[HN Gopher] Geeks, MOPs, and sociopaths in subculture evolution
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Geeks, MOPs, and sociopaths in subculture evolution
Author : rbanffy
Score : 29 points
Date : 2020-01-05 20:00 UTC (3 hours ago)
(HTM) web link (meaningness.com)
(TXT) w3m dump (meaningness.com)
| SolaceQuantum wrote:
| > Subcultures were the main creative cultural force from roughly
| 1975 to 2000, when they stopped working. Why?
|
| The SCP Foundation would like a word.
| voldacar wrote:
| It's arguably past the point of being "invaded by muggles"
| vermilingua wrote:
| Well past. The sociopath takeover is complete there, the
| community is entirely unrecognizable from when it began.
| twic wrote:
| And yet started it 2008, and its heyday in the years after,
| which postdates the 2000 cutoff date in the article.
| paganel wrote:
| Really interesting article as I've seen this at a second degree
| level for one of my friends.
|
| She was really a "fanatic" (as the article names them) for some
| "geeks" until the number of "mops" started getting larger and
| larger and at some point I guess the "sociopaths" also showed up,
| and the New Thing became the Lite Thing (and I'm imagining that
| in another 2-3 years it will be run into the ground by said
| "sociopaths", milked of everything that they can).
|
| It's interesting that at some point said friend was indeed
| offered the role of a "actual service worker" (to quote the
| article), presumably by one of the "sociopaths", but she refused
| it. At that moment I couldn't understand why ("my friend really
| likes this Thing! why isn't she willing to get more involved with
| it and even get paid for the privilege?"), but reading articles
| like this one I can understand why that happened and why the
| decision she took was for the best.
|
| Later edit: Because I've seen the subculture mentioned in the
| article's comments, I might as well also mention it here, that is
| that the New Thing for my friend was in fact a local EDM variant
| (if you follow ResidentAdvisor religiously you've probably heard
| of it by now).
|
| It would also be interesting to hear from people a little older
| than me and who have lived through those times how exactly the
| same thing happened to the punk scene back in the '80s (at least
| I suppose that's when punk became mainstream and the "sociopaths"
| took control over it). A similar history for grunge could also be
| interesting, even though I guess Cobain's suicide precipitated
| some things.
| desert_boi wrote:
| > Subcultures were the main creative cultural force from roughly
| 1975 to 2000, when they stopped working. Why?
|
| I suspect the author was 25 at some point in that range of time.
| It's hard to keep going when an essay starts out that way.
| vermilingua wrote:
| Care to explain why that would impact the essay?
| TeMPOraL wrote:
| Subcultures are young people's game, and something you
| usually grow out of.
| vermilingua wrote:
| But if subcultures are dead, and the author was a young
| person in their heyday; would they not be perfectly
| qualified to write a postmortem of sorts?
| Avamander wrote:
| But they're really not dead, they're just different.
| Writing a postmortem on something that isn't dead is
| difficult.
| PaulHoule wrote:
| A cynic would say that Stan Lee was the ultimate sociopath: a
| real creator, but also a self-promoter and all about the
| Benjamins in the end.
| StefanKarpinski wrote:
| According to the article, that would classify him as a genius.
| Which checks out.
| joe_the_user wrote:
| This is one of those article so riddled with cliches that people
| normally believe that's truth is hard to measure. Not saying it's
| wrong _but..._
|
| An article that gives either some objective of these things would
| be interesting and a book that gave a lot of anecdotes and
| details around a particular phenomena might worth the read. But
| for an article like this I can only shrug.
| buzzkillington wrote:
| >A slogan of Rao's may point the way: Be slightly evil. Or: geeks
| need to learn and use some of the sociopaths' tricks. Then geeks
| can capture more of the value they create (and get better at
| ejecting true sociopaths).
|
| That sounds a lot like what's happening to open source. Mops are
| happy that they get things for free, creators are living on
| starvation wages, sociopaths at the cloud companies are making
| hundreds of billions.
|
| >At best you can charge them admission or a subscription fee, but
| they'll inevitably argue that this is wrong because capitalism is
| evil, and also because they forgot their wallet.
|
| Yes, open source mops to a t.
| peterburkimsher wrote:
| Discussion from 2018:
|
| https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=17433487
|
| And 2015:
|
| https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=9632751
| twic wrote:
| Isn't this just Crossing the Chasm seen from a different angle?
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