2026-08-18 23:02:15
I owe an apology to every English teacher I ever had. I always assumed that so-called “great” literature was a hoax, a punishment inflicted upon adolescents for the crime of being young. These books did not have anything special about them, and covering up that fact was simply a make-work exercise for former English majors, a sort of “jobs for snobs” program.
I was wrong about this. There is such thing as greatness. More specifically, there is such thing as thickness. Great works of fiction—for that matter, great works of any art—unfurl in response to your attention. The more time you spend with them, the more you get out of them. That kind of responsiveness is so addicting that it can lead people to do crazy things, like try to teach literature to high schoolers.
But thickness is tricky, because rewarding the careful reader often means repelling the casual one. And this is where I would like an apology in return from my English teachers, because while this might have been obvious to them, they never made it obvious to me.
I was presented with art and literature as if it was self-explanatory, and that everything wonderful about it was plainly visible from the outside. But those works were much more like dark, winding caves with treasure stashed inside of them. My teachers were like, “Right, well, into the cave you go!” and I was like “But there’s nothing in there” and they were like “Entering the cave is 30% of your grade” and so I took a few steps into the darkness and I was like “Just as I suspected: an empty cave” and then I came trudging back out and pretended that I saw something.
But if someone had outfitted me appropriately, if they warned me that you have to bring one of those crank-up flashlights and you might have to shimmy through some narrow antechambers and spelunk through some flooded passageways, but that eventually you would reach a room full of untold riches—well, maybe I would have actually tried.
Instead, I had to learn about thickness by looking at a guy’s butt.
For most of my life, I treated art museums like celebrity scavenger hunts. The point of visiting was to see in person the thing you had seen on a screen or in a book; the goal was collection rather than contemplation. And so I would power-walk through the galleries, scanning the placards for famous names, rushing over whenever one of my companions would hiss, “Oh, this one’s a Van Gogh!”
This ended when I encountered The Garden of Earthly Delights, a triptych painted by the Dutch master Hieronymous Bosch. When I went to collect that one, I got stuck. I wanted to stand in front of it forever.
It’s a painting from 500 years in the past that looks like a painting from 500 years in the future. Every corner of it is filled with “freakish riddles” and “irresponsible phantasmagoria”, in the words of art critic Wilhelm Fränger. For example, what is going on with this dude?
Or this lil guy here?
In the third panel of the triptych, there’s a scene of some instruments, some naked dudes, and some kind of pink demon with an alarmingly long tongue. Look closely, and you’ll see one of the naked dudes has some music printed on his butt (helpfully, one of his friends is pointing at it, as if to say, “dude you have some music on your butt”).
In 2012, a student at Oklahoma Christian University named Amelia Hamrick noticed the butt music and decided to transcribe it, record it, and post it to her blog, catapulting her to instant worldwide fame.
When I started writing this section, I intended to include this fact as a fun little Easter egg—look how thick this painting is, that it goes to the trouble of writing an actual song on a guy’s hiney!
But it turns out I got this all wrong, and the painting was even thicker than I thought. While researching the story, I stumbled upon three magisterial blog posts by Ian Pittman, an expert on medieval music. He argues:
Hamrick was not the first to resurrect the butt music. It was also done by the Swedish group Vox Vulgaris in 2003, Atrium Musicae in 1978 (from the LP Codex Gluteo), and, according to a now-deleted angry comment, by some art history professors in 1981 and 1961, whose erasure from this story has left them quite, if you will, butthurt.
The butt music is not music at all. It lacks a clef, the notes are spaced out randomly, and one of the staffs has a different number of lines. If you try to turn it into a coherent song, you’re basically making things up—or as we would call it if an LLM did it, hallucinating. (Perhaps this is why every rendition of the butt music has sounded so different.)
Bosch intended the butt music to be unplayable. If you look across his works, understand the context of his life, and spend a little extra time inspecting The Garden of Earthly Delights, you realize that Bosch thought secular music was a one-way ticket to hell. (Church music was a-ok, as long as it was for the glory of god and not the glory of the players.) That’s why he depicted so many musicians being tortured: one of them is trapped inside a drum that’s being beaten by some kind of raccoon demon, another is being crucified on a harp, and the butt music guy himself is being crushed by a giant lute. For Bosch, putting actual music on a guy’s ass would be like the FBI handing out copies of the Anarchist Cookbook.
So the butt music is not a secret, but a warning: “If you play music outside of a church context, demons will torture you for eternity.” I find this funny, because I grew up amidst a moral panic over rap music; just imagine growing up in a moral panic over all music. “Oh, your heart will go on, Celine Dion? No, your heart will be torn from your chest and fed to the slavering servants of Beelzebub.”
So that’s what thickness looks like, but what is it? What makes something thick?
There is no straightforward answer to this question, which is what makes thickness both rare and remarkable in the first place. But I think there are four thickening agents worth considering:
Thick art bears the marks of approaches attempted and discarded, a pile of scraps larger than the finished project. For example, here are four versions of the same idea from the artist Hokusai, one produced when he was 33, another when he was 44, another at 46, and another when he was 72, which is the one you’ll recognize.1
The Betty Crocker Corporation could put just egg powder into their cake mix, but they don’t, because cracking an egg into a bowl allows people to pretend that they’re baking. When you present your grandma with a birthday cake, you want to feel like “I made this for you, O Beloved Grandmama” and not like “I dumped a bag of dust into a bowl and heated it up so open wide you old biddy.”
Thick art is like that: it gives you an egg to crack. It leaves space for some essential ingredient you bring yourself, so that the real action happens in your mind, rather than on the page or the canvas or the screen.
This effect is often too subtle to demonstrate in a single bullet point, but here’s an accessible example. The 11th Hour by Graeme Base reads like a normal children’s book at first—oh look here are some beautiful pictures of animals, look at them playing board games, how nice, etc.
Only at the end of the story do you realize that a crime has been taking place under your nose the whole time, and that the clues are hidden in the details of the pictures you’ve just been paging through. The real experience of the book is re-reading the book with this in mind.
Why this word, this scene, this character, and not some other one? Thin art has no answers; thick art does. Sometimes these reasons are known to the artist, and sometimes they are not, much to the delight and employment of Freudians everywhere.
For example, did you know there’s lots of ears in Hamlet? There’s the poison-in-the-ear thing, of course, and characters are always eavesdropping on each other and exhorting each other to listen, but there’s also a lot of talk about ears (“in the porches of my ears”) and number of odd ear-based metaphors (“the whole ear of Denmark”, “like a mildewed ear”). Whether Shakespeare did this on purpose because he had some kind of ear fetish, whether the muse whispered it to him in his sleep (and through what orifice?), and whether any reader notices it—these are all beside the point. The recurrence of these themes and images creates a depth that can be felt even if it isn’t known, and endlessly explored if it is.2
Humans are mortal, for now. This means all of our actions incur opportunity costs, and so the greater the cost paid to create a work of art, the thicker it can get. There’s no guarantee this will happen, of course, and that risk is part of the thrill.
The Met Cloisters has these wooden altarpieces from the 1400s that draw your attention immediately, I think because the mind can subconsciously calculate the time it must have taken to carve them, and it sends a signal back to the eyes: important. You know that you are not just seeing a work of art, but the expenditure of a life.
Here’s an even more haunting example. I once saw the magician duo Penn and Teller perform live, and at the end of the show, Penn told us he was going to swallow fire. As he dipped the torch in gasoline, he explained that what he was about to show us is not a trick. Magicians are always saying things like that, but in this case it’s true: there is no sleight of hand the protects the fire-eater from the flames. They get blisters and burns, the fuel drips down their esophagus and poisons them, they suck the hydrocarbons into their lungs and contract “fire-eater’s pneumonia”. To watch someone eat fire is to watch someone shorten their lifespan for your entertainment.
“When you leave the theater tonight, you’re going to ask yourselves, ‘How did they do it?’”, Penn said as he lit the torch. “Instead, I’d like you to ask yourselves, ‘Why did they do it?’“ And then he reared his head back and swallowed the flame.
The other way to understand thickness is to study its absence.
Guys who work in bike shops like to joke about bicycle-shaped objects—sure, that mass-produced hunk of metal and plastic has a seat, pedals, wheels, and handlebars, but that doesn’t mean it’s a bike. When the materials are so cheap and the construction is so slapdash, it deserves another name entirely.
This terminology comes in handy, because it turns out there are also movie-shaped objects and book-shaped objects, art-shaped objects and thought-shaped objects. Just because a series of pictures flickered across the screen and the credits followed, that doesn’t mean it was a movie. Just because it’s printed out and bound in cardboard, that doesn’t mean it’s a book. There is an additional essence that is necessary to turn something from the shape of a thing into the actual thing, and the difference between having and lacking that essence is the difference between a corpse and a person.
This essence is what makes fiction worth reading in the first place, but it’s hard to capture in a paragraph, so let me show you some nonfiction instead, where you can spot the thinness in an instant. Here’s a passage from a self-help book that a friend sent me recently:
You are built to perform under pressure and that is exactly what you will do. Reminding yourself of this changes the meaning of those signs of stress that might otherwise be seen as “symptoms” of a problem. In fact, research shows that simply reminding someone that their performance improves under pressure improves their actual performance by 33 percent (Jamieson et al., 2018).
These sentences crumble immediately upon inspection. First of all, there’s something embarrassing and grating about getting generic encouragement from a book—you don’t know me! Maybe I am not “built to perform under pressure”! I might be a pathetic weakling who is destined to choke at the pivotal moment. What then?
Plus, the facts here are brittle. I looked up the paper in question and could not find this “33 percent” number anywhere. Maybe it’s made up? And what is “performance”, anyway? Performance on anything? Surely not; the studies cited in the paper are mainly about taking multiple-choice tests.3 This is exactly the kind of finding that rises to prominence thanks to one small and flawed experiment, attracts a bunch of excited research, gets wildly overgeneralized under the handwavy phrase “studies show”, and then shrivels under a wave of debunkings and non-replications, such that after years of work, the whole thing ends with an embarrassed shrug. (Unsurprisingly, there is some evidence of publication bias for this “built to perform under pressure” effect.)
Reading a book like this feels like wandering through a Potemkin village. Touch any of the ideas, and they tip over.
In nonfiction, it might seem like the solution for puffery is pedantry, as if thickness comes from presenting every relevant fact in agonizing detail. But it doesn’t, just as thickness in fiction doesn’t come from describing every object in the room before you let the characters open their mouths. Instead, thickness comes from surfacing a few facts well, and in such a way that you realize the existence of entire universes of additional facts that could be known.
