I am so fascinated by this, especially as I consider my own social media activity/consumption/"presence" and what i actually want to be doing on the internet.
Your explanation of "manufactured nonchalance" remind me of things written by Jess DeFino (https://jessicadefino.substack.com) and others about how skincare has been usurping makeup, how trends are increasingly leaning toward "clean girl" and "no makeup makeup," and how it seems like "undetectable" plastic surgery could usurp skincare. That's similarly wrapped up in class & class performance. This essay also reminded me of this video on Alexa Demie "the power of privacy and mystique": https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=YvYoQLcFlHw
Thanks for the rec! Re: skincare, you may be interested in this https://joukovsky.substack.com/p/the-fountain-of-youth & re: the Alexa Demie video, I’d recommend checking out The Power of Glamour by Virginia Postrel.
I love this stuff. Meanwhile the stress I feel around it usually revolves around: I've never really been any good at any sort of reputation games, so how affected is my life or career by it?
Hard to know how closely the feeling of being bad at them means you actually are—and I’d venture to say self-deprecation in this regard has the potential to become its own signal of status-boosting nonchalance.
I'd say it's very easy to convince yourself that the reason you're not involved is because you don't do it well and the reason you don't do well is because you're not involved, what cooks your noodle is when you genuinely wonder if you're missing opportunities because you don't try and you don't try because you've convinced yourself you're not good.
Sorry, to be clear, in the really real world the alternative I took was to keep to personal, in-person relationships, which arguably is still a bigger driver of opportunity than social media. However since social media is in the business of selling itself as a powerful engine of representation, it shows you the successes of people who used social media to gain recognition, even if you have evidence otherwise. The self-doubt still comes whether you play the game or not.
This is great! I especially love that you started with Veblen. My workhorse model for making sense of contemporary American society is The Theory of the Leisure Class overlayed with parts of David Brooks’ Bobos in Paradise and filtered through Venkatesh Rao’s Gervais Principle. Basically, the old WASP establishment was displaced by a new professional managerial class that merged the work ethic and the discretion of the bourgeois with the bohemian need for individual self-expression. And increasingly this PMC is composed of folks that Rao would categorize as clueless; that is, they don’t really understand the game but they feel compelled to play it.
I’m wondering if you’ve come across this piece: https://alexdanco.com/2021/01/22/the-michael-scott-theory-of-social-class/. The basic idea is that the higher you go in the PMC, the more you become Michael Scott, stuck in this weird middle ground where you are alienated from many of the realities of working class Americans but also unable to make your way into the inner sanctum where real power is wielded. So, you’re left just spinning your wheels, going nowhere but constantly trying to signal that you belong so you don’t end up losing the comforts of your upper middle class life.
What you're highlighting here about Instagram is playing out on Twitter and LinkedIn and anywhere people feel compelled to play reputation games instead of focusing on actual accomplishment. The problem is that human beings are remarkably good at telling signal from noise, especially over multiple iterations. Accomplishment will always trump reputation.
I don't know if IG is doomed, but reputation games are certainly a dead end and AI is going accelerate that trend. We're increasingly posturing not for other people, but for an unknowable algorithm. That won't end well.
Wow I love the Michael Scott essay, thanks for sharing! Re: Bobos in Paradise, you might be interested in this: https://joukovsky.substack.com/p/the-creative-class-against-itself. I‘d also highly recommend its forerunner, Paul Fussell’s Class. Fussell’s “X” class is basically the Bobo middle ladder.
Thinking about Infinite Jest, I wrote down somewhere my most loved passages. But it was probably in one of the handwritten journals I kept. But what I still have in computer-text is a list of strange words I started to collect when reading Infinite Jest (and still continue to this day). Wait, here are some:
* violence free expression of sympathy
* spontaneous detoxification
* post noise inner ear reverberation silence
And so on. DFW even invented some new words. Anyways, my most beloved passage was definitely the Game of Eschaton they played. Just saying.
I have to admit I don't know the english words that DFW used for the words I put up there. I only read the German translation, if I remember correctly. What's funny in German is "post noise inner ear reverberation silence" is actually one long word: Postkrachohrennachklingstille. I have no idea what the original term was in English.
Thus I'm not sure what the translation of fantods is. Oh well, I just looked it up and now I know.
I just remembered something else that was funny: ultimate neorealism, where people go to a theater to throw a dart into a telephone book. The next 90 minutes in the life of that person are the plot, but no one can see it.
I am so fascinated by this, especially as I consider my own social media activity/consumption/"presence" and what i actually want to be doing on the internet.
