EE.UU. vive una era de cambios rápidos que desordena los campos establecidos sin producir nada nuevo. Goldberg comenta un libro que explica cómo la evolución cultural se vincula allí con el deseo de ascender en la escala social.
Michelle Goldberg, ensayista y columnist/New York Times - 3 September 2022
En mayo, el crítico literario Christian Lorentzen publicó en la plataforma Substack un boletín sobre el aburrimiento.
“Las películas de Hollywood son aburridas. La televisión es aburrida. La música pop es aburrida. El mundo del arte es aburrido. Broadway es aburrido. Los libros de las grandes editoriales son aburridos”, escribió.
Como yo también me he aburrido bastante, pagué cinco dólares para leer el artículo completo, pero no me convenció su conclusión, que atribuye la culpa del estancamiento artístico a la primacía del marketing. La aversión al riesgo de los conglomerados culturales no puede explicar por qué no surgen más cosas independientes interesantes. Yo tenía la esperanza de que, cuando el agujero negro de la presidencia de Donald Trump terminara, la energía redirigida permitiera un florecimiento cultural. Hasta ahora, eso no ha sucedido.
Una advertencia obvia: soy una madre blanca de mediana edad, así que cualquier cosa que sea verdaderamente genial ocurre, por definición, fuera de mi ámbito. Sin embargo, cuando voy a cafés donde hay gente joven, la música suele ser la misma que yo escuchaba cuando era joven o música que suena igual. Uno de los singles más exitosos del año es una canción de Kate Bush que salió en 1985. No se me ocurre ninguna novela o película reciente que haya provocado un debate apasionado. Las discusiones públicas sobre el arte – sobre la apropiación y la ofensa, por lo general – se han vuelto tediosas y repetitivas, casi mecánicas.
Los artículos escritos sobre la microescena levemente transgresora de Manhattan conocida como Dimes Square son en sí mismos una prueba de la sequía cultural; los cronistas del zeitgeist están desesperados por encontrar nuevo material.
(Yo misma soy culpable de haber escrito un artículo de ese tipo.)
Mucha gente está buscando algo vivaz y nuevo y no lo encuentra.
La mejor explicación que he leído sobre nuestro actual malestar cultural aparece al final del libro de W. David Marx, Status and Culture: How Our Desire for Social Rank Creates Taste, Identity, Art, Fashion, and Constant Change (Estatus y cultura: Cómo nuestro deseo de nivel social crea el gusto, la identidad, el arte, la moda y el cambio constante), un libro que no es nada aburrido y que modificó sutilmente mi forma de ver el mundo.
Marx plantea la evolución cultural como una especie de máquina de movimiento perpetuo impulsada por el deseo de la gente de ascender en la jerarquía social. Los artistas innovan para ganar estatus, y la gente adapta inconscientemente sus gustos para marcar su nivel de estatus o ascender a uno nuevo. Como escribe en la introducción, “las luchas de estatus alimentan la creatividad cultural en tres ámbitos importantes: la competencia entre clases socioeconómicas, la formación de subculturas y contraculturas, y las batallas intestinas de los artistas”.
Uno de sus ejemplos más resonantes es el del compositor de vanguardia John Cage. Cuando Cage presentó su discordante pieza orquestal “Atlas Eclipticalis” en el Lincoln Center de Nueva York en 1964, muchos patrocinadores se levantaron y se fueron. Los miembros de la orquesta abuchearon a Cage cuando hizo el saludo final; algunos incluso destrozaron su equipo electrónico. Pero la obra de Cage inspiró a otros artistas, lo que llevó a “los historiadores y los curadores de museo a considerarlo una figura crucial en el desarrollo del arte posmoderno”, lo que, a su vez, hizo que el público prestara una atención respetuosa a su obra.
(Yoko Ono dividió una vez la historia de la música en Antes de Cage y Después de Cage.)
“Se inició para Cage un círculo virtuoso: su originalidad, su misterio y su influencia le dieron estatus de artista; eso animó a las instituciones serias a explorar su obra; la frecuentación de su obra le dio a Cage prestigio entre el público, que vio mejorado su estatus por tomarse su obra en serio”, escribió Marx. Para Marx, esto no es una cuestión de petulancia. El prestigio, escribió, “abre las mentes a propuestas radicales de lo que puede ser el arte y cómo deberíamos percibirlo”.
Internet, escribió Marx en la sección final de su libro, cambia esa dinámica. Con tanto contenido disponible, la posibilidad de que otros reconozcan el significado de una señal cultural oscura se reduce. El arte exigente pierde su prestigio. Además, en la era de internet, el gusto nos dice menos sobre una persona. No hace falta abrirse paso en ningún mundo social para familiarizarse con Cage… o, para el caso, con el hip-hop underground, el performance art extraño o las zapatillas deportivas raras. En cierto modo, eso es genial. La gente puede encontrar fácilmente cosas que le gusten y perder menos tiempo fingiendo que le gustan cosas que no le gustan. Utilizar el capital cultural para marcar nuestro lugar en la jerarquía de estatus es snob y excluyente.
