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Notes -
Seems well-written to me.
I can’t say I agree with the stages, necessarily? Especially 1 and 2. “Client ID” describes a phase in some movements, where adoption doesn’t pick up until elites grab the idea. But it doesn’t fit others. Look at Christianity, which didn’t gain elite support until it was firmly established among the periphery. It skips stage 2 entirely, too, since most of its institutions don’t develop until after regional hegemony. Or perhaps it would be more accurate to say that it started from stage 2.
Have you considered a comparison with Scott’s barber pole of fashion?
Pretty similar to the g/m/s model, except all the levels have a similar level of awareness. There’s no clueless class existing only to get played by the next step up; instead, each group acts according to its own intuition. But you still get segmented behavior if there’s enough space to distinguish A from C.
So, does this apply to political causes?
I’m going to argue “yes.” Maybe that’s because I’m an inveterate mistake theorist and I don’t like the idea that individuals are driven by class interest. Personal incentives, though? Fair game. I think you can explain a lot of political phenomena as (counter) signaling without giving too much credit to the sociopaths.
I don't actually know enough about the early history of Christianity to make a claim one way or another, to be honest. I'd be interested if you have an alternative set of stages. Or even if you just think there's a better word than "stages" which does sort of imply a linear progression in what is not necessarily a linear process.
Regarding your latter point, I think for me, "class interest" is basically just an emergent phenomena of people following their own personal incentives. For example, if I'm lawyer or doctor, anything lowering the barrier to entry in these fields is against my personal economic interest. Meanwhile, people with aspirations of upward mobility from non-PMC backgrounds, who can't afford or qualify for however many thousands of dollars of student debt that career path entails, would prefer that these barriers to entry be lowered."Class" is such a slippery phenomena; any given individual might be in different classes over the course of their lives, and if we use the word in the broadest sense (to include, say, religious or ethnic groups as well as socioeconomic strata), several different classes at the same time.
I’d say the five categories (ID-advocacy-critical-fragmentation-dissolution) are describing a real phenomenon. The problem is that it’s not the only life cycle. Sometimes an idea just really is appealing!
This is my understanding of, say, early Christianity, which saw strong growth in the fringes despite active persecution by the elite. No Client ID, since the entrepreneurs of Christianity largely were their underserved population. Advocacy based on building power structures which happened to conflict with elite ones like tax collection. More importantly, the Critical Mass for Christianity either lasted up til the modern era, or passed into Fragmentation immediately! It was actively gaining social capital even through its early schisms and heresies.
When growth is powered by geeks instead of sociopaths, the framework doesn’t make sense. There’s a rival life cycle that describes sincere movements. Call it “technology adoption,” where the underlying idea is strong enough to spread in the absence of status games.
Once you have a rival model, though, you have to ask which one fits each fashion. How do you decide?
Apologies for the lateness of this reply; I go through long stretches of inactivity here. Maybe both geeks and sociopaths can be driving growth concurrently? At any given time, in any given movement, you can have participants along the whole spectrum of motives. Its probably also true that some movements have "better tech" than others; they're more likely to take root and have lasting impacts. The various Abrahamic monotheisms come to mind as movements with really strong tech. If anything, its probably that the better the underlying idea, the more status to be gained by getting in on the ground floor.
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