4 ms·

There's probably something to this analysis, but to go from "jobs that depend on cultural as opposed to financial capital can lead to overly homogeneous groups

There's probably something to this analysis, but to go from "jobs that depend on cultural as opposed to financial capital can lead to overly homogeneous groups with strong and at times bizarre in-crowd behaviors" to the idea that a majority or at least a very large group of writers and journalists are "a hilariously homogeneous monolith of progressive cosplay, often producing little in the way of insight or information, surviving emotionally off the status returns of living in a bubble of mutual-affirmation and shared anxiety", well, that's like, just your opinion, man, and rather ironically an opinion that depends not on any honest attempt at assessing the prevalence of the problem but is constructed for the sole means of pandering to an in-crowd.

csdvrx 5y ago
> well, that's like, just your opinion, man, and rather ironically an opinion that depends not on any honest attempt at assessing the prevalence of the problem but is constructed for the sole means of pandering to an in-crowd. Fully agreed. Markets exist to convert the various forms of capital. For example, you participate in the labor market, where you convert your education and know-how into liquidity. Cultural capital is already exchange for financial capital: art is sold, and people pay to visit prestigious museums. What's missing here is a market where social capital can easily be converted into financial capital, at low cost and with as little friction as possible: the elusive "micropayments". Remember the old idea of "commoditizing your complement": for web2.0 (social media), tech companies have commoditized the participation that create their core value. They benefited tremendously through network effects, sending these profits mostly towards the shareholders, with a few crumbs sent to the tech workers (I know a lot of people think developers are "highly" paid because they get paid low 6 digits wages, but in a company with over $1M in ARR per capita, I politely disagree) I believe NFT/cryptos/etc. will pave the way for inverting this commoditization: well known authors/influencers will want to commoditize the tech companies, who'll have to respond by offering deals. We are starting to see that: look on the gaming forums where people say they use Bing... because it pays for their free gamepass every month!!! Bing is good enough for what they do, so people react to the incentive and switch! If you have the choice between, say instagram and tiktok, and it's essentially the same thing for you, you may decide to share content on instagram if they can compensate you in a way that's meaningful to you. It may be hard for them to give you cash, but it could be easier to give you something else that's essentially the same to you, or that can be traded for cash.
ianai 5y ago
Yes, I think the author got stuck in the mire. I took the point: The current situation is making a group of people incentivized to fall in-line with the “established truth”. Things like groupthink, authoritarianism, tyranny, and fascism thrive on such insularity.
- mherdeg 5y ago
  I've heard an opinion from people on Team Right that "it's just our bad luck that we got stuck with the antivaxxers and Capitol stormers this time around, this could just as easily have come from the other team". That's how I read this article's conclusion, and then the rest kind of works backwards from that conclusion: > It’d all be pretty innocuous if I didn’t worry that today’s progressive writer’s commune is also a breeding ground for tomorrows purveyors of reactionary fearmongering and misinformation. My own worry about the drying-up of print display ads and the end of classifieds, which led to the demise of the steady union career at the midmarket metro daily, and everything that happened afterward, is different. I worry not that people are reporting the wrong thing, but that there are too few people doing the job to even have a "right" or "wrong" set of journalists to read on a topic. In a US metro area of under 500k people there may not be any reporter who is going to open-to-the-public committee meetings and small-scale corruption can basically happen in public. This doesn't seem healthy for democracy.
  - zozbot234 5y ago
    > "it's just our bad luck that we got stuck with the antivaxxers and Capitol stormers this time around, this could just as easily have come from the other team". The bulk of the "right" has been anti-intellectual for a long time - there are some sensible and nuanced points of view coming from that side of the political spectrum, but they've always seemed to be in the minority. You do also see a lot of anti-intellectualism on the left these days, especially with the new "woke" craziness, but that's a much more recent phenomenon and we have yet to see a proper reaction to it.
    - deleted 5y ago
      [deleted]
jonnycomputer 5y ago
"can lead to" is the sort of statement that is only slightly more modest than "will lead to", in practice. Like, it could also be that it can lead to both heterogeneity and homogeneity, depending on other factors (or even chance). If the author believes the one, the author should put a probability on that outcome, rather than just assume the worst.
notahacker 5y ago
It also misses the other rather obvious factor: newspapers have owners, editors and readers. Owners often are very open about their agenda, editors have owners to please, historic reputations to uphold and their own politics (which is often a bit more firmly established than a twentysomething first jobber's) and the subset of the population that actually pays for newspapers has their own opinion of the sort of content it wants to read. Most of the stereotypes about bubbles of young underpaid, overeducated middle class status-chasers living in the capital and associating mostly with other young people, journalists and politicos/intellectuals could be applied to the UK, but our mainstream print media leans right (with a couple of very outspoken exceptions, whose journalists live in the same bubble!), as you might expect from the personal politics of their owners, and newspapers are bought in much greater numbers by older, more right wing people

