LogFAQs > #958170863

masterplum posted...

I dont think its as obvious as you are making it, as I think she accurately points out you cant just have more money to be more powerful any more.

Is it though? On one hand we have someone who has the disposable income for boat and a ton of political campaign merch and is among culturally like-minded people and so clearly possesses a sense of belonging and is secure enough in their position to chat with a journalist. Against a nameless protester that this person and the journalist are only seeing from afar because, y'know, they're on the boat. Hell, even if you grant the premise some credibility and grant "wokeness" some "cultural value" in the manner Brooks describes it's a poor example because Abolish ICE never really "caught on" in a large, mainstream sense so any accusations of "Oh, he's virtue signalling for social cred" just fall absolutely flat. It's possible this protester is in a privileged position but from the information presented? Nah, it's an easy call.

Like I said, it's a microcosm of the piece because it's as if Brooks identifies a character issue with himself, does some self-reflection I guess, but then somehow enlarges it from a personal issue to a societal one and lays at its feet many of the societal ills he sees around him. As I said, for a piece that seems to lay the blame for cultural snobbery and condescension as a primary driver in polarization the piece itself is absolutely laden with it itself in ways I'm pretty damn sure it doesn't intend to be (because it's often in the framing and diction rather than, you know, the actual instances or examples he cites.) Like it presupposes a whole lot there and feels targeted to an audience that agrees with him. Take this example we're discussing, it appears to presuppose the reader will react with confusion and headscratching that he posed a difficult and complex question there when the only reason for hesitation I see is if you react in the exact manner he criticizes in the rest of the piece and go like "Eww, a Trump voter, how classless" and that reaction overpowers all else. Which is the exact, if not even more extreme, kind of behavior he says is as fault... only I think he's doing it unknowingly.

And the entire piece is similar in a sense that it feels designed for readers who already share his conclusions that there's some liberal elite infestation in culture that has served to spawn societal ills. But I think it crumples pretty easily over even the barest scrutiny.

Such as...

masterplum posted...

Elon Musk became one of the richest people in the world by being cool his companies valuation and thus his stock values are wildly out of line from fundamentals because he has cultural wealth.

So in a way, cultural power has magnified his wealth, and that same phenomenon works as you go down the traditional wealth chain. Companies are more often specifically looking for smart independent people. Ive interviewed at 4-5 jobs that straight gave an IQ test as part of the interview process.

Cancel culture doesnt discriminate based on wealth. Weve seen low class workers lose their jobs, but also high class individuals like Papa John who previously would have been nearly invincible due to their upper class wealth.

I feel this is a misdiagnosis of what's going on here. If you want to "blame" a culprit for what you're describing here I'd say you're looking for the internet. Or more precisely, the greater access and democratization of many of the processes, systems, and levers that had once been the exclusive domain of the privileged and powerful that the internet provided to the masses.

Let's start with Musk. What's really going on here, IMO, is the exposure of some flaws in the stock market itself. I think the Gamestop situation earlier actually demonstrates this quite nicely. What you had for over a century was essentially a big gambling game that only really allowed the rich and powerful a seat at the table. Sure, access to it was theoretically available to the middle class, but if you wanted to play at the high roller tables you had to be rich. Only these tables had rules - not the laws, which were regularly flouted if not written by these same people (and then still flouted) of a more unwritten sort (again, ironically, the same kind of thing Brooks will go on to criticize in his piece just in a completely different kind of context and off-base, in my view.) They were sort of reigned in a bit following the Great Depression but by the 70s, 80s, and 90s they were itching for the old, unregulated game pretty hard and dismantled most of those protections - and promptly crashed the market again in 2008. Anyway, to the main point, with the rise of the internet, and in this case specifically, stock trading apps, this game become much more available to just about anyone - and that meant a lot of people who weren't wealthy and didn't know - or didn't care - about those unwritten rules. They identified ways to basically game the system with Gamestop and the old class went absolutely nuts and moved to shut that shit down immediately. This wasn't because Gamestop suddenly gained a massive amount of cultural influence lol, it's just that once a bunch more people got involved they started stress testing the old system in ways it hadn't before and identified flaws in it and exploited them. The basic exploit was understood by the old, rich class but they basically had an unwritten understanding to only use it on their terms and say-so. Musk, I would argue, identified a similar flaw and realized that if he could develop a cult-like following (I use cult in a lesser form, like you would with "cult hit") you could mobilize that following to bend the system to work in your favor beyond what it normally would allow pre-Internet because you could leverage these new players in the game to your advantage.

Now, as to cancel culture. I've referred to this article in the past when discussing the issue, because I still think it is extremely insightful as to the actual situation surrounding "cancel culture."

https://www.nytimes.com/2019/11/22/opinion/colin-kaepernick-nfl.html

Honestly, Ta-Nehisi Coates states the case far better than I ever could and if you haven't read the piece you really should, but to summarize: "Cancel culture" has existed forever. Spanning back centuries. The Dixie Chicks during the Bush era, the treatment of Japanese Americans during WWII, the Compromise of 1877 "cancelling" the black South. So, the recent backlash over it now from the right isn't because "cancelling" was invented in the past few years, it's because all of a sudden the internet democratized the process and allowed ordinary people to operate the levers of the process against whomsoever they desired.

I would pause here to add that addition to the democratization of cancel culture that is being objected to by the right now that it no longer flows exclusively from the powerful down to the vulnerable but also in many instances the targets. Because they're still absolutely fine with, and even seem to relish "cancelling" people themselves, but only when it is the "right" people. Frequently the objections and outrage fly when the subjects aren't the kind of people that were frequently cancelled in the past because all of a sudden there are consequences they never had to face before.

Hitting the character limit so I'll wrap abruptly here, sorry.

---

xp1337: Don't you wish there was a spell-checker that told you when you a word out?