Arts & Letters #3
So
dropped an interesting essay and, props, this got stuck in my head.So I got some opinions but first, some specific props.
The concept of “ick” and the picture are really good and evocative.
The Gooncave and especially that graphic is top tier. I mentioned “gooncave” to a couple people and it immediately clicked, they got it, and that’s…hard to do. And those art deco pictures of the “Longhouse” contrasted with the “Gooncave” is phenomenal. I still think
is the king of evocative “mood” AI art but that structure, two contrasting pictures, that’s so good it needs to be stolen.I think the shift from specific policy proposals to “vibes” and “aesthetics” is highly accurate and descriptive.
Finally, this line
“It’s also personal: as a (female) member of the now widely discussed gen Z, I often feel like I need to correct my (often male) elders (yes, it’s you Millennials, you’re the elders now) on any incorrect assumptions.”
Is great because I, as a millennial man, can finally tell the whippersnappers what’s what. But also, I feel kinda disconnected from Gen Z and I don’t really know what’s going on with them and it’s genuinely insightful. Without fully grasping what Ruxandra wrote, what I read was that Gen Z gender relations are…uh, like Gamergate except more intense and never ending.
I’ve got three thoughts, less a coherent theory than...This I know, oh this I know.
First, there is definitely a social class above liberal/leftist/woke.
I’m just going to quote Scott Alexander here:
But I look at my Facebook feed, and here is what I observe.
I see my high school classmates – a mostly unselected group of the general suburban California population – posting angry left stuff like “Ohmigod I just heard about that mayor in South Carolina WHAT A FUCKING BIGGOT!!!”
I see the people I think of as my intellectual equals posting things that are conspicuously nuanced – “Oh, I heard about that guy in South Carolina. Instead of knee-jerk condemnation, let’s try to form some general principles out of it and see what it teaches us about civil society.”
And I see the people I think of as the level above me posting extremely bizarre libertarian-conservative screeds making use of advanced mathematics that I can barely understand: “The left keeps saying that marriage as an institution isn’t important. But actually, if we look at this from a game theoretic perspective, marriage and social trust and forager values are all in this complicated six-dimensional antifragile network, and it emergently coheres into a beneficial equilibrium if and only if the government doesn’t try to shift the position of any of the nodes. Just as three eighteenth-century Frenchmen and a renegade Brazilian Marxist philosopher predicted. SO HOW COME THE IDIOTS ON THE LEFT KEEPS TRYING TO MAKE GOVERNMENT SHIFT THE POSITION OF THE NODES ALL THE TIME???!”
That was…8 years ago. Something like that. And not much has changed. Every time I look up at the people I think are smarter than me, cleverer than me, they’re usually either kinda libertarian or kinda reactionary. Like, just to take some examples from my substack subscriptions: Scott Alexander, Curtis Yarvin, Balaji Srinivassan, John Mearshiemer, David Friedman. And that’s excluding people who feel more like peers (in real life at least) than aspirational figures, guys like Kulak or Dave the Distributist or the PSmiths, but who all make good and interesting stuff.
Like, most of these people aren’t “conservative” but none of them are remotely woke/liberal-left. Whereas on the left…god, I struggle to think of more than 3 authors/creators who generate any interest or excitement. Freddie DeBoer makes good stuff, Contrapoints made good stuff, and…Max Fisher’s “Captialist Realism”?
I mean, there are certain things that you read and your mind just lights up, it grabs you AND makes you rethink things, all the neurons start forming new connections. It’s a high. And, I mean, let me know if I’m missing authors on the left but…it feels trivially easier to find that intellectual high from this weird libertarian/reactionary/grey tribe thing than anything the left has produced in the last decade.
This isn’t to say that it’s just intellectual, most of the people I see above me on the social and economic ladder also aren’t woke (at least interpersonally) but public intellectual writing is much more universal; you can see it and confirm it.
Second, I don’t understand this class but there’s something that the PMC does that they find deeply repellant.
I think a lot about the following quote from Paul Graham’s essay Jessica Livingston:
Jessica was boiling mad that people were accusing her company of sexism. I've never seen her angrier about anything. But she did not contradict them. Not publicly. In private there was a great deal of profanity. And she wrote three separate essays about the question of female founders. But she could never bring herself to publish any of them. She'd seen the level of vitriol in this debate, and she shrank from engaging.
It wasn't just because she disliked fighting. She's so sensitive to character that it repels her even to fight with dishonest people. The idea of mixing it up with linkbait journalists or Twitter trolls would seem to her not merely frightening, but disgusting.
