I love the Venkat and Chapman models: the Gervais Principle and the MOPs. Below is a free translation of Chapman's model of the evolution of subcultures with my comments.
I.
Geek communities died in the late 2000s. Not so long ago, the last of the Mohicans, Scott Alexander, gave up. A whole praxis of geeks went with him. One NYT editor has effortlessly dumped a powerful family tree of information giants that has its roots in Fashori Gymnasium in Budapest. Hungarian Martians gave us von Neumann and [insert any major mathematician and physicist of the 20th century], Internet, Fido, Habr.
Lucky for me, I still saw the agony of the lesswrong community, where each user checked their Bayesian priors before starting a post or comment. Scott was one of the most notable writers on lesswrong after Eliezer Yudkowski. His blog slatestarcodex was the last refuge for rationalists and effective altruists on the web. All rationalists know his real name, but it is not accepted to mention it in decent society. Scott realized that after the article in NYT his world would be available to casuals and deliberately went underground.
So, the sic transit gloria mundi algorithm says that popularity precedes death. Scott has become too visible, and in the forest you need to be quiet and not shine.
II.
On the biology of subcultures on the fingers.
First there were the Authors. They create, write, talk about their geeky hobbies. Their contribution is intellectual - they create an esoteric geek Product. Authors do not know how to tell the world about their findings, they talk to each other more.
At the second stage of the life of any community, Fans appear. Their contribution is more related to organization, resources, support of Authors. Fans do an excellent job of popularizing the Author's Product.
What unites Authors and Fans is their geekiness. They understand each other well, even if they have different abilities and temperaments.
Over time, Fans soften the hardcore geekiness of the original Product. This compulsory measure is dictated by a memetic codon with an encrypted inscription "Always Spread Information". Fans are going to deliberately dilute geek actions in the hope of gaining support, attention, and interest from the general public. But, as my friend, an ancient Greek oligarch, says, beware of answered prayers.
Casuals flock to the simplified version of the geek Product. They are also fans, but they are moderately fanatical, without fanaticism. Geeks admit Casuals to the light version of a geek Product because geeks like to share their hobbies with everyone. Sometimes you can get money from Casuals, for which geeks can forget about work for a while and concentrate on developing their geek Product. But the Casuals don't have their name in vain - they take a lot more from the geek crowd than they bring to the community. They are casual guests, passive spectators, furry vampires. If a geek Product becomes popular, a critical mass of Casuals eats away at any community, simplifying and flattening the geek Product with each iteration.
The authors, due to their kindness and some naivety, cannot show the Casuals the door. Fans are more experienced: they came to the community for the Authors and the Product, not serving the Casuals forever. Usually active fans are the first to leave the stagnant community. Which now has only two choices: collapse or slowly die.
III.
But what good is it to be lost? Often a dying community is picked up by Sociopaths. They come to the Fans' place and always find a way to ride a dead horse. Once again: Authors create intellectual and cultural capital in the form of a Product, Fans create social capital in the form of connections, conf, resources, Casuals create liquid capital in the form of the first round of IPOs and box office at concerts / conferences. None of them understands how best to use all these capitals. Until Sociopaths come.
Sociopaths speak like Authors. Only much prettier. Sociopaths speak like Fans. Only much more convincing. Sociopaths are not without talent - they can create Product too. And it will be, if not creativity, then such a confident, competent quality. Sociopaths see Authors as rivals, gradually neutralize or squeeze them out of the community. Only the most loyal and narrow-minded are left behind.
Casuals don't understand what's going on. They do not read social dynamics in groups well, begin to mistake Sociopaths for an improved version of Authors, a new generation of creators. Sociopaths are beginning to capitalize on cultural capital: they choose their friends and lovers from the Cazuals, recruit their support groups, and raise admission prices and commissions. Fans have never been able to monetize the community. Therefore, Fans are forced to hire those supporting Sociopaths: the latter need to scale, the former like to work with the Product. Some fans walk into the sunset with a broken heart and a buzzing head.
