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Comments (147)

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  keiferski
  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.)
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  armchairhacker
  I disagree that people are less weird and deviant today. I believe they’re less weird offline, because weirdness is easier, safer, and less embarrassing to express online.I also disagree that online has become less weird. It’s less weird proportionally, because the internet used to consist of mostly weird people, then normal people joined. Big companies are less weird because they used to cater to weird people (those online), now they cater to normal people. But there are still plenty of weird people, websites, and companies.Culture is still constantly changing, and what is “weird” if not “different”? Ideas that used to be unpopular and niche have become mainstream, ex. 4chan, gmod (Skibidi Toilet), and Twitch streamers. I’m sure ideas that are unpopular and niche today will be mainstream tomorrow. I predict that within the next 10 years, mainstream companies will change their brands again to embrace a new fad; albeit all similarly, but niche groups will also change differently and re-organize.(And if online becomes less anonymous and more restrictive, people will become weirder under their real ID or in real life.)
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  Multicomp
  I initially thought not to post this because I think this is potentially flamebait adjacent for someone and I dont want to rock the boat.But in the interests of attempting to not be so conformist and give us something interesting to discuss about this interesting article, I will try this anyways, and if you have a problem with me saying this then feel free to flag and move on, I don't care enough to get into a flame war about this, but I believe I'm not trying to troll or get a rise out of people.Perhaps this is the feminization of society? As women have asserted themselves in the workforce and due to young women being the creators of mass culture for their generation, perhaps this is a partial driver for why everyone is so much less independent.I dont know, this thought is not done and I'm already expecting incoming fire from someone somewhere, but perhaps this could help drive this.Then again, it's more likely that this fits one of my conformation bias pet issues.
• arjie
  I have this fondness for the old-school web of blogs and so on. And I thought perhaps that this decline of deviance was the reason for the perceived dip in blogs. But now I think it's actually different. All of us from then were the early adopters of this stuff. We were never going to be a lot. It's just that previously there were a thousand (metaphorically) of us with nine hundred of us like what we were, and now there are a billion with nine hundred of us like what we were, and the rest are what they were but now they're here.I have this belief: if you don't know where the artist went, it's probably because you were a groupie rather than an artist and they eventually tired of you. After all, right now in San Francisco there are people like those in the circle of Aella (of Sankey chart fame) who had a "birthday gangbang" where each man had some limited time with her and then had to go to a fluffer. One of those fluffers married one of the men she met there.This is beyond strange to me, but not in a disparaging way. It's just out of my zone of familiarity in a way where I feel I would not know what being in these people's presence is like. So I think the strange people are just finding the other strange people and enjoying their time together rather than what they would previously do: entice some normies to strangeness.I also think many of these things have various causes. Apartment buildings have the same shape everywhere because they are all designed by committee and have the same schools of thought dictating "breaking up the massing" and all that. But even in that world, in the NIMBY capital of the world, there is a building like Mira SF which is pretty damned cool!
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  ianbutler
  Others are saying the end of leaded gasoline, I’ll add that around 2008 when the trend accelerates schools started becoming more locked down and consequences for being a kid can now follow you into adulthood much easier due to social media.I think we’re seeing a natural result of kids being scared of that one bad night being immortalized or that one fight turning into an arrest.You’re just not allowed to be a kid really.
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  digitalsushi
  I, gen-x '79, was taught by Gen-z the reason we don't drink at the bars is cause someone'll make a video of us being weird and ruin us. Be weird at home. With the door locked. Fit in when the camera could be hiding and stay employed. Adequately satisfactory, A+.I'm too old not to be weird. I get a lot of blank stares. I'm the only person I need the approval of. (For now. I worry the cameras find me more and more)
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  swiftcoder
  A couple of generations ago, the majority of people transacted entirely in cash, and the only government ID they carried was a drivers license (and the women and children didn't even have that).I can't help the feeling that everything in our lives and finances being tied to our permanent government-sanctioned identity has a chilling effect on deviance. No longer can one skip across state lines with a crisp hundred in ones pocket if one's deviance becomes widely known...
