This interview with W. David Marx was conducted and condensed by Tatti Ribeiro.
I am David Marx. I'm the author of two books. My second book Status and Culture tries to explain where fashion and culture come from, which is something I've been obsessed with for a really long time and didn't feel like there was a single book that brought together all that we already know.
How do you even begin to approach something like that?
I was interested in culture in the abstract, and at some point, I was just like, well, what is culture? How do you define it? Like, what are we talking about? Can we talk about culture with the precision that we talk about economics? And then in graduate school, you would learn what Veblen says about conspicuous consumption, and here's what Bordieu says about how aesthetics and class are related, but no one would ever show that there's some sort of underlying thread between them. They would always just be contrasted or siloed. I always wanted to thread all these pieces together to show that they're part of the same model, that there must be some sort of human behaviors
As I was writing, the one thing I kept coming back to was status as a motivator. If you kind of took the individual pursuit of status out of the model, nothing about culture or fashion made sense. To write about this, I just thought that I would go to the library and find the book on status and plug it into what I was working on.
And there wasn't really a book on status, so I said, okay, I should make a book about explaining how status works and then showing how it flows into macro cultural patterns. And so that was where the book came from. The number one positive reader feedback I get is that you're explaining all these things I've always felt, but never had the language to describe. And for me, that was the whole point of the book.
Yeah. So what is your working definition of status?
Yeah, status is a very ambiguous term. When you say status colloquially, people think you mean trying to one-up your neighbor. Like a person who cares about status wants to drive a fancy car. It’s unfortunate because it makes this seem like sinful behavior, like being a glutton. But if you strip status down to its basic sociological definition, all the word is saying is that society is not flat. There are inherent hierarchies based on factors like family dynamics, race, and class. Your position within these hierarchies is your status. Seeking status essentially means aiming to avoid low status, which results in poor treatment and a lower quality of life. It is quite rational for humans to pursue two things: securing their own status within a community, where they receive various benefits such as familial support, workplace dignity, or societal respect; and striving to move up the hierarchy to gain additional benefits. Your level of desire may differ based on what society you live in. But at the end of the day, humans have a fundamental desire for status, and that isn't a sin, it's just the way that society works. Accepting that and then trying to figure out what the downstream effects are, are what I'm interested in.
What are the signifiers of status and how has the internet changed that? There are now very public vehicles of status whereas before it may have been more private.
It's a very big topic, but the first approach would be to look at status symbols. Status symbols are anything that people use to signal the fact that they have a higher status than someone else. And status symbols need three particular things. First of all, be associated with a high-status community already. For example, when we see a Porsche and consider it a status symbol, it's because we typically associate Porsches with wealthy individuals. So, the Porsche symbolizes wealth. It's simplistic, but that's essentially it.
The second is it has to have what economists call signaling costs, which means there must be some sort of barrier preventing everyone from obtaining it. Typically, this barrier is money, but time and information can also be signaling costs. Having Gucci loafers in the seventies in the United States was a big deal because it often implied you had traveled to Europe to purchase them.
And then the last is that status symbols have to have an alibi, which is you have to have some reason to possess it other than trying to signal for status. I think that one of the reasons NFTs didn't work well is because there's really no reason to own an NFT other than the show that you spent a lot of money on an NFT.
The internet fundamentally devalues status symbols. And so, your ability to say, I have this and you don't, is also weakened. These factors alone, more or less tip status symbols to be focused on money. Money-based status symbols unfortunately are also not that interesting.
On top of that, the internet also quantified people's status in a way that had never existed before. In the past, you would maybe say, “My guess would be Britney Spears is more famous than Paris Hilton.” Now you can go to Google Trends and see. This quantification gets rid of some of the ambiguity, and then it just pushes behavior, whether it’s on a website or in real life, that results in higher and higher numbers. Everyone is working to increase their “quantity.” And that does a couple of things. For one, it focuses on the lowest common denominator type of cultural experiences because that's how you're going to aggregate more people. And then, it also propels a very pro-business attitude.
