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Neomania does indulge in nostalgia—but as ironic, superficial fun, not the reverence of a golden age.
The internet opened storytelling to everyone, a development long beheld as a great democratic revolution. But this also has robbed nerds of their longtime monopoly on content creation and gatekeeping.
Thus the very appeal of TikTok is its “mediocrity,” writes Vox’s Rebecca Jennings: “No one follows you because they expect you to be talented. They follow you because they like you.”
With popular-kid creators shooting their real lives, the resulting content is unsurprisingly low on obscure historical references or artistic pretensions.
This focus on a limited cultural vocabulary makes neomania more inclusive, but the effect is to disconnect it from the twentieth-century paradigm of cool.
If these attributes make neomania alienating for adults, that is perhaps the point. Just as MTV provided a hiding place for Gen X, TikTok offers a completely walled-off world where kids can escape the cultural dominance of adults and reveal themselves.
Certainly the previous generations didn’t always explore history as a virtuous preservation of human knowledge. When culture centered around canons, radical artists learned history in order to know the enemy.
Familiarity with the canon is what allowed radical artists to gauge the innovation of their own works. And innovations more quickly became influential when they appeared to be principled rejections of established convention.
If we return to the maxim that “what doesn’t grow out of tradition is plagiarism,” inventions are unlikely to be influential when they’re shallow re-creations of recent hits.
For much of teenage online culture, diffusion has been stunted—like a trend for lanyard bracelets at summer camp that doesn’t catch on back at school.
Online stars are making millions a year without validation from established institutions. The question is whether these platforms inspire true artistic innovation.
And the easier path toward reliable revenue-share agreements and commercial sponsorship is building “scale.” Attracting large audiences is much easier with lowest-common-denominator content than with “art.”
Follower counts and gross earnings appear to be the only relevant sign of cultural import. Starving artists simply starve.
As of 2022 culture is bifurcated between the big “head” of blockbuster movies and Super Bowl half-time concerts versus the Internet Famous.
Our fears of cultural stasis, then, may be less about the creation of new artifacts, styles, and sensibilities than about their failure to take over mainstream culture.
The long tail predicted utopian cohabitation of tiny consumer subcultures but, instead, the professional classes have all coalesced into a world of omnivore taste where nothing is great because everything is good.
At some point our expectations will adjust to these structural realities, but at the moment, we suffer from what Pierre Bourdieu calls hysteresis—the lingering values of a previous age continuing to guide our judgments.
Today anyone with a smartphone and an internet connection can be broadcasted. Yet the sheer act of mediation still manages to make individuals seem more charismatic. But why should we still be enamored with fame at all when fame is so cheap? Maybe soon we won’t be.
cultural change may follow a pattern of punctuated equilibrium, moments of dramatic transformation followed by long periods of stasis.
In other words, the breakneck cultural change of the sixties may have been the exception, not the norm.
Periods of stasis are more common in human history than moments of rapid change, but we’re likely to feel disappointed about our own stasis as long as the previous century looms over our judgments.
Status structures provide the underlying conventions for each culture, which determine our behaviors, values, and perception of reality.
The status upheavals of the twentieth century resulted in an explosion in new artifacts supporting a wide range of new sensibilities, as high-status groups used the conventions of less wealthy communities as cultural capital.
Moreover, the deep influence of status on our individual choices challenges our very sense of free will.
The regularity of mechanisms behind aesthetics, choice, taste, and identity all question where to draw the line between “our very nature” and our position within a particular hierarchy.
Not every human choice is a direct result of status seeking, but when attempting to explain cultural change on a macro level, status value should be considered as the primary factor.
All analysis of cultural trends should thus first work through an innovation’s status implications.
Many dog breeds are handsome and small enough for apartment life; the article neglected to mention that mini Australian shepherds may also serve as status symbols. Just because no one who was interviewed for the article openly admitted their status seeking doesn’t mean we should take their alibis in good faith.
The “neutral” model of cultural diffusion is neutral: humans randomly imitate one another without any consideration of hierarchy or privilege. Status, by contrast, adds an uncomfortable political valence to every trend and custom.
Status principles reveal that creating and maintaining hegemony requires no shadowy conspiracy—just individuals and institutions in capitalist economies gravitating toward behaviors that boost and protect their status.
Elites strategically form and maintain conventions for their own self-interest and, once these practices are established as legitimate, alternatives, even when equally effective, are “wrong.” High-status individuals then point to their own effortless adherence as proof of their eminence.
Indie rock’s rules are what they are because its founders found them effortless to follow.
Hierarchy is inevitable as long as we continue to grant esteem to individuals who demonstrate impressive talents and feats.
Radical political movements have attempted to rectify these status inequalities through fiat, only to witness elites quietly deploy new means of distinction.
Allowing individuals to form their own alternative status groups is a good start, but this also requires equalizing the global distribution of status benefits among the groups.
Institutions could support status equality by increasing the duties required of high-status individuals in taking an exalted position. This would decrease the net benefits, thus ambiguating the advantages of higher status.
While we can’t outlaw signaling, we could attempt to reduce its frequency and effectiveness. This is the point of uniforms;
But uniforms constrict personal expression. The better method would be to devalue status symbols by revealing them as status symbols.
In Status Anxiety, the writer Alain de Botton argues that the most notable radical ideologies, from democracy and Marxism to Christianity, are ultimately radical reassessments of status criteria.
We must better guarantee that positive—and radical—contributions to the culture receive esteem and status benefits.
A robust, diverse, and complex cultural ecosystem is better than a bland, stagnant monoculture. Complexity doesn’t have to involve impenetrable or esoteric art, just the skillful manipulation of higher-order symbols in new and surprising ways. Complexity is good for our brains.
One important aspect of complexity is ambiguity. Simple things have one interpretation; complex things have more. The neurobiologist Semir Zeki believes ambiguity is the secret of “great art,” as it “corresponds to as many different concepts in as many different brains over as long a period of time as possible.”
At the same time, creativity tends to prosper with an increase in total artistic activity.
Symbols become more complex the more they refer to other symbols, and it helps when more people are involved in creating new ones.
While kitsch and extravagance have their charms, an ecosystem solely composed of low complexity culture quickly becomes stagnant.
Cultural ecosystems that encourage symbolic complexity solve this problem: innovations of high complexity trickle down and “refresh” mass culture.
Complex works endure longer, contributing to future generations’ ecosystems and supporting the potential emergence of geniuses.
When economic capital is the exclusive means of distinction, elites are satisfied with simple symbols based on wealth. In systems where elite exclusion involves diversified forms of cultural capital, artists receive high status for their transgressions.
Esteem is not infinite: every poptimist embrace of Lana Del Rey is some time, energy, enthusiasm—and status value—denied to a lesser-known creator pursuing less immediately comprehensible art.
Proponents of a universal basic income suggest that guaranteed wages will allow us to “all be artists.” Perhaps we can all be creators; to be “artists,” with all its associated high honors and esteem, we don’t just need living expenses but a social system for doling out respect to the most genius negations of the dominant conventions.
Without artists receiving a status boost for their radical inventiveness and audiences receiving a boost for their understanding of radical inventiveness, culture falls prey to a pure economic logic.