csdvrx 5y ago

> well, that's like, just your opinion, man, and rather ironically an opinion that depends not on any honest attempt at assessing the prevalence of the problem but is constructed for the sole means of pandering to an in-crowd. Fully agreed. Markets exist to convert the various forms of capital. For example, you participate in the labor market, where you convert your education and know-how into liquidity. Cultural capital is already exchange for financial capital: art is sold, and people pay to visit prestigious museums. What's missing here is a market where social capital can easily be converted into financial capital, at low cost and with as little friction as possible: the elusive "micropayments". Remember the old idea of "commoditizing your complement": for web2.0 (social media), tech companies have commoditized the participation that create their core value. They benefited tremendously through network effects, sending these profits mostly towards the shareholders, with a few crumbs sent to the tech workers (I know a lot of people think developers are "highly" paid because they get paid low 6 digits wages, but in a company with over $1M in ARR per capita, I politely disagree) I believe NFT/cryptos/etc. will pave the way for inverting this commoditization: well known authors/influencers will want to commoditize the tech companies, who'll have to respond by offering deals. We are starting to see that: look on the gaming forums where people say they use Bing... because it pays for their free gamepass every month!!! Bing is good enough for what they do, so people react to the incentive and switch! If you have the choice between, say instagram and tiktok, and it's essentially the same thing for you, you may decide to share content on instagram if they can compensate you in a way that's meaningful to you. It may be hard for them to give you cash, but it could be easier to give you something else that's essentially the same to you, or that can be traded for cash.

ianai 5y ago

Yes, I think the author got stuck in the mire. I took the point: The current situation is making a group of people incentivized to fall in-line with the “established truth”. Things like groupthink, authoritarianism, tyranny, and fascism thrive on such insularity.

mherdeg 5y ago
I've heard an opinion from people on Team Right that "it's just our bad luck that we got stuck with the antivaxxers and Capitol stormers this time around, this could just as easily have come from the other team". That's how I read this article's conclusion, and then the rest kind of works backwards from that conclusion: > It’d all be pretty innocuous if I didn’t worry that today’s progressive writer’s commune is also a breeding ground for tomorrows purveyors of reactionary fearmongering and misinformation. My own worry about the drying-up of print display ads and the end of classifieds, which led to the demise of the steady union career at the midmarket metro daily, and everything that happened afterward, is different. I worry not that people are reporting the wrong thing, but that there are too few people doing the job to even have a "right" or "wrong" set of journalists to read on a topic. In a US metro area of under 500k people there may not be any reporter who is going to open-to-the-public committee meetings and small-scale corruption can basically happen in public. This doesn't seem healthy for democracy.
- zozbot234 5y ago
  > "it's just our bad luck that we got stuck with the antivaxxers and Capitol stormers this time around, this could just as easily have come from the other team". The bulk of the "right" has been anti-intellectual for a long time - there are some sensible and nuanced points of view coming from that side of the political spectrum, but they've always seemed to be in the minority. You do also see a lot of anti-intellectualism on the left these days, especially with the new "woke" craziness, but that's a much more recent phenomenon and we have yet to see a proper reaction to it.
  - deleted 5y ago
    [deleted]

jonnycomputer 5y ago

"can lead to" is the sort of statement that is only slightly more modest than "will lead to", in practice. Like, it could also be that it can lead to both heterogeneity and homogeneity, depending on other factors (or even chance). If the author believes the one, the author should put a probability on that outcome, rather than just assume the worst.

notahacker 5y ago

It also misses the other rather obvious factor: newspapers have owners, editors and readers. Owners often are very open about their agenda, editors have owners to please, historic reputations to uphold and their own politics (which is often a bit more firmly established than a twentysomething first jobber's) and the subset of the population that actually pays for newspapers has their own opinion of the sort of content it wants to read. Most of the stereotypes about bubbles of young underpaid, overeducated middle class status-chasers living in the capital and associating mostly with other young people, journalists and politicos/intellectuals could be applied to the UK, but our mainstream print media leans right (with a couple of very outspoken exceptions, whose journalists live in the same bubble!), as you might expect from the personal politics of their owners, and newspapers are bought in much greater numbers by older, more right wing people