Barring a drastic egalitarian revolution or technological changes that alter basic human motivations, status will remain an integral part of the human experience.

Radical political movements have attempted to rectify these status inequalities through fiat, only to witness elites quietly deploy new means of distinction. The Soviet Union abolished private property, flattened salaries, and downplayed consumerism, and yet status hierarchies popped up in bureaucratic micro-positions, apartment sizes, and the procurement of foreign goods. Humans are adept at turning any small advantage into a status marker.

The “neutral” model of cultural diffusion is neutral: humans randomly imitate one another without any consideration of hierarchy or privilege. Status, by contrast, adds an uncomfortable political valence to every trend and custom. Despite ideals of equality, fraternity, and liberty, high-status groups wield greater influence on the public’s choices, values, and perspectives. The lessons in this book lend credence to the Marxist idea of hegemony, which is defined by the Birmingham Centre for Contemporary Cultural Studies as “the shaping of the society’s culture in the image of that of the dominant class.”

Today culture exists in infinite quantities, information barriers have been reduced to zero, and fashion cycles are fast and shallow—all of which work against the creation of status value.

But we seem to be in a “post-subculture” world. The sociologist David Muggleton writes, “Perhaps the very concept of subculture is becoming less applicable in postmodernity, for the breakdown of mass society has ensured that there is no longer a coherent dominant culture against which a subculture can express its resistance.

In tandem, anti-imperialist ideology challenged the privileging of Western high culture—the literary canon, classical music, ballet, academic art—over Indigenous works from less prosperous countries. And how can we complain about kitsch when so many status-disadvantaged individuals rise up the social ladder through their market success in the culture industry?

In his newsletter Garbage Day, the journalist Ryan Broderick writes, “The ugly American weirdness of Facebook—the casual racism, the petty small town drama, the nameless grifters, the weird old people, the Minion memes, the public meltdowns at fast food restaurants, the goths, the bored nurses, the men in their trucks talking on their phones, the extremely basic backyard viral challenges—it will all come to TikTok.” And if status must be procured by signaling within these apps, no one can flee the virtual town square.

The disappearance of true Old Money has only further emboldened the new nouveau riche. But another elite group has stepped in to countersignal gauche extravagance: the professional-class tech billionaires, who are forming their own taste culture. Growing up in well-educated, upper-middle-class households, the Gates, Bezos, Brin/Page, Zuckerberg types created wealth without shedding their professional-class habitus. In these circles there is a skepticism of glamour and a respect for thoughtful thrift. Like any good professional-class members, they make their choices based on functional rationales rather than the open pursuit of status symbols.

The influx of users has changed the nature of internet content. During the early days of the World Wide Web, online life gravitated toward the niche tastes of college students and tech geeks, like a virtual extension of campus life: liberal politics, rogue mp3 trading, FAQs about obscure Japanese animations, and expert guitar tabs for They Might Be Giants songs. During the rise of blogs in the early 2000s, top sites like Boing Boing and kottke.org continued this tradition of catering to nerd curiosity. By the 2010s, however, the internet became true mass culture—a democratization by both “class and geography. A fifth of internet users now use it in Chinese. And with the appearance of visual apps like YouTube, Instagram, Twitch, and TikTok, being “extremely online” no longer even required literacy. People everywhere could participate through consuming visuals and music, speaking, singing, lip-syncing, or dancing. And so, over just three decades, the internet became the primary site where we interact with others and create personas. As the economist-blogger Noah Smith quipped, “Fifteen years ago, the internet was an escape from the real world. Now, the real world is an escape from the internet.

We had high hopes for the internet: an infinite reservoir of content, free distribution, a broader canon, and a more diverse creator base, which would inspire more people to make more amazing things. But this “deluge” of digital culture, writes film critic A. O. Scott, “is often perceived as a drought.

In the past, the difficulty of acquiring long-tail content suggested that a person had many underlying status assets, such as intelligence, curiosity, and deep knowledge. When anyone can find anything obscure on the internet within minutes, acquisition alone reveals no virtues or skills.

Fashion cycles appear to be a waste of time and energy, moving the population from one arbitrary practice to another for no reason other than elitist distinction and social conformity. Emulation is a delusional lunge at status improvement that only bolsters the existing social hierarchy.

