Optimising for status optimises for status
response to Russell
In response to my thesis that zoomers are the status seeking generation, Russell Walter argued that Millennials were also status seekers, but hid their status seeking under veneers, such as taste. He identified hipsters are a type of status seeker who rank people based on their taste. He then goes on to say that this culture of taste-based status made things better, be it restaurants, food, or beer. Now, hipsters aren’t cool and they have been replaced by poptimism and a skepticism of high culture, which has contributed to our current cultural degeneration.
What he said about hipsters is true, insomuch as Millennial culture engaged in status-signalling through less overt and more plausibly deniable mechanisms. However, when status is competed over in these less overt domains, it is less salient because self-deception, while real, is imperfect and doesn’t always function the way we want to. So I still think the thesis I posited is defensible.
What I think that Russell and I disagree on a more fundamental and metaphysical level is status. I think it is real, insomuch as humans value it, and that its acquisition leads to things that we care about on an intrinsic or instrumental level like attention or social connections. I, however, think that when status is optimised for directly, it leads to worse outcomes on a social level. Russell, on the other hand, views status-seeking as innate to human nature and a social good.
Frankly, I have no idea if what he said about restaurants was true. In 2013, I was 12 years old, didn’t live in the anglo world, and my favourite thing to do was write and read fanfiction. If his thesis is true, then I would cite it as an example of an exception, and if it is false, then it is an example of the rule.
The best example of where status-seeking makes things worse is storytelling.
People disagree on what exactly makes a story good — whether it is the aesthetics, characters, writing, thematic consistency, premise, or ending. Fundamentally, what makes a story good is if it accomplishes what it is meant to do, and whether what it is trying to do is valuable.
Take Harry Potter for example. Harry Potter, as a novel, is trying to connect itself to people. It gives them a set of characters that are easy to relate to, a school that would be a lot of fun to go to, and a vast, expansionary world that lends itself towards fantasising. And it worked. Tons of people absolutely loved it.
I see a grey cloud around Harry Potter. People seem to feel embarrassed about liking it, and it is often criticised for being poorly written or being written by JK Rowling. In other words: it’s low status now. I also see this in anime — people criticising Steins;Gate, an anime which functionally revolves around the protagonist, for having undeveloped side characters. Criticising Code Geass, a story that is trying to create a spectacle and drama, for being… Melodramatic and tumultuous. Critics dislike stories for what they try to do more than how they actually do them.
Beyond what makes a story good, there is also the question of why people like them. A simple theory: taste is shaped by early exposure. Children who grow up with disney films turn into disney adults; people who liked anime as children also like it as adults. They might feel embarrassed by these things, or might not relate to some of the stories they liked as a child, but the software remains installed. I think taste for the style in which a story is told is more environmentally susceptible, while the specific stories people like change with cognitive and emotional development.
When people apply status games to storytelling, the magic disappears. People stop being willing to like what they like, or become insecure about it. Critics become pedantic, deciding the value of stories based on plot holes people don’t notice or care about, instead of the engine that drives everything: telos and meaning. Rather than taking poptimism literally, I see it as a reaction to the increasingly status-insecure and pedantic critics of culture. A 300 kilogram neckbeard who plays runescape because he likes it has achieved a high level of spiritual advancement.
Our revealed preferences also tell us much more about what we like than our stated preferences, which are susceptible to social or personal biases regarding what “should” be good and enjoyable. Critics might not like rap, but it has quite a bit of staying power, and I don’t see exactly why most people would pretend to enjoy it. I like it at least. Tasteism, the pursuit of status through the communication of taste, is a sign of a declined physiology that lacks energy, security, or capacity for action, and therefore resorts to judgement1.
You could argue that status plays a role in what stories people write or why they write them — I don’t deny that. It’s not bad for people to write things for attention, prestige, legitimacy, and money, it’s part of the flow of the universe. What I object to is authors who only write for these reasons, and not to create value and meaning beyond that. To do so is to create slop, art that commands attention only for the purposes of attention. Status-striving attitudes encourage the creation of more slop, in the overt status-seeking zoomer ecology; vapid pretentiousness, in the millennial ecology. Personally, I think the former is worse than the latter, so I guess I’m in agreement with Russell on that front.
On the question of whether taste is relative or absolute, subjective or objective — those are not the correct frames by which to answer this question. A subject is simply another object, and there is no privileged frame of perspective. That doesn’t mean that some tastes aren’t better than others — good taste is harmony with values.
Some taste has an arbitrary and banal compontent to it — preferring redheads over blondes, or white chocolate over dark chocolate. It doesn’t mean anything. In some cases, taste has a component of predictability and self-knowledge to it. That is to say, their cognition is more able to reliably interpret whether they like something independent of their mood and emotional state.
Sometimes, taste can arise due to cognitive gatekeeping. Some people are better at emotionally connecting to other people, and so they will find stories that effectively provoke emotional responses better. Intelligent people will be more able to clearly see thematic or philosophical components behind stories, and as a result, events that involve this theme will feel more meaningful to them.
I then ask: what has overt status-seeking made better? College applications? Dating? The internet? Hugging cats on the street?
So
My thesis is not that other people shouldn’t strive for status — dominance, prestige, legitimacy, money, and attention2. Other people’s value functions aren’t something that I have intimate knowledge of, and there is no cosmological tablet that states “though shall not seeketh status”. What I do think, however, is that when people start competing overtly over these limited resources, that things just seem to get worse at scale — regardless of whether the competition is overt, covert, or self-deceptive. It does make people more motivated, but it doesn’t make them motivated to do the right things.
This is directed to the hipsters, not Russell.
I’ve changed my mind on this multiple times; other people’s value functions are unknown to me, and I would prefer to keep my own intentions private.
100% agree.
Status itself is zero-sum — one person moving up necessarily moves someone else down the global social hierarchy. But most things people work on are positive-sum for society: building a good story, a house, a cocktail, a song, a friendship, etc.
Pro-social behavior is building things because they’re good and you like them — and then society allocates status largely based on contributions.
Anti-social or a-social behavior is chasing status itself by hacking society’s status allocation systems (e.g. making money via bot farms, most marketing, getting attention via plastic surgery, getting a good follower ratio by following/unfollowing, etc.)
All right on. The overt Zoomer status seeking is a disaster...incredibly distasteful to observe from everyone else, and impossible for it to lead to anything other than profound disappointment or embarrassment for those same overtly striving Zoomers once they get older and everything they're presently valorizing or striving for inevitably starts to erode.
Also, for most of American history, normative messaging regarding the dangers and immorality of status obsession were regularly pounded into people's heads, especially kids...by their parents, in children's books, in church, basically everywhere. It was the norm to constantly be overtly discouraging youthful narcissism and status striving. It feels like that messaging just kind of disappeared in the 21st century, or the incentives of the internet/social media steamrolled right over it. But pride, envy, and greed (all drivers of status striving) are literally right there in the seven deadly sins, classically considered the worst and most dangerous human failings that were preached against for hundreds of years. I suppose the decrease in religious belief is probably at least a factor in overt narcissism becoming socially acceptable, though mostly I think it's just being online (can't really separate the online world from decreasing religiousity anyway, they go hand in hand).