• ironman1478
  The world has become very expensive and everything is way more competitive than it was in the past.To me, it feels like there is little room to make mistakes. If you get detailed it's hard to get back on track. That I think is the primary reason people are taking less risks (or being deviant).
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  opwieurposiu
  It used to be cool to be deviant and not to be accepted by society at large. Ravers, skaters, punk rockers, cross-dressers, all subcultures that did not care if they were accepted by the normies. Transgression of social norms was considered the cool thing to do.Now everyone wants social norms to be changed so they feel included no matter what crazy ass thing they are into.Feels lame to me but I am old so what do I know.
• HPsquared
  The author using the 90s as a reference point strikes me as odd, as though that was a normal period.The 90s was peak "binge", the West was on top of the world with no challengers. People felt they could relax. Perhaps they relaxed a bit too much.
• MattGrommes
  I feel like a lot of this is breaking up of culture into a million shards. People are being weird in much smaller domains so if you look at the old bigger chunks of culture it seems like it's solidifying. Just because TV is largely boring doesn't mean online video isn't weird. You just might not like it so you don't pay attention to it.
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  jancsika
  > But wait, shouldn’t we be drowning in new, groundbreaking art?We are.I just watched a short Youtube clip of Corey Henry on organ accompanying a preacher's sermon. It's fucking insane-- he's doing two-handed Liszt-inspired cadenzas while the preacher is freely changing keys. I've never heard anything like it.Also, some weirdo did what appears to be an accurate scrolling transcription that accompanies the clip.Now Youtube is recommending a bunch more clips with scrolling transcriptions of out-of-this-world jazz performers doing deviant things.Here's one now of Benny Benack scat-singing, showing an unbelievable vocal range. Now he's yelling the name "Phil Woods" as he quotes a fragment from Phil Woods' solo on Billy Joel's "Just the Way You Are."Youtube will keep suggesting these things at me literally until I have to go eat food to survive. And that's just the scrolling transcriptions of deviant jazz solos.In short, author is so wrong he thinks he's right.Edit: clarification
• tolerance
  People are deeply concerned over their own wellbeing and that of their others’ while being bombarded by a collage of choices that indicate how to either preserve or compromise their lives and the associated consequences and as a result of this they are either reaching for things safe and familiar or leaping toward new ideals to a rough jingle of outcome and in truth there is such a surplus of “weird” going around and no one with the guts to determine the “good kinds of weirdness” from the bad kinds and all this guy has to offer us is countless links, fourteen footnotes and a glib call to action.
• hn_throwaway_99
  I made a comment related to this recently (https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=45486391) and I got a lot of helpful responses that I think help explain some of these trends:1. With the Internet, things "converge to an optimum" much faster than before where you had more regional variation. Dominant design, https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dominant_design, explains part of this trend.2. This article from earlier this year, "The age of average", https://www.alexmurrell.co.uk/articles/the-age-of-average, makes many of the same points but links to other good posts that help explain the change, particularly as it applies to business consolidation and risk aversion.
• ksymph
  Great post from Adam Mastroianni as usual, lots to chew on -- but to treat deviance and risk as equivalent seems a bit of a leap. The graphs line up, but just about any wide-reaching measure was put on its current trajectory sometime in the 70s-80s (see [0]).The hypothesis that lower 'background risk' leads to lower voluntary risks (drugs, unprotected sex, etc.) makes sense. But as far as arts go, I think the cultural homogeneity we see is more of a direct effect of globalization than anything else. In other words, the default state of highly interconnected societies is one of convergence; the variety of the 20th century can be attributed to growth in communication and exposure to new concepts. Now that media technology has somewhat stabilized, we see a return to the cultural stability that has defined humanity for most of its existence.[0] https://wtfhappenedin1971.com/
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  wolframhempel
  I'm wondering if this overlooks areas where we experience much higher levels of deviation today. Take music, for example. When I grew up, I was basically limited to whatever was playing on the radio or MTV—there was only so much airtime for a small set of popular songs. The mainstream was much more mainstream. Today, I can listen to obscure Swedish power metal bands with fewer than 5,000 monthly listeners on Spotify without any difficulty.The same goes for fashion. I have a picture of my mom and her friends where everyone looks like a miniature version of Madonna. Today, fashion seems far more individualistic.Streaming has given us a vast spectrum of media to consume, and we now form tiny niche communities rather than all watching Jurassic Park together. There are still exceptions like Game of Thrones, The Avengers, or Squid Game, but they are less common.One of my friends is into obscure K-pop culture that has virtually zero representation in our domestic media. Another is deeply interested in the military history of ancient Greece—good luck finding material on that when there were only two TV channels.Maybe deviance hasn't disappeared—maybe it's just shifted elsewhere…?
