The decline of deviance

https://www.experimental-history.com/p/the-decline-of-deviance

by zdw • 9 months ago

313 245 9 months ago

experimental-history.com

robocat• 9 months ago

Weird that the article uses so many statistical averages, while trying to discuss outliers.

Edit: average is the wrong word - measuring outliers is hard.

RajT882• 9 months ago

For the most part, this seems to be measuring the same trends behind the violent crime rate - which some think is related to the introduction (and banning) of leaded gasoline.

Interesting to put these trends into the mix. It sort of tracks - but the teen birth rate was the one which stood out as really not tracking well.

mempko• 9 months ago

Seems to correlate with the increase and decline of lead poisoning. I guess the plus side of lead poisoning was an interesting world. We need more deviants than ever now, given the authoritarian push we are seeing. Too many obey.

tonyedgecombe3• 9 months ago

Also there isn't much point breaking into houses or mugging people for consumer goods that are so cheap to buy new.

watwut4• 9 months ago

The article is using weird definition of "weird".

I do not remember high school students drinking alcohol being "weird". It was basically "normal". Most adults would pretend they do not see it, fair amount of them even facilitated it. It was only when things got noisy and too visible the rule was used.

Moving away was weird in America? I perceived economic mobility as something Americans were proud of and seen as superior over nations more likely to stay. It was not weird to move away, it was the expected action for quite a lot of people.

yesfitz• 9 months ago

"Deviance" is probably the word to focus on here, as in "deviation" from the mean.

Drinking underage is a deviation from the norm of following the law.

Moving is a deviation from the norm of staying (as evidenced by the census data showing that in the 1950s ~20% of people lived somewhere different than they had the previous year, in 2023 it was 7.4%. In 1950 3.5% of the population lived in a different state than they had the previous year, in 2023 it was 1.4%)

xboxnolifes• 9 months ago

I get the moving away portion, but if underage drinking was >50% of the population in the past, isn't that the norm, not the words on the law? That would mean now is more deviation not less. Of course, that's entirely down to how you want to frame it.

watwut4• 9 months ago

My point is, drinking was not deviation from the mean. It was "the mean". There was no real norm in following the law in that one. Like I said, adults would wink wink look away or directly give you alcohol.

If you was not drinking at all, you was the weird one. Literally.

The mean is shifting toward drinking less. But that does not say much about how many people are "weird".

giancarlostoro• 9 months ago

Depends on where you grew up I suppose, and your personal views at the time. I don't think I ever got the idea that adults were ever pretending not to see it.

dauertewigkeit• 9 months ago

Millennials are really great parents and the result of that is that the kids are well rounded and less deficient. That results in conformity because the history nerd, also goes to the gym and the gym bro also strives to do well at school.

Throaway152• 9 months ago

^^^ Much less brittle nerds & ignoramo jock heads

ianbutler2• 9 months ago

Others are saying the end of leaded gasoline, I’ll add that around 2008 when the trend accelerates schools started becoming more locked down and consequences for being a kid can now follow you into adulthood much easier due to social media.

I think we’re seeing a natural result of kids being scared of that one bad night being immortalized or that one fight turning into an arrest.

You’re just not allowed to be a kid really.

RajT882• 9 months ago

I would suggest that another trend which contributes to this "one bad fight" is the growing personal disposable income in the US, which allows parents to be highly litigious, demanding things like arrests of kids their kids get in fights with:

https://fred.stlouisfed.org/series/DSPIC96

Anecdotally, teachers have been talking about fear of getting sued by parents for a long time now. I suspect this is a big driving force behind the "everyone gets a trophy" mentality and not at all liberalism. Teachers have been kowtowing to moneyed tiger/helicopter parents in ever more egregious ways.

My own pet theory anyways.

rangestransform• 9 months ago

You’ve been downvoted but my company’s legal aid insurance started offering coverage for school related matters

jrm42• 9 months ago

Interesting; for what it's worth, as a black person who grew up in a relatively privileged environment, the "one bad fight" rule was subconsciously our entire existence in a way that it wasn't for many people around us.

rightbyte• 9 months ago

What does that mean? One is enought to ruin your reputation and chances later as an adult?

AvAn122• 9 months ago

+1 for the Lead Hypothesis. Apart from negative health effects, lead exposure leads to more impulsive behavior and reduced inhibition - which kind of covers nearly everything here.

Have to say, I am glad that the world is safer and less wild, but I do miss the creative energy and "real world" social engagement of 1980s-1990s

card_zero• 9 months ago

That generation were a bunch of mindless, selfish dicks. Free from poisoning, the new generations can think clearly about how to be selfish dicks, and plan it out more deliberately.

PaulDavisThe1st3• 9 months ago

and in the 80s and 90s, we missed the creative energy and "real world" social engagement of the 60s and 70s ...

plus ca change, plus le meme chose ...

hrimfaxi2• 9 months ago

I think we’re seeing a natural result of kids being scared of that one bad night being immortalized or that one fight turning into an arrest.
You’re just not allowed to be a kid really.

I learned yesterday about the skull breaker challenge, where you and two friends line up and jump at the same time to see who jumps highest, except the outside two people conspire to kick the legs out of the middle one. Is that being a kid? If anything, the proliferation of social media is enabling the normalization of deviance in the form of these meme challenges. People are going around spraying bug spray on the produce at the grocery and posting it on TikTok.

ianbutler2• 9 months ago

Yeah I would be willing to bet serious money that this is a few kids and that the number is not even greater than a fractional fraction of a percent.

You're seeing point wise incidents, chosen to generate outrage, and trying to apply them like all kids are doing these things, which per all trends they are not.

Sorry some fraction of people will always be stupid, we shouldn't apply constraints on the many to save the few stupid ones.

aj_hackman• 9 months ago

People are going around spraying bug spray on the produce at the grocery and posting it on TikTok.

One single person did this, and was sentenced to a year in prison for it.

tstrimple• 9 months ago

I'm sure you never heard "if your friend jumps off a bridge would you?" question growing up. But it seemed to be very common saying in my family and in others at the time. So it seems like kids were making bad decisions based off of peer pressure well before social media. It's only that it goes "viral" that anyone pays attention at all. Just more ammunition for the "kids these days" type of people I guess.

watwut4• 9 months ago

Is that being a kid?

Imo, it is being an asshole kid, potentially a bully. That totally existed when I was young.

Theodores2• 9 months ago

The lead in gasoline hypothesis is certainly plausible, however, I blame the larger picture of car dependency as well as the Thatcher/Reagan revolution, when 'stranger danger' was the big fear.

The article does go into this aspect, with a map of Sheffield in the footnotes showing how far eight year old kids were able to travel over the different generations. There was a time when the child could go across to the other side of the city to go fishing, whereas now, a child is essentially imprisoned and not expected to be going very far.

The Thatcher/Reagan revolution created exceptional oppositional culture in the UK, with 'rave' being the thing. The last 'free range' children grew up to be the original ravers and they had considerable organisational ability, needed to put on parties and other events. Furthermore, the music of the rave scene was banned by the BBC and the government ('repetitive beats').

In time, most of the rave generation grew up, got day jobs, had kids and all of that fun stuff. They got old and moved on, however, there was nobody to fill their shoes. Instead of illegal rave events and lots of house parties, organised festivals and city nightclubs took over. The cost aspect meant going with a small handful of friends rather than just the closest two hundred friends.

A good party should be heard from a considerable distance away (sorry neighbours) and I am surprised at how few parties there are these days. I travel by bicycle on residential roads, often late at night. Rarely do I find myself stumbling across people having house parties. This doesn't mean that parties aren't happening, but, equally, it doesn't mean I am old and out of touch.

digitalsushi• 9 months ago

I, gen-x '79, was taught by Gen-z the reason we don't drink at the bars is cause someone'll make a video of us being weird and ruin us. Be weird at home. With the door locked. Fit in when the camera could be hiding and stay employed. Adequately satisfactory, A+.

I'm too old not to be weird. I get a lot of blank stares. I'm the only person I need the approval of. (For now. I worry the cameras find me more and more)

kruffalon• 9 months ago

Yeah, I really think this is a big part of it: more control and harsher social punishment for less.

Unfortunately it is not only a bad thing.

Wojtkie• 9 months ago

Yeah, I still like doing "weird" things wrt music and experiencing art, but I am not posting about it anywhere or paying much for it. Most of the really interesting things I've been to in the last 5 years or so have been very local, small, and not really monetized.

ksymph• 9 months ago

Great post from Adam Mastroianni as usual, lots to chew on -- but to treat deviance and risk as equivalent seems a bit of a leap. The graphs line up, but just about any wide-reaching measure was put on its current trajectory sometime in the 70s-80s (see [0]).

The hypothesis that lower 'background risk' leads to lower voluntary risks (drugs, unprotected sex, etc.) makes sense. But as far as arts go, I think the cultural homogeneity we see is more of a direct effect of globalization than anything else. In other words, the default state of highly interconnected societies is one of convergence; the variety of the 20th century can be attributed to growth in communication and exposure to new concepts. Now that media technology has somewhat stabilized, we see a return to the cultural stability that has defined humanity for most of its existence.

[0] https://wtfhappenedin1971.com/

wolframhempel• 9 months ago

I'm wondering if this overlooks areas where we experience much higher levels of deviation today. Take music, for example. When I grew up, I was basically limited to whatever was playing on the radio or MTV—there was only so much airtime for a small set of popular songs. The mainstream was much more mainstream. Today, I can listen to obscure Swedish power metal bands with fewer than 5,000 monthly listeners on Spotify without any difficulty.

The same goes for fashion. I have a picture of my mom and her friends where everyone looks like a miniature version of Madonna. Today, fashion seems far more individualistic.

Streaming has given us a vast spectrum of media to consume, and we now form tiny niche communities rather than all watching Jurassic Park together. There are still exceptions like Game of Thrones, The Avengers, or Squid Game, but they are less common.

