Paul Skallas writes Substack essays on culture, Lindy ideas, refinement culture, architecture, and health topics.
HN commenters cite his refinement culture and 'Is Culture Stuck?' essays when discussing cultural stagnation, and one lists the blog among their regular reading.
I didn't see a definition, but this seems to be a concise instance of the effect:
> These minimal improvements in each phone are indistinguishable to the average person. It's still 2007 we are stuck. All they can do is add another camera to the back. Refining.
It's kind of interesting that all of the examples lie in mass culture. Sports. Phones. Marketing. Cars.
Writing is covered in Part 2:
> It managed to get the top of Hacker News without anyone realizing it wasn’t a real person writing it [GPT-3 did].
https://paulskallas.substack.com/p/refinement-culture-c1b
Even so, writing that appears on the front page of HN is not likely to be too far out of the bounds of normal. That's the whole idea.
What all of these phenomena have in common is mass market selection pressure. You have a thing that needs to appeal to the largest possible audience.
Is it any surprise that the things that pop out the other end of this Darwinian selector tend to look the same? To be a little too optimized? To lack personality or quirkiness?
If you want to see counterexamples, look at any niche community. They're all over the Internet. Some of them surfaced during the last US presidential election, to the shock and horror of the masses. These communities seem to be growing in number, and exploring ever more exotic norms of behavior, aesthetics, spirituality, and ground truth.
> There’s a HN rule against complaining that HN is becoming like Reddit. This comment is in the same genre - it was better in the good ole days.
So called "refiniment culture" is very much a real phenomenom, and is driven by the wave of data sciences injected into all categories of life: https://paulskallas.substack.com/p/refinement-culture
This is why everything seems calculated & homogenic. There is very little room for "happy accidents" today, because the data analysts will tell you how to make the biggest ROI with a given set of circumstances.
America is colonizing the rest of the developed world. There are probably at least a billion people worldwide (mostly in Europe, but also among Third-World elites) who act American and are invested in America's issues despite never having set foot in the country. The internet has exacerbated this greatly. Just look at the BLM protests in Poland and Japan... or the Amerikaner "digital nomads" who are able to live in foreign countries thanks to the Anglo Internet's worldwide penetration.
https://paulskallas.substack.com/p/basic-concepts-1kyae
Historically, yes. American soft-power has been arguably more important than its military supremacy.
The whole world watches Hollywood films and buys American brands. If America becomes uncool and unpopular, that will be a loss that no number of aircraft carriers could make up for.
https://www.nsfwcorp.com/dispatch/jihad-hyperpanda/
https://paulskallas.substack.com/p/basic-concepts-1kyae
A piece theorising "refinement culture" [1] points out that the Olympics have changed a lot since their invention and revival. Originally, they were a celebration of the human form. Now, they're about putting up the most extreme freak you can find.
I didn't find the overall argument persuasive, but i thought that was interesting.
[1] https://paulskallas.substack.com/p/refinement-culture
Google News for news(I do not read just one single newspaper);
Youtube(every evening);
Stackoverflow(for work related stuff);
Paul Skallas’ blog(https://paulskallas.substack.com/);
xkcd
https://towardsdatascience.com/
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