*Why Movie Criticism?

Why is movie (and pop cultural) criticism such fertile ground for popular political analysis? It’s certainly something I engage in whole-heartedly.

You may have read about sportswriting becoming a liberal profession, and while that is interesting too, this is a fairly different dynamic. Sportswriting has long produced far-ranging criticism because it’s such a Rorschach blot. Sports is so empty and so chaotic (and so emotionally charged) that what we read into it says a great deal about ourselves. Like financial opinionating, there’s a lot of information and little hard theory, so it’s the perfect sea for projecting your ideology onto. (It’s hard not to see the ideology in the hilarious Fire Joe Morgan.) This is not entirely a good idea.

Movie-criticism-as-political-analysis doesn’t come out of the same tradition, especially when you devote thousands of words to decade old movies. There will always be a market for adding to the hype of an upcoming movie by saying How One Actress Is Racist or Defending The Casting Of A Racially Charged Role, but that’s not the same as thumb-suckers about movies past.

In fact, presentism is always a problem in philosophical writing (and no there’s not a hard line between political and philosophical.) Bloggers write essays on timeless subjects, people ooh and ah over them for a few days... and that’s it. If you’re very lucky you get as remembered as Tolerance For The Out Group, but usually such insight porn gets no more than a few days shelf-life. Who links to Less Wrong or The Last Psychiatrist posts anymore?

Instead, virality demands insight-porn about ongoing events. Tell us how your theory of anomie explains Trump. Look at feminism through the lens of a gamerbro’s bad breakup. Explain how Hillary Clinton is the perfect incarnation of the posthuman subject (oops I need to write that one.)

However, as most comedians and philosophers know, fuck topicality. Your “insight” is now trapped in a context that will seem over-rated and over-discussed next week, and completely foreign and opaque in five years. You’ve given your deepest thoughts a shelf life, and a very short one at that.

(This was much of the drive behind Vox’s “explainer journalism card stacks” where topical content could be evergreen and easily refreshed for whenever a subject comes to the fore again. I think history has given that approach a resounding “eh”.)

So no one’s going to read your dry thesis on social cliques and judgment, or they’re going to forget your fragile hot-take on Mencius Moldbug once everyone stops caring what Lambda Conference is. What are you to do.

The answer is movies (or, if everyone has read it, some books. Or a play if for some reason everyone in the country becomes obsessed with a Broadway hit.) If you write a political analysis of the themes in a movie - not whether a certain actress is in political trouble, that’s just gossip, but about the movie itself - then it feels like a live story. But it’s also a story people will understand decades later, as one they know the details of and can even immerse themselves in by rewatching the movie.

Fear and Terror

Dictionary.com defines fear as:

a distressing emotion aroused by impending danger, evil, pain, etc.,whether the threat is real or imagined; the feeling or condition of being afraid.

and it defines terror as:

intense, sharp, overmastering fear:

Ie, just more fear.

This seems incorrect. Not just in my personal parlance, but in how these words are used by people. For instance, from a TUOC post the other day about small towns dealing with opiod epidemics.

When a town mishandles its overdose deaths by criminalizing addicts and harassing people who call in overdoses and beefing up a police force with a record of violence, then I’m bothered by the senseless tragedy of the subsequent deaths but there’s a sense of ‘okay, we know what to do about this’. But when we’ve done all the things we know to do about this and things are still getting worse, then that’s just kind of terrifying. 

Fear is this anxious dread that something is coming to get you, that could be avoided or prevented. It's the worry that your boss dislikes you so he's going to ignore your effort and find some reason to fire you. It's the anger at puritans who are treating a drug crisis like a morality problem rather than a health problem. It's the anxiety that someone hates you and you're going to have to spend a whole party being in the same room as them. It's thinking someone has been trailing you this night for hours and no one will hear you if you scream.

Sometimes fear is overwhelmingly strong causing you panic attacks, and sometimes it's just a background presence that adds subtle anxiety to your interactions, ergo "size of effect" is not the way to define the boundaries of fear. It's more about the specificity of the emotion, and the belief that the bad outcome could be avoided if only people didn't do bad things. If only the small town bigots had listened to you about the costs of prohibition, if only your boss wasn't sexist, if only everyone had listened to you when you said a serial killer is loose...

Fear then serves a powerful purpose: it motivates you to fix things, and provides you with a visible emotion to get others on board with your goals. This doesn't mean that it isn't real, it is very, very real in your head, as real as love or hunger or anger. As they say, fear is the mindkiller.