• soufron
  Wow… an engineer making generalizations about the fact that he is in a tunnel… and not realizing for a second that he is in said tunnel. How new.
• ajkjk
  personal theory is that it has to do with connectedness. everyone is much more aware of everyone else now, and how to act, so it's far easier to not act out. In the past there were many more isolated subcultures, people disconnected from mainstream culture, etc, and they could stay that way for a very long time. Now there's a strong normative pressure, so they become more 'normal', that is, boring.
• megamix
  Definitely internet. When I’m not online, I goof out infinitely.
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  shevy-java
  > we’re in a recession of mischiefI don't think this is true per se. It is more that a lot of things are censored or tailored into a specific direction now. The Trump administration shows this - see how recently the Python Software Foundation came to the conclusion that they could not ethically sign a grant proposal that was modified by the Trump administration seeking to manhunt down any LGBT supporter upon entry into the USA (once found they "abused" or rather misused US grants, which was the logical implication to follow-up on that clause the US government tried to sneakily add). Things became more uniform also because of Google search sucking now. How can we find alternative views? It is much harder than before. The world wide web has been turned into a nerfed variant by Google and co. All "AI summaries" show this - Google hallucinates to the user a variant of the web they control.
• robocat
  Weird that the article uses so many statistical averages, while trying to discuss outliers.Edit: average is the wrong word - measuring outliers is hard.
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  superconduct123
  One thing I've noticed with the younger generation is they are much more analytical and "in their heads"They over-analyze and overthink everything a lot more than past generations which can be good and badProbably due to the internet and more access to informationFor example when I was a kid you would watch a movie or play a video game and not think about it that much.Whereas now its all about RT scores, metacritic, review megathreads, unboxing, reaction videos, video essay breakdowns/explainers , tv show podcastsAnalyzing/reviewing/meta-content has never been bigger
• didgetmaster
  Anyone displaying 'weirdness' these days gets diagnosed with a place on the 'spectrum' and prescribed some kind of medication to tamp it down.
• stronglikedan
  the author obviously has not seen one of the near daily protests lately, or the majority of videos posted to social media, or perhaps they just chose the wrong word ("weird") for what they are trying to express. everywhere I look, freak flags are on full and public display now more than I ever remembered them being
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  dluan
  Qualifying myself on this topic to say I've written websites with `<blink></blink>` in them.Half of this reads like a reactionary grasping at straws, throwing together a bunch of unrelated things to try and bemoan a "return to weird, but my version of weird". When in reality, the explanation is more straight forward: you're old man.The culture is a live and well. I've lived through ircs and Discord groups. It's out there, it's just better gatekept to match the existing community now. Berghain doesn't just let in any sex pest. Furthermore, this is incredibly English speaking limited view of culture. Chinese and Japanese web culture is alive and well, you just don't know the language and so you can't participate.The other reason for a lot of these shallow complaints - architecture being samey, websites being samey, branding being samey - is capitalism, which always as a rule tends towards consolidation. Things become same and boring because they figured out how to make money with it.And using mass shootings as some sort of logical counter factual is some of the wildest, most insane strawmanning I've seen on the internet.What a garbage article, I feel dumber for having read it. How in the world this guy manages to command a veneer of intellectualism is hilarious.
• RajT88
  For the most part, this seems to be measuring the same trends behind the violent crime rate - which some think is related to the introduction (and banning) of leaded gasoline.Interesting to put these trends into the mix. It sort of tracks - but the teen birth rate was the one which stood out as really not tracking well.