For example, here’s a short passage from Jane Jacobs’ The Death and Life of Great American Cities:
[City planners] operate on the premise that city people seek the sight of emptiness, obvious order and quiet. Nothing could be less true. People’s love of watching activity and other people is constantly evident in cities everywhere. This trait reaches an almost ludicrous extreme on upper Broadway in New York, where [...] benches have been placed behind big concrete buffers and on any day when the weather is even barely tolerable these benches are filled with people at block after block after block, watching the pedestrians who cross the mall in front of them, watching the traffic, watching the people on the busy sidewalks, watching each other.
Jacobs notes that further north, near Columbia University, the streets are quieter, the pedestrians are more orderly, the traffic is calmer...and the benches are empty. “I have tried them and can see why,” Jacobs says. “No place could be more boring.”4
There are a lot of threads here, so I’ll pick just one. Jacobs is pointing out a fact that millions of people observe every day, but almost none of them notice. Including me! I once lived on those boring blocks that Jacobs describes, and although I noticed something amiss—I would tell friends I lived in “the dead zone of Manhattan”—I never understood why. Nor do I think psychologists really have an answer for what motivates people to sit on benches and watch other humans go by. What drive is this satisfying?
There is a danger, of course, in seeking and praising thickness, one that even I understood when I was a barely-sentient teenager. If you allow for the existence of secret treasures that can only be accessed with effort and analysis, then you empower the elitists and the snobs. “Buddy, don’t even talk to me until you’ve been in the cave!”
But look around. The snobs are in full retreat. We have swung the pendulum so far toward poptimism, toward the blinkered idea that all art is equal because all humans are equal, toward the ethos that guilty pleasures are simply pleasures, that I’m not sure if we can ever swing it back.
Erasing the line between the thick and the thin has left us defenseless against slop at the exact moment of its onslaught. Everyone can sense there’s something amiss with the prose that comes out of the machines, but we lack the language to talk about it, and so we’ve converged on the idea that slop simply means using too many em dashes, bullet points, and line breaks.
No, what separates substance from slop is thickness. Slop holds no secrets; it signifies nothing. Under scrutiny, it evaporates. All it can offer is bottomlessness—sure, there’s nothing on, but at least there are infinite channels!
That’s why I’m neither surprised nor dismayed when studies find that people prefer AI art to human art. Of course they do! In the short term, thinness prevails. When people are making snap judgments, they want pretty flowers, poems that rhyme, pleasing pablum, the simulacrum of thought.5 But none of these last. The real question is not “which of these things looks nicer when you look at them for two seconds?” but “which of these things will stand the test of time?” Which of them will people fly across the world to see? Which of them will drive people so mad they’ll major in the humanities?
This kind of quality can only be proven by longevity. Which answers another question I had when I was scowling in the back of English class: why do we have to spend so much time reading old stuff? And the answer is: this is the only stuff that we can be sure is any good. Great works of art, like successful genes, convince humans to keep passing them on. If something has survived for centuries, then there’s probably something to it. We’re not still brewing Bronze Age beer and we’re not still sailing Bronze Age ships, but we are still telling Bronze Age stories, and this warrants our attention.
Speaking of longevity, remember a few months ago, when everyone was Studio Ghibli-fying all the pictures in their camera roll? Well, why did they stop? Why are those millions of images gathering dust in a data center while people continue to watch actual Studio Ghibli films? Why is it that Suno can AI-generate you any kind of music you want, but if you go on the Suno Reddit, you’ll find a running joke that no one can stand anyone’s Suno music but their own—a quality that, I can’t help but mention, also applies to farts?
The slop-acalypse that so many of us fear, when people will stop looking at anything made by humans and only look at things made by machines—why hasn’t that happened yet? Do the models need another million tokens? Are we still looking for the right prompts? Or could it be that we are attempting to mass-produce something that cannot be mass-produced?
Regardless, people keep trying. About once a week, I get a pitch from some AI startup that wants to automate some part of my writing. The most recent one says it’s “built for credible thinkers who have a book’s worth of ideas but not the time it typically takes to write one”.
I’m sorry, but if you’re building or using a tool like this, then you’ve got slop for brains. There is no such thing as having a “book’s worth of ideas” that are all ready to go except for the small matter of choosing the right words and putting them in the right order.
I know exactly the feeling that these slop-trepeneurs are preying on, because I feel it all the time: I’ve got these thoughts in my head, and boy oh boy they’re good ones, all-timers, really, and it’s so annoying that I have to spend all this time making the words sound good, when the ideas behind the words are already so good!
But this is an illusion. The ideas are not already good. They need to be thickened. I understand why it’s tempting to force a machine do the hard part for you, but it can’t, and the hard part is the only part worth doing anyway. Making something thick—that’s a lot of pressure! But remember: you were built to perform under pressure, and that’s just what you’ll do.
These images come from this article, which was referenced in this tweet, which was picked up in this post, which is where I found it.
I first learned of this example from ’s What Makes Art Great?, which is another good take on this topic.
Also, those studies did not remind participants “that their performance improves under pressure”—they told participants that feeling anxious during a test doesn’t mean you will necessarily perform worse, and it might make you perform better.
p. 37
For another take on this, see ’s “People prefer A.I. art because people prefer bad art”.
2026-08-05 22:54:40
We can all agree: the incentives are bad. Everywhere you look, people are being rewarded for doing the wrong thing. This has become the go-to diagnosis for every problem, from climate change to political polarization to scientific malfeasance—“sorry pal, you’ve got a bad case of the incentives.”
I don’t disagree with this analysis, exactly. Who could? It’s basically tautological. “People do bad things because they are encouraged and rewarded for doing bad things.” Well, why else would you do them?
My real gripe with this line of thinking is it implies that incentives should be obeyed, that it is normal or even noble to do so, and that is perhaps impossible to do otherwise. How could you be expected to break a rule, forego a promotion, or give up decimal of your grade point average, for the sake of—what? Doing the right thing?
There’s a point here that should go without saying, but instead it has simply gone unsaid. Which is: incentives are for losers. Doing something simply because an arbitrary reward system will give you a lil treat—that’s for pigeons, not people. If you build your life around satisfying incentives, then you’re a dummy and a schmuck.1
When I played Little League baseball for a few disastrous years, my least favorite part was going up to bat, because you had to wear one of these ratty old batting helmets supplied by the local rec department. None of them fit right, and they all smelled like a hundred sweaty 10-year-olds had worn them before you, because a hundred sweaty 10-year-olds had worn them before you. And so every at-bat carried not only the risk of striking out, but also the risk of contracting head lice.2
A few kids, the serious ones, brought their own helmets—custom fitted, tastefully decorated with decals, and presumably containing zero lice. These kids ran the bases like little princes. Any errant pitches bounced harmlessly off their heads, leaving their perfect skulls un-dented. The outfielders would perk up whenever a kid with a bespoke helmet stepped up to the plate, all of them thinking to themselves, this kid might actually hit the ball.
I say all this because incentives are like batting helmets: if you don’t bring your own, you’ll have to use the crappy ones that are provided for you.
A critical part of human development—in fact, the most human part of human development—is to acquire a purpose. That means refining your sense of right and wrong and figuring out how you, personally, can increase the right and decrease the wrong. Once your neural tube has ballooned into a brain, once you can poop without issue, conjugate irregular verbs, and feed yourself solid foods, you ought to ask yourself, “Why am I doing these things?” What’s it all for? How can I make myself useful?
It’s fine if you’re still working on your answers to those questions. It’s fine—and good!—if you have multiple answers, or if your answers change over time. But it’s not fine to pass on the questions entirely. We owe these answer to each other, and we owe them to ourselves, because a sense of purpose is both prosocial and protective. If you have a void where your moral convictions should be, then that cavity of your personality will get filled up with tumorous desires—for money, power, fame, status. This is the kind of person who “responds to incentives”.
It took me a long time to understand this. In my early 20s, when I was at the bottom of every ladder that I aspired to ascend, I assumed the people at the top of those ladders must be pretty great. How wise these incentive-maxxers must be, how cool and smart, to have the things that everybody else wants!
But over the years, as I had the opportunity to meet some of these captains of industry, these Grand Pooh-Bahs and Distinguished Scholars, I’ve realized how wrong I was. They only seemed enviable because I was looking at them from a distance, so all I could see was what they had. Up close, when you can see what they are, it becomes clear that only a few of these ladder-toppers are indeed wise and cool. More often, they’re sniveling little twerps. They’re spiritually chinless. They have no convictions, no passions, no purpose other than ladder-climbing. It’s sad to watch them, these people who have everything except the one thing that actually matters.
Often, these are the people who are most insistent that the incentives ought to be obeyed. They are quick to swear that good grades, cash, prestige, etc. are inherently valuable, or that they are useful proxies for value. The incentive-obsessives feel this way because they have to. Like the government of a failing nation, they must swear that their currency is real, and they must lash out at anyone attempting to participate in an alternative economy, lest the whole fraud come crashing down upon itself.
Without any formal instruction, approximately 100% of humans will learn to speak, and approximately 0% of humans will learn to read. Talking comes easy and early, enabled by ancient mental structures that hoover up words and extract the meaning behind them. These are the original LLMs, and still the best in the known universe. Reading, on the other hand, comes late and laboriously, piggybacking on bits of brain that were never meant to decode squiggles on paper, let alone comprehend Finnegans Wake.
So when thinking about any human ability, it’s useful to ask: is this more like speaking, or is it more like reading? Is this an ancient capability that we get for free just by living long enough, or is this a modern skill that you can’t get without working for it?
Developing a value system seems to be a lot more like reading, because research suggests that many people don’t make it very far.
In the early 2000s, the sociologists Christian Smith and Melinda Lundquist Denton asked hundreds of American teenagers about their religious beliefs. What they got in return was a bunch of gobbledygook. Regardless of their supposed faith, few of these teens could say anything specific about the divine. Most of them believed that God is like, this cool dude who floats in the sky and wants everybody to be happy and to get along, and if you ask him nicely he might help you achieve your goals, but otherwise he’s mostly busy floating. Fortunately, this celestial butler is not super specific about what you should and shouldn’t do, and he doesn’t really speak unless spoken to.3
Smith and Denton came up with a name for this thin soup of theology: moralistic therapeutic deism. They only studied teenagers, but they suspect that many people remain moralistic therapeutic deists for their whole lives—after all, the teens probably picked up this loose handful of beliefs from their parents. People will claim on surveys that they belong to a certain religion, or they’ll get riled up about specific bits of dogma. But if you dig into their beliefs at all, you’ll soon hit a gooey core of underbaked religious mishmash.4
I first encountered this research a decade ago, but when I revisited it recently, I realized something remarkable: this appears to be a rare case where sociologists and psychologists have discovered the same phenomenon by approaching it from different directions. It’s like we started excavating on opposite sides of the Earth, and now we’ve finally clanged shovels.
