americans were no longer interested in becoming cookie-cuttout people (as required by mazes).
I think people are becoming more diverse on superficial features and less diverse on ‘important’ features (granted this is sort of an abuse of language that is somewhat question-begging). This makes sense if the system as a whole is (in an agencyless way) incentivizing finding and exploiting the sorts of things that cause people to rebel in more superficial ways. E.g. social media makes rebellion with any real teeth more costly.
Have you read The Refragmentation? The way I see it, there are many large forces pushing toward fragmentation. If there is large-scale anti-fragmentation happening, I don’t understand how it is happening.
I didn’t buy the essay when it first came out and I buy it even less now. Radicalization seems like a cycle and we currently seem to be in a swing back towards centrism with record numbers of people condemning radicals of their own party and election results that heavily favored more centrist candidates on both sides of the isle.
Since my earlier comment, it occurred to me that there’s a pretty obvious source of “anti-fragmentation”: far more people going to college/university. Although this results in superficial specialization, it means people have a far more uniform life experience in their early 20s compared to if they learned specialties on the job rather than at a large institution.
I think people are becoming more diverse on superficial features and less diverse on ‘important’ features (granted this is sort of an abuse of language that is somewhat question-begging). This makes sense if the system as a whole is (in an agencyless way) incentivizing finding and exploiting the sorts of things that cause people to rebel in more superficial ways. E.g. social media makes rebellion with any real teeth more costly.
Have you read The Refragmentation? The way I see it, there are many large forces pushing toward fragmentation. If there is large-scale anti-fragmentation happening, I don’t understand how it is happening.
I didn’t buy the essay when it first came out and I buy it even less now. Radicalization seems like a cycle and we currently seem to be in a swing back towards centrism with record numbers of people condemning radicals of their own party and election results that heavily favored more centrist candidates on both sides of the isle.
Since my earlier comment, it occurred to me that there’s a pretty obvious source of “anti-fragmentation”: far more people going to college/university. Although this results in superficial specialization, it means people have a far more uniform life experience in their early 20s compared to if they learned specialties on the job rather than at a large institution.