Always worth pondering when it works, and when, for whom, and how it fails.
"If you’re a top executive, turning up to work on a bicycle is a high-status activity because it was a choice and not a necessity. But if you work at Pizza Hut, turning up on a bike means you can’t afford a car."
Shamelessness is acting without embarrassment and countersignalling is deliberately downplaying because you're so confident you don't need to prove yourself.
Using the example from the article, another person who comes to mind besides Paris Hilton is Trump. He uses countersignalling as a strategic tool, and sloppiness as a Swiss knife. The followers of both Paris and Trump interpret that sloppiness as confidence and authenticity, which is why it's so effective. And to pull off being deliberately sloppy, you need to be shameless.
Here's hoping for a New New Sincerity to bring us back.
That said, this is about the messaging aspect. Trump say could lack seriousness of rhetoric, but still be seriously pursuing his self-interests.
There's an art scene and political movement:
Art (mostly): https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Metamodernism
Movement: https://metamoderna.org/metamodernism/
> generally describes creative works that expand upon and break away from concepts of postmodernist irony and cynicism.
That basically refers to anything that is not irony and cynicism, isn't it?
You know how people now hate the "umm that just happened" style of comedy writing? Its basically thay backlash. People dont want quippy remarks and tearing things down, they was genuine appreciation for things
I feel if we think about it more it might have a relarion to shamelessness. But im not so sure. Shamelessness seems to be opposite of cynicism by itself
And I think it's actionable advice for all of us. Be genuine, be vulnerable, and don't be afraid to be your true self. People like that.
In Ye Olden Days of the last century, this would be a shameful act, and people would be shamed for doing it.
In our enlightened modern times, people don't give a shit, and trying to shame them into not doing it is pointless. They are shameless about their selfishness, and apparently that's OK now.
With the result, as others have said, that we end up in the worst box on the Prisoner's Dilemma choices: we all have to put with other people's shitty taste in music and no-one gets any peace and quiet.
I don't get how we write this up as "authenticity" without also concluding that these people authentically have no consideration for the other people around them, and are therefore bad people. I certainly do not want these people to be authentic around me, I would very much like them to have some shame and maintain a considerate front, even if that's not their true nature.
But that's not being authentic, that's being plain rude, and there should be a difference.
You can be authentic and still respect boundaries and be considerate towards other people.
And on the other side, if being rude is your form of authenticity, then you're not authentic, you're just another rude person, probably following a specific type of common behaviour.
You see, they shame for playing music in public. Okay, great.
But they also shame for your weight, your sexuality, the color of your skin. Your job, your hobbies, your family. Your clothing, your skin, your hair.
And now, shame, as a tool, has been worn down to its bones. Of course then society at large begins to reject it.
no self awareness, no reflection. just impulse. me, me, me.
blasting music in public, talking at max volume, slamming doors. taking 20 mins to use an ATM when it takes me 30 seconds. and so on.
In fact, people who act authentically are often liked not despite of but because of their flaws. To be human is to be flawed, we're all guilty. And it turns out a lot of people crave permission to not be perfect.
The shamelessness thing is similar but fundamentally different in that it gets a following. Everyone thinks the kid/boomer without headphones is an ass, they just don't say it.
Speak for yourself, its at least satisfying. Insult their choice of music and provide suggestions for what they should play instead.
>In Ye Olden Days of the last century, this would be a shameful act, and people would be shamed for doing it.
Your equivalent ilk of decades past complained about "kids these days" and their boomboxes in public in basically the same way you're doing now.
But for regular people it's a fantasy. Because it only works if you're rich.
> But for regular people it's a fantasy
So for authentic people it's a fantasy???
I can only imagine that either
(a) you struggle to differentiate fake authenticity from authentic fakeness
or (b) perhaps you don't have enough authentic non-wealthy acquaintances.
Some welloff people countersignal successfully. But many don't because status signaling is difficult (evolutionarily).
> it only works if you're rich
And you imply that you think that people look up to the rich - however many people don't - perhaps that says something about your own pretensions?
Disclaimer: I'm a well off geek - definitely not rich and I'm rather poor at recognizing or playing status games.
Or they know other people won't accept them regardless and they don't care.
It's one of those communication patterns you see at the top and the bottom and if your life consists of working in an office, living in a condo and golfing on the weekends you'll basically never run across anyone that does it.
This "freedom to be themselves" works very well when priviledge is at stake.
Shame exists to keep us from engaging in antisocial behavior.
If your true self is a liar, a cheat, a cruel person, then you should absolutely be afraid to be your true self.
