What’s happened with car reviews illustrates a wider socio-cultural shift. The exponential growth of two…

What’s happened with car reviews illustrates a wider socio-cultural shift. The exponential growth of two connected things. Team sports (imitative rivalry), and what I call spec culture. /1 https://t.co/jGm3Kb7bRr

Vehicles are a dominant marker of status. One of the clearest ways to see how what we call ‘technology’ is really just one more way we create social status distinctions. How we create identity. Identity flows from status. How you become somebody, rather than nobody. /2

The BYD Shark is a direct assault on the highest status part of our current vehicle culture. The dual cab ute, and off-roading vehicles more generally. It’s enraged many in that culture. They devote hours trying to prove that it’s worthless. /3 https://t.co/jGm3Kb7bRr

It’s part-electric. It’s Chinese. Those two things alone are grenades thrown into the middle of this comfy status hierarchy, where the ute has become the vehicle de rigueur for everyday Australians. It was always going to be a shitfight. /4

BYD are clever enough to have made great inroads into this status quo, in a very short time. But the status quo won’t surrender that easily. The majority of people who buy dual cab utes never take them seriously off-road or tow anything with them. /5

But those are the touchstones for credibility in the status culture surrounding them. Thus the now relentless wars, the imitative rivalry, around the Shark. Do we get tired of everything now being a fight? I do. BYD have created a real innovation here. /6

Electric or part-electric off-roading is still a work in progress. But grab a seat in one of these online wars and look at the comments. This isn’t about technical things. This is people fighting for status and identity. /7

We could sensibly say well done, BYD, this is a great leap forward. lol, yeh right. Read the comments. /8 https://t.co/jGm3Kb7bRr

This is all team sports, like everything in our culture now is. Everything is turned into a rivalry, with status and identity at stake. Social media dramatically magnifies this shift. Its business model and features are this status and identity mechanism. /9

And this is where spec culture comes in. Because these status games produce a proliferation of differentiated ways to distinguish status and identity. Spec or mod culture in utes is something to behold. It’s like grown ups playing with their GI Joe sets. /10

How you spec your ute helps further define you in your team, and vs other teams. We gloss over this sort of thing as ‘technical’. It’s nothing of the sort, it’s purely social behaviour. Creating and refining a status. /11 https://t.co/fz82pLoj8l

This has shifted into other vehicle categories too. Watch any of the major online review sites and you’ll see what I mean. A car review now is almost perverse. Every square centimetre of the vehicle is caressed and prodded. /12

The material even in the door bins is assessed for its ‘premium’ feel. Premium or luxury is now the expectation even in cheaper cars. A car with ‘hard plastics’ is like your dad wearing crocs, 10 years ago. A social gaffe. /13

Reviewers literally caress and prod every surface of the vehicle, to assess its premium quality. It’s like watching a forensic pathologist dissect a cadaver. This is the same social shift as the rivalry I’ve discussed above. Rivalry produces the demand for premium. /14

The growth of luxury products is clear to observe in many industries right now. This is a culture now overwhelmed by status games. Everything is a fight. Everything is premium. That’s our lives now. /15

Because we demand that there is no such thing as ‘elites’, and we think we live in flattened hierarchies we call democracies, we paradoxically generate a pandemic of the opposite. Status games now infect every aspect of our lives. /16

By constantly attacking our centralised status hierarchies, like governments and other institutions, we set free an orgy of status-seeking everywhere else. Take away our collective ways of having status and identity, and we will reinvent them, individually. /17

Leading to a society that is essentially gang culture. Competing gangs in every area of life fighting for status and identity. People set fire to and vandalise Teslas, while abusing their drivers, the brand now on the outer of social acceptability. /18

Without centralised, collective status hierarchies, gang culture replaces civilised society. Nothing but status games. Gangs have their kings, they have their markers of ‘premium’ status (often gold, watches etc.). /19

All this is now happening in car culture and car reviews. It’s brutal, it’s boring, but it’s also a window into what we’re becoming. Good luck if you’re tired of all the fights and the premium products. Houses turned into hotel rooms on competitive renovation shows. /20

You can’t unsee it. /end