Not all of this is as straightforward as the author seems to suggest. In particular, I believe the massive increase in mass shootings is only in one country. Part of it is, I believe, the fear-mongering our glorious leaders and the media love so much.

This is interesting although I'm a bit weirded out by how it conflates what I see as two (or maybe more) very different kinds of "deviance". One is doing something that is new, different, or somehow an expression of individuality. The other is just doing things that are (or are perceived as) edgy or bad.

In the latter category are things like teenagers smoking. You're going to have a hard time convincing me that it's somehow a bad thing that teenagers smoke less now than they did in the past. Also, when teenagers did smoke, that wasn't some kind of groundbreaking new trend; often they did it precisely to be like other people who were perceived as "cool". That's sort of the opposite of deviance in the sense of individuality.

I see those things as quite distinct from stuff like the homogenization of design or the prevalence of sequels, which can much more plausibly be characterized as a genuine loss of diversity, creativity, or something along those lines.

Now you could try to make some argument that there's a link between these things, and it feels like the article is sort of trying to do that, but it doesn't really connect the dots. I don't particularly see why a decline in teenage smoking would have any causal connection to a decline in book cover design diversity. At the most general level you could adopt a position like "great art requires suffering", but it's not even clear that the "lost deviances" mentioned involve suffering.

The article does mention at the end that "the decline of deviance is mainly a good thing", but it still seems to be trying to say that there is some causal link between the bad kinds and the good kinds.

I'd look elsewhere for the causes of the decline of "good" deviances (i.e., the creative ones). The one that comes to mind is the increasing interconnection of the economic and cultural world, which in effect forces businesses and creators in more and more sectors to compete in a huge market. It's hard for the quirky local music store with the eccentric owner to stay in business when everyone can buy a guitar cheaper online. It's also harder for the local musician to make a living when the main sources of music are oriented towards whatever is most popular across a big area (e.g., nationwide).

In domains where there are objective measures of progress, this can be a good thing. If someone comes up with way to build a better mousetrap, it is (or at least can be) beneficial for that idea to spread rapidly and displace worse mousetraps. But where the only thing being "improved" is the amount of money made, or where there is no ground-truth notion of "improvement" (as in art), interconnection is likely to cause "leveling", where everyone chases the latest trend because everyone can immediately see that everyone else is already chasing it.

In my view we don't need more illegal behavior or "bad" deviance to get around this. What we need is more robust defenses against leveling. That means, for a start, a breakup of the major commercial/cultural channels. If there is no single source for books, for music, for mousetraps, for playground equipment, for whatever, then people are forced to look for those things in different places. And then those different sources can evolve differently. And they can cross-pollinate, but we have to be careful to avoid allowing them to merge too much.

Good deviance can be seen as a form of diversity, and for diversity we need things to be different from other things. To get more different things we need more different sources, more different people in control, a greater number of distinct "generators" of all kinds.

Technology is the opiate of the masses.

I would first want to clarify the vocabulary.

The author mostly means "statistical deviance" within certain scopes, which has no normative force (there's nothing good or bad about statistical distributions as such - it could be either good or bad, or neutral), but equivocates by quietly switching to other meanings of the word, like "moral deviance". We don't want moral deviance, by definition: anything deviating from the "ought" deviating from the good and thus bad in proportion to its deviation. It is good that drug use among teenagers, for example, has dropped such that the statistically common case is that few teens use drugs. (Note also the funny entailment: if drug use were extremely common among teens, we would also have low statistical deviance, but high moral deviance. Would the author then dream of the case where half of the teen population takes drugs to maximize statistical deviance in this respect?)

Now, within the scope of fashion, design, art, music, architecture, etc., are in one sense subject to fashion and so each epoch will show signs of convergence, replication, exploration, and reproduction of certain similar forms as they are developed and copied. However, globalism has long been accused of having a homogenizing effect, so the scope and scale today permits continuous information flow that stifles the development of divergent exploration. Culture has been flattened as a result. We often connect more quickly with distant constructs of the media and the social media than we do with the physical human beings around us.

Cultural exchange, I claim, is a good thing in general, but it is only successful when it respects the principle of subsidiarity which successfully marries the local with the global without destroying one or the other, as well as the objectively moral. While parochialism excludes itself from the richness of exchange, globalism crushes the local [0]. But the global can only be a function of the aggregate of locals, as the global lacks cultural substance of its own. The corporate and commercial now fill that void. This would seem to explain the dominance of the corporate and commercial in popular culture and the homogenizing effects of industrial mass production moved by the profit motive, and the resulting homogeneous poor quality. The poor quality of cultural production is the real offense.

[0] The best example of something that manages to accomplish this is the Catholic Church. A Catholic can walk into any church on earth and feel spiritually at home, even while there is variation in the liturgical practices among cultures. The Church is a patchwork of cultural and ethnic diversity sharing in a common truth. Cultural exchange is transmitted through it without crushing any of the participating parties. Simply put, the universality of the Church - the word "catholic" means "universal" - doesn't smother ethnic difference, and within this scope, patriotism - a love of one's people - doesn't metastasize into some kind of ideology of chauvinism or hatred of others. The spirit of logoi spermatikoi permeates and seeks to embrace the true and the good and the beautiful, wherever it is found, and include it in the great patrimony, transfiguring it where necessary. It is not a vacuous, egalitarian, relativistic pseudo-embrace of diversity, but a love of the variety and varying degrees of the objectively good.

My theory is it all has todo with immigration, or rather the way we treat immigration since the 2000s. In order to accomodate everyone the culture gained new sensibilities, and the bubble burst. But idiosyncratic cultures can only grow in bubbles.

We ve seen that in Europe before the US, where the german, french, English culture lost their influence and originality, becoming touristic products being sold by people of all colors and cultures.