Terror is even worse, but also more true, and therefore in some ways better. It's when we transition from an uncertain dread to an overpowering certainty. Certainty that something is wrong, and everything is wrong. Even if everyone in town had the most enlightened attitude, drugs would still destroy your community. Even if this stalker is thwarted, death will take you some day soon. Even if your boss relaxed about you, the entire industry is dying and you hate your job with every fiber of your being. Terror is the moment in a horror movie when a giant hand comes out of nowhere and smashes the brave hero.

Terror is realizing you never had a chance. It's no one's fault and there's nothing to do, because those options presuppose that other outcomes were even imaginable.

Fear is worrying Satan has a devil set aside for you. Terror is looking upon the glory of all Creation and realizing how small you are.

Fear is being upset that your children won't honor you in your old age and after you die. Terror is contemplating how long the universe will go on after you and everyone you know has died.

You get the point. Terror either drives us into depressive nihilism, or insanity. It is not nearly as helpful an emotion at accomplishing our goals as fear is. But it is more accurate. Fear is usually an illusion, often of self-importance, that covers up the true terror of the situation.

If you press through the terror, and accept it, then you can come out the other side with a realistic assessment of your situation. You can make actual choices. That is very powerful, and what more, is the cure for the original fear. Once you've accepted something a thousand times worse than what you were worrying about, then the original anxiety has less hold on you.

You could stop being afraid of Green Party voters who sabotage the Democratic candidate. The really terrifying prospect is the millions upon millions of voters who chose an idiot fascist, or who couldn't be bothered to choose at all. And that they are a tide sweeping many nations. Where is your anxiety at Jill Stein compared to all of that?

It is very hard. There's no denying that. There is a comfort in the old fear, that there was one really evil and ignorant bad guy who polluted the whole town into dealing with drugs badly. And pushing through something that looks for all intents and purposes like insanity, is not ever socially or personally pleasant.

But the true reward of existential freedom that is your sole birthright, lies on the other side.

Accelerationism: Dos and Dont's

Accelerationism is the word for the political tendency among radicals to encourage the worst among their enemies, and to be dismissive of short-term material gains that fall short of a revolution. It's a form of logical argument, and you can see this form replicated among many political movements with different concrete values.

It's leftists who argue that Trump will be good for revealing the ugly face of nationalism; it's right-anarchists who thought the ACA would be so bad it would undermine support for all of big government liberalism; an environmentalist would rather a park become polluted and ugly and get people to focus on corporate actors who contribute to climate change.

The current society is mired in a capitalist ideology dedicated to making everyone miserable. It cannot be redeemed or purified. Should measures like increased Medicaid funding, or a cool black man as President, be supported as making lives better and the oppressed happier, or should we withhold our support because they distract from the only goal that will get us out of this system: anti-capitalist revolution?

That's the question of accelerationism in a nutshell. Things are getting bad, do we make them get bad faster to bring about the inevitable end state sooner? It's an accusation that gets through around between center-leftists and far-leftists a lot.

But we are really talking about two different things, and that is key.

***

In purely material terms, should you help the worst off, or should you refrain in order to stoke the fires of their anger?

This is obviously a dumb question.

There is no guarantee the revolution is coming. There might never be a revolution. Or the revolution might just empower a totalitarian dystopia. Or your neglectful immiseration of people might be entirely irrelevant to that revolution.

The world is very large, and very complex, and incredibly uncertain. Especially when it comes to political tactics. Who the fuck knows what works. Who knows if your long-term goal is really a good idea. We're not talking "a bird in the hand is better than two in the bush," we're talking "a bird we're about to catch is still better than two thousand birds in a bush on top of a high mountain in another country that someone told you about once."

Your ethical responsibility is to proximate results. Help the people you can, do things that you know will work and that you can see the results of. Resist ideologies and political theories that say "actually doing this mean or easy thing serves the greater good in the very long term" and who never seem to actually pay out the greater good. Focus on specificity.

So yes, increased Medicaid funding is great. No ethical left should oppose it.

***

But there's a difference between helping everyone, and making a situation smoother and more pleasant.

For instance, David Simon, creator of the Wire which dramatizes amazingly well how the drug war hurts black communities, is opposed to marijuana legalization.

"I'm against it," Simon told his stunned audience at the Royal Institution on Thursday night. "The last thing I want to do is rationalise the easiest, the most benign end of this. The whole concept needs to be changed, the debate reframed. 

"I want the thing to fall as one complete edifice. If they manage to let a few white middle-class people off the hook, that's very dangerous. If they can find a way for white kids in middle-class suburbia to get high without them going to jail," he continued, "and getting them to think that what they do is a million miles away from black kids taking crack, that is what politicians would do."

(Yes, I'm assuming everyone who reads this is pro-legalization, at least in terms of ending the brutal Drug War.)

If you think Simons is being too blinkered here, let's imagine a more extreme scenario: What if we legalized heroin and instituted addiction-rehabilitation programs for the families of Congresspeople?

