The Decline of Deviance 2

越轨行为的衰落2

2026-07-09 · Adam Mastroianni | Experimental History (Substack) · 原文

Many forms of risk-taking and rule-breaking have declined since the 1990s.

自 20 世纪 90 年代以来，许多形式的冒险和违反规则的行为都在减少。

Deviance is declining because prosperity has increased—people have more to lose, and they’re acting like it.

越轨现象正在减少，因为繁荣已经增加——人们会失去更多，而他们的行为也正是如此。

Since I put it out last October, this has become my most-read post of all time.

自从我去年十月发布以来，这已成为我有史以来阅读次数最多的帖子。

Lots of folks have chimed in with hypotheses, critiques, and good old-fashioned internet dunks, so let’s see if we can take this idea one level deeper, and weave something out of all these loose threads.

That’s right: we’re doing a sequel to the post about how there are too many sequels.

没错：我们正在制作关于续集太多的帖子的续集。

(The trends, not the post itself, although that too sometimes.)

（趋势，而不是帖子本身，尽管有时也是如此。）

To most folks, the decline of deviance is a turn for the worst.

对大多数人来说，越轨行为的减少意味着最坏的情况发生。

Previous generations got to live through artistic golden ages, while we have to suffer through an era where there are four different movies that are all, technically, Spider-Man 2 .

But this response misses half the post, and the most important point.

但这个回应忽略了一半的内容，也是最重要的一点。

In 1995, half of high school students drank, 35% smoked, and 40% had at least tried weed.

1995年，一半的高中生喝酒，35%的人吸烟，40%的人至少尝试过大麻。

10% of them had brought a weapon to school at some point.

其中 10% 的人曾在某个时候携带武器到学校。

About 6% of girls aged 15-19 were pregnant.

Crime rates were about as high as they had been since we started keeping track of them.

犯罪率大约是我们开始追踪以来的最高水平。

Over the next 30 years, all of these problems shrank and some of them nearly disappeared.

在接下来的30年里，所有这些问题都减少了，其中一些几乎消失了。

And not because of anything we did on purpose!

We have no idea how to get kids to stop smoking—when we try to persuade them, we sometimes cause them to smoke more .

我们不知道如何让孩子们戒烟——当我们试图说服他们时，有时我们会导致他们吸更多的烟。

No, these improvements happened basically by magic, for free, and—I think—as a byproduct of our increasing prosperity.

不，这些改进基本上是魔法般的、免费的，而且——我认为——是我们日益繁荣的副产品。

This is like waking up one day to find that you’ve been left a large fortune by a long-lost aunt.

这就像有一天醒来，发现一位失散多年的阿姨给你留下了一大笔财产。

How does this great, unearned victory make us feel?

这场伟大的、不劳而获的胜利让我们有何感想？

Apparently, it doesn’t make us feel anything.

We would have spent billions to solve all of these problems back in the 1990s—no doubt we were spending considerable sums of money on anti-drug programs and public service announcements, wasting almost all of it—and yet when we got the thing we wanted so badly, we didn’t even notice.

Now we’re on to worrying about whether the kids are too sad, whether they play outside enough, etc. Which is all reasonable and fine, but also, can we take a win?

Can we at least try to reverse-engineer how some of these trendlines ended up going in our preferred directions, so we can make more of them do that?

I, too, would like to see a movie that is not Spider-Man 2 .

我也想看一部《蜘蛛侠2》以外的电影。

But I also appreciate that I can watch it safely in my home without fear of being attacked by pregnant teenage criminals.

但我也很高兴我可以在家里安全地观看它，而不必担心受到怀孕的青少年罪犯的攻击。

Many people looked at the trends I presented and said, “Oh, the internet did this”.

许多人看到我提出的趋势后说：“哦，互联网做到了这一点”。

Maybe the internet killed the vibe by enabling mass surveillance—everyone’s afraid to be weird inside the digital panopticon, where all of your behaviors are recorded, uploaded, and permanently preserved.

Or maybe the internet flattened culture by subjecting it to algorithmic curation.

或者，互联网可能通过算法管理来扁平化文化。

We can’t have nice things anymore because the computers won’t show them to us.

我们不能再拥有美好的东西，因为计算机不会向我们展示它们。

Both of these hypotheses are probably wrong, because the internet—at least, the internet as we know it today—simply showed up too late to be a plausible suspect.

A majority of Americans didn’t get broadband until 2007 .

大多数美国人直到 2007 年才获得宽带。

Instagram only launched in 2010 , which was also the year that iPhones got a front-facing camera .

Instagram 于 2010 年才推出，同年 iPhone 配备了前置摄像头。

So the transition from the 1990s to the 2000s, where we see many forms of deviance declining, is not really the transition from “pre-internet” to “post-internet”.

That transition happened somewhere around 2012 when a majority of people got a smartphone , and long after most of these trends were already in motion.

So I don’t think the internet is the killer, but I do think it’s an accessory after the fact.

所以我不认为互联网是杀手，但我确实认为它是事后的一个附属品。

In particular, I think the internet accelerated three trends that don’t get much attention.

特别是，我认为互联网加速了三种并未引起太多关注的趋势。

I’m going to call them cultural carcinization, de-frictioning , and the flat-Earth problem .

我将把它们称为文化癌化、消除摩擦和地平问题。

In nature, apparently, being a crab is a good way to be.

在自然界中，显然，成为一只螃蟹是一种很好的生活方式。

Several independent evolutionary lineages have ended up with crab-like body plans, a process called carcinization .

