Posted by zdw 10/28/2025
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.)
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.
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.
That’s my favorite John Mayer song
See every content producer following the posting schedule exactly, because the Algorithm punishes deviance from the schedule. Not everyone can be Captain Disillusion.
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.
It has changed a lot about my life, and I am so much happier. And have so much more privacy, given I also only use cash in public. I am mostly invisible when away from home, digitally.
Yet here you are. Oops.
Turns out you do not need to be reachable or stay connected with the lives of far away people every second of every day.
Absent mass automated surveillance, the state's ability to do so at scale was limited.
Once implemented (and processed and stored), norms on use erode over time... and then anyone anomalous is being auto background-checked when showing up in a new area.
Or do we think someone won't find a use for all the dark datacenter GPU power after AI pops?
That is the historical norm. Is it supposed to be a new concept?
Even the most closed societies (say, East Germany, the USSR, and the DPRK) only accomplished a fraction of what's now technically possible, and that historical analogue through a massive human labor force.
The norm is that you're born somewhere and you stay there forever. Everyone there knows you and they've known you since you, or they, were born. If a traveler happens to show up, everyone can recognize immediately, by looking at their face, that they're from somewhere else. Strangers get low levels of trust.
That said, while wandering off jobless is a ticking clock, it is easier than ever to work remotely while wandering. And if you have property rented while you're away, you can get some of the deviance without digging too much of a hole for yourself.
That used to be support, graphic design, and writing, but all are being offshored or replaced by AI. Marketing more broadly probably is one of the few career paths I can think of that is still viable remotely, excluding the groups I mentioned before.
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.
https://www.amazon.com/Against-Creativity-Oli-Mould-ebook/dp...
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.
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.
I agree that there's a general decline in criminality (which is good) and general risk-taking (which is mixed). I don't see that this is strongly connected to wealth-seeking, given that overall wealth has increased for the majority of people and offset some of the risk involved when sacrificing income and wealth for other values.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
"Back up?" Ever heard of workhouses, or debtors' prisons? There wasn't a 'back up', generally.
Has anyone here had the chance to have a frank conversation which such types? Morbid curiosity...
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?"
Deviance is all around, the author is too trapped in a bubble to see it.
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.
Your comment supports this. While you may talk about how it's harder to "break through" or "get lucky" than it was, it presents both of those as good things.
There used to be other measures of success for musicians other than financial.
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.
I think the author isn't considering that people's bubbles have gotten smaller and more opaque. There's still plenty of weird hackers innovating, they just do it with their chosen peers, not in mass-culture.
As predicted "The revolutions are not being televised."
Which is why this Jesse Welles's stuff hits me like a freight train
it’s your own damn fault you’re so damn fat / Shame shame shame
All the food on the shelf was engineered for your health / So you’re gonna have to take the blame
And let's not forget that protest songs aren't usually promoted by those in power...
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.
The only thing that this may say is that in USA the regime fights dissent in mainstream media. Like, if you want to catch signs of a product made out of popular discontent, you can't e.g. find in UK charts the Sleaford Mods or Kneecap?
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.
Let's send the author to a furry con.
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.
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.)
"The underground is a lie" was right then and still is: https://www.jimgoad.net/goadabode/issue%202/undergnd.html
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.
It was a recipe for people that wanted that identity, with both the music and the looks being where the money was made.
This happened at a time when there was no internet, and with no cynical clowns like me to piss in the punch, to claim that punk was just marketing.
This was not the first 'off the shelf' identity for young people to take up, however, punk was the most planned, even though it is all about not conforming to the rules of society. Compare with the 'hipster' trend where there was no mastermind planning it, but more of a convergence of influences.
Apparently, you weren't there. London in 76/77 was full of people claiming that punk was just marketing.
Mclaren was instrumental in fomenting the UK/London punk scene, but he was not in control of it, and probably not even the mastermind, had there actually been one. Ditto for Westwood.
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.
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://www.reddit.com/r/lansing/comments/1no5rtl/lansing_pa...
Win or lose, start or end the fight, regardless of what actually happened -- there's always the extremely lopsided chance that I'm seen as the aggressor and get strongly punished; especially in the days before cell phones.
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
plus ca change, plus le meme chose ...
> 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.
One single person did this, and was sentenced to a year in prison for it.
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.
Imo, it is being an asshole kid, potentially a bully. That totally existed when I was young.
Plenty of time from primary school to junior high to work up to a proper jump.
Bonus salt water sharks and crocodiles.
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.
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.
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)
Unfortunately it is not only a bad thing.
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.
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.
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.
> 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...
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.
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.
(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).
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.
(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).
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!
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.
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.
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.