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Exactly this. Status requires keeping track of people’s standing, but we can’t naturally do that for numbers greater than Dunbar’s. There comes in play the pro

Exactly this. Status requires keeping track of people’s standing, but we can’t naturally do that for numbers greater than Dunbar’s. There comes in play the prosthetic status through indirect signals and symbols, from the feathers on a tribe leader’s hat to follower counts on social media. Unfortunately since status is also a comparative good (it matters having more status than the other) the virtual competition space for prosthetic status is made infinitely stretchable and manipulable for the latter.

kqr 5y ago
> Status requires keeping track of people’s standing, but we can’t naturally do that for numbers greater than Dunbar’s. Status isn't symmetric: a local Lord can be a high status person in the eyes of more than Dunbar's number of peasants, because he doesn't need to care much about their status (he has advisors on payroll for that.) Obviously, he's in all their Dunbar-sized circles.
- acituan 5y ago
  I think a better characterization would be "status is not necessarily reciprocal"; the person evaluated for status does not need to be aware of the evaluators, as long as they can leverage the evaluated status itself. I think this is exactly the property that allows for prosthetic status. But it also makes it much more game-able than the real, just-in-time, participatory status. In the case of a lord, the carrier of status is actually the title than the person who happens to be the lord at that time. Lordship is the technology that attempts to scale the status across time and across a higher number of people. The problem of giving what is ultimately dead-matter so much power is that anyone who can capture it can also use it, regardless of legitimacy. This is a perennial problem woven into literature and philosophy for centuries. The high-follower-count as a status technology is just a newer, planet scale version of this game, but it is not the ultimate status carrier either. The ultimate status is held by the tech company that can give the follower count its meaning. It is the immediate entity that can convince us to divorce status from its original, participatory meaning and to respond to its reduced form that is the number. It is the almost transparent medium where numbers and attention flow through, all of which it can ultimately can turn into money.

kqr 5y ago

> Status requires keeping track of people’s standing, but we can’t naturally do that for numbers greater than Dunbar’s. Status isn't symmetric: a local Lord can be a high status person in the eyes of more than Dunbar's number of peasants, because he doesn't need to care much about their status (he has advisors on payroll for that.) Obviously, he's in all their Dunbar-sized circles.

acituan 5y ago
I think a better characterization would be "status is not necessarily reciprocal"; the person evaluated for status does not need to be aware of the evaluators, as long as they can leverage the evaluated status itself. I think this is exactly the property that allows for prosthetic status. But it also makes it much more game-able than the real, just-in-time, participatory status. In the case of a lord, the carrier of status is actually the title than the person who happens to be the lord at that time. Lordship is the technology that attempts to scale the status across time and across a higher number of people. The problem of giving what is ultimately dead-matter so much power is that anyone who can capture it can also use it, regardless of legitimacy. This is a perennial problem woven into literature and philosophy for centuries. The high-follower-count as a status technology is just a newer, planet scale version of this game, but it is not the ultimate status carrier either. The ultimate status is held by the tech company that can give the follower count its meaning. It is the immediate entity that can convince us to divorce status from its original, participatory meaning and to respond to its reduced form that is the number. It is the almost transparent medium where numbers and attention flow through, all of which it can ultimately can turn into money.