I think an important thing to note in this post is that most Karate is fake, you can in fact just pretend to be a black belt and start your own school and get status and money, and there's no formal system for preventing it. You may think winning fights would be the final arbiter of skill at a martial art, but in practice it turns out not to matter much. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=gjbSCEhmjJA&t=4s
I think the same dynamics and incentives apply to a lot of non-profit stuff too.
The sociopaths can't show up and beat genuine skilled fighters at their own game just by being willing to lie, but they can show up and cash in from ignorant outsiders.
I firmly believe that cycles don't exist and never have existed.
This is my shitposting way of saying "I have never, once, in my years of experience modeling human behavioral time series, come across an honest-to-god cyclical pattern (excluding time of year/month/week/day effects)." And yet for some reason, every time I show a time series to anyone ever, people swear to god the data looks cyclical.
This comments section is such fertile ground for likes right now, there's no need for anyone to disagree with me. If you don't agree, just post your own comment and we can both prosper. If you do, just say so and you'll look like a genius for agreeing before everyone else jumped on the bandwagon. Plus you'll be playing out a meta-commentary on the article, which should be good enough to insulate us against one round of criticism. It's free karma real estate!
Is this post intended to chronicle the cycle of those subcultures that are clearly 'movements', or is it intended to cover subcultures in general? Because I can think of any number of garden variety subcultures (skateboarding in the 70s and 80s, punk rock, D&D guys, etc) that had/have significant cultural traction that don't obviously fit this model.
If we're just talking about 'ism' cultures then it seems like a lot of this tracks, though even there I'm guessing that those 'ism' cultures where a critical number of the participants are clearly committed to making sure everyone knows how smart they are might be more susceptible. The Klan (in its many unfortunate incarnations) was/is definitely a subculture, but just as I don't see it necessarily fitting this pattern I also don't suspect it's a subculture where the members were eager to tell you how bored they were in K-12, or what their SAT scores were.
This ties into a concept I recently learned about, "subcultural capital" as coined by Sarah Thornton in 1995. Her book Club Cultures is on my to-read list after I saw a reference in an unrelated book.
The idea is that music/art subcultures like Punk usually define themselves in opposition to whatever the relevant "mainstream" is, which helps in the early stages because it attracts people who are not happy with their mainstream status. Much of the fighting for status in a subculture eventually revolves around being hip or authentic, and I think that's a key part of the involution phase. This is why "selling out" makes people so angry: trying to convert your status inside a subculture to money or mainstream popularity shows a lack of commitment to the subculture. Once a particular subculture has been around long enough it's pretty hard for anything to be "hip" so it has to postcycle and either fragment or stabilize around something other than status.
Wow! This is one of those posts that crystalizes things. You've described exactly what's happened in science fiction. Perhaps it's happened several times. But, I was disappointed you didn't give personal examples. I suggest that it (giving personal examples) would be risky, but high pay-off.
> I never felt like there was any influx of sociopaths.
And I bet many to the large majority of times you were right. But you probably were attracted to movements that didn’t have their fair share of sociopaths. And even if they did, you avoided seeing this at the individual level.
> each faction might well think that the subculture must have been taken over by sociopaths
And they are wrong some of the time. But definitely not all of the time. The cyclic pattern you describe feels right to me, but it’s often accelerated by sociopaths.
I think you missed a key dynamic. As the opportunities to break new grounddry up and it becomes harder to advance and there's more money/momentum the feedback loops break down. People start to be rewarded for conforming to the expectations of the current movement consensus. That's when you get Loyalists. Loyalists are the opposite of Heresiarchs and their followers. They not only dogmatically follow a pro-movement ethos but they actively purge and purity-spiral people who are not sufficiently devoted or who smell too much like Heresiarchs.
In the early days you pushed things forward by improving the movement, having interesting ideas, offering actionable criticism and then executing, and so on. As that becomes harder (and you need to be a genius) you can instead get ahead by unswerving loyalty and attacking the heresiarchs, effectively reassuring people in power. And people who look kind of like heresiarchs which creates space by clearing out competition.
This produces a more orthodox but less interesting kind of thought. It's easier to be a loyalist and it gives you a chance to create new virgin territory by invoking what amount to purity spirals. Yes, you might not be able to align AI as well as that guy. But you can find that time he said that maybe AI alignment wasn't the most important thing ever and he needs to be purged! (Whether this example happens I can't say. But you get the concept.)
This hardens the organization, ossifies it. This can be good if it really has found the one true path. But usually it's actually a trap. One that's especially hard to detect for true believers. And a worse trap than the heresiarchs.
Some of the heretics want to burn everything down but most of them are reformers who just want to make their own ideas dominant. But Loyalists force them out of the movement and the movement itself into increasingly rigid forms of thinking. In the process of making the movement pure it destroys its immune system. And then the question becomes: did the movement amass enough money and power in its earlier stages to maintain itself as a mature organization, driven more by momentum than by innovation? Or does this ossified shell die?
Something not mentioned is that when the people who are doing this cool new thing because this is a cool thing that I want to do for its own sake (and, incidentally, I might get some status from it, even though I don't care about such things very much, because I don't see any way to stop this) begin to be approached in numbers in the group by the people who are doing this cool new thing because they can get status from it, and are precisely drawn to it because it will generate status for them, and status is what they care about more than anything or most anything in the world) -- Gresham's law kicks in.
Many of the cool people *leave* because they cannot stand to be around people who *aren't* in it for its own sake.
I'm sick of starting cool groups, companies, etc which I have to leave when it stops being about the things I love and care about, done by people I like more than a little, and starts being about giving status to people I am at best indifferent to, and often dislike, and who often take a strong dislike to me because, for as long as I can hold out, I will try to flatten the status levels which cuts into their prestige.
If you haven't looked on the creation of status as an undesirable outcome that needs limiting, you may not have ended up in a situation where the first person to drive you and other likeminded out of your group gets to keep all the chips. And that is one place where the psychopaths thrive.
Seen this in a political movement. What was absolutely shocking is how fast it went through the stages once it got to success. It was basically a long grind of ~10 years to get legitimacy, a relatively short burst of success and very rapid expansion to become a national/parliamentary party (around one year)... and 6 months after the elections the energies already started focusing inwards, with everything blowing up and getting completely "taken over by sociopaths" before the 1 year mark. Romania, 2016/17, USR.
Scott' description here is pretty spot on. What I can add is that strong and stable leadership might change the pattern, especially if it has some form of sanctity. May be why religious and ideological organizations thrive more than secular ones. There will always be pressure to go for status seeking inside the org, but if it's either hopeless (with strong leadership) or even better, hopeless and heretical, then you just put a lid on it and use the extra pressure to force expansion and object-level results.
In my example above leadership turned out to be an unexpectedly weak point, and once the inward status race started, there wasn't much hope to do anything else. You could try to do good work, but without getting aligned with the right faction (or at least a faction), at the next power shuffle you'll end up just not getting an eligible spot, even while being literally the most active member of parliament in history (happened), or having great results but being replaced by a glorified intern in very fair internal elections (also happened).
Trying to speculate and model what would have happened with strong enough leadership... and I still see problems. Even if the absolute top status level is not available, there is still pressure to turn inwards for the next few upper levels (I'm reminded of the quip "All politics is internal"). Leadership needs to be not just unassailable, but strong enough to bash heads and force either a clear process, or some form of Sanctity / alignment that makes too much internal focus something that Just Isn't Done.
That's a huge advantage older orgs have over new: the power system is old and ossified enough, almost a bureaucracy. It's true, the best hope is "a position commensurate to your talent and diligence", which means on average you get less. But even if the management may be less competent than you, you get the guarantee that your peers won't be fighting you for status - they'll at most be competing with you, more or less fairly.
The tragedy here is that how passionately people feel about the Cause is not helping at all, without also having a mechanism to turn this Belief into negentropy. The only thing I can think of, that can turn a young org's energies outwards, is an unassailable central figure. And it needs to be unassailable, not just powerful, because he/she's the lid that keeps the pressure up and outwards.
>David Chapman’s Geeks, MOPs, and Sociopaths In Subculture Evolution is rightfully a classic, but it doesn’t match my own experience.
IMO Chapman's article exhibits one of the worst trends in the rationalist community: models that sound so profound and convincing that you can't tell if they're actually *true*.
My initial reaction was "Wow, this is brilliant! I see the matrix now!" Then I thought about the subcultures I'm familiar with: his model didn't fit any of them. Yeah, Chapman's mechanism makes sense and there may be elements of truth in it. Or it could just be a castle in the sky.
My own experience: subcultures generally die because the soil that supported them no longer exists.
For example, tape-traders. People used to record songs off the radio onto cassettes and share them at school. Or they'd stay up late and record anime off obscure channels (you'd get "tape kings" with literal mountains of Sailor Moon and Yu Yu Hakusho recordings in their basement, hand-labeled and everything. They held onto them like a hoard of dragon gold).
These subcultures died a long time ago. Was it because of some invasion of sociopaths? No, it's because PirateBay and 1337x made them obsolete.
Perhaps the sociopaths are always with us, but in the postcycle phase they are the ones at the top, exposed by the withdrawal of the enthusiasts for the original subculture?
You think there are no sociopaths? Crypto is 90% sociopaths and it fits every point of your description perfectly. I could believe EA and new atheism had no sociopaths because the average member was too smart.
> you can’t just walk in and argue that YOU should be the black belt and the master should defer to YOU <
This is a common misperception about martial arts and karate in particular - that there is something very special about the achievement of a black belt.
It actually more like the academic equivalent of an undergraduate degree. To a 12 year old it might be extremely impressive, but in a meeting of full professors, a first degree denotes not much more than a basic introduction to a subject.
Wikipedia puts it rather well in its first paragraph about black belt ability -
< In contrast to the "black belt as master" stereotype, a black belt commonly indicates the wearer is competent in a style's basic technique and principles >
Another way of looking at it is that someone who has just achieved a black belt (after maybe two or three years of practice) is much nearer a complete beginner than a master.
Considering how often I feel the need to say some version of “I’m not, like, one of __those__ members of the Rationalist movement, I just sort of think some of their ideas make sense sometimes.”, I'd suppose we're firmly in at least Stage 3 now.
Also, I can't remember what blog the original reference came from, but I thought this was a somewhat better version of Chapman's article (despite being really wrong in different ways): https://status451.com/2016/09/15/social-gentrification/
Okay, so I have to ask; What observation or observations would falsify this model? Because I suspect we could find some internicean strife in many small groups and emerging cultures.
I think the sociopaths very much depend on the nature of the movement. For instance, I think something like EA is fairly 'sociopath-resistant' just because the movement is about finding the most rational ways to help people. The incentives are for finding smart ways of helping people and exploring ideas around that.