One of my friends is into obscure K-pop culture that has virtually zero representation in our domestic media. Another is deeply interested in the military history of ancient Greece—good luck finding material on that when there were only two TV channels.

Maybe deviance hasn't disappeared—maybe it's just shifted elsewhere…?

munificent• 9 months ago

Consuming niche stuff isn't really deviance in any meaningful sense.

There's no risk-taking there, no producing something new for the world, and very little personal actualization beyond getting to consume a thing you like.

pixl979• 9 months ago

Maybe we're looking at this wrong. Maybe 'new' stuff just isn’t that interesting to people any more. I mean the amount of 'new' things out there are huge and we are constantly exposed to them lots of them. Then when you couple that with the massive amount of advertising that is everywhere on every surface and site, people start to brain adblock and focus on patterns they recognize.

datameta• 9 months ago

I'd also argue the culture of "digital degeneracy" has permeated the internet and is no longer locked away in, say, the bastion of mid/late 2000s 4chan. What used to be violent NSFL liveleaks content is now easily accesible by anyone with a phone. Softcore content is completely widespread on "clean" apps like IG and Tiktok.

If we measure deviance only by the metrics that existed before social media, we will of course find what is expected.

opwieurposiu• 9 months ago

It used to be cool to be deviant and not to be accepted by society at large. Ravers, skaters, punk rockers, cross-dressers, all subcultures that did not care if they were accepted by the normies. Transgression of social norms was considered the cool thing to do.

Now everyone wants social norms to be changed so they feel included no matter what crazy ass thing they are into.

Feels lame to me but I am old so what do I know.

keiferski7• 9 months ago

A big part of this IMO is that “money won”, for lack of a better phrase. There is no real concept of selling out anymore. Being shamelessly focused on wealth accumulation seems to be socially acceptable in a way it wasn’t fifty years ago.

Someone will probably say this is because current generations have less financial security, and I’m sure that’s a factor. But I think it’s a cultural shift that is much older and tracks better to the decline of traditional sources of values (community, cultural groups, religion, etc.) and their replacement by the easily understandable dollar. So it becomes harder and harder for a cultural definition of success to not mean financially successful. And being financially successful is difficult if you have deviant, counter cultural ideas (and aren’t interested in monetizing them.)

delusional• 9 months ago

But I think it’s a cultural shift that is much older and tracks better to the decline of traditional sources of values (community, cultural groups, religion, etc.) and their replacement by the easily understandable dollar.

I think about that in the complete opposite direction. I think the dollar displaced traditional values. The cause I'd attribute would be our increasing reliance on "reason", especially short term cause-and-effect "reason".

Most of my perspective on this comes from "Dialectic on enlightenment", which I can recommend if you can stomach an incredibly dense and boring book.

ahartmetz• 9 months ago

Let's do the traditional thing and blame it on music! US hip hop videos of the early 2000s were full of garish displays of wealth.

brazukadev• 9 months ago

But the people trying to show off weren't actually that rich it was a genuine counter-culture movement. Today they are rich af.

uvaursi2• 9 months ago

This isn’t true and hasn’t been true fifty years ago either. A handful of the most well-known books regarding getting wealthy and having a high status were written almost a century ago. The practice of wealth accumulation was already established by anyone who was above room temperature IQ for as long as we have existed.

Deviance is all around, the author is too trapped in a bubble to see it.

reaperducer3• 9 months ago

Deviance is all around, the author is too trapped in a bubble to see it.

Show me the modern counter-culture movement. Show me the modern Firesign Theater. Show me today's National Lampoon. Show me the modern Anarchist's Cookbook.

No, 2600 doesn't count. It's a toothless parody of what it once was that you can buy on the shelf at Barnes and Noble next to Taylor Swift magazines.

Heck, even the 2000's had hipsters.

Where are the protest songs? I think this is the first generation that doesn't have mainstream protest songs.

keiferski7• 9 months ago

There used to be much more tension between creating culture (art, music, etc.) and making money from it. I think that tension has pretty much evaporated.

pfdietz2• 9 months ago

Deviance is all around, the author is too trapped in a bubble to see it.

Let's send the author to a furry con.

GuinansEyebrows3• 9 months ago

The practice of wealth accumulation was already established by anyone who was above room temperature IQ for as long as we have existed

i can't tell if you're trying to make a point about people who don't practice wealth accumulation. probably because i have a room temperature IQ.

mihaic• 9 months ago

I think you're missing that deviants have to interact with people in the normal sphere for them to count socially, and the fact that you're arguing that the author is in a bubble pretty much is making his case actually.

ericmcer• 9 months ago

compounding gains has also become the only strategy to stay afloat.

Look at the performance of broad index funds since 2008. You either dumped everything you had in the market over the last 15 years or literally lost out on 4Xing your money.

That kind of dynamic is pretty shitty for risk, why would I sink my money into any kind of risky venture when the market keeps spitting out 15% a year returns on safe investments.

All expenditures also get warped by this, move across the country? Buy a new car/house? Better to play it safe and keep the wheels spinning and watch the numbers go up and to the right.

keiferski7• 9 months ago

That’s a good point too. You increasingly need to participate in the system or you get left behind and can’t afford the things you could 5-6 years prior. So doing something crazy like wandering the country in your car or working at a cafe to fund your artist lifestyle is a constant ticking clock.

roenxi• 9 months ago

why would I sink my money into any kind of risky venture when the market keeps spitting out 15% a year returns on safe investments

If it returns 15% it isn't a safe investment. The rate of return for a safe investment is in the 1-3% real range. Someone is offering you 15% real that implies they think it is a risky enterprise to sign on with. 15% nominal isn't so hard to find (gold yields at 10% nominal - but that isn't actually coming out ahead as much as treading water). It isn't a very impressive nominal rate of return in that sense but it is still not all that safe.

reaperducer3• 9 months ago

Being shamelessly focused on wealth accumulation seems to be socially acceptable in a way it wasn’t fifty years ago.

In the 70's the expression was "He who dies with the most toys wins."

Today, replace "toys" with "dollars."

People seem to be using raw money as some kind of measure of success, as if life was a big video game, trying to rack up the highest score.

It's part of the gamification of everything: Politics, dining, shopping. Everything is a game now, and everyone is expected to keep score.

dominicrose• 9 months ago

When you need to borrow a hundred times your salary to own a decent home, you need three hundred months to pay it back, that's 25 years in an economy were you're lucky to keep the same job for a couple of years. And I'm not even talking about all the related or other fixed or mandatory costs.

It may be a game for someone who's already rich, but it's not for most people, and if you add kids to the equation, well, that's much more difficult because it requires time which we don't have, or if we have it then it means we don't have money.

rockskon2• 9 months ago

There's also the issue of gatekeepers squashing deviance. Payment processors killing payments to various legal adult websits. Information-discovery gatekeepers squashing discoverability of deviant material. Social media....has had a dual affect of being subject to the gatekeeper's restrictions and the risk of self-appointed moral busybodies searching for deviant content to threaten peoples' lives/livelihoods over.

Cultural gatekeepers are able to exert influence over more people now than they have ever had before in human history. In many cases the ability to be deviant is becoming more difficult to even attempt.

4gotunameagain• 9 months ago

Labeling pornography as "deviance" is simply funny. It is one of the most prevalent things that exist right now.

Which imo is also an outcome of late stage capitalism (money won, as aptly phrased above). You body is a commodity to be monetised, sacrifice everything in the name of money.

mjbale116• 9 months ago

A big part of this IMO is that “money won”, for lack of a better phrase. There is no real concept of selling out anymore. Being shamelessly focused on wealth accumulation seems to be socially acceptable in a way it wasn’t fifty years ago.

Fifty years ago you had Soviet Union.

An entity which provided an alternative to the US and Western Europe vassals freemarketeering shenanigans.

With the Soviet Union gone, and the communists in retreat, the Capitalists can shove their ideologies down the populace's collective throat.

It has already been established that "what we have here is the best system" and any failure to ascend in said system is a failure of the individual rather than the system's.

"Here is a feel good story of an immigrant that learned python and made it big in America, why can't you do the same?"

strken2• 9 months ago

It looks cyclical to me. The materialism of the postwar era led into the civil rights movement of the late 60s and 70s, which turned into the materialistic 80s, which was rejected by the countercultural late 90s and 2000s, after which there was a slight deviation in which transgression rather than anti-materialism was rejected, and now we're back to materialism.

My guess is that in a decade or two society will elevate an ideology that directly opposes material wealth again. If nobody has any damn money then they can't exactly use wealth as a measure of worth.

gwd2• 9 months ago

It looks cyclical to me. The materialism of the postwar era led into the civil rights movement of the late 60s and 70s, which turned into the materialistic 80s, which was rejected by the countercultural late 90s and 2000s, after which there was a slight deviation in which transgression rather than anti-materialism was rejected, and now we're back to materialism.

The post has loads of graphs going back to the 50's, with trend lines continually going down, not cycling up and down during those time frames.

antoniojtorres• 9 months ago

Mark Fisher describes this as precorporation in Capitalist Realism. The idea that at a certain point capital will anticipate and ahead of time incorporate the behavior, thus absorbing it into the overall mechanism.

DuperPower• 9 months ago

no, the romantic narrative of Life was just a facade used by cynical boomers to club to the top, its true many were earnest in the way they focused on quality of their Jobs (doing that also lead you to money) so its not that now its about money, It always was It just the romantic layers were removed so even if you are passionated about something if you are not cold with money as the hard reality of everything you Will seem deluded

inglor_cz• 9 months ago

I don't really believe this explanation, it is too narrow (in the usual "the US is the whole world" sense typical for US-based forums), and the same trend seems to be happening in many countries and cultures at once.