(El arte de vanguardia, como escribió Susan Sontag, también puede ser bastante aburrido.)
Pero, obviamente, la gente no está menos obsesionada con su propio estatus hoy que en tiempos de fecunda producción cultural. Sólo que los marcadores del alto nivel social se han vuelto más materialistas. Cuando el valor del capital cultural se degrada, escribió Marx, hace que “la popularidad y el capital económico sean aún más fundamentales para marcar el estatus”. En consecuencia, escribió, hay “menos incentivos para que los individuos creen y celebren la cultura con alta complejidad simbólica”.
Para un trepador tiene más sentido fingir un viaje en un jet privado que fingir interés en el arte contemporáneo. Vivimos en una época de cambios rápidos y desorientadores en materia de género, religión y tecnología. Estéticamente, gracias a internet, todo es bastante aburrido.
(excerto)
THE GRAND MYSTERY OF CULTURE AND THE STATUS TABOO
Oh, how they laughed at Stu Sutcliffe’s new haircut. Poor Stu had put aside his painting career in Liverpool to live in the most wretched corner of Hamburg, Germany, and play bass guitar in his mates’ rock ’n’ roll cover band with a silly pun-based name: the Beatles. And now those very Beatles — four Gene Vincent clones in pompadours held aloft with copious dollops of Brylcreem — were berating Stu for switching to a chic “Caesar cut” where the bangs fell straight down on his forehead.
The lads knew who to blame for Stu’s sudden makeover: Astrid, his “existentialist” German girlfriend. She cut his hair to resemble the local art school boys, who were in turn imitating the latest French mode. Stu spent the next few days enduring constant japes for his coiffure, but then came an unexpected turn of events. The youngest Beatle, George, asked Astrid to cut his hair the same way. John and Paul capitulated several months later.
While on vacation in Paris, they realized Stu’s look would be necessary for picking up “Bohemian beauties on the Left Bank.” But chasing tail was only an alibi: after time on the Continent, John and Paul had lost confidence in their British take on American swagger and now believed Stu’s look
would set them apart from the other English rock ’n’ roll bands. Despite their initial mockery, the Beatles returned to Liverpool without Stu but wearing his distinctive “moptop.” With “near-baldness” being the hairstyling norm for men in England at the time, the Beatles’ bangs loomed large in their legend. The New York Times’ first-ever article about the group reported from the United Kingdom, “One shake of the bushy fringe of their identical, moplike haircuts is
enough to start a riot in any theater where they are appearing.” While young women loved the Beatles’ hair, British adults found it “unsightly, unsafe, unruly, and unclean.” Factories suspended young apprentices who dared to show up in a moptop.
As the Beatles planned their first visit to the United States in 1964, what had been mild British apprehension about shaggy hair escalated into full moral panic in America. University of Detroit students formed a Stamp Out the Beatles Society to protest the band’s “un-American” haircuts. At the Beatles’ first U.S. press conference, the media steered much of the conversation toward grooming. “Do you feel like Samson,” asked one reporter, “[that] if you lost your hair, you’d lose what you have?” Another asked, “Are you going to get a haircut at all while you’re here?” to which
George Harrison offered the now famous rejoinder, “I had one yesterday.”
In the ensuing Beatlemania, companies pumped out fifteen thousand Beatles wigs a day, which TV hosts Ed Sullivan and Alfred Hitchcock plopped on their heads as a cheap gag. At first young American men also scoffed at the “effeminate” moptop. But upon noticing the hairstyle’s aphrodisiac effect on young American women, they decided it was time to grow out their crew cuts. As baby boomers brought moptops into their homes, the British invasion leaped from TV screens to suburbia. Parents hated it: a 1965 Gallup poll found that two-thirds of Americans opposed the Beatles cut. The eventual middle-class acceptance of longer hair on men came, argued LSD guru Timothy Leary, only with the prime-time television debut of The Monkees — an American clone of the Fab Four with “no controversy, no protest. No thinking strange, unique thoughts. No offending Mom and Dad and the advertisers.”
By 1968, parents calmed down, perhaps because such anguish over bushy fringes had become moot. A moptop looked eminently respectable compared with the Beatles’ full-length hippie locks.
I was eight years old when I first encountered a photo of the Beatles’ moptops, two full decades removed from the height of their infamy. At the time I lived in Oxford, Mississippi, an exceptionally tradition-minded town where parents still expected children to respond “Yes, sir” and “Yes,
ma’am.”
