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Our memory of certain looks tends to reflect the revival over the original. Later teddy boys looked not to yellowing tabloid photographs of fifties teds for style guidance but to Ringo Starr’s outfits in his 1973 retro fifties film, That’ll Be the Day.
Despite the irony and cynicism at the heart of retro, our revisiting of past styles allows a greater diversity of human understanding and experiences in the present. If the past is a foreign country, retro has been a useful passport.
Despite the many controversies surrounding it, the canon does offer opportunities to experience the cultural excellence of the past. The best artworks possess a depth and “strangeness” that delight and resonate, no matter the generation.
Between 1955 and 2005, almost half of all charting musicians were one-hit wonders. But in slower-moving, less crowded marketplaces, hits secured enough repetition to help us remember them later, even if in embarrassment.
Viral content, on the other hand, rarely becomes culture with any sense of permanence.
Viral culture lacks depth and weight, and it creates few new sensibilities or styles. And yet viral content resembles “real” culture: we consume silly videos just as we watched videos on MTV, read Twitter as we read newspaper articles, pin aspirational visuals to Pinterest boards like posters on a dorm room wall.
But this “deluge” of digital culture, writes film critic A. O. Scott, “is often perceived as a drought.”
This negativity is unfortunate, because the internet does offer many advantages. We can enjoy more varieties of more content from a greater diversity of voices at greater convenience.
The move from analog to digital has altered the nature of social interaction, consumerism, signaling, and taste. And all of these structural changes hinder the creation of a critical ingredient underlying our appreciation of culture—status value.
They also debase cultural capital as an asset, which makes popularity and economic capital even more central in marking status. The end result, at least so far, has been less incentive for individuals to both create and celebrate culture with high symbolic complexity.
“The Internet isn’t really a thing at all. Rather, it’s shorthand for an entire period of history, and all the interlocking technological, economic, and social changes that happened therein.”
As the economist-blogger Noah Smith quipped, “Fifteen years ago, the internet was an escape from the real world. Now, the real world is an escape from the internet.”
With the rise of social media, signaling now happens 24/7, and status claims can potentially reach a global audience at no cost.
“You can’t just walk around and be visible on the internet—for anyone to see you, you have to act.” And the “main purpose of this communication” is “to make yourself look good.”
Social media also enables us to quantify our status like never before: in likes, retweets, comments, and followers, and, for those at the top, in the number of brands reaching out with free products and promotional opportunities.
The failed start-up Klout attempted to extend these principles to everyone’s social influence—assigning a “Klout score” to individuals on a one-hundred-point scale.
Beyond signals being devalued in toto, the internet has also debased two critical signaling costs: barriers to information and barriers to acquisition.
Information can’t be a strong signaling cost when “information wants to be free.”
With obscurity itself a fleeting state, price reemerges as the most reliable signaling cost.
As elite groups fail to imbue their cachet upon products and knowledge relying only on obscurity as a signaling cost, entire swaths of “pure” indie culture lose status value.
The internet makes creation and distribution easier, resulting in more artworks, more products, and more exposition. In the twentieth century, finite limits on pages and broadcast time restricted our knowledge of goods, artists, artworks, and styles.
The long-tail hypothesis, however, ignores much of what we’ve learned in this book about status and taste.
Most people don’t want extreme uniqueness. Mass culture can be highly appealing in its low complexity and low social risk. The long-tail theory posits that we all want to sing our own individual songs, when there remains an obvious allure to singing “99 Luftballons” in unison at Oktoberfest.
Signals pulled from long-tail culture don’t serve as classifiers, other than perhaps classifying someone as a long-tail consumer—a category not currently sitting at the highest rungs of the status ladder.
When anyone can find anything obscure on the internet within minutes, acquisition alone reveals no virtues or skills.
The ubiquity of virality also means we have come to expect random things of dubious quality to attract attention.
Ironic hate-watching often drives up the numbers. After it was dubbed “the worst video ever made,” the wealthy teenager Rebecca Black’s vanity single “Friday” drew 156 million views on YouTube.
Culture is collapsing around a small number of massive mainstream artists, athletes, and celebrities with enough industrial support to have staying power.
The head may not provide much status value, but at least our appraisers will know we’re in sync with the times and not outcasts languishing in an obscure niche.
If the long tail makes different branches of culture mutually incomprehensible and the common language centers around middle-of-the-road mega-hits, the internet further reduces the cachet of obscure culture.
The final factor behind a reduction in status value is the inherent high speed of the internet, which disrupts traditional fashion cycles.
Fashion relied on social friction to slow down the diffusion process, which allowed elites to look sincere and authentic in adoption—a gradual lifestyle upgrade rather than a flashy attempt at status distinction.
Between the paparazzi industrial complex, social media, and fast fashion, an elite convention can spread to the masses in a matter of weeks, days, or even hours. Knowing this, elites may abstain from adopting new styles and goods that could be easily copied.
The frenzied pace of internet culture thus pushes humans far beyond the acceptable rate of changes to our personas. Where elites are better off not investing in new trends, the culture becomes conservative.
Viral content—like my forgotten Kanye piece—helps us kill time but inspires little of the long-term devotion crucial for shaping identities.
The ability to search past content also raises the bar for what’s considered “original.” On Twitter, there are always receipts for who came up with a style, joke, or meme first.
At an unconscious level, this affects our judgments of intrinsic quality: films, songs, and books without status value just aren’t as rewarding as their predecessors. As part of our desire for status, we chase status value. And so if niche culture lacks status value, many have fled the long tail to return to the head.
When a trend evaporates as a superficial fad, there may not be enough collective memory for it to take on historical value, either. We’ll never equate the half-baked electroclash genre of 2001 with the four-year-long grunge movement that transformed the nineties.
The emerging world has embraced bombastic conspicuous consumption as a rational status strategy, as demonstrated by the explosion of luxury sales in China, Russia, and India.
The emerging universal grammar of signaling, based on Western conventions, has ushered in a global monoculture.
Milan Kundera was prescient when he wrote, “The brotherhood of man on earth will be possible only on a base of kitsch.” He was off by one word: unity requires luxury kitsch. And so as the new nouveau riche emerges, so begins the Big Bling.
The primary proponents and benefactors of the Big Bling are minor royal families, corrupt politicians, monopolists in extractive industries, and organized crime leaders from formerly third-world countries—and critically, their children.
The West, as real wages stagnate and middle-class jobs disappear, has also become a fertile ground for such autocratic and oligarchic sensibilities.
Large evangelist Christian audiences flock to the “prosperity theology” of Joel Osteen and Creflo Dollar. Luminaries in the broader pop culture preach their own Gospel of Wealth.
These ballooning fortunes make Old Money barely money at all. What good is a no-frills trust fund when IPOs and crypto holdings turn former classmates into multimillionaires overnight?
Traditional Old Money can’t compete with these sums, but more important, tech wealth and television programs like Shark Tank frame giant fortunes as the righteous gains of shrewd entrepreneurialism and technical prowess. Hereditary wealth is shameful if not used as a pool of capital for further—and ethical—investments.
But another elite group has stepped in to countersignal gauche extravagance: the professional-class tech billionaires, who are forming their own taste culture.
In these circles there is a skepticism of glamour and a respect for thoughtful thrift. Like any good professional-class members, they make their choices based on functional rationales rather than the open pursuit of status symbols.
Instead, they use the great deference afforded them to debase formality itself.
Naturally, professional-class billionaires flex in their own way. Snug-fit athleisure shows off chiseled bodies and good health, achievable only through strict discipline, personal trainers, and staff nutritionists.