In the nineties, there was a tension in alternative culture, because it became very big and very lucrative. Yet, the people who were making it were quite freaked out by that and took steps to push away commercial offers. Marc Jacobs, when he was designing for Perry Ellis, did a grunge collection, and he sent it to Courtney Love and Kurt Cobain, and they literally burnt it.
Nowadays, it's like, great, I'm going to work with this big brand and I'm going to take this money, and the money itself is going to prove that I have status, et cetera, et cetera. The vast monetization of culture started before the internet, but the internet takes it to a really extreme place. All these quantifications just make us more or less absorb a raw capitalist logic.
Yeah for a while it felt like the shift was happening to me specifically — because I moved from San Francisco to LA in 2009. I thought oh, LA is just really open to wealth in a way Northern California isn’t, like the overt display of it. As time went on it became obvious this was a global shift not a California one. The LA-ification of the world. The Kardashian effect I guess.
Absolutely.
I just finished Paris Hilton's memoir, and what's interesting about Paris Hilton is that she has multi-generational wealth, there's a family name, and prestige from birth. She had this extremely privileged background. But then, the way she tells the story is that she was sent to these horrible cult-like reform schools, and it so scarred her that she was like, I'm gonna make so much money as revenge. At age 19, this already incredibly wealthy privileged woman is like, “I am going to monetize my fame.” “I'm going to be really famous and I'm going to sell products to people.” The fact that even for the super-wealthy people, inherited money isn't good enough. You can see the same thing with Zuckerberg or the Winklevoss twins. Growing up wealthy wasn't enough. Everybody needed to get richer and richer. And being a famous, well-respected singer is not enough. You have to turn that into a brand. And then the Kardashians… it’s almost so cliché that people don’t talk about it anymore, but Kim Kardashian leaked her sex tape, and six months later they announced Keeping Up With The Kardashians. We've been so swept up into this idea that I call “ultra optimism” that if the market approves of something, it must be amazing. And who are you to criticize it?
In all of pop culture, it feels exactly like what you’re describing — as if size (number of followers or dollars), is the only qualifier. Do you feel good or bad or neutral about that?
It's also not cool at the moment to be a scold and just say, “Culture used to be better and now it's terrible.” The truth is that more people can make more culture than ever before. There are a lot of advantages to the internet and overall democratization.
But what has happened is there's been a general devaluing of culture because there's too much of it, and everybody's attention is spread too thin. There are finite limits to human attention. Things that are outrageous or blockbusters are just more likely to grab our attention. Paris Hilton is like one of the most emblematic people of the 21st century because she was super famous while also being completely despised. She kept winning all these awards for being the least-liked person, and yet, nobody could turn away. And it's very easy to see Donald Trump in the same model.
So, culture being spread so thin in the internet era has ironically made these middle-of-the-road entities even more powerful. That wasn't supposed to happen. The initial expectation was that the internet would enable numerous niches to flourish, leading to the decline of mass culture. But what happened instead is all the niches became so weak and spread out that they have no impact, and then the things in the middle are the only things that matter.
Culture is an ecosystem. In this ecosystem, you have mass consumers who just want to be entertained, and that's fine. And then there are people who are interested in pushing the culture forward. Culture is based on conventions of how a song is supposed to sound, how a book is supposed to read, and how a film is supposed to go. And there are people who we call artists who say, well, what if a film was like this instead? Or what if you did this? What if you broke this convention?
Now, there's this real anti-elitist sentiment and an idea that we should value all culture equally. I agree that you shouldn’t disparage somebody because of their cultural taste, but at the same time, artists aren't just randomly doing things. They're trying to create downstream effects from their work. And if there's not a system to reward these artists, which is that critics would go out of their way to think about innovative artists rather than just being like, their art is not going to be valued, they're not going to be paid attention to and then you don’t see any kind of innovation happening in the wider culture.