I was eight years old when I first encountered a photo of the Beatles’ moptops, two full decades removed from the height of their infamy. At the time I lived in Oxford, Mississippi, an exceptionally tradition-minded town where parents still expected children to respond “Yes, sir” and “Yes,
ma’am.”
When I saw the cassette cover for the compilation The Beatles / 1962–1966, I simply thought, They look just like my brother and me. Most young men in Oxford at the time wore their bangs down, not so different from Stu Sutcliffe in 1961. The Beatles cut, which once divided nations and
generations, had become profoundly ordinary even in the conservative South. As a kid I found it strange that such a conventional hairstyle could cause so much opprobrium. Today the outrage seems even more preposterous. The moptop has not just become normal but classic. In 2019,
GQ noted it “looks just as good now as it did then.”
Most of us know the story of the moptop and its backlash, but this familiarity may blind us to the odd human behaviors revealed therein. As with the moptop and thousands of the other micro social movements we call trends, humans hop en masse from one set of arbitrary practices to another, for elusive reasons. At first these minor stylistic differences engender terrible social friction — only to later win acceptance including the initial opponents. Later pundits herald the trends’ originators as “icons” and “legends,” and from there, formerly radical behaviors secure a place in our shared cultural heritage. Stu Sutcliffe decided to wear bangs one day and ended up creating a potent symbol of the era we call the early sixties.
These peculiarities of human behavior can be summarized in a broader enigma I like to call the Grand Mystery of Culture: Why do humans collectively prefer certain practices, and then, years later, move on to alternatives for no practical reason? As the undertaker Mr. Omer quips in
David Copperfield, “Fashions are like human beings. They come in, nobody knows when, why, or how; and they go out, nobody knows when, why, or how.”
By contrast technological change is very logical, as innovations provide greater efficiency and conveniences at lower costs. Our ancestors adopted the spinning wheel not as a “fad,” but because it shortened the time required to twist fibers into yarn. From this perspective cultural change appears bizarre. What were Stu and his imitators hoping to accomplish with a
moptop? What changed their taste? Neither evolutionary biology nor economics can explain this behavior — the moptop has no intrinsic value over other styles, nor offers more tactile pleasure. Was the moptop a form of self-expression? If so, how did everyone know what feeling this particular haircut expressed? And why would everyone seek to express the same
emotions through the same haircut at the same time?
Unlike many other aspects of the human experience, there are still few authoritative answers on what alters our cultural preferences.
generations, had become profoundly ordinary even in the conservative South. As a kid I found it strange that such a conventional hairstyle could cause so much opprobrium. Today the outrage seems even more preposterous. The moptop has not just become normal but classic. In 2019,
GQ noted it “looks just as good now as it did then.”
Most of us know the story of the moptop and its backlash, but this familiarity may blind us to the odd human behaviors revealed therein. As with the moptop and thousands of the other micro social movements we call trends, humans hop en masse from one set of arbitrary practices to another, for elusive reasons. At first these minor stylistic differences engender terrible social friction — only to later win acceptance including the initial opponents. Later pundits herald the trends’ originators as “icons” and “legends,” and from there, formerly radical behaviors secure a place in our shared cultural heritage. Stu Sutcliffe decided to wear bangs one day and ended up creating a potent symbol of the era we call the early sixties.
These peculiarities of human behavior can be summarized in a broader enigma I like to call the Grand Mystery of Culture: Why do humans collectively prefer certain practices, and then, years later, move on to alternatives for no practical reason? As the undertaker Mr. Omer quips in
David Copperfield, “Fashions are like human beings. They come in, nobody knows when, why, or how; and they go out, nobody knows when, why, or how.”
By contrast technological change is very logical, as innovations provide greater efficiency and conveniences at lower costs. Our ancestors adopted the spinning wheel not as a “fad,” but because it shortened the time required to twist fibers into yarn. From this perspective cultural change appears bizarre. What were Stu and his imitators hoping to accomplish with a
moptop? What changed their taste? Neither evolutionary biology nor economics can explain this behavior — the moptop has no intrinsic value over other styles, nor offers more tactile pleasure. Was the moptop a form of self-expression? If so, how did everyone know what feeling this particular haircut expressed? And why would everyone seek to express the same
emotions through the same haircut at the same time?
Unlike many other aspects of the human experience, there are still few authoritative answers on what alters our cultural preferences.
A recent book trying to explain the mechanics of taste concluded by raising a white flag, dismissing changes over time as a “random walk” akin to the stock market’s short-term fluctuations. For the last two decades, the most established theory of cultural change has cast it as “viral contagion,” arguing that we succumb to fads like we contract the measles. But cultural changes are never random, nor do they befall us as plagues.
