Posted by zdw 5 days ago
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.
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".
It’s just easier to be weird and find other similarly weird people and to build a community of weirdness that is socially self-sufficient.
I mean, I get what they're trying to say, but "anti-social behaviour in a place which was basically in a low-level civil war from the late 60s to late 90s fell in the noughties and tens" is not at all surprising, and not a useful comparison with the US.
NI is such a weird case that you should be very cautious about reading anything about broader trends into it at all.
I do like the illustration that they chose for the article. Jazzercise; the ultimate manifestation of deviance.
> There is no comprehensive dataset on cult formation, but Roger’s Bacon analyzed cults that have been covered on a popular and long-running podcast and found that most of them started in the 60s, 70s, and 80s, with a steep dropoff after 2000
I also don't love this as methodology. By its nature a podcast on cults is going to be biased towards covering the most _documented_ cults, and those will be older. Take something like the Zizians; did anyone other than compulsive 'Rationalist'-watchers even know they _existed_ until those murders? There are likely cults forming today which won't _really_ be noticed for a while.
(I'm not saying they're wrong that fewer cults are forming; I think they're probably right. But the methodology they're using to get there is questionable.)
> CULTURE IS STAGNATING
I don't buy this one _at all_; it likely _is_ true of movies and video games, for financial reasons, but pretty much nothing else. The sheer volume of music and TV produced today is vastly greater than previously, and that's even before getting into fan works and original internet creations (again, I think there's a measurement problem there).
> Every new apartment building looks like this:
AIUI the look that they're talking about is basically a consequence of common US planning rules; other places have their own apartment building archetype. All the apartment blocks built in a given place in a single year always look pretty similar; it's largely dictated by the rules.
The 90s was peak "binge", the West was on top of the world with no challengers. People felt they could relax. Perhaps they relaxed a bit too much.
>scientific papers used to have style. Now they all sound the same, and they’re all boring.
Sometimes that can be because there's more paper than findings.
I think the shape of cults has changed. There is a vast army of social media influencers exploiting e.g. “new age” concepts to take advantage of vulnerable people, sometimes with devastating impact. Research just hasn’t caught up yet.