Comment by api
2 hours ago
When it comes to these lines of thinking, and to romanticism which is closely related, I have a hard time not seeing some of it as disdain for the middle class and nostalgia for the stories classic aristocracy told about itself.
I’m American and grew up inundated with cultural disdain for the suburbs, tract housing, malls, all those things, and at some point I asked, well, what then? What’s better?
Sauce made slowly by hand is better. Carefully curated culture is better. Hand made, artisan, intentional.
Rare. Special. And if it’s rare and special few can have it, making it also expensive and aristocratic.
As soon as you try to give everyone that experience, you get chain stories. You get tract homes. You get mass culture. Because it’s a mass. It’s million, billions of people, and we are not as unique as we think we are. None of us are.
I’m not saying the whole critique is this. There’s another side to it that’s about exploitation and addiction and that one rings true to me. But I find that it’s hard to peel the two things apart.
It’s not exploitation to raise the standard of living of masses of people, and if you think it’s inherently tacky maybe you’re a neo-feudalist reactionary and don’t know it yet. There’s a reason that stuff took hold so easily among certain kinds of hipsters.
I see a lot of leftists where if you could get them to let go of one idea, namely equity and equality, you’d instantly have a “trad.” Most of their other opinions are already aligned.
I don’t see my post as making any judgement, let alone offering criticism. It’s simply my observation that many people prefer the artificial stuff to the original product.
But since you’ve brought this up, I’d argue that it’s not a question of elitism, but rather that 'the masses' simply isn’t given access to these products. What they get is an abstraction of the original, which merely imitates the flavour but abstracts anything else away. Take, for example, meat or vegetable stock, which is now a staple in every kitchen in the form of powder or stock cubes. If you take a look at the ingredients and nutritional values, they’re rather disappointing. The masses may get access to the taste, but not to the nutrients.
I didn’t mean to come off as criticizing you, just providing a balancing counterpoint on some of the ideas.
The question is: can you give billions of people the “authentic” version?
In some cases you can. In the US at least there’s boutique groceries and farmers markets that sell more authentic organic food that usually does have better nutritional value. But it costs more.
The artificial mass market imitation is cheaper because it is thermodynamically cheaper. It takes far less labor (the most costly input to almost all processes) and it substitutes things that can be bulk produced at a lower unit cost. Being less nutritious probably directly correlates since nutrition is chemical complexity is lower entropy, higher energy, harder to scale.
There’s a lot of rare “authentic” experiences that cannot be scaled. That means most people can’t have them, ever.
You can’t have both rarity / exclusivity and democratization / equality. One side has to give.
This is exactly what the article touches on, the race to the bottom. It drags everyone's experience down. This appeal to scalability is part of the problem, IMO. Not every experience is or should be scalable. Some kids find blackberry bushes at grandma's instead of strawberries. Little is gained by strip mining human experience so the thinnest veneer can be "scaled".
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