On the psychology side, we called this discovery the illusion of explanatory depth. As I’ve written before, people seem to understand the world exactly as well as they need to, and no better. Everyone knows how to use a toilet, for example, but they mistakenly think they also know how a toilet works.
I think this illusion is inevitable, given the architecture of the mind. According to predictive processing theory, the mind is always trying to guess what’s going to happen next, and it only updates its guesses when its expectations don’t match its experience. If you run that algorithm for a while, you’ll end up with a model of the world that is good enough, even if it’s not particularly good. You don’t notice the errors in your model until you run smack-dab into them, and every time you correct one, you assume that you’ve gotten them all.
From the sociology side, this same phenomenon can show up as something like moralistic therapeutic deism. People’s folk morality and folk religion, just like their folk physics, their folk biology, etc., are exactly as detailed as they need to be. Don’t hit, don’t steal, take turns, say please and thank you—almost everyone achieves this basic level of moral development, because otherwise you’ll end up friendless, if not incarcerated. Similarly, almost everyone acquires some vague notion of an all-seeing, sky-dwelling God through simple osmosis. (After all, He is kind of everywhere, literally and metaphorically.)
But beyond a handful of high-level principles, most folks remain mushy on the particulars. Smith and Denton didn’t perform the whole illusion of explanatory depth protocol with their participants, but I’m willing to bet that everyone feels like they have a coherent system of ethical and religious beliefs right up until you ask them any specific questions.
Our value systems are flimsy for the same reason our scientific reasoning is flimsy: we don’t fix our mental models until something tells us that they’re broken. So unless your pastor is popping quizzes during the sermon and cold-calling people in the pews, and unless you find yourself thrust into various Trolley Problems on a regular basis, there’s nothing that tells you that you need to firm up your moral and theological convictions. Why spend your days wondering about right and wrong, good and evil, sacred and profane, etc. when you don’t have to? You’re just going to get yourself into trouble, or even worse, into a philosophy PhD program.
This could explain why our sense of right and wrong is so easily overwritten by any half-decent system of rewards and punishments: we just don’t have much written there in the first place.
So how does anyone ever develop a value system that’s more than a few bullet points? I think, in short, that they look at a fish and they go insane.
You can summarize most of H.P. Lovecraft’s short stories as “Guy looks at something so messed up that he goes totally bonkers.” “Dagon” was among Lovecraft’s first: it’s about a guy who gets marooned at sea and encounters a really freaky fish, which upsets him so much that he ultimately throws himself out a window.
This is a useful metaphor, because I think at the center of everyone’s psyche is some version of the Big Horrible Fish: some unexamined assumption that, if you fully considered it, would require you to upend a significant portion of your life.
I saw my fish in 2020 in San Fransisco, during the annual meeting of the Society for Personality and Social Psychology.5 Inside the conference hotel were dozens of talks about stereotyping, prejudice, inequality, and so on. That had never struck me as strange until that year, when outside of the hotel, which was in the middle of SF’s Tenderloin district, people were sprawled out on the sidewalk, dying of overdoses. Scholars were scurrying past homeless people to give talks on social justice, which is ironic because “scholars will scurry past homeless people to give talks on social justice” is literally the main finding from one of the most famous psychology studies of all time.6
Something un-clicked for me that day. I had assumed that the answer to every dilemma was “more research”, and that eventually, all of the experiments being presented inside the hotel would solve the problems outside of it. But as I ate canapés in a ballroom mere feet from so much misery, I started to wonder whether any of us were even trying to make progress, or whether we were just publishing papers. I still believe that the barrier between us and a better world is a lack of knowledge; I’m just no longer convinced it’s that knowledge. I don’t think we will cure the human suffering visible on the streets of San Francisco by running another thousand studies on stereotype threat, ego depletion, and growth mindset, no matter what wonders it does for our CVs.
I saw many more fish after that, of species varied and grotesque. That’s why, on the rare occasions that I enter the conference hotel these days, my name badge does not have an academic affiliation on it, but instead simply says “guest”.
When I meet someone of uncommon integrity, someone willing to defy the incentives at any cost, I find they almost always have seen the fish—big, hulking fish, far larger than any I’ve ever encountered. They have undergone some kind of moral reckoning that undid their illusion of philosophical depth and gave them the chance to forge their own values. They’re the kind of person who could go to the gallows with a witticism on their lips, the opposite of a loser.
I used to see a guy like that every day, although he died a long time ago. Near the psychology department, there was a statue of Senator Charles Sumner, who is most famous for being beaten nearly to death by a congressman from the South in 1856. But that bit of historical trivia doesn’t do justice to the story of his life.
Sumner grows up poor in Boston, living amongst the city’s considerable Black population. On a trip to France in the 1830s, he’s astounded to see Black and white students studying together as equals at the University of the Sorbonne. He writes in his diary: “It must be then that the distance between free blacks and whites among us is derived from education, and does not exist in the nature of things.” He later becomes the most outspoken white abolitionist of his generation, taking positions even his friends think are crazy: the complete and immediate freeing of all enslaved people, followed by Black suffrage7 and racially integrated schools.
Then comes the infamous part: a few days after one of Sumner’s most inflammatory speeches, a congressman named Preston Brooks approaches Sumner at his desk on the Senate floor, accuses him of libel, and then to beats him with a cane until it breaks. Sumner, caught by surprise, is tangled up in his desk and cannot escape; he nearly dies. But then he recovers, and when he does, he becomes even more provocative. In 1861, he pushes Lincoln to abolish slavery in the Confederacy, which causes the newspapers in Sumner’s home state of Massachusetts to call him “a candidate for the insane asylum”. (Two years later, Lincoln issues the Emancipation Proclamation.) Sumner writes bills, arguments, and amendments that are often defeated or defanged, only for them to reappear 100 years later in Brown v. Board of Education and the Civil Rights Act of 1964.8
All that to say: I am guessing somewhere on Beacon Hill, at the Sorbonne, and in the puddle of his own blood on the Senate floor, Sumner saw the fish, and he refused to look away.
I understand why so many people are so concerned with incentives. It’s infuriating to watch villains succeed. And look, if we can stop rewarding people for doing the wrong things, we obviously should.
But I don’t know if we can. Goodhart’s Law, Campbell’s Law, and their corollaries state that every incentive is destined to be corrupted eventually, and so far, no one has proven these conjectures wrong. That’s why discussions around incentives often sound to me like we’re talking about a monkey’s paw that will grant our wishes, but only in evil, ironic ways. “The last time we made a wish on the Monkey’s Paw, it backfired horrifically. To rectify this, we have decided to make another wish on the Monkey’s Paw.”
In the eternal game of cat and mouse between the goodhearted people trying to fix the incentives and the Goodhart’d people trying to exploit the incentives, I am rooting for the cats. We should check whether our incentive systems are having their intended effects, and we should revisit and revise them accordingly. But for some reason, the second we start talking in terms of incentives, we also start acting like courage doesn’t exist and can’t exist. Bad incentives have become our generation’s version of “I was just following orders”, an excuse that should be an indictment.
So we should try to get our incentives right, but also—incentives be damned, do the right thing. If we seek an end to our permanent problems, we must cultivate in ourselves the same three things Charles Sumner said we should look for in a leader: “The first is backbone, the second is backbone and the third is backbone.”
Shout out to this post from Tal Yarkoni and this tweet from Alice Maz, which I saw long ago and no doubt spiritually inspired this post:
Only morons and cowards “respond to incentives.” Healthy people do what they want to do if reasonably practical, great people do what they want to do no matter what.
It was understood that these helmets, with their gnawed and rotted foam, would offer little protection if you actually got beamed in the head with a baseball. Their role was more ceremonial than functional, like a chef’s toque or a pope’s mitre.
As one participant in Smith and Denton’s study, a Muslim boy from California, put it:
God is like an entity that decides when, if, he wants to intervene with a lot of things. To me God is pretty much like intervention, like extreme luck. Say you’re $50 away from something and you find $50 on the floor, then that’s probably God’s intervention or something like that. But other than that it just seems like he’s monitoring. He just kind of stays back and watches, like he’s watching a play, like he’s a producer. He makes the play all possible and then he watches it, and if there’s something he doesn’t like, he changes it.
Survey research reaches a similar conclusion. For example, Catholics and Protestants spent several centuries murdering each other over doctrinal disputes. Today, however, only about half of Catholics know that they, unlike the Protestants, are supposed to believe in transubstantiation—that the bread and wine used in mass become the literal body and blood of Jesus. Meanwhile, about half of Protestants don’t know who Martin Luther was.
It took place in February, just before covid really kicked off in the US. I remember my advisor cautioning me not to go, and I dismissed him, citing the standard armamentarium of psychological biases: focusing illusion, scope neglect, availability heuristic. When I delivered my apology to him, it had to be over Zoom.
In the 1970s, a pair of psychologists recruited a bunch of seminary students to give a short lecture, either about career opportunities for seminary graduates, or about the story of the Good Samaritan. Some of them were told that they were late to give their lecture and they should hurry, or they were told they were on time or early. On their way to the building where they were supposed to deliver their talk, all the participants passed by a man slumped over in a doorway, groaning and coughing in the December cold. The participants in the “hurry” condition were less likely to stop and help; the content of their talk did not matter. As is common for studies from this era, there aren’t enough participants to be certain these results are robust, but I’m optimistic you could find an effect like this again.
For men, anyway. Sadly, Sumner was never much of an advocate for women. His biographer suggests he was probably gay, and he may have had some resentments toward the opposite sex. He exchanged saucy letters with a male friend of his, and was despondent when that friend married. Sumner himself remained a bachelor until in his 50s, only to have his wife immediately start cheating on him openly and then dump him a few months later. She told everybody he was impotent, which gave his political enemies no end of ammunition.
Sources for this section here, here, and here. For more, see this 600-page biography that came out last year.
2026-07-21 22:38:24
This is the third annual Experimental History Blog Post Competition, Extravaganza, and Jamboree, where people send me their best new blog posts and I reward my favorites with praise and cash.
This year, I got 68 submissions from folks all over the world, including visual artists, consultants, high schoolers, economists, engineers, lawyers, and all sorts of pseudonymous internet weirdos.
