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.
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.
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%)
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".
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.
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.
https://www.reddit.com/r/lansing/comments/1no5rtl/lansing_pa...
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
> 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.
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.
One single person did this, and was sentenced to a year in prison for it.
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)
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.
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…?
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.
If we measure deviance only by the metrics that existed before social media, we will of course find what is expected.
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.
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.)
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.
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.
The last century was full of them. From Bob Dylan to Marvin Gaye to Crosby, Stills, Nash and Young to Sting to U2.
There were probably hundreds that made the Top 40 charts.
That's exactly the kind of stuff everybody is saying that doesn't count. It's not deviant if everybody is doing it.
And let's not forget that protest songs aren't usually promoted by those in power...
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Culture_industry
I also guess it is just a wordy description of the combination of commercial entertainment and industrialization.
I like your point, although I feel that in some contexts, it was probably _easier_ for people to create something they feel is valuable as art and also can earn them money, a few decades ago.
I don't think the tension has evaporated, it's just the difference between "art" and "entertainment". Sure, you can always say that entertainment is art. No matter if you're Christopher Nolan or a street musician who knows what to play to get some money.
The tension is still there, there's just a mass-scale production of commercial art that hasn't been there before.
But I'd say that probably, with these products that have giant budgets and are feeding thousands of people, there are just a few people involved who consider themselves artists in a sense that isn't the same in that a baker or sewer is also an artist.
No coincidence we're discussing this in a forum that has software development as a main subject.
Christopher Nolan's movies are "art" the same way Microsofts UI design is art, IMHO.
I didn't bring Nolan into this in order to be smug about him, his work just feels like it symbolizes this kind of industrial cultural production well, especially because many people might consider him a top-notch _artist_.
I'm more curious if the periphery has declined in coherence thanks to "autocuration" as by TikTok & YouTube.
(creators of GangnamStyle or BabyShark have industrial funding to outdo themselves on their preferred axes just like Nolan but..?)
Opposite, less quantitative take:
https://contraptions.venkateshrao.com/p/the-new-systems-of-s...
(author sorta argued that we're deep in the Perma_weirdo_cene)
It's easy on HN where "votes have won".. evenso I've given up and have resorted to reviewing what 1-pointers PaulHoule and his machine deign coherent enough to respond to
One in a thousand talented artists will get lucky, but I suspect the ratio is historically low. Everyone else more or less needs to find another job.
There are other things that probably push artists toward the cultural mean. You're no longer trying to cater to the tastes of a wealthy patron or even a record studio executive. Now, you gotta get enough clicks on YouTube first. The surest way to do this is to look nice and do some unoffensive covers of well-known pop songs.
Let's send the author to a furry con.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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?"
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
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.
Maybe we're just used to past generations that were poisoned by atmospheric lead from gasoline making under thought decisions.
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.)
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".
> 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.
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.
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.
Sigh. Nobody is saying that.
>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! ;-)
Either that, or you've personally suffered from severe lead poisoning.
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.
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!
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?
I guess it's not deviant if it's a large percentage of the population.
No means no.
Maybe means no.
Yes means maybe.
Regret equals rape.
Fortunately, there's Pornhub.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).
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.
> 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.
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
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
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.
robocat•12h ago
Edit: average is the wrong word - measuring outliers is hard.