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A big part of this IMO is that “money won”, for lack of a better phrase. There is no real concept of selling out anymore. Being shamelessly focused on wealth ac

A big part of this IMO is that “money won”, for lack of a better phrase. There is no real concept of selling out anymore. Being shamelessly focused on wealth accumulation seems to be socially acceptable in a way it wasn’t fifty years ago. Someone will probably say this is because current generations have less financial security, and I’m sure that’s a factor. But I think it’s a cultural shift that is much older and tracks better to the decline of traditional sources of values (community, cultural groups, religion, etc.) and their replacement by the easily understandable dollar. So it becomes harder and harder for a cultural definition of success to not mean financially successful. And being financially successful is difficult if you have deviant, counter cultural ideas (and aren’t interested in monetizing them.)

rockskon 1y ago
There's also the issue of gatekeepers squashing deviance. Payment processors killing payments to various legal adult websits. Information-discovery gatekeepers squashing discoverability of deviant material. Social media....has had a dual affect of being subject to the gatekeeper's restrictions and the risk of self-appointed moral busybodies searching for deviant content to threaten peoples' lives/livelihoods over. Cultural gatekeepers are able to exert influence over more people now than they have ever had before in human history. In many cases the ability to be deviant is becoming more difficult to even attempt.
- 4gotunameagain 1y ago
  Labeling pornography as "deviance" is simply funny. It is one of the most prevalent things that exist right now. Which imo is also an outcome of late stage capitalism (money won, as aptly phrased above). You body is a commodity to be monetised, sacrifice everything in the name of money.
  - actionfromafar 1y ago
    You put the finger on it - there's something sad about "if only deviance was more easily monetized". Money perverts everything, in a much sadder way than kinks ever can on their own. When you do the thing to get another thing, the inherent joy can so easily seep away. See every content producer following the posting schedule exactly, because the Algorithm punishes deviance from the schedule. Not everyone can be Captain Disillusion.
  - el_benhameen 1y ago
    > Your body is a commodity to be monetised That’s my favorite John Mayer song
  - tavavex 1y ago
    It's a little telling that the only association you make with "adult content" is immediately "pornography" (and only the kind where you film yourself). There's a lot of stuff that's not advertiser- or corporate-friendly that's being financially squeezed out. Adult content includes many types of goods and services, and many of them are out on the fringes that are part of what the post describes as deviance.
  - rockskon 1y ago
    And yet it is routinely taken down, subject constant attacks worldwide who believe they need to prevent others from seeing a nipple on the Internet at all costs, adult toy vendors are routinely removed from vending platforms, age gating by boomer politicians listening to religiously motivated political activists.
mjbale116 1y ago
> A big part of this IMO is that “money won”, for lack of a better phrase. There is no real concept of selling out anymore. Being shamelessly focused on wealth accumulation seems to be socially acceptable in a way it wasn’t fifty years ago. Fifty years ago you had Soviet Union. An entity which provided an alternative to the US and Western Europe vassals freemarketeering shenanigans. With the Soviet Union gone, and the communists in retreat, the Capitalists can shove their ideologies down the populace's collective throat. It has already been established that "what we have here is the best system" and any failure to ascend in said system is a failure of the individual rather than the system's. "Here is a feel good story of an immigrant that learned python and made it big in America, why can't you do the same?"
strken 1y ago
It looks cyclical to me. The materialism of the postwar era led into the civil rights movement of the late 60s and 70s, which turned into the materialistic 80s, which was rejected by the countercultural late 90s and 2000s, after which there was a slight deviation in which transgression rather than anti-materialism was rejected, and now we're back to materialism. My guess is that in a decade or two society will elevate an ideology that directly opposes material wealth again. If nobody has any damn money then they can't exactly use wealth as a measure of worth.
- gwd 1y ago
  > It looks cyclical to me. The materialism of the postwar era led into the civil rights movement of the late 60s and 70s, which turned into the materialistic 80s, which was rejected by the countercultural late 90s and 2000s, after which there was a slight deviation in which transgression rather than anti-materialism was rejected, and now we're back to materialism. The post has loads of graphs going back to the 50's, with trend lines continually going down, not cycling up and down during those time frames.