For the first time, I ran all potential winners through Pangram, which is an AI-writing detector.1 So according to the machine (and to my ear), all of the winners are 100% human-written. And here they are:
In the blogging biz, when someone dares to actually work on a piece of writing before they publish it—when they bother to cite their sources, check their facts, find a good story to frame their argument, etc.—we call that an “effort post”.
“How to Survive Boiling Water” is a quintessential effort post. Cook accidentally drinks some probiotic tea, and then she’s like, wait, how could “probiotic tea” possibly be a thing? Don’t all the bacteria die when they get dunked in boiling water? This is where most blog posts would end. Instead, Cook decides to run an elaborate experiment involving, among other things, a makeshift Bunsen burner, molten agar, and a dash of polymerase chain reaction. Ultimately, she discovers that bacteria are freaky little creatures that are capable of all kinds of depravity.
Bio:
Jane Cook is a PhD candidate and a microbiologist at large.
“As far as I can tell,” begins López Cordero’s piece, “the word ‘vape’ appears in only one national constitution on Earth.”
There’s an art to the short blog post like this, the kind that drops something interesting your lap, gives you a nod, and walks away. So in describing his post, I’ll do the same.
Bio: Ricardo López Cordero is “a writer and producer from Mexico City”.
“Young person discovers their roots” is a tried-and-true format. What stands out about Hsieh’s version is that her roots occupy such a unique spot in history: her grandparents were Chinese born in Indonesia, which means they got caught between the rock of the Cultural Revolution and the hard place of anti-communist backlash.
A Mi [Hsieh’s grandfather’s classmate] told me about the first weeks: propaganda posters appearing on walls overnight, enormous red characters, and then the label fandong (反動), reactionary. For overseas Chinese who had grown up in capitalist Southeast Asia, the label followed them everywhere.
[...] I think about how differently we use the word uncertainty now. I say it about job markets, AI, whether to stay in one city or move to another. She meant: I did not know if I would be allowed to continue learning. I did not know if I would be allowed to leave. I did not know who I was allowed to become.
Bio:
I write in search of clarity
Dingfelder has extremely sparse autobiographical memories, which means, on occasion, people remind her that she has made out with them:
This feels mean to say, but it’s true: I have absolutely no memory of this makeout session, or Mark’s entire existence, for that matter.
Kamdar is a conservationist, and he finds that regular people generally figure out reasonable ways of dealing with the wildlife they encounter. “Total institutions” like the army, on the other hand, try to deal with animals in ways that are totally bananas. For example:
The armed forces of Sweden, for over a decade in the 1980s were bombing the living daylights out of their coasts because they were certain that what they heard through their acoustic sensors in the water were Soviet submarines. [...] [Much later,] the Swedish armed forces approached ecologists working on marine sounds. They quickly figured out that these sounds were only shoals of the herring fish releasing gas from their butts.
Martsinovich argues, via code snippets, that there is no such thing as a “conversation” with a chatbot. The AI is born anew every time it speaks, and it simply reads the dialogue so far and then tries to write the next line:
ChatGPT may look like a chat, but there is no single entity on the other side. If anything, it’s more akin to speed dating, where you get a new partner for every phrase you say. The other side receives a full transcript and does their best to role-play a coherent conversation. They are all excellent actors, and you’re having a great time, but in the end you will go home alone and nobody will know your name.
People say that reading introduces you to places and people you’d never meet otherwise. This is especially true about reading blog posts. In this case, allow me to introduce you to someone who will do whatever it takes to avoid using a toilet that flushes automatically:
I was 5 years old, starting kindergarten, and using the toilet in the bathroom attached to our classroom. I finished my business, reached for the toilet paper and FA-WHOOM, a tsunami exploded beneath my exposed bottom. A fear was planted that day, one that has blossomed and sprouted since. I don’t truck with automatic toilets. [...] I can count on one hand the number of times I’ve used one in the last ten years.
And with that, I hereby call to a close the 2026 Experimental History Blog Post Competition, Extravaganza, and Jamboree. Thanks to everyone who submitted, thanks to all of you for reading, and thanks to the paid subscribers who make both this blog and this jamboree possible. Because of you, the jamboree continues eternally in our hearts.
There is no perfect detector for AI writing. Freddie de Boer has a post showing how easy it is to get Pangram to say that a piece of writing is “100% human” or “100% AI”. But given the recent Commonwealth Prize debacle, I think competitions that intend to reward humans should at least try to make sure that they aren’t rewarding machines instead.
2026-07-09 00:10:54
In The Decline of Deviance, I argued that:
Many forms of risk-taking and rule-breaking have declined since the 1990s.
This is both good (less crime) and bad (less innovation).
Deviance is declining because prosperity has increased—people have more to lose, and they’re acting like it.
Since I put it out last October, this has become my most-read post of all time. Lots of folks have chimed in with hypotheses, critiques, and good old-fashioned internet dunks, so let’s see if we can take this idea one level deeper, and weave something out of all these loose threads.
That’s right: we’re doing a sequel to the post about how there are too many sequels.
The most common response I got was: “how awful!”
(The trends, not the post itself, although that too sometimes.)
To most folks, the decline of deviance is a turn for the worst. Previous generations got to live through artistic golden ages, while we have to suffer through an era where there are four different movies that are all, technically, Spider-Man 2.
But this response misses half the post, and the most important point.
In 1995, half of high school students drank, 35% smoked, and 40% had at least tried weed. 10% of them had brought a weapon to school at some point. About 6% of girls aged 15-19 were pregnant. Crime rates were about as high as they had been since we started keeping track of them.
Over the next 30 years, all of these problems shrank and some of them nearly disappeared. And not because of anything we did on purpose! We have no idea how to get kids to stop smoking—when we try to persuade them, we sometimes cause them to smoke more. No, these improvements happened basically by magic, for free, and—I think—as a byproduct of our increasing prosperity. This is like waking up one day to find that you’ve been left a large fortune by a long-lost aunt.
How does this great, unearned victory make us feel? Apparently, it doesn’t make us feel anything. We would have spent billions to solve all of these problems back in the 1990s—no doubt we were spending considerable sums of money on anti-drug programs and public service announcements, wasting almost all of it—and yet when we got the thing we wanted so badly, we didn’t even notice.
Now we’re on to worrying about whether the kids are too sad, whether they play outside enough, etc. Which is all reasonable and fine, but also, can we take a win? Can we at least try to reverse-engineer how some of these trendlines ended up going in our preferred directions, so we can make more of them do that?
I, too, would like to see a movie that is not Spider-Man 2. But I also appreciate that I can watch it safely in my home without fear of being attacked by pregnant teenage criminals.
Many people looked at the trends I presented and said, “Oh, the internet did this”. Maybe the internet killed the vibe by enabling mass surveillance—everyone’s afraid to be weird inside the digital panopticon, where all of your behaviors are recorded, uploaded, and permanently preserved. Or maybe the internet flattened culture by subjecting it to algorithmic curation. We can’t have nice things anymore because the computers won’t show them to us.
Both of these hypotheses are probably wrong, because the internet—at least, the internet as we know it today—simply showed up too late to be a plausible suspect. A majority of Americans didn’t get broadband until 2007. Instagram only launched in 2010, which was also the year that iPhones got a front-facing camera. So the transition from the 1990s to the 2000s, where we see many forms of deviance declining, is not really the transition from “pre-internet” to “post-internet”. That transition happened somewhere around 2012 when a majority of people got a smartphone, and long after most of these trends were already in motion.
So I don’t think the internet is the killer, but I do think it’s an accessory after the fact. In particular, I think the internet accelerated three trends that don’t get much attention. I’m going to call them cultural carcinization, de-frictioning, and the flat-Earth problem.
In nature, apparently, being a crab is a good way to be. Several independent evolutionary lineages have ended up with crab-like body plans, a process called carcinization.
Culture can carcinize too, not in the sense that we all turn into crabs, but in the sense that we converge on a small set of strategies. If you’ve ever played a “social deduction” or “hidden role” game like Werewolf, Mafia, The Resistance, Avalon, or Secret Hitler, you’ve seen this happen in real time. Things start out wild and unpredictable as people get a feel for the rules. But everyone’s tactics have to evolve because each gambit can only work once (“If you’re the Secret Hitler, raise your hand right now!”). If you play long enough with the same group, eventually you’ll end up with a handful of maneuvers that continue to be viable even after they’re known, often because they’re difficult to pull off. At this point, the game becomes both extremely competitive and extremely repetitive. This is what cultural carcinization looks like.
The faster we can communicate, the faster we culturally carcinize. When information only travels as fast as humans can walk or horses can run, it takes a long time for any given strategy to play itself out. As we acquire steamships, railroads, telephones, and airplanes, the pace of the game picks up, and tactics have to turn over faster and faster. By the time we get the internet, it’s like every human on Earth is playing Secret Hitler a million times a day. (Except some people are not-so-secretly Hitlers.) Strategies appear and go out of date almost instantaneously until we all end up in a Nash equilibrium, where there’s no way for anyone to get the upper hand anymore.
The internet gives every social trend a pair of rocket-powered roller skates, speeding it toward its crablike final form. On Twitter, for instance, memes go from punchy to passé in a matter of days rather than decades. But if we could play culture on 1x speed rather than 10x speed, if we had time to screw around with different strategies before the game reached its cutthroat stage, we might have discovered different paths entirely. Maybe some folks would end up as crabs, while others became lobsters or kangaroos. Instead, in a hyper-competitive marketplace of ideas, we end up with the same few memes, all done to death.1
We’ve forgotten how much time people in the past spent consuming content that they didn’t actually want to consume: the unskippable clunker of a song that came in the middle of an album, the late-night infomercial that you sat through because there was nothing else on, the magazine you read cover-to-cover in the waiting room because your doctor was 45 minutes late.2
Each new media technology reduces this friction. CDs, TiVo, satellite radio, streaming—they all allow us to spend more time with the content that we supposedly desire. And what happens when this friction goes away? Well, in the mid-1990s, a pair of Russian artists named Komar and Melamid surveyed people around the world about their artistic preferences, and then they painted the “most wanted” scene from each country. The results looked like this:
The lesson here is that when people can articulate exactly what they want, and when the marketplace can give it to them, most folks end up sucking down slop. But I don’t think this is because humans yearn for crap and kitsch. I think it’s because no one knows actually what they like until they’re confronted by it. If you cater to people’s raw, undeveloped preferences, sure, you’re going to take them to Sloptown. But people are capable of acquiring more interesting tastes, if you give them the chance. This is the work art does for us—it stretches our desires, rather than merely satisfying them.3
Komar and Melamid also asked people about their least favorite paintings, and then the duo painted those, too. The results looked like this:
I doubt I’m alone in thinking that a few of these least-wanted paintings are better than every single most-wanted painting. They have a little tang to them, that smidgen of rizz it takes to raise the eyebrow and tickle the fancy.