My explanations would be:

a. A lot of your current life is recorded online and visible to others, and people in general behave more carefully when under de facto surveillance. Similar to self-censorship in authoritarian countries.

b. Personal contact has been supplanted by virtual contact over apps, especially among the young, and doing risky things, including sex and booze, faces a lot more obstacles when your main gateway to the rest of humanity, including friends, is a screen.

Quite a lot of my, uh, non-standard behavior in my 20s was initiated by an impulsive decision in company of others, who came up with some ...idea... This is what just does not happen when everyone is in their room alone.

terminalbraid• 9 months ago

There's a book "Against Creativity" by Oli Mould which is on this topic. The title is about the redirection of creativity into monetizing everything. It hypothesizes that any current counterculture gets bought out by the system and sold back to society while those creators effectively get golden handcuffs to not rock the boat meaningfully.

https://www.amazon.com/Against-Creativity-Oli-Mould-ebook/dp...

igleria• 9 months ago

Being shamelessly focused on wealth accumulation seems to be socially acceptable in a way it wasn’t fifty years ago

Has anyone here had the chance to have a frank conversation which such types? Morbid curiosity...

rsynnott4• 9 months ago

Someone will probably say this is because current generations have less financial security, and I’m sure that’s a factor.

Than the previous couple of generations, sure. But, in most places, far _more_ than those born late in the 19th century, say. That in itself isn't a great explanation.

keiferski7• 9 months ago

Agreed but I think the comparison is ultimately what matters. Being poorer than your parents makes you more cautious about money, even if you're 5x as wealthy as your great-grandparents.

potato37328423• 9 months ago

If you are destitute for any length of time these days you'll likely wind up entrapped by various sorts of welfare systems one of which probably has some sort of cliff you can't scale on your way out. If it's not the food stamps that gets ya it's sec8.

If you were totally destitute in 1900 or 1800 you might starve. But the costs incurred on your way back up were more like steps than cliffs.

andrewrn• 9 months ago

This aligns fairly closely with one of the main theses of “The Technological Republic,” Alex Karp’s new book.

Basically, our abandonment of shared identities (national, religious, cultural) has allowed status and market forces to rush in to give people meaning and identity.

Obviously a take that will ruffle some feathers, but I found it fairly convincing.

lo_zamoyski2• 9 months ago

Our culture is certainly commercialized - with the ancien régime out, the merchants began to dominate, and with it a cultural shift toward commerce. Commercialism embraces industrialization and industrialization produces homogeneity. Profit becomes the sole measure of "success", giving way to streamlining and predictability.

superconduct123• 9 months ago

One thing I've noticed with the younger generation is they are much more analytical and "in their heads"

They over-analyze and overthink everything a lot more than past generations which can be good and bad

Probably due to the internet and more access to information

For example when I was a kid you would watch a movie or play a video game and not think about it that much.

Whereas now its all about RT scores, metacritic, review megathreads, unboxing, reaction videos, video essay breakdowns/explainers , tv show podcasts

Analyzing/reviewing/meta-content has never been bigger

echelon• 9 months ago

Whereas now its all about RT scores, review megathreads, unboxing, reaction videos

Is that them or is that content and algorithms seeping into every possible nook and cranny of the human experience? Creators seeking to tap value off of popular brands and fans trying to find more content and falling into a long tail?

We're making more content, taking up more time, resulting in people who are stimulated all the time. Busy all the time.

pixl979• 9 months ago

They over-analyze and overthink everything a lot more than past generations

Maybe we're just used to past generations that were poisoned by atmospheric lead from gasoline making under thought decisions.

armchairhacker• 9 months ago

I disagree that people are less weird and deviant today. I believe they’re less weird offline, because weirdness is easier, safer, and less embarrassing to express online.

I also disagree that online has become less weird. It’s less weird proportionally, because the internet used to consist of mostly weird people, then normal people joined. Big companies are less weird because they used to cater to weird people (those online), now they cater to normal people. But there are still plenty of weird people, websites, and companies.

Culture is still constantly changing, and what is “weird” if not “different”? Ideas that used to be unpopular and niche have become mainstream, ex. 4chan, gmod (Skibidi Toilet), and Twitch streamers. I’m sure ideas that are unpopular and niche today will be mainstream tomorrow. I predict that within the next 10 years, mainstream companies will change their brands again to embrace a new fad; albeit all similarly, but niche groups will also change differently and re-organize.

(And if online becomes less anonymous and more restrictive, people will become weirder under their real ID or in real life.)

keiferski7• 9 months ago

Weirdness isn’t really deviance. Punk was deviance, anti-system. Modern internet weirdness is mostly just having weird consumer tastes and sociopolitical opinions.

10729287• 9 months ago

Punk is still strong. The internet destroyed Geek tho.

PaulDavisThe1st3• 9 months ago

I think it is useful to differentiate between transgressive and "deviance" in the sense it was used in TFA.

Punk was primarily transgressive from my POV (growing up in London as punk exploded there). It concerned itself with rule breaking, norms breaking and generally doing things you weren't supposed to do, all just for the sake of doing those things, and mostly because life fucking sucked.

The way "deviance" is used in TFA seems much more related to people making non-transgressive but neverthless uncommon choices, closer to ideas about statistical distributions ("standard deviation") than the sort of scream of anger that drove punk forward.

I should probably view that even though I don't like much if any real punk for its aesthetics, I think it was and is a really good thing, particularly in terms of its focus on a DIY model which spread beyond just music.

a-french-anon• 9 months ago

The total opposite, large movements like punks or hippies weren't really deviance, it was choosing another large group to belong to. It's conveniently cellophane-wrapped rebellion for people who need an identity but can't bear to stand alone and truly think for themselves.

"The underground is a lie" was right then and still is: https://www.jimgoad.net/goadabode/issue%202/undergnd.html

Synaesthesia• 9 months ago

The internet used to have all kinds of crazy sites, anyone remember rotten.com?

It was a lot more uncensored and anarchistic. It wasn't dedicated to consumerism and sold out to corporations.

We had personal websites, blogs and such. No, it has definitely changed for the worse in terms of personal freedom. Enshittification is real.

xorvoid2• 9 months ago

It's just the internet.

Lots of deviant communities that are still quite active if you turn off your laptop/phone and go seek out the eccentric folks in the real world.

The internet has pushed towards homogeneity over the last couple decades. If you're confusing internet with the real world constantly (i.e. staying "plugged in"), its easy to come to the article's conclusion. But, you can always choose to just "turn it off".

pixl979• 9 months ago

The internet isn’t some PC sitting in your house these days. It's with you on your phone, and it's on every phone and device around you, pretty much everywhere in the world. Even if you 'turn it off' everyone else can make it your problem.

xorvoid2• 9 months ago

Try going on a hike in the sticks where there is no cellular service at all. The idea that you can't escape the internet is a fiction. This is so overblown.

chemotaxis2• 9 months ago

I have an issue with the claim that the culture is stagnating. One of the arguments is this:

fewer and fewer of the artists and franchises own more and more of the market. Before 2000, for instance, only about 25% of top-grossing movies were prequels, sequels, spinoffs, etc. Now it’s 75%.

I think the explanation isn't a decrease in creativity as much as the fact that in the 1980s, there just weren't that many films you could make a sequel of. It's a relatively young industry. There are more films made today because the technology has gotten more accessible. The average film is probably fairly bland, but there are more weird outliers too.

The same goes for the "the internet isn't as interesting as it used to be" - there's more interesting content than before, but the volume of non-interesting stuff has grown much faster. It's now a commerce platform, not a research thing. But that doesn't mean that people aren't using the medium in creative ways.

lapcat5• 9 months ago

A number of comments have suggested lead poisoning, but I think that's far too facile an answer. Perhaps it explains a bit, but does lead poisoning make you prefer original movies to sequels or to have better musical taste? If so, I say bring back the lead! ;-)

The article author presents a life expectancy explanation, but I think that's even less plausible than lead poisoning. When I was a teenager, I wasn't thinking about how long I would live, and it would have made no difference whether life expectancy was 60, 70, 80, or 90. Does it make any sense at all that teens drink alcohol and smoke pot if they believe they'll live to 70 but not if they believe they'll live to 90?

One thing that has definitely changed is parenting styles. I was a stereotypical "latchkey kid". Between the end of school and the beginning of dinner, I was free to go anywhere and do anything with no adult supervision. This was very common among GenX. However, later generations suffered from "helicopter parents" who won't let their kids out of their sight and arranged "playdates" and other organized activities for their kids, not allowing them to spontaneously choose for themselves. I suspect a lot of that was inspired by fear, American's Most Wanted and similar fearmongering about stranger danger and child abduction.

There's probably not just one factor to explain everything. Corporate consolidation, for example, also explains many cultural changes, and such consolidation has been occurring and growing over the course of many decades, even before the internet.

pixl979• 9 months ago

The original movies thing probably had more to do with ownership of theaters and IP spread over a much larger number of companies, as you say with the corporate consolidation. A huge amount of consolidation has occurred and it's not something instantly noticeable.

For anyone saying bring back the lead, most of the problems there weren't obvious or out in the open. You're bringing back even more abuse and dark things.

lapcat5• 9 months ago

For anyone saying bring back the lead

Sigh. Nobody is saying that.

tonyedgecombe3• 9 months ago

However, later generations suffered from "helicopter parents" who won't let their kids out of their sight and arranged "playdates" and other organized activities for their kids, not allowing them to spontaneously choose for themselves.

I wonder how much of that is down to car culture. The amount of traffic I had to deal with as a child was tiny compared what my children faced.

lapcat5• 9 months ago

I wonder how much of that is down to car culture. The amount of traffic I had to deal with as a child was tiny compared what my children faced.