On the contrary, movements that are explicitly political or financial (think crypto and antitrust right now) are more likely to attract sociopaths because the paths to status are more direct, the status rewards are much greater, and there is much more incentive for bullshitting and/ or bullying people.
Crypto currently incentivises bullshitting normal people to get them to make your richer. Antitrust currently incentivises harassing big tech at every turn even when it makes everyone (including themselves) miserable.
In short, incentives determine the propensity for sociopathic capture.
Like with Rao, I think so too with Chapman the Sociopath label is off (actually in almost any non-medical context where I've ever seen sociopath or psychopath used the term didn't fit - people just seem to have a hard time resisting the temptation to use it).
What's true is that when a subculture get's big it starts to attract people interested in power, money or status rather than the thing itself. That will lead to professionalisation, mainstreaming and dilution of the subculture. But calling all of that sociopathy seems like a really big stretch to me. By the same logic, anybody who chooses their career with any consideration for the job market, earning potential or potential impact would be a sociopath.
I think another thing that happens in a cycle is that the early fanatics are usually young people full of passion and idealism. As they get older and start to settle down, they themselves try to make the whole thing more stable and businesslike, something that can support their family. In Chapmans terminology the geek becomes the sociopath. Again, the label doesnt fit the category.
I think most people's hobbies never really leave Phase 1, and they're probably better off that way.
For example, one of my hobbies is playing Ultimate. I don't care about whether Ultimate is taking over as a major sport - it's popular enough already that I never have trouble finding people to play with. (There are semi-professional Ultimate teams, but they're not growing very much.)
I don't even care that much about improving my own playing skills - I've almost certainly plateaued. I play because it's fun, because it's healthy exercise, and because I've made a few friends. And most of the people I play with have the same attitude.
On the other hand, one of my hobbies that didn't work out well was writing on Quora. It was a great experience until around 2018 because few of the Top Writers took it seriously. But when the company tried to become profitable, they wrecked the existing culture.
So the lesson here is that if you want a simple, fun, drama-free life, you should look for things you enjoy that are low-status and have little chance of ever changing. And definitely stay away from political movements and from anything that's backed by VCs.
I think the term "Sociopath" sets up too high a bar."status seeking relatively unscrupulous person" rolls terribly off the tongue, but would definitely describe a lot of people in these spaces whose intentions might not be unaligned with the movement.
Probably not super mind-blowing, but I think the sociopaths are more likely to show up if the nature of the thing provides a path to personal enrichment (like monetarily). They might not all be antisocial but they certainly are grifters.
"One way for this to happen is institutionalization. A movement rises. It founds some groups to promote its agenda. The fires of excitement die down, and the groups remain. Feminism is no longer as big a deal as it once was, but we still have NOW and Planned Parenthood. These institutions have stopped being social Ponzi schemes. You join them as a day job. You expect to work hard, and at best get a position commensurate to your talent and diligence. It’s not really worth criticizing the leadership, because everything happens through formal governance structures which are hard to affect. Most people who want to be feminists have already decided to support Planned Parenthood and not you. And you cannot take over Planned Parenthood unless you win over their Board of Directors, which you won’t."
This process and its impact on progressive institutions, particularly nonprofits, will be a big part of my next book. (Available in 2023 from Simon & Schuster!)
Book by Albert-László Barabási (2002) might be insightful, if we operationalize "subculture" as meaning a particular kind of "networked relationship".
I also think Scale: The Universal Laws of Life and Death in Organisms, Cities and Companies by Geoffrey West (2017) might useful to better describe the process of the growth and decline a subculture.
All of the sub-discussions here about calcification/true believers etc is really important too. Especially on a political/civilizational level.
All of the structures mentioned (the conferences, the journals, and so on) are institutions. And institutions at their core exist to stay the same. To perpetually stand firm on some core set of organizing principles. It applies to whatever institution you like--you are "instituting" something at a particular point in time and hoping that it will hold the line. Marriage, Boy Scouts, the church, the military, whatever.
This line of thinking is one of the bright lines of distinction between what we can loosely call "conservatives" and "liberals." In my case I am particularly in tune with this because I would rather conserve most things even if they are obsolete due to the aesthetic. And having that instinct gets one labelled [fill in the blank "ist" or "ophobe"]. It's not really any of those things, and comes from a good place in most cases.
However, things like the second amendment were instituted when the most powerful weapon on earth was an 8" ball that could knock down a wall and kill 2-3 people. This is the part where people like me must confront our nature to conserve, even if the proposed change is scary. It's just one example.
The "liberal" has another set of second and third-order effects and consequences to his internal drives that he must confront. To keep myself from going crazy I must, out of necessity assume they do that soul searching as well. Or else it becomes "they are trying to make America a communist/woke/totalitarian state with gulags and gas chambers for cis white males with jobs."
It sounds cliche, but the "truth" may be somewhere in the middle.
I wonder if mature professions follow this pattern. I’ve read (maybe here?) that 150 years ago, pretty much anyone who could read could get into law school, and practice law. Now you have to do five extracurricular activities to get into a good college, do volunteering and more activities in college while maintaining good grades to get into law school. Then get into good internships once you’re in law school etc.
Same with many other mature professions. What’s missing though, is the decline. And barring the collapse of society and/or the rule of law, I don’t imagine being a lawyer will ever be low status.
Other commenters seem to have more or less pointed out already that in this usage "sociopath" is a kind of pejorative label for a group rather than a literal diagnosis, but I'm surprised to see that nobody's mentioned the more obvious fact that *everybody who's in it for status* is a Sociopath in this model of subcultures. You're supposed (according to the implicit moral of this type of model, which I subscribe to) to be in a subculture for the thing in itself; *any amount* of using it instrumentally, as a means to status rather than an end in itself, makes you a Sociopath (or arguably I guess a MOP). All of the people you describe who join in phase three and are disappointed to find there's no free-floating status to harvest and upset that they're doomed to be low-status forever, rather than rejoicing that so many people share their special interest, are fuckups.
My own experience with the rationalist community, and political organisations is that a major factor is people having other things to do with their time that takes them away from the community, either not working on the same stuff anymore, or working on it in private. If you look at the main posters from the less wrong 'golden age' in the late 2000s early 2010s most don't post anymore. Not because of ideological schisms but because they had kids, or have jobs that take up most of their time and energy. Even if they're working on related areas it won't be in a publicly visible way (e.g someone who used to post about game theory and economics goes and works for a bank, they might be writing similar things but it's all internal). And while new people can replace them they're less enthusiastic.
It's a cliché that people are radicals when they're young, then settle down to do the same things as their parents. But it's a significant phenomenon
I think this insufficiently considers the explanation typically given by the actual people in the movement who are making criticisms / fragmenting off: that they've grown disillusioned with the core ideas of the movement & realized it doesn't solve everything like it claimed to (or that it at least has deep unaddressed issues). What makes you doubt that explanation (and think instead that it's primarily a status competition thing)? Or do you think those are actually compatible in some deep way?
There's a much simpler explanation for feminism being in the "postcycle" phase: feminism accomplished huge swathes of its goals (right to vote, reduced sexism, etc), so people who agree with it have less reason to make an effort.
There's also the fact that if you spend ten years forming a new school of art with two other people you're close with and who also live for that school, you're unlikely to be willing to say "This movement has accomplished what it set out to accomplish so I guess I'll go home." More likely you'll create things more worthy of negative criticism while also being much less personally willing to heed that criticism.
I wonder if this is the next evolutionary step of the thing you and Chapman are both describing. Like Chapman's version is how subcultures primarily functioned 1960~2000 and your version is how subcultures function(ed) from 2000~now.
I think about the 60's and 70's subcultures of my parents' generation and they seem (with a nod to the possible distortions of pandering/revisionist histories) to fit Chapman's model (e.g. Jobs vs Woz) much more so than the ones from the last 10 to 20 years.
Come to think of it, that would actually tie into Chapman's thesis a bit, i.e. that subcultures no longer function. It isn't worth it to the sociopaths to become involved anymore.
A lot of this sounds like truism, or selection bias. Thing isn't popular or exciting to most, then it catches on and grows, then it stops growing, fragments into new directions and isn't novel but becomes part of the mainstream. This HAS TO describe literally anything in the past that was ever popular/exciting, because it wasn't always that way (started small) and can't grow indefinitely without becoming either an institution (stable leadership/direction), fragmented (new leadership/direction), or just falling apart.
But what about cultures that never grew, or that don't confer enough money/status/passion among participants (not exciting enough) that you can quit your day job? I guess you wouldn't call it a subculture then ... but some people take e.g. being a bike rider quite seriously, without there being a status struggle about who is True Lord of the Bike Shorts and Leader of the Movement.
Rewards being high for the innovators (like the example of founding Google) isn't a Ponzi scheme, because the reward for doing X is how much value X produces, not getting people to pay you so that they too can do X. The Google founders don't sell the secret of how to found Google in an infinite cycle of Google sales, they sell ads. Probably why Google isn't "a subculture" either, but weird example.
Also a Ponzi scheme is strictly better for the first movers. Here we have a phase of low-reward die-hards before growth that don't get their investment paid off, that were there before it became a Ponzi. Maybe blogs in the 90s were higher-visibility and you trace that to the culture of today, what about the BBS users before that? So better to say "at some point, some subcultures become a sort of Ponzi scheme", which would also make more clear the post-selection of picking just the successful subcultures and just the right times.
An alternative, parallel explanation is just about doing work.
Initially, there's a lot of work to do, and consistency isn't as important. Then there's some foundational work left, but mostly people are building on the foundations, sometimes in different directions, and conflicts are becoming more obvious. And finally, all basic parts are in place, so new work is either a refinement which (as you point out) no one notices, or constructive criticism, or a fork of some part, depending on whether the new person agrees, partially agrees, or disagrees with the part they're most interested in. Since as postulated no one notices the refinements, all people notice are the criticisms and the forks.
I'm not saying your model doesn't exist. Maybe it's more salient! Mostly I'm asking, how would we tell the difference?
I think there's a new movement starting up now, which is something like "religion is inevitable and attempts to banish it have only created not-so-great religions (marxism, wokism, various cryptocurrencies etc) so we might as well be conscious about it and try to create one that doesn't have the problems of either traditional religions, or the newer non-religion religions."
I'm seeing this play out in multiple different substacks with lots of followers. Lots of people realizing we can't escape the conscious cultivation of value systems, the only question is _which_ value system to consciously cultivate.
Of course, this new movement seems like it's probably the oldest movement in the book. Perhaps what's different is that ideas are now far more competitive with each other than ever before. It's like social media was 'gain of function' research for memes, and the ubermeme, the great-grandaddy of all memes, "good", is now likely to stumble upon some incredibly powerful variant, possibly one that's K selected in stead of r-selected.
My take is that most people read "desperately struggling" as "sociopathy" because people very rarely encounter desperate struggle, and it is sociopathic, in that to desperately struggle you have to turn off that part of you that cares who is hurt in your desperate struggles.