几个独立的进化谱系最终形成了类似螃蟹的身体结构，这一过程称为癌化。

Culture can carcinize too, not in the sense that we all turn into crabs, but in the sense that we converge on a small set of strategies.

文化也可以致癌，不是说我们都变成螃蟹，而是说我们集中在一小部分策略上。

If you’ve ever played a “social deduction” or “hidden role” game like Werewolf, Mafia, The Resistance, Avalon, or Secret Hitler, you’ve seen this happen in real time.

Things start out wild and unpredictable as people get a feel for the rules.

当人们逐渐了解规则时，事情开始变得疯狂且不可预测。

But everyone’s tactics have to evolve because each gambit can only work once (“If you’re the Secret Hitler, raise your hand right now!”) .

If you play long enough with the same group, eventually you’ll end up with a handful of maneuvers that continue to be viable even after they’re known, often because they’re difficult to pull off.

如果你在同一组中玩得足够长，最终你会得到一些即使在已知之后仍然可行的策略，通常是因为它们很难实现。

At this point, the game becomes both extremely competitive and extremely repetitive.

此时，游戏变得竞争极其激烈且重复性极高。

This is what cultural carcinization looks like.

The faster we can communicate, the faster we culturally carcinize.

我们沟通得越快，我们的文化癌化得就越快。

When information only travels as fast as humans can walk or horses can run, it takes a long time for any given strategy to play itself out.

当信息传播的速度只能达到人类行走或马匹奔跑的速度时，任何给定的策略都需要很长时间才能发挥作用。

As we acquire steamships, railroads, telephones, and airplanes, the pace of the game picks up, and tactics have to turn over faster and faster.

随着我们获得轮船、铁路、电话和飞机，游戏的节奏加快，战术的转变也必须越来越快。

By the time we get the internet, it’s like every human on Earth is playing Secret Hitler a million times a day.

当我们有了互联网时，就好像地球上的每个人每天都在玩《秘密希特勒》一百万次。

(Except some people are not-so-secretly Hitlers.) Strategies appear and go out of date almost instantaneously until we all end up in a Nash equilibrium , where there’s no way for anyone to get the upper hand anymore.

The internet gives every social trend a pair of rocket-powered roller skates, speeding it toward its crablike final form.

互联网为每一种社会趋势提供了一双火箭驱动的溜冰鞋，加速其走向螃蟹般的最终形态。

On Twitter, for instance, memes go from punchy to passé in a matter of days rather than decades.

例如，在推特上，模因在几天而不是几十年内就从流行变成了过时。

But if we could play culture on 1x speed rather than 10x speed, if we had time to screw around with different strategies before the game reached its cutthroat stage, we might have discovered different paths entirely.

但如果我们能够以 1 倍速度而不是 10 倍速度玩文化，如果我们有时间在游戏达到残酷阶段之前尝试不同的策略，我们可能会发现完全不同的路径。

Maybe some folks would end up as crabs, while others became lobsters or kangaroos.

也许有些人最终会成为螃蟹，而另一些人则成为龙虾或袋鼠。

Instead, in a hyper-competitive marketplace of ideas, we end up with the same few memes, all done to death.

相反，在竞争异常激烈的思想市场中，我们最终会得到同样的几个模因，全部都死掉了。

We’ve forgotten how much time people in the past spent consuming content that they didn’t actually want to consume: the unskippable clunker of a song that came in the middle of an album, the late-night infomercial that you sat through because there was nothing else on, the magazine you read cover-to-cover in the waiting room because your doctor was 45 minutes late.

我们已经忘记了过去人们花费了多少时间来消费他们实际上并不想要消费的内容：专辑中间出现的一首不可跳过的笨重歌曲，因为没有其他内容而让你观看的深夜电视广告，因为你的医生迟到了 45 分钟而让你在候诊室里从头到尾阅读的杂志。

Each new media technology reduces this friction.

每一种新媒体技术都会减少这种摩擦。

CDs, TiVo, satellite radio, streaming—they all allow us to spend more time with the content that we supposedly desire.

CD、TiVo、卫星广播、流媒体——它们都让我们能够花更多的时间来阅读我们想要的内容。

And what happens when this friction goes away?

当这种摩擦消失时会发生什么？

Well, in the mid-1990s, a pair of Russian artists named Komar and Melamid surveyed people around the world about their artistic preferences, and then they painted the “most wanted” scene from each country.

嗯，在 20 世纪 90 年代中期，一对名叫 Komar 和 Melamid 的俄罗斯艺术家调查了世界各地人们的艺术偏好，然后他们画出了每个国家“最想要”的场景。

The results looked like this:

结果如下：

The lesson here is that when people can articulate exactly what they want, and when the marketplace can give it to them, most folks end up sucking down slop.

这里的教训是，当人们能够准确地表达出他们想要什么，并且当市场能够给他们提供它时，大多数人最终都会吸走废品。

But I don’t think this is because humans yearn for crap and kitsch.

但我不认为这是因为人类渴望垃圾和媚俗。

I think it’s because no one knows actually what they like until they’re confronted by it.

我认为这是因为没有人真正知道自己喜欢什么，直到他们面对它。

If you cater to people’s raw, undeveloped preferences, sure, you’re going to take them to Sloptown.

如果你迎合人们原始的、未开发的偏好，当然，你会把他们带到 Sloptown。

But people are capable of acquiring more interesting tastes, if you give them the chance.

但如果你给人们机会，人们就有能力获得更有趣的品味。

This is the work art does for us—it stretches our desires, rather than merely satisfying them.