The metaphor of the game is a good one for general understanding (though the Signaling / Counters-signaling paper is a TIL for me)
I was hoping that there would be a "solution" of sorts to tackle / handle this issue of when EVERYBODY seems to use this strategy, but perhaps there isn't one...?
(My own way of dealing with this is to, uh, not read / watch any news / social media... but such ways are quite brittle, of course)
Is there some sudden rise of it? All my life I've been told by politicians and media corporations and others that I should be ashamed of various things that I think and do and am, as a poorly veiled effort to gain power by controlling people. And before my generation it had been going on a long time, with women wanting independence, black people wanting equal rights, men not wishing to be drafted to wars, gay rights, etc. I think shame and shaming has been a constant, and doesn't arise come from politics or media but human nature.
And I think most upheavals of the status quo have had to overcome this shame barrier. Shaming is probably a very effective psychological tool to conserve social order, but if it's abused or if people want change enough, eventually the lid will pop, and then when there is some critical mass moving away they actually bond together and take pride in being shameless and offending the people trying to shame them, and even might go to exaggerated lengths to do these "shameful" things and rile people up.
So I don't think it is that people or the politicians they vote for just decided they would use it as a strategy. I think it's actually that shame (which they see as coming from an "outgroup") is no longer a viable strategy.
Too often shaming or labelling viewpoints you disagree with as "hateful" without further elaboration is really just a thin veneer over the absence of any actual position. Intellectual laziness masked with the paper tiger of loaded words and language.
[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Thought-terminating_clich%C3%A...
It’s called government regulation. There’s whole fields of research on how to solve an arbitrarily complicated Prisoner’s Dilemma. A lot of people are allergic to the idea because they don’t want to have limits on their behavior, only on others or on no one at all.
So we get everyone picking the bad square in the Dilemma
So are we doomed? if we don't vote in people who can properly regulate this, it seems the dilemma continues. But how does one convince an entire society to stop being so selfish and myopic?
Some people are allergic to your knee jerk silver bullet solution because often times it comes with downsides that are on comparable orders to the original problem, same as every other silver bullet being peddled by every other ideologue.
Shit is complicated and care needs to be taken.
It's a comforting one but I think it's also a crappy and wrong one. Take a few steps further back and it looks like the pendulum is simply swinging.
It was over the past 10-20yr very fashionable to invest (or waste, depending on your take) a lot of resources softening up what we have to say and how we say it in order to avoid unnecessarily offending people, avoid imprecision, avoid edge cases of meaning and head off nitpickers and detractors who we'd never agree with.
Now, a more "I'll say more or less what I mean with no shits given about edge cases, I'll handle offense after the fact if it's a problem and the haters can go f themselves because I was never going to appease them anyway" style of communication is taking off because it offers a competitive advantage of less resource investment for message delivered.
All the communications overhead comes from this neurotic desire to sanitize speech of all possible offense, all possible negative implication, and indeed all humanity. The end result is vapid corpo doublespeak, which says... absolutely nothing at all.
The information content of the language of a culture that can be offended by everything tends towards nothing.
We're overdue for a major war, which will be reset on how we treat other humans by the end of it. Humans killing humans on an industrial scale between near-peers is followed by periods where people realize that maybe being dicks to each other isn't the ideal state. More cantankerous politicians being elected only increases the odds of war breaking out due to diplomatic failures.
There's probably an argument for European countries specifically not wanting to return to the near-constant warfare across its history. But I'm not sure that holds for US v USSR (which came perilously close to open warfare several times), or conflicts elsewhere.
Shamelessness as a strategy (2019) - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=32233451 - July 2022 (214 comments)
Shamelessness as a Strategy (2019) - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=25591066 - Dec 2020 (213 comments)
I also disagree how the author essentially defined "success" as some sort of follower count. I can't remember how I saw this clip, but it was about Lance Bass' wedding to his boyfriend, and he was talking about it with the Kardashian mom. All the Kardashian mom wanted to know about were what the ratings were for their televised wedding, because that's all that mattered to her. I mean, if that's how you want to be "successful", knock yourself the fuck out. I happen to think it's disgusting and the actual opposite of "success", but what do I know, I actually value my relationships for the people I get to know and care about.
Maybe I would like this essay better if it were titled "psychopathy as a strategy". Psychopathy certainly works, at least from the perspective of the psychopath, but it's not exactly something I want to aspire to.
Contrast that with acting out specifically because it's shameful, as a social/media tactic instead of a considered moral stance.