I don't see how this is related at all. Car culture was already firmly established 50-60 years ago, and I haven't noticed any significant changes in traffic. Of course the traffic level depends on exactly where you live. Anyway, the suburban area I live in now has no more traffic than the suburban areas I lived in as a child.

rawgabbit• 9 months ago

The word choice is strange. The author is listing the decline of risk-taking and experimental life choices like: pregnancies, crime, joining a cult etc. He is talking about people making safer / more conservative life choices. He also noticed that the monetary value assigned to people's lives has risen dramatically (over 12 million USD compared to 4 million USD a few decades ago). It is not the decline of deviance; it is decline of risk taking. That doesn't mean it is good or bad. It is just a fact.

gostsamo• 9 months ago

Mass culture is educating people to a level which it wasn't possible before, pruning really bad examples, and suggesting attainable relationships with self and the world. Lead is maybe a big reason why it succeeds, but even before the 192x when the lead started, people and craziness were wide spread. What happened with the maturation of all the media channels is that old religious and religion-derived psychoses were pushed out of fashion and being yourself wasn't opposed by centuries old norms. Being creative is often correlated with suffering and we are actually happy right now.

I don't mean that we don't have problems and the concentration of wealth and power in the hands of a few is maybe causing part of the uniformity, but generally, we call them creative solutions, because they are aimed at uncomfortable problems.

nickelcitymario• 9 months ago

Seeing a lot of comments disputing singular data points, but the author goes out of his way to provide as wide a variety of data points as he could find, and to try to disprove his own theory.

A couple anecdotal things I've noticed in my own life that align with his conclusions:

(1) I work in advertising. I've long bemoaned that my industry has turned to producing high-production low-creativity work for decades now. In the 60s, 70s, and 80s, people relied on creativity to get a message across. But today, it's all polish and no substance. I assumed it was because technology made it easier than ever to to do so, but maybe it's part of a wider trend.

(2) I used to love the variety of car designs. Every car was unique. Some were crazy. But today, take the logo off, and I'd be challenged to tell the difference between any two pickup trucks or any two sedans or any two vans. Every manufacturer has converged on the exact same design. (We see this in every industry, I just happened to be a fan of cars back in the day. But if you look at housing, clothing, computers, phones, tablets, etc etc, I can't think of any category that has real variety in design.)

(3) The author mentions book covers. Up until today, I was mistaking all those designs as meaning those books were part of the same series or something. I hadn't dug in to realize they were actually unrelated.

(4) My own kids have played it incredibly safe. I'm proud of them for being more responsible than I ever was. But I'm also worried they don't know how to take risks. I'm strongly of the belief that anything worth doing involves a healthy dose of risk. Could it really be that as a society, we've just abandoned risk?

I'm not saying the article is necessarily 100% correct. But I think it does pose what may be one of the most important questions of our era. Yeah yeah, I know that sounds bombastic: we have increasing global conflicts, a climate crisis, the apparent rise of neo-fascism, etc. But I don't know how we're going to solve those problems if we're all driving into the middle. How can 8 billion people be more homogenous than the 7, 6, 5, 4 billion that came before?

Brian: Look, you've got it all wrong! You don't need to follow me. You don't need to follow anybody! You've got to think for yourselves! You're all individuals!
Crowd: Yes! We're all individuals!
Brian: You're all different!
Crowd: Yes, we are all different!
Man in crowd: I'm not...
Crowd: Shhh!

stronglikedan• 9 months ago

the author obviously has not seen one of the near daily protests lately, or the majority of videos posted to social media, or perhaps they just chose the wrong word ("weird") for what they are trying to express. everywhere I look, freak flags are on full and public display now more than I ever remembered them being

Lerc• 9 months ago

I feel like there are so many factors here that it's hard to identify which thing have the greatest impact. Instead of attempting a coherent argument, I'll offer some further observations.

Taylor Swift is one of the most famous people in the world, yet I know quite a large number of people who could name only one or two of her songs. I would count myself a Taylor Swift fan even though I am in the group of knowing very little of her music. I admire her creativity, business acumen, legs, assertiveness, intelligence, and determination.

In the past, a performer at that height would dominate a much smaller range of media coverage leading to a more profound cultural impact. While being on fewer channels, they'd be on a greater proportion of the whole media landscape.

I think that pushes the dial in both directions. When something is targeted at all, they have to stay around the median to encompass the largest population.

Transformational change happens to a society when something that is targeted beyond the median becomes popular and drags the world with it.

You hear a lot of talk about the Overton window these days. I have heard it raised frequently as an argument for deplatforming. It strikes me as a profound misunderstanding of what the Overton window represents. People argue that you should suppress ideas you disagree with so that the measurement of the Overton window shows an opinion that is under-sampled against your adversary and consequently moves in the direction you prefer. This one of the most damaging examples of Goodhart's law that I know of.

To stick with the music analogy, I think if Guns 'n' Roses appeared before the Beatles there would have been a significant negative response from the public (although I would really like to pull an open minded musical expert out of history to capture their experiences of modern music). Some experts favour protecting the establishment, while others are the very first to realise the significance of a revolutionary new thing.

People are generally repelled by objectionable views and while the Overton window suggests that the notion of what is objectionable might change over time, suppressing objectionable views removes that repulsion from them while simultaneously being an act that many find objectionable. Both changes cause the dominant public opinion to move in the same direction, the opposite to what the people attempting to control the dialog desire. At the same time making the Overton window harder to measure, obscuring their failure.

The decline of deviance could be thought of as either a shrinking or expansion of the standard deviation of the Overton window. It depends upon your perspective and if you consider objective measures of variance to be more significant to subjective measures.

When the Overton window is much wider, there are a much broader set of opinions in the world, but also, by definition with the same level of acceptance as a compressed window. everything within the window is accepted. You could interpret that as a decline in deviance because you just don't consider the range of things accepted to be deviant.

When the Overton window is narrow, social pressures cause people to restrict their behaviour, which would also be considered a decline in deviance. On the other hand it would take much less to be considered deviant.

This makes me wonder if you need a second order Overton to measure the acceptability of opinions relative to their proportionate position on the Overton window. Would such a measurement measure polarisation? I would imagine that the ideal arrangement, no matter what the width of the Overton window was, would be a slower decline in acceptance of things that are disagreed with.

Once again though. If you started measuring this, would it become a target, and subject to gaming?

MattGrommes• 9 months ago

I feel like a lot of this is breaking up of culture into a million shards. People are being weird in much smaller domains so if you look at the old bigger chunks of culture it seems like it's solidifying. Just because TV is largely boring doesn't mean online video isn't weird. You just might not like it so you don't pay attention to it.

neilv• 9 months ago

Another disappearing form of deviance: people don’t seem to be joining cults anymore.

I guess it's not deviant if it's a large percentage of the population.

Animats• 9 months ago

T-shirt:

    No means no.
    Maybe means no.
    Yes means maybe.
    Regret equals rape.

    Fortunately, there's Pornhub.

ramesh31• 9 months ago

Chalk up one more nightmarish facet of modern life almost soley attributable to housing costs. I'd love nothing more than to work a part time job and practice the Sitar all day. But now that equals homelessness.

BrenBarn2• 9 months ago

Housing cost itself is one more nightmarish facet of modern life largely attributable to wealth inequality.

didgetmaster• 9 months ago

Anyone displaying 'weirdness' these days gets diagnosed with a place on the 'spectrum' and prescribed some kind of medication to tamp it down.

kykat• 9 months ago

I thought so too, would be interesting to compare with per capita use of psych drugs

ironman1478• 9 months ago

The world has become very expensive and everything is way more competitive than it was in the past.

To me, it feels like there is little room to make mistakes. If you get detailed it's hard to get back on track. That I think is the primary reason people are taking less risks (or being deviant).

ajkjk• 9 months ago

personal theory is that it has to do with connectedness. everyone is much more aware of everyone else now, and how to act, so it's far easier to not act out. In the past there were many more isolated subcultures, people disconnected from mainstream culture, etc, and they could stay that way for a very long time. Now there's a strong normative pressure, so they become more 'normal', that is, boring.

Multicomp4• 9 months ago

I initially thought not to post this because I think this is potentially flamebait adjacent for someone and I dont want to rock the boat.

But in the interests of attempting to not be so conformist and give us something interesting to discuss about this interesting article, I will try this anyways, and if you have a problem with me saying this then feel free to flag and move on, I don't care enough to get into a flame war about this, but I believe I'm not trying to troll or get a rise out of people.

Perhaps this is the feminization of society? As women have asserted themselves in the workforce and due to young women being the creators of mass culture for their generation, perhaps this is a partial driver for why everyone is so much less independent.

I dont know, this thought is not done and I'm already expecting incoming fire from someone somewhere, but perhaps this could help drive this.

Then again, it's more likely that this fits one of my conformation bias pet issues.

johnthedebs• 9 months ago

I'll reply here in good faith: I just don't see how you connect those dots, or why this has anything to do with gender.

women have asserted themselves in the workforce

Agree.

young women being the creators of mass culture for their generation

Citation(s) needed. I've never heard an argument for this or even seen someone suggest it before.

partial driver for why everyone is so much less independent

Even if we take your previous statements as true, what does that have to do with peoples' independence?

To me (and my own confirmation bias pet issue), it seems much more likely that having recordings and visible online identities the way we do now with smartphones, ever present cameras, and social media causes people to think a lot more about how they're perceived by others.

And, the flip side, spending so much time seeing other people via tv, online videos, social media, etc constantly reinforces what "normal" behavior looks like.

People are also so absorbed in modern media that they just do way less interesting stuff overall imo.

Multicomp4• 9 months ago

Hey there, thanks for the good faith, here's what I hope is reciprocal.

I'll reply here in good faith: I just don't see how you connect those dots, or why this has anything to do with gender.

That's a reasonable opinion to doubt that gender affects this at all. I'm not certain it does myself, but I thought it was worth discussing in case there is a role there.

Citation(s) needed. I've never heard an argument for this or even seen someone suggest it before.