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  unraveller
  Weirdness itself is no personal virtue to be admired, there is already an epidemic of Quirk Chungus type personalities to avoid. This guy too offers an erratic yet safe gish gallop article blaming no one for the loss of our something.Johnathan Bi explains [1] the stagnant output of deviant/contrarian creatives better as a lack of respect for artistic foundations after being influenced by the rabid 3rd or 4th generation in whatever artistic movement.[1] https://youtu.be/YfLj1pHGfT4?t=1358
• Animats
  T-shirt: No means no. Maybe means no. Yes means maybe. Regret equals rape. Fortunately, there's Pornhub.
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  xorvoid
  It's just the internet.Lots of deviant communities that are still quite active if you turn off your laptop/phone and go seek out the eccentric folks in the real world.The internet has pushed towards homogeneity over the last couple decades. If you're confusing internet with the real world constantly (i.e. staying "plugged in"), its easy to come to the article's conclusion. But, you can always choose to just "turn it off".
• tzury
  this post which mentioned in the OP has far broader exampleshttps://www.alexmurrell.co.uk/articles/the-age-of-average
• Perenti
  Not all of this is as straightforward as the author seems to suggest. In particular, I believe the massive increase in mass shootings is only in one country. Part of it is, I believe, the fear-mongering our glorious leaders and the media love so much.
• ryanjshaw
  > people don’t seem to be joining cults anymoreI think the shape of cults has changed. There is a vast army of social media influencers exploiting e.g. “new age” concepts to take advantage of vulnerable people, sometimes with devastating impact. Research just hasn’t caught up yet.
• chemotaxis
  I have an issue with the claim that the culture is stagnating. One of the arguments is this:> fewer and fewer of the artists and franchises own more and more of the market. Before 2000, for instance, only about 25% of top-grossing movies were prequels, sequels, spinoffs, etc. Now it’s 75%.I think the explanation isn't a decrease in creativity as much as the fact that in the 1980s, there just weren't that many films you could make a sequel of. It's a relatively young industry. There are more films made today because the technology has gotten more accessible. The average film is probably fairly bland, but there are more weird outliers too.The same goes for the "the internet isn't as interesting as it used to be" - there's more interesting content than before, but the volume of non-interesting stuff has grown much faster. It's now a commerce platform, not a research thing. But that doesn't mean that people aren't using the medium in creative ways.
• rawgabbit
  The word choice is strange. The author is listing the decline of risk-taking and experimental life choices like: pregnancies, crime, joining a cult etc. He is talking about people making safer / more conservative life choices. He also noticed that the monetary value assigned to people's lives has risen dramatically (over 12 million USD compared to 4 million USD a few decades ago). It is not the decline of deviance; it is decline of risk taking. That doesn't mean it is good or bad. It is just a fact.
• neilv
  > Another disappearing form of deviance: people don’t seem to be joining cults anymore.I guess it's not deviant if it's a large percentage of the population.
• seydor
  My theory is it all has todo with immigration, or rather the way we treat immigration since the 2000s. In order to accomodate everyone the culture gained new sensibilities, and the bubble burst. But idiosyncratic cultures can only grow in bubbles.We ve seen that in Europe before the US, where the german, french, English culture lost their influence and originality, becoming touristic products being sold by people of all colors and cultures.Words like 'spirit' and 'soul' have been replaced with 'content and money, and the media is being driven by people with a generic "global" culture and outlook
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  watwut
  The article is using weird definition of "weird".I do not remember high school students drinking alcohol being "weird". It was basically "normal". Most adults would pretend they do not see it, fair amount of them even facilitated it. It was only when things got noisy and too visible the rule was used.Moving away was weird in America? I perceived economic mobility as something Americans were proud of and seen as superior over nations more likely to stay. It was not weird to move away, it was the expected action for quite a lot of people.
• anon
  undefined
• gostsamo
  Mass culture is educating people to a level which it wasn't possible before, pruning really bad examples, and suggesting attainable relationships with self and the world. Lead is maybe a big reason why it succeeds, but even before the 192x when the lead started, people and craziness were wide spread. What happened with the maturation of all the media channels is that old religious and religion-derived psychoses were pushed out of fashion and being yourself wasn't opposed by centuries old norms. Being creative is often correlated with suffering and we are actually happy right now.I don't mean that we don't have problems and the concentration of wealth and power in the hands of a few is maybe causing part of the uniformity, but generally, we call them creative solutions, because they are aimed at uncomfortable problems.