In dynamic capitalist societies, fashion sells itself as a potential means for status improvement when, in fact, it works to just legitimize the current structure.

While production logic is often understood as a consequence of capitalism, status directs how it plays out—namely, the fact that early majority consumers seek products that won’t upset established conventions. Status also explains why manufacturers tend to copy innovations with cachet rather than create new conventions from scratch. Many gloss the term “marketing” to mean selling what a company already makes, but marketers see their own work as understanding what the public wants and producing goods that match to consumer desires.

Status symbols such as these don’t need to be rare in an absolute sense. They only need to be perceived as rare within the community. This allows elites to acquire rarities through the act of arbitrage—using their privileges to easily procure goods from one domain and deploy them back home. In the Soviet Union, modest foreign goods such as nylon stockings, imported cigarettes, and Parker pens took on cachet, since only the top bureaucrats could travel abroad or secure enough foreign currency to purchase them.

In mid-1980s New York, hard-core sneakerheads desired the Nike Air Force 1, simply because they could be purchased only at a single Bronx store. Snobs are often disparaged for valuing signaling costs over intrinsic qualities.

In mid-1980s New York, hard-core sneakerheads desired the Nike Air Force 1, simply because they could be purchased only at a single Bronx store. Snobs are often disparaged for valuing signaling costs over intrinsic qualities.

Fashion trends after World War II, however, strained the trickle-down metaphor. As the scholar Barbara Vinken notes, “Fashion is now made, worn and displayed, not by the bourgeoisie or the aristocracy, but on the street.” As subcultural capital grew in importance for creative-class signaling, high-status groups began to embrace formerly low-status conventions. By the mid-1970s, journalist Tom Wolfe observed, “If you walk down the street in New York, you may see a couple emerging from a co-op wearing tie-dyed pre-faded bell-bottomed Levi’s with aluminum studs up the outseam who happen to be the owners of a $175,000 apartment upstairs” (around $900,000 today). With the rich dressing like the poor, have we come to the end of trickle-down? Have we entered a new world of “trickle-up” or “trickle-across”?

Not quite. The fundamental human desire for status continues to direct imitation upward. All that has changed is that the cultural capital of urban, cosmopolitan groups includes knowledge of lower-status lifestyles.

Were the original groups truly “subcultural” if they could be so seamlessly absorbed into the commercial marketplace? In the language of contemporary marketing, “subculture” has come to mean little more than “niche consumer segment.” A large portion of contemporary consumerism is built on countercultural and subcultural aesthetics. Formerly antisocial looks like punk, hippie, surfer, and biker are now sold as mainstream styles in every American shopping mall.

The commercialization of outsider styles raises political questions, especially as companies squeeze cash out of cachet and force status-advantaged groups to seek out new oppositional styles. There is something obviously untoward about majority entrepreneurs profiting off the inventions of groups they otherwise oppress. Black artists invented jazz, rhythm ’n’ blues, and funk, only to see white majorities imitate, defuse, and profit from them.

The major social change of the twentieth century, however, was the integration of minority and working-class conventions into mainstream social norms. This process has been under way at least since the jazz era, when rich whites used the subcultural capital of Black communities to signal and compensate for their own lack of authenticity.

Disadvantaged ethnic minorities also form their own alternative status groups—crafting cultural oases of music, fashion, and leisure to escape structural discrimination. The sociologist Dick Hebdidge writes, “Black culture, and especially Black music, has provided one of the strongest means of survival—a secret language of solidarity, a way of articulating oppression, a means of cultural resistance, a cry of hope.

To succeed in the postmodern information economy requires ingesting, retrieving, and processing vast amounts of information, and the professional class considers their competence in these areas as justified criteria for higher status. Their most valuable signals, then, are not based on money or time being rich, but the exclusive possession of privileged information.

Nonchalance makes taste appear to be an inevitable product of the habitus—absorbed through an Old Money upbringing rather than learned in conscious imitation. This technique also helps Old Money battle the most cunning New Money type, the one who studiously educates themselves in high-status taste. The famed interior designer Mark Hampton made fun of New Money clients for their pedagogy: “One can almost hear the poor creature flipping the pages of Architectural Digest and House and Garden in her mind.