by BrenBarn | 2025-10-30 06:38:04+00:00
This is interesting although I'm a bit weirded out by how it conflates what I see as two (or maybe more) very different kinds of "deviance". One is doing something that is new, different, or somehow an expression of individuality. The other is just doing things that are (or are perceived as) edgy or bad.

In the latter category are things like teenagers smoking. You're going to have a hard time convincing me that it's somehow a bad thing that teenagers smoke less now than they did in the past. Also, when teenagers did smoke, that wasn't some kind of groundbreaking new trend; often they did it precisely to be like other people who were perceived as "cool". That's sort of the opposite of deviance in the sense of individuality.

I see those things as quite distinct from stuff like the homogenization of design or the prevalence of sequels, which can much more plausibly be characterized as a genuine loss of diversity, creativity, or something along those lines.

Now you could try to make some argument that there's a link between these things, and it feels like the article is sort of trying to do that, but it doesn't really connect the dots. I don't particularly see why a decline in teenage smoking would have any causal connection to a decline in book cover design diversity. At the most general level you could adopt a position like "great art requires suffering", but it's not even clear that the "lost deviances" mentioned involve suffering.

The article does mention at the end that "the decline of deviance is mainly a good thing", but it still seems to be trying to say that there is some causal link between the bad kinds and the good kinds.

I'd look elsewhere for the causes of the decline of "good" deviances (i.e., the creative ones). The one that comes to mind is the increasing interconnection of the economic and cultural world, which in effect forces businesses and creators in more and more sectors to compete in a huge market. It's hard for the quirky local music store with the eccentric owner to stay in business when everyone can buy a guitar cheaper online. It's also harder for the local musician to make a living when the main sources of music are oriented towards whatever is most popular across a big area (e.g., nationwide).

In domains where there are objective measures of progress, this can be a good thing. If someone comes up with way to build a better mousetrap, it is (or at least can be) beneficial for that idea to spread rapidly and displace worse mousetraps. But where the only thing being "improved" is the amount of money made, or where there is no ground-truth notion of "improvement" (as in art), interconnection is likely to cause "leveling", where everyone chases the latest trend because everyone can immediately see that everyone else is already chasing it.

In my view we don't need more illegal behavior or "bad" deviance to get around this. What we need is more robust defenses against leveling. That means, for a start, a breakup of the major commercial/cultural channels. If there is no single source for books, for music, for mousetraps, for playground equipment, for whatever, then people are forced to look for those things in different places. And then those different sources can evolve differently. And they can cross-pollinate, but we have to be careful to avoid allowing them to merge too much.

Good deviance can be seen as a form of diversity, and for diversity we need things to be different from other things. To get more different things we need more different sources, more different people in control, a greater number of distinct "generators" of all kinds.