harry stopped being as cool. Though I don’t know what happened after high school, he seems to have been a case of peaking early – perhaps in some ways a victim of his abilities, because many of us would have gladly taken his place if we could have pulled it off.

Case #2: The positive type is based on genuinely positive behaviors, traits, and qualities. What happens in these cases is that others adopt these behaviors because they want to be seen favorably by their peers. But the problem is that they tend not to want to do the much larger amount of work to really embody the trait, and so they merely take up the low hanging, superficial elements of the behavior. 

But this is the same kind of bullshitting and pretense as in the first case, and the result is once again that the broader culture now has a motivation to make this bullshitting legible so that they can reign it in. This is accomplished by typing the behaviors, and the genuinely positive instances are collateral damage. This process can even be stoked by competitors acting in bad faith, one way that being legible creates a handle by which others can grab and manipulate you.

These dynamics are what's happening on the ground driving the macro phenomenon in David Chapman’s analysis of subcultures: 

Subcultures were the main creative cultural force from roughly 1975 to 2000, when they stopped working. Why? One reason—among several—is that as soon as subcultures start getting really interesting, they get invaded by muggles, who ruin them. Subcultures have a predictable lifecycle, in which popularity causes death.

Illegibility is a buffer against this kind of terminal popularity. If the masses can’t easily understand something, fewer will adopt it; and those that do will be unable to adopt it with any kind of high fidelity, leaving room for the true adopters to differentiate themselves.

As an example of something positive becoming negatively typed in this way, consider the phenomenon of clichés.

What exactly happens when something becomes clichéd? Something - a phrase, a plot device, a style - had the quality to become popular and widespread, but then becomes too popular. Wanting to associate this quality with themselves, the masses use it inappropriately in contexts lacking its original motivation and inspiration. Adopted widely and replicated poorly, its repeated misuse comes to dominate its cultural associations, and it becomes typed.

Clichés demonstrate the extent to which being typed can thoroughly tar something regardless of its other positive qualities, and why people work so hard to avoid them and remain illegible. Think of how strange it is that the behaviors, attitudes, styles, and possessions that were high status in the previous generation now elicit cringes and second hand embarrassment.

These dynamics are the basis for the third law:

3. High status things tend to be illegible, and illegible things tend to be new.

This law is responsible for much of what happens in culture. It’s what drives fashion evolution, for instance. Something new and high status comes along, and once legible, it draws in the masses until they destroy it. Trends do return, but only once their old cultural meanings and associations have faded and they have the freedom to become something new.

It’s also part of why culture reliably cycles between generations and why generations tend to clash. The young and those with few identity commitments have a natural advantage in this process, and they vie to take status from those who already have it by undermining the structures and norms of their elders in favor of their own – think ‘ok boomer’.

The result of all of this is that being legible is a vulnerability much of the time, regardless of whether it happens through a positive or negative type - being described is the prelude to being attacked. And so people aim to exist in the negative space between unfavorable types, and to earn stature through ordinary virtues and prevailing cultural currents without ever becoming too legible.

This complicated dance is part of what’s behind interest in celebrity culture. Prior to the social media era, pop culture was the arena in which the prevailing types and the most advanced strategies to navigate them were fully on display, and people have a deep natural interest to know what works and what doesn’t. It’s become less centralized as a result of social media, and now everyone is showcasing their strategies, with the successful rising to influencer and even celebrity stature.

The Three Laws of Culture

1. Status is negotiated through identity, and identity is negotiated through types

2. Individuals strive to remain illegible to the group; and the group strives to make individuals legible

3. High status things tend to be illegible, and illegible things tend to be new

The combined effect of these laws is an ecosystem in which people are ever on the run from their peers; trying to form and maintain a ‘safe’ identity within a shifting matrix of complex associations that is always looming in the background threatening to swallow them.

If that doesn’t sound bad enough, here’s the thing: this is accelerating.