这就是艺术为我们所做的工作——它扩展了我们的欲望，而不仅仅是满足它们。

Komar and Melamid also asked people about their least favorite paintings, and then the duo painted those, too.

科马尔和梅拉米德还询问人们他们最不喜欢的画作，然后两人也画了这些画。

The results looked like this:

结果如下：

I doubt I’m alone in thinking that a few of these least-wanted paintings are better than every single most-wanted painting.

我怀疑只有我一个人认为这些最不想要的画作中的一些比每幅最想要的画都好。

They have a little tang to them, that smidgen of rizz it takes to raise the eyebrow and tickle the fancy.

它们有一点点特有的味道，那一点点的卷曲感会让人眉毛一扬，让人产生兴趣。

This is Komar and Melamid’s second lesson: if you want to see something interesting, you have to see things that you might dislike.

这是科马尔和梅拉米德的第二课：如果你想看到有趣的东西，你就必须看到你可能不喜欢的东西。

And I don’t mean things that merely bore you, like an AI-written Netflix series that’s only meant to be half-watched while you also shop for shoes on your phone.

我指的并不是那些只会让你感到厌烦的事情，比如人工智能编写的 Netflix 连续剧，当你还在手机上买鞋子时，你只能看一半。

I mean things that grab your attention, only to slap it around.

我的意思是那些吸引你注意力的东西，只是为了把它打乱。

Acquiring new tastes means, from time to time, spitting things out.

获得新的品味意味着时不时地吐出一些东西。

In a frictionless environment, however, this never has to happen.

然而，在无摩擦的环境中，这种情况永远不会发生。

The internet excels at identifying what people already seem to want, and giving it to them good and hard.

互联网擅长识别人们似乎已经想要的东西，并尽力将其提供给他们。

Oh, you liked that video where a monkey eats a piece of cantaloupe?

哦，你喜欢猴子吃一块哈密瓜的视频吗？

How about 30 million more of those?

如果再增加 3000 万个怎么样？

How about an anteater licking a watermelon?

食蚁兽舔西瓜怎么样？

Will that keep your attention for another three seconds?

这会让你的注意力再停留三秒钟吗？

Wait, don’t go yet!!

等等，先别走！！

We’ve got a baby hedgehog nibbling on a pineapple!!

我们有一只小刺猬正在啃菠萝！

People once theorized that globalization would cause niche culture to thrive because small-timers could make their living by selling to a tiny proportion of the populace spread all over the globe—the so-called “long tail”.

人们曾经推测，全球化将导致利基文化蓬勃发展，因为小企业可以通过向全球一小部分人销售产品来谋生，即所谓的“长尾”。

That did become possible , but it didn’t become desirable .

这确实成为可能，但并没有变得可取。

Everybody came to the same realization: once you can reach anyone, why not try to reach everyone ?

每个人都得出了同样的认识：一旦你可以接触到任何人，为什么不尝试接触到每个人呢？

Why sell to one thousand people in every single country, when you could sell to every single person in every single country?

当你可以向每个国家的每一个人销售产品时，为什么要向每个国家的一千个人销售产品呢？

Here’s the rub: the more customers you want, the more you have to cater to the lowest common denominator.

问题是：你想要的客户越多，你就越需要满足最低的共同标准。

If you want your film to play in every theater on earth, then it has to appeal to eight billion different sensibilities, which also means it’s going to suck.

如果你想让你的电影在地球上的每一个影院上映，那么它就必须吸引八十亿种不同的情感，这也意味着它会很糟糕。

This is the flat-Earth problem.

这就是地平问题。

It’s easy to see these effects if you know where to look.

如果您知道在哪里寻找，就很容易看到这些效果。

Because Hollywood wants to sell movies in every market, they’re willing to do everything from editing out laundry clotheslines that make a country look “too backward” to pretending that Freddie Mercury wasn’t gay .

因为好莱坞希望在每个市场上销售电影，所以他们愿意做一切事情，从删除让一个国家看起来“太落后”的晾衣绳到假装弗雷迪·摩克瑞不是同性恋。

Here’s how the Chinese version of Fight Club ends 4 :

中国版《搏击俱乐部4》的结局是这样的：

If this is what’s happening in post-production, what do we think is happening in pre-production?

如果这是后期制作中发生的情况，那么我们认为前期制作中发生了什么？

What projects aren’t getting greenlit because they won’t play in Guangzhou?

哪些项目因为无法在广州上映而无法获得批准？

While some folks blamed the internet for the decline of deviance, other people denied the decline entirely.

虽然有些人将异常现象的减少归咎于互联网，但其他人则完全否认这种现象的减少。

One common retort to my argument was that I’m just an old fuddy-duddy.

对我的论点的一个常见反驳是，我只是一个老古板。

For example, a blogger named Jenn claims that I am too uncool and out of touch to understand the cultural innovation happening in new forms of media like YouTube and Roblox.

例如，一位名叫 Jenn 的博主声称我太不酷、太脱离现实，无法理解 YouTube 和 Roblox 等新媒体形式中发生的文化创新。

“Before I take a ‘culture is stagnating’ take seriously,” Jenn writes, “I want to see proof of work by the critics.” She concludes: “The culture is fine.

“在我认真对待‘文化停滞’之前，”詹写道，“我想看看批评者的工作证明。”她总结道：“文化很好。

Go play Return of the Obra Dinn.” ( Return of the Obra Dinn is a video game.)