Now, the families of Congresspeople are people too. Their pain is real. If one of them goes to jail for possession, that is bad. And if they are addicted, humane and effective rehabilitation is better than jail. So from a pure harm reduction stance, how can you object to this?

But we of course know the incentives it sets up. It is good that Congress labors under the same laws as the rest of its citizenry. They should pay the cost for these laws like the rest of us, so that if the laws are cruel and unjust they will notice and get rid of them. A world where their kids don't go to jail for possession is more pleasant to them, but it's not beneficial for everyone.

That may be absurdly extreme, but it's not very different from "legalizing the drug white people do." The Drug War is cruel, invasive, and counter-productive - exempting some upper classes from it allows them to forget that experience, and to Other the people who do experience its vicissitudes.

This is, for instance, the problem with tax deductions for employer sponsored healthcare. It guarantees healthcare to the people our ruling class interacts with, leaving out and isolating the people our rulers avoid anyway, making it even harder to get any help for them. This is why universal programs are so important.

That accelerationism, to pull down the benefits some people enjoy that allow them to ignore the pain of the larger masses, is good and just. It is right to pull off the pleasant mask of capitalism or state violence, so that everyone sees its obscene underneath.

So, when faced with the question of, "do I want to make things worse in order to encourage far off radical solutions", we need to figure out whether it's a policy that helps everyone, or a policy that merely covers up the existing harsh reality, and then decide our accelerationism.

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@balioc replied:

I strenuously object to this framing. 
The “actually helping” versus “just making things smoother” dichotomy is not a real thing.  Or, rather, it is – but, seen for what it is, it is not a thing that you would support as a foundation for ethics or policy.  I certainly don’t.   

***** 

The examples of “anti-smoothing” policies that you support, on an abstract level, function exactlythe same way as the examples of “just causing pain” policies that you despise.  They hurt people unnecessarily, on the grounds that the hurting will spur the world to productive action, while relieving the hurt would lull the world into a sense of undeserved complacency.  As you say yourself: the white stoner kid, and the heroin-addicted Congressman’s child, are enduring real and morally-salient suffering at the hands of the legal system.  By choosing to let that happen to them rather than patching the system to prevent it, we are saying “we care less about your suffering than about some hazy unknowable distant prospect of greater systemic change.”  We are deciding that “allowing the upper classes to forget [the systemic problems],” which is a very abstract sort of problem that may not result in anything concrete at all, matters more than the ruination of kids’ lives.  Calling it “anti-smoothness” is a hypocritical fudge.  It is accelerationism, pure and simple.   

And on the flip side…well, if you really want to ensure that the rich-and-powerful aren’t allowed to forget about the big systemic problems, the best way to make that happen is to get the non-rich-and-powerful to riot.  Which works better if you take away all their stuff.  It doesn’t have to be a vague, heighten-the-contradictions “maybe things will hit rock bottom and then start going up again” kind of plan; it can be very tactical and very concrete.  This is the strategy espoused by all manner of radical groups back in the ‘60s, and today.   

***** 

So…what is the actual difference between the examples on your first list and the examples on the second list?  Who the victims are.  That’s it.  In the “unacceptable” cases, the suffering is endured by the “worst-off.”  In the “acceptable” cases, the suffering is endured by the “powerful.”     

You’ve reinvented the concept of privilege here.  You have divided people into classes and said “these people’s suffering is deontically unconscionable, but these’s people’s suffering doesn’t matter as much, it can be countenanced for the greater good.”  Bad universalist, no biscuit.   

***** 

The actual answer that yields the result you want is something you’ll like a lot less.  It’s not a Supreme Ethical Principle; it’s a calculus.  It’s the rationalists’ “shut up and multiply!”  Usually accelerationism is bad, sometimes it’s good, and the difference is (a) what the costs are and (b) what the expected payout is.  If we’re talking about laws that apply only to save Congressmen’s kids, well, the costs of not implementing them are (relatively) low and the amount of acceleration that you gain is relatively great.  If we’re talking about laws that give much-needed healthcare to millions of poor people who are not right this moment in the process of fomenting revolution, the costs of not implementing them are almost certainly too high.  

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So if you only paid attention to the two (point five) examples, and not to the abstract description, then yes I can see how you would arrive at that conclusion. It is in fact wrong to go “haha, the suffering of privileged people like Congressional kids, white UMC dope smokers, and employed people (??) does not matter.” That would not be ethical, and so you can be pretty sure that’s not what I meant, especially as it also contradicts the thesis (which you didn’t directly address, except by noting the absence of applicable examples.)

I should provide more examples then. But first, let’s go back to the beginning.