Your explanation of "manufactured nonchalance" remind me of things written by Jess DeFino (https://jessicadefino.substack.com) and others about how skincare has been usurping makeup, how trends are increasingly leaning toward "clean girl" and "no makeup makeup," and how it seems like "undetectable" plastic surgery could usurp skincare. That's similarly wrapped up in class & class performance. This essay also reminded me of this video on Alexa Demie "the power of privacy and mystique": https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=YvYoQLcFlHw
Thanks for writing!
Thanks for the rec! Re: skincare, you may be interested in this https://joukovsky.substack.com/p/the-fountain-of-youth & re: the Alexa Demie video, I’d recommend checking out The Power of Glamour by Virginia Postrel.
i think that post was what led me to subscribe! and thank you for the recommendation!!
Marvelous. Never has useless been so relevant, not to say useful.
I love this stuff. Meanwhile the stress I feel around it usually revolves around: I've never really been any good at any sort of reputation games, so how affected is my life or career by it?
Hard to know how closely the feeling of being bad at them means you actually are—and I’d venture to say self-deprecation in this regard has the potential to become its own signal of status-boosting nonchalance.
I'd say it's very easy to convince yourself that the reason you're not involved is because you don't do it well and the reason you don't do well is because you're not involved, what cooks your noodle is when you genuinely wonder if you're missing opportunities because you don't try and you don't try because you've convinced yourself you're not good.
Sorry, to be clear, in the really real world the alternative I took was to keep to personal, in-person relationships, which arguably is still a bigger driver of opportunity than social media. However since social media is in the business of selling itself as a powerful engine of representation, it shows you the successes of people who used social media to gain recognition, even if you have evidence otherwise. The self-doubt still comes whether you play the game or not.
Oh damn this is BLEAK
hm sounds like an escalating cycle 😅
This is great! I especially love that you started with Veblen. My workhorse model for making sense of contemporary American society is The Theory of the Leisure Class overlayed with parts of David Brooks’ Bobos in Paradise and filtered through Venkatesh Rao’s Gervais Principle. Basically, the old WASP establishment was displaced by a new professional managerial class that merged the work ethic and the discretion of the bourgeois with the bohemian need for individual self-expression. And increasingly this PMC is composed of folks that Rao would categorize as clueless; that is, they don’t really understand the game but they feel compelled to play it.
I’m wondering if you’ve come across this piece: https://alexdanco.com/2021/01/22/the-michael-scott-theory-of-social-class/. The basic idea is that the higher you go in the PMC, the more you become Michael Scott, stuck in this weird middle ground where you are alienated from many of the realities of working class Americans but also unable to make your way into the inner sanctum where real power is wielded. So, you’re left just spinning your wheels, going nowhere but constantly trying to signal that you belong so you don’t end up losing the comforts of your upper middle class life.
What you're highlighting here about Instagram is playing out on Twitter and LinkedIn and anywhere people feel compelled to play reputation games instead of focusing on actual accomplishment. The problem is that human beings are remarkably good at telling signal from noise, especially over multiple iterations. Accomplishment will always trump reputation.
I don't know if IG is doomed, but reputation games are certainly a dead end and AI is going accelerate that trend. We're increasingly posturing not for other people, but for an unknowable algorithm. That won't end well.
Wow I love the Michael Scott essay, thanks for sharing! Re: Bobos in Paradise, you might be interested in this: https://joukovsky.substack.com/p/the-creative-class-against-itself. I‘d also highly recommend its forerunner, Paul Fussell’s Class. Fussell’s “X” class is basically the Bobo middle ladder.
Thinking about Infinite Jest, I wrote down somewhere my most loved passages. But it was probably in one of the handwritten journals I kept. But what I still have in computer-text is a list of strange words I started to collect when reading Infinite Jest (and still continue to this day). Wait, here are some:
* violence free expression of sympathy
* spontaneous detoxification
* post noise inner ear reverberation silence
And so on. DFW even invented some new words. Anyways, my most beloved passage was definitely the Game of Eschaton they played. Just saying.
The word I most associate with the novel (and loved enough to use deliberately in my own!) is “fantods.”
I have to admit I don't know the english words that DFW used for the words I put up there. I only read the German translation, if I remember correctly. What's funny in German is "post noise inner ear reverberation silence" is actually one long word: Postkrachohrennachklingstille. I have no idea what the original term was in English.
Thus I'm not sure what the translation of fantods is. Oh well, I just looked it up and now I know.
I just remembered something else that was funny: ultimate neorealism, where people go to a theater to throw a dart into a telephone book. The next 90 minutes in the life of that person are the plot, but no one can see it.
This is my new favorite German word, thank you.