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It's hilarious that this is standard self-help advice designed to make you a better worker, packaged up as something subversive or "anti-mimetic." I am reminded

It's hilarious that this is standard self-help advice designed to make you a better worker, packaged up as something subversive or "anti-mimetic." I am reminded of Mark Fisher: "Witness, for instance, the establishment of settled 'alternative' or 'independent' cultural zones, which endlessly repeat older gestures of rebellion and contestation as if for the first time. 'Alternative' and 'independent' don't designate something outside mainstream culture; rather, they are styles, in fact the dominant styles, within the mainstream."

jameshart 5y ago
Yes, surely the main ‘anti-mimetic’ strategy to adopt is not adopting lifestyle affectations from a blog post that claims that that will make you a better person.
- noduerme 5y ago
  That's exactly what they want you to say. Now you can level up and understand this advice is just for the weak-minded. For a few thousand bucks you can go to a special seminar.. etc WHY the fuck did this rank on HN?
  - qkls 5y ago
    This is exactly the kind of post that ranks on HN. It seems intelligent but is not very challenging.
AutumnCurtain 5y ago
Had exactly this thought reading it. Here's a list of platitudes to make you a subversive independent thinker!
- throwanem 5y ago
  I'm surprised they haven't yet sold them as NFTs.
  - noduerme 5y ago
    And they said it would be easy to start a cult. Not with all these other assholes copy/pasting Oprah's book into GPT-3!
PragmaticPulp 5y ago
> It's hilarious that this is standard self-help advice designed to make you a better worker, Are we reading the same article? This article doesn’t read at all about becoming a better worker. It emphasizes anti-consumerism and building diverse personal experiences and insists on not blindly following your peers and doing what others want you to do.
- Cpoll 5y ago
  I think they meant that the same advice is presented in a different context as self-help/better worker advice. I can see what they're saying, a lot of this also gets mentioned as productivity advice: - Anti-Mimetic Scheduling: take advantage of the off-peak times - Building a Deep Bookshelf: allocate 10% of your annual reading to books where you know you’re not going to ‘agree’ with the fundamental premise - Don’t Participate in the Shark-Tankification of Worth - Learn to Navigate without GPS: It kills the brain and it kills the wandering — the spirit. - Stop Writing to Please - etc.
- eat_veggies 5y ago
  It's for a specific kind of worker -- the neoliberal individual, the "entrepreneur of the self" who cultivates their personal value like a capital investment because they are human capital. "Building diverse personal experiences" is a nice euphemism for this. Although you are not doing what others want you to do, it's a freedom conditioned by the market. Being anti-memetic is already priced in. Not all of the tips, like "be nice" and "forgive people" accord to this logic, but as a general through-line: Burgis is relentlessly focused on "the way great companies are built" (#23), worships the great innovators Henry Ford and Steve Jobs (#18), demands that everything has a purpose (#17, #13), in service of what he deems most important, "the calling" or personal vocation (#1). We might read this through the lens of 20th century German sociologist Max Weber, who traces the spirit of capitalism to the Protestant ethic [1]. As a very short summary, it's an ethic defined by the very same vocational