cultural trends

Bilingual

The Decline of Deviance
2 months ago
- Deviance is declining across society, including in crime, substance use, teen pregnancy, and cult membership.
- Youth are less likely to drink, smoke, have sex, or engage in risky behaviors compared to previous generations.
- Adults are also behaving more conventionally, with crime rates and anti-social behavior falling sharply.
- Positive and neutral forms of deviance are decreasing, such as geographic mobility, creative output, and architectural diversity.
- Culture and media have become homogenized, with fewer original works and more sequels, repetitive music, and uniform designs.
- Scientific progress is slowing, with fewer paradigm-shifting discoveries and increasingly standardized writing.
- The decline began before the internet era and is driven by increased life expectancy, wealth, and safety, leading to risk aversion.
- While the trend brings benefits like longer, safer lives, it also risks stifling innovation and exciting cultural expression.
The Decline of Deviance 2
2 months ago
- The decline of deviance since the 1990s has reduced crime and risky behaviors but also cultural innovation and diversity.
- Increasing prosperity is the primary driver: people have more to lose, so they avoid risks and rule-breaking.
- The internet accelerated deviance decline through cultural carcinization (convergence on few strategies), de-frictioning (perfect preference matching leading to unoriginal content), and the flat-Earth problem (global appeal lowering common denominators).
- Alternative explanations like nostalgia or increased tolerance are considered but insufficient; prosperity explains paradoxes like less teen weed use despite easier access.
- Rising prosperity raises the opportunity cost of being a starving artist, reducing cultural deviance and experimentation.
- Greater tolerance and commercialization (e.g., Hot Topic) co-opt subcultures, diluting their countercultural edge.
- The author calls for supporting 'good deviance' by acting as lenient gatekeepers to preserve cultural vitality.
New Literalism Comes for Museums
3 months ago
- The article discusses 'New Literalism' in contemporary culture, referring to the simplification and reduction of complexity in movies, art exhibitions, and museums to avoid ambiguity and controversy.
- It critiques artists like KAWS for surface-level, apolitical pop culture appropriation and museums for flattening complex figures like Picasso into single-dimensional narratives, such as labeling him solely a misogynist.
- Museums are adopting New Literalism as a strategic retreat into superficiality to insulate themselves from financial and public risks, prioritizing attendance and safety over engaging with difficult or ambiguous ideas.
- This shift has led to comparisons with blatantly superficial venues like the Museum of Ice Cream or Refik Anadol's Dataland, which oversimplify topics like AI without addressing societal harms, further eroding the museum's traditional role.
- The author argues that museums should reclaim their purpose of fostering media literacy and navigating ambiguity, suggesting that doing so would attract an attentive public and complete the interpretive role of art, as emphasized by Duchamp.

cultural trends

The Decline of Deviance

The Decline of Deviance 2

New Literalism Comes for Museums