This is Komar and Melamid’s second lesson: if you want to see something interesting, you have to see things that you might dislike. And I don’t mean things that merely bore you, like an AI-written Netflix series that’s only meant to be half-watched while you also shop for shoes on your phone. I mean things that grab your attention, only to slap it around. Acquiring new tastes means, from time to time, spitting things out.
In a frictionless environment, however, this never has to happen. The internet excels at identifying what people already seem to want, and giving it to them good and hard. Oh, you liked that video where a monkey eats a piece of cantaloupe? How about 30 million more of those? How about an anteater licking a watermelon? Will that keep your attention for another three seconds? Wait, don’t go yet!! We’ve got a baby hedgehog nibbling on a pineapple!!
People once theorized that globalization would cause niche culture to thrive because small-timers could make their living by selling to a tiny proportion of the populace spread all over the globe—the so-called “long tail”. That did become possible, but it didn’t become desirable. Everybody came to the same realization: once you can reach anyone, why not try to reach everyone? Why sell to one thousand people in every single country, when you could sell to every single person in every single country?
Here’s the rub: the more customers you want, the more you have to cater to the lowest common denominator. If you want your film to play in every theater on earth, then it has to appeal to eight billion different sensibilities, which also means it’s going to suck. This is the flat-Earth problem.
It’s easy to see these effects if you know where to look. Because Hollywood wants to sell movies in every market, they’re willing to do everything from editing out laundry clotheslines that make a country look “too backward” to pretending that Freddie Mercury wasn’t gay. Here’s how the Chinese version of Fight Club ends4:
If this is what’s happening in post-production, what do we think is happening in pre-production? What projects aren’t getting greenlit because they won’t play in Guangzhou?
While some folks blamed the internet for the decline of deviance, other people denied the decline entirely.
One common retort to my argument was that I’m just an old fuddy-duddy. For example, a blogger named Jenn claims that I am too uncool and out of touch to understand the cultural innovation happening in new forms of media like YouTube and Roblox. “Before I take a ‘culture is stagnating’ take seriously,” Jenn writes, “I want to see proof of work by the critics.” She concludes: “The culture is fine. Go play Return of the Obra Dinn.” (Return of the Obra Dinn is a video game.)
This is a petty thing to do, but can I be a little petty, as a treat? My deviance post includes research from an earlier post I wrote called Pop Culture Has Become an Oligopoly, where I found that more and more of the cultural landscape is dominated by fewer and fewer players. Toward the end of that post, which I published in 2022, I say this:
While the top of the charts has been oligopolized, the bottom remains a vibrant anarchy. [...] Two of the most interesting video games of the past decade put you in the role of an immigration officer and an insurance claims adjuster.
That insurance claims adjuster game is Return of the Obra Dinn, which I played that year. (And enjoyed!) I hope anticipating this critique four years ago counts as my proof of work.
Pettiness aside, I think Jenn’s claim is plausible: the older you get, the less access you have to the most interesting parts of culture. If you think things are stagnating, you’re just admitting that you aren’t getting invited to the cool parties anymore. Plus, old folks can’t stop themselves from seeing the past through rose-colored glasses—in survey after survey, people think pretty much everything in culture just happened to peak when they were between four and twelve years old:
But things get a little more complicated when you separate people’s responses by age. When you first glance at this YouGov survey, it seems like every generation strongly prefers the music from their own childhood:
But look a little closer. The responses from Gen X, Baby Boomers, and the Silent Generation all have a clear peak flanked by much smaller hills. Millennials’ preferences, on the other hand, are more spread out. And Gen Z’s preferences are basically a plateau—they’re almost equally likely to nominate the 1980s, 1990s, 2000s, and 2010s.
We can’t know whether this is an age effect that they’ll grow out of—maybe every generation was culturally omnivorous when they were younger, and their tastes only calcified when they got older. But I doubt it. For all you Gen X’ers out there, did you spend your teenage years spinning your parents’ Perry Como records until you suddenly switched to Led Zeppelin in adulthood?
Besides, Jenn’s age argument cuts both ways. Old folks are biased by nostalgia, but young folks are biased by inexperience. When you’re young, everything seems new because it’s new to you. You don’t know that your favorite anime is a rehash of a movie from the 1980s, because you weren’t alive in the 1980s. You’re not tired of the tropes yet because you’ve only seem them a few dozen times. You can’t pine for what you lost because you never had it in the first place.5
It’s reasonable to be skeptical of any narrative of decline—I did my PhD on why people perceive declines that haven’t actually happened. But (a), unlike most of those spurious nostalgic fantasies, the decline of deviance has both pros and cons. And (b), there are so many weird phenomena here and they need explaining, not just waving away.
For instance—
Here are three facts.
It’s easier than ever to get weed—in 24 US states, you can buy and consume it purely for fun. The only thing standing between a 15-year-old and a four-pack of JBAD Jellies Blue Razz THC Pucks is one unscrupulous older sibling who is willing to pick them up for you.
Today’s teens see weed as less risky than previous generations of teens did. My generation got abstinence-only drug education (i.e., “if you smoke weed you’re gonna end up living in van down by the river”). But the Reefer Madness routine doesn’t work in a world where you can buy CBD gummies at the gas station.
And yet, despite all that, kids today still smoke less weed than kids did in the 1990s!
Mysteries like this ought to send us scrambling for explanations, and the strength of the “rising prosperity” hypothesis is that it has answers for these weird phenomena. As life gets safer and more prosperous, it makes less and less sense to take risks. So even if kids rightly believe that a single joint won’t kill them, and even if that joint is easier than ever to get, it still doesn’t seem like a good idea to light up. You’ve got infinite entertainment on demand, you’ve got another ~70 healthy years ahead of you that are—in most places on Earth, at least—unlikely to be cut short by murder, war, accidents, or untimely disease. If you can get into a decent school and keep your nose clean, you’ve got a good shot at a decent life, so why take a chance on the devil’s grass?
Another theory that readers put forward: the deviance got scarce because life got hard. Nobody can do cool art anymore because everything is too expensive: housing, college, supplies, etc.
I think this is probably wrong. I suspect that it’s always been hard to be an artist, and previous generations were simply more willing to starve for it—not because they were braver, but because the difference between starving and not-starving used to be much smaller.
Read an old book that isn’t about princes and princesses, and you’ll quickly see how normal poverty used to be. Not Dickensian, “please sir may I have some more”-type poverty, but regular, everyday poverty, where the things we consider necessities today are treated as unimaginable luxuries. For example, early on in Moby-Dick, Ishmael has to stay at a crummy, packed inn where his choice is either to sleep on some benches in the dining room, or to share a bed with a stranger. (He chooses the latter, which leads to a thinly-veiled homoerotic encounter with a Polynesian sailor named Queequeg.) Everyone involved thinks it’s annoying to bunk in with a rando, but nobody thinks it’s strange—that’s just what you gotta do sometimes. This is the level of comfort you could expect in the 1850s even if you were gainfully employed full-time.
You don’t have to go that far into the past to find a kind of poverty that feels foreign today. I read an article a while back about punk musicians living in New York in the 1970s, and they’re sleeping in roach-infested flophouses, they’re making music in abandoned buildings, they’re getting evicted and mugged and addicted to drugs.6 They’re truly broke, not “I can’t contribute to my retirement fund this month” broke, but “I might have to spend the night on this bench because I can’t afford a bus ticket back home” broke. I know plenty of aspiring musicians are out there slumming it right now, but this is a level of deprivation that most folks in developed countries would find unacceptable, if not downright dangerous. Once you’re sleeping rough, it’s time to hawk the guitar and call the temp agency.
That’s not because dire poverty became less glamorous—it was never glamorous!—but because it became uncommon. When five musicians spend the night in a bus station, that’s called being punk. When one musician spends the night in a bus station, that’s called being homeless.
The richer the world gets, the higher the opportunity cost that starving artists have to pay. If you’ve got the chops to write a great novel, then you might also have the chops to make $95k working as a product manager for some mid-sized fintech firm. If your alternative was tilling turnips or spending six months at sea hunting sperm whales, you might say, screw it, I’d rather go hungry for my art than go somewhat less hungry for anything else. But that manuscript in your desk drawer is less enticing when you can have PTO and dental and an annual international vacation where you get to sleep in a bed that doesn’t have any strangers in it.
Here’s an example. When I was in college, I went with my improv group to see one of our alums perform at a theater in Chicago. I remember sitting there mesmerized, thinking, this guy’s so funny, why is he working some soulless corporate job during the day and only doing his art on Tuesday nights? I cornered him afterward, and he told me he had, in fact, spent years trying to make a comedic career work. “But then I got tired of not being able to afford to fly to my friends’ weddings,” he said, “so I went to law school instead.” Now he can fly to as many weddings as he wants.
I don’t blame him. When nobody can afford a plane ticket, being broke isn’t embarrassing. But when everybody else is jetting off for the wedding, you’re not just poor; you’re also a loser. Unfortunately, when every interesting person chooses comfort over creativity, we end up with four different Spider-Man 2s.
As William James wrote 100 years ago:
We have grown literally afraid to be poor. We despise any one who elects to be poor in order to simplify and save his inner life. [...] We have lost the power even of imagining what the ancient idealization of poverty could have meant: the liberation from material attachments, the unbribed soul, the manlier indifference, the paying our way by what we are or do and not by what we have, the right to fling away our life at any moment irresponsibly,—the more athletic trim, in short, the moral fighting shape.
The difference is that today we don’t despise people who elect to be poor, I think, because we don’t know any of them.
Many people asked some version of, “Is the decline of deviance actually an increase in tolerance?” After all, even if you wanted to be deviant today, how would you do it?
I don’t think this explanation covers everything—murder is still deviant, for instance, and it’s rarer than ever. But there is something to it. Crack open the General Social Survey, and you’ll see that Americans have given up many of their hangups. Same-sex and interracial marriage, recreational drug use, premarital sex, working mothers—these things used to be scandalous, and now they’re unremarkable.7 People used to get their undies in a bunch about Bermuda shorts:
So no doubt part of the decline of deviance is an increase in tolerance. But I think it, too, can be explained by the rise of mass prosperity.