Accelerationism is an attitude we see frequently in political disputes. (Even Trump today is rejoicing that the AHCA failed, because its explosion will create pressure for future repeal.) It comes up often enough that saying accelerationism is always wrong (or always right) seems overbroad. There are too many cases of sick systems that need to be broken, rather than given short term balm. We need a differentiator.

Your solution is to “do the math.” But our ability to make these sort of cause and effect calculations is incredibly bad. And all attempts at making the sort of super-complicated predictions this requires just open our thinking to the sort of biases Less Wrongers know so well. We’ll choose the most comforting narrative and tell ourselves we are doing cold, hard math.

Consequentialism is hard, yo. If you’re talking trolley problem thought experiments where you know the probablistic outcome of all actions to the third significant figure, yeah go do that. But we don’t usually know it, but must usually make decisions anyway.

The different option I offer is an aesthetic differentiation. Is the harm you are preventing (or not) primarily material deprivation, or is it just a disruption of harmony? Is it unpleasant?

An example might be the election of Trump. Besides the possibility of nuclear oblivion, most of the histrionic liberal reaction to him was how unpleasant he was (at least relative to most other Republican candidates.) He said racist things, he said sexist things, he was cavalier about assault, he lied blatantly, it was just an endless parade of obscenities. And so when evaluating “Trump vs Cruz” (or even Kasich) we have to ask will he make the policy results that much worse, or will he just make political life more unpleasant, uglier, and rough?

And if we admit it’s the latter, is that really inaccurate? It’s more likely that Trump represents the truth of Republican positions (contradictory idiocy motivated by gut feeling that flatters white, rich Christians as the center of the world), and will accelerate the proper reaction to that. Not Trump as “easier to beat in the general”, but Trump as an acceleration President. The commentators who predicted that Trump would be hugely offensive but on material consequence not very different from a responsible, moderate Republican… have so far not been very wrong.

As @redantsunderneath mentioned in his film taste recently (which I share), the great thing difficult and visceral movies can do for us is to teach us to lean in to discomfort. We can differentiate between something that is actually hurting us and evil, or something that is disgusting or disharmonious. 

Sometimes this aesthetic improvement means “we have cleaned up the area around the powerful decision makers”, like kicking the homeless and porn shops out of Times Square, or legalizing drugs their kids are using. Even if there is some material component to that, we can tell the difference between what the primary vector is: actual broad harm reduction, or adding rosy tints to the windows of the subjective actors.

Sometimes it’s just a matter of asking “is that friend or commenter who I am very annoyed at hurting me, or just making me uncomfortable?”

To return to one of my original examples: I am not actually saying “repeal the employer-based tax deduction for healthcare to see what universal program Congress passes in its place.” We know the harm that would come from that. It was just an example of a policy that reduced harm, but did even more than that by reducing all the harm of being uninsured within sight of the wealthy and influential, and so also stalled further progress. We can understand this dynamic, and in the future try to build our programs around the dispossessed rather than around the affluent and hoping they work their way down to everyone. 

The Unfreedom of Scarcity

One of the real problems of the liberal model of freedom is in situations of extreme scarcity, where there is not enough for not only everyone, but for only a few people at most.

This is most common in “lottery” professions, where a few very successful people present the face of the profession, and the vast majority are exploited and holding out for their one shot at greatness. So we’re talking Academia, Startups, Acting, Professional Sports, Publishing, Politics… really way too many fields that define success in our world.

Only some people can make it. To some degree this will be determined by merit, but luck and networking play a very large role in that. Ask anyone in that field and getting a mentor is a HUGE HUGE deal (okay I don’t know much about pro sports, but I know people in every one of the other listed fields.) To go from toiling in obscurity and starving to “this one person you respect actually likes your work and wants to help you” is the biggest relief you can imagine.

And the mentor, or any networking connection like that, really does help. They introduce you to people who can help your career get started a little, who are happy to help you if it means impressing Big Name Mentor. It makes you feel like you actually have a shot to prove yourself, and it can not be underestimated how psychically valuable this is.

It’s kind of nice, sure, but it exists entirely outside formal ethical networks and so there is nothing obligatory about it. A mentor has the right to be friends with whoever they want, and to introduce their friends to whoever they want, and they haven’t crossed any moral lines. And they have the freedom to NOT be friends and not introduce you around as well.

You can see where the power dynamics of this go.

If you displease your mentor in any way whatsoever your ladder out of the abyss will just curl up and disappear. If you disagree politically with your mentor, they may not introduce you to that photographer. If you stop laughing at their boring jokes, they may not use their leverage to get you that internship. If you don’t sleep with your mentor, they may stop returning your calls (and soon everyone else will too.)