  - ambicapter 1y ago
    The graphs are about alcohol usage, teen pregnancy and crime rates. You can be counter-cultural without doing those things.
  - strken 1y ago
    Sorry, to clarify, wealth-seeking in mainstream culture looks cyclical to me. I was replying to a comment that said that "money won". I agree that there's a general decline in criminality (which is good) and general risk-taking (which is mixed). I don't see that this is strongly connected to wealth-seeking, given that overall wealth has increased for the majority of people and offset some of the risk involved when sacrificing income and wealth for other values.
antoniojtorres 1y ago
Mark Fisher describes this as precorporation in Capitalist Realism. The idea that at a certain point capital will anticipate and ahead of time incorporate the behavior, thus absorbing it into the overall mechanism.
DuperPower 1y ago
no, the romantic narrative of Life was just a facade used by cynical boomers to club to the top, its true many were earnest in the way they focused on quality of their Jobs (doing that also lead you to money) so its not that now its about money, It always was It just the romantic layers were removed so even if you are passionated about something if you are not cold with money as the hard reality of everything you Will seem deluded
inglor_cz 1y ago
I don't really believe this explanation, it is too narrow (in the usual "the US is the whole world" sense typical for US-based forums), and the same trend seems to be happening in many countries and cultures at once. My explanations would be: a. A lot of your current life is recorded online and visible to others, and people in general behave more carefully when under de facto surveillance. Similar to self-censorship in authoritarian countries. b. Personal contact has been supplanted by virtual contact over apps, especially among the young, and doing risky things, including sex and booze, faces a lot more obstacles when your main gateway to the rest of humanity, including friends, is a screen. Quite a lot of my, uh, non-standard behavior in my 20s was initiated by an impulsive decision in company of others, who came up with some ...idea... This is what just does not happen when everyone is in their room alone.
terminalbraid 1y ago
There's a book "Against Creativity" by Oli Mould which is on this topic. The title is about the redirection of creativity into monetizing everything. It hypothesizes that any current counterculture gets bought out by the system and sold back to society while those creators effectively get golden handcuffs to not rock the boat meaningfully. https://www.amazon.com/Against-Creativity-Oli-Mould-ebook/dp/B0796D526M https://www.amazon.com/Against-Creativity-Oli-Mould-ebook/dp...
igleria 1y ago
> Being shamelessly focused on wealth accumulation seems to be socially acceptable in a way it wasn’t fifty years ago Has anyone here had the chance to have a frank conversation which such types? Morbid curiosity...
rsynnott 1y ago
> Someone will probably say this is because current generations have less financial security, and I’m sure that’s a factor. Than the previous couple of generations, sure. But, in most places, far _more_ than those born late in the 19th century, say. That in itself isn't a great explanation.
- keiferski 1y ago
  Agreed but I think the comparison is ultimately what matters. Being poorer than your parents makes you more cautious about money, even if you're 5x as wealthy as your great-grandparents.
- potato3732842 1y ago
  If you are destitute for any length of time these days you'll likely wind up entrapped by various sorts of welfare systems one of which probably has some sort of cliff you can't scale on your way out. If it's not the food stamps that gets ya it's sec8. If you were totally destitute in 1900 or 1800 you might starve. But the costs incurred on your way back up were more like steps than cliffs.
  - rsynnott 1y ago
    > If you were totally destitute in 1900 or 1800 you might starve. But the costs incurred on your way back up were more like steps than cliffs. "Back up?" Ever heard of workhouses, or debtors' prisons? There wasn't a 'back up', generally.
andrewrn 1y ago
This aligns fairly closely with one of the main theses of “The Technological Republic,” Alex Karp’s new book. Basically, our abandonment of shared identities (national, religious, cultural) has allowed status and market forces to rush in to give people meaning and identity. Obviously a take that will ruffle some feathers, but I found it fairly convincing.
lo_zamoyski 1y ago
Our culture is certainly commercialized - with the ancien régime out, the merchants began to dominate, and with it a cultural shift toward commerce. Commercialism embraces industrialization and industrialization produces homogeneity. Profit becomes the sole measure of "success", giving way to streamlining and predictability.
delusional 1y ago