去玩《奥布拉丁归来》吧。” （《Obra Dinn 归来》是一款电子游戏。）

This is a petty thing to do, but can I be a little petty, as a treat?

这是一件小事，但我可以小事一点，作为一种享受吗？

My deviance post includes research from an earlier post I wrote called Pop Culture Has Become an Oligopoly , where I found that more and more of the cultural landscape is dominated by fewer and fewer players.

我的异常帖子包括我之前写的一篇名为“流行文化已成为寡头垄断”的帖子的研究，其中我发现越来越多的文化景观由越来越少的参与者主导。

Toward the end of that post, which I published in 2022, I say this:

在我于 2022 年发表的那篇文章的末尾，我这样说：

While the top of the charts has been oligopolized, the bottom remains a vibrant anarchy.

虽然排行榜的顶部已经被寡头垄断，但底部仍然充满活力的无政府状态。

[...] Two of the most interesting video games of the past decade put you in the role of an immigration officer and an insurance claims adjuster .

[...] 过去十年中最有趣的两款视频游戏让您扮演移民官和保险理赔员的角色。

That insurance claims adjuster game is Return of the Obra Dinn , which I played that year.

那个保险索赔理算员游戏是《Obra Dinn 的回归》，我那年玩过。

(And enjoyed!) I hope anticipating this critique four years ago counts as my proof of work.

（并且很享受！）我希望四年前预期的这一批评可以算作我的工作证明。

Pettiness aside, I think Jenn’s claim is plausible: the older you get, the less access you have to the most interesting parts of culture.

撇开琐事不谈，我认为 Jenn 的说法是有道理的：你年纪越大，接触文化中最有趣的部分的机会就越少。

If you think things are stagnating, you’re just admitting that you aren’t getting invited to the cool parties anymore.

如果您认为事情停滞不前，那么您只是承认自己不再受邀参加很酷的派对。

Plus, old folks can’t stop themselves from seeing the past through rose-colored glasses—in survey after survey, people think pretty much everything in culture just happened to peak when they were between four and twelve years old:

另外，老年人无法阻止自己用玫瑰色眼镜来看待过去——在一次又一次的调查中，人们认为文化中的几乎所有事情都恰好在他们四岁到十二岁之间达到顶峰：

But things get a little more complicated when you separate people’s responses by age.

但当你按年龄区分人们的反应时，事情会变得更加复杂。

When you first glance at this YouGov survey, it seems like every generation strongly prefers the music from their own childhood:

当您第一眼看到这项 YouGov 调查时，似乎每一代人都强烈喜欢自己童年时期的音乐：

But look a little closer.

但仔细观察一下。

The responses from Gen X, Baby Boomers, and the Silent Generation all have a clear peak flanked by much smaller hills.

X 一代、婴儿潮一代和沉默一代的反应都有一个明显的高峰，两侧的山丘要小得多。

Millennials’ preferences, on the other hand, are more spread out.

另一方面，千禧一代的偏好更加分散。

And Gen Z’s preferences are basically a plateau—they’re almost equally likely to nominate the 1980s, 1990s, 2000s, and 2010s.

Z 世代的偏好基本上处于稳定状态——他们提名 1980 年代、1990 年代、2000 年代和 2010 年代的可能性几乎相同。

We can’t know whether this is an age effect that they’ll grow out of—maybe every generation was culturally omnivorous when they were younger, and their tastes only calcified when they got older.

我们不知道这是否是他们长大后会摆脱的年龄效应——也许每一代人在年轻时都是文化杂食性的，而他们的品味只有在年老时才变得僵化。

But I doubt it.

但我对此表示怀疑。

For all you Gen X’ers out there, did you spend your teenage years spinning your parents’ Perry Como records until you suddenly switched to Led Zeppelin in adulthood?

对于所有 X 一代来说，你们是否在青少年时期一直在翻唱父母的 Perry Como 唱片，直到成年后突然转向 Led Zeppelin？

Besides, Jenn’s age argument cuts both ways.

此外，詹恩的年龄争论是双向的。

Old folks are biased by nostalgia, but young folks are biased by inexperience.

老年人因怀旧而产生偏见，而年轻人则因缺乏经验而产生偏见。

When you’re young, everything seems new because it’s new to you .

当你年轻的时候，一切看起来都是新的，因为它对你来说是新的。

You don’t know that your favorite anime is a rehash of a movie from the 1980s, because you weren’t alive in the 1980s.

你不知道你最喜欢的动漫是 20 世纪 80 年代电影的翻版，因为你已经不在 1980 年代了。

You’re not tired of the tropes yet because you’ve only seem them a few dozen times.

你还没有厌倦这些比喻，因为你只看过几十次。

You can’t pine for what you lost because you never had it in the first place.

你不能为失去的东西而悲伤，因为你从一开始就没有拥有过它。

It’s reasonable to be skeptical of any narrative of decline—I did my PhD on why people perceive declines that haven’t actually happened .

对任何关于衰落的叙述持怀疑态度都是合理的——我的博士学位是研究为什么人们会认为实际上并未发生的衰落。

But (a), unlike most of those spurious nostalgic fantasies, the decline of deviance has both pros and cons.

但是（a），与大多数虚假的怀旧幻想不同，越轨行为的减少有利有弊。

And (b), there are so many weird phenomena here and they need explaining, not just waving away.

(b)，这里有很多奇怪的现象，需要解释，而不是只是挥手走开。

It’s easier than ever to get weed—in 24 US states , you can buy and consume it purely for fun.

