How the internet changed culture — and what it means

And if the only two fair measures are popularity and who can make the most money on things, it tends to over-emphasize things that are conventional, rather than radical, because conventional things sell better. And so we’re just rewarding ourselves for following formulas. And the whole point of cultural creation is supposed to be breaking those for

And so money itself is also becoming a really confusing signal. Because you see all these fake influencers who have rented time in a parked private jet to make it look like they’re in a private jet. Or bragging about all this lifestyle that’s not real. And so if everyone’s over-signaling, I think it’s also devaluing all signals.

If you’re thinking about it from a status perspective, it becomes very clear: The whole reason we adopted trends in the 20th century is because it would associate us with a certain identity and a certain group. And those associations just aren’t getting built if culture moves too quickly.

I think it’s forking, and I don’t think it’s going to be completely subsumed by online. Because I think the one thing we need to look at pretty closely is: For a long time, being “more online” was higher status, and it is now flipped, where the highest-status thing you could do is not be on social media at all. You know, you have your assistant who

We think about identity as “I want to be really different, and I want this unique identity.” But we don’t just want a unique identity. We want to have a unique identity that is recognized as unique and valuable, in terms of status.

When you think about YouTube or TikTok or any of these platforms, the creators who have risen on these platforms, it’s very unlikely they would have risen through traditional channels. If they said, “Give me money to go make a movie, it’s going to be 90 minutes of me jumping into slime,” that probably wouldn’t have worked. But then they can start a

And so if you were signaling online, and then you’re getting all this applause, and people are treating you with high status online… And then you get offline and people can’t see any of these signals — because you’re just a kid in school and they don’t see your cool videos, or whatever it is. And you’re treated a lot worse — and not necessarily bec

So there’s a weird thing going on where there’s abundance, and yet, at the same time, we’ve become really conservative about our own styles, because people fundamentally don’t want to adopt things that feel inauthentic to them, or will be judged inauthentic.

And because culture is so ephemeral, there’s just more stuff that people are worried that —