The economists Daron Acemoglu and James Robinson argue that nations get rich when they build inclusive economic and political institutions. Oligarchs and aristocrats fear any growth or reform that they can’t control, which in practice means basically all growth and reform. (“We do not desire at all that the great masses shall become well off and independent,” once remarked Frederick Gantz, an imperial flunky of Francis I of Austria. “How could we otherwise rule over them?”) If the plebs and the serfs can get a bit of money and power, however, it kicks off a virtuous cycle. Once people have some cash and influence, it becomes bad business and bad politics to shut them out—if you won’t engage with them, someone else will, and your more open-minded rivals will eventually out-compete you.
This process takes a long time, it’s uneven, and it’s not close to being completed. However, a few generations of semi-inclusive institutions have created a much wider spectrum of acceptable lifestyles. If you want to live in a polyamorous, genderless vegan witch commune, you can order your nutritional yeast on Amazon, trade memes with your friends on Tumblr, and vote for Democrats who think your choices are a-ok. If you want to live in a neoreactionary monarchist compound where you stockpile weapons and hunt bears, you can buy your guns at Wal-Mart, read posts on TruthSocial, and vote for Republicans who are on board with all of it. As long as you have money to spend and ballots to cast, someone can get ahead by catering to you.
(Case in point: one of the “platinum sponsors” of the New York City Pride Parade is Deutsche Bank.)
This is a good thing. Inclusive institutions make everybody better off, except for the few cleptocrats who used to live in palaces while everyone else lived in shacks.
The downside is that every corner of culture gets commercialized. Reading comic books, listening to death metal, piercing body parts other than your ears—these used to be legitimately countercultural acts that distanced you from polite society and bonded you to an alternative community. Now you can do all these things at the mall. The Hot Topic-ization of culture means that anything new and interesting gets co-opted and mass-produced, thus draining it of everything that made it cool in the first place.
I ended the first Decline of Deviance post with the story of Arturo di Modica, the Italian sculptor who ran away from home to study art in Florence, moved to New York, dug a secret basement in his studio, and placed his giant sculptures illegally in public places, including the famous Charging Bull statue that sits on Wall Street.
It is natural to assume that the hero of Arturo di Modica’s story is Arturo di Modica. But I think his story has many heroes. The dean of his art school who let a runaway kid take sculpture classes. The policeman who let him off with a $25 fine when he dumped several multi-ton sculptures in Rockefeller Center. The mayor who shook his hand for doing the same, rather than carting him off to jail. The building inspector who retroactively approved his illegal basement. The parks department bureaucrat who rescued Charging Bull from the impound lot and put it back on the street.
These people were neither artists nor weirdos. They were normal folks who knew good deviance when they saw it, and they decided to let it live.
Few of us will have the courage to be an Arturo di Modica, especially because that takes more bravery than ever. (If you were staring down a dead-end life in postwar Sicily, you, too, might run away from home and hop a train to an art school in Florence.) But the rest of us will have the chance to be that dean, that cop, and that bureaucrat. We are all keepers of tiny gates, and by the sum total of our actions, we get to decide what kind of culture we live in. We can choose to let our times be interesting. Or we can just keep doing what we’re doing, and enjoy what’s coming up this fall:
This is why I don’t buy the claim that there are finite songs, scripts, etc., and we’ve simply done all of them. That assumes culture is like Tic Tac Toe, where the rules are simple and the optimal strategy is obvious. I think culture is a lot more like chess, where we can discover new strategies even after playing the game for a thousand years.
We all think it’s bad to spend so much time on our phones these days, but is wasting thirty minutes on TikTok really worse than wasting thirty minutes watching a man demonstrate the Ronco Electric Food Dehydrator and Veg-O-Matic?
As a side note, this is why AI has not eliminated the demand for human-made art, and why I don’t expect it ever will. Yes, people can now generate any image or essay they want, for free. The problem is they have no idea what images and essays they want. Nobody is like, “Computer, show me a timeless film about a wizard of oz!” Artistic skill is not only knowing how to use a brush, a pen, or Final Cut Pro, but knowing what to use them for.
It later got its original ending back after public outcry.
Relevant:
I lost this article forever in the demise of the Pocket app, alas!
But note that, in my own research, people are often wrong about how public opinion has changed over time.
2026-06-23 23:57:56
This is the quarterly links ‘n’ updates post, a collection of things I’ve been reading and doing for the past few months.
A British man named Tommy McHugh was on the toilet pooping when apparently he strained too hard, had a stroke, and woke up in the hospital. McHugh was construction worker and ex-con who had never been in an art gallery “except maybe to steal something”, but as he recovered, he was possessed by an intense desire to make art:
I’ll paint three or six or nine pictures at a time. […] Canvases became too costly, so I started painting the ceilings and the wallpaper and the floor.
Here’s what it looked like:
As he said in an interview, “The most wonderful thing that happened to Tommy McHugh [was] having a stroke while doing a poo.”
The blogger claims that Pope Leo’s first encyclical, which is about AI, was substantially written by AI. I believe that it’s a mortal sin to pass off computer-generated text as your own, so if this is true, I hope the pontiff confesses and repents.
According to the blogger Jenn, Canada lost its measles elimination status because they don’t have enough nurses who speak Low German. Basically, measles outbreaks in Canada are concentrated among Mennonites, who do seem to be hesitant about vaccines, but much less so when medical professionals can speak to them in their native language. For instance, here’s the kind of miscommunication that can happen between doctors and Mennonites, as told by a Low German-speaking support worker in Ontario:
The following morning, the mother called me: her child was coughing so violently she was vomiting. I told her to go to the hospital. Later, she called me again, upset. She said that when she got to the ER, they’d told her to go home.
I couldn’t help but think something was off. The hospital doesn’t turn people away, I told her, but she insisted that they had. So I called them directly to figure out what had happened. It turned out there had been a miscommunication. Hospital staff had told her not to come in, using a “stop” hand gesture to communicate, and she had become so flustered that she failed to catch the second part of the message: that she should wait in the car while they prepared a negative-pressure room.
In 1830s Massachusetts, beards were so uncommon and strange that a man named Joseph Palmer was mocked and shunned for wearing one. Assailants tried to forcibly shave him, but he fought them off with a knife, and was imprisoned for assault. He refused to pay his fine or court fees, and so he remained in prison for over a year. This at least gave him the excuse to create this all-time classic tombstone:
The Vegetable Lamb of Tartary supposedly grew out of the ground, grazed all the grass it could reach with its stem-like umbilical cord, and then died. European scholars considered it a plausible organism well into the 1700s, but doubts started to creep in after various expeditions failed to turn up any specimens.1
TV shows and movies often depict uranium as a glowing green ore, even though it doesn’t actually glow. claims this trope did not come from uranium glass, a novelty product from 100 years ago that does glow green (but because of fluorescence, not radioactivity). Instead the image of green, glowing uranium came, as so many things do, from The Simpsons.
Uri Bram has a cool new tool that tells you how weird you are. For instance, if you have a bachelor’s degree or higher, you don’t have a gun in your home, and both of your parents were born in the United States, congratulations—only 14% of Americans match you on all three. (This is based on the US General Social Survey so it only works for Americans, but it should be easy to recreate for any country with a similar dataset.)
Here’s another number that surprised me. If you asked me how many artists make more than $100k in royalties on Spotify, I’d probably guess, I dunno, 5,000? The actual number is 13,800.
I happened to be reading Helen DeWitt’s novel The Last Samurai when I saw her post about her troubles with the Windham Campbell Prize. The prize is meant to “provide writers with the opportunity to focus on their work independent of financial concerns” by cutting them a check for $175,000. However, they also require you to spend eight hours filming a promotional video and three days participating in a workshop at Yale.
This might not seem like a lot, but as the biologist puts it, Weird Nerds come with tradeoffs. If you’re the kind of person who can write an extremely inventive (and good!) novel, you might also have a hard time doing things that are easy for other people, like, say, finding Wi-Fi, or putting your writing on hold to fly to Yale. DeWitt says she hasn’t had proper time to write for years, between taking care of her dying mother, fending off a stalker, and dealing with dilatory editors, and so she’d rather be strapped for cash if it means she’s free to write uninterrupted. And so she turns down the prize and the check that comes with it. That’s what seriousness looks like.
Fortunately, then this happened2:
Another writing prize controversy: one of the Commonwealth Short Story Prizes appears to have been awarded to an obviously AI-generated story. The prize-winning stories all appear in Granta magazine, and the editor’s response was basically a shrug:
We showed Claude.ai the story and asked whether it was AI-generated. The response was long, concluding that it was ‘almost certainly not produced unaided by a human’.
A computer scientist named claims that the empty metaphors that plague the prize-winning story—and that plague all AI writing—often come from human-written fanfiction. For instance, the rare phrase “the patience of a reptile”, which appears in the allegedly AI-generated story, also occurs in this fanfiction based on the Japanese anime/manga Naruto. There’s no way to be sure that an LLM sucked it up and spat it back out, but it’s worth remembering that a meaningful amount of the text inside these machines was written by people who were playing pretend with anime characters.
Apparently some estimates of microplastics in the environment might be way too high because the samples got contaminated by lab gloves. As this tweet puts it:
has a great article on the controversies around eLife, one of the few scientific journals willing to actually try new things. In 2018, the journal ran a trial where it did away with accept/reject decisions altogether for a small sample of papers—it just posted the manuscripts and their peer reviews as “Reviewed Preprints”. Authors were then able to try publishing their papers elsewhere, or revise and repost them on eLife.
In 2023, the journal was about to make this the policy for all papers, and some of the editors and the governing board staged a revolt. They got the editor-in-chief, Michael Eisen, fired. Clarivate, a for-profit company that collects publishing metrics, yanked the journal’s “Impact Factor”, which is a number that people use to judge a journal’s prestige. Fortunately, eLife’s experiment continues, for now.
It is dismaying to discover that, if you try to do something even mildly different with a scientific journal, people will freak out and try to self-immolate to stop you. Clearly, this isn’t a system that can be reformed from the inside, and it needs a controlled burn instead. (See: The one science reform we can all agree on, but we’re too cowardly to do.)
According to China-watcher Tanner Greer, the Chinese Communist Party has decided that the future belongs to the nation with the best science and technology, and naturally, they want that country to be China. As a result, China has
the world’s most sensitive ultra-high-energy cosmic-ray detector, the world’s largest and most sensitive radio telescope, the world’s strongest steady-state magnetic field, the world’s fastest quantum computer by computational advantage, and the world’s most sensitive neutrino detector [...and] the world’s largest primate medical research center.
