Fashion, art cycles are driven by counter-dominance signals of elite competition(royalsocietypublishing.org) |
Fashion, art cycles are driven by counter-dominance signals of elite competition(royalsocietypublishing.org) |
I think you can genericize it a bit and say humans are bad at defining themselves and need a reference point, and they often take the opposite stance of that reference point. I think this model fits in with that pretty well - there are groups who want to be "not-the-elite" which, if successful, the elite adopt. Classic "hipsterism."
It also fits in with a lot of local, national, and global politics, market differentiation, etc.
(sorry, nothing concrete to share and likely won’t for a long time)
I think one of the keys to a complementary bundle of mechanics is that they're distinct. Acting on different time scales, different reward structures that tug the brain around, creating choices that feel meaningful and don't ever repeat exactly.
Decades later, it's what the mainstream now sounds like. It always percolates up.
> I can attest that what drove us is not the desire to differentiate, but that the mainstream elite were lifeless bullshit
Here you state that the mainstream elite was "lifeless bullshit."
> we wanted to express something new
And you wanted to express NOT lifeless bullshit.
> that only we could sense. We were being us
This is what the mainstream elite couldn't see or make. It was NOT mainstream elite thought.
> it's what the mainstream now sounds like
The mainstream adopted it, and now there's a new generation of people who think that sound is mainstream lifeless bullshit and will create something that is NOT mainstream lifeless bullshit. This is not part of the Graeber thesis, but aligns well with the original post.
I also want to be clear that I don't think this is supposed to be a conscious process - there are times when people are intentionally contrarian but there are also people and groups who are unconsciously contrarian simply by saying "I don't like this thing."
I don't think the error is in defining ourselves by what sets us apart--it's fine and good to acknowledge our differences. I think the bad thing is leaning into those differences due to an aversion to the outgroup, which is the very essence of tribalism (or nearly so).
He also does not assign a property of good or bad to this observation, just that we do it.
I still think Bullshit Jobs was a terrible read but maybe I need to give some of his other stuff a shot.
1. https://textbooks.whatcom.edu/duttoncmst101/chapter/intercul...
Their observations align with my own - it's all about standing out. Me different because me better. Or vice versa. Same thing
Let’s explain fashion using cellular automata. This isn’t going to be cringe-inducingly nerdy at all!
Any government, including human beings who identify as nations, can signal they've shifted to practicing such a culture by adopting the following symbol and integrating it into their symbology:
∀
This is the mathematic notation for the phrase "for all." A government that's operating on a model to meet all needs while denying none can signal this by including this symbol in their art, like flags, seals, etc.
Easy to say duh to this in 2021 thanks to education, internet, and everything. Must've been a breakthrough a few hundred years ago. For various reasons
It's true, of course, that the end result will be a subset of the people leading and most not (which is an outgrowth of basic specialization theory: if everyone's in charge of coordination and leadership, nobody has time to do the work that needs coordination and leadership). But was the new elite always apart from the followers and supporters, or are the rulers overthrown and during that process some subset of the overthrowers become a new elite due to the needs of specialization? Or, to say it another way: would the "new elite" have ever been an elite if they hadn't won?
George Washington was never commissioned in the British army. Fidel Castro was the bastard son of an immigrant. Had their revolutions not succeeded, would history remember them as elite?
(This is not an attack against crypto in general, there are ways to design a cryptocurrency so it's equal to all participants regardless of the time they buy in, it's just that they fail to gain adoption because of a lack of VC funding and support from the crypto community, as neither can make a quick buck out of it)
But there was still a massive moat for institutions due to the need for trust, backed by a regulatory framework. And entrenched institutions means entrenched elite. What crypto provide is a temporary workaround for a faction of the financial elite to build rival institutions.
But the crucial thing is member of the new "crypto" elite are for the most part "junior" (in the status sense) members of the Tradfi elite. So for the rest of us peons, it will stay business as usual !
[1] https://www.theodysseyonline.com/why-hate-coexist-bumper-sti...
We need systems that are fun, healing, and don't caretake for trust trauma.
"This" could be considered a culture of freely giving to meet people's needs, including the needs of the environments they live in.
Satisfying All Needs Through A narchogiving (SANTA)
I want a network of SANTA communities, offline and online, dedicated to meeting people's needs. The SANTANet.
Another example: I'm helping my hair to mat into ∀.
I've legally changed my name to Peacefully Revoking Consent To Be Governed For You And For All. My signature is "<peace sign> ∀" I'm also running for president on a platform of founding a new government to replace this one. The logo will include ∀
I'm nurturing a 3yo by empowering them to do whatever they want that won't kill them. This requires facing down and releasing old traumatic conditioning. I'm not perfect and need more people in my life to help them revolt against me when I slip into choosing from trauma mode. So a community where it's normal to run around naked in cold weather, regardless of age, is something I'm working toward.
Cities still have a lot going for them by providing the best access to services (especially after covid is over), but one thing I see happening in the future is the establishment of "remote working villages" in smaller towns. Price and quality of housing will be the main selling point, but they'd also have access to nature and a good sense of community (in fact the projects could be self-organised and funded by the residents if you find the right people).
That doesn't follow.
1. a blues singer listens to mainstream
2. a blues singer hears a variety of blues influences on the mainstream
3. a blues singer says, "Hey great, we got some blues influences in the mainstream, let me try to add some more"
1. "Hipster" creates music that is anti-mainsteam, becomes popular for doing something different (and doing it well, at the right time/place, etc.)
