Links on Culture - March 2023

Instagram face, Ozempic, olive oil coffee, Pynchon, and when that submarine most definitely does not come out

Each month I review new developments in global culture within the framework of my book, Status and Culture.

New Fashion Cycles: Instagram Face

Grazie Sophia Christie’s very astute piece in Tablet lays out exactly how status signaling forms particular aesthetics through an exploration of “Instagram Face” — “the chiseled nose, the overfilled lips, the cheeks scooped of buccal fat, eyes and brows thread-lifted high as the frescoed ceiling” formed in the congruence of Kylie Jenner, Bella Hadid, Carla Bruni, and Emily Ratajkowski. With the rise of cosmetic surgery promising “reversible, low-stakes modification,” the costs to acquire this face have fallen, which made it ubiquitous even among non-celebrities. So like all aesthetics, Instagram Face is following the pattern of all fashion cycles, and the current stage is for higher-status women to flee from it. Wealthy women are flocking towards more discreet work that helps them “look more like themselves.” A fancy plastic surgeon says, ​​“The good work is going undetected. The only stuff you see is bad work.”

Predictable Status Symbols: Floppy Birkins, continued

I was quoted in The New York Times on why beat-up Hermes bags are better status symbols than new ones. The formula for valuable status symbols — cachet + signaling costs + alibi — is quite useful for predicting which of the potential artifacts out there will be best suited for signaling.

Intermittent Status Symbols: Thinness

I just read Christopher Forth’s Fat: A Cultural History of the Stuff of Life, which I recommend for its very nuanced take on how girth has been valued and devalued over the centuries. Forth is not a full-out cultural determinist, but the narrative ultimately reveals how the ideal embonpoint has shifted according to the particular economic, social, and medical arrangements.

We’re seeing the next stage of this play out now with novel weight-loss drug Ozempic (read: Jia Tolentino, Derek Thompson). In the short run, these drugs will make thinness even more of a status symbol (“All over Instagram, the wealthy and the professionally attractive were showing newly prominent clavicles and rib cages.”). But in the long run, such drugs will become ubiquitous and greatly lower the signaling costs of thinness. With status, however, there can never, ever be true equalization, and so we should expect elites to find a new way to discount “artificial” weight loss through medical treatments as being somehow inferior to "natural" thinness.

New Artifacts: Starbucks’s Oleato olive oil coffee

Writing for The New Yorker, Gideon Lewis-Kraus reported from Italy about Starbuck’s bizarro Oleato coffee — “Starbucks Arabica coffee beans” with “Partanna cold-pressed extra virgin olive oil” inside. (The taste: “It’s really very much a lot of oil.”) The article is a detailed chronicle of globalization and of corporate excess; Oleato is the kind of product-line mission creep that happens when a dictatorial CEO decides to go in a wild direction based on “no consumer research whatsoever.”

New products are always great for studying cultural mechanics, as they enter the ecosystem as a blank slate and we can watch how they gain value over time. For Oleato, the actual flavor is only one mere value. What also will matter is whether drinking it says something about you to others. And as this innovation becomes a convention, we'll judge it on how it progresses over time. If it becomes hot for a brief moment and then disappears, we can value it as an epoch-marking fad. If it catches on and becomes a permanent part of the menu, it becomes a new custom alongside cafe lattes and hand-drip. But just as likely is that Oleato takes on the permanent anti-cachet of Crystal Pepsi.

Continued Narrative: The End of Internet Content

Back in the halcyon days of clickbait, editors added seductive titles to boring articles to run up audience numbers. Freddie DeBoer frets about the latest stage of clickbait, where video titles promise intriguing developments but… nothing happens. For example, in a video called “When that submarine comes out.” a submarine never comes out. Before Gladwell commandeered the term, “tipping point” denoted the moment of system collapse, and DeBoer’s essay suggests that we’ve gone into a world where algorithms are excited to promote hollow videos that generate short-term views without caring much about how this discourages long-term usage. But have we really reached a dead end? “The internet is like a person you know who you think can’t possibly stoop any lower, and then manages to pull it off, over and over again.”

Canon Changes: Gravity’s Rainbow as Postmodernist Relic

Ted Gioia wrote on the 50th anniversary of Thomas Pynchon's Gravity's Rainbow — a book that has become even more "prickly" now that "readers forget what it is like to grapple with deliberately difficult works." The canon — that established body of artworks from the past we continue to teach into the future — is never permanent, but shifts based on the latest turns in contemporary art. Works that have ceased to be influential tend to drop out. Gioia suggests that difficult authors like Pynchon and Wiliam Gaddis were the end-point of high-modernism, and their difficulty itself is no longer valued (or even fetishized). That being said, I assume Pynchon will endure, because in teaching literature he will always be one of the best to represent "postmodernism" as a style (although classes will surely assign The Crying of Lot 49 instead of making everyone slog through GR.)

What I can’t imagine is that 22 year-olds feel the pressure to read Gravity’s Rainbow the way I did at that age. It took me three attempts and probably nine+ months to get through it; will people really do this in a world where a 90 second video feels like the longest video of all time?