And this can all happen without any malice! To the famous mentor, you were a fun person to pal around with, things cooled down, and they’re moving on with their life. What’s wrong with that? In fact if you were to criticize their behavior, you’d be criticizing their liberal freedom to do whatever they want so long as “their fist doesn’t reach someone else’s face.” You’d be putting some sort of unasked for moral obligation on them. (Ew.)

But losing them means giving up on your dreams, just as they are in sight. Hell, it means finding an entirely new professional identity to base the rest of your lifepath on.

So instead you know you have to keep the mentor interested in you. What was initially a fun flirtation with someone impressively accomplished (and success is HOT in any field) can evolve into unending attempts to keep them “interested” in you, and the sort of joyless, obligatory sex no one benefits from. Or an unwillingness to even consider political points of view that may be uncool to the people you are trying to impress.

This is where the sex scandals in a lot of the lottery professions seem to come from (start with Bill Cosby and google any of the above fields.) It’s not superiors saying “sleep with me or else”, but famous people assuming all the young hot things want to sleep with them, and the young exploited proles going along with it until things have gone so far they explode from the tensions (which are complete surprises to the increasingly dense mentors, who don’t think there’s anything wrong with all the people desperate for their approval.)

And I think these scandals are just the tip of the iceberg, the rare cases where someone is so hurt by the affair that they go public and potentially give up any career in that field. Much more often is the case when the junior person goes along with it, gets in too deep, has a shitty few months of feeling used, and then pulls away or is kicked away, to a diminished future. (Of course, this pattern probably plays out often with every party feeling satisfied afterwards as well.)

Like this sort of power imbalance is just unhealthy and wrong. Marx wrote that no one is free when they are hungry, and I don’t think that just means “hunger is really bad” but that “people will do anything, give up anything when they are truly desperate.” They’ll give up their sexuality, their political independence, their dignity, anything to just get a bit of hope - and no one has to force it away from them, people do it wholly willingly under extreme scarcity. So what does free speech, or consent, or private property even mean in such situations?

(Even the masters are fucked over, because it’s impossible for them to have equal, healthy relations under a system of oppression. Imagine not being able to be friends with anyone because you don’t know if their laughter at your jokes is ever genuine? So they become emotional idiots who have to convince themselves that no one needs them that much and no one is trying to use them, exploding at the slightest narcissistic injury to this illusion.)

You can’t just make up a bunch of rights that people have protecting them, when there’s a power structure that asks people to give up anything for just a bit of hope. Class power analysis matters, or else you just end up like the Hollywood dating scene.

***

@balioc

This seems correct.

And very very very hard to solve, from a cultural-engineering perspective, short of sledgehammer solutions like “we are going to clamp down on technology so hard that no one knows anyone outside his own little hunter-gatherer tribe.” You can redistribute resources all you want, you can work your ass off to make the masses more materially secure…but it’s not like people are desperate to break into movies or publishing for the material security. So long as there are large human networks, there are going to be implicit social hierarchies, with the concomitant incentives to rise. That’s pretty damn fundamental.

…I guess there are a lot of proposed solutions that amount to “make people more enlightened so that they don’t feel the urge to climb.” I tend to be skeptical that anything in this vein is at all plausible.

And then there’s my pet “solution,” which involves reconstructing such urges (rather than eliminating them) so that they can be more easily satisfied by low-level personal interactions. But even to my fond eyes that’s obviously going to work only to some extent, some of the time.

Bluh. I dunno. This is hard, man. Let’s go shopping.

***
It is hard, but I’m not aiming to *fix all these systems now.* More, our knowledge of that dynamic should affect our understanding of the phenomenon around it. For instance. 1. This is a reason to be very leery of extreme inequality. Even when the baseline material well being of the exploited class isn’t that bad (say, computer programmers looking at startups), the social dynamics between extreme havenots and them is still inimical to human well being. Which is why a period of widening inequality is going to lead to people “voluntarily” giving up their rights more and more just to get a shot at getting ahead, and render liberalism meaningless if it goes too far. 2. When considering creating or joining a lottery profession, this should be a cost you are aware of. Tech geeks tend to celebrate Silicon Valley and its superstars, and want it to have a more prominent place in America’s culture, but there’s really a lot of toxic exploitation that is inevitable under it. And you may think going into academia or hollywood is at worse, a gamble you might lose - but it can be even worse than that, where it’s several years where you have every incentive to sell your dignity to get ahead. (The namesake TV show, Silicon Valley, actually offers wonderful illustrations of this phenomenon.) 3. These are systemic problems, not personal moral ones. Whenever we see an explosive scandal of some high-powered mentor sleeping with/stealing from/exploiting some ingenue, the story is usually the same:

“the mentor had idea this was going so badly, and thought themselves “one of the good ones” because they certainly never threatened the ingenue in order to get them to do whatever. In fact, the ingenue came onto them, so it’s all a horrible misunderstanding. Yeah it got kind of pressurey or stalky towards the end, but what relationship doesn’t? It started so innocent, etc etc.”