China now graduates twice as many STEM PhDs as the US does, and it dominates citation metrics in all sorts of applied physics and chemistry fields. It is easy to waste your science funding and it’s easy to game citation metrics with junk papers—as we Americans know all too well. And it is hard to pull off a paradigm shift without a lot of intellectual freedom. But a decade or two from now, it’s going to be obvious which countries were pumping money into their scientific ecosystems, and which ones were cancelling grants by using CTRL-F on the word “diversity”.
Every once in a while, I reacquaint myself with Suzanne Triester’s fictional video game stills, made on an Amiga computer in the early 1990s:
ICE agents carry guns around, and so we think of them like police officers. But they’re not. They’re actually government bureaucrats, and they’re subject to the same laws that govern, say, the EPA. And since the Supreme Court has been so intent on neutering the administrative state, there are actually a lot of ways to rein in ICE that don’t rely on the police brutality playbook. So argues this very insightful article in The Atlantic that also happens to be written by my wife.
Crime rates in the US have been mostly decreasing since the 1990s. But most people feel like crime is increasing, even when it’s not:
Some of these people claim that A) the statistics are somehow made up or they’re misleading because people are reporting less crime, or B) homicides only appear to be down because medical care has improved. Scott Alexander reviews the evidence for these claims and finds them both wanting.
Okay, but even if people aren’t committing more major crimes, maybe they’re doing more petty crimes—litter, graffiti, shoplifting, etc. Here the evidence is less clear and more mixed, but we can at least rule out a large and obvious increase in social disorder.
As you can tell from the comments sections on these posts, people find Alexander’s claims very annoying. Deep in their hearts, humans feel like they can precisely estimate crime rates by walking around and comparing the world that they see to the one that they remember. I often get the same reaction when talking about the Illusion of Moral Decline—once, someone came up to me and was like, “Well, my neighbor just put up a fence to spite me, so clearly morality is declining”.
Also in the Illusion of Moral Decline, we asked people to estimate how cooperation rates in lab-based economic games—i.e., the Prisoner’s Dilemma—had changed over the past 70 years. We paid them a bonus if they got the answer right. On average, people thought cooperation had gone down, when actually those rates have gone up. A new paper replicates this effect in both America and China:
A new study claims that an eight-minute conversation with ChatGPT can reduce belief in conspiracy theories by about 20%, and that these effects last at least two months. I am always wary of tiny interventions that purport to have large and long-lasting effects, but I don’t see anything immediately fishy about this study, and the mechanism is plausible. I bet most 9/11 truthers have never spoken to a skeptic who both took them seriously and who knew a lot about 9/11.
This is, I think, an underrated and positive aspect of AI. People are worried about hallucinations and AI psychosis, and rightfully so. But keep in mind that many people do not know basic, uncontroversial truths about their world. 37% of Americans—a plurality—believe that God created humans in their present form within the last 10,000 years. 40% don’t understand how a control group works. 26% think that the sun goes around the Earth. For these people, talking to a chatbot is likely to leave them with a more accurate view of reality.
My good friend Jake Robertson has a PhD in history from Oxford, and he’s one of the most creative fellas I know. (Not a lot of people are both experts on the Gulag and have also played Hamlet in the nude in Central Park). His greatest love is taking stories from the past and bringing them to life, which he’s done for decades with his own family history, and now you can hire him to do the same for yours. This is a great gift for the grandparent who has everything, for the mom who wants more than just a family tree and a stack of census records, and for settling family feuds about whether Uncle Harry actually had a secret second family back in Warsaw.
Kirk Smith is building a homemade, open-source, low-cost battery to capture renewable energy; check it out here.
From : Join the Independent Science Society. Especially relevant if you live in London, but they also have a Discord.
is working on an AI-enabled replacement for peer-reviewed journals. I hear a lot of science reform ideas that are basically, “What if AI, you know, just made all the problems go away?” so what I like about this one is how specific it is, and that it has an actual theory of change.
Thanks to everyone who submitted to the 2026 Experimental History Blog Post Competition, Extravaganza, and Jamboree! I’ll announce the winners later this summer.
did another replication of the Things Could Be Better effect and the results look pretty similar:
I’m planning a meetup in Chicago—go here for more info.
Infinite Loops (paradigms & progress)
Through Conversations (the scientific ecosystem)
Behind the Slides with Scott Matson (academia & publishing)
The Happiness Lab with Laurie Santos (the Illusion of Moral Decline)
And finally, a post from the archive: two years ago, I found a way to put my horrible master’s thesis to good use.
I swear I first learned about this through an Astral Codex Ten links post, but now I can’t find it, so maybe I hallucinated it.
Full disclosure, I am also the recipient of an Emergent Ventures grant. Apparently they’ll give ‘em to just anybody these days.
2026-06-10 00:58:56
Here’s a story from 30 years ago that would make no sense today.
It’s 1992. Pearl Jam’s debut album Ten is selling well. But then MTV puts the music video for their song “Jeremy” in heavy rotation, and the band rockets into superstardom—shows suddenly sold out, fans smashing record store windows, the whole shebang.
That’s familiar enough, but what happens next is not. Pearl Jam responds to this hullabaloo by refusing to make music videos for the next five years. They decline photoshoots and interviews. When their producer tells them that their song “Better Man” is a surefire hit, they cut it from their second album.1 Nevertheless, that album sells nearly a million copies in its first week, setting a record. Then it sells six million more, staying at #1 on the Billboard chart for over a month.
They say that the past is a foreign country, and reading a Pearl Jam profile from the early 90s, it certainly feels that way. The writer takes for granted that fame is inherently bad. And not just because fans might, say, break into your backstage dressing room and steal your notebooks—which they did—but also because commercial success and artistic integrity are so obviously at odds with one another. Kurt Cobain had mocked the band for catering to the mainstream, and the criticism clearly stung. It was understood that being popular was somehow, paradoxically, uncool, and that Pearl Jam owed everyone assurances that they hadn’t gotten too big for their britches.
I am just barely old enough to remember this era, when “selling out” was a bad thing you did with your career, rather than a good thing you do with your stadium tour. Blank Space: A Cultural History of the 21st Century, the book where I first read this story about Pearl Jam, quotes the 90s chronicler Chuck Klosterman: “the concept of ‘selling out’ [...] is the single most nineties aspect of the nineties”. I gained consciousness at about the time that Backstreet Boys, NSYNC, and the Spice Girls gained worldwide fame, and I understood that it was hip to hate them.2 This didn’t stop them from selling millions of records, of course. But there was a sizable sector of society that refused to join in, a clutch of (sometimes snobby) purists who were ready to turn on anyone who got too big or too rich. As the music writer points out, around this time, a rock band could lose permanently lose their street cred for appearing in a Miller commercial.
That feeling part of a larger anti-consumerist vibe percolating through culture at the time. This was the era of Super Size Me and the anti-World Trade Organization protests that came to be known as the Battle of Seattle. My parents furnished me with copies of Eric Schlosser’s Fast Food Nation and Naomi Klein’s anti-capitalist manifesto No Logo.3 My English teacher made the whole class read anti-consumerist YA novels like Feed and The Gospel According to Larry. I got so caught up in the fervor that I almost showed up to a school dance with a handmade sign that said “I AM PROTESTING CONSUMERISM”. I chickened out at the last second, but clearly there was some potent zeitgeist going on if a 13-year-old was about to stake their reputation on, I guess, not buying stuff?
Fast forward to today, and that zeitgeist is long gone. Meghan Thee Stallion is a Popeyes franchisee, Drake would like you to try online gambling, and Maroon 5 is covering Bob Marley’s “Three Little Birds” as a tribute to Hyundai.4 Shortly after she charted her first hit, the rapper Ice Spice was partnering with Ben Affleck and Dunkin’ Donuts on an Ice Spice Munchkins Drink.5 We’ve got punk icon Iggy Pop selling insurance and Bob Dylan appearing in a Victoria’s Secret commercial.6 Lollapalooza once featured alt rock and heavy metal; these days, you can catch a set by DJ D-Sol, better known as David Solomon, the CEO of Goldman Sachs. And if you love Lady Gaga’s album Chromatica and the associated HBO special Gaga Chromatica Ball, then don’t miss these limited edition Lady Gaga Chromatica-themed Oreos!
Hyper-commercialism is nothing new, in music or anywhere else. (See, for instance, the band KISS’ officially licensed Kiss Kasket). People who bemoan our era of “late capitalism” rarely realize that phrase is 100 years old. The only thing that’s unprecedented about these craven cash-ins is how well they seem to be working. Selling out no longer carries a stigma—if anything, fans are excited for tie-ins between their favorite bands and their favorite brands, no matter how shameless. The Chromatica Oreos reportedly flew off the shelves, earning a thumbs-up even from the Washington Post’s food critic. Some people complained about the texture and the color, or how it was simply a re-release of the much-hated “golden” Oreo, but they did not complain that it is cringe, perhaps even depraved, for a musician to collaborate with an international food conglomerate to stick her name on a million mass-produced sandwich cookies.
And if that doesn’t send Kurt Cobain spinning in his grave, wait until he finds out that Gen Z thinks Nirvana is a clothing brand.
How did the punk ethos die?
W. David Marx, the author of Blank Space, has a theory that I think is correct, but incomplete. He blames an ideology called poptimism: the idea that popular art (and especially pop music) is just as meritorious as any other kind of art. Poptimism was meant to be a reaction to rockism7, a strain of cultural snobbery that insisted rock ‘n’ roll was the only authentic form of art—if it ain’t a white guy with a guitar, it ain’t real music! Both sides of that debate might sound stupid now, but the poptimist critique made sense back when people were flocking to baseball stadiums to blow up piles of disco records:
Unfortunately, Marx says, the critics took poptimism too far, and they brought the discourse with them. They embraced pop music not only because they had suddenly discovered the musical genius of Britney Spears, but also because they realized the political winds had changed. In the words of one music writer, poptimism was “a kind of penance, atoning for past rockist misdeeds”. Saying that some art is better than other art started sounding too much like saying that some people are better than other people. And once you’re unwilling to judge art for its artistry, you’re stuck judging it by its popularity.
I don’t doubt Marx’s thesis that culture writers abandoned their posts, but I do doubt that this was enough to kill the anti-consumerist vibe on its own. Something even bigger was happening at the same time: while the critics were changing their tune, they were also getting tuned out. The internet decapitated art criticism, elevating the YouTube commenter to the same level as the Pitchfork editor. And although there are plenty of problems with professional tastemakers—they can be condescending and exclusionary, they can have their heads up their butts, etc.—they are at least, in theory, concerned with separating art from schlock.
