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

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

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

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

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

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

The article is using weird definition of "weird".

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

We are.

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

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

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

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

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

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

Edit: clarification