calling [Beruf], where labor acquires a religious significance and produces values that then become secularized. From my copy of his book: > One of the constitutive components of the modern capitalist spirit, and, moreover, generally of modern civilization, was the rational organization of life on the basis of the idea of the calling. It was born out of the spirit of Christian asceticism [...] The Puritan wanted to be a person with a vocational calling; we must be. Whether or not you believe the historiography, the function of the vocational calling is to produce a subject who works and disciplines themself automatically. [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Max_Weber#The_Protestant_Ethic_and_the_Spirit_of_Capitalism https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Max_Weber#The_Protestant_Ethic...
WFHRenaissance 5y ago
This piece is definitely haunted by the flood of self-help listicles that we've seen in the past decade or so, but also there are facets of it which are actually very effective ways for cultivating meaning in one's life outside the dominant styles. There is a film of fetishism going on here, but still some good parts. Outsideness is possible.
jmfldn 5y ago
I'm a big fan of Mark Fisher's work but I must say that I didn't read this piece in this sort of light. Seems like quite different to the usual co-opting of wisdom in the service of capitalist hegemony. At the very least, more insightful and wiser than a lot of listicles.
TheOtherHobbes 5y ago
"To learn more about [anti-memetic counter-culture] my website and be notified when we release new content sign up here." OK. I'm going with Mark Fisher on this one. This is absolutely generic and unoriginal cut-and-paste Californian lifestyle advice trying to package itself as something deeper - which is something generic and unoriginal Californian lifestyle advice always does, as part of its own branding™. But it does raise the question: what would a genuine online counter-culture look like? I'm pretty sure going to museums and restaurants and playing golf at off-peak times wouldn't be part of it. But what would?
- liaukovv 5y ago
  Something like 4chan in the past
- turminal 5y ago
  > I'm pretty sure going to museums and restaurants and playing golf at off-peak times wouldn't be part of it. Why not?
- Nowado 5y ago
  That's the point of Fisher and those before him, isn't it? Counter culture gets recuperated. New terrain becomes deterritorialized and reterritorialized. Edge becomes fashionable and popular. Even if we knew what would, would that thing survive getting mentioned on HN?
- crocodiletears 5y ago
  > But it does raise the question: what would a genuine online counter-culture look like? I can think of: The short-live Boogaloo meme culture The NRX movement Fundamentalist religious communities Note that none of these subcultures are ever likely to be history's protagonists. But they are (or were) arrayed against the dominant culture's contemporary beliefs, narratives, and trends. 100rabbits permacomputing work is worth looking into. There are other pockets out there, typically left-leaning that are too multitudinous, heterogenous, and individually niche to be effectively categorized in a single sentence.
  - 5y ago
presentation 5y ago
> Being “anti-mimetic” does not mean being a ‘contrarian’ or refusing to imitate one’s peers. That’s what every hipster thinks he’s doing, too. “Everyone leaves the beaten path only to fall into the same ditch,” wrote the social theorist René Girard, the father of mimetic theory. This kind of naive rejection of the culture is not what we’re talking about here.

