Sublime
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Zoning is losing its power. New ventures are able to reach a meaningful scale before regulators (and competitors) react. The boundaries between different uses are blurring, with people lodging in apartment buildings, living in hotels, working in restaurants and retail malls, and sleeping or socializing at the office.
Dror Poleg • Dror’s Substack | Substack
My claim is that luxury goods are gradually becoming a noisier signal of one's position in society. This isn't to say that they don't still confer status — they clearly do. People still buy material items to signal their status. But because they've become a noisier signal over time, people are starting to signal their status with their beliefs and... See more
The Profile Interview: Author Rob Henderson on Why We Hold ‘Luxury Beliefs’ and Develop ‘Status Anxiety’
The Great Diminishment has several causes. (The internet, social media, apathy, etc., all play a role. I’ve written more about how “everyone is numbing out.”) But a big cause is what I’ll call the “venture capitalization” of culture, where as much cost is squeezed out of every nook and cranny as possible, while prices remain the same or higher. You... See more
Catherine Shannon • The Great Diminishment
While there are notable differences in the complexity, nuance, allusion, artistic innovation and experimentation found in mass, mid, and high culture, the argument that one is intrinsically more valuable than the others is, of course, fundamentally elitist. It’s no accident that this sort of cultural work—by Macdonald and others—is often the pet
... See moreAnne Helen Petersen • Too Fat, Too Slutty, Too Loud: The Rise and Reign of the Unruly Woman
Much of leisure, for the aspirational class, has become productive.
Elizabeth Currid-Halkett • The Sum of Small Things: A Theory of the Aspirational Class
Something I've been thinking about recently is the decoupling of aesthetic and economic capital in asset-based economies, and how it contributes to cultural stagnation.
It used to be that cultural fluency/education was a proxy for wealth because it was used as the legitimising https://t.co/I2WpTuL5Ys