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naraburns  nihil supernum  1yr ago (text post)   3575 thread views

Small-Scale Question Sunday for December 4, 2022

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Culture war topics are accepted, and proposals for a better intro post are appreciated.

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I think there's a case to be made that the transition occured around the 3rd great awakening (post civil war to ww1 roughly). Protestant Christianity increased it's focus on social issues and materialism got major rhetorical boosts in philosophy.

Please nobody ask me about my "floor living" stage. I was a cringy teenager.

Were you a weeb with a futon?

The tv thing doesn't work because of smartphones. Before the Netflix era, not having a tv meant not watching anything, but you still had a phone or a computer. Now to say I don't watch tv, you have to go full Luddite, no phone no computer. So virtually impossible professionally. Otherwise you're just changing format.

You can still "not watch TV" in the sense that you don't keep up with the mainstream news channels and TV shows, and instead prefer to consume obscure political blogs and manga.

Yes but just not owning a tv doesn't represent the same kind of pre commitment to not watching tv it would have pre streaming. So not having a tv in your house just seems inconvenient rather than high status.

So not having a tv in your house just seems inconvenient rather than high status.

Or simply a sign that there's little of worth watching on TV, you're not a console gamer and any shows / movies you might watch at home is done on a laptop / tablet. Like many of my friends, I gave up TV when we moved to digital era and simply never bothered to buy one as I see so little personal benefit to having one.

Which is what I'm saying, it's normal to not own a TV now, it's not a status flex.

Circa the mid 90s to the iphone era, it was a big status flex to say "I don't own a TV." See, for an in-TV example, the episode of Frasier early on when his dad moves in with him. Frasier doesn't want a TV, because he's a pretentious twat; his dad does because he's a salt of the earth retired cop. It's framed, like much of Frasier as a class conflict, Frasier and Niles are ivy educated psychiatrists who are obsessed with status signaling to their wine club friends, neither choose to have TVs in their homes on their own (though they do watch things like Antiques Roadshow in some episodes).

In fact, @RococoBasilica , you want your answer: go watch Frasier that will give you all the status symbols you could want. Foreign and abstract artwork, furniture choices, music, opera, tv, wine, food, coffee, travel.

Re-watching 30 Rock might be instructive, as it plays with a lot of these affluent status-signalling tropes, but written by someone that isn't native to any of it and hates it, and it pre-dates the omnipresent obnoxiousness of wokeness.

I'd also say re-watch early south park and the stuff they were making fun of.

Oh, that's a great call.

IIRC, feminism in the form of language policing.

Being "green" and anti-war. Driving a Prius with a "no blood for oil" bumper sticker.

It didn't go away, but it lost its cache after about 2010. When I went to college in the 00s, the way to virtue signal was to bike everywhere on a fixed-gear bicycle, carry re-useable hemp grocery bags, put anti-bush and anti-war buttons and stickers on everything you own, volunteer to plant trees and other "carbon offsets," try (and probably fail) to go vegan, and learn to play the banjo or ukulele. People still do this stuff but it's not considered Very Morally Important the way it used to be. The modern equivalent is pronouns in bios, land acknowledgements, etc.

Yeah, but is this a change in the subject matter or in the way it's being pursued? I strongly think it's the latter. Maybe it's different with young people and with Americans, but at least the woke in Germany seem to have preserved all the goodthink of yesteryear.

Since you mentioned chic, have you read Tom Wolf's "radical chic"? Upper class status signalling beliefs were pretty cringy back then too.

TL;DR A "meet & great the Black Panther Revolutionaries at Leonard Bernstein's condo" party attended by all the most fashionable Manhatten sociop--socialites.

It's well above "aspirational upper-middle class," but it's a window into what was trendy at the time. And it's hauntingly familiar to anyone who lived through 2020: I'd never actually seen the cover before this tweet, only the txt file, but it says it all.

IIRC, being pacifist, international, cosmopolitan, anti-nationalist, pro-migration, anti-native, subversive...honestly? Exactly the same as wokeness, only less organized.

Nah, it was already there. Not formalized, not organized, but the value system was the same: White straight christian man bad, all others good. Not complicated.

Perhaps not, but it seems to me that they were still playing the same game in a more old-fashioned way. They may not have captured institutions institutions with the same success as the woke do, but I'd say the subversives have developed new social technologies, or just chipped away at what resistance there was, in order to more successfully play the same status game. It's racecars instead of chariots, but they're still racing on the same track.

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