> But I think it’s a cultural shift that is much older and tracks better to the decline of traditional sources of values (community, cultural groups, religion, etc.) and their replacement by the easily understandable dollar. I think about that in the complete opposite direction. I think the dollar displaced traditional values. The cause I'd attribute would be our increasing reliance on "reason", especially short term cause-and-effect "reason". Most of my perspective on this comes from "Dialectic on enlightenment", which I can recommend if you can stomach an incredibly dense and boring book.
ahartmetz 1y ago
Let's do the traditional thing and blame it on music! US hip hop videos of the early 2000s were full of garish displays of wealth.
- brazukadev 1y ago
  But the people trying to show off weren't actually that rich it was a genuine counter-culture movement. Today they are rich af.
uvaursi 1y ago
This isn’t true and hasn’t been true fifty years ago either. A handful of the most well-known books regarding getting wealthy and having a high status were written almost a century ago. The practice of wealth accumulation was already established by anyone who was above room temperature IQ for as long as we have existed. Deviance is all around, the author is too trapped in a bubble to see it.
- reaperducer 1y ago
  Deviance is all around, the author is too trapped in a bubble to see it. Show me the modern counter-culture movement. Show me the modern Firesign Theater. Show me today's National Lampoon. Show me the modern Anarchist's Cookbook. No, 2600 doesn't count. It's a toothless parody of what it once was that you can buy on the shelf at Barnes and Noble next to Taylor Swift magazines. Heck, even the 2000's had hipsters. Where are the protest songs? I think this is the first generation that doesn't have mainstream protest songs.
  - nbk_2000 1y ago
    Other zines have filled the void left by 2600, one of my favorites being PoC||GTFO. (pocorgtfo.hacke.rs) I think the author isn't considering that people's bubbles have gotten smaller and more opaque. There's still plenty of weird hackers innovating, they just do it with their chosen peers, not in mass-culture. As predicted "The revolutions are not being televised."
    - listenfaster 1y ago
      Thanks for the reco for pocgtfo. I had no idea.
  - vixen99 1y ago
    You have a point. Deviance is tending not to stick its head above the parapet.
  - JackMorgan 1y ago
    I generally agree with you. Which is why this Jesse Welles's stuff hits me like a freight train https://youtu.be/I6vjaimSK4E?si=e18sT1m179W2bM2G https://youtu.be/I6vjaimSK4E?si=e18sT1m179W2bM2G
ericmcer 1y ago
compounding gains has also become the only strategy to stay afloat. Look at the performance of broad index funds since 2008. You either dumped everything you had in the market over the last 15 years or literally lost out on 4Xing your money. That kind of dynamic is pretty shitty for risk, why would I sink my money into any kind of risky venture when the market keeps spitting out 15% a year returns on safe investments. All expenditures also get warped by this, move across the country? Buy a new car/house? Better to play it safe and keep the wheels spinning and watch the numbers go up and to the right.
- deleted 1y ago
  [deleted]
- roenxi 1y ago
  > why would I sink my money into any kind of risky venture when the market keeps spitting out 15% a year returns on safe investments If it returns 15% it isn't a safe investment. The rate of return for a safe investment is in the 1-3% real range. Someone is offering you 15% real that implies they think it is a risky enterprise to sign on with. 15% nominal isn't so hard to find (gold yields at 10% nominal - but that isn't actually coming out ahead as much as treading water). It isn't a very impressive nominal rate of return in that sense but it is still not all that safe.
  - potato3732842 1y ago
    It's only returning a few percent. The rest is the dollar devaluing.
- keiferski 1y ago
  That’s a good point too. You increasingly need to participate in the system or you get left behind and can’t afford the things you could 5-6 years prior. So doing something crazy like wandering the country in your car or working at a cafe to fund your artist lifestyle is a constant ticking clock.
  - prawn 1y ago
reaperducer 1y ago
Being shamelessly focused on wealth accumulation seems to be socially acceptable in a way it wasn’t fifty years ago. In the 70's the expression was "He who dies with the most toys wins." Today, replace "toys" with "dollars." People seem to be using raw money as some kind of measure of success, as if life was a big video game, trying to rack up the highest score. It's part of the gamification of everything: Politics, dining, shopping. Everything is a game now, and everyone is expected to keep score.
- dominicrose 1y ago
  When you need to borrow a hundred times your salary to own a decent home, you need three hundred months to pay it back, that's 25 years in an economy were you're lucky to keep the same job for a couple of years. And I'm not even talking about all the related or other fixed or mandatory costs. It may be a game for someone who's already rich, but it's not for most people, and if you add kids to the equation, well, that's much more difficult because it requires time which we don't have, or if we have it then it means we don't have money.