But Jessica knew her example as a successful female founder would encourage more women to start companies, so last year she did something YC had never done before and hired a PR firm to get her some interviews. At one of the first she did, the reporter brushed aside her insights about startups and turned it into a sensationalistic story about how some guy had tried to chat her up as she was waiting outside the bar where they had arranged to meet. Jessica was mortified, partly because the guy had done nothing wrong, but more because the story treated her as a victim significant only for being a woman, rather than one of the most knowledgeable investors in the Valley.
After that she told the PR firm to stop.
Now I can’t guarantee that she was talking about this 2014 Vox article but, if not, she certainly was responding to something similar.
And the first thing I take from that is that…something is off on my social radar; some kind of “Blub programmer” thing except with social status. Like,
Jessica Livingston is clearly higher on the socioeconomic hierarchy than me.
And I look over at Vox and it doesn’t ping me as deeply disgusting or wrong. I mean, it feels kinda middle-brow clickbaity now but back in 2014 it was kinda hot, new media venture with Klien & Yglesias behind it, not-horrible references from Scott Alexander.
But Livingston had one interview and was so disgusted by the entire process and vibe that she essentially never engaged with news media again.
And I look across at the Vox writer, and that feels like a peer-to-peer, and I see someone…moderately disagreeable but they don’t trigger an automatic disgust reaction, and then I look up and I see someone reacting to a Vox writer with unbridled disgust, the way you or I might react to the lowest Twitter scum. And I notice I am confused.
But I would like to broach two possibilities for serious consideration. First, very specifically for Ruxandra and other Gen Z women, I want to broach the possibility that theirs peers and immediate superiors are acting in a way deeply shameful to people higher on the socioeconomic ladder and they view you/them with exactly the same raw disgust and…”ick” that you feel for the gooncave. Like, when you’re in college, it’s very easy to feel like every high status person is extremely left but, in the broader world…lots of professors and college administrators are not high status. I mean they’re not low but…university professor is far from the top of the hierarchy. And if your professors and your peers would not be deeply disgusted by being interviewed by a major news agency…there should be some warning bells.
And this is not political, this is surely 90%+ aesthetics vibes. These people aren’t voting for Trump or against abortion or anything but where the policy differences are small, the aesthetic difference is large, just like between the Longhouse and the Gooncave.
Because I get the vibe from Ruxandra that a lot of women feel kinda trapped, there’s no way they can interact with the gooncave, no respectable person wants to be associated with that. And I want those women to consider the possibility that, once they leave college, a lot of the most successful people will view their leftist aesthetic and vibe with the same raw disgust that they view the gooncave. That they’re doing something deeply uncool and wrong, something that “most decent educated men do not want to be associated with”.
But the other reason I think about this so much is I look at it from the perspective of the journalist because…reading the social norms of people higher up the social ladder is hard. To paraphrase Lil Wayne, real ones seem to move in silence, like lasagna.
By which I mean imagine this interaction from the perspective of whatever poor reporter Jessica talked to. How did they experience this interaction? How would they have known they did something wrong?
I mean, this is a lady who is furious, the angriest she’s even been, and is so disgusted by interacting with the journalist that she swears off it forever. But from the journalist’s perspective, a PR company reached out about a cool prospective article, they sat down, had a pleasant chat, the journalist wrote a nice little article that probably got good engagement….everything seems cool. And then over a year later Paul Graham writes his essay and it turns out Jessica was livid, hated it.
This is part of why everything feels whispery and vague. Every time I look up the status hierarchy, I see people cultivating their privacy, avoiding engagement on a number of topics. They’re…they’re always polite, they’re always cordial, or at least they seem that way.
I dunno, I feel like class back in the day was very explicit and now power and high status people hide or are camouflaged or something. Like, I know that Taylor Swift has opinions and aesthetics that are different to those she shares with reporters and fans but I don’t know what those are or how those people move.
I think that might be part of why liberal/leftist/woke aesthetics feel so dominant and elite; everyone higher on the status hierarchy is quiet.
Finally, third, properly placing the “liberal elite”
I’ve grown to increasingly dislike the term “liberal elites” but there’s something real there and, while I don’t know what real elites find so aesthetically “off” about liberals/leftists/woke, I think I’ve got an element of it.
So, let’s go over to
“The Republican Party is doomed”This essay is great because it’s a visceral, lived explanation of Yarvin’s Cathedral. Like, yup, this is what Yarvin/Moldbug meant when he wrote about it, that’s why Christopher Rufo is aiming so hard at the universities, yup, you’ve just written it as your personal experience rather than Yarvin’s thousand meandering pages.