IV.
A couple of years pass. Geek Product does not develop, Sociopaths have used all the opportunities to withdraw resources and capital. Sociopaths leave the ship in search of a new harbor *, a few geeks are left alone with the Casuals. Often Authors and Fans within the community find themselves in a state of low-intensity war with each other (Authors vs. Editors) - this is the result of the good old divide and conquer tactics of Sociopathic management.
It is very rare, in exceptional circumstances, that a Genius Author can revive a community and make it great again. This always happens with the support of Sociopaths: most Genius Authors know that they are geniuses, that their Product will appeal to the general public, that they can become stars and cultural icons. But the Authors themselves do not know how to do this. No Sociopaths The author's product will remain a geeky hobby that three people know about. Sociopaths make geeks and their Products great. They also destroy geek communities. The dialectic of sociopathy is beyond the scope of this article, so that's enough about that.
I do not like to extrapolate simple models to large structures, but a similar dynamics of the development of communities is observed in the life cycles of the empires of the Bronze Age (1177 BC collapse), Antiquity (Rome fell when it began to give citizenship to barbarians and invite local heliogabals to the throne), mass movements of the 20th century ( motley surrealists and Dadaists were fashioned by the sociopath Breton), music groups, fintech startups and political parties. Anyone interested in looking for parallels can continue in the comments.
V.
How to avoid a terrible end or endless horror? It is necessary to look for mechanisms of protection against the free-rider problem at the very beginning of the life cycle of subcultures.
You can limit the Casuals, because Sociopaths always come after them. Some communities understand this and live on the casual radars.
Geeks can learn from Sociopaths, learn to take more capital for themselves and direct it to the development of the Product.
Also, geeks can stop thinking about the Product and the community as a thing-in-itself. As the only value. As a philosopher's stone. Just one injection of realism and that's it: no, your Product won't save humanity; no, your Product will not make the world a better place; yes, good Foods are worth creating and protecting from Sociopaths; Yes, a firm fixation on successful success will destroy you and your community if you are overly naive and gullible; yes, other people may have different plans for your Product. Stop watching pov pron, welcome to reality, bois.
* A rare hybrid case: Sociopaths can create their communities for the recurrent exploitation of Authors and Casuals - in such subcultures they prefer to keep in the shadow of the Nobel laureates, who are used as humanitarian mouthpiece. This year I wrote a report for The Mont Pelerin Society about the brave new world of global government, if invited, I will go to their den. The topic of the 2020 conference: how can we quickly dismantle national countries and cut down this world parliament for ourselves. A very interesting community, has connections in universities in different countries, holds rare conferences, and for external publicity uses the reputation of prominent economists and philosophers: Milton Friedman, Friedrich Hayek, Karl Popper, von Mises.
Update: Thanks to the attentive and patient readers.You know who I mean.To avoid misunderstandings, I will quickly go through Sociopaths. This is a vague term, at the very beginning of the text I give a warning that medicine and the clinic explain other types of sociopathy, and I use a rough model in this situation. Are you familiar with the quote "everyone gets something different from each transaction?" This is from Erickson. I like Chapman's model because it describes the Author-Fan-Casual-Sociopath line well. These are not rigid roles and behaviors of people in groups. One person can go through the entire line from beginning to end, his place and role is determined by the temperament and timing of entering the group. At each stage of community development, it attracts and repels certain patterns of behavior, generates and gives away certain types of capital. Sociopaths come at the end and pick up what's left. Usually these are material values,because all cultural capital and social values go to the first three behaviors. Consequently, the term "Sociopaths" is not pejorative in nature, it is a purely technical definition of the stage and dominant model of behavior in the mature community. Any attempts to put this term on the author or the reader are untenable, please do not do so. I did not write about you specifically, I suggested considering the mechanism of community evolution. Peace.I proposed to consider the mechanism of community evolution. Peace.I proposed to consider the mechanism of community evolution. Peace.