Status is one of the few places left where the sort of people who comment online encounter a situation where A. resources are scarce, B. "wealth" can be gained by cruelty and so C. it's worthwhile to sociopath.
I feel this is a very strong framework with useful applications. The communities I have (as a lurker) seen this happen to this seems like a good fit, and the community I saw that partially avoided this had a baked-in solution.
However, twice in this essay a word was chosen that took me out of stream. It showed up at critical points that discussed the method of action but the word chosen seemed itself to contradict the thesis. That word was "realize".
The thesis, as I understand it, is this process enters its infighting stage due to status games pursued not by sociopaths, but by well-meaning people (my interpretation of "good") being affected by incentives. Realize, to me, implies a conscious discovery of information. So when you say "This is the stage where the last tier joins the pyramid, realizes that there won’t be a tier below them, and feels betrayed." why would a well-meaning person feel betrayed by that? Again, when you say "At some point, everyone realizes you can’t get easy status from the subculture anymore." and to a lesser extent on "The actual elites realize their status is also precarious, and some of them side with the counterelites in order to get a new base, bringing the conflicts to the highest levels." why would well-meaning people consciously seeing the rules of status affecting them make them start behaving in intentionally antisocial ways?
The people who see "my status or opportunity of status is threatened, therefore I need to wrest status away from someone else" are the sociopaths you said there isn't an influx of or aren't taking over. Unless your greater point is the sociopaths were there from the start and the change of incentives directs energy previously building something into competitive energy. Which is a fair point to make but it doesn't coexist well next to your other points barring some other synthesis like "sociopaths are good people" or "sociopaths naturally occur everywhere and the only way to contain them is to create an incentive system that focuses their energies on growth/good".
Those might actually be good syntheses, but I wonder if the non-sociopath thesis can be salvaged by finding a different method of action other than realizing that status is no longer available and desiring status.
A direction for Further Research: how does the down cycle of an existing movement breed the fomentation of a new one? what about a cultural space that is absolutely glutted with conflicting movements, or one in which one movement is so hegemonic that new movements become subordinate to it?
Interesting essay, but it would be nice if it incorporated the insights of Mark Fisher “Exiting the Vampire Castle,” which was referred to yesterday in "Present At the Creation: Of the Social Justice Memeplex Within the Anarchist Movemen" on the Year Zero substack.
To summarize, these essays outline how the politics of denunciation affect left-wing subcultures.
Hypothetically, a subculture is kept healthy if there are many opportunities to do the thing without winning big. For example, the basis for gaming sub-cultures is small groups doing gaming. It's probably possible to become a big name DM and make money at it (I'm guessing) but that's very little of what's going on.
This is just geeks mops sociopaths with different words. Only a sociopath allows their "desperation" of high status to disrupt and bring bad vibes to an entire subculture for their own personal gain. A non-sociopath would just be at peace with the fact that they showed up too late and stay in their lane. The "counterelites" in this article are just the sociopaths of geeksmops.
I find the theory described by Scott very convincing. But, why wouldn't the psycopaths turn up in these movements and utlimately take over? After all, there is research showing that psychopats are over-proportionally represented at managerial positions in corporations. Why should movements be different?
I first learned the term "involution" while studying breast cancer. After a female (mouse, human, whatever) ceases to breast feed, the breast tissue reduces back somewhat so that it's closer to the pre-pregnancy state. Because otherwise you're producing milk all the time and anybody's baby will make you leak all over the place. Interesting to see the term catch on outside a strict biological context.
There seems to be a kind of tension in this piece. You note that periods of involution come about when "the only source of status is to seize someone else’s - ie to start a fight." Which makes sense! But later on you say that a) the phenomenon of these cycles doesn't really actually involve sociopathy and b) "doesn't require that the new people be any different in ethics or commitment from the old people".
Isn't it the case that deliberately starting a fight for the motive of gaining status is a kind of sociopathic behavior? Likewise, doesn't intentionally making a movement more vulnerable and fractious, if not sabotaging it directly, for your own gain count as a kind of evidence for being unethical, or uncommitted to the movement?
I wonder if part of the problem is the difficulty of getting a job in EA. If I was the EA leadership, I think I would've only done a marketing campaign to attract more junior EAs once the movement reached the point where it was having a hard time filling open positions. I wonder if the current strategy is creating a sort of "EA overproduction" where a huge wave of new junior EAs compete over a comparatively tiny pool of EA jobs. In the worst case, this could create a huge pool of disaffected ex-EAs and cripple EA's potential for a generation.
> Sometimes I found myself on opposite sides of battle lines from some of the earliest and most valued members of the movement. But I never doubted they were honest; I hope they didn’t doubt me either.
I don't doubt that you're honest, Scott, and I don't think you're a sociopath. You just never seemed to grasp that writing about politics comes with a certain amount of responsibility. That your communities actually did have more racists in them because you deliberately sought a neoreactionary audience (a predictable effect), and your denialism about the frightening and very definitely fascistic movement behind Trump only made things worse.
I don't think you're dishonest, or a sociopath. I just think you were a useful idiot, and until you figure out where the extremism in our politics really lies (oof that was a bad essay), you're perpetually going to be fighting the fact that your own writing discredits you as a political commentator of merit.
Woke Derangement Syndrome is just as real as the Trump Derangement Syndrome I've been accused of having in all of your communities. The evaporative cooling effect of your apparent willingness to indulge a 'two screens' postmodern methodology for papering over basic warning signs is so strong that the people who are willing to tell you you were wrong are vanishingly few.
Sometimes it's as simple as: you were wrong about such an important thing at such an early date that you can't recover until you publicly recognize that. Trumpism was fascistic from 2016. This is the basic political intelligence test that your communities tend to fail very badly.
It can be difficult to recognize that you parted ways with reality because so many of your newfound followers flattered your intelligence for being woke-critical. If you can't listen to the speech Trump gave on 1/6 and put the pieces together on how the fascist organism directs itself: from mob ("FIGHT FOR TRUMP") to leader, to the mob in the halls of our power, then you, as well as your subculture, are doomed to irrelevancy.
The difference between Chapman's analysis and Scott's isn't Chapman's (admittedly poorly named) Sociopaths. Those are basically the same people as Scott's zero-sum-status-seeking infighters, though Chapman mostly focuses on their financial rather than social ambitions. Approximately the same process works for both, and approximately the same people will chose to pursue them at the expense of the subculture's health.
The difference is that Chapman's version includes the MOPs as an important transitional element. Scott describes a subculture as composed of people who want to create something new, contribute to the subculture's goal, and build positive-sum status in so doing. And when that becomes impractical because all the low-hanging fruit is picked and what little is out of reach of the newbies, Scott sees people who are seeking to create and contribute and earn status and are frustrated.
One hundred and thirty five thousand people attended San Diego Comicon this year. I'll wager that at *least* a hundred thousand of them never intended to create anything and never expected to gain any status within the Comicon community. They were just there for the show, to watch the movies and see all the other cool stuff, and hang out with people who shared their tastes. Possibly a few of them even read some comic books. These are the MOPs, "Members Of the Public".
Many of these MOPs can easily be monetized by "sociopaths", which is the dynamic Chapman describes. Other people here have described D&D and boardgaming as subcultures that don't seem to fit Scott's model - but they do fit the model of lots of people just wanting to consume the content and willing to deliver money who provides their sort of content.
In other subcultures, the MOPs will be some combination of less numerous, less visible, and harder to monetize. I don't think they'll be wholly absent, though - when e.g. a political protest movement becomes popular enough, it will get plenty of people who just want to join the party, enjoy the rallies (or riots), and feel like they are Doing Something. I think these are the sort of subcultures Scott is experiencing, and generalizing from. The MOPs are still there, but they're not as obviously distinct from the later generations of Geeks.
But even there, the MOPs are I think important to the status-infighting part of the process. They are harder to monetize than e.g. gamers or comic-book fans, but they can still afford status to the people they accept as leaders. And even where there *is* money to be had, there will also be status and people will want to grab it. But status (and money) as given by content-consuming MOPs, is different from status as given by content-creating Geeks. Two separate axes of status, in a single community with a limited supply of e.g. awards and podium space and steering-committee memberships, gets you an extra dose of infighting.
I'm curious if anyone thinks the space expansionism movement has any resemblances to a subculture, or whether it has gone through phases, such as in Golden Age sci-fi vs. what we're seeing now with Zubrin's Mars Society and Musk's mission.
I don't know Chinese, but google translate suggests that the term means something like coiling in on itself, which I would describe as "Ouroborosing". Once the outside fertile ground is exhausted, the competition and fights naturally turn inward.
Scott had a post about human history on the old blog... About how each expansion eventually fizzles, until some cataclismic event kicks the state out of the (inadequate) equilibrium.
Scott, you are really really high status, and consequently you are going to be pretty much ground zero for any sociopathic reality distortion attempts. Of course you think you are lucky to never have witnessed a sociopath takeover. In other news, the teacher has never noticed any bullying in her classroom, and the king's son has never noticed any corruption in the kingdom.
This is pretty depressing. I mean, it seems to imply that all movements are primarily about a quest for status, rather than about the thing the movement claims to be about. To the extent that any
new movement is primarily about status, it's doomed to become uninteresting very quickly. Agreed. But to the extent that a new movement is about something other than status- then it can stay interesting/ relevant indefinitely. How often do those new movements succeed? Or how often do those new movements have their goals corrupted/ why do these goals get corrupted? Is it because of status seekers? Is it because the goals were not in tune with reality in the first place? These are the questions about new movements that interest me. Treating all new movements as interchangeable status-seeking machines seems to do great injustice to them. They're usually about more than this. At least at first.
"Yet unlike Chapman, I never felt like there was any influx of sociopaths. Sometimes I found myself on opposite sides of battle lines from some of the earliest and most valued members of the movement. But I never doubted they were honest; I hope they didn’t doubt me either."
Did they ever start a Scissor topic, or just, like you, felt obliged to pick a side? The sociopaths hypothesis have them rock the boat as they rise, no sense for anyone on top to pick a fight.
One other dynamic that I've seen that feeds into the cyclic nature of subcultures that is hinted at both in the status and the sociopath explanations, but is slightly different (apologies if other commenters have mentioned this):
Subcultures start off as several weirdos doing a cool, new thing that shares some sort of je ne sais quoi. However, the early and influential works are often *surprisingly* different - this is particularly salient in the early works of new genres of music. At some point, "the thing" becomes codified and, rather than being a melting pot of weirdos, there is a template for how "the thing" is done. This codification is in part caused by the arrival of the mop/sociopath axis alliance. It's also facilitated by copycats looking for easy (but vanishing) status. I think it's slightly different than either of those things, though.
