thread: 2013-06-12 : Status is Your Toy!
On 2013-06-17, Vincent wrote:
Mads: Not exactly, no.
Whatever our community's values, our community's status system is a force for creative entropy. Even if our community values innovation and novelty, its status system wants creators to limit themselves to creating things that flatter and soothe the community. It's a familiar thing to me, the group that loves its own fashionable innovations but cries down any and all innovations from outside itself, no matter how brilliant.
I distinguish status relationships from working relationships. A community's working relationships are creatively productive. Its status relationships are creatively conservative. The best creative communities are built on a majority of working relationships and a minimum of status ones.
Funnily enough, to status-anxious people, good working relationships look like high status cliques from which they are unfairly excluded.