Trends happen because individuals choose to take up new behaviors. And when we examine the history of cultural change, there are clear patterns in how humans move from one practice to another. Sixty years before the moptop, social scientist William Graham Sumner seemingly predicted how it would rise and fall: “A new fashion of dress seems at first to be absurd,
ungraceful, or indecent. After a time this first impression of it is so dulled that all conform to the fashion.” In almost all instances, new behaviors begin as an exclusive practice of smaller social groups — whether elites or outsiders — and then eventually spread to the wider population. This is true for the diffusion of superficial hairstyles but also applies to things not considered “fashions”: practical technologies like cars and hybrid seed corn, delicacies like chocolate and gin, political and spiritual beliefs, and the succession of artistic movements in modern art. The thing we call culture is always an aggregation of individual human behaviors, and if taste were the mere product of random idiosyncrasies and irrational psychologies, culture would display no patterns, only noise. The fact that in these disparate fields follow a similar rhythm of change suggests there must be universal principles of human behavior at work — the presence of a “cultural gravity” nudging humans into the same collective behaviors at the same time.
For all the dismissal of cultural changes as superficial, they are central to our lived experience as humans. They define our identities and determine how others treat us. Every day we must make choices whether to follow social standards or “be ourselves.” We come to find certain things “cool” without knowing why. We use markers of cultural change as touchstones for our past; embarrassing haircuts help us date old photos. The Beatles weren’t just a band — they were the band who wore moptops. As we’ll see by the end of this book, fashions explain behavioral change more than we’ve been willing to admit.
Ever since I discovered moptops as a child, I’ve been looking for answers to the Grand Mystery of Culture. During college, I made my first breakthroughs after examining how the Japanese street fashion brand A Bathing Ape amassed its cultlike fan base through a counterintuitive marketing strategy of hard-to-find stores, undersupplied products, and no advertising. Later, in graduate school, I focused my research on how economic systems affect the content of pop culture, looking specifically at whether monopolies in the music industry stymied artistic innovation. My
first book, Ametora, followed the birth and growth of one particular cultural stream: how a single unorthodox business spread American style in postwar Japan, and decades later, Japanese clothing companies have come to influence Americans’ sense of “traditional” apparel choices. And after working at a small independent magazine based in the Lower East Side and then overseeing Asia-wide communications for a multinational company in Tokyo, I have spent decades observing new trends in music, art, and fashion unfold in real time — all following the same classic pattern of rise and fall. And yet, in all these long years of obsessively researching this topic, I never found a single book that explains the Grand Mystery of Culture.
Trends happen because individuals choose to take up new behaviors. And when we examine the history of cultural change, there are clear patterns in how humans move from one practice to another. Sixty years before the moptop, social scientist William Graham Sumner seemingly predicted how it would rise and fall: “A new fashion of dress seems at first to be absurd,
ungraceful, or indecent. After a time this first impression of it is so dulled that all conform to the fashion.” In almost all instances, new behaviors begin as an exclusive practice of smaller social groups — whether elites or outsiders — and then eventually spread to the wider population. This is true for the diffusion of superficial hairstyles but also applies to things not considered “fashions”: practical technologies like cars and hybrid seed corn, delicacies like chocolate and gin, political and spiritual beliefs, and the succession of artistic movements in modern art. The thing we call culture is always an aggregation of individual human behaviors, and if taste were the mere product of random idiosyncrasies and irrational psychologies, culture would display no patterns, only noise. The fact that in these disparate fields follow a similar rhythm of change suggests there must be universal principles of human behavior at work — the presence of a “cultural gravity” nudging humans into the same collective behaviors at the same time.
For all the dismissal of cultural changes as superficial, they are central to our lived experience as humans. They define our identities and determine how others treat us. Every day we must make choices whether to follow social standards or “be ourselves.” We come to find certain things “cool” without knowing why. We use markers of cultural change as touchstones for our past; embarrassing haircuts help us date old photos. The Beatles weren’t just a band — they were the band who wore moptops. As we’ll see by the end of this book, fashions explain behavioral change more than we’ve been willing to admit.
Ever since I discovered moptops as a child, I’ve been looking for answers to the Grand Mystery of Culture. During college, I made my first breakthroughs after examining how the Japanese street fashion brand A Bathing Ape amassed its cultlike fan base through a counterintuitive marketing strategy of hard-to-find stores, undersupplied products, and no advertising. Later, in graduate school, I focused my research on how economic systems affect the content of pop culture, looking specifically at whether monopolies in the music industry stymied artistic innovation. My
first book, Ametora, followed the birth and growth of one particular cultural stream: how a single unorthodox business spread American style in postwar Japan, and decades later, Japanese clothing companies have come to influence Americans’ sense of “traditional” apparel choices. And after working at a small independent magazine based in the Lower East Side and then overseeing Asia-wide communications for a multinational company in Tokyo, I have spent decades observing new trends in music, art, and fashion unfold in real time — all following the same classic pattern of rise and fall. And yet, in all these long years of obsessively researching this topic, I never found a single book that explains the Grand Mystery of Culture.