I heard it in person from my sister over a year ago, I don't have scientific data at all for this. Totally 'just, like, my opinion, man.'

Having said that, here's [1]/[2](archive link) some Forbes blogger who relatively compactly lays out the theory of how young women are creators of mass culture for their generation.

Even if we take your previous statements as true, what does that have to do with peoples' independence?

I mis-spoke here I should have expanded 'independence' there to represent people's awareness of the 'slow life history path' that is more common today.

To me (and my own confirmation bias pet issue), it seems much more likely that having recordings and visible online identities the way we do now with smartphones, ever present cameras, and social media causes people to think a lot more about how they're perceived by others.

You know I think this is very fair and probably more relevant than my comment. If everybody is watching us all the time, we act on our best behavior and are not (for better/worse) feeling as much at liberty to be our unfettered deviant selves.

And, the flip side, spending so much time seeing other people via tv, online videos, social media, etc constantly reinforces what "normal" behavior looks like.

Also fair. There are many subcultures now, from fountain pen collectors to fantasy writers to Managed Democrats (as a random and /definitely/ not specific-to-me example), and you can tailor your behavior to what the community expects just as the royal we used to do back when we would use internet forums and learn what they liked/didn't like.

People are also so absorbed in modern media that they just do way less interesting stuff overall imo.

I could see that. I do a lot of potentially interesting things in-person or in LAN that I will never let go WAN, I know that the public web is the largest/harshest critic out there and the downside risks are ever yawning while the upside risks are not that much. So if others come to similar conclusions, then the only online stuff that most normal people will put up will be the curated social media appropriate highlight reels.

[1] https://www.forbes.com/sites/bradsimms/2024/05/30/teenage-gi...

[2] https://archive.is/PlfV0

dluan2• 9 months ago

Genuinely wondering why in the world this is your first intellectual instinct.

nevdka• 9 months ago

I think the observed feminisation isn't a causal factor, but instead shares a causal factor - that every space must now accept everyone. This causes a few problems.

0. One of the ideas that has tagged along with inclusion has been changing from an input focus ("e.g. No girls allowed in treehouse!") to an output focus (Fewer girls than boys are in the treehouse). In the input focused model, you want to change the rule to stop excluding girls. In the output focused model you also need to change the treehouse to be more attractive to girls. From this, any 'deviant' interests that happen to be gendered (or racial, cultural, etc) get suppressed in the name of creating inclusive outcomes.

1. Most humans have a natural urge to conform to those around us, some just experience it stronger or weaker than others. When 'deviants' are included in a non-deviant space, their deviant tendencies face a subtle yet strong conformity pressure that wouldn't be felt if they were excluded entirely.

2. 'Deviants' being accepted more widely means they don't need to create or find their own spaces. Hence there are fewer spaces where the deviation is locally normal, which would allow the conformist pressure to enhance and refine the deviation.

Multicomp4• 9 months ago

that every space must now accept everyone

Okay, this is good answer here because this is more of what I was after. I would initially lay this effect exclusively at the feet of feminism, but I agree now that there are a lot of other movements that could be put into that slot as well.

If we could keep the input focus gains of feminism/$movement while identifying/losing the output-focus overreaches of $movement, I think we would all be better off. Moderation is the key.

Politics jumps in to find that level of moderation, and I've already used all of my 'stir the HN pot' tokens for this month so I will leave further discussion there alone.

Thanks for a good comment that expands the discussion further in the direction I wanted to go but couldn't articulate in my post.

pfannkuchen2• 9 months ago

The fact that you felt the need for that long preface (rightly so, I might add) demonstrates the real root problem. If everything we’re doing is right and true, why can’t we even talk about it directly? The truth doesn’t really mind being talked about, because after you’re finished talking it’s still the truth.

(Which isn’t to say I agree with your take, I haven’t given it much thought. But anything to do with feminism potentially having negative effects is verboten).

Der_Einzige• 9 months ago

Ya OP didn’t get the memo that trump won in 2016 and leftwing political thought is against the dominant cultural narrative of the trump years. You don’t need to put that preface again until at a minimum trump is out.

watwut4• 9 months ago

Women fought for independence and feminists are the ones most despised by a lot in larger culture, lol.

Meanwhile, conservative male spaces tend to be all about being in group and forcing everyone to be like them. And about forcing women back to dependence.

rsynnott4• 9 months ago

I'm not sure I get what you're trying to say. I think it probably _is_ fair to say that women now produce more culture than men, in aggregate, but I'm not sure that that is evidence for your thing. Like, I'm not seeing cause and effect here.

(Granted, I don't totally buy into their claims that society is more conformist than it used to be in the first place; it's clear that _crime_ has fallen, but there's no particular reason that that should be joined at the hip to non-conformism and their evidence for cultural stagnation is far weaker than their evidence on crime).

Multicomp4• 9 months ago

My comment was pretty vague even to me when I posted it, so I would instead direct your attention to the sibling comment https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=45742822 which is much more what I was wondering.

ssivark• 9 months ago

I don't know if you made a subconscious allusion, but Helen Andrews recently wrote an article with a similar premise: The great feminization https://www.compactmag.com/article/the-great-feminization/

jancsika• 9 months ago

But wait, shouldn’t we be drowning in new, groundbreaking art?

We are.

I just watched a short Youtube clip of Corey Henry on organ accompanying a preacher's sermon. It's fucking insane-- he's doing two-handed Liszt-inspired cadenzas while the preacher is freely changing keys. I've never heard anything like it.

Also, some weirdo did what appears to be an accurate scrolling transcription that accompanies the clip.

Now Youtube is recommending a bunch more clips with scrolling transcriptions of out-of-this-world jazz performers doing deviant things.

Here's one now of Benny Benack scat-singing, showing an unbelievable vocal range. Now he's yelling the name "Phil Woods" as he quotes a fragment from Phil Woods' solo on Billy Joel's "Just the Way You Are."

Youtube will keep suggesting these things at me literally until I have to go eat food to survive. And that's just the scrolling transcriptions of deviant jazz solos.

In short, author is so wrong he thinks he's right.

Edit: clarification

selimthegrim• 9 months ago

Corey Henry is so loud in person I’m unable to bear being in the same venue. Maybe this is a more tolerable volume.

gxs• 9 months ago

It makes sense that everything would converge on the same time

When every company does the same market “research” to figure out what appeals to consumers, over time they are all going to arrive at the same conclusion

As this particular style becomes familiar to people, it only reinforces the preference and now you’re stuck in a cycle

This is why imo there will always be room for a startups - eventually someone deviates from the path and strikes gold, eventually a company is *actually* courageous, does something bold, and moves an industry forward

We are unfortunately getting to a point though where giant tech companies have a stranglehold on resources and it hinders innovation

tzury• 9 months ago

this post which mentioned in the OP has far broader examples

https://www.alexmurrell.co.uk/articles/the-age-of-average

tolerance• 9 months ago

People are deeply concerned over their own wellbeing and that of their others’ while being bombarded by a collage of choices that indicate how to either preserve or compromise their lives and the associated consequences and as a result of this they are either reaching for things safe and familiar or leaping toward new ideals to a rough jingle of outcome and in truth there is such a surplus of “weird” going around and no one with the guts to determine the “good kinds of weirdness” from the bad kinds and all this guy has to offer us is countless links, fourteen footnotes and a glib call to action.

renewiltord• 9 months ago

This is an interesting set of observations. One curious thing I've noticed is the moving thing. Frequently people online will say things like "You expect me to pick up my entire life and leave my friends and family behind to go somewhere just to find a job? People should be able to live where they want" or something of the sort. Leaving out the housing affordability part of that, I found the sentiment odd when reading it but with the context of this article I see it was that I was a blind man trying to figure out an elephant by holding his tail.

I've moved across continents so many times now in search of making it, and I feel like I have made it now. I could not have imagined the other way of doing things. But I suppose kids these days can make it wherever they are.

Some of these things do make sense, though, just out of accessibility. Once everyone can access everything, most will likely go watch 'the best'. That tends to a power-law now that access is cheap.

In some sense, web forums have also trended towards this. You'll get the exact same commentary on HN as on Reddit as on Digg. That kind of uniformity was hard in the old web forum days. We are all part of the same big community: the once hilariously-named 'netizen' is now real.

arjie• 9 months ago

I have this fondness for the old-school web of blogs and so on. And I thought perhaps that this decline of deviance was the reason for the perceived dip in blogs. But now I think it's actually different. All of us from then were the early adopters of this stuff. We were never going to be a lot. It's just that previously there were a thousand (metaphorically) of us with nine hundred of us like what we were, and now there are a billion with nine hundred of us like what we were, and the rest are what they were but now they're here.

I have this belief: if you don't know where the artist went, it's probably because you were a groupie rather than an artist and they eventually tired of you. After all, right now in San Francisco there are people like those in the circle of Aella (of Sankey chart fame) who had a "birthday gangbang" where each man had some limited time with her and then had to go to a fluffer. One of those fluffers married one of the men she met there.

This is beyond strange to me, but not in a disparaging way. It's just out of my zone of familiarity in a way where I feel I would not know what being in these people's presence is like. So I think the strange people are just finding the other strange people and enjoying their time together rather than what they would previously do: entice some normies to strangeness.

I also think many of these things have various causes. Apartment buildings have the same shape everywhere because they are all designed by committee and have the same schools of thought dictating "breaking up the massing" and all that. But even in that world, in the NIMBY capital of the world, there is a building like Mira SF which is pretty damned cool!

dluan2• 9 months ago

Qualifying myself on this topic to say I've written websites with `<blink></blink>` in them.

Half of this reads like a reactionary grasping at straws, throwing together a bunch of unrelated things to try and bemoan a "return to weird, but my version of weird". When in reality, the explanation is more straight forward: you're old man.