获取大麻比以往任何时候都容易——在美国 24 个州，您可以纯粹为了好玩而购买和消费它。

The only thing standing between a 15-year-old and a four-pack of JBAD Jellies Blue Razz THC Pucks is one unscrupulous older sibling who is willing to pick them up for you.

一个 15 岁的孩子和四包 JBAD Jellies Blue Razz THC Pucks 之间唯一的障碍就是一个不择手段的哥哥，他愿意为你捡起它们。

Today’s teens see weed as less risky than previous generations of teens did.

今天的青少年认为大麻的风险比前几代青少年要低。

My generation got abstinence-only drug education (i.e., “ if you smoke weed you’re gonna end up living in van down by the river ”).

我们这一代人接受的只是禁欲毒品教育（即“如果你吸大麻，你最终会住在河边的货车里”）。

But the Reefer Madness routine doesn’t work in a world where you can buy CBD gummies at the gas station.

但是，在你可以在加油站购买 CBD 软糖的世界里，冷藏疯狂例程并不适用。

And yet, despite all that, kids today still smoke less weed than kids did in the 1990s!

然而，尽管如此，今天的孩子吸大麻的数量仍然比 20 世纪 90 年代的孩子少！

Mysteries like this ought to send us scrambling for explanations, and the strength of the “rising prosperity” hypothesis is that it has answers for these weird phenomena.

像这样的谜团应该让我们争先恐后地寻求解释，而“繁荣增长”假说的力量在于它为这些奇怪的现象找到了答案。

As life gets safer and more prosperous, it makes less and less sense to take risks.

随着生活变得更加安全和繁荣，冒险变得越来越没有意义。

So even if kids rightly believe that a single joint won’t kill them, and even if that joint is easier than ever to get, it still doesn’t seem like a good idea to light up.

因此，即使孩子们正确地相信单个关节不会杀死他们，即使该关节比以往任何时候都更容易获得，但点燃似乎仍然不是一个好主意。

You’ve got infinite entertainment on demand, you’ve got another ~70 healthy years ahead of you that are—in most places on Earth, at least—unlikely to be cut short by murder, war, accidents, or untimely disease.

你可以随心所欲地享受无限的娱乐，你还有大约 70 年的健康岁月等着你——至少在地球上的大多数地方——不太可能因谋杀、战争、事故或不合时宜的疾病而缩短。

If you can get into a decent school and keep your nose clean, you’ve got a good shot at a decent life, so why take a chance on the devil’s grass?

如果你能进入一所体面的学校并保持自己的清白，你就有机会过上体面的生活，那为什么还要在魔鬼的草地上冒险呢？

Another theory that readers put forward: the deviance got scarce because life got hard.

读者提出的另一个理论是：由于生活变得艰难，越轨行为变得稀少。

Nobody can do cool art anymore because everything is too expensive: housing, college, supplies, etc.

没有人能再创作很酷的艺术了，因为一切都太贵了：住房、大学、用品等等。

I think this is probably wrong.

我认为这可能是错误的。

I suspect that it’s always been hard to be an artist, and previous generations were simply more willing to starve for it—not because they were braver, but because the difference between starving and not-starving used to be much smaller.

我怀疑成为一名艺术家总是很困难，而前几代人只是更愿意为此挨饿——不是因为他们更勇敢，而是因为挨饿和不挨饿之间的差异过去要小得多。

Read an old book that isn’t about princes and princesses, and you’ll quickly see how normal poverty used to be.

读一本与王子和公主无关的老书，你很快就会发现贫穷过去是多么正常。

Not Dickensian, “please sir may I have some more”-type poverty, but regular, everyday poverty, where the things we consider necessities today are treated as unimaginable luxuries.

不是狄更斯式的“先生，请让我再拥有一些”式的贫困，而是普通的、日常的贫困，我们今天认为是必需品的东西被视为难以想象的奢侈品。

For example, early on in Moby-Dick , Ishmael has to stay at a crummy, packed inn where his choice is either to sleep on some benches in the dining room, or to share a bed with a stranger.

例如，在《白鲸》的早期，以实玛利必须住在一家破旧、拥挤的旅馆里，他的选择是要么睡在餐厅的一些长凳上，要么与陌生人共用一张床。

(He chooses the latter, which leads to a thinly-veiled homoerotic encounter with a Polynesian sailor named Queequeg.) Everyone involved thinks it’s annoying to bunk in with a rando, but nobody thinks it’s strange—that’s just what you gotta do sometimes.

（他选择了后者，这导致了与一位名叫奎奎格的波利尼西亚水手的一场毫不掩饰的同性恋遭遇。）每个参与其中的人都认为和兰多一起睡很烦人，但没有人认为这很奇怪——这正是你有时必须做的事情。

This is the level of comfort you could expect in the 1850s even if you were gainfully employed full-time.

即使您是有报酬的全职工作，这也是 1850 年代您可以期待的舒适程度。

You don’t have to go that far into the past to find a kind of poverty that feels foreign today.

你不必回到过去那么远的地方就能找到一种在今天感觉很陌生的贫困。

I read an article a while back about punk musicians living in New York in the 1970s, and they’re sleeping in roach-infested flophouses, they’re making music in abandoned buildings, they’re getting evicted and mugged and addicted to drugs.

我不久前读过一篇关于 20 世纪 70 年代纽约朋克音乐家的文章，他们睡在蟑螂出没的廉价旅馆里，他们在废弃的建筑里创作音乐，他们被驱逐、被抢劫，还沉迷于毒品。

6 They’re truly broke, not “I can’t contribute to my retirement fund this month” broke, but “I might have to spend the night on this bench because I can’t afford a bus ticket back home” broke.