Over the centuries many wise scholars have uncovered critical insights about taste and cultural change, but they tend to be buried in turgid prose or minor corners of the academic literature. If I wanted this knowledge stitched together into a single coherent explanation, I would have to do it myself.
So as I began to synthesize all the significant theories and case studies to explain how culture works as a system and why culture changes over time, I realized that there was one key concept that links everything together — and that is status. The problem is: status itself has also long been
a mystery.
What exactly do I mean by “status”?
So as I began to synthesize all the significant theories and case studies to explain how culture works as a system and why culture changes over time, I realized that there was one key concept that links everything together — and that is status. The problem is: status itself has also long been
a mystery.
What exactly do I mean by “status”?
We use the word colloquially to describe an individual’s position in an informal ranking of social
importance. Every community has a status hierarchy, with the famous, powerful, and esteemed at the top; the majority of people in the middle; and the unfortunate, disadvantaged, and despised at the bottom. Our position in the hierarchy governs our daily experiences as individuals. If we have high status, things go well, people are nice to us, and we’re relatively happier. If we lack status, we grow bitter and depressed. Sociological research demonstrates that our social position affects long-term well-being, motivates our behavior, and becomes a goal in its own right — and thus can
be considered a fundamental human desire.
We seek status because it provides esteem and favors from others. But it’s never easy to obtain. High status is a position within a hierarchy, so the more who seek to move up, the more difficult it becomes to reach the top.
This inherent uncertainty puts many on a never-ending quest for higher position. Researchers recently concluded that the achievement of high status only makes people want more.
Despite the importance of status, there has been a conspicuous lack of discussion about its influence on human behavior. This stems, in part, from the fact that most people view stratification as a social ill. Philosophers beseech us to define ourselves without reference to others’ judgments,
while religious leaders implore us to contemplate a higher spiritual order.
Advocates for democracy and socialism blame status hierarchies for societal dysfunction and struggle. The author Tom Wolfe concluded in the 1970s that status was the “fundamental taboo, more so than sexuality and everything of that sort. It’s much easier for people to talk about their sex lives in this day and age than it is to talk about their status.”
importance. Every community has a status hierarchy, with the famous, powerful, and esteemed at the top; the majority of people in the middle; and the unfortunate, disadvantaged, and despised at the bottom. Our position in the hierarchy governs our daily experiences as individuals. If we have high status, things go well, people are nice to us, and we’re relatively happier. If we lack status, we grow bitter and depressed. Sociological research demonstrates that our social position affects long-term well-being, motivates our behavior, and becomes a goal in its own right — and thus can
be considered a fundamental human desire.
We seek status because it provides esteem and favors from others. But it’s never easy to obtain. High status is a position within a hierarchy, so the more who seek to move up, the more difficult it becomes to reach the top.
This inherent uncertainty puts many on a never-ending quest for higher position. Researchers recently concluded that the achievement of high status only makes people want more.
Despite the importance of status, there has been a conspicuous lack of discussion about its influence on human behavior. This stems, in part, from the fact that most people view stratification as a social ill. Philosophers beseech us to define ourselves without reference to others’ judgments,
while religious leaders implore us to contemplate a higher spiritual order.
Advocates for democracy and socialism blame status hierarchies for societal dysfunction and struggle. The author Tom Wolfe concluded in the 1970s that status was the “fundamental taboo, more so than sexuality and everything of that sort. It’s much easier for people to talk about their sex lives in this day and age than it is to talk about their status.”
Open discussion of social hierarchy is unpleasant and impolite. When the British novelist Nancy Mitford mused on the subtle differences between upperclass and middle-class speech in a 1955 essay, “unprintably violent” letters poured into her publisher’s editorial office. This also explains why we dislike social climbers: they remind us there is a ladder to climb. In fact, the modern word “villain” derives from the status-related sin of lowly villein feudal tenants daring to seek a higher social position.
This collective unease with status has greatly impaired our ability to recognize its effects — and has held us back from solving the Grand Mystery of Culture. Once we understand status, cultural change is much less mysterious. Just as microeconomics posits that markets form as selfinterested individuals maximize utility for their money, a similar “invisiblehand” mechanism exists between status and culture: in seeking to maximize and stabilize status, individuals end up clustering into patterns of behavior (customs, traditions, fashion, fads, taste) that we understand as culture.
This collective unease with status has greatly impaired our ability to recognize its effects — and has held us back from solving the Grand Mystery of Culture. Once we understand status, cultural change is much less mysterious. Just as microeconomics posits that markets form as selfinterested individuals maximize utility for their money, a similar “invisiblehand” mechanism exists between status and culture: in seeking to maximize and stabilize status, individuals end up clustering into patterns of behavior (customs, traditions, fashion, fads, taste) that we understand as culture.