rockskon 1y ago

There's also the issue of gatekeepers squashing deviance. Payment processors killing payments to various legal adult websits. Information-discovery gatekeepers squashing discoverability of deviant material. Social media....has had a dual affect of being subject to the gatekeeper's restrictions and the risk of self-appointed moral busybodies searching for deviant content to threaten peoples' lives/livelihoods over. Cultural gatekeepers are able to exert influence over more people now than they have ever had before in human history. In many cases the ability to be deviant is becoming more difficult to even attempt.

4gotunameagain 1y ago
Labeling pornography as "deviance" is simply funny. It is one of the most prevalent things that exist right now. Which imo is also an outcome of late stage capitalism (money won, as aptly phrased above). You body is a commodity to be monetised, sacrifice everything in the name of money.
- actionfromafar 1y ago
  You put the finger on it - there's something sad about "if only deviance was more easily monetized". Money perverts everything, in a much sadder way than kinks ever can on their own. When you do the thing to get another thing, the inherent joy can so easily seep away. See every content producer following the posting schedule exactly, because the Algorithm punishes deviance from the schedule. Not everyone can be Captain Disillusion.
- el_benhameen 1y ago
  > Your body is a commodity to be monetised That’s my favorite John Mayer song
- tavavex 1y ago
  It's a little telling that the only association you make with "adult content" is immediately "pornography" (and only the kind where you film yourself). There's a lot of stuff that's not advertiser- or corporate-friendly that's being financially squeezed out. Adult content includes many types of goods and services, and many of them are out on the fringes that are part of what the post describes as deviance.
- rockskon 1y ago
  And yet it is routinely taken down, subject constant attacks worldwide who believe they need to prevent others from seeing a nipple on the Internet at all costs, adult toy vendors are routinely removed from vending platforms, age gating by boomer politicians listening to religiously motivated political activists.

mjbale116 1y ago

> A big part of this IMO is that “money won”, for lack of a better phrase. There is no real concept of selling out anymore. Being shamelessly focused on wealth accumulation seems to be socially acceptable in a way it wasn’t fifty years ago. Fifty years ago you had Soviet Union. An entity which provided an alternative to the US and Western Europe vassals freemarketeering shenanigans. With the Soviet Union gone, and the communists in retreat, the Capitalists can shove their ideologies down the populace's collective throat. It has already been established that "what we have here is the best system" and any failure to ascend in said system is a failure of the individual rather than the system's. "Here is a feel good story of an immigrant that learned python and made it big in America, why can't you do the same?"

strken 1y ago

It looks cyclical to me. The materialism of the postwar era led into the civil rights movement of the late 60s and 70s, which turned into the materialistic 80s, which was rejected by the countercultural late 90s and 2000s, after which there was a slight deviation in which transgression rather than anti-materialism was rejected, and now we're back to materialism. My guess is that in a decade or two society will elevate an ideology that directly opposes material wealth again. If nobody has any damn money then they can't exactly use wealth as a measure of worth.

gwd 1y ago
> It looks cyclical to me. The materialism of the postwar era led into the civil rights movement of the late 60s and 70s, which turned into the materialistic 80s, which was rejected by the countercultural late 90s and 2000s, after which there was a slight deviation in which transgression rather than anti-materialism was rejected, and now we're back to materialism. The post has loads of graphs going back to the 50's, with trend lines continually going down, not cycling up and down during those time frames.
- ambicapter 1y ago
  The graphs are about alcohol usage, teen pregnancy and crime rates. You can be counter-cultural without doing those things.
- strken 1y ago
  Sorry, to clarify, wealth-seeking in mainstream culture looks cyclical to me. I was replying to a comment that said that "money won". I agree that there's a general decline in criminality (which is good) and general risk-taking (which is mixed). I don't see that this is strongly connected to wealth-seeking, given that overall wealth has increased for the majority of people and offset some of the risk involved when sacrificing income and wealth for other values.

antoniojtorres 1y ago

Mark Fisher describes this as precorporation in Capitalist Realism. The idea that at a certain point capital will anticipate and ahead of time incorporate the behavior, thus absorbing it into the overall mechanism.