6 他们真的破产了，不是“我这个月无法为退休基金缴款”，而是“我可能不得不在这张长凳上过夜，因为我买不起回家的公交车票”。

I know plenty of aspiring musicians are out there slumming it right now, but this is a level of deprivation that most folks in developed countries would find unacceptable, if not downright dangerous.

我知道现在很多有抱负的音乐家都在贫民窟里生活，但这种贫困程度对于发达国家的大多数人来说是不可接受的，甚至是完全危险的。

Once you’re sleeping rough, it’s time to hawk the guitar and call the temp agency.

一旦你露宿街头，就该兜售吉他并打电话给临时工中介了。

That’s not because dire poverty became less glamorous—it was never glamorous!—but because it became uncommon .

这并不是因为赤贫变得不再那么迷人——它从来就不那么迷人！——而是因为它变得不常见了。

When five musicians spend the night in a bus station, that’s called being punk.

当五个音乐家在公交车站过夜时，这就是所谓的朋克。

When one musician spends the night in a bus station, that’s called being homeless.

当一位音乐家在公交车站过夜时，这被称为无家可归。

The richer the world gets, the higher the opportunity cost that starving artists have to pay.

世界越富裕，饥饿的艺术家必须付出的机会成本就越高。

If you’ve got the chops to write a great novel, then you might also have the chops to make $95k working as a product manager for some mid-sized fintech firm.

如果你有能力写一本伟大的小说，那么你也可能有能力在一些中型金融科技公司担任产品经理，年薪 9.5 万美元。

If your alternative was tilling turnips or spending six months at sea hunting sperm whales, you might say, screw it, I’d rather go hungry for my art than go somewhat less hungry for anything else.

如果你的选择是耕种萝卜或花六个月的时间在海上捕抹香鲸，你可能会说，管它呢，我宁愿为我的艺术而饥饿，也不愿为其他任何东西而减少饥饿。

But that manuscript in your desk drawer is less enticing when you can have PTO and dental and an annual international vacation where you get to sleep in a bed that doesn’t have any strangers in it.

但是，当你可以享受 PTO 和牙科服务，以及一年一度的国际假期，你可以睡在一张没有任何陌生人的床上时，你办公桌抽屉里的手稿就不那么有吸引力了。

Here’s an example.

这是一个例子。

When I was in college, I went with my improv group to see one of our alums perform at a theater in Chicago.

当我上大学时，我和我的即兴表演小组一起去芝加哥的一家剧院观看我们的一位校友的表演。

I remember sitting there mesmerized, thinking, this guy’s so funny, why is he working some soulless corporate job during the day and only doing his art on Tuesday nights?

我记得我坐在那里出神地想，这家伙太有趣了，为什么他白天在一些没有灵魂的公司工作，而只在周二晚上做他的艺术？

I cornered him afterward, and he told me he had, in fact, spent years trying to make a comedic career work.

后来我把他逼到墙角，他告诉我，事实上，他花了很多年的时间试图让喜剧事业成功。

“But then I got tired of not being able to afford to fly to my friends’ weddings,” he said, “so I went to law school instead.” Now he can fly to as many weddings as he wants.

“但后来我厌倦了买不起飞机去参加朋友的婚礼，”他说，“所以我去了法学院。”现在他可以随心所欲地飞去参加尽可能多的婚礼。

I don’t blame him.

我不怪他。

When nobody can afford a plane ticket, being broke isn’t embarrassing.

当没人买得起机票时，破产并不令人尴尬。

But when everybody else is jetting off for the wedding, you’re not just poor; you’re also a loser.

但当其他人都飞去参加婚礼时，你不仅很穷，而且还很穷。你也是一个失败者。

Unfortunately, when every interesting person chooses comfort over creativity, we end up with four different Spider-Man 2s .

不幸的是，当每个有趣的人都选择舒适而不是创造力时，我们最终会得到四个不同的《蜘蛛侠2》。

We have grown literally afraid to be poor.

我们确实变得害怕贫穷。

We despise any one who elects to be poor in order to simplify and save his inner life.

我们鄙视任何一个为了简化和拯救内心生活而选择贫穷的人。

[...] We have lost the power even of imagining what the ancient idealization of poverty could have meant: the liberation from material attachments, the unbribed soul, the manlier indifference, the paying our way by what we are or do and not by what we have, the right to fling away our life at any moment irresponsibly,—the more athletic trim, in short, the moral fighting shape.

[……]我们甚至已经失去了想象古代贫困理想化可能意味着什么的力量：从物质依恋中解放出来，不受贿赂的灵魂，更有男子气概的冷漠，通过我们的身份或行为而不是我们拥有的东西来支付我们的生活，随时不负责任地抛弃我们的生命的权利，——更运动的装饰，简而言之，道德战斗的形状。

The difference is that today we don’t despise people who elect to be poor, I think, because we don’t know any of them.

我认为，不同之处在于，今天我们不会鄙视那些选择贫穷的人，因为我们不认识他们中的任何一个。

Many people asked some version of, “Is the decline of deviance actually an increase in tolerance?” After all, even if you wanted to be deviant today, how would you do it?

很多人问这样的问题：“越轨行为的减少实际上是容忍度的增加吗？”毕竟，就算你今天想要离经叛道，又会怎样做呢？

I don’t think this explanation covers everything—murder is still deviant, for instance, and it’s rarer than ever.