These mentors aren’t lying, they really believe it, it’s just they were in a system where people felt making them happy was required for career success, and the mentor blithely went along with it. We must resist the temptation to cleanse the field of One Perverted Dude, and to look at all the systemic contributions. And if you think people having sex they don’t fully want, or falling into line politically when they have doubts, are really that bad, then yes you should want to smash the whole system with a sledgehammer. I’d love to see all our modern liberal culture’s rage about sexual exploitation aimed at Hollywood and to just wreck it until they can build some other more egalitarian system. Maybe that’s not realistic, but it still means we are making a choice that we tolerate that exploitation if it gives us a film industry. We are complicit - don’t push this all on the one idiot you caught today. (My frustration with most social justice causes is not that they go too far, but that they don’t go far enough whenever it comes to eliminating the systemic causes of most of the evils they rightly see. They burn a few witches then forget the problem.) 4. The thing the idiots who get caught are guilty of is ignoring power dynamics. Don’t sleep with someone you have a lot of power over. Don’t expect them to be your bosom friend, or turn to them for political agreement. You may not think you are coaxing them, but at some point they don’t have a choice even if they wanted to. Consent is the beginning of sexual ethics, not the end of them. 5. Full communism, etc, not just in money but in social status, so that we know people who are interacting with us are doing so genuinely out of their care for and enjoyment of us.

Ironic Humor

How do we define it?

This is not simply dramatic irony, but rather, when someone we respect says something we would consider stupid or cruel but they say (or rather, we just know) they are being ironic.

This comes up because of the constant newsflashes around pewpewdie’s latest joke and overreaction to it, or Milo Y talking about pedophilia, or god knows what other “joke” taken awry *and also* the return of this thread about Baby It’s Cold Outside.

***

A really interesting post that is marxist-without-knowing it, is here. http://slatestarcodex.com/2014/04/22/right-is-the-new-left/ I recommend reading it when you get the chance. But I'll summarize.

The post posits that fashion tastes act like a celluar automata ladder. Celluar automata are models where a single cell, or space on a board, only cares about the spaces next to it, and follows rules based on those spaces. And yet, from these simple rules, large complex patterns can emerge across the entire board.

The post asks us to think of a class ladder of 4 cells: upper, middle, lower, underclass. Each cell has the same two rules: First priority, to imitate the cell above it, second priority to not be like the cell below it. The scenario starts off with all cells being white. Or, all members of society wear white clothes. All the cells that have someone above them are imitating the ones above them, so all is stable.

But the upper class wants to differentiate itself from the middle class. So it changes to black clothes. Next year, the middle class also changes to black clothes, so they can appear upper class. Important note: this really really happens. Look at baby names http://www.slate.com/articles/business/the_dismal_science/2005/04/trading_up.html

In the third year, two things happen: the upper class stops wearing black, and the lower class start wearing black. The upper class have no one to imitate, but they really don't want to be viewed as the middle class. But note that in changing to white, they imitate the lower and underclass.

Why is it worth being similar to the lower class and underclass just to be different from the middle class? Because the cell is confident. The way they were raised, the way they talk, the way they *wear* their clothes, means they could never be mistaken for someone as distant as lower class. Their only threat is being mistaken for middle class, who could pass as them and vice versa. (Similarly the lower class don't aspire in the first year to look upper class, it wouldn't work. Their best hope is to pass for middle class.)

So we see this cycle continue, until the upper class – being annoyed at being constantly imitated - hits on a new idea. *Purposefully dress like the lower class*. The middle class can't risk dressing like that, because they fear being mistaken in the wrong direction. The upper class style isn't the exact same as lower class, there are subtle differences they can use to reassure themselves, but it's the subtle differences that the middle class aren't expected to pick up on and will reveal themselves as poseurs. So the subtler, the vaguer, the less defined the better.

This lasts longer, until the middle class really feels safe imitating this style so associated is it with the upper class. The more punishment there is for being mistaken for lower class, the longer this stability will last.

The ideas about imitating those you want to be associated with (but plausibly could pass as), and changing to be different from those you fear being associated with (but plausibly could be mistaken for) are decent important lessons we can all reflect on.

But what really gets me is the result that: the upper class purposefully imitates the lower class as a way of shoring itself up. This is fascinating.

Mark Zuckerberg is famous for being a billionaire who wears a hooded sweatshirt a lot. This is supposed to be a sign that he doesn't care about his appearance. It is instead a sign of *how much* he cares about appearance. He could wear any random thing he wanted, but wears what the other people he interacts with can't get away with. (And this is true for many dressing-down computer geeks in good jobs.)