Once the "cool, weird new thing" becomes "a checklist of things you can do," several things happen. Copycats flood the market. N00b purists evangelize the "checklist of things you can do" without perspective on the early nature of the movement. Both the excesses and the insipidity of the movement are rightly criticized by smart weirdos — who then form a new subculture in response to their frustration with the homogenization, status-seeking, and perspectiveless moralizing that ruined the cool, weird new thing they used to love.
The Chapman model is, I think, based on music, and seems very much on-point. A fascination book that many readers here may enjoy is _Major Labels: A History of Popular Music in Seven Genres_ which is constantly talking about this and the constantly repeated themes of
- the rest of world is <insert epithet> because they don't like our music
- the old music was great when it was authentic, before the rest of the world got involved
It works for music (and perhaps some music-adjacent things like clubs and fashion?) because all the elements meet the model. But most sub-cultures don't match the model in some way.
I think artists want to believe that they somehow fit into this model, and perhaps there's a weird art world I know nothing about where it works. But art is not something that is sold to the masses (a sociopath invading an art scene will monetize perhaps by making it cool to certain millionaires, but there's not really any machinery to monetize art by selling it to the masses).
Film goes the other way, you don't even get started in film unless you sell to the masses. The gap between some weirdo making art movies that three other people watch and a normal movie is basically unbridgeable. Mumblecore is just on the edge – with the result that normal people are irritated as hell by it, whereas hipsters don't gain much cred by referring to it. There's not much there to monetize and no obvious path to do so.
(Perhaps porn represents the invasion of the sociopaths into what used to be a quiet little niche for afficionados? I guess that's what Boogie Nights is trying to claim.)
So consider for example either atheism or feminism. Is there a way to monetize atheism?
Is there even much cultural capital in atheism? Honestly the people talking about the influence of the Four Horsemen of Atheism (for good or ill) always struck me as basically far up their own fundaments, absolutely certain that the rest of the world was obsessed with their fights as to whether Jungle Music was a legitimate evolution of Punk or a heresy that betrayed Punk, unaware that the outside world had no idea about either and could not care less.
How about feminism? Well plenty of people will tell you that Woke has sold out, that feminism has become a way for Dove to advertise and for Target to sell even more different types of clothes ("a spunky girl can be mountain climbing in the morning, at the office in the afternoon, at a cocktail party at night, and she needs appropriate outfits for all three!")
That this hasn't led to any sort of "collapse of feminism" probably says nothing about sub-cultures, but says something about holy words. If a culture manages to become holy then you never criticize the words, they just mean whatever you want them to mean. So: is it feminist to go to bed on the first date, or to hold out for marriage? Apparently, yes. Is it feminist to support trans-rights or see them as distraction? Yes. Is it feminist to be a home maker, or to prioritize starting a company over starting a family? Yes.
I think what this tells us is that there are multiple ways for scenes/subcultures to evolve.
One is the Chapman model (if there's a way to monetize the mops).
One is the Scott Alexander model, where there's no money but there is status to fight over.
One is the apotheosis model, where (largely for historo-political reasons) words and symbols associated with the subculture become sacred, so sacred that they cannot be attacked (which means, inevitably, that they become meaningless attached to anything and everything).
I think there are other models. For example a field may be technically demanding enough that even the fans are rare, and mops are largely impossible. (Some games of skill? Any sort of serious discussion of math pr physics?)
I have some Thomist friends. They create endless frustration and intellectual stimulation. But Thomism, you will quickly find, had it's own efflorescence and involution in the 19th and early 20th century. Did you know it wasn't until 1879 that Thomism became *the philosophy* of the Catholic church, that even to this day Canon Law says that Thomas Aquinas' theology and philosophical method will have a high place in the instruction of priests? But that this mandate is only loosely followed? For by 1879, the influence of Kant, Hegel, and other continental philosophers was so great upon theology, that the Vatican thought putting Aquinas on top, might help stem the tide of idealism and Kantian dualism - at least within the Church - and provide a workable realism to ground the sciences and theology? That this effort resulted in many schools of Thomism forming, synthesizing different elements from the contemporary and the ancient tradition, and then fracturing into an endless pit of ineffectual navel gazing? Did you know that after 30 minutes one can find out "what type of Thomist" one is talking to and be able to forecast their opinion on such topics as prime matter, animal welfare, the foundations of mathematics, and the role of consequences in moral action? What perfect loveliness of this colossal wreck!
Too long, didn't read. How do I get large status with no effort? (This is a joke).
The book "Speedrunning Science" notes one solution to this, specficially in speedrunning: Endlessly splitting by game, category, etc. Everyone famous to 15 people.
Another solution would be to give me, FractalCycle, 100% of the world's status.
One of the few pleasures of getting old is believing you are uniquely capable of realizing stuff like this because of your age -- which you do occasionally whereupon you immediate remember something you've read somewhere about wisdom. You've stolen that pleasure. Good on you!
I think this is an excellent post, very insightful and well-reasoned, with just one issue: I think the use of the word "status" almost ruins it. Here's the question: do the people within the movement fighting each other think they're fighting for personal status (rather than for what they believe is right, or other principled goal)? If yes, well I'm struggling to imagine someone consciously joining an intellectual or ethical movement for the purpose of gaining status as NOT being a borderline sociopath. If no, then it seems pretty uncharitable to use the word.
"I'm on a crusade to return this movement to what I believe are its true principles."
"Oh, you're on a crusade for higher status?"
"...no, I really believe the movement's lost its way morally and--"
"Yeah, that's what we call wanting status,"
"But it's not about my status it's about--"
"La la la, all I'm hearing is you're a power-hungry seeker of status."
I'm sure there are lots of people unconsciously motivated by selfish self-advancement in what they think are moral crusades, but assuming that of everyone, without requiring evidence of it in any particular case, is not only rudely uncharitable, it's also in tension with the anti-cynical "no sociopaths required" tone of the rest of the post.
This doesn't seem to explain the evolution of punk rock to me. Do you think it's possible that maybe some people get something more "authentic" out of some subcultures then the simple factors that are modeled here? This model strike me as being way over reductionist and doesnt seem to account for something like "genuine value".
Something like this goes on in literature. There seems to be a large-scale cycle in which entire philosophies of literature are replaced every century or so: late middle-ages allegory, the Renaissance, neo-classicism, Enlightenment, Romanticism, naturalism, modernism. These large-scale cycles affect nearly all art in unison, although in different ways (e.g., modern art is quite different from modern literature), and not in unison at different places (e.g., the Renaissance didn't really reach England until 2 centuries after beginning in Italy).
English literature and literary theory has smaller-scale waves, which don't sync up neatly with the bigger multi-modal waves, e.g.: realism (Balzac), scientific experimental realism (Zola), progressive fiction (Dickens), modernism, New Criticism, whatever you call what they did in the 1950s, post-modernism, wokeness.
The pattern isn't perfect. For instance, Marxism played a large role in 20th-century literary criticism, but can't be assigned to a single time period; it was big at least in the 1930s, 1960s, and 1990s.
Scott's model is missing some things that played a big part in literary cycles:
1. Inversion. Each cycle or wave is primarily an attack on the previous one, which derives its values mostly by inverting most of the values of the previous one. The English Renaissance, which to us is just Shakespeare, cast aside the dictums of the Middle Ages; neo-classicism brought them back; the Enlightenment brought back Renaissance naturalism, individualism, & scientific inquiry; Romanticism rebelled against the science part and against naturalist metaphysics (but not technique); modernism became largely defined as the opposition to naturalism and modernity (which is why photography is considered non-art rather than modernized painting).
2. Infiltration of institutions. One clear example is how Ezra Pound deliberately infiltrated prominent English Literature journals with his own people and used them to promote his ideology, most-notably in manufacturing an artificial positive reception of James Joyce's /Ulysses/. Another is how the American English Literature and English teacher journals were taken over by Marxists, leveraging the anti-war movement, in the late 1960s.
3. Slander, usually done after infiltrating institutions. The clearest example is the slander of the New Critics. Every book on the history of English literary theory that talks about the New Critics says nothing but lies about them. The wave of new literary theorists after them, starting perhaps with Northrup Frye and Frank Kermode, first convinced people that "New Critics" was a valid category (it mostly was), then convinced them that the New Critics had said nothing but things they'd never said or at least never agreed on (like "historical context and authorial intent is irrelevant"), then finally, when the New Critics had been swept off the scene, claimed as their own novel ideas the things the New Critics had actually advocated.
Having watched psychedelics go from subculture to effectively mainstream I've been wondering what happens when the consumerisation forces of the free market root out every niche, selling all possible subcultures back to us as soon as we can develop them, and the low barrier of entry to previously hard-to-enter subcultures that social media brings makes each burgeoning subculture evolve and dissipate quickly with few long term committers.
Doesn't this "mainstream" everything? And if (let's say national) cultures become more mainstreamed, and we run out of taboo, there is no rebellion, your parents are likely still cool af, giving you the only options of being cool af or uncool af, there is no tangible oppressor to position yourself against, the romantic struggle against the other that many cling to for meaning disappears, and therefore we become less differentiated, less individuated (in spite of the individuation force of the free market consumerisation), we all did or are doing the trips and all have tattoo sleeves and tidy beards, the snap-on cultural accessories we pick up and drop become more and more meaningless, the infinite choices we have collapse into our preferences, shaped crudely by our underlying rudimentary culture, we become less concerned about what is happening outside our cultural borders and we gather again around the local maypoles that unites us, we become more culturally unified and nationalistic, we become more tribal within our national boundaries, or other more local boundaries, we are all eventually reading from the same parochial page.
I think this is evident in the recent rise of populism (check ngram for populism to get a feel for that), which leads me to thinking about the tension between the global market economy and it's infinite choice element, and the simultaneous rise of nationalistic politics in the West, effectively revealing our parochial preferences.
What happens to this dynamic when we all become mainstream, when all dogs are having their day together at all times? Do we need to reconfigure connotations to see that the popular mainstream is the big tribe, and that that is where we are all heading with this niche-eliminating system?
>Ordinary rank-and-file members hear so much criticism of the movement that it’s hard for them to stay optimistic about it. They stop talking about it as The Amazing Movement That Will Change Everything, and become defensive: “I’m not, like, one of those members of the movement, I just sort of think some of their ideas make sense sometimes.”
I think an important thing to note in this post is that most Karate is fake, you can in fact just pretend to be a black belt and start your own school and get status and money, and there's no formal system for preventing it. You may think winning fights would be the final arbiter of skill at a martial art, but in practice it turns out not to matter much. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=gjbSCEhmjJA&t=4s
I think the same dynamics and incentives apply to a lot of non-profit stuff too.
The sociopaths can't show up and beat genuine skilled fighters at their own game just by being willing to lie, but they can show up and cash in from ignorant outsiders.
I firmly believe that cycles don't exist and never have existed.
