Status Signaling

While I was thinking through the cringe matrix, I thought a lot about celebrities. Given one of their main purposes as public figures is to both establish and violate social norms, thus providing us with both guidance and gossip, they’re always operating with a high cringe risk.

We see status evolutions already happening online. It used to be high status to have a lot of followers. Now, many people view it as a “green flag” if someone isn’t even on social media.

Openness is a major driver of Evaporative Cooling. If anyone can join your community, then the people most likely to join are those who are below the average quality of your community because they have the most to gain.

The spectacle is a social relation between people that is mediated by an accumulation of images that serve to alienate us from a genuinely lived life. The image is thus an historical mutation of the form of commodity fetishism.