DuperPower 1y ago

no, the romantic narrative of Life was just a facade used by cynical boomers to club to the top, its true many were earnest in the way they focused on quality of their Jobs (doing that also lead you to money) so its not that now its about money, It always was It just the romantic layers were removed so even if you are passionated about something if you are not cold with money as the hard reality of everything you Will seem deluded

inglor_cz 1y ago

I don't really believe this explanation, it is too narrow (in the usual "the US is the whole world" sense typical for US-based forums), and the same trend seems to be happening in many countries and cultures at once. My explanations would be: a. A lot of your current life is recorded online and visible to others, and people in general behave more carefully when under de facto surveillance. Similar to self-censorship in authoritarian countries. b. Personal contact has been supplanted by virtual contact over apps, especially among the young, and doing risky things, including sex and booze, faces a lot more obstacles when your main gateway to the rest of humanity, including friends, is a screen. Quite a lot of my, uh, non-standard behavior in my 20s was initiated by an impulsive decision in company of others, who came up with some ...idea... This is what just does not happen when everyone is in their room alone.

terminalbraid 1y ago

There's a book "Against Creativity" by Oli Mould which is on this topic. The title is about the redirection of creativity into monetizing everything. It hypothesizes that any current counterculture gets bought out by the system and sold back to society while those creators effectively get golden handcuffs to not rock the boat meaningfully. https://www.amazon.com/Against-Creativity-Oli-Mould-ebook/dp/B0796D526M https://www.amazon.com/Against-Creativity-Oli-Mould-ebook/dp...

igleria 1y ago

> Being shamelessly focused on wealth accumulation seems to be socially acceptable in a way it wasn’t fifty years ago Has anyone here had the chance to have a frank conversation which such types? Morbid curiosity...

rsynnott 1y ago

> Someone will probably say this is because current generations have less financial security, and I’m sure that’s a factor. Than the previous couple of generations, sure. But, in most places, far _more_ than those born late in the 19th century, say. That in itself isn't a great explanation.

keiferski 1y ago
Agreed but I think the comparison is ultimately what matters. Being poorer than your parents makes you more cautious about money, even if you're 5x as wealthy as your great-grandparents.
potato3732842 1y ago
If you are destitute for any length of time these days you'll likely wind up entrapped by various sorts of welfare systems one of which probably has some sort of cliff you can't scale on your way out. If it's not the food stamps that gets ya it's sec8. If you were totally destitute in 1900 or 1800 you might starve. But the costs incurred on your way back up were more like steps than cliffs.
- rsynnott 1y ago
  > If you were totally destitute in 1900 or 1800 you might starve. But the costs incurred on your way back up were more like steps than cliffs. "Back up?" Ever heard of workhouses, or debtors' prisons? There wasn't a 'back up', generally.

andrewrn 1y ago

This aligns fairly closely with one of the main theses of “The Technological Republic,” Alex Karp’s new book. Basically, our abandonment of shared identities (national, religious, cultural) has allowed status and market forces to rush in to give people meaning and identity. Obviously a take that will ruffle some feathers, but I found it fairly convincing.

lo_zamoyski 1y ago

Our culture is certainly commercialized - with the ancien régime out, the merchants began to dominate, and with it a cultural shift toward commerce. Commercialism embraces industrialization and industrialization produces homogeneity. Profit becomes the sole measure of "success", giving way to streamlining and predictability.

delusional 1y ago

> But I think it’s a cultural shift that is much older and tracks better to the decline of traditional sources of values (community, cultural groups, religion, etc.) and their replacement by the easily understandable dollar. I think about that in the complete opposite direction. I think the dollar displaced traditional values. The cause I'd attribute would be our increasing reliance on "reason", especially short term cause-and-effect "reason". Most of my perspective on this comes from "Dialectic on enlightenment", which I can recommend if you can stomach an incredibly dense and boring book.