The culture is a live and well. I've lived through ircs and Discord groups. It's out there, it's just better gatekept to match the existing community now. Berghain doesn't just let in any sex pest. Furthermore, this is incredibly English speaking limited view of culture. Chinese and Japanese web culture is alive and well, you just don't know the language and so you can't participate.

The other reason for a lot of these shallow complaints - architecture being samey, websites being samey, branding being samey - is capitalism, which always as a rule tends towards consolidation. Things become same and boring because they figured out how to make money with it.

And using mass shootings as some sort of logical counter factual is some of the wildest, most insane strawmanning I've seen on the internet.

What a garbage article, I feel dumber for having read it. How in the world this guy manages to command a veneer of intellectualism is hilarious.

a-hill• 9 months ago

Do you have any recommendations of where to look for Japanese web culture as I have really struggled to find anything. Japanese tech blog websites like Qiita and zenn seem to just post bland tech articles

hattmall2• 9 months ago

I definitely think you are missing quite a bit of the overall idea. The author is foremost creating imagery with the statistics. The mass shooting thing tracks with what the point is. IMO it doesn't seem to be simply, "you're old man".

Yes culture is still going on many things are still happening, that's not being denied. The thesis is that deviance from societal norms is decreasing. The deviance that finds it's way into societal norms is what we look back at and consider new culture. Therefore the less the pot is stirring with deviance the less culture is evolving. Which I really think IS a valid point and reasoning. I don't think the author is wrong, at least not about what he is talking about.

BUT, I think the author is looking for deviance in some of the wrong places. I don't think it's age, but more of position, both societal, and geographic. Not unlike the accumulation of wealth, where the top percent has been increasing their share over time I think that deviance driven culture is accumulating in much the same fashion.

My guess is that the author lives somewhere in typical city-surrounded-by-suburbs-urban type area, where most people spend the bulk of their time in some sort of gainful employment that mostly benefits the wealthy. Typical weekends are spent paying attention to sports or music events and going out to eat at restaurants. Most people probably take a couple vacations to another area for a few days a year or maybe go on a cruise or something. Having a passport is common.

The examples and ideas he evaluates are deviance WITHIN that framework, but not deviance FROM that framework. In the past much of culture was spawned by that deviance, the deviance that exists within the idea of the typical urban/suburban worker.

Where deviance is abundantly evident today, that you could miss if you aren't in position is to be completely outside of that framework. That's the deviance today.

Some examples: The percentage of homeschooling children is rising rapidly. The number of SxS deaths annually is increasing at a huge rate. The adoption of eBikes, solar panels, off grid living, tiny homes, non-standard pets, lake culture, trail rides, guerilla playgrounds, CPNS, take-overs, pull up concerts, unlicnensed popups, dump truck beaches, etc. There's a TON Of deviance but it's concentrated around the same groups and it's coordinate but at the same time it ends up shutting people out that aren't in those groups, so it really is this sort of cultural accumulation that's not spread as evenly as it once was. And ultimately those situations ARE spawning new culture, trends, music, styles and products etc.

chubot• 9 months ago

BUT, I think the author is looking for deviance in some of the wrong places

In the section at the end, he does admit that possibility:

The internet ethnographer Katherine Dee argues that the most interesting art is happening in domains we don’t yet consider “art”, like social media personalities, TikTok sketch comedy, and Pinterest mood boards.

https://culture.ghost.io/why-its-hard-to-argue-about-cultura...

I think that is true

But I also think he's right about movies, music, architecture, corporate logos, etc.

---

off grid living, tiny homes, non-standard pets, lake culture, trail rides, guerilla playgrounds, CPNS, take-overs, pull up concerts, unlicnensed popups, dump truck beaches, etc

Hm interesting. It feels like the Internet has made off-grid living more feasible. Well I only know from YouTube :-/

But from watching those videos, it does seem like there is a ton of information that can be a matter of life and death ... which you can either find out (1) the hard way (2) from a book or a neighbor (the old ways), or (3) through the Internet !

So the Internet can make new(-ish) things more possible, but I also think it has a dampening/homogenizing effect, as many others said in this thread

hn_throwaway_99• 9 months ago

I made a comment related to this recently (https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=45486391) and I got a lot of helpful responses that I think help explain some of these trends:

1. With the Internet, things "converge to an optimum" much faster than before where you had more regional variation. Dominant design, https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dominant_design, explains part of this trend.

2. This article from earlier this year, "The age of average", https://www.alexmurrell.co.uk/articles/the-age-of-average, makes many of the same points but links to other good posts that help explain the change, particularly as it applies to business consolidation and risk aversion.

shevy-java• 9 months ago

we’re in a recession of mischief

I don't think this is true per se. It is more that a lot of things are censored or tailored into a specific direction now. The Trump administration shows this - see how recently the Python Software Foundation came to the conclusion that they could not ethically sign a grant proposal that was modified by the Trump administration seeking to manhunt down any LGBT supporter upon entry into the USA (once found they "abused" or rather misused US grants, which was the logical implication to follow-up on that clause the US government tried to sneakily add). Things became more uniform also because of Google search sucking now. How can we find alternative views? It is much harder than before. The world wide web has been turned into a nerfed variant by Google and co. All "AI summaries" show this - Google hallucinates to the user a variant of the web they control.

pfannkuchen2• 9 months ago

Trump administration seeking to manhunt down any LGBT supporter upon entry into the USA

Am I misreading this, or are you saying the Trump administration has enacted manhunts on (foreign?) LGBT supporters on the basis of them being LGBT supporters? If that’s what you’re saying - how can I find out about this?

unraveller• 9 months ago

Weirdness itself is no personal virtue to be admired, there is already an epidemic of Quirk Chungus type personalities to avoid. This guy too offers an erratic yet safe gish gallop article blaming no one for the loss of our something.

Johnathan Bi explains [1] the stagnant output of deviant/contrarian creatives better as a lack of respect for artistic foundations after being influenced by the rabid 3rd or 4th generation in whatever artistic movement.

[1] https://youtu.be/YfLj1pHGfT4?t=1358

seydor2• 9 months ago

Weirdness is necessary in every cultural bubble. Christianity was weird once, as was gayness, as was rationalism, market economy etc.

seydor2• 9 months ago

My theory is it all has todo with immigration, or rather the way we treat immigration since the 2000s. In order to accomodate everyone the culture gained new sensibilities, and the bubble burst. But idiosyncratic cultures can only grow in bubbles.

We ve seen that in Europe before the US, where the german, french, English culture lost their influence and originality, becoming touristic products being sold by people of all colors and cultures.

Words like 'spirit' and 'soul' have been replaced with 'content and money, and the media is being driven by people with a generic "global" culture and outlook

swiftcoder• 9 months ago

A couple of generations ago, the majority of people transacted entirely in cash, and the only government ID they carried was a drivers license (and the women and children didn't even have that).

I can't help the feeling that everything in our lives and finances being tied to our permanent government-sanctioned identity has a chilling effect on deviance. No longer can one skip across state lines with a crisp hundred in ones pocket if one's deviance becomes widely known...

athrowaway3z• 9 months ago

I'm not 100% sold on the direct relation, but just to brainstorm some more.

A society wide panopticon would not just decrease deviance, it would also increase overall stress, and disproportionally allow people who are shameless - willing to lie and bluster - to get relatively more attention.

ryanjshaw• 9 months ago

people don’t seem to be joining cults anymore

I think the shape of cults has changed. There is a vast army of social media influencers exploiting e.g. “new age” concepts to take advantage of vulnerable people, sometimes with devastating impact. Research just hasn’t caught up yet.

Perenti• 9 months ago

Not all of this is as straightforward as the author seems to suggest. In particular, I believe the massive increase in mass shootings is only in one country. Part of it is, I believe, the fear-mongering our glorious leaders and the media love so much.

soufron• 9 months ago

Wow… an engineer making generalizations about the fact that he is in a tunnel… and not realizing for a second that he is in said tunnel. How new.

megamix• 9 months ago

Definitely internet. When I’m not online, I goof out infinitely.

HPsquared• 9 months ago

The author using the 90s as a reference point strikes me as odd, as though that was a normal period.

The 90s was peak "binge", the West was on top of the world with no challengers. People felt they could relax. Perhaps they relaxed a bit too much.

martchat• 9 months ago

I believe there is some merit in the fact that everything is overanalyzed now. Every new trend, fashion, or viral phenomenon is analyzed and commoditized so quickly that it kills its originality. Movies are generated, not directed (Netflix). Music lacks character — where are the crazy, drunken stars from the ’70s, ’80s, and ’90s?

I also agree that there may be some connection with the use of mobile phones, which has actually made personal contact more difficult. Previously, if you wanted to discuss something with your neighbor or an old acquaintance, you had to call them and talk. Now it’s often just a chat. People are less aggressive and less willing to take risks.

It reminds me of an excellent Stanisław Lem sci-fi novel, Return from the Stars, where an astronaut returning from a mission finds that people on Earth have neutralized themselves from all aggressive impulses, and he is perceived as a wild and dangerous “prehistoric” man.

Another factor could also be that populations are growing older, which means less risky behavior and fewer “youth” crimes.

On the other hand, perhaps the norm to which we should compare the 20th century is the Middle Ages, when for hundreds of years everyone lived in essentially the same way.

evolighting• 9 months ago

Some concept from evolutionary biology: if the environment remains stable, dominant competitors can sustain their advantage indefinitely, ultimately excluding all other rivals.

This pattern seems to apply equally to the "lifestyle" of human societies. When societal environments are too stable, existing advantage groups or models will continually reinforce their status, resources become concentrated and monopolized, and new changes and opportunities become increasingly scarce.

In other words, what we may be facing is a social system lacking ecological disturbances—a world that is so stable as to suppress evolution.

