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This piece manages to miss the memetic classism distinctions about consumption and strikes me as irrationally grating and perhaps unwittingly embodying it. Like

This piece manages to miss the memetic classism distinctions about consumption and strikes me as irrationally grating and perhaps unwittingly embodying it. Likely unfair but I can't help but see echoes of the sour grapes of reduced-to-irrelevance gentry with their posturing about how possessions aren't really that important anyway now that they aren't at top, and seeing the history the hypocrisy galls. When it was confined to the elite such excess was to be called a virtue outside of times of open rebellion (which almost always lost and would return to the status quo). Having plenty of extra rooms and great halls in case of guests is befitting of your station but to have extra chairs stored away for guests and it is a vice! But when lower classes catch up in a luxury it becomes passe unless there is something to upsell! If 'nominally lower' mercantile classes end up moving beyond them then it is outright immorality.

wisty 6y ago
This paragraph really stood out as this: > “The late seventeenth-century invention of shops and shopping by an urban middle class who lived by trade was mirrored by the growth of a new type of domestic space,” Worsley writes. “What might be termed the ‘middle-class’ living room was full of superfluous objects, chosen for ornament rather than use yet cheap and not truly beautiful: a barricade of possessions intended to stabilize a precarious position in the world.” It kind of reminds me of a famous watch Youtuber who berates anyone who wastes their money on a watch that costs more than a Casio, but less than a Rolex.
- nicbou 6y ago
  That reminds me of this SSC article: https://slatestarcodex.com/2014/04/22/right-is-the-new-left/ https://slatestarcodex.com/2014/04/22/right-is-the-new-left/ Long story short, people want to distance themselves from the class below them, and mimic the class above them. The strategy that emerges is to appropriate the culture of people two classes below them, because people one class below them can't. If you're rich and do poor people things, you set yourself apart from middle class people, who doesn't want to be mistaken for poor people. No one will mistake you for a poor person anyway.

wisty 6y ago

This paragraph really stood out as this: > “The late seventeenth-century invention of shops and shopping by an urban middle class who lived by trade was mirrored by the growth of a new type of domestic space,” Worsley writes. “What might be termed the ‘middle-class’ living room was full of superfluous objects, chosen for ornament rather than use yet cheap and not truly beautiful: a barricade of possessions intended to stabilize a precarious position in the world.” It kind of reminds me of a famous watch Youtuber who berates anyone who wastes their money on a watch that costs more than a Casio, but less than a Rolex.

nicbou 6y ago
That reminds me of this SSC article: https://slatestarcodex.com/2014/04/22/right-is-the-new-left/ https://slatestarcodex.com/2014/04/22/right-is-the-new-left/ Long story short, people want to distance themselves from the class below them, and mimic the class above them. The strategy that emerges is to appropriate the culture of people two classes below them, because people one class below them can't. If you're rich and do poor people things, you set yourself apart from middle class people, who doesn't want to be mistaken for poor people. No one will mistake you for a poor person anyway.