This is my shitposting way of saying "I have never, once, in my years of experience modeling human behavioral time series, come across an honest-to-god cyclical pattern (excluding time of year/month/week/day effects)." And yet for some reason, every time I show a time series to anyone ever, people swear to god the data looks cyclical.
This comments section is such fertile ground for likes right now, there's no need for anyone to disagree with me. If you don't agree, just post your own comment and we can both prosper. If you do, just say so and you'll look like a genius for agreeing before everyone else jumped on the bandwagon. Plus you'll be playing out a meta-commentary on the article, which should be good enough to insulate us against one round of criticism. It's free karma real estate!
You either exit the subculture a geek or stay long enough to see yourself become the sociopath.
Is this post intended to chronicle the cycle of those subcultures that are clearly 'movements', or is it intended to cover subcultures in general? Because I can think of any number of garden variety subcultures (skateboarding in the 70s and 80s, punk rock, D&D guys, etc) that had/have significant cultural traction that don't obviously fit this model.
If we're just talking about 'ism' cultures then it seems like a lot of this tracks, though even there I'm guessing that those 'ism' cultures where a critical number of the participants are clearly committed to making sure everyone knows how smart they are might be more susceptible. The Klan (in its many unfortunate incarnations) was/is definitely a subculture, but just as I don't see it necessarily fitting this pattern I also don't suspect it's a subculture where the members were eager to tell you how bored they were in K-12, or what their SAT scores were.
First follower is Andrew, not Simon Peter.
This ties into a concept I recently learned about, "subcultural capital" as coined by Sarah Thornton in 1995. Her book Club Cultures is on my to-read list after I saw a reference in an unrelated book.
The idea is that music/art subcultures like Punk usually define themselves in opposition to whatever the relevant "mainstream" is, which helps in the early stages because it attracts people who are not happy with their mainstream status. Much of the fighting for status in a subculture eventually revolves around being hip or authentic, and I think that's a key part of the involution phase. This is why "selling out" makes people so angry: trying to convert your status inside a subculture to money or mainstream popularity shows a lack of commitment to the subculture. Once a particular subculture has been around long enough it's pretty hard for anything to be "hip" so it has to postcycle and either fragment or stabilize around something other than status.
Wow! This is one of those posts that crystalizes things. You've described exactly what's happened in science fiction. Perhaps it's happened several times. But, I was disappointed you didn't give personal examples. I suggest that it (giving personal examples) would be risky, but high pay-off.
> I never felt like there was any influx of sociopaths.
And I bet many to the large majority of times you were right. But you probably were attracted to movements that didn’t have their fair share of sociopaths. And even if they did, you avoided seeing this at the individual level.
> each faction might well think that the subculture must have been taken over by sociopaths
And they are wrong some of the time. But definitely not all of the time. The cyclic pattern you describe feels right to me, but it’s often accelerated by sociopaths.
I think you missed a key dynamic. As the opportunities to break new grounddry up and it becomes harder to advance and there's more money/momentum the feedback loops break down. People start to be rewarded for conforming to the expectations of the current movement consensus. That's when you get Loyalists. Loyalists are the opposite of Heresiarchs and their followers. They not only dogmatically follow a pro-movement ethos but they actively purge and purity-spiral people who are not sufficiently devoted or who smell too much like Heresiarchs.
In the early days you pushed things forward by improving the movement, having interesting ideas, offering actionable criticism and then executing, and so on. As that becomes harder (and you need to be a genius) you can instead get ahead by unswerving loyalty and attacking the heresiarchs, effectively reassuring people in power. And people who look kind of like heresiarchs which creates space by clearing out competition.
This produces a more orthodox but less interesting kind of thought. It's easier to be a loyalist and it gives you a chance to create new virgin territory by invoking what amount to purity spirals. Yes, you might not be able to align AI as well as that guy. But you can find that time he said that maybe AI alignment wasn't the most important thing ever and he needs to be purged! (Whether this example happens I can't say. But you get the concept.)
This hardens the organization, ossifies it. This can be good if it really has found the one true path. But usually it's actually a trap. One that's especially hard to detect for true believers. And a worse trap than the heresiarchs.
Some of the heretics want to burn everything down but most of them are reformers who just want to make their own ideas dominant. But Loyalists force them out of the movement and the movement itself into increasingly rigid forms of thinking. In the process of making the movement pure it destroys its immune system. And then the question becomes: did the movement amass enough money and power in its earlier stages to maintain itself as a mature organization, driven more by momentum than by innovation? Or does this ossified shell die?
Something not mentioned is that when the people who are doing this cool new thing because this is a cool thing that I want to do for its own sake (and, incidentally, I might get some status from it, even though I don't care about such things very much, because I don't see any way to stop this) begin to be approached in numbers in the group by the people who are doing this cool new thing because they can get status from it, and are precisely drawn to it because it will generate status for them, and status is what they care about more than anything or most anything in the world) -- Gresham's law kicks in.
Many of the cool people *leave* because they cannot stand to be around people who *aren't* in it for its own sake.
I'm sick of starting cool groups, companies, etc which I have to leave when it stops being about the things I love and care about, done by people I like more than a little, and starts being about giving status to people I am at best indifferent to, and often dislike, and who often take a strong dislike to me because, for as long as I can hold out, I will try to flatten the status levels which cuts into their prestige.
If you haven't looked on the creation of status as an undesirable outcome that needs limiting, you may not have ended up in a situation where the first person to drive you and other likeminded out of your group gets to keep all the chips. And that is one place where the psychopaths thrive.
Seen this in a political movement. What was absolutely shocking is how fast it went through the stages once it got to success. It was basically a long grind of ~10 years to get legitimacy, a relatively short burst of success and very rapid expansion to become a national/parliamentary party (around one year)... and 6 months after the elections the energies already started focusing inwards, with everything blowing up and getting completely "taken over by sociopaths" before the 1 year mark. Romania, 2016/17, USR.
Scott' description here is pretty spot on. What I can add is that strong and stable leadership might change the pattern, especially if it has some form of sanctity. May be why religious and ideological organizations thrive more than secular ones. There will always be pressure to go for status seeking inside the org, but if it's either hopeless (with strong leadership) or even better, hopeless and heretical, then you just put a lid on it and use the extra pressure to force expansion and object-level results.
In my example above leadership turned out to be an unexpectedly weak point, and once the inward status race started, there wasn't much hope to do anything else. You could try to do good work, but without getting aligned with the right faction (or at least a faction), at the next power shuffle you'll end up just not getting an eligible spot, even while being literally the most active member of parliament in history (happened), or having great results but being replaced by a glorified intern in very fair internal elections (also happened).
Trying to speculate and model what would have happened with strong enough leadership... and I still see problems. Even if the absolute top status level is not available, there is still pressure to turn inwards for the next few upper levels (I'm reminded of the quip "All politics is internal"). Leadership needs to be not just unassailable, but strong enough to bash heads and force either a clear process, or some form of Sanctity / alignment that makes too much internal focus something that Just Isn't Done.
That's a huge advantage older orgs have over new: the power system is old and ossified enough, almost a bureaucracy. It's true, the best hope is "a position commensurate to your talent and diligence", which means on average you get less. But even if the management may be less competent than you, you get the guarantee that your peers won't be fighting you for status - they'll at most be competing with you, more or less fairly.
The tragedy here is that how passionately people feel about the Cause is not helping at all, without also having a mechanism to turn this Belief into negentropy. The only thing I can think of, that can turn a young org's energies outwards, is an unassailable central figure. And it needs to be unassailable, not just powerful, because he/she's the lid that keeps the pressure up and outwards.
>David Chapman’s Geeks, MOPs, and Sociopaths In Subculture Evolution is rightfully a classic, but it doesn’t match my own experience.
IMO Chapman's article exhibits one of the worst trends in the rationalist community: models that sound so profound and convincing that you can't tell if they're actually *true*.
My initial reaction was "Wow, this is brilliant! I see the matrix now!" Then I thought about the subcultures I'm familiar with: his model didn't fit any of them. Yeah, Chapman's mechanism makes sense and there may be elements of truth in it. Or it could just be a castle in the sky.
My own experience: subcultures generally die because the soil that supported them no longer exists.
For example, tape-traders. People used to record songs off the radio onto cassettes and share them at school. Or they'd stay up late and record anime off obscure channels (you'd get "tape kings" with literal mountains of Sailor Moon and Yu Yu Hakusho recordings in their basement, hand-labeled and everything. They held onto them like a hoard of dragon gold).
These subcultures died a long time ago. Was it because of some invasion of sociopaths? No, it's because PirateBay and 1337x made them obsolete.
Perhaps the sociopaths are always with us, but in the postcycle phase they are the ones at the top, exposed by the withdrawal of the enthusiasts for the original subculture?
Thank you for the article. It is plausible in certain conditions.
You think there are no sociopaths? Crypto is 90% sociopaths and it fits every point of your description perfectly. I could believe EA and new atheism had no sociopaths because the average member was too smart.
> you can’t just walk in and argue that YOU should be the black belt and the master should defer to YOU <
This is a common misperception about martial arts and karate in particular - that there is something very special about the achievement of a black belt.
It actually more like the academic equivalent of an undergraduate degree. To a 12 year old it might be extremely impressive, but in a meeting of full professors, a first degree denotes not much more than a basic introduction to a subject.
Wikipedia puts it rather well in its first paragraph about black belt ability -
< In contrast to the "black belt as master" stereotype, a black belt commonly indicates the wearer is competent in a style's basic technique and principles >
Another way of looking at it is that someone who has just achieved a black belt (after maybe two or three years of practice) is much nearer a complete beginner than a master.
Considering how often I feel the need to say some version of “I’m not, like, one of __those__ members of the Rationalist movement, I just sort of think some of their ideas make sense sometimes.”, I'd suppose we're firmly in at least Stage 3 now.
Also, I can't remember what blog the original reference came from, but I thought this was a somewhat better version of Chapman's article (despite being really wrong in different ways): https://status451.com/2016/09/15/social-gentrification/
Okay, so I have to ask; What observation or observations would falsify this model? Because I suspect we could find some internicean strife in many small groups and emerging cultures.
I think the sociopaths very much depend on the nature of the movement. For instance, I think something like EA is fairly 'sociopath-resistant' just because the movement is about finding the most rational ways to help people. The incentives are for finding smart ways of helping people and exploring ideas around that.
On the contrary, movements that are explicitly political or financial (think crypto and antitrust right now) are more likely to attract sociopaths because the paths to status are more direct, the status rewards are much greater, and there is much more incentive for bullshitting and/ or bullying people.
Crypto currently incentivises bullshitting normal people to get them to make your richer. Antitrust currently incentivises harassing big tech at every turn even when it makes everyone (including themselves) miserable.
In short, incentives determine the propensity for sociopathic capture.