我不认为这个解释涵盖了一切——例如，谋杀仍然是异常现象，而且比以往任何时候都更加罕见。

But there is something to it.

但这是有道理的。

Crack open the General Social Survey , and you’ll see that Americans have given up many of their hangups.

打开综合社会调查，你会发现美国人已经摆脱了许多困扰。

Same-sex and interracial marriage, recreational drug use, premarital sex, working mothers—these things used to be scandalous, and now they’re unremarkable.

同性和异族婚姻、消遣性吸毒、婚前性行为、职业母亲——这些事情曾经是可耻的，现在却变得平淡无奇。

7 People used to get their undies in a bunch about Bermuda shorts :

7 人们曾经把内裤放在一堆关于百慕大短裤的地方：

So no doubt part of the decline of deviance is an increase in tolerance.

因此，毫无疑问，偏差的减少部分是由于容忍度的提高。

But I think it, too, can be explained by the rise of mass prosperity.

但我认为这也可以用大众繁荣的兴起来解释。

The economists Daron Acemoglu and James Robinson argue that nations get rich when they build inclusive economic and political institutions.

经济学家达龙·阿西莫格鲁和詹姆斯·罗宾逊认为，国家在建立包容性的经济和政治制度时就会变得富有。

Oligarchs and aristocrats fear any growth or reform that they can’t control, which in practice means basically all growth and reform.

寡头和贵族担心任何他们无法控制的增长或改革，这实际上意味着基本上所有的增长和改革。

(“We do not desire at all that the great masses shall become well off and independent,” once remarked Frederick Gantz, an imperial flunky of Francis I of Austria.

（“我们根本不希望广大群众变得富裕和独立，”奥地利弗朗西斯一世的帝国走狗弗雷德里克·甘茨曾经说过。

“How could we otherwise rule over them?”) If the plebs and the serfs can get a bit of money and power, however, it kicks off a virtuous cycle.

“否则我们怎么能统治他们呢？”）然而，如果平民和农奴能够获得一点金钱和权力，就会启动一个良性循环。

Once people have some cash and influence, it becomes bad business and bad politics to shut them out—if you won’t engage with them, someone else will, and your more open-minded rivals will eventually out-compete you.

一旦人们拥有了一些现金和影响力，将他们拒之门外就会成为糟糕的商业和糟糕的政治——如果你不与他们接触，其他人就会这么做，而你更开放的竞争对手最终会在竞争中胜过你。

This process takes a long time, it’s uneven, and it’s not close to being completed.

这个过程需要很长时间，而且参差不齐，距离完成还很遥远。

However, a few generations of semi-inclusive institutions have created a much wider spectrum of acceptable lifestyles.

然而，几代半包容性机构已经创造了更广泛的可接受的生活方式。

If you want to live in a polyamorous, genderless vegan witch commune, you can order your nutritional yeast on Amazon, trade memes with your friends on Tumblr, and vote for Democrats who think your choices are a-ok.

如果你想生活在一个多角恋、无性别的纯素食女巫公社里，你可以在亚马逊上订购营养酵母，在 Tumblr 上与你的朋友交换表情包，并投票给那些认为你的选择没问题的民主党人。

If you want to live in a neoreactionary monarchist compound where you stockpile weapons and hunt bears, you can buy your guns at Wal-Mart, read posts on TruthSocial, and vote for Republicans who are on board with all of it.

如果你想住在新反动君主主义大院里，在那里储存武器和猎熊，你可以在沃尔玛购买枪支，阅读 TruthSocial 上的帖子，然后投票给支持这一切的共和党人。

As long as you have money to spend and ballots to cast, someone can get ahead by catering to you.

只要你有钱可以花，有选票可以投，就有人可以通过迎合你来取得成功。

(Case in point: one of the “platinum sponsors” of the New York City Pride Parade is Deutsche Bank .)

（举个例子：纽约市骄傲游行的“白金赞助商”之一是德意志银行。）

This is a good thing.

这是一件好事。

Inclusive institutions make everybody better off, except for the few cleptocrats who used to live in palaces while everyone else lived in shacks.

包容性的制度让每个人都过得更好，除了少数窃贼，他们过去住在宫殿里，而其他人都住在棚屋里。

The downside is that every corner of culture gets commercialized.

缺点是文化的每个角落都被商业化了。

Reading comic books, listening to death metal, piercing body parts other than your ears—these used to be legitimately countercultural acts that distanced you from polite society and bonded you to an alternative community.

阅读漫画书、听死亡金属、刺穿耳朵以外的身体部位——这些曾经是合法的反文化行为，它们使你远离礼貌社会，并将你与另类社区联系起来。

Now you can do all these things at the mall.

现在你可以在商场做所有这些事情。

The Hot Topic-ization of culture means that anything new and interesting gets co-opted and mass-produced, thus draining it of everything that made it cool in the first place.

文化的热门话题化意味着任何新的、有趣的东西都会被吸收和大量生产，从而耗尽了它最初让它变得很酷的一切。

I ended the first Decline of Deviance post with the story of Arturo di Modica , the Italian sculptor who ran away from home to study art in Florence, moved to New York, dug a secret basement in his studio, and placed his giant sculptures illegally in public places, including the famous Charging Bull statue that sits on Wall Street.

