don’t read “Status as a Service” on the “Remains of the Day” website. it is bad.

note: I cannot avoid the author saying that this post itself is a “status game”, or that any criticism of this reasoning is a status game. when your theory explains everything, it explains nothing.

hi, it’s me, Alfred MacDonald. these are my words.

and no, while I am sure the author would construe mentioning my own name as a “status” decision, I have done so because I should be held accountable for what I say; this is a matter of epistemology and truth, not “status”. under this framework, I don’t want people to read vaccine misinformation not because it produces catastrophic results but because antivaxx belief is “low status” — this should be transparently ridiculous to you and if it isn’t, spend a week or two alone and reevaluate the way you see the world from first principles.

(I also, with a few exceptions, do not think anonymity in the english-speaking US+UK+colonies world is a good thing for writers/authors due to the same accountability reason, but this is a belief vastly outside the scope of what I’m doing here. (2nd/3rd world countries with dangerous governments are another matter — no, whatever first-world country some reader might live in as a counterexample does not have a “dangerous government”. you are sheltered and schizo.))

you may wonder why, in spite of my position on anonymity, I have chosen to use “the author” instead of their name. that is because, other than just habit and convention, I don’t think the author deserves people to know their name for this work. (that is also not a “status” position, that is an “I don’t want people believing ridiculous things” position.)

so many paragraphs by this author are filled with hackneyed commentary that seem practically regurgitated from tech journalists who are themselves hackneyed, like this

(140-or-less comedy existed long before twitter; this is all of bash.org and large parts of comedy in general. despite being on the internet for so long, the author writes like they’ve barely been on the internet.)

this author is desperate to attach “status” as a causal explanation for everything, despite not defining it in a way that does not encompass basically all behavior in a tautological way

this is one of the few useful paragraphs in the work that is not saying something obvious or trite

yet another “people’s parents are on facebook” paragraph. this didn’t need to be a paragraph and, additionally, the author is constantly referencing how old they are as some kind of attempt to be funny and also humblebrag, and also uses a “kids these days” trope as if there’s any real difficulty in understanding tiktok or any of these new platforms the author talks about

this was perhaps one of the only insights of the essay that I actually could *identify as an insight*, as opposed to a regurgitation or recitation of otherwise derivative commentary

this didn’t need to be a paragraph, and the author reveals themselves as someone who thinks “Zizek = person who writes long complicated social commentary I don’t understand” while themselves writing an egregiously long 20,000 word essay that manages to say at most 500 words of new things

this is more trite shit that didn’t need to be a paragraph, with strained marketing analogies

this is more old-as-humblebrag with condescending presumptions about the audience

this is more trite and done-to-death obvious shit that didn’t need to be paragraphs

this is extremely cliché commentary about the fashion industry and also didn’t need to be a paragraph

yes, when you try to strain the framework of “status game” to include basically all behavior, you will find people “sneering” at “status games”

THE AUTHOR HAD THE AUDACITY TO USE A “KNOW IT WHEN I SEE IT” MOVE FOR THE DEFINITION. TRASH EPISTEMOLOGY. THEY SHOULD HAVE STOPPED WRITING HERE.

more attempts to fit everything into an overly simplistic framework by “if you deny A you are A” logic

this is “everyone actually believes in Jesus” logic. if you deny you’re believing in Jesus you’re just being tested that much harder by god. or whatever. “deniers of A are actually A” structure should be the smoking gun that you’re full of shit.

this is the author’s best attempt to explain something like 4chan, a network exempt from status to begin with — but then, what can I expect from someone whose website dates to 2001 and somehow wasn’t online enough to remember or mention all of the IRC era

this is outright wrong; if there has ever been a karma requirement to create subreddits I didn’t know about it, and my notoriety as a subreddit-originator includes being a founding moderator of /r/TumblrInAction. I stopped being a redditor in 2018, so maybe this changed — but if you call something “canonical” you should not be wrong about what that is.

twitter is anything but this, but then if the author thinks 20,000 words of this is worthwhile perhaps I’m overestimating the author’s capacity to judge what is interesting

except on 4chan, and wikipedia, and… (author attempts to contort this “status game” theory to fit all human activity)

not the author, but same energy.

a mother holding her child out of love is a “status transaction”? is it a “status transaction” if I love my dog so much that I feel heartbreak when it dies? this framework is so obviously wrong, and by “obviously” I mean this is a “you’d see why this is dumb if you thought about it for five fucking seconds” thought.

this is among the dumbest things that Aella has said publicly, but Aella does not write 20,000-word essays and, in her undeserved defense, is still in the process of improving as she takes the long and chaotic road of Learn Everything Outside Literally Any Traditional Institution. the author of “Status as a Service” by contrast takes multiple steps to remind us how old/experienced they are and how much of a career they’ve had, so the author has no such defense.

(I am sure I could describe this using “status”, but I don’t have confidence that people who buy into this sort of thing would realize I am making fun of them.)

the author should have recognized how shallow and obviously-wrong this framework is by the 5,000th or 10,000th word, so my best guess as to how the author was able to finish it is an epistemic sunk cost fallacy; after all, medieval and communist scholars have dedicated their lives and entire written bibliography to transparently incorrect theories, so by comparison 20,000 words is a bean in a pot of chili.

PERHAPS IT IS THAT YOUR FRAMEWORK IS AN EXTREMELY INCORRECT OVERSIMPLIFICATION OF HUMAN BEHAVIOR

this is the closest the author gets to something more realistic like “people derive satisfaction from making real contributions” but *still* tries to contort their framework to fit

the author did not even proofread enough to notice they were rhetorically autopiloting and used the same paragraph transition twice

hi, it’s me again. don’t read this essay.

as this is Medium I cannot avoid the author once again trying to overfit this “status game” theory to my very criticism. but, once more, this is “if you deny you believe in god you actually believe in god” reasoning, or “denying patriarchy is just due to patriarchy” reasoning. this is unfalsifiable. it is a bad theory, and the essay is worse. I strongly recommend not reading it, but if you must, I implore you to not circulate it because this is bad epistemology and we do not whatsoever need more of that.

— — —

(and in case anyone invokes robin hanson as some kind of defense against this article’s framework, I think a lot of robin hanson’s work is just finding some phenomenon and attributing the origin to status differences without controlling for other things that explain the phenomenon, such as what he did when he claimed status differences are observable in interpersonal interactions. in his TED Talk he cited a study where he found conversational rhythm can differ by status — okay, and it can also differ by how much food that person has had to eat, or whatever drugs they’ve taken, or how sensitive they are to the ambient temperature, or … any number of things. it’s going to require *controlling for a fuckton of shit* to confidently say that status is the thing that’s been isolated and is the cause of those observed differences in interpersonal interactions, and I don’t think he’s done this. I elaborated on that here.)