What is "EA" mentioned in the tweet there? Tried looking it up but nothing really made any sense.
Like with Rao, I think so too with Chapman the Sociopath label is off (actually in almost any non-medical context where I've ever seen sociopath or psychopath used the term didn't fit - people just seem to have a hard time resisting the temptation to use it).
What's true is that when a subculture get's big it starts to attract people interested in power, money or status rather than the thing itself. That will lead to professionalisation, mainstreaming and dilution of the subculture. But calling all of that sociopathy seems like a really big stretch to me. By the same logic, anybody who chooses their career with any consideration for the job market, earning potential or potential impact would be a sociopath.
I think another thing that happens in a cycle is that the early fanatics are usually young people full of passion and idealism. As they get older and start to settle down, they themselves try to make the whole thing more stable and businesslike, something that can support their family. In Chapmans terminology the geek becomes the sociopath. Again, the label doesnt fit the category.
I think most people's hobbies never really leave Phase 1, and they're probably better off that way.
For example, one of my hobbies is playing Ultimate. I don't care about whether Ultimate is taking over as a major sport - it's popular enough already that I never have trouble finding people to play with. (There are semi-professional Ultimate teams, but they're not growing very much.)
I don't even care that much about improving my own playing skills - I've almost certainly plateaued. I play because it's fun, because it's healthy exercise, and because I've made a few friends. And most of the people I play with have the same attitude.
On the other hand, one of my hobbies that didn't work out well was writing on Quora. It was a great experience until around 2018 because few of the Top Writers took it seriously. But when the company tried to become profitable, they wrecked the existing culture.
So the lesson here is that if you want a simple, fun, drama-free life, you should look for things you enjoy that are low-status and have little chance of ever changing. And definitely stay away from political movements and from anything that's backed by VCs.
I think the term "Sociopath" sets up too high a bar."status seeking relatively unscrupulous person" rolls terribly off the tongue, but would definitely describe a lot of people in these spaces whose intentions might not be unaligned with the movement.
Probably not super mind-blowing, but I think the sociopaths are more likely to show up if the nature of the thing provides a path to personal enrichment (like monetarily). They might not all be antisocial but they certainly are grifters.
"One way for this to happen is institutionalization. A movement rises. It founds some groups to promote its agenda. The fires of excitement die down, and the groups remain. Feminism is no longer as big a deal as it once was, but we still have NOW and Planned Parenthood. These institutions have stopped being social Ponzi schemes. You join them as a day job. You expect to work hard, and at best get a position commensurate to your talent and diligence. It’s not really worth criticizing the leadership, because everything happens through formal governance structures which are hard to affect. Most people who want to be feminists have already decided to support Planned Parenthood and not you. And you cannot take over Planned Parenthood unless you win over their Board of Directors, which you won’t."
This process and its impact on progressive institutions, particularly nonprofits, will be a big part of my next book. (Available in 2023 from Simon & Schuster!)
Linked: The New Science of Networks
Book by Albert-László Barabási (2002) might be insightful, if we operationalize "subculture" as meaning a particular kind of "networked relationship".
I also think Scale: The Universal Laws of Life and Death in Organisms, Cities and Companies by Geoffrey West (2017) might useful to better describe the process of the growth and decline a subculture.
All of the sub-discussions here about calcification/true believers etc is really important too. Especially on a political/civilizational level.
All of the structures mentioned (the conferences, the journals, and so on) are institutions. And institutions at their core exist to stay the same. To perpetually stand firm on some core set of organizing principles. It applies to whatever institution you like--you are "instituting" something at a particular point in time and hoping that it will hold the line. Marriage, Boy Scouts, the church, the military, whatever.
This line of thinking is one of the bright lines of distinction between what we can loosely call "conservatives" and "liberals." In my case I am particularly in tune with this because I would rather conserve most things even if they are obsolete due to the aesthetic. And having that instinct gets one labelled [fill in the blank "ist" or "ophobe"]. It's not really any of those things, and comes from a good place in most cases.
However, things like the second amendment were instituted when the most powerful weapon on earth was an 8" ball that could knock down a wall and kill 2-3 people. This is the part where people like me must confront our nature to conserve, even if the proposed change is scary. It's just one example.
The "liberal" has another set of second and third-order effects and consequences to his internal drives that he must confront. To keep myself from going crazy I must, out of necessity assume they do that soul searching as well. Or else it becomes "they are trying to make America a communist/woke/totalitarian state with gulags and gas chambers for cis white males with jobs."
It sounds cliche, but the "truth" may be somewhere in the middle.
I wonder if mature professions follow this pattern. I’ve read (maybe here?) that 150 years ago, pretty much anyone who could read could get into law school, and practice law. Now you have to do five extracurricular activities to get into a good college, do volunteering and more activities in college while maintaining good grades to get into law school. Then get into good internships once you’re in law school etc.
Same with many other mature professions. What’s missing though, is the decline. And barring the collapse of society and/or the rule of law, I don’t imagine being a lawyer will ever be low status.
Other commenters seem to have more or less pointed out already that in this usage "sociopath" is a kind of pejorative label for a group rather than a literal diagnosis, but I'm surprised to see that nobody's mentioned the more obvious fact that *everybody who's in it for status* is a Sociopath in this model of subcultures. You're supposed (according to the implicit moral of this type of model, which I subscribe to) to be in a subculture for the thing in itself; *any amount* of using it instrumentally, as a means to status rather than an end in itself, makes you a Sociopath (or arguably I guess a MOP). All of the people you describe who join in phase three and are disappointed to find there's no free-floating status to harvest and upset that they're doomed to be low-status forever, rather than rejoicing that so many people share their special interest, are fuckups.
My own experience with the rationalist community, and political organisations is that a major factor is people having other things to do with their time that takes them away from the community, either not working on the same stuff anymore, or working on it in private. If you look at the main posters from the less wrong 'golden age' in the late 2000s early 2010s most don't post anymore. Not because of ideological schisms but because they had kids, or have jobs that take up most of their time and energy. Even if they're working on related areas it won't be in a publicly visible way (e.g someone who used to post about game theory and economics goes and works for a bank, they might be writing similar things but it's all internal). And while new people can replace them they're less enthusiastic.
It's a cliché that people are radicals when they're young, then settle down to do the same things as their parents. But it's a significant phenomenon
I think this insufficiently considers the explanation typically given by the actual people in the movement who are making criticisms / fragmenting off: that they've grown disillusioned with the core ideas of the movement & realized it doesn't solve everything like it claimed to (or that it at least has deep unaddressed issues). What makes you doubt that explanation (and think instead that it's primarily a status competition thing)? Or do you think those are actually compatible in some deep way?
There's a much simpler explanation for feminism being in the "postcycle" phase: feminism accomplished huge swathes of its goals (right to vote, reduced sexism, etc), so people who agree with it have less reason to make an effort.
There's also the fact that if you spend ten years forming a new school of art with two other people you're close with and who also live for that school, you're unlikely to be willing to say "This movement has accomplished what it set out to accomplish so I guess I'll go home." More likely you'll create things more worthy of negative criticism while also being much less personally willing to heed that criticism.
I wonder if this is the next evolutionary step of the thing you and Chapman are both describing. Like Chapman's version is how subcultures primarily functioned 1960~2000 and your version is how subcultures function(ed) from 2000~now.
I think about the 60's and 70's subcultures of my parents' generation and they seem (with a nod to the possible distortions of pandering/revisionist histories) to fit Chapman's model (e.g. Jobs vs Woz) much more so than the ones from the last 10 to 20 years.
Come to think of it, that would actually tie into Chapman's thesis a bit, i.e. that subcultures no longer function. It isn't worth it to the sociopaths to become involved anymore.
A lot of this sounds like truism, or selection bias. Thing isn't popular or exciting to most, then it catches on and grows, then it stops growing, fragments into new directions and isn't novel but becomes part of the mainstream. This HAS TO describe literally anything in the past that was ever popular/exciting, because it wasn't always that way (started small) and can't grow indefinitely without becoming either an institution (stable leadership/direction), fragmented (new leadership/direction), or just falling apart.
But what about cultures that never grew, or that don't confer enough money/status/passion among participants (not exciting enough) that you can quit your day job? I guess you wouldn't call it a subculture then ... but some people take e.g. being a bike rider quite seriously, without there being a status struggle about who is True Lord of the Bike Shorts and Leader of the Movement.
Rewards being high for the innovators (like the example of founding Google) isn't a Ponzi scheme, because the reward for doing X is how much value X produces, not getting people to pay you so that they too can do X. The Google founders don't sell the secret of how to found Google in an infinite cycle of Google sales, they sell ads. Probably why Google isn't "a subculture" either, but weird example.
Also a Ponzi scheme is strictly better for the first movers. Here we have a phase of low-reward die-hards before growth that don't get their investment paid off, that were there before it became a Ponzi. Maybe blogs in the 90s were higher-visibility and you trace that to the culture of today, what about the BBS users before that? So better to say "at some point, some subcultures become a sort of Ponzi scheme", which would also make more clear the post-selection of picking just the successful subcultures and just the right times.
An alternative, parallel explanation is just about doing work.
Initially, there's a lot of work to do, and consistency isn't as important. Then there's some foundational work left, but mostly people are building on the foundations, sometimes in different directions, and conflicts are becoming more obvious. And finally, all basic parts are in place, so new work is either a refinement which (as you point out) no one notices, or constructive criticism, or a fork of some part, depending on whether the new person agrees, partially agrees, or disagrees with the part they're most interested in. Since as postulated no one notices the refinements, all people notice are the criticisms and the forks.
I'm not saying your model doesn't exist. Maybe it's more salient! Mostly I'm asking, how would we tell the difference?
I think there's a new movement starting up now, which is something like "religion is inevitable and attempts to banish it have only created not-so-great religions (marxism, wokism, various cryptocurrencies etc) so we might as well be conscious about it and try to create one that doesn't have the problems of either traditional religions, or the newer non-religion religions."
I'm seeing this play out in multiple different substacks with lots of followers. Lots of people realizing we can't escape the conscious cultivation of value systems, the only question is _which_ value system to consciously cultivate.
Of course, this new movement seems like it's probably the oldest movement in the book. Perhaps what's different is that ideas are now far more competitive with each other than ever before. It's like social media was 'gain of function' research for memes, and the ubermeme, the great-grandaddy of all memes, "good", is now likely to stumble upon some incredibly powerful variant, possibly one that's K selected in stead of r-selected.
My take is that most people read "desperately struggling" as "sociopathy" because people very rarely encounter desperate struggle, and it is sociopathic, in that to desperately struggle you have to turn off that part of you that cares who is hurt in your desperate struggles.
Status is one of the few places left where the sort of people who comment online encounter a situation where A. resources are scarce, B. "wealth" can be gained by cruelty and so C. it's worthwhile to sociopath.