• gxs
  It makes sense that everything would converge on the same timeWhen every company does the same market “research” to figure out what appeals to consumers, over time they are all going to arrive at the same conclusionAs this particular style becomes familiar to people, it only reinforces the preference and now you’re stuck in a cycleThis is why imo there will always be room for a startups - eventually someone deviates from the path and strikes gold, eventually a company is *actually* courageous, does something bold, and moves an industry forwardWe are unfortunately getting to a point though where giant tech companies have a stranglehold on resources and it hinders innovation
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  dauertewigkeit
  Millennials are really great parents and the result of that is that the kids are well rounded and less deficient. That results in conformity because the history nerd, also goes to the gym and the gym bro also strives to do well at school.
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  ramesh31
  Chalk up one more nightmarish facet of modern life almost soley attributable to housing costs. I'd love nothing more than to work a part time job and practice the Sitar all day. But now that equals homelessness.
• mempko
  Seems to correlate with the increase and decline of lead poisoning. I guess the plus side of lead poisoning was an interesting world. We need more deviants than ever now, given the authoritarian push we are seeing. Too many obey.
• renewiltord
  This is an interesting set of observations. One curious thing I've noticed is the moving thing. Frequently people online will say things like "You expect me to pick up my entire life and leave my friends and family behind to go somewhere just to find a job? People should be able to live where they want" or something of the sort. Leaving out the housing affordability part of that, I found the sentiment odd when reading it but with the context of this article I see it was that I was a blind man trying to figure out an elephant by holding his tail.I've moved across continents so many times now in search of making it, and I feel like I have made it now. I could not have imagined the other way of doing things. But I suppose kids these days can make it wherever they are.Some of these things do make sense, though, just out of accessibility. Once everyone can access everything, most will likely go watch 'the best'. That tends to a power-law now that access is cheap.In some sense, web forums have also trended towards this. You'll get the exact same commentary on HN as on Reddit as on Digg. That kind of uniformity was hard in the old web forum days. We are all part of the same big community: the once hilariously-named 'netizen' is now real.
• nickelcitymario
  Seeing a lot of comments disputing singular data points, but the author goes out of his way to provide as wide a variety of data points as he could find, and to try to disprove his own theory.A couple anecdotal things I've noticed in my own life that align with his conclusions:(1) I work in advertising. I've long bemoaned that my industry has turned to producing high-production low-creativity work for decades now. In the 60s, 70s, and 80s, people relied on creativity to get a message across. But today, it's all polish and no substance. I assumed it was because technology made it easier than ever to to do so, but maybe it's part of a wider trend.(2) I used to love the variety of car designs. Every car was unique. Some were crazy. But today, take the logo off, and I'd be challenged to tell the difference between any two pickup trucks or any two sedans or any two vans. Every manufacturer has converged on the exact same design. (We see this in every industry, I just happened to be a fan of cars back in the day. But if you look at housing, clothing, computers, phones, tablets, etc etc, I can't think of any category that has real variety in design.)(3) The author mentions book covers. Up until today, I was mistaking all those designs as meaning those books were part of the same series or something. I hadn't dug in to realize they were actually unrelated.(4) My own kids have played it incredibly safe. I'm proud of them for being more responsible than I ever was. But I'm also worried they don't know how to take risks. I'm strongly of the belief that anything worth doing involves a healthy dose of risk. Could it really be that as a society, we've just abandoned risk?I'm not saying the article is necessarily 100% correct. But I think it does pose what may be one of the most important questions of our era. Yeah yeah, I know that sounds bombastic: we have increasing global conflicts, a climate crisis, the apparent rise of neo-fascism, etc. But I don't know how we're going to solve those problems if we're all driving into the middle. How can 8 billion people be more homogenous than the 7, 6, 5, 4 billion that came before?> Brian: Look, you've got it all wrong! You don't need to follow me. You don't need to follow anybody! You've got to think for yourselves! You're all individuals!> Crowd: Yes! We're all individuals!> Brian: You're all different!> Crowd: Yes, we are all different!> Man in crowd: I'm not...> Crowd: Shhh!
