I have an issue with the claim that the culture is stagnating. One of the arguments is this:

> 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 author obviously has not seen one of the near daily protests lately, or the majority of videos posted to social media, or perhaps they just chose the wrong word ("weird") for what they are trying to express. everywhere I look, freak flags are on full and public display now more than I ever remembered them being

For the most part, this seems to be measuring the same trends behind the violent crime rate - which some think is related to the introduction (and banning) of leaded gasoline.

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've wondered if anyone has made a scholarly comparison of current trends in manners and general social liberalization to Victorian manners. I'd like to read a book comparing these two ages.

My impression is that, at least in the US, there are two contradictory trends overlapping and intermingling: extreme personal liberty (supremacy of "me" over "us"); and cultural enforcement of strict manners (e.g, around language and gender).

Anyone displaying 'weirdness' these days gets diagnosed with a place on the 'spectrum' and prescribed some kind of medication to tamp it down.

I think it’s simple economics. A competitor starts scrappy and has nothing to lose. It will take risks because if it fails because it has nothing to loose and everything to gain. It’s successful and as it grows in success it becomes more risk averse because it has so much more to loose. It looses the scrappiness that made it the dominant force.

This happened to the Roman Empire and it’s what’s happening to our current world order.

Not sure how these might be causally related to this:

https://www.freerangekids.com/short-sweet-how-we-got-to-heli...

I.e., decline of deviance might be causing helicopter parenting; or helicopter parenting might be causing the decline of deviance; or they may be reinforcing each other.

It's just the internet.

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".

Wow… an engineer making generalizations about the fact that he is in a tunnel… and not realizing for a second that he is in said tunnel. How new.

The world is more deviant than it's ever been. It's just no one cares anymore beacuse it's normalized. Look at Deviant Art, Pixiv, Only Fans, 4chan, etc... It's all over the place. It's just we came to mostly except it. We've got way more explicit popsongs today and music videos that are way more sexualized than 20-30-40 years ago. It's all normalized. In the 70s a film like Halloween was considered too gross. Now movies like Deadpool-vs-Wolverine or the TV show Bad Boys are just full of exploding bodies and guts and no one blinks an eye.

As for people not drinking/smoking/having-sex, yea, because they're all at home looking at those sites I just mentioned, and because between the 1960s/1970s the message sunking that that shit is bad for you. Killing yourself != deviance.