***

It is important to remember that all class, all status, all appearance is an illusion. There is no essentialist truth of whether you are "at heart a rich person", that means you can't ever be truly poor. Only a series of subtler signals you trust to defend you from being seen as poor. Similarly for charisma, what works to clearly and boldly distinguish you from the awkward people in some situations will fail you in others.

But these illusions are very real and matter a lot. They determine how people treat us. And we've internalized them as true, so when we fight for them we feel we are fighting both for the tangible benefits, and the sanctity of our identity. And because of the relative class ladder, any gains we make make some others feel they are losing something (damn middle class stop thinking they are as good as us.)

It's also important that this constant struggle makes us constantly unhappy.

***

Now the way tribal slurs work make a lot more sense. We all know how oppressed groups have taken words that were used to insult them, and instead use them affectionately with each other. The controversy of the racist and sexist terms I think obscures how common this is. Nerds use the term geek, military folks use the term jarhead, midwesterners use hoosier, extreme christians use the term fundie. All these are at once insults from the enemy, and affectionate monikers among each other.

This is sometimes described as appropriating the terms, and showing your power by taking possession of a word (like the enemy's gun) is one aspect of what's going on. But that overstates the process I think. If the word's meaning was changed, then that would apply to everyone. By acknowledging that the word is still a slur when it comes out of the mouths of people outside your tribe, you acknowledge the meaning hasn't really been changed. So that's not the (full) dynamic that's going on.

But under fashion theory, it makes perfect sense.

Imagine there are three groups in ascending moral order. Martians (who have been persecuted since they fled their exploding planet), friends of Martians who now feel guilty for all the persecution Martians have suffered, and anti-Martian bigots. The bigots used the term "redder" to refer to Martians. And one day, the Martians start using the word redder too. So some friends of Martians, wonder why they can't use redder. After all, they aren't bigots so when they use the term it won't have that slur meaning. How could you possibly mistake the friend of Martians for a bigot? Their best friend is Martian.

The Martians know you aren't a bigot. You aren't lower class. But you are middle class pretending to be upper class. And they would like you to know, that instead you are a middle class at risk of being seen as lower class. If you continue to try to rebel against the class structure, then they will eventually decide you actually lower class. And by the nature of appearance, the judgment of others that you are lower class will make you lower class.

You own internal beliefs about Martians and bigotry don't enter into it. No one can directly observe them.

And for now, no matter what your beliefs are, you can't pass as upper class. You will never be an actual Martian.

But, ahha, you the middle class friend thinks. You have so much credibility with some Martians – so many friends, so many hours spent fighting for their cause, you know how to cook their recipes, you adopted a Martian daughter – that many of them do consider you one of them. So you can safely use the term redder, and have used it meaning the better meaning on many occasions. Other Martians were fine with it.

That was elsewhere. This is here. You thought you could pass with others, but those "subtle signals" you trust don't actually shield you in all situations. There is no truth to whether, deep down, you are a Martian or a bigot. There is just the appearance, and at this point, you appear as a middle class person looking lower class.

Stop imitating us or we will get very angry.

(The Martian case is understandable here too. Tribal cohesion and identity is important to people. The Martians these days rarely interact with bigots. But they do interact with middle class friends of Martians all the time. They need to ruthlessly patrol the boundaries between their tribe and the closest.)

This becomes an identity fight (am I Martian or not) and everyone is miserable.

***

Irony at this point should be obvious. I can write a blog praising Jar Jar Binks, a character associated with childish writing and lack of intellect. But no one thinks of me as someone who likes those things (I'm not lower class), so by praising him I separate myself from all the middle class people who merely dislike Jar Jar Binks. I like him at a higher level, thus elevating my perceived intellect. The real risky thing for me to do would instead to talk about how much I loved Lord of the Rings.

Check out how many film critics and academics love pro-wrestling and bad slasher horror movies.

(Hilariously, from a distance, I look just like someone who non-ironically appreciates Jar Jar Binks, and arguments about the different reasons we like the character look like two comic book nerds arguing:  http://www.theonion.com/articles/i-appreciate-the-muppets-on-a-much-deeper-level-th,16208/ )

When someone is being ironically sexist, they are not just talking about themselves versus the sexists. They are positing a middle group that is not an obvious bigot, but needs to watch themselves and toe the line.

Liberal egalitarians rebel against this analysis. A joke should be the same whether it comes from a female mathematician or a male mathematician, right? There must be something inherent in the joke that if we break it down, we can find the sexism or lack thereof.

But we're not really talking about the joke. In fact the joke (whether sexist or ironic) has trivial impact on like anyone at all. What it does is tell us about the person who said it. And there's nothing egalitarian in using signals to analyze who someone really is, we are by definition judging and ranking them already. So yes, an ironic joke has to mean something different coming from someone with real credibility. (Where by "mean something" we refer solely to "what it says about the speaker".)