NoboruWataya• 9 months ago

The article makes some good points but I think a lot of it is cyclical. Drinking, the very first activity mentioned in the article, was hardly considered weird or deviant for many of us growing up. I'm sure there are cultural factors at play here (I grew up in Ireland) but when I was a teenager it was the non-drinkers who were weird. Drinking was what our parents had done and their parents before them. Some of the more benign illegal drugs like weed were not so common that it was weird not to do them, but they were arguably common enough that they lost their weird status.

The decline in teen pregnancies can probably be explained (in part at least) by better access to abortion and contraceptives.

And as for the internet becoming more homogenous, this is a super very complaint on HN but I have long doubted it. I already know there are parts of the modern internet that are weird as fuck to me (just yesterday I read an article posted here about "gooning culture"). Objectively, the internet is just so much bigger now than it was then that it is statistically implausible that there isn't more weird stuff on it. HNers (myself included) are just in a relatively normal bubble.

But certainly the fact that we are all constantly online now can only encourage homogeneity in thought and behaviour.

rPlayer6554• 9 months ago

I think it’s simple economics. A competitor starts scrappy and has nothing to lose. It will take risks because if it fails because it has nothing to loose and everything to gain. It’s successful and as it grows in success it becomes more risk averse because it has so much more to loose. It looses the scrappiness that made it the dominant force.

This happened to the Roman Empire and it’s what’s happening to our current world order.

socalgal2• 9 months ago

The world is more deviant than it's ever been. It's just no one cares anymore beacuse it's normalized. Look at Deviant Art, Pixiv, Only Fans, 4chan, etc... It's all over the place. It's just we came to mostly except it. We've got way more explicit popsongs today and music videos that are way more sexualized than 20-30-40 years ago. It's all normalized. In the 70s a film like Halloween was considered too gross. Now movies like Deadpool-vs-Wolverine or the TV show Bad Boys are just full of exploding bodies and guts and no one blinks an eye.

As for people not drinking/smoking/having-sex, yea, because they're all at home looking at those sites I just mentioned, and because between the 1960s/1970s the message sunking that that shit is bad for you. Killing yourself != deviance.

weinzierl• 9 months ago

The headline talks about deviance and the the article starts with "People are less weird than they used to be." and continues talking about weirdness mostly.

Deviance and weirdness are not the same thing. I 100% agree that deviance is in decline. I also think the authors impression that people are less weird and express themselves more boringly comes only from him living in his conformist bubble.

The weirdness has always been a countercultural thing and that is well alive; even though of course not accessible to everyone - like it never has been.

What is different in my opinion is that there is surprisingly little visible deviance (in the sense of dissent, defiance, disobedience) nowadays. I have a hunch this is because most young people value security more than freedom but I am not very sure about this.

bentt• 9 months ago

There’s no more The Man.

kwar13• 9 months ago

I have a hypothesis why that's the case:

1- Before everybody got an HD camera in their pocket, it was less costly to be "weird" in public. 2- Millennials and Gen Z's are both economically worse off than Boomers and Gen X. If you're economically insecure then counterculture and going against the trend don't quite live up to the feeling of what comes in their daily lives otherwise.

Just my two cents.

KaiserPro• 9 months ago

THe article is mashing large socio-economic factors together to draw a false conclusion

In the 90s, it was _the done thing_ to go out, get drunk and fuck someone. It was the cultural expectation. I felt pressure to do it, and was deeply troubled at my inability to persuade people to fuck me.

none of that was deviant

Violent crime dropping across the board is a good thing.

The drop in northern ireland's antisocial behaavior is a Feature not a bug. Up until 2000 there was an active civil war, and youth violence was a pathway used by both unionists and republicans to recruit, train and execute the on going war. youth violence dropping is a fucking brilliant thing.

The points later on about sameness is also not surprising. Most people do not like sticking out. For example in the 1950s it would take a _very_ special person to build a japanese style interior in their house. The same for japan, you're not going to see loads of english parlours either.

But culture is global now, which means we all vaguely conform to global standards. Why? because we all see much more of the globe than our parents or grandparents.

But the _key_ point is that the complaints aren't new.

This is just nostalgia with graphs.

stego-tech• 9 months ago

Good read, good points, but man I’d caution readers that the author’s perspective seems to very much come from a “normie” viewpoint.

For those of us in the “deviant” circles (like pretending to be a dinosaur on the internet), the reality is that a lot of deviancy became heavily normalized and accepted, not disappeared. The internet helped millions of deviants realize they can live authentic lives without worrying about the opinions of others, because the secret sauce is most people don’t give a damn about your deviancy. The little old Christian ladies berating a cashier for blue hair and tattoos are the minority, not the norm, and it means things once shunned as deviant are now embraced as acceptable, even natural.

I also think this is, in part, cyclical. Deviancy is itself a kind of luxury, in that you can afford to take part in it either because you have nothing to lose from doing so, or at the very least it won’t impact your gains in a negative manner. It explains why deviancy rises in times of comfort (post-WW2 America) and declines in times of crisis or stress (today).

The deviants are out there, we’re just not the deviants society came to expect from decades of prior stereotyping and therefore not readily found. As cultural experts churn from the old guard to the new, you’ll see the plethora of art, culture, and deviancy already present finally be surfaced for analysis by the masses.

At least, that’s my perspective, from the fringes of the weird.

freehorse• 9 months ago

Deviancy is itself a kind of luxury, in that you can afford to take part in it either because you have nothing to lose from doing so, or at the very least it won’t impact your gains in a negative manner. It explains why deviancy rises in times of comfort (post-WW2 America) and declines in times of crisis or stress (today).

The article argues for the opposite, that more safety brings more risk-averse behaviour (you can take more risks, but you are less willing to), with good merit imo. But perhaps you are talking about different things.

rsynnott4• 9 months ago

Here’s some similar data from Northern Ireland on “anti-social behavior incidents”, because they happened to track those

I mean, I get what they're trying to say, but "anti-social behaviour in a place which was basically in a low-level civil war from the late 60s to late 90s fell in the noughties and tens" is not at all surprising, and not a useful comparison with the US.

NI is such a weird case that you should be very cautious about reading anything about broader trends into it at all.

I do like the illustration that they chose for the article. Jazzercise; the ultimate manifestation of deviance.

There is no comprehensive dataset on cult formation, but Roger’s Bacon analyzed cults that have been covered on a popular and long-running podcast and found that most of them started in the 60s, 70s, and 80s, with a steep dropoff after 2000

I also don't love this as methodology. By its nature a podcast on cults is going to be biased towards covering the most _documented_ cults, and those will be older. Take something like the Zizians; did anyone other than compulsive 'Rationalist'-watchers even know they _existed_ until those murders? There are likely cults forming today which won't _really_ be noticed for a while.

(I'm not saying they're wrong that fewer cults are forming; I think they're probably right. But the methodology they're using to get there is questionable.)

CULTURE IS STAGNATING

I don't buy this one _at all_; it likely _is_ true of movies and video games, for financial reasons, but pretty much nothing else. The sheer volume of music and TV produced today is vastly greater than previously, and that's even before getting into fan works and original internet creations (again, I think there's a measurement problem there).

Every new apartment building looks like this:

AIUI the look that they're talking about is basically a consequence of common US planning rules; other places have their own apartment building archetype. All the apartment blocks built in a given place in a single year always look pretty similar; it's largely dictated by the rules.

carefulfungi• 9 months ago

I've wondered if anyone has made a scholarly comparison of current trends in manners and general social liberalization to Victorian manners. I'd like to read a book comparing these two ages.

My impression is that, at least in the US, there are two contradictory trends overlapping and intermingling: extreme personal liberty (supremacy of "me" over "us"); and cultural enforcement of strict manners (e.g, around language and gender).

gcanyon• 9 months ago

I was frustrated through the first...25%? of the article that basically the author was conflating all sorts of obviously negative things: drugs, alcohol, smoking, gun violence etc. with "deviance".

And then: no mention of furries, open sexuality, pastafarianism or the like? I think the author simply doesn't recognize "new" deviance. Each generation defines their own standards and non-standards.

The kids are alright.

scythe• 9 months ago

Furries are more than 20 years old and Pastafarianism was invented in 2005.

NoraCodes3• 9 months ago

Deviance has to be new?

chrisbrandow• 9 months ago

Two things kicked in around mid 90’s:

1. Dropping levels of elemental lead in folks born 20 years earlier, so lower impulsivity. 2. “The internet”, leading to higher levels of homogenization of culture

Waterluvian• 9 months ago

I don’t think there’s a decline in deviance at all. Just a normalization of deviance (no, not that kind. Go back to sleep, Rich. It’s not Halloween just yet).

It’s just easier to be weird and find other similarly weird people and to build a community of weirdness that is socially self-sufficient.

andrewstuart• 9 months ago

Technology is the opiate of the masses.

potato37328423• 9 months ago

You don't know what you don't know. A comment section vaguely representative of an industry that is an integral part of "the system" isn't gonna be well equipped to accurately assess what forms deviance takes these days and the degree to which it proliferates.

dogleash• 9 months ago

What can you possible mean? We've assessed plenty of deviants here. Like that one blogger that had the temerity to talk about our industry and use swearing at the same time. He even had opinions so insufficiently hedged that they didn't collapse to wishy-washy support of the status quo! Of course we understand what a deviant is here.

modo_mario• 9 months ago

Hasn't there been a massive drop in average testosterone as well? In the context of that I remember a study which basically said increasing testosterone led to a higher chance of expressing opinions that didn't fit the in group consensus.

I wonder if this plays a role even if only ever so slightly

lunias• 9 months ago

Intuitively this feels to me like an emergent property of interconnectedness. I suspect that if we operated more within the boundaries of smaller, localized communities, then deviance (from some communities' perspective) would be more observable by looking across those boundaries. Society has adopted a much more globalized consciousness where a lot of would-be-choices have already been distilled into a "best choice" based on the massive availability of data; knowing the "best choice" makes choosing easy, and people like easy choices, even if other people are making them on their behalf.

owenversteeg2• 9 months ago

Among the hundred ninety comments here there are countless claimed examples of modern deviance. To list some: furries, blue hair, Skibidi Toilet, queer culture, protest music, modern hip-hop, violence on TV, kpop, modern protests, online subcultures, and Berghain.

