In my original articulation of my weird cultural theory, I reached a conclusion which I am now reconsidering. Now, I'm sure that anyone who happens to read this blog on the reg is hoping that what I'm reconsidering is the general thrust of my weird cultural theory, but that would require meaningful counter-evidence against it, which nobody seems able to provide.
What I am reconsidering is the extent of signaling, the independence of the distractions, and the role of popular culture (see points 1.1 and 3). More specifically, I'm no longer convinced that popular culture serves solely as a distraction. I think it's highly likely that popular culture can serve both as a distraction and as a signal. I am working on a paradigm for this. My original thought was that popular culture can be split into categories of signal-culture and distraction-culture. Upon further consideration, I suspect that these exist as a continuum rather than distinct categories.
My working theory for the continuum is as follows: popular culture has two possible functions: to send signals on the behalf of the economy, and to distract people from the true nature of civilization. These functions exist on a continuum, with the most acceptably mainstream elements of popular culture being those which serve more effectively as the economy's behavioral signals. Especially vapid popular culture may at times serve very little distracting purpose, and portray civilization largely as it is, because the people among whom it is popular do not need to be distracted; they are either suited better as drones for the economy than as autonomous people, or they just don't do enough thinking to be in danger of being woke.
I also have a working theory for why I missed popular culture's signaling function the first time around, and it's a pretty simple one: I'm a weirdo. I conscientiously avoid the most accepted forms of popular culture, and I'm also largely immune to the economy's signals. Also, nobody needs a distraction from life more than the person who actually knows the true nature of life. Being weird is, in general, immensely useful for observing the way the world works. To understand the unthinking assumptions of others, those assumptions more or less need to be foreign enough to require thinking about them. To observe assumptions common to all of human civilization, one needs to be, essentially, a foreigner to humanity. This provides the best big-picture understanding of the nature of civilization, but leaves me with easiest access to a less-than-ideal model for how humanity responds to, and is meant to respond to, civilization. Basically, because I don't respond to popular culture as though it is a signal from the economy to work or spend, I assumed that I'm not supposed to.
As previously stated, I now believe that assumption to have been made in error. Oops.
