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Culture War Roundup for the week of January 23, 2023

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It isn't an "elite culture" - it is an international business culture. It is what Scott Alexander calls "universal culture" and what the alt-right calls "globohomo". It isn't just an elite (although it skews whiter and wealthier than the indigenous cultures who host it) - it stretches all the way down the SES hierarchy to the masked microphone girl and the baristas at your local indie coffee house. Its capital is distributed between the business class cabins of the airliners flying between New York and London, and the people who fly in them call the North Atlantic the "Pond" and treat it as narrower than the Hudson or the M25 median barrier. When my work situation improves, I am planning an effortpost on this point.

Elite culture and universal culture have a lot of overlap, perhaps they're even the same thing, but it's certainly more concentrated and adopted within elite circles. In a typical company, employees express this culture proportionally to their rank. The elite culture gives you status, and you have to signal you're part of the in-group.

My model of Scott's universal culture is a natural common-denominator. Elite culture is more forced and over-the-top, due to the status it gives its members. Perhaps elite culture is downstream from universal culture.

Baristas and mic-girls might express the same attitudes on some social issues like gender and the environment, but different views on economic issues.