2. Over years, mainstream music adopts unique thing hipster did. <- this is where you stop
3 New generation of hipsters create music that is anti-mainstream... <- this is what is relevant to this discussion
You can find examples of the above in any modern genre of music and I would argue is a part of a bigger pattern that happens to any sub/counter culture.
On further reflection there was a lot of deliberate removal of pop or mainstream rave signals. We were excluding their signals to create our own space. Minimal Techno is pretty much defined by it's rules of what isn't allowed. So that's conscious differentiation.
There are enough people who think the losing side wasn't the wrong side to keep the legend alive for the Confederate leadership.
That said, there are some things that stand out that I am spending a lot of time contemplating as a result of the book so far:
* I now agree with him that there were likely societies operating at a reasonable level of scale (larger than the Band/Tribe stereotype) that were significantly more egalitarian than current societies or any others in the Greco-Roman/Western civilization lineage.
* There was likely significantly more experimentation around social structures in early human history than I had thought of or imagined.
* There were societies which operated with different types of governance based on the time of year and activities associated with that time of year. This is interesting to me since I believe there is no "best" political system, but I had not considered how to take advantage of multiple types without trying to recombine them in some way. I particularly want to think about this more in the context of corporate organizations, since they already do this in some ways without being as explicit about it. For example, I have worked with an organization that operated like a collective of empowered product teams for large portions of the year but operated more like a standard hierarchy during annual planning season or when there was inter-organizational conflict. At the time I perceived it as a faux front for a top-down organization, but now I'm not sure that's fair.
* This one is probably more philosophically obvious, but, there is an opportunity for me, personally, to rethink the version of "freedom" I value. In doing so I think I will reconcile some conflicts I have between my social and economic views. The book didn't give me a new definition for freedom that I want to use, but it presented at least one alternative definition that I think is valid and interesting.
"I do not believe I have made it to the meat of that thesis yet but, up to this point, I have not been convinced by his evidence that there were long-lasting, large-scale human organizations (think city scale and higher) that operated without some hierarchy."
There exists a natural hierarchy between the category of needs for humans to survive and the category of needs for humans to thrive. Nature provides enough.
There are essential jobs that need doing regardless of the opinions of the workers who perform them. In fact, if people focused on the value their so-called "bullshit" jobs provide other people, rather than on their own assessment of how meaningful their job is, they would likely end up much happier.
It's an incredibly condescending and self-centered way to look at the world.
Jobs don't exist for the employee, wages exist for the employee. Jobs exist because the employer feels that the wage is a good trade for the person's time. The employee's perception of their contribution has essentially 0 importance in this interaction. A better definition of a bullshit job from the employee's perspective is one where the wage isn't worth it for the bullshit they have to put up with. In that case they should find a new one. If they can't, than putting up with that specific bullshit is still their best choice. If they keep showing up to work and taking that trade, apparently they don't think it's bullshit. And if the employer keeps thinking that the money is a good trade for their time, they apparently also don't think it's bullshit, otherwise they'd fire them.
So if two people freely engage in the same trade of time for money everyday for years on end, then simply calling it bullshit isn't that profound. It starts to sound a lot like some way to intellectualize whining about not liking your job.
So yeah, no amount of writing is going to save a totally broken premise.
This is a handwaving assertion. It happens to be strongly correlated with the way our society(ies) allocates labor, but is not something inherent to the labor/wage relationship. It's not hard to imagine a world in which people do things because those things matter to them, or are interesting to them, or both.
Graeber didn't call them "Bullshit Jobs" because the jobs required dealing with bullshit, he called them "Bullshift Jobs" because the actual stated purpose of the job was at best deeply suspect and at worst, well, bullshit.
There is a better fundamental critique of "Bullshit Jobs" which is a little more sophisticated, I think. That critique says that the reason people get confused about the meaning and importance of their job is that our economic system has grown too complex for them to really understand the role they play. The division of labor has reached such extreme levels that it is very difficult for many individuals to grasp how their "apparently meaningless aka bullshit" jobs could be contributing anything at all to the world. But their inability to understand or visualize this does not mean that their work is, in fact, meaningless or without value.
I admit I only skimmed it, but I thought the point was "the employer" is not a homogeneous entity. "The employer" therefore doesn't make the wage decision. Managers with some extreme perverse incentives do.
What's bullshit is the idea that as soon as an enterprise does something inefficient, boom, they'll be outcompeted. They might, eventually, if no market failures or regulatory capture exists. So in reality, large and even small/medium organization with a successful pattern can tolerate a lot of bullshit.
Your evaluation seems fair to me but it's still not clear to me what he's saying should be done or even why this is a problem.
My suspicion is that people find it exciting to read a book with a curse word in the title that tells them they are right for hating their job
Do we want some congressional committee to sit around and decide which jobs are bullshit? I sure don't.
It turns out the Nash equilibrium of the world is that some people have jobs that seem silly on the surface but end up being the optimal move for everyone involved. Out of all the problems in the world this seems like a weird one to fixate on.
The reason he is interesting is that his underlying views of society are of those from way outside of the Overton Window, so he sees some things more clearly than those with more "normal" viewpoints. While I do not agree with him on many things, all his books are critiques of the entirety of the modern socioeconomic system.
> Do we want some congressional committee to sit around and decide which jobs are bullshit? I sure don't.
The suggestion that he thought the government should decide which jobs are real and which are bullshit is antithetical to everything he believed. He would argue that the fact that you can only see it as a question of either "free market" or "government managed" is a part of the oppressive system itself.