This is not to say that culture exists only as a means to mark status. All status symbols rely on objects and behaviors with practical or aesthetic value that enrich our lives. Many bourgeois class-marking cultural standards promote rational behaviors with obvious health benefits — such as
eating organic vegetables rather than prepackaged foods, and doing daily exercise rather than watching endless hours of television. The radical art used in elite distinction is emotionally rewarding and spiritually invigorating. Culture makes possible human self-understanding, complex
thinking, and creative expression. But as we’ll see, status and culture are so intertwined that we can’t understand how culture works without understanding status. And the best way to understand the status structures of society is to observe how they manifest in cultural patterns. The idea of their inexorable linkage dates back at least to the economist Thorstein Veblen’s writings about conspicuous consumption in the Gilded Age, in which he posited that wealthy people buy expensive things to reveal they can buy expensive things. But the interactions go much deeper: Status shapes our aspirations and desires, sets standards for beauty and goodness, frames our identities, creates collective behaviors and morals, encourages the invention of new aesthetic
sensibilities, and acts as an automated motor for permanent cultural change.
Culture is embodied in the products, behaviors, styles, meanings, values, and sensibilities that make up the human experience — and it is status that guides their creation, production, and diffusion.
The principles of status and culture we’ll uncover in this book provide us an invaluable toolbox for analyzing the world around us. We’ll gain new clarity on old questions of taste, authenticity, identity, class, subcultures, art, fashion, fads, media influence, retro, and canons. And these lessons help us decode the latest trends, explain topical issues of “identity,” and propose a common language for cultural critique. These principles aren’t just important because culture plays a major role in our lives, but because the parts of life we believe transcend culture — technology, personal beliefs, and judgments of beauty — also get swept up in the vagaries of fashion.
These analytic tools are particularly helpful for addressing a pressing concern of the moment: Why does internet culture often feel less valuable than what we experienced in the analog world? Why does everything seem less cool than before?
The reasons are much clearer when viewed through the lens of how the internet has changed status signaling. Where we once pleaded for status in person (or through media reporting of real-life appearances at social events), there is now a twenty-four-hour, seven-day-a-week pageant of
flexing on social media apps. Elites could once protect their status symbols behind information barriers and exclusive access to products; now nearly everything is available to nearly everyone. Meanwhile, the fragmentation of culture into the “long tail” has diluted the power of taste to serve as an effective means of social exclusion. And the inherent hyperspeed of the internet means fashion cycles pump out ephemeral fads rather than eradefining trends. Subcultures once provided society with a constant stream of cultural innovations, but the most notable outsider group of the twenty first century has been the internet trolls rebelling against diversity, equity, and inclusion through revanchist slogans and memes.
Taken together, the changes to the status structure are conspiring against the widespread adoption of new cultural trends at the same frequency we experienced in the twentieth century. Many feel we’ve entered into a period of cultural stasis. On the internet, time moves so fast that it doesn’t move at all. The transformation of idealistic hippies from the class of ’68 into yuppie materialists fifteen years later provided the dramatic tension of the film The Big Chill; in 2022, culture from 2007 feels disappointingly familiar. Many bored with contemporary culture have fled into a “retromania” obsession with exhuming the past. Meanwhile, Gen Z appears to have abandoned previous generations’ determination toward radical artistic innovation for laid-back amateurism.
Cultural stasis is not trivial: we measure the health of our civilization through the fecundity and profundity of cultural production. And we rely on stylistic changes to define our particular moment in time and space. Here too we will find answers from a deeper understanding of how status
interacts with culture.
This book surely seems to tackle too many topics at once: social hierarchies, conventions, signaling, symbols, identity, class, subcultures, art, fashion, mass media, history, technology. But only in examining the intersection of these phenomena can we fully understand how status and
culture function as a system. To demonstrate the universality of the principles behind status and culture, we’ll examine a wide range of real-life historical examples, from hairstyles and clothing to pets, beverages, snacks, pop and classical music, celebrities and frauds, memes, novels, painting,
and nightlife.
eating organic vegetables rather than prepackaged foods, and doing daily exercise rather than watching endless hours of television. The radical art used in elite distinction is emotionally rewarding and spiritually invigorating. Culture makes possible human self-understanding, complex
thinking, and creative expression. But as we’ll see, status and culture are so intertwined that we can’t understand how culture works without understanding status. And the best way to understand the status structures of society is to observe how they manifest in cultural patterns. The idea of their inexorable linkage dates back at least to the economist Thorstein Veblen’s writings about conspicuous consumption in the Gilded Age, in which he posited that wealthy people buy expensive things to reveal they can buy expensive things. But the interactions go much deeper: Status shapes our aspirations and desires, sets standards for beauty and goodness, frames our identities, creates collective behaviors and morals, encourages the invention of new aesthetic
sensibilities, and acts as an automated motor for permanent cultural change.