I had a co-worker who was addicted to verbally correcting everyone around him, which was super irritating but he seemed just quick enough and just technically correct enough that his formula kind of worked, for him. I would come into work and he would be in a middle of an argument where he insisted some distinction that everyone else that was asinine, he felt was important, and he always got the last word. Everything from pronunciation to definitions of ordinary concepts, and it was visibly important to his self esteem how right he was about all of these things.
At one point he claimed I "didn't understand comedy" because I enjoyed Tim and Eric. If you don't know them, think adult swim style surrealist meta-humor but in lo-fi live action. And my theory for this particular co-worker is that something about what Tim and Eric make fun of must have hit too close to home, too close to his sense of normalcy, which in this case meant seeing them not as comedic personas but as familiar targets to "correct", only to realize they were part of a comedic persona satirizing a certain idea of normalcy, to his initial bafflement and then resentment. Because for a moment he could make a home in that world, and it was a world they were making fun of.
These are all my assumptions of course, but I think they map on to this Paris Hilton analysis, which is that for some reason he needed to see their entire way of doing comedy as not real or not legitimate, because doing so would mean something fundamental about his psychology was something that could be turned into a joke.
Some people are obnoxious because they never learned not to be. It's about empathy, bad habits, and never getting the right feedback. Of course there is accounting for people being different and your goal in life shouldn't be "never bother anybody", but some folks take things too far. In a work context a manager needs to take a dude aside and gently suggest they tone the behavior down. We don't want to be surrounded by either tone police or constant needless corrections.
Don't envy them!
If I avoid shame, it's to avoid consequences, not to maintain self-image.
Well that's an unfortunately dangerous effect. But thinking about it, it really only takes a few dozen active members to kindle a community, and then they use that to grab in any vulnerable people who they pitch their scam to.
>The concept of a “genius mastermind” is itself outdated, because it assumes that someone needs to be in control. The shameless person is simply a host for a set of ideas, which, like any virus, will continue to propagate as long as there are willing hosts to receive it.
Yeah, fair enough. People just see a catalyst and it will attract a whole swarm of people who will use it to fit their agenda. I suppose it explains a lot of the clshing reports within the US administration this year. Lots of sabetours all trying to do their thing, but they are wrangling a mascot around who they need to keep pleased.
----
As usual, I don't even know how to start to address this. This article was in 2019, and for my country it definitely torpedoed down this decade. It just feels like the few powers left to check it are ransacking the country, and some part of the country is cheering on the destruction of everything. You can't really fight that kind of nihilism.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=19OaCHOLoxI
(long, but fascinating)
As a reaction, the public makes a mockery of them. As a bonus, getting a politicians that speaks his mind in the common way, is an added spice! Seeing the revulsion in the faces of the political nobility when Trump opens his mouth, gives many satisfaction.
So in politics, this is a sign of health. It is a kind of catharsis. Trump was one of the first in the modern era, and he'll get copy cats, and the strategy will then start to lose its efficiency, but, it will have recalibrated politics away from the previous state where it was a toy for the nobility and commoners were not welcome.
This is also something they fear. That commoners, not part of the nobility, might gain entrance to their domain.
So this is a healthy sign for democracy!
A student is on social media saying things that upset people solely to make money
> But what I do know is when I see my peers rolling their eyes at someone or deriding them for being “shameless”, there’s a good chance that, instead of writing them off, we should examine their actions a bit more closely.
What about Donald Trump shamelessly bragging about sexual assault? Incidentally he even has "shame" and is trying to disassociate himself from Epstein - so, it seems he still needs some social acceptance, but that's a curious point about LGBTQ and shame, because many cultures have made these things something bad and to be ashamed about - although I wonder where they've come from, homosexuality wasn't a big deal in Ancient Greece, and they were even the kind where adult men had relations with adolescent boys.
This is a great point, and we can push it further. Perhaps the more powerful effect is that once the supporting fringe communities grow large and influential enough, the original establishment will move over to the shameless person’s camp. This happens swiftly, like dominoes falling, because the establishment’s opposition was actually not ideological to begin with but rather based on perception of the most socially acceptable / financially beneficial position at every moment.
You had integrity, put in the work, and failed. Life is brutal - anyone can respect your effort.
You tried to be the next Paris, and failed. You look like a fucking clown.
Very few people in 2004 could pull off the Paris. It's a lot easier in 2024.
A lot of people, almost instinctively, and for good reason.
> any major politician sticking to a pre-2016 playbook today is almost certainly not going to win.
Doubt that shamelessly corrupt will have the same effect.