We at once believe there is a difference, and yet will always resist it. It must be definitionally indistinguishable, and undefinably distinct. If you defined an element of a joke that makes it ironic (it has to be satire, or not delivered in this specific way, or…) then the middle class could safely start using it. And that is very much against the point. But if you said "nope it's entirely about who said it" then you would give the lie to liberal egalitarianism. A lie we can't resist right now.

Liberals barely manage to struggle with the idea that certain four and six letter words are off limits to them when talking about other races. How could they accept that a whole sphere of jokes is disallowed to them?

(Ideology is contradiction. The rules must neither be too clear, nor too opaque.)

***

The point is that under our current social system, this type of dynamic is constant. The upper class (whatever group is respected most in any particular scenario) will imitate a lower class behavior, and some of the middle class will think they can imitate that, and they will get *smacked down hard*.

And because appearance is very different based on perspective, people go into these status contests with very different assumptions, and other people fight to disabuse them of their perspective and instead enforce the moral rightness of their own perspective.

This is of course, not the only dynamic going on in any social situation. But it's a common one and one designed to lead to misery. Thinking you are trending upper class but being told you're actually at risk of lower class is a huge source of anxiety, and will cause fierce arguments and internal anger.

***

The scandal referred to as #Shirtgate (haha, I am ironically using a phrase that MRA types used to describe it, only because the reader knows for certain I don’t think it’s actually a scandal worthy of the word gate) is a perfect example of this.  

In short, a scientist who was part of the team that landed a rover on a comet, did a televised interview wearing the shirt you’ll see here http://www.newstatesman.com/sites/default/files/styles/fullnode_image/public/blogs_2014/11/shirtgate.png?itok=HZIEUWip .

It has half dressed women on it. Accordingly, he thought it was ironic. As evidence for his good intent, he has many signals typical of being a liberal hipster. In particular the shirt was made for him by a feminist female friend, and with all of that he presumably thought he was secure in the shirt being read as a signal of the upper class (unimpeachably not sexist) instead of the lower class (very sexist.)

If Ruth Bader Ginsburg had walked in wearing that shirt, we would have laughed. We should have laughed, because the image of her in that shirt is pretty funny. A bearded middle aged hipster guy, is less convincing of irony and thus less funny. (Even if his has other traits and history that might make him think him being sexist is as absurd as RBG).

Shirtguy publicly apologized, and vocal critics accepted this. This was shown as evidence of mercy, but is in fact entirely the point. He admitted that he is middle class (not blatantly sexist, but potentially so) and stopped fronting as upper class, and the upper class was glad that this boundary had been policed. That is the ideal class sustaining outcome. If Shirtguy rebelled and fought to prove his irony, he would have been relegated to lower class (assumed bigot), but it would have created an enemy and more dissatisfaction with the class system.

The public claim for this criticism was that the shirt showed how women are objectified in science and why many women stay out of science. This is entirely fitting. By objectified, the critics mean “the shirt reveals that the guy has intent to view women as objects”. If the shirt was worn by someone (like Ruth Bader Ginsburg) who was unimpeachable, then it couldn’t represent that. The shirt is saying that to them because of who wears it, and the other signals he flies.

His actual, true inner intent is irrelevant of course. It can’t be measured objectively, and is just something people use various signals to theorize about.

He thought (in another context) he was upper class enough to wear irony. In the more public context, he was not.

***

Reading this, it’s easy to blame the upper class (of any particular scenario). But even the upper class is oppressed by this. Mark Zuckerberg’s dress style is still determined. And even when enforcing these class boundaries, they are unhappy - afraid, angry, and even paranoid. The cycle demands sympathy for everyone involved.

And the band for the middle class, the distance between unimpeachably pure and possible bigot is much thinner than we expect, especially when we add in variance for different perspectives. We are all surrounded by class anxiety, even those at the top.

***

So now I have to reevaluate how I use irony. I like irony, it makes me laugh a lot. Jon Bois is one of the funniest writers I know, and he's clearly "separating himself from middle class writers by showing he can write like a lower class (stupid) person but with subtle distinctions so we know he doesn't really mean it.”

Even if you think Jon Bois subtly distinguishes his work from the targets that his irony is mocking (and there is real skill in his writing), I’ve read other convincing ironists who simply copy paste what someone from the lower class wrote, but under their handle. It’s still funny.

But I'm also uncomfortable being part of the status cycle of misery. It's possible that there's no way I can escape status and can never be 100% pure. We have to make choices. But this honestly feels like a fairly direct instantiation of the class ladder, too direct to just ignore.