Behavioral norms, such as dinner table etiquette, are costly because they require investment in social knowledge. Rituals and cultural performances are costly because they require time to perform or consume.
David Foster Wallace declared irony the ethos and problem of his age in 1993
Rather than compete for the same resources, the species diversified—not purposefully, but through mutation. Darwin would call this process of divergence adaptive radiation.
Fromm argued that people escape the responsibility and uncertainty of freedom by submitting to authoritarian rule, thereby conforming to and imposing that order on others (reminiscent of social dominance orientation). By the 1950s, more and more social critics began to sign on to the idea that mass society created a deficient personality type.
According to Lindner, the defining quality of the psychopath was his inability to delay gratification, acting impulsively and instinctually.
The money is our brain’s way of signaling our interest in a social relationship with them. The fact that it does so even when there’s no prospect of a relationship (because the game is played anonymously) is an important clue that social selection has shaped social reflexes that require no conscious deliberation or explicit strategizing.
Other experiments have involved norm violations such as riding an elevator facing the back wall, standing too close to strangers, or trying to negotiate bus fares.
The emergence of cool stemmed from an oppositional stance that rejected this dominant hierarchical social structure instead of emulating those on its upper rungs. Indeed, the architects of rebel cool, such as Norman Mailer and Jack Kerouac, inverted the dominant social hierarchy, rejecting the values of those at its top and appropriating the values of those at its bottom.
The rise of cool consumerism was a rebellion against three strands of the Status Dilemma: hierarchical social structure, the psychological motive of status emulation, and the conception of status as having one dimension (specifically, wealth).
the ever-present hoodie that Zuckerberg wore while on his IPO tour raised the issue of whether he was too unconventional, and the episode became known as Hoodiegate.
Many of the founding Beats met as students at Columbia University. Allen Ginsberg went there with plans to become a lawyer. William Burroughs had gone to Harvard and enjoyed a trust fund from his wealthy family.
As Stewart Brand, a central figure in this revolution, wrote in 1995, “The real legacy of the sixties generation is the computer revolution.” Inspired by the technophile visions of Buckminster Fuller, the media visions of Marshall McLuhan, and 1960s counterculture ideas, a key segment of that generation would embrace what they saw as technology’s liberating potential and shape it with countercultural ideas.
Jack Weinberg’s remark during the 1960s Berkeley Free Speech Movement, “Don’t trust anyone over thirty,” succinctly captured the sentiment that rebel cool was for the young.