Culture is embodied in the products, behaviors, styles, meanings, values, and sensibilities that make up the human experience — and it is status that guides their creation, production, and diffusion.
The principles of status and culture we’ll uncover in this book provide us an invaluable toolbox for analyzing the world around us. We’ll gain new clarity on old questions of taste, authenticity, identity, class, subcultures, art, fashion, fads, media influence, retro, and canons. And these lessons help us decode the latest trends, explain topical issues of “identity,” and propose a common language for cultural critique. These principles aren’t just important because culture plays a major role in our lives, but because the parts of life we believe transcend culture — technology, personal beliefs, and judgments of beauty — also get swept up in the vagaries of fashion.
These analytic tools are particularly helpful for addressing a pressing concern of the moment: Why does internet culture often feel less valuable than what we experienced in the analog world? Why does everything seem less cool than before?
The reasons are much clearer when viewed through the lens of how the internet has changed status signaling. Where we once pleaded for status in person (or through media reporting of real-life appearances at social events), there is now a twenty-four-hour, seven-day-a-week pageant of
flexing on social media apps. Elites could once protect their status symbols behind information barriers and exclusive access to products; now nearly everything is available to nearly everyone. Meanwhile, the fragmentation of culture into the “long tail” has diluted the power of taste to serve as an effective means of social exclusion. And the inherent hyperspeed of the internet means fashion cycles pump out ephemeral fads rather than eradefining trends. Subcultures once provided society with a constant stream of cultural innovations, but the most notable outsider group of the twenty first century has been the internet trolls rebelling against diversity, equity, and inclusion through revanchist slogans and memes.
Taken together, the changes to the status structure are conspiring against the widespread adoption of new cultural trends at the same frequency we experienced in the twentieth century. Many feel we’ve entered into a period of cultural stasis. On the internet, time moves so fast that it doesn’t move at all. The transformation of idealistic hippies from the class of ’68 into yuppie materialists fifteen years later provided the dramatic tension of the film The Big Chill; in 2022, culture from 2007 feels disappointingly familiar. Many bored with contemporary culture have fled into a “retromania” obsession with exhuming the past. Meanwhile, Gen Z appears to have abandoned previous generations’ determination toward radical artistic innovation for laid-back amateurism.
Cultural stasis is not trivial: we measure the health of our civilization through the fecundity and profundity of cultural production. And we rely on stylistic changes to define our particular moment in time and space. Here too we will find answers from a deeper understanding of how status
interacts with culture.
This book surely seems to tackle too many topics at once: social hierarchies, conventions, signaling, symbols, identity, class, subcultures, art, fashion, mass media, history, technology. But only in examining the intersection of these phenomena can we fully understand how status and
culture function as a system. To demonstrate the universality of the principles behind status and culture, we’ll examine a wide range of real-life historical examples, from hairstyles and clothing to pets, beverages, snacks, pop and classical music, celebrities and frauds, memes, novels, painting,
and nightlife.
(But by no means are they the only possible examples.)
Likewise we must transcend the boundaries of academic disciplines to excavate and synthesize the wisdom of sociology, anthropology, economics, philosophy, linguistics, semiotics, cultural theory, literary theory, art history, media studies, and neuroscience. There are obvious disadvantages to
working at this scale: the loss of nuance, the neglect of edge cases, the high potential for oversights. Such worries aside, we are in need of a basic conceptual framework around status and culture, and once this is in place, we can easily make further enrichments, expansions, and amendments.
Readers may already be familiar with many of the principles that guide culture, such as the “trickle-down” of fashion trends and the predictable return of outmoded styles as “retro.” And some of the scholarly theories introduced, whether Pierre Bourdieu’s deconstruction of “taste” or Everett
Rogers’s model for the diffusion of “innovations,” have become wellknown outside of academia. But the frequent discrepancies of these cultural laws with our personal lived experiences breeds an inherent skepticism about their predictive power. The challenge, then, is not just to catalog our
collective knowledge about the mechanics of culture but to demonstrate why these social phenomena arise as a result of individuals’ self-interested behavior. To do this carefully requires beginning with somewhat obvious observations and then building up to more remarkable conclusions. We’ll eventually see how status seeking shapes our deepest personal desires, why
profligate spending is logical, how status has been important in encouraging radical artistic invention, how fashion exists without a fashion industry, how elites influence what we remember, how postmodern politics have made us ashamed of taste, and how the moral duty to be “original” may be simply the democratization of aristocratic custom.