我以意大利雕塑家阿图罗·迪·莫迪卡（Arturo di Modica）的故事结束了第一篇《偏差的衰落》的故事，这位意大利雕塑家离家去佛罗伦萨学习艺术，搬到了纽约，在他的工作室挖了一个秘密地下室，并将他的巨型雕塑非法放置在公共场所，其中包括华尔街著名的冲锋公牛雕像。

It is natural to assume that the hero of Arturo di Modica’s story is Arturo di Modica.

人们很自然地认为阿图罗·迪·莫迪卡故事的英雄就是阿图罗·迪·莫迪卡。

But I think his story has many heroes.

但我认为他的故事中有很多英雄。

The dean of his art school who let a runaway kid take sculpture classes.

他的艺术学校院长让一个离家出走的孩子去上雕塑课。

The policeman who let him off with a $25 fine when he dumped several multi-ton sculptures in Rockefeller Center.

当他在洛克菲勒中心倾倒数吨重的雕塑时，警察对他处以 25 美元罚款并予以释放。

The mayor who shook his hand for doing the same, rather than carting him off to jail.

市长也因为他做了同样的事而与他握手，而不是把他送进监狱。

The building inspector who retroactively approved his illegal basement.

追溯批准他的非法地下室的建筑检查员。

The parks department bureaucrat who rescued Charging Bull from the impound lot and put it back on the street.

公园部门的官员从扣押地救出了冲锋公牛，并将其放回街道上。

These people were neither artists nor weirdos.

这些人既不是艺术家，也不是怪人。

They were normal folks who knew good deviance when they saw it, and they decided to let it live.

他们都是普通人，当他们看到异常行为时就会知道它是好的，并且决定让它继续存在。

Few of us will have the courage to be an Arturo di Modica, especially because that takes more bravery than ever.

我们中很少有人有勇气成为阿图罗·迪·莫迪卡，特别是因为这比以往任何时候都需要更多的勇气。

(If you were staring down a dead-end life in postwar Sicily, you, too, might run away from home and hop a train to an art school in Florence.) But the rest of us will have the chance to be that dean, that cop, and that bureaucrat.

（如果你在战后的西西里岛过着没有出路的生活，你也可能会离家出走，跳上火车去佛罗伦萨的一所艺术学校。）但我们其他人将有机会成为那个院长、那个警察和那个官僚。

We are all keepers of tiny gates, and by the sum total of our actions, we get to decide what kind of culture we live in.

我们都是小门的守护者，通过我们行动的总和，我们可以决定我们生活在什么样的文化中。

We can choose to let our times be interesting.

我们可以选择让我们的时代变得有趣。

Or we can just keep doing what we’re doing, and enjoy what’s coming up this fall:

或者我们可以继续做我们正在做的事情，享受今年秋天即将发生的事情：

This is why I don’t buy the claim that there are finite songs, scripts, etc., and we’ve simply done all of them.

这就是为什么我不相信歌曲、剧本等是有限的，而我们只是简单地完成了所有这些。

That assumes culture is like Tic Tac Toe, where the rules are simple and the optimal strategy is obvious.

假设文化就像井字游戏，规则很简单，最佳策略也很明显。

I think culture is a lot more like chess, where we can discover new strategies even after playing the game for a thousand years.

我认为文化更像是国际象棋，即使玩了一千年，我们也可以发现新的策略。

We all think it’s bad to spend so much time on our phones these days, but is wasting thirty minutes on TikTok really worse than wasting thirty minutes watching a man demonstrate the Ronco Electric Food Dehydrator and Veg-O-Matic ?

我们都认为现在花这么多时间在手机上很糟糕，但是在 TikTok 上浪费 30 分钟真的比浪费 30 分钟观看一个人演示 Ronco 电动食物脱水机和 Veg-O-Matic 更糟糕吗？

As a side note, this is why AI has not eliminated the demand for human-made art, and why I don’t expect it ever will.

顺便说一句，这就是为什么人工智能没有消除对人造艺术的需求，也是我认为它永远不会消除的原因。

Yes, people can now generate any image or essay they want, for free.

是的，人们现在可以免费生成他们想要的任何图像或文章。

The problem is they have no idea what images and essays they want.

问题是他们不知道自己想要什么图像和文章。

Nobody is like, “Computer, show me a timeless film about a wizard of oz!” Artistic skill is not only knowing how to use a brush, a pen, or Final Cut Pro, but knowing what to use them for .

没有人会说，“电脑，给我看一部关于绿野仙踪的永恒电影！”艺术技能不仅是知道如何使用画笔、钢笔或 Final Cut Pro，而且是知道如何使用它们。

I lost this article forever in the demise of the Pocket app, alas!

由于 Pocket 应用程序的消亡，我永远失去了这篇文章，唉！

But note that, in my own research, people are often wrong about how public opinion has changed over time .

但请注意，在我自己的研究中，人们对于公众舆论随时间变化的看法常常是错误的。

Mastroianni doesn't miss: somehow every one of his posts is an absolute banger, both fun to read and genuinely insightful.

马斯楚安尼不会错过：不知何故，他的每一篇文章都绝对是一篇文章，既读起来有趣，又具有真正的洞察力。

For music: can it be that each generation prefers the whole body of music that was accessible to them when they were young?

对于音乐：是否每一代人都更喜欢他们年轻时就能接触到的全部音乐？

There was no medium revolution after streaming and basically all music is accessible in streaming in decent quality, so that might be the reason why GenZ are are so omnivorous.

流媒体之后并没有发生媒体革命，基本上所有音乐都可以在流媒体中以不错的质量播放，所以这可能就是 Z 世代如此杂食的原因。

中文为机器翻译，仅供参考。