I feel this is a very strong framework with useful applications. The communities I have (as a lurker) seen this happen to this seems like a good fit, and the community I saw that partially avoided this had a baked-in solution.
However, twice in this essay a word was chosen that took me out of stream. It showed up at critical points that discussed the method of action but the word chosen seemed itself to contradict the thesis. That word was "realize".
The thesis, as I understand it, is this process enters its infighting stage due to status games pursued not by sociopaths, but by well-meaning people (my interpretation of "good") being affected by incentives. Realize, to me, implies a conscious discovery of information. So when you say "This is the stage where the last tier joins the pyramid, realizes that there won’t be a tier below them, and feels betrayed." why would a well-meaning person feel betrayed by that? Again, when you say "At some point, everyone realizes you can’t get easy status from the subculture anymore." and to a lesser extent on "The actual elites realize their status is also precarious, and some of them side with the counterelites in order to get a new base, bringing the conflicts to the highest levels." why would well-meaning people consciously seeing the rules of status affecting them make them start behaving in intentionally antisocial ways?
The people who see "my status or opportunity of status is threatened, therefore I need to wrest status away from someone else" are the sociopaths you said there isn't an influx of or aren't taking over. Unless your greater point is the sociopaths were there from the start and the change of incentives directs energy previously building something into competitive energy. Which is a fair point to make but it doesn't coexist well next to your other points barring some other synthesis like "sociopaths are good people" or "sociopaths naturally occur everywhere and the only way to contain them is to create an incentive system that focuses their energies on growth/good".
Those might actually be good syntheses, but I wonder if the non-sociopath thesis can be salvaged by finding a different method of action other than realizing that status is no longer available and desiring status.
Haven't even read this article yet but immediately thought of: https://xkcd.com/1095/
A direction for Further Research: how does the down cycle of an existing movement breed the fomentation of a new one? what about a cultural space that is absolutely glutted with conflicting movements, or one in which one movement is so hegemonic that new movements become subordinate to it?
Interesting essay, but it would be nice if it incorporated the insights of Mark Fisher “Exiting the Vampire Castle,” which was referred to yesterday in "Present At the Creation: Of the Social Justice Memeplex Within the Anarchist Movemen" on the Year Zero substack.
To summarize, these essays outline how the politics of denunciation affect left-wing subcultures.
It is impossible to read this article without thinking of a relevant article in the June 1959 issue of Mad Magazine.
http://www.kaleberg.com/public/Non%20Conformists.pdf
Hypothetically, a subculture is kept healthy if there are many opportunities to do the thing without winning big. For example, the basis for gaming sub-cultures is small groups doing gaming. It's probably possible to become a big name DM and make money at it (I'm guessing) but that's very little of what's going on.
This is just geeks mops sociopaths with different words. Only a sociopath allows their "desperation" of high status to disrupt and bring bad vibes to an entire subculture for their own personal gain. A non-sociopath would just be at peace with the fact that they showed up too late and stay in their lane. The "counterelites" in this article are just the sociopaths of geeksmops.
I find the theory described by Scott very convincing. But, why wouldn't the psycopaths turn up in these movements and utlimately take over? After all, there is research showing that psychopats are over-proportionally represented at managerial positions in corporations. Why should movements be different?
I have long believed that the existence of a Rock and Roll Hall of Fame is a sure sign that rock and roll is dead as a seminal cultural movement.
Now, it's an institution, complete with self-appointed Authorities.
I first learned the term "involution" while studying breast cancer. After a female (mouse, human, whatever) ceases to breast feed, the breast tissue reduces back somewhat so that it's closer to the pre-pregnancy state. Because otherwise you're producing milk all the time and anybody's baby will make you leak all over the place. Interesting to see the term catch on outside a strict biological context.
There seems to be a kind of tension in this piece. You note that periods of involution come about when "the only source of status is to seize someone else’s - ie to start a fight." Which makes sense! But later on you say that a) the phenomenon of these cycles doesn't really actually involve sociopathy and b) "doesn't require that the new people be any different in ethics or commitment from the old people".
Isn't it the case that deliberately starting a fight for the motive of gaining status is a kind of sociopathic behavior? Likewise, doesn't intentionally making a movement more vulnerable and fractious, if not sabotaging it directly, for your own gain count as a kind of evidence for being unethical, or uncommitted to the movement?
My favorite Scottpost in years :D
I wonder if part of the problem is the difficulty of getting a job in EA. If I was the EA leadership, I think I would've only done a marketing campaign to attract more junior EAs once the movement reached the point where it was having a hard time filling open positions. I wonder if the current strategy is creating a sort of "EA overproduction" where a huge wave of new junior EAs compete over a comparatively tiny pool of EA jobs. In the worst case, this could create a huge pool of disaffected ex-EAs and cripple EA's potential for a generation.
> Sometimes I found myself on opposite sides of battle lines from some of the earliest and most valued members of the movement. But I never doubted they were honest; I hope they didn’t doubt me either.
I don't doubt that you're honest, Scott, and I don't think you're a sociopath. You just never seemed to grasp that writing about politics comes with a certain amount of responsibility. That your communities actually did have more racists in them because you deliberately sought a neoreactionary audience (a predictable effect), and your denialism about the frightening and very definitely fascistic movement behind Trump only made things worse.
I don't think you're dishonest, or a sociopath. I just think you were a useful idiot, and until you figure out where the extremism in our politics really lies (oof that was a bad essay), you're perpetually going to be fighting the fact that your own writing discredits you as a political commentator of merit.
Woke Derangement Syndrome is just as real as the Trump Derangement Syndrome I've been accused of having in all of your communities. The evaporative cooling effect of your apparent willingness to indulge a 'two screens' postmodern methodology for papering over basic warning signs is so strong that the people who are willing to tell you you were wrong are vanishingly few.
Sometimes it's as simple as: you were wrong about such an important thing at such an early date that you can't recover until you publicly recognize that. Trumpism was fascistic from 2016. This is the basic political intelligence test that your communities tend to fail very badly.
It can be difficult to recognize that you parted ways with reality because so many of your newfound followers flattered your intelligence for being woke-critical. If you can't listen to the speech Trump gave on 1/6 and put the pieces together on how the fascist organism directs itself: from mob ("FIGHT FOR TRUMP") to leader, to the mob in the halls of our power, then you, as well as your subculture, are doomed to irrelevancy.
The difference between Chapman's analysis and Scott's isn't Chapman's (admittedly poorly named) Sociopaths. Those are basically the same people as Scott's zero-sum-status-seeking infighters, though Chapman mostly focuses on their financial rather than social ambitions. Approximately the same process works for both, and approximately the same people will chose to pursue them at the expense of the subculture's health.
The difference is that Chapman's version includes the MOPs as an important transitional element. Scott describes a subculture as composed of people who want to create something new, contribute to the subculture's goal, and build positive-sum status in so doing. And when that becomes impractical because all the low-hanging fruit is picked and what little is out of reach of the newbies, Scott sees people who are seeking to create and contribute and earn status and are frustrated.
One hundred and thirty five thousand people attended San Diego Comicon this year. I'll wager that at *least* a hundred thousand of them never intended to create anything and never expected to gain any status within the Comicon community. They were just there for the show, to watch the movies and see all the other cool stuff, and hang out with people who shared their tastes. Possibly a few of them even read some comic books. These are the MOPs, "Members Of the Public".
Many of these MOPs can easily be monetized by "sociopaths", which is the dynamic Chapman describes. Other people here have described D&D and boardgaming as subcultures that don't seem to fit Scott's model - but they do fit the model of lots of people just wanting to consume the content and willing to deliver money who provides their sort of content.
In other subcultures, the MOPs will be some combination of less numerous, less visible, and harder to monetize. I don't think they'll be wholly absent, though - when e.g. a political protest movement becomes popular enough, it will get plenty of people who just want to join the party, enjoy the rallies (or riots), and feel like they are Doing Something. I think these are the sort of subcultures Scott is experiencing, and generalizing from. The MOPs are still there, but they're not as obviously distinct from the later generations of Geeks.
But even there, the MOPs are I think important to the status-infighting part of the process. They are harder to monetize than e.g. gamers or comic-book fans, but they can still afford status to the people they accept as leaders. And even where there *is* money to be had, there will also be status and people will want to grab it. But status (and money) as given by content-consuming MOPs, is different from status as given by content-creating Geeks. Two separate axes of status, in a single community with a limited supply of e.g. awards and podium space and steering-committee memberships, gets you an extra dose of infighting.
I'm curious if anyone thinks the space expansionism movement has any resemblances to a subculture, or whether it has gone through phases, such as in Golden Age sci-fi vs. what we're seeing now with Zubrin's Mars Society and Musk's mission.
I don't know Chinese, but google translate suggests that the term means something like coiling in on itself, which I would describe as "Ouroborosing". Once the outside fertile ground is exhausted, the competition and fights naturally turn inward.
Scott had a post about human history on the old blog... About how each expansion eventually fizzles, until some cataclismic event kicks the state out of the (inadequate) equilibrium.
Scott, you are really really high status, and consequently you are going to be pretty much ground zero for any sociopathic reality distortion attempts. Of course you think you are lucky to never have witnessed a sociopath takeover. In other news, the teacher has never noticed any bullying in her classroom, and the king's son has never noticed any corruption in the kingdom.
This is pretty depressing. I mean, it seems to imply that all movements are primarily about a quest for status, rather than about the thing the movement claims to be about. To the extent that any
new movement is primarily about status, it's doomed to become uninteresting very quickly. Agreed. But to the extent that a new movement is about something other than status- then it can stay interesting/ relevant indefinitely. How often do those new movements succeed? Or how often do those new movements have their goals corrupted/ why do these goals get corrupted? Is it because of status seekers? Is it because the goals were not in tune with reality in the first place? These are the questions about new movements that interest me. Treating all new movements as interchangeable status-seeking machines seems to do great injustice to them. They're usually about more than this. At least at first.
How could a group of people coordinate to avoid this infighting?
"Yet unlike Chapman, I never felt like there was any influx of sociopaths. Sometimes I found myself on opposite sides of battle lines from some of the earliest and most valued members of the movement. But I never doubted they were honest; I hope they didn’t doubt me either."
Did they ever start a Scissor topic, or just, like you, felt obliged to pick a side? The sociopaths hypothesis have them rock the boat as they rise, no sense for anyone on top to pick a fight.
One other dynamic that I've seen that feeds into the cyclic nature of subcultures that is hinted at both in the status and the sociopath explanations, but is slightly different (apologies if other commenters have mentioned this):
Subcultures start off as several weirdos doing a cool, new thing that shares some sort of je ne sais quoi. However, the early and influential works are often *surprisingly* different - this is particularly salient in the early works of new genres of music. At some point, "the thing" becomes codified and, rather than being a melting pot of weirdos, there is a template for how "the thing" is done. This codification is in part caused by the arrival of the mop/sociopath axis alliance. It's also facilitated by copycats looking for easy (but vanishing) status. I think it's slightly different than either of those things, though.