Once we understand how individuals’ status seeking creates wider social movements, it’ll be clear why the Beatles wore moptops, why so many people got angry about it, and why the look eventually caught on and became a “classic.”
Most explications of status, especially outlining the advanced rules of taste, sound like endorsement. This is not the intention. We come here to deconstruct status, not to praise it. The human propensity toward order — especially in the form of racism, sexism, and other bigotries — has long acted as a pernicious barrier to realizing a truly democratic society. But if we seek to promote equality over hierarchy and encourage cultural creativity and experimentation, we must learn the full implications of how culture and status work together.
While status desire may be fundamental to humans, many readers may be tempted to conclude, “Yes, other people conform to these principles, but not me.”
Likewise we must transcend the boundaries of academic disciplines to excavate and synthesize the wisdom of sociology, anthropology, economics, philosophy, linguistics, semiotics, cultural theory, literary theory, art history, media studies, and neuroscience. There are obvious disadvantages to
working at this scale: the loss of nuance, the neglect of edge cases, the high potential for oversights. Such worries aside, we are in need of a basic conceptual framework around status and culture, and once this is in place, we can easily make further enrichments, expansions, and amendments.
Readers may already be familiar with many of the principles that guide culture, such as the “trickle-down” of fashion trends and the predictable return of outmoded styles as “retro.” And some of the scholarly theories introduced, whether Pierre Bourdieu’s deconstruction of “taste” or Everett
Rogers’s model for the diffusion of “innovations,” have become wellknown outside of academia. But the frequent discrepancies of these cultural laws with our personal lived experiences breeds an inherent skepticism about their predictive power. The challenge, then, is not just to catalog our
collective knowledge about the mechanics of culture but to demonstrate why these social phenomena arise as a result of individuals’ self-interested behavior. To do this carefully requires beginning with somewhat obvious observations and then building up to more remarkable conclusions. We’ll eventually see how status seeking shapes our deepest personal desires, why
profligate spending is logical, how status has been important in encouraging radical artistic invention, how fashion exists without a fashion industry, how elites influence what we remember, how postmodern politics have made us ashamed of taste, and how the moral duty to be “original” may be simply the democratization of aristocratic custom.
(...)
The internal mechanisms of status cause perpetual fashion cycles, and high-status groups tend to determine what becomes “history” and what is forgotten.Once we understand how individuals’ status seeking creates wider social movements, it’ll be clear why the Beatles wore moptops, why so many people got angry about it, and why the look eventually caught on and became a “classic.”
Most explications of status, especially outlining the advanced rules of taste, sound like endorsement. This is not the intention. We come here to deconstruct status, not to praise it. The human propensity toward order — especially in the form of racism, sexism, and other bigotries — has long acted as a pernicious barrier to realizing a truly democratic society. But if we seek to promote equality over hierarchy and encourage cultural creativity and experimentation, we must learn the full implications of how culture and status work together.
While status desire may be fundamental to humans, many readers may be tempted to conclude, “Yes, other people conform to these principles, but not me.”
The political scientist Russell Hardin once wrote that the “biggest thorn in all of social theory” is that readers “deny the relevance of our accounts to their behavior and motivations.”
This is especially true for status, which is not a “game” some choose to play but an invisible force
undergirding the entirety of individual behavior and social organization. As individuals we regard our tastes and preferences as personal expressions — not mechanical reactions to a position in the social hierarchy. We believe in our own free will and seek to forge unique identities. We want great art andenduring beauty to derive from intrinsic value — not from elite associations.
There will certainly be points in the course of reading this book when a particular principle may not apply to you. But it’s important to remember that culture, as we live and breathe it, is never an objective measurement of every single individual’s behavior — it’s an abstracted and interpreted
approximation. The best parallel may be chemistry: not every molecule moves the exact same way, yet we can still draw inferences about the properties of gases.
In all likelihood, status shapes your behavior in profound ways, just as it influenced the Beatles’ switch from pompadours to moptops. And only when we become experts in status can we work to achieve the society and culture we desire.
undergirding the entirety of individual behavior and social organization. As individuals we regard our tastes and preferences as personal expressions — not mechanical reactions to a position in the social hierarchy. We believe in our own free will and seek to forge unique identities. We want great art andenduring beauty to derive from intrinsic value — not from elite associations.
There will certainly be points in the course of reading this book when a particular principle may not apply to you. But it’s important to remember that culture, as we live and breathe it, is never an objective measurement of every single individual’s behavior — it’s an abstracted and interpreted
approximation. The best parallel may be chemistry: not every molecule moves the exact same way, yet we can still draw inferences about the properties of gases.
In all likelihood, status shapes your behavior in profound ways, just as it influenced the Beatles’ switch from pompadours to moptops. And only when we become experts in status can we work to achieve the society and culture we desire.
(...)