jameshart 5y ago

Yes, surely the main ‘anti-mimetic’ strategy to adopt is not adopting lifestyle affectations from a blog post that claims that that will make you a better person.

noduerme 5y ago
That's exactly what they want you to say. Now you can level up and understand this advice is just for the weak-minded. For a few thousand bucks you can go to a special seminar.. etc WHY the fuck did this rank on HN?
- qkls 5y ago
  This is exactly the kind of post that ranks on HN. It seems intelligent but is not very challenging.

AutumnCurtain 5y ago

Had exactly this thought reading it. Here's a list of platitudes to make you a subversive independent thinker!

throwanem 5y ago
I'm surprised they haven't yet sold them as NFTs.
- noduerme 5y ago
  And they said it would be easy to start a cult. Not with all these other assholes copy/pasting Oprah's book into GPT-3!

PragmaticPulp 5y ago

> It's hilarious that this is standard self-help advice designed to make you a better worker, Are we reading the same article? This article doesn’t read at all about becoming a better worker. It emphasizes anti-consumerism and building diverse personal experiences and insists on not blindly following your peers and doing what others want you to do.

Cpoll 5y ago
I think they meant that the same advice is presented in a different context as self-help/better worker advice. I can see what they're saying, a lot of this also gets mentioned as productivity advice: - Anti-Mimetic Scheduling: take advantage of the off-peak times - Building a Deep Bookshelf: allocate 10% of your annual reading to books where you know you’re not going to ‘agree’ with the fundamental premise - Don’t Participate in the Shark-Tankification of Worth - Learn to Navigate without GPS: It kills the brain and it kills the wandering — the spirit. - Stop Writing to Please - etc.
eat_veggies 5y ago
It's for a specific kind of worker -- the neoliberal individual, the "entrepreneur of the self" who cultivates their personal value like a capital investment because they are human capital. "Building diverse personal experiences" is a nice euphemism for this. Although you are not doing what others want you to do, it's a freedom conditioned by the market. Being anti-memetic is already priced in. Not all of the tips, like "be nice" and "forgive people" accord to this logic, but as a general through-line: Burgis is relentlessly focused on "the way great companies are built" (#23), worships the great innovators Henry Ford and Steve Jobs (#18), demands that everything has a purpose (#17, #13), in service of what he deems most important, "the calling" or personal vocation (#1). We might read this through the lens of 20th century German sociologist Max Weber, who traces the spirit of capitalism to the Protestant ethic [1]. As a very short summary, it's an ethic defined by the very same vocational calling [Beruf], where labor acquires a religious significance and produces values that then become secularized. From my copy of his book: > One of the constitutive components of the modern capitalist spirit, and, moreover, generally of modern civilization, was the rational organization of life on the basis of the idea of the calling. It was born out of the spirit of Christian asceticism [...] The Puritan wanted to be a person with a vocational calling; we must be. Whether or not you believe the historiography, the function of the vocational calling is to produce a subject who works and disciplines themself automatically. [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Max_Weber#The_Protestant_Ethic_and_the_Spirit_of_Capitalism https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Max_Weber#The_Protestant_Ethic...

WFHRenaissance 5y ago

This piece is definitely haunted by the flood of self-help listicles that we've seen in the past decade or so, but also there are facets of it which are actually very effective ways for cultivating meaning in one's life outside the dominant styles. There is a film of fetishism going on here, but still some good parts. Outsideness is possible.

jmfldn 5y ago

I'm a big fan of Mark Fisher's work but I must say that I didn't read this piece in this sort of light. Seems like quite different to the usual co-opting of wisdom in the service of capitalist hegemony. At the very least, more insightful and wiser than a lot of listicles.

TheOtherHobbes 5y ago

"To learn more about [anti-memetic counter-culture] my website and be notified when we release new content sign up here." OK. I'm going with Mark Fisher on this one. This is absolutely generic and unoriginal cut-and-paste Californian lifestyle advice trying to package itself as something deeper - which is something generic and unoriginal Californian lifestyle advice always does, as part of its own branding™. But it does raise the question: what would a genuine online counter-culture look like? I'm pretty sure going to museums and restaurants and playing golf at off-peak times wouldn't be part of it. But what would?

liaukovv 5y ago
Something like 4chan in the past
turminal 5y ago
> I'm pretty sure going to museums and restaurants and playing golf at off-peak times wouldn't be part of it. Why not?
Nowado 5y ago
That's the point of Fisher and those before him, isn't it? Counter culture gets recuperated. New terrain becomes deterritorialized and reterritorialized. Edge becomes fashionable and popular. Even if we knew what would, would that thing survive getting mentioned on HN?
crocodiletears 5y ago
> But it does raise the question: what would a genuine online counter-culture look like? I can think of: The short-live Boogaloo meme culture The NRX movement Fundamentalist religious communities Note that none of these subcultures are ever likely to be history's protagonists. But they are (or were) arrayed against the dominant culture's contemporary beliefs, narratives, and trends. 100rabbits permacomputing work is worth looking into. There are other pockets out there, typically left-leaning that are too multitudinous, heterogenous, and individually niche to be effectively categorized in a single sentence.
- 5y ago

presentation 5y ago

> Being “anti-mimetic” does not mean being a ‘contrarian’ or refusing to imitate one’s peers. That’s what every hipster thinks he’s doing, too. “Everyone leaves the beaten path only to fall into the same ditch,” wrote the social theorist René Girard, the father of mimetic theory. This kind of naive rejection of the culture is not what we’re talking about here.