Once the "cool, weird new thing" becomes "a checklist of things you can do," several things happen. Copycats flood the market. N00b purists evangelize the "checklist of things you can do" without perspective on the early nature of the movement. Both the excesses and the insipidity of the movement are rightly criticized by smart weirdos — who then form a new subculture in response to their frustration with the homogenization, status-seeking, and perspectiveless moralizing that ruined the cool, weird new thing they used to love.
Don't different subcultures play out differently?
The Chapman model is, I think, based on music, and seems very much on-point. A fascination book that many readers here may enjoy is _Major Labels: A History of Popular Music in Seven Genres_ which is constantly talking about this and the constantly repeated themes of
- the rest of world is <insert epithet> because they don't like our music
- the old music was great when it was authentic, before the rest of the world got involved
It works for music (and perhaps some music-adjacent things like clubs and fashion?) because all the elements meet the model. But most sub-cultures don't match the model in some way.
I think artists want to believe that they somehow fit into this model, and perhaps there's a weird art world I know nothing about where it works. But art is not something that is sold to the masses (a sociopath invading an art scene will monetize perhaps by making it cool to certain millionaires, but there's not really any machinery to monetize art by selling it to the masses).
Film goes the other way, you don't even get started in film unless you sell to the masses. The gap between some weirdo making art movies that three other people watch and a normal movie is basically unbridgeable. Mumblecore is just on the edge – with the result that normal people are irritated as hell by it, whereas hipsters don't gain much cred by referring to it. There's not much there to monetize and no obvious path to do so.
(Perhaps porn represents the invasion of the sociopaths into what used to be a quiet little niche for afficionados? I guess that's what Boogie Nights is trying to claim.)
So consider for example either atheism or feminism. Is there a way to monetize atheism?
Is there even much cultural capital in atheism? Honestly the people talking about the influence of the Four Horsemen of Atheism (for good or ill) always struck me as basically far up their own fundaments, absolutely certain that the rest of the world was obsessed with their fights as to whether Jungle Music was a legitimate evolution of Punk or a heresy that betrayed Punk, unaware that the outside world had no idea about either and could not care less.
How about feminism? Well plenty of people will tell you that Woke has sold out, that feminism has become a way for Dove to advertise and for Target to sell even more different types of clothes ("a spunky girl can be mountain climbing in the morning, at the office in the afternoon, at a cocktail party at night, and she needs appropriate outfits for all three!")
That this hasn't led to any sort of "collapse of feminism" probably says nothing about sub-cultures, but says something about holy words. If a culture manages to become holy then you never criticize the words, they just mean whatever you want them to mean. So: is it feminist to go to bed on the first date, or to hold out for marriage? Apparently, yes. Is it feminist to support trans-rights or see them as distraction? Yes. Is it feminist to be a home maker, or to prioritize starting a company over starting a family? Yes.
I think what this tells us is that there are multiple ways for scenes/subcultures to evolve.
One is the Chapman model (if there's a way to monetize the mops).
One is the Scott Alexander model, where there's no money but there is status to fight over.
One is the apotheosis model, where (largely for historo-political reasons) words and symbols associated with the subculture become sacred, so sacred that they cannot be attacked (which means, inevitably, that they become meaningless attached to anything and everything).
I think there are other models. For example a field may be technically demanding enough that even the fans are rare, and mops are largely impossible. (Some games of skill? Any sort of serious discussion of math pr physics?)
I have some Thomist friends. They create endless frustration and intellectual stimulation. But Thomism, you will quickly find, had it's own efflorescence and involution in the 19th and early 20th century. Did you know it wasn't until 1879 that Thomism became *the philosophy* of the Catholic church, that even to this day Canon Law says that Thomas Aquinas' theology and philosophical method will have a high place in the instruction of priests? But that this mandate is only loosely followed? For by 1879, the influence of Kant, Hegel, and other continental philosophers was so great upon theology, that the Vatican thought putting Aquinas on top, might help stem the tide of idealism and Kantian dualism - at least within the Church - and provide a workable realism to ground the sciences and theology? That this effort resulted in many schools of Thomism forming, synthesizing different elements from the contemporary and the ancient tradition, and then fracturing into an endless pit of ineffectual navel gazing? Did you know that after 30 minutes one can find out "what type of Thomist" one is talking to and be able to forecast their opinion on such topics as prime matter, animal welfare, the foundations of mathematics, and the role of consequences in moral action? What perfect loveliness of this colossal wreck!
Too long, didn't read. How do I get large status with no effort? (This is a joke).
The book "Speedrunning Science" notes one solution to this, specficially in speedrunning: Endlessly splitting by game, category, etc. Everyone famous to 15 people.
Another solution would be to give me, FractalCycle, 100% of the world's status.
(Is this "Girardian"?)
What's EA??
One of the few pleasures of getting old is believing you are uniquely capable of realizing stuff like this because of your age -- which you do occasionally whereupon you immediate remember something you've read somewhere about wisdom. You've stolen that pleasure. Good on you!
What was the original movement for which the emergence and fragmentation of the intellectual dark web was the involution?
All of this sounds like the true definition of involution. This is the process of aging.
I think this is an excellent post, very insightful and well-reasoned, with just one issue: I think the use of the word "status" almost ruins it. Here's the question: do the people within the movement fighting each other think they're fighting for personal status (rather than for what they believe is right, or other principled goal)? If yes, well I'm struggling to imagine someone consciously joining an intellectual or ethical movement for the purpose of gaining status as NOT being a borderline sociopath. If no, then it seems pretty uncharitable to use the word.
"I'm on a crusade to return this movement to what I believe are its true principles."
"Oh, you're on a crusade for higher status?"
"...no, I really believe the movement's lost its way morally and--"
"Yeah, that's what we call wanting status,"
"But it's not about my status it's about--"
"La la la, all I'm hearing is you're a power-hungry seeker of status."
I'm sure there are lots of people unconsciously motivated by selfish self-advancement in what they think are moral crusades, but assuming that of everyone, without requiring evidence of it in any particular case, is not only rudely uncharitable, it's also in tension with the anti-cynical "no sociopaths required" tone of the rest of the post.
This doesn't seem to explain the evolution of punk rock to me. Do you think it's possible that maybe some people get something more "authentic" out of some subcultures then the simple factors that are modeled here? This model strike me as being way over reductionist and doesnt seem to account for something like "genuine value".
And this from the author of Beware The Man Of One Study.
Something like this goes on in literature. There seems to be a large-scale cycle in which entire philosophies of literature are replaced every century or so: late middle-ages allegory, the Renaissance, neo-classicism, Enlightenment, Romanticism, naturalism, modernism. These large-scale cycles affect nearly all art in unison, although in different ways (e.g., modern art is quite different from modern literature), and not in unison at different places (e.g., the Renaissance didn't really reach England until 2 centuries after beginning in Italy).
English literature and literary theory has smaller-scale waves, which don't sync up neatly with the bigger multi-modal waves, e.g.: realism (Balzac), scientific experimental realism (Zola), progressive fiction (Dickens), modernism, New Criticism, whatever you call what they did in the 1950s, post-modernism, wokeness.
The pattern isn't perfect. For instance, Marxism played a large role in 20th-century literary criticism, but can't be assigned to a single time period; it was big at least in the 1930s, 1960s, and 1990s.
Scott's model is missing some things that played a big part in literary cycles:
1. Inversion. Each cycle or wave is primarily an attack on the previous one, which derives its values mostly by inverting most of the values of the previous one. The English Renaissance, which to us is just Shakespeare, cast aside the dictums of the Middle Ages; neo-classicism brought them back; the Enlightenment brought back Renaissance naturalism, individualism, & scientific inquiry; Romanticism rebelled against the science part and against naturalist metaphysics (but not technique); modernism became largely defined as the opposition to naturalism and modernity (which is why photography is considered non-art rather than modernized painting).
2. Infiltration of institutions. One clear example is how Ezra Pound deliberately infiltrated prominent English Literature journals with his own people and used them to promote his ideology, most-notably in manufacturing an artificial positive reception of James Joyce's /Ulysses/. Another is how the American English Literature and English teacher journals were taken over by Marxists, leveraging the anti-war movement, in the late 1960s.
3. Slander, usually done after infiltrating institutions. The clearest example is the slander of the New Critics. Every book on the history of English literary theory that talks about the New Critics says nothing but lies about them. The wave of new literary theorists after them, starting perhaps with Northrup Frye and Frank Kermode, first convinced people that "New Critics" was a valid category (it mostly was), then convinced them that the New Critics had said nothing but things they'd never said or at least never agreed on (like "historical context and authorial intent is irrelevant"), then finally, when the New Critics had been swept off the scene, claimed as their own novel ideas the things the New Critics had actually advocated.
Having watched psychedelics go from subculture to effectively mainstream I've been wondering what happens when the consumerisation forces of the free market root out every niche, selling all possible subcultures back to us as soon as we can develop them, and the low barrier of entry to previously hard-to-enter subcultures that social media brings makes each burgeoning subculture evolve and dissipate quickly with few long term committers.
Doesn't this "mainstream" everything? And if (let's say national) cultures become more mainstreamed, and we run out of taboo, there is no rebellion, your parents are likely still cool af, giving you the only options of being cool af or uncool af, there is no tangible oppressor to position yourself against, the romantic struggle against the other that many cling to for meaning disappears, and therefore we become less differentiated, less individuated (in spite of the individuation force of the free market consumerisation), we all did or are doing the trips and all have tattoo sleeves and tidy beards, the snap-on cultural accessories we pick up and drop become more and more meaningless, the infinite choices we have collapse into our preferences, shaped crudely by our underlying rudimentary culture, we become less concerned about what is happening outside our cultural borders and we gather again around the local maypoles that unites us, we become more culturally unified and nationalistic, we become more tribal within our national boundaries, or other more local boundaries, we are all eventually reading from the same parochial page.
I think this is evident in the recent rise of populism (check ngram for populism to get a feel for that), which leads me to thinking about the tension between the global market economy and it's infinite choice element, and the simultaneous rise of nationalistic politics in the West, effectively revealing our parochial preferences.
What happens to this dynamic when we all become mainstream, when all dogs are having their day together at all times? Do we need to reconfigure connotations to see that the popular mainstream is the big tribe, and that that is where we are all heading with this niche-eliminating system?
>Ordinary rank-and-file members hear so much criticism of the movement that it’s hard for them to stay optimistic about it. They stop talking about it as The Amazing Movement That Will Change Everything, and become defensive: “I’m not, like, one of those members of the movement, I just sort of think some of their ideas make sense sometimes.”
Why do they have to? Ideas aren't people.