• Lerc
  I feel like there are so many factors here that it's hard to identify which thing have the greatest impact. Instead of attempting a coherent argument, I'll offer some further observations.Taylor Swift is one of the most famous people in the world, yet I know quite a large number of people who could name only one or two of her songs. I would count myself a Taylor Swift fan even though I am in the group of knowing very little of her music. I admire her creativity, business acumen, legs, assertiveness, intelligence, and determination.In the past, a performer at that height would dominate a much smaller range of media coverage leading to a more profound cultural impact. While being on fewer channels, they'd be on a greater proportion of the whole media landscape.I think that pushes the dial in both directions. When something is targeted at all, they have to stay around the median to encompass the largest population.Transformational change happens to a society when something that is targeted beyond the median becomes popular and drags the world with it.You hear a lot of talk about the Overton window these days. I have heard it raised frequently as an argument for deplatforming. It strikes me as a profound misunderstanding of what the Overton window represents. People argue that you should suppress ideas you disagree with so that the measurement of the Overton window shows an opinion that is under-sampled against your adversary and consequently moves in the direction you prefer. This one of the most damaging examples of Goodhart's law that I know of.To stick with the music analogy, I think if Guns 'n' Roses appeared before the Beatles there would have been a significant negative response from the public (although I would really like to pull an open minded musical expert out of history to capture their experiences of modern music). Some experts favour protecting the establishment, while others are the very first to realise the significance of a revolutionary new thing.People are generally repelled by objectionable views and while the Overton window suggests that the notion of what is objectionable might change over time, suppressing objectionable views removes that repulsion from them while simultaneously being an act that many find objectionable. Both changes cause the dominant public opinion to move in the same direction, the opposite to what the people attempting to control the dialog desire. At the same time making the Overton window harder to measure, obscuring their failure.The decline of deviance could be thought of as either a shrinking or expansion of the standard deviation of the Overton window. It depends upon your perspective and if you consider objective measures of variance to be more significant to subjective measures.When the Overton window is much wider, there are a much broader set of opinions in the world, but also, by definition with the same level of acceptance as a compressed window. everything within the window is accepted. You could interpret that as a decline in deviance because you just don't consider the range of things accepted to be deviant.When the Overton window is narrow, social pressures cause people to restrict their behaviour, which would also be considered a decline in deviance. On the other hand it would take much less to be considered deviant.This makes me wonder if you need a second order Overton to measure the acceptability of opinions relative to their proportionate position on the Overton window. Would such a measurement measure polarisation? I would imagine that the ideal arrangement, no matter what the width of the Overton window was, would be a slower decline in acceptance of things that are disagreed with.Once again though. If you started measuring this, would it become a target, and subject to gaming?
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  lapcat
  A number of comments have suggested lead poisoning, but I think that's far too facile an answer. Perhaps it explains a bit, but does lead poisoning make you prefer original movies to sequels or to have better musical taste? If so, I say bring back the lead! ;-)The article author presents a life expectancy explanation, but I think that's even less plausible than lead poisoning. When I was a teenager, I wasn't thinking about how long I would live, and it would have made no difference whether life expectancy was 60, 70, 80, or 90. Does it make any sense at all that teens drink alcohol and smoke pot if they believe they'll live to 70 but not if they believe they'll live to 90?One thing that has definitely changed is parenting styles. I was a stereotypical "latchkey kid". Between the end of school and the beginning of dinner, I was free to go anywhere and do anything with no adult supervision. This was very common among GenX. However, later generations suffered from "helicopter parents" who won't let their kids out of their sight and arranged "playdates" and other organized activities for their kids, not allowing them to spontaneously choose for themselves. I suspect a lot of that was inspired by fear, American's Most Wanted and similar fearmongering about stranger danger and child abduction.There's probably not just one factor to explain everything. Corporate consolidation, for example, also explains many cultural changes, and such consolidation has been occurring and growing over the course of many decades, even before the internet.
• panloss125
  [dead]