Fashion Cycles
And, after all, what is a fashion? From the artistic point of view, it is usually a form of ugliness so intolerable that we have to alter it every 6 months.
Oscar Wilde, “Literary and Other Notes I”, Woman’s World (November 1887138ya)
XKCD #2857: “Rebuttals”
Agenda-setting: “Up and down with ecology—the ‘issue-attention cycle’”, 1972; “On Anthony Downs’s ‘Up and Down with Ecology: The “Issue-Attention” Cycle’”, Gupta & Jenkins-2015; “Political Communication as a Tragedy of the Commons”, 2022; “Why Speculate?”, 2002
“Novelty and human aesthetic preferences”, et al1983
“Signaling Status with Luxury Goods: The Role of Brand Prominence”, et al2010
“The Logic of Fashion Cycles”, et al2012
“Violence and the Sacred: College as an incubator of Girardian terror”, Dan Wang; “My Whole Life Was Ballet—What Did It Mean to Give it Up?”; “The Ph.D. Grind: A Ph.D. Student Memoir”, Philip J. 2012/
2015 ; “What Does Any of This Have To Do with Physics?”; “Math Team: and other horrible things you do to get into Stanford”, Benedict Hsieh“Accelerating dynamics of collective attention”, Lorenz-et al2019 (see also “Predicting History”, et al2019); “Anchoring in the past, tweeting from the present: Cognitive bias in journalists’ word choices”, 2022
“The universal decay of collective memory and attention”, et al2019
“The Paradox of Publicity: How Awards Can Negatively Affect the Evaluation of Quality”, 2014; “Fashion and art cycles are driven by counter-dominance signals of elite competition: quantitative evidence from music styles”, et al2019
“The hipster effect: When anti-conformists all look the same”, 2019
“From Aristocratic to Ordinary: Shifting Modes of Elite Distinction”, Friedman & Reeves
“Hipsters and the cool: A game theoretic analysis of identity expression, trends, and fads”, et al2021
“Too Cool for School? Signaling and Countersignalling”, et al2002
“Things You Can’t Countersignal”; “Why Can’t Anyone Tell I’m Wearing This Business Suit Ironically?”
Politics:
Mazdak; Anabaptism: Münster rebellion; the wreck of the Batavia
“Mau-Mauing the Flak Catchers”/
“Radical Chic: That Party at Lenny’s”, Tom Wolfe 1970 “Self-Censorship in Public Discourse: A Theory of ‘Political Correctness’ and Related Phenomena”, 1994
Scott Alexander: “Right Is The New Left” (eg. English Catholic converts); “Book Review: Fussell On Class” (Bourdieu); “New Atheism: The Godlessness That Failed”/
“The Rise And Fall Of Online Culture Wars”; “What Happened To ’90s Environmentalism?”; “A Cyclic Theory Of Subcultures”; “Contra Kriss On Nerds And Hipsters” “COVID-19, climate change, and the finite pool of worry in 2019 to 2021 Twitter discussions”, 2022
See Also: “Why Do Hipsters Steal Stuff?”; “Culture is Not About Esthetics”; “Who Buys Fonts?”; “The Melancholy of Subculture Society”
The Dao that can be stated, is not the eternal Dao;
The name that can be named, is not the eternal name.
The unnamed is the origin of heaven and earth;
The named is the mother of the myriad things.
Tao Te Ching, ch1