Casual consumers have no such hangups. They don’t care whether every pop song they listen to is written by the same middle-aged Swedish guy; they just want their eardrums vibrated, their retinas tickled, and their pleasure centers stimulated. And so, the more you cater to the consumer over the connoisseur, the more you’re going to be serving up slop. The internet makes this possible; competition makes it irresistible.
Together, the decline of art criticism and the ascent of art populism can explain how corny, lowest-common-denominator kitsch went from being a guilty pleasure to simply being a pleasure. The line separating art and entertainment went undefended, and then it was washed away by a tsunami of swill.
However, that doesn’t explain why we became so tolerant of shameless greed and self-promotion. As we lost the ability to distinguish between Joni Mitchell and Celine Dion, why did we also lose the ability to distinguish between a single and a jingle? Listening to Lady Gaga is one thing, but where did we acquire our appetite for her Oreos?
The answer to that is, I think, the Great Switcheroo.
In every country on Earth, poor people outnumber rich people. Many of those countries are ostensibly democratic. This leaves us with a puzzle: why don’t the poor people vote to take all the money away from the rich people and redistribute it amongst themselves?
John Steinbeck’s famous explanation was that, in the United States at least, poor people see themselves as “temporarily embarrassed millionaires”.8 You don’t want to outlaw affluence if you might have some for yourself one day. That wasn’t a crazy thing to think when Steinbeck was writing in the 1930s, as some of the richest men in America had come from modest means—Rockefeller, Carnegie, Ford, Edison, Hershey, and Chrysler. If fortunes are popping into existence all the time, it may seem like the wealthy are a group to be joined rather than beaten.
The average American is not feeling so upwardly mobile these days, and so people aren’t as sanguine about the super-rich as they might have once been. When YouGov surveyed Americans about their opinions of 40 different rich people, not a single one of them was liked by more than 50% of the population. (For instance, 90% of respondents know who Jeff Bezos is, but only 19% approve of him). An increasing number of people—and especially young people—say that billionaires are a bad thing for the country:
As the public has soured on the rich, however, they seem to have sweetened on the famous. In similar YouGov polls, celebrities do extraordinarily well compared to billionaires. Lady Gaga, for instance, has 97% recognition and 61% approval. Samuel L. Jackson: 96% recognition, 81% approval. Even Paris Hilton’s 40% approval rate is better than every single rich person except Warren Buffet (he’s at 41%).9 Not bad for someone who once described her life’s mission as, “I want to be famous. [...] And I want to monetize that, like a lot.”10
This Great Switcheroo happened, I think, because as it got harder to become rich, it got easier to become famous. It’s hard to remember now, but going viral on the internet was once a bad thing. Back in 2002, when Star Wars Kid got famous for pretending to be Darth Maul in a home video, he got death threats, not brand deals. His classmates bullied him so badly that his family sued them; meanwhile, his school asked him not to come back. The “Numa Numa” Kid was originally “distraught” and “embarrassed” by his fame (he later tried to capitalize on it, mostly unsuccessfully). Afro Ninja, a Black stunt performer whose disastrous audition tape went viral, said of his unexpected notoriety, “If I had a choice to do it all over again [...] I would pass”.
Once the attention economy built out its financial infrastructure, however, overnight fame suddenly went from painful to profitable. The YouTube Partner Program (2007), Stripe (2010), and Patreon (2013) all made it easier to turn eyeballs into dollars. The first wave of internet celebrities peaked too early to cash in, but subsequent waves became icons rather than pariahs. Just as the Americans who lived through the Gilded Age watched industrial moguls build business empires, we watched tweens become millionaires in their bedrooms. They got Andrew Carnegie; we got Mr. Beast.11
As a result, the attention economy is the one corner of the overall economy where people are still feeling upwardly mobile. 57% of Gen Z (and 41% of older adults!) say they would like to be influencers. And why not? You are not going to escape the underclass by driving an Uber or dusting the server racks at a data center, but you might be able to do it by posting mukbang videos.
I think this is why we now tolerate such blatant greed among famous people: we think we have a chance of becoming one of them. We once saw ourselves as temporarily embarrassed millionaires; now we see ourselves as temporarily unknown celebrities.
(Of course, the celebrities we look up to are also millionaires, but their riches are incidental to their fame, rather than the other way around.)
It doesn’t matter whether you’re actually trying to become TikTok famous. The fact that there is a path between us and the stars—however tenuous, however unlikely to be trod—makes it feel like they are, somehow, just like us. You and I could never be Jeff Bezos, Bill Gates, or Sam Altman, and so they seem distant and despicable. But some part of us believes that we could be Billie Eilish, Ed Sheeran, or Taylor Swift, and so we exempt them from the noblesse oblige that we used to demand of the aristocracy.
In fact, while most of us feel like billionaires owe us something (see: the California Billionaire Tax, heading to ballots this fall), many people apparently feel like they owe something to their favored celebrities. Millions of people have joined the ranks of fan clubs like the Rihanna Navy, the BTS Army, Ariana Grande’s Arianators12, Justin Bieber’s Beliebers, Beyoncé’s Beyhive, and so on. The paramilitary-esque branding of these groups is not accidental. These are the folks writing guides on how to inflate BTS’s streaming statistics, issuing death threats to a music writer who dared to give Taylor Swift an 8.0/10, and enlisting themselves as copyright police when an Ariana Grande album leaked early, hunting down and flagging links to the pirated music so it wouldn’t hurt her advance sales. As the author of that BTS guide put it in an interview with The New York Times, promoting her favorite band feels like “we are also promoting our own voices, our own struggles, our own hope for a better world.”
This has got to be the greatest marketing coup in history: convincing fans that they are “promoting their own voices” while they are helping a record executive afford his second yacht.
I’m being harsh, but look around: are you pleased with the state of our culture? Are you excited by music videos that double as commercials for Wonder Bread and Miracle Whip?13 Do you enjoy jockeying with ten million other people for Taylor Swift tickets, nine million of whom are attempting to invest in them as speculative assets? Does it warm your cockles when The Rock brags on Twitter that Red One, his Christmas movie, has “a long shelf life and multiple verticals - kudos to our Amazon partners for their strategic win”? This is what decades of poptimism, populism, and celebrity worship have gotten us:
If we want this to stop, the solution is simple: we have to stop eating Lady Gaga’s Oreos. We have to stop pretending that celebrities are just like us, and that their success is our success. We have to redraw the line between art and entertainment, and more importantly, we have to redraw the line between art and advertisement.
I have no problem with artists making money—everybody has to pay their rent somehow. I don’t even have a problem with artists getting rich—if you can write a song that makes the whole world sing, then you deserve a big fat check.
I have a problem with artists doing commerce under the guise of art. I listen, I read, and I watch because I want to inhabit, even if just for a moment, the mind of another human. I want to feel what it’s like to be them, and in so doing, I want to better understand what it’s like to be me. But if I journey to the center of someone’s psyche and all I find there is a billboard for Pizza Hut, I’m turning around. If your art is just one node in your business empire, if your albums are merely commercials for your cologne, if you’re trying to turn your first billion into your second billion, you are no longer an artist at all. You are a credit default swap with a discography attached.
If we can revive the stigma of selling out, maybe we can also revive the rest of the punk ethos that we seem to have lost. To the extent that anti-consumerist sentiment survives at all today, it mainly exists in two diminished forms. One is the environmentalist variant, which says it’s naughty to buy stuff not because it’s bad for your soul, but because it’s bad for the Earth. That’s a fine way to feel, but there are plenty of ways to sell your soul without increasing your carbon footprint.
The other is the anti-capitalist variant, which says it’s bad for rich people to have so much more money than poor people do. That’s also a fair critique, but if you’re not careful, you can make it sound like it’s actually awesome to own tons of stuff, and the only problem with Birkin bags and Patek Philippes is that some people don’t get to have them.
We’re missing the most potent part of that 90s counterculture, the part that said there’s nothing noble about the act of consumption itself. I’d like to live in a world where a heavy metal musician who shills for margarine would become a laughingstock rather than a millionaire. Our world used to be a little more like that, and I think it could be again. We don’t need to revive rockism—it was always stupid to think that you can only make good art with a Fender Stratocaster. But we do need to revive our desire for seriousness among our cultural elite. If we’re going to let these people into our lives, they ought to stand for something more than themselves. They should to be willing to put their art ahead of their pocketbook and their follower count. And, ideally, they should not also be the CEO of Goldman Sachs. I have seen the future that awaits us if we fail to bring punk back, and it looks like this:
The producer was right: they later put it on their third album, and it spent eight weeks at #1 on the rock charts, despite not being released as a single.
I mean, c’mon, the founding members of NSYNC were former Mickey Mouse Club actors, and Backstreet Boys was assembled by a music producer in a blimp hangar in Orlando. The magazine ad that announced auditions for the group that would become the Spice Girls read like this:
WANTED: R.U. 18–23 with the ability to sing/dance? R.U. streetwise, outgoing, ambitious, and dedicated? Heart Management Ltd. are a widely successful music industry management consortium currently forming a choreographed, singing/dancing, all-female pop act for a recording deal.
If there is a less-cool origin story for a band, I’d love to hear it.
Always remember the Naomi Mnemonic:
if the Naomi be Klein
you’re doing just fine
If the Naomi be Wolf
Oh, buddy. Ooooof.
Maroon 5:
Bob Marley is one of the greatest artists in the history of music, he is truly a genius, so we were excited to be given the opportunity to cover ‘Three Little Birds” for Hyundai’s new campaign.
No relation to the Spice Girls nor to the dancehall artist Spice.
In the comments, Dylan fans claim this commercial is merely performance art. In 1965, a reporter asked Dylan, “If you were going to sell out to a commercial interest, which one would you choose?” and Dylan replied, “Ladies’ garments”. That means his Victoria’s Secret collab is more like a prophecy fulfilled than a legacy shilled. In that case, I, uh, also hereby declare that I would only ever sell out for a company that hawks brassieres, and so if I ever appear in a Victoria’s Secret commercial, rest assured I am during it in a cool and ironic way.
Gosh these names are terrible.
The “millionaires” framing of this quote is probably a later paraphrase. The original quote says “temporarily embarrassed capitalist”.
Michael Jackson is currently at 67% approval, which is impressive considering Netflix just released a documentary about whether he sexually abused children.
Blank Space, p. 44.
If Star Wars Kid had debuted a decade later, he’d probably be a Disney brand ambassador right now. Instead, he is making documentaries about the dangers of the internet.
No offense to Ariana Grande, but I would have encouraged my fans to pick something that didn’t sound like a rejected name for the Hitler Youth.
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