Cargo cults

Following on the unsurprising Newsweek disappointment…

When dinosaurs grow big and arrogant, mammals will take over one way or another.

After sensing the threat, a dinosaur will try two different responses, both of which will ultimately fail. One is suppression, and the other is fake adaptation.

Fake adaptation has a cargo cult flavor. The dinosaur picks up some of the superficial qualities of the mammal and hopes its customers and workers will be fooled.

Sometimes a dinosaur learns the correct lesson and adapts. The US auto industry, after a brief period of cargo cults (Corvair and Vega) learned Toyota’s lesson.

Toyota wasn’t winning because it was small or radical. Toyota was OLD-FASHIONED, a typical 1940s British car. Toyota was winning because it offered near-perfection in the experience of driving and the experience of maintaining and repairing.

VW was technically radical but it was even more OLD-FASHIONED in its form, a typical 1938 car. VW also offered superior driving and repairing experience, though nowhere near Toyota or Renault.

By 1980 Detroit had adapted, offering smaller and more practical cars, built more carefully, with features that made driving more pleasant. The auto industry is still running, somewhat reduced from its grand peak. Most cars purchased by Americans are made by American workers, though the factories are often managed by Toyota and Nissan.

= = = = =

Big journalism and big entertainment are at the suppression and cargo cult stage now. They’re trying to ban Tiktok and Substack, and they’re trying to adopt the surface features of the opposition without understanding WHY PEOPLE WANT the opposition.

Like VW, the mammals in those fields are new in technology and OLD-FASHIONED in form. People are deadly tired of Innovative Disruption that ruins everything with constant change.

The mammals are reverting to a more local type of entertaining and reporting that existed for centuries before the networks and corporations centralized everything. Old-fashioned journalism was neighbors gossiping. Facebook is neighbors gossiping. Old-fashioned entertainment was local pageants and street musicians. Tiktok is local pageants and street musicians. The best of the new forms have found the sweet spot that feels like a perfect driving experience or a perfect repairing experience. It’s easy to watch and read, and it’s easy to make your own content.

= = = = =

Big academia hasn’t started ANY response yet, though both sides of its customer base are walking away fast. Employers are quickly abandoning college requirements, and young men are abandoning college. Entire subjects (eg history and philosophy and sociology) have run off the cliff of trivial stupidity, and nobody wants to join their self-destruction. I can see one small cargo cult, the fake “independent” Austin project. UATX is missing the point in the same way that Corvair missed the point. The fakers are offering “open debate” and “critical thinking”, which were never part of real schools, and never the reason people WANTED schooling. People WANTED schooling for two purposes: Certification of nobility and training in real skills. Certification still works, but aristocrats have always been a small part of the population, not enough to sustain a big university in every city. Harvard will survive, and Harvard is the only Registrar Of Nobility we need.