Words like 'spirit' and 'soul' have been replaced with 'content and money, and the media is being driven by people with a generic "global" culture and outlook

I think the weird is still out there, but increasingly confined to meatspace. Burning Man? Very weird, especially the regional burns. Boutique music festivals have tons of weird. Go camping in the backcountry and you'll meet people who are at least eccentric.

Online there's plenty of weirdness still out there on obscure forums, Twitch streams, and Discords. Tumblr is still going, and Bluesky would have a lot more weirdness if it wasn't constantly consumed by woke purity spirals. (This is unfortunately a problem with IRL left-coded social spaces as well, left-libertarian seems to be the sweet spot.)

Unfortunately corporate America has taken over the vast majority of internet social spaces and that has made the weird much more difficult to find. This makes sense, back in the 90s there wasn't much weird on AOL (the FB of its day) - you had to go to Usenet, IRC, or BBSes. Later on Livejournal and Myspace.

Seeing a lot of comments disputing singular data points, but the author goes out of his way to provide as wide a variety of data points as he could find, and to try to disprove his own theory.

A couple anecdotal things I've noticed in my own life that align with his conclusions:

(1) I work in advertising. I've long bemoaned that my industry has turned to producing high-production low-creativity work for decades now. In the 60s, 70s, and 80s, people relied on creativity to get a message across. But today, it's all polish and no substance. I assumed it was because technology made it easier than ever to to do so, but maybe it's part of a wider trend.

(2) I used to love the variety of car designs. Every car was unique. Some were crazy. But today, take the logo off, and I'd be challenged to tell the difference between any two pickup trucks or any two sedans or any two vans. Every manufacturer has converged on the exact same design. (We see this in every industry, I just happened to be a fan of cars back in the day. But if you look at housing, clothing, computers, phones, tablets, etc etc, I can't think of any category that has real variety in design.)

(3) The author mentions book covers. Up until today, I was mistaking all those designs as meaning those books were part of the same series or something. I hadn't dug in to realize they were actually unrelated.

(4) My own kids have played it incredibly safe. I'm proud of them for being more responsible than I ever was. But I'm also worried they don't know how to take risks. I'm strongly of the belief that anything worth doing involves a healthy dose of risk. Could it really be that as a society, we've just abandoned risk?

I'm not saying the article is necessarily 100% correct. But I think it does pose what may be one of the most important questions of our era. Yeah yeah, I know that sounds bombastic: we have increasing global conflicts, a climate crisis, the apparent rise of neo-fascism, etc. But I don't know how we're going to solve those problems if we're all driving into the middle. How can 8 billion people be more homogenous than the 7, 6, 5, 4 billion that came before?

> Brian: Look, you've got it all wrong! You don't need to follow me. You don't need to follow anybody! You've got to think for yourselves! You're all individuals!

> Crowd: Yes! We're all individuals!

> Brian: You're all different!

> Crowd: Yes, we are all different!

> Man in crowd: I'm not...

> Crowd: Shhh!

I feel like there are so many factors here that it's hard to identify which thing have the greatest impact. Instead of attempting a coherent argument, I'll offer some further observations.

Taylor Swift is one of the most famous people in the world, yet I know quite a large number of people who could name only one or two of her songs. I would count myself a Taylor Swift fan even though I am in the group of knowing very little of her music. I admire her creativity, business acumen, legs, assertiveness, intelligence, and determination.

In the past, a performer at that height would dominate a much smaller range of media coverage leading to a more profound cultural impact. While being on fewer channels, they'd be on a greater proportion of the whole media landscape.

I think that pushes the dial in both directions. When something is targeted at all, they have to stay around the median to encompass the largest population.

Transformational change happens to a society when something that is targeted beyond the median becomes popular and drags the world with it.

You hear a lot of talk about the Overton window these days. I have heard it raised frequently as an argument for deplatforming. It strikes me as a profound misunderstanding of what the Overton window represents. People argue that you should suppress ideas you disagree with so that the measurement of the Overton window shows an opinion that is under-sampled against your adversary and consequently moves in the direction you prefer. This one of the most damaging examples of Goodhart's law that I know of.

To stick with the music analogy, I think if Guns 'n' Roses appeared before the Beatles there would have been a significant negative response from the public (although I would really like to pull an open minded musical expert out of history to capture their experiences of modern music). Some experts favour protecting the establishment, while others are the very first to realise the significance of a revolutionary new thing.

People are generally repelled by objectionable views and while the Overton window suggests that the notion of what is objectionable might change over time, suppressing objectionable views removes that repulsion from them while simultaneously being an act that many find objectionable. Both changes cause the dominant public opinion to move in the same direction, the opposite to what the people attempting to control the dialog desire. At the same time making the Overton window harder to measure, obscuring their failure.

The decline of deviance could be thought of as either a shrinking or expansion of the standard deviation of the Overton window. It depends upon your perspective and if you consider objective measures of variance to be more significant to subjective measures.

When the Overton window is much wider, there are a much broader set of opinions in the world, but also, by definition with the same level of acceptance as a compressed window. everything within the window is accepted. You could interpret that as a decline in deviance because you just don't consider the range of things accepted to be deviant.

When the Overton window is narrow, social pressures cause people to restrict their behaviour, which would also be considered a decline in deviance. On the other hand it would take much less to be considered deviant.

This makes me wonder if you need a second order Overton to measure the acceptability of opinions relative to their proportionate position on the Overton window. Would such a measurement measure polarisation? I would imagine that the ideal arrangement, no matter what the width of the Overton window was, would be a slower decline in acceptance of things that are disagreed with.

Once again though. If you started measuring this, would it become a target, and subject to gaming?

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