The Decline of Deviance
People are less weird than they used to be. That might sound odd, but data from every sector of society is pointing strongly in the same direction: weâre in a recession of mischief, a crisis of conventionality, and an epidemic of the mundane. Deviance is on the decline. Iâm not the first to notice something strange going onâor, really, the lack of something strange going on. But so far, I think, each person has only pointed to a piece of the phenomenon. As a result, most of them have concluded that these trends are: a) very recent, and therefore likely caused by the internet, when in fact most of them began long before b) restricted to one segment of society (art, science, business), when in fact this is a culture-wide phenomenon, and c) purely bad, when in fact theyâre a mix of positive and negative. When you put all the data together, you see a stark shift in society that is on the one hand miraculous, fantastic, worthy of a ticker-tape parade. And a shift that is, on the other hand, dismal, depressing, and in need of immediate intervention. Looking at these epoch-making events also suggests, I think, that they may all share a single cause. Letâs start where the data is clear, comprehensive, and overlooked: compared to their parents and grandparents, teens today are a bunch of goody-two-shoes. For instance, high school students are less than half as likely to drink alcohol as they were in the 1990s: Theyâre also less likely to smoke, have sex, or get in a fight, less likely to abuse painkillers, and less likely to do meth, ecstasy, hallucinogens, inhalants, and heroin. (Donât kids vape now instead of smoking? No: vaping also declined from 2015 to 2023.) Weed peaked in the late 90s, when almost 50% of high schoolers reported that they had toked up at least once. Now that number is down to 30%. Kids these days are even more likely to use their seatbelts. Surprisingly, theyâre also less likely to bring a gun to school: All of those findings rely on surveys, so maybe more and more kids are lying to us every year? Well, itâs pretty hard to lie about having a baby, and teenage pregnancy has also plummeted since the early 1990s: Adults are also acting out less than they used to. For instance, crime rates have fallen by half in the past thirty years: Hereâs some similar data from Northern Ireland on âanti-social behavior incidentsâ, because they happened to track those: Serial killing, too, is on the decline: Another disappearing form of deviance: people donât seem to be joining cults anymore. Philip Jenkins, a historian of religion and author of a book on cults, reports that âcompared to the 1970s, the cult issue has vanished almost entirelyâ.1 (Given that an increase in cults would be better for Jenkinsâ book sales, Iâm inclined to trust him on this one.) There is no comprehensive dataset on cult formation, but analyzed cults that have been covered on a popular and long-running podcast and found that most of them started in the 60s, 70s, and 80s, with a steep dropoff after 20002: Crimes and cults are definitely deviant, and they appear to be on the decline. Thatâs good. But hereâs where things get surprising: neutral and positive forms of deviance also seem to be getting rarer. For exampleâ Moving away from home isnât necessarily good or bad, but it is kinda weird. Ditching your hometown usually means leaving behind your family and friends, the institutions you understand, the culture you know, and perhaps even the language you speak. You have to be a bit of a misfit to do such a thing in the first place, and becoming a stranger makes you even stranger. I always figured that every generation of Americans is more likely to move than the last. People used to be born and die in the same zip code; now they ping-pong across the country, even the whole world. I was totally wrong about this. Americans have been getting less and less likely to move since the mid-1980s: This effect is mainly driven by young people: These days, âthe typical adult lives only 18 miles from his or her motherâ. Creativity is just deviance put to good use. It, too, seems to be decreasing. A few years ago, I analyzed a bunch of data and found that all popular forms of art had become âoligopoliesâ: fewer and fewer of the artists and franchises own more and more of the market. Before 2000, for instance, only about 25% of top-grossing movies were prequels, sequels, spinoffs, etc. Now itâs 75%. The story is the same in TV, music, video games, and booksâall of them have been oligpol-ized. As points out, weâre still reading comic books about superheroes that were invented in the 1960s, buying tickets to Broadway shows that premiered decades ago, and listening to the same music that our parents and grandparents listened to. You see less variance even when you look only at the new stuff. According to analyses by The Pudding, popular music today is now more homogenous and has more repetitive lyrics than ever. Also, the cover of every novel now looks like this: But wait, shouldnât we be drowning in new, groundbreaking art? Every day, people post ~100,000 songs to Spotify and upload 3.7 million videos to YouTube.3 Even accounting for Sturgeonâs Law (â90% of everything is crapâ), that should still be more good stuff than anyone could appreciate in a lifetime. And yet professional art critics are complaining that culture has come to a standstill. According to The New York Times Magazine, We are now almost a quarter of the way through what looks likely to go down in history as the least innovative, least transformative, least pioneering century for culture since the invention of the printing press. Remember when the internet looked like this? That era is long gone. Take a stroll through the Web Design Museum and youâll immediately notice two things: Every site has converged on the same look: sleek, minimalist design elements with lots of pictures Website aesthetics changed a lot from the 90s to the 2000s and the 2010s, but havenât changed much from the 2010s to now A few examples: This same kind of homogenization has happened on the parts of the internet that users create themselves. Every MySpace page was a disastrous hodgepodge; every Facebook profile is identical except for the pictures. On TikTok and Instagram, every influencer sounds the same4. On YouTube, every video thumbnail looks like it came out of one single content factory: No doubt, the internet is still basically a creepy tube that extrudes a new weird thing every day: Trollface, the Momo Challenge, skibidi toilet. But notice that the raw materials for many of these memes is often decades old: superheroes (1930s-1970s), Star Wars (1977), Mario (1981), PokĂ©mon (1996), Spongebob Squarepants (1999), Pepe the Frog (2005), Angry Birds (2009), Minions (2010), Minecraft (2011). Remember ten years ago, when people found a German movie that has a long sequence of Hitler shouting about something, and they started changing the subtitles to make Hitler complain about different things? Well, theyâre still doing that. The physical world, too, looks increasingly same-y. As Alex Murrell has documented5, every cafe in the world now has the same bourgeois boho style: Every new apartment building looks like this: The journalist Kyle Chayka has documented how every AirBnB now looks the same. And even super-wealthy mega-corporations work out of offices that look like this: People usually assume that we donât make interesting, ornate buildings anymore because it got too expensive to pay a bunch of artisans to carve designs into stone and wood.6 But the researcher Samuel Hughes argues that the supply-side story doesnât hold up: many of the architectural flourishes that look like they have to be done by hand can, in fact, be done cheaply by machine, often with technology that weâve had for a while. Weâre still capable of making interesting buildingsâwe just choose not to. Brands seem to be converging on the same kind of logo: no images, only words written inâŠ
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