ahartmetz 1y ago

Let's do the traditional thing and blame it on music! US hip hop videos of the early 2000s were full of garish displays of wealth.

brazukadev 1y ago
But the people trying to show off weren't actually that rich it was a genuine counter-culture movement. Today they are rich af.

uvaursi 1y ago

This isn’t true and hasn’t been true fifty years ago either. A handful of the most well-known books regarding getting wealthy and having a high status were written almost a century ago. The practice of wealth accumulation was already established by anyone who was above room temperature IQ for as long as we have existed. Deviance is all around, the author is too trapped in a bubble to see it.

reaperducer 1y ago
Deviance is all around, the author is too trapped in a bubble to see it. Show me the modern counter-culture movement. Show me the modern Firesign Theater. Show me today's National Lampoon. Show me the modern Anarchist's Cookbook. No, 2600 doesn't count. It's a toothless parody of what it once was that you can buy on the shelf at Barnes and Noble next to Taylor Swift magazines. Heck, even the 2000's had hipsters. Where are the protest songs? I think this is the first generation that doesn't have mainstream protest songs.
- nbk_2000 1y ago
  Other zines have filled the void left by 2600, one of my favorites being PoC||GTFO. (pocorgtfo.hacke.rs) I think the author isn't considering that people's bubbles have gotten smaller and more opaque. There's still plenty of weird hackers innovating, they just do it with their chosen peers, not in mass-culture. As predicted "The revolutions are not being televised."
  - listenfaster 1y ago
    Thanks for the reco for pocgtfo. I had no idea.
- vixen99 1y ago
  You have a point. Deviance is tending not to stick its head above the parapet.
- JackMorgan 1y ago
  I generally agree with you. Which is why this Jesse Welles's stuff hits me like a freight train https://youtu.be/I6vjaimSK4E?si=e18sT1m179W2bM2G https://youtu.be/I6vjaimSK4E?si=e18sT1m179W2bM2G

ericmcer 1y ago

compounding gains has also become the only strategy to stay afloat. Look at the performance of broad index funds since 2008. You either dumped everything you had in the market over the last 15 years or literally lost out on 4Xing your money. That kind of dynamic is pretty shitty for risk, why would I sink my money into any kind of risky venture when the market keeps spitting out 15% a year returns on safe investments. All expenditures also get warped by this, move across the country? Buy a new car/house? Better to play it safe and keep the wheels spinning and watch the numbers go up and to the right.

deleted 1y ago
[deleted]
roenxi 1y ago
> why would I sink my money into any kind of risky venture when the market keeps spitting out 15% a year returns on safe investments If it returns 15% it isn't a safe investment. The rate of return for a safe investment is in the 1-3% real range. Someone is offering you 15% real that implies they think it is a risky enterprise to sign on with. 15% nominal isn't so hard to find (gold yields at 10% nominal - but that isn't actually coming out ahead as much as treading water). It isn't a very impressive nominal rate of return in that sense but it is still not all that safe.
- potato3732842 1y ago
  It's only returning a few percent. The rest is the dollar devaluing.
keiferski 1y ago
That’s a good point too. You increasingly need to participate in the system or you get left behind and can’t afford the things you could 5-6 years prior. So doing something crazy like wandering the country in your car or working at a cafe to fund your artist lifestyle is a constant ticking clock.
- prawn 1y ago

reaperducer 1y ago

Being shamelessly focused on wealth accumulation seems to be socially acceptable in a way it wasn’t fifty years ago. In the 70's the expression was "He who dies with the most toys wins." Today, replace "toys" with "dollars." People seem to be using raw money as some kind of measure of success, as if life was a big video game, trying to rack up the highest score. It's part of the gamification of everything: Politics, dining, shopping. Everything is a game now, and everyone is expected to keep score.

dominicrose 1y ago
When you need to borrow a hundred times your salary to own a decent home, you need three hundred months to pay it back, that's 25 years in an economy were you're lucky to keep the same job for a couple of years. And I'm not even talking about all the related or other fixed or mandatory costs. It may be a game for someone who's already rich, but it's not for most people, and if you add kids to the equation, well, that's much more difficult because it requires time which we don't have, or if we have it then it means we don't have money.