I'll give you an example. If you look at trap music from Atlanta, it had a different kind of rhythmic structure than hip hop in the nineties. It just sounds different. And then a lot of those techniques started trickling into pop and even trickling into country music. And so if you listen to a country music song from today compared to 20 years ago, it sounds completely different. All of this came from the Atlanta Trap community and there were cultural flows outside of its initial original point. It's really important that art can flow through the system; otherwise, the system becomes really static.
Democratization implies that it is inherently good — but sometimes I think about the idea that the audience (via their data and an algorithm) is dictating what sort of shows I get to see. I want an artist to make something that I didn’t know I wanted to see myself. I’m not sure it should work the other way around.
Yeah, I mean, if we define artists as people who understand the conventions that underpin culture and change them with intention, this work can’t be crowd-sourced. You can’t crowdsource a way to surprisingly break rules that most people don't even think about. To understand the invisible rules requires some sort of expertise. There's already a very small group of people who can even do that work. And most people, if they're in the cultural industry and they're just trying to make money, they're not even trying to do the tweaking because they're just trying to take the formula and replicate it to make money. That's not a diss. That's literally what you do if you as an economic actor inside of an industry. You don't sit there and try to impress your friends. You try to make money.
So, you can't have democratic art for this very technical reason. It's not a snobbish reason. Art requires artists to surprise us by not doing what already has been done. By crowdsourcing, you generally tend to just replicate what people already think. And AI is doing the same thing. AI is a sophisticated way of crowdsourcing, which is like looking at the entire world of paintings and then replicating some of these features.
The AI is not thinking, "How do I subvert that? How do I find the convention to subvert it?" It's just thinking about finding the convention to give it back to you. That’s why the results tend to not be that interesting. Could you program an AI to then subvert the convention? Sure. But then it would just be a random subversion. The only reason we accept some subversions and not others is because artists or critics tell us the human reason why it’s a legitimate subversion.
We’ve been online for a while now. The use of it has changed over time. Do you have any ideas about where we’re heading now?
When I published the book, I was quite pessimistic about whether there'd be a natural remedy to this crisis. One of the points I make in the book is that there is not some sort of altruistic reason why people made all this great culture and everybody flipped from being preppy to hippies to grunge or whatever. There's just these mechanisms in society that push people into changing their styles at a certain pace. And now the internet messed up all of those mechanisms. But, the way the internet works rapidly changes. It used to be that these platforms were your own little world – and now Instagram is pushing reels into your feed. You barely see your own world or your own friends anymore. I don't think that is sustainable. I think people will want to be in smaller communities which really strengthens the culture inside of it and makes it more interesting.
Another thing I’ve felt in Tokyo is that tourism has massively increased and it used to be that the tourists only went to about four or five neighborhoods, and if you just avoided those neighborhoods, you didn't really have to deal with tourists. And now it's like, I'll go to my favorite little neighborhood cafe in Tokyo and then there'll be a line of like 50 people because someone's put on TikTok that they had really great pudding. And so these places with six seats that have had, you know, a trickle of customers for 50 years suddenly have lines down the block because somebody put it on TikTok. So I'm hearing people now ask me for recommendations and say, 'I won't post this online because I don't want that to happen.' And so I think there is going to be much more withholding of information, which will make it more valuable again as a status symbol.
You're saying gatekeeping is back.
Gatekeeping has to come back because people only shared a lot at the beginning because the act of sharing gave you social benefits. If you knew a great café, you were "the guy who knew the great cafe." But by sharing it now, you ruin your own favorite cafés.
So, I believe there will be a shift back from the infinite culture of the internet to something more finite – because that's where value is created. I don't think we'll ever return to a 20th-century scenario where culture and information move slowly, and you have to rely on personal connections. But we're likely moving away from the peak of oversharing and being constantly connected on these massive platforms, allowing their algorithms to dictate our content consumption.