But there’s also a weird thing where, like, this group TracingWoodgrains is referencing really is powerful but…they’re not elite. Like, this is a wonderful explanation of the second and third decile of social status but the people TracingWoodgrains is pointing to aren’t the top 10% or top 1%. And it’s weird. Because this educated class is important and influential but it’s not, like, elite-elite and I’m not sure what to call it. But I have grappled on to this weird dichotomy.
So…is a New York Times reporter elite?
I mean, on the one hand, clearly yes. They interview some of the most powerful people in society, lots of CEOs and politicians pay major attention to what the NYT writes about them, and they can make or break the careers of very influential people.
On the other hand…According to Glassdoor: https://www.glassdoor.com/Salary/New-York-Times-Salaries-E960.htm
A NYT reporter makes $52k-$90k
A NYT journalist makes $62k-$112k
A NYT journalist/reporter makes $70k-$127k
And a NYT editor makes $56k-$96k
So I think it’s fair to say that the average NYT “reporter” is making $70-$90k…in New York. Now I don’t know anything about New York, it’s a strange place out East where theZvi lives, but if it’s anything like San Francisco, $90k/year means you’re living with roommates. It’s not glamorous, it’s not elite, frankly it’s a pretty low standard of living in a place like New York or SF.
And there’s something in this dichotomy among the liberal/left/woke PMC that…that just grabs me. I see this in teachers, in adjunct professors, in HR professionals, in the core liberal/left/woke group, this combination of an incredibly impactful role with an…emaciated personal life. Like, that NYT reporter living with roommates in his 50’s…that’s winning, that’s succeeding in a brutal tournament profession, climbing in many ways to the top of their field…for $80k/year in New York, with roommates and no 401k.
I don’t know, it’s not just money, lots of these PMC professionals also have atrophied personal lives and poor health but…that contrast, the gap between the power and respect of their role vs their actual life…something is there.
God, I love that second picture because it captured something that I didn’t realize I felt…pity. I look around at a lot of the liberal/left/woke PMC figures I hate and fear the most and when I look past their role I almost always feel pity and empathy for the people underneath.
The role of a NYT reporter is a terrifying thing and most of us are well aware that, should we draw its ire, our corporate overlords would discard us in a heartbeat to avoid bad PR. But underneath that, as
has written so eloquently about on many occasions, are a ton of hardworking people desperately scrambling in a dying industry to secure even a lower-middle class standard of living. All of them are replaceable at a moment’s notice and few have any other career options. Liberal journalists loved Twitter until the Musk takeover but imagine having, as part of your professional advancement, to be on Twitter 3+ hours day, riffing and hobnobbing. Scrambling to get a story, forced to write whatever gets the most clicks. Going back to Jessica Livingston and that reporter she talked to, it’s entirely possible that the “sexism” angle wasn’t their decision, it was “forced” on them because sexism would drive the most views and, well, they have to chase views, they don’t have much leeway there. Frankly, the normal life of a journalist, their daily existence, looks incredibly sordid and sad.So, whippersnappers, I don’t know where the line between the liberal/left/woke PMC and actual elite is but this line, this gap between the status of the person themself and the role they inhabit, that seems important. And I hope that helps you conceptualize the status hierarchy because, well, when you’re in college the PMC status hierarchy can feel very all encompassing, and I wanted something a bit more…concrete for ya’ll.
Man, this was longer than I anticipated. If nothing else, props again to Ruxandra, as they say, she got the noggin joggin.
Madame Butterfly is the shit, best opera I’ve seen so far and the one I would most recommend to new viewers. Partly because it’s short and it flows very well. Also, like, super sad.
No spoilers but I’m wrapping up 40k’s “The end and the death, p. III” and…ehhhh? I don’t like some of the decisions they made but there’s…in continuing universes and such, like pro-wrestling, it feels like you can almost never give any individual story an ideal conclusion because you always have to set up for the next book/movie/story/whatever.
Apologies for being so middle-brow but on reflection this is something I really appreciate about Marvel’s Infinity War movies in retrospect. While there was some set up for new characters and arcs, the heart of the movies is wrapping up the stories of Iron Man and Captain America in a deeply satisfying way. And, unfortunately, their shareholders would probably be happier if they spent less time paying off the buildup of all the previous movies and more time building anticipation for new heroes ‘n such.
Went to a nutritionist for the first time, very impressed, will be going again and we’ll see what kind of results I get over 2024.
*Deep nerd shame sigh*
Alright, so I watch Shadiversity from time to time. And I know he brought on two new people a while back. And one of them, Tyranth, has apparently started up his own channel and is trying to build his own brand.
And one of the first things Shad does is promote that guys new channel on his channel, even though they’re covering almost exactly the same subject.
And that just felt like a super chad move.