Some things are "high-status" and some are "low-status". Formula 1 is high-status, NASCAR is low-status. Wine, beer. Classical, pop. Whole Foods, Kroger. But there is no universal scale — status is a creation of the observer.
Luxury handbags got me thinking about this. They're high-status to some people, but I couldn't care less — the idea of brand advertising is deeply unaesthetic to me.
For any high-status thing, among whom does it garner status?
You can optimize for the median person. There is a sort of vague, generalized societal average status. The status Schelling point.
Man is the creature who does not know what to desire, and he turns to others in order to make up his mind. We desire what others desire because we imitate their desires. — René Girard's theory of memetic desire
But do you really care about the median person? It depends on what status you desire.
The status hierarchy I care about is defined by what interesting skills you have or projects you've done. And you gain status by being recognized as having interesting skills or projects by people who are high-status by this definition.
So this status hierarchy is a bit like the PageRank algorithm. If you ask each member of the group who the highest status person is, and then you ask that person who they consider highest status, etc, how often do you visit each person? That's their status.
Obviously, nobody is keeping score like this — and there are cases where I and the weighted average disagree — but it's an intuition pump. Not all status hierarchies are mutually recursive like this. There are other graph topologies.
The simplest topology is a more pyramidal, feudal shape. A corporate org chart, or military hierarchy. You gain status by having more people to owe fealty to you. Your self-worth is assigned to you by the person above you in the chart.
A more extreme topology is the status hierarchy of social media influencers and their followers. An influencer's status is largely a function of their follower count, not their interactions with each other. But their followers have essentially zero status in this hierarchy.
The topology of the "high-agency tech-adjacent" hierarchy I care about is a fully connected graph of all the core participants. There are still non-participant lurkers who plug in to this graph, but they don't bestow nearly as much status as in the influencer case.
People like Andrej Karpathy, Elon Musk, Patrick McKenzie, etc all have hundreds of thousands of followers, but a guy with 1000 followers that include those guys can be just as high-status.
The thing I like most about this status hierarchy arrangement is the alignment of status with virtue — Generating knowledge and applying it is as close to a definitional virtue as you can get for me.
I don't think any high-status influencers actually believe their follower-count makes them virtuous. They're not not virtuous, either. Just orthogonal.
Luxury goods are slightly more aligned. Supporting amazing craftsmanship is virtuous in my eyes. But most of the value and status that comes with luxury goods isn't in the craftsmanship, but the name brand, price, and artificial scarcity.
There are other status hierarchies that also closely align status with virtue. A lot of religious communities fit the bill.
That symmetry may not be too accidental. It wouldn't be too wrong to model the tribe I call home as a religion that worships innovation.
So what's your virtue? Align your status landscape and start hiking.
Thanks to Sebastian Bensusan for giving early feedback on this post