The problem is that it is all standardized, commoditized, low-risk, polished, neatly packaged for easy consumption. You can buy a physical plastic Skibidi Toilet at Walmart; not one but countless nameless skibidi toilet SKUs, injection-molded in China in volumes that would boggle the mind and shipped across the globe for pennies. You can identify with a unique gender and sexual identity and Mastercard will sponsor the event, with free drinks (synthetic syrups shipped worldwide in bulk bladders served in the same plastic cup, conveniently conforming to global regulations enabling concurrent use in Chile, Canada and Curaçao.

It does not help matters that most of your clothes, food, and tchotchkes similarly spent some of their disturbed existence sailing the globe in bulk-shipped liquid form.

A good litmus test is time travel. Go back and ask anyone in town about the capital-D Deviants. You will quickly find deviancy defying all my complaints. You will find risky, rough-edged, tough-to-swallow deviancy lurking in every corner and every corner will be unique. If someone dares to dye their hair or start a protest or dance weird then it will be truly unique. The liquids which with they drink and dye will be local. The words they chant at protests, write on signs, speak in hushed tones will be in local accents, with local affectations, in the local languages. The clothes they wear, the things they eat, and even the dark corners they hide in will be unique. Now, of course, even the corners are the same. They are lit brightly with the same LEDs, they are constructed to international building codes, they are made from smooth featureless sheets extruded from nameless factories. They conform.

NoraCodes3• 9 months ago

Are there actually fewer genuinely unique deviant subcultures out there? Maybe. But I've seen more than one dark corner, all very different, most not very welcoming to outsiders, and none sponsored by MasterCard. There are plenty of places people go where they can't use their real names for fear of losing employment, just like in the bad old days; I think you might just not be spending time in them.

owenversteeg2• 9 months ago

Of course not everything is sponsored by Mastercard. In my small country - the Netherlands - there was a small, unique gay community for many years. It had its own very specific culture. That is dead and gone now; and indeed, its corpse is sponsored by Mastercard (an American corporation.)

You can escape sponsorship, but homogenization is inescapable. I'm not sure where you are on Earth, but I have traveled far and wide and the list of places where newly-built corners are not generic extrusions of glass and steel and aluminum and drywall is short and grows shorter by the day.

projectazorian• 9 months ago

I think the weird is still out there, but increasingly confined to meatspace. Burning Man? Very weird, especially the regional burns. Boutique music festivals have tons of weird. Go camping in the backcountry and you'll meet people who are at least eccentric.

Online there's plenty of weirdness still out there on obscure forums, Twitch streams, and Discords. Tumblr is still going, and Bluesky would have a lot more weirdness if it wasn't constantly consumed by woke purity spirals. (This is unfortunately a problem with IRL left-coded social spaces as well, left-libertarian seems to be the sweet spot.)

Unfortunately corporate America has taken over the vast majority of internet social spaces and that has made the weird much more difficult to find. This makes sense, back in the 90s there wasn't much weird on AOL (the FB of its day) - you had to go to Usenet, IRC, or BBSes. Later on Livejournal and Myspace.

zyklonix• 9 months ago

Rosalia gives me hope... https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=htQBS2Ikz6c

uvaursi2• 9 months ago

Sarcasm tag?

lo_zamoyski2• 9 months ago

I would first want to clarify the vocabulary.

The author mostly means "statistical deviance" within certain scopes, which has no normative force (there's nothing good or bad about statistical distributions as such - it could be either good or bad, or neutral), but equivocates by quietly switching to other meanings of the word, like "moral deviance". We don't want moral deviance, by definition: anything deviating from the "ought" deviating from the good and thus bad in proportion to its deviation. It is good that drug use among teenagers, for example, has dropped such that the statistically common case is that few teens use drugs. (Note also the funny entailment: if drug use were extremely common among teens, we would also have low statistical deviance, but high moral deviance. Would the author then dream of the case where half of the teen population takes drugs to maximize statistical deviance in this respect?)

Now, within the scope of fashion, design, art, music, architecture, etc., are in one sense subject to fashion and so each epoch will show signs of convergence, replication, exploration, and reproduction of certain similar forms as they are developed and copied. However, globalism has long been accused of having a homogenizing effect, so the scope and scale today permits continuous information flow that stifles the development of divergent exploration. Culture has been flattened as a result. We often connect more quickly with distant constructs of the media and the social media than we do with the physical human beings around us.

Cultural exchange, I claim, is a good thing in general, but it is only successful when it respects the principle of subsidiarity which successfully marries the local with the global without destroying one or the other, as well as the objectively moral. While parochialism excludes itself from the richness of exchange, globalism crushes the local [0]. But the global can only be a function of the aggregate of locals, as the global lacks cultural substance of its own. The corporate and commercial now fill that void. This would seem to explain the dominance of the corporate and commercial in popular culture and the homogenizing effects of industrial mass production moved by the profit motive, and the resulting homogeneous poor quality. The poor quality of cultural production is the real offense.

[0] The best example of something that manages to accomplish this is the Catholic Church. A Catholic can walk into any church on earth and feel spiritually at home, even while there is variation in the liturgical practices among cultures. The Church is a patchwork of cultural and ethnic diversity sharing in a common truth. Cultural exchange is transmitted through it without crushing any of the participating parties. Simply put, the universality of the Church - the word "catholic" means "universal" - doesn't smother ethnic difference, and within this scope, patriotism - a love of one's people - doesn't metastasize into some kind of ideology of chauvinism or hatred of others. The spirit of logoi spermatikoi permeates and seeks to embrace the true and the good and the beautiful, wherever it is found, and include it in the great patrimony, transfiguring it where necessary. It is not a vacuous, egalitarian, relativistic pseudo-embrace of diversity, but a love of the variety and varying degrees of the objectively good.

gwd2• 9 months ago

Not sure how these might be causally related to this:

https://www.freerangekids.com/short-sweet-how-we-got-to-heli...

I.e., decline of deviance might be causing helicopter parenting; or helicopter parenting might be causing the decline of deviance; or they may be reinforcing each other.

fuzzfactor• 9 months ago

8. SCIENCE IS STUCK Science requires deviant thinking.
scientific papers used to have style. Now they all sound the same, and they’re all boring.

Sometimes that can be because there's more paper than findings.

BrenBarn2• 9 months ago

This is interesting although I'm a bit weirded out by how it conflates what I see as two (or maybe more) very different kinds of "deviance". One is doing something that is new, different, or somehow an expression of individuality. The other is just doing things that are (or are perceived as) edgy or bad.

In the latter category are things like teenagers smoking. You're going to have a hard time convincing me that it's somehow a bad thing that teenagers smoke less now than they did in the past. Also, when teenagers did smoke, that wasn't some kind of groundbreaking new trend; often they did it precisely to be like other people who were perceived as "cool". That's sort of the opposite of deviance in the sense of individuality.

I see those things as quite distinct from stuff like the homogenization of design or the prevalence of sequels, which can much more plausibly be characterized as a genuine loss of diversity, creativity, or something along those lines.

Now you could try to make some argument that there's a link between these things, and it feels like the article is sort of trying to do that, but it doesn't really connect the dots. I don't particularly see why a decline in teenage smoking would have any causal connection to a decline in book cover design diversity. At the most general level you could adopt a position like "great art requires suffering", but it's not even clear that the "lost deviances" mentioned involve suffering.

The article does mention at the end that "the decline of deviance is mainly a good thing", but it still seems to be trying to say that there is some causal link between the bad kinds and the good kinds.

I'd look elsewhere for the causes of the decline of "good" deviances (i.e., the creative ones). The one that comes to mind is the increasing interconnection of the economic and cultural world, which in effect forces businesses and creators in more and more sectors to compete in a huge market. It's hard for the quirky local music store with the eccentric owner to stay in business when everyone can buy a guitar cheaper online. It's also harder for the local musician to make a living when the main sources of music are oriented towards whatever is most popular across a big area (e.g., nationwide).

In domains where there are objective measures of progress, this can be a good thing. If someone comes up with way to build a better mousetrap, it is (or at least can be) beneficial for that idea to spread rapidly and displace worse mousetraps. But where the only thing being "improved" is the amount of money made, or where there is no ground-truth notion of "improvement" (as in art), interconnection is likely to cause "leveling", where everyone chases the latest trend because everyone can immediately see that everyone else is already chasing it.

In my view we don't need more illegal behavior or "bad" deviance to get around this. What we need is more robust defenses against leveling. That means, for a start, a breakup of the major commercial/cultural channels. If there is no single source for books, for music, for mousetraps, for playground equipment, for whatever, then people are forced to look for those things in different places. And then those different sources can evolve differently. And they can cross-pollinate, but we have to be careful to avoid allowing them to merge too much.

Good deviance can be seen as a form of diversity, and for diversity we need things to be different from other things. To get more different things we need more different sources, more different people in control, a greater number of distinct "generators" of all kinds.

lukas099• 9 months ago

Even the natural world is becoming more same-y, with specialist species going extinct and generalists thriving, and the same invasive species becoming prevalent the world over.

more_corn• 9 months ago

It’s because the bar has moved and more things are thought of as normal.

ChiMan• 9 months ago

You can’t afford to risk being weird anymore. Housing is too expensive. Too many weird steps in non-pecuniary directions and you’ll end up on the street or your mom’s couch.

ta20240528• 9 months ago

I read somewhere that the USAF has been captured by officers with very conservative Christian expectations. To the point that junior officers don't even drink in public lest its held against them.

rajnathani• 9 months ago

Maybe this is also slow-scale evolution by traits.

The decline of deviance

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