Vice President Quayle was mocked endlessly for spelling the word potato incorrectly. Now we have a dude who can barely string a sentence together.
The mafia/werewolf example is certainly a bad analogy and maybe there'd be more consequences to labeling if labeling wasn't used all the time as a political maneuver to destroy an opponent.
It's also ridiculously all over the place claiming Paris Hilton somehow popularized being out there. In the US, Fame and "larger than life" attitudes have always been successful provided they come together with money or power.
A more curious case, although it became prominent years after this post was published, is that of the Bidens. Their son Hunter was a big liability, and even the most staunch Democrats, if they thought about it outside the context of the cultural battle between right and left, would have admitted it. But by all accounts, the whole issue became entangled in the cultural battle between left and right, and people took sides depending on where their vote was going.
The same thing happened in Italy with Berlusconi and his interest in younger women whom he paid to have sex with him. He neither explained nor justified his behavior much (just dinner with friends, he said: can I relax the way I want after long days of work?), and the subject became one of many that his friends and enemies discussed daily.
Zelensky allowed himself and his wife to appear in what I consider to be an incredibly misguided and glamorous photo shoot published in Vanity Fair, a shameless strategy, but he had cover from criticism, as any criticism of the photo shoot would have been interpreted as openly siding with Putin.
But shamelessness doesn’t always save you. Strauss-Kahn, a prominent figure in French and European politics up until some 15-20 years ago, failed to weather the storm, but not because of his infidelity or his passion for escorts, but because he, a socialist, had treated some immigrants and low-status people with vicious contempt (in addition to allegations of sexual misconduct). If it had been just about the escorts or vanilla misconduct, the shameless strategy would probably have worked (after all, who doesn't like escorts?).
Although it is always a matter of circumstances, I believe that the shameless strategy works for people of very low status, who do not fear criticism because they have little to lose, or for those of high status, especially when they manage to make it seem normal, that it has always been done, but that it has now become a problem because their enemies want to make it so, for political, financial, or cultural reasons. For mid-level managers in the tech industry, on average, it doesn't work very well.
Trump's strategy works because it/he has all the elements to do so. Has he ever offered apologies? Never. He always moves forward: the past is the past. From an appearance standpoint, he offers an easy target for his rivals. But why hasn't anyone hit him, or when they have, why have they missed the mark? Because it's not in their nature, it is not them, they would not be consistent, it would be a one-off, not a strategy, but just an expedient tactic.
It is more difficult to determine whether a shameless proactive strategy, such as Trump's (harshly criticizing others' physical appearance, openly bullying less powerful peers) would work for others. It has proven to be unexpectedly successful for him. However, it is consistent with his personality. A similar strategy might not work for Macron, given the stark gap between his traditionally presidential demeanor and a Trump-like shameless political and personal strategy.
The spiritually inclined tech founder is a common archetype/personality of the post-2000 tech boom, and I found the point the article was making, i.e. that his was a shameless strategy, quite off base.
It is important to differentiate between a way of being (e.g., introvert/extrovert, more or less affected by criticism), a goal, a strategy, and a tactic. An excellent read for those topics is "Winners", by Alastair Campbell, which surprisingly few people in tech, and I dare to say in politics too, have read.
following older narratives of gender dynamics it would commonly be thought that the wife wanted it, because hey, Vanity Fair! and got the husband to go along.
I am baffled that this serious misstep has been forgotten so quickly, but as I wrote in another comment, what you do plays a secondary role in how you are perceived; the main role is to show where you stand, whether that stand is supported by actions or not. Declare yourself anti-fascist, and any criticism of you and your policies will be interpreted as fascist.
This seems wildly unsupported. I lived through that era, and admittedly I wasn't breathlessly tuned into the latest celebrity gossip, but from a sort of second hand (or third or fourth) she seemed to say and do the exact same things as any other rich young socialite.
She went to parties with other celebs, had her fashiom choices reported on and occasionally said something mildly vapid.
The biggest moment, of course, was her ex-boyfriend selling their sex tape, but she wasn't the first or the last person to have someone publish private material.
Is the argument that she was the first woman to not commit suicide when that happened and there for she's shameless?
Or just that she was famous despite acting like an average wealthy child and that made people real mad?
It seems like a truly Reed Richards level stretch to get to someone like Trump who says and does a bunch of awful things most people thought were off limits for a politician and was rewarded by a bunch of awful people.
I supposed it’s possible she’s really as dumb as she portrayed on her “reality” tv show, but I find it extremely unlikely given the money and education.
