More and more I realize I am completely obvlious to all of the class signaling happening here. I couldn't imagine spending that much on anything, let alone a watch. And I certainly wouldn't think someone wearing that did, either.
I feel bad for the folks who pick up on stuff like this, that must be a heavy weight to bear constantly comparing yourself to other people.
Ironically a desire for such social signalling requires being poor enough that you believe the item is worth a vast and near unobtainable amount of money making it seem like a very impressive signal to you. That’s what makes these items desirable. As in these signals can be a sign of just how poor you are as opposed to how wealthy.
A classic case is when you observe teenager targeted status signalling trends. This can be as low value as an expensive shirt, ie shirts branded ‘supreme’ costing $300 which isn’t worth signalling to anyone who pays rent or a mortgage. But to a teenager? Wow man $300! such status!!! On the flip side if we see someone above teenager age wearing such teenager targeted status symbols we reasonably subconsciously assume they live with their parents and have very little income.
This continues up the wealth chain forever. Status symbols are invariably a way to see just how little people actually have because the person wearing the status symbol clearly believes the value of what they are flaunting is impressive.
Status symbols aren’t a signal of how much money you have so much as signal of what you believe to be an incredible amount of wealth to flaunt.
Well framed. I will add though that it's not entirely indicative of how much one thinks is a lot; it can also be, as was explained to me, that for ultra wealthy people, the price, at any magnitude becomes a rounding error.
half a million for a car sounds absurd to me, but it's 0.5% of $100M. Compare that to $50k car on a ~$200k median net-worth US household.
Yep. I'm in a European city, most of the people driving Mercedes and BMW cars are, if not outright poor, low-status, low-education, low long-term wealth.
The old money drives beat-up cars (often Swedish made, US imports for enthusiasts, or old-style 4x4s for outdoor pursuits) and are more likely to take taxis. Young, highly-educated BoBo types walk, take transit or cycle.
Just-above-poor neighbourhoods have a much higher proportion of flash cars than rich ones.
I mean, you just wrote that rich people buy vanity cars and poor people buy cars that are for daily use. US imports for enthusiasts and old-style 4x4s for outdoor pursuits are both definition of vanity car.
> I am completely oblivious to all of the class signaling happening here.
If you're comfortably middle class and in a demographic recognized to "deserve" to be middle class, then you can afford to be oblivious to a whole lot of class signaling. You aren't striving to reach a higher station, and you aren't likely to get demoted out of your current one, so you can mostly ignore it.
People that are lower-class and trying to move up, or in demographic categories that are often shunned access to higher social classes don't have that luxury and are incentivized to be savvy to this kind of stuff.
This is one of the kinds of things that people talk about when they talk about "privilege". It's not that you should feel bad because you don't have to worry about this stuff. It's just an acknowledgement that some people have the privilege of not having to worry about this stuff because they were born into a level of class security that others lack.
>I feel bad for the folks who pick up on stuff like this, that must be a heavy weight to bear constantly comparing yourself to other people.
You can have that heavy weight while living on the suburbs or even the ghetto too. The objects are prices mostly change with the wealth level, not the game.
It being an "acquired taste" is part of the appeal. A lot of high-end stuff is ass-ugly on purpose. If everyone liked it because it simply looked nice, you couldn't tell who's "in the club" of other rich people. Brands will attach elaborate stories and histories to objects to make people feel cultured that they have invested time in acquiring the knowledge, but really it comes down to in-group object recognition.
My least favorite of that eras Gerald Genta designs. The original Royal Oak is comparatively far more attractive. Both are outdone by the 222 (different designer though), but it's all subjective.
Ads for Patek Philippe on the back of The Economist get more and more annoying over time. (e.g. the president writes "How Happy I am to be a Nepo Baby")
Watches were understated in the 70s and turned more to gold in the 80s and a super proliferation of diversity in the 90s. 90s also had machismo Schwarzenegger sized cases for steroid men.
2000s brought Hiphop bling culture to them which embraced maximalism with size further increasing and 85 diamonds and rubies being something worthy of showing.
2010s austerity led to a retreat all the way to 1940s style trench and dress watches, cases back to 38mm.
Post Covid, boldness is having a comeback. See the newest Planet Ocean. We are seeing bling and ostentatious gold again on celebrities this year.
I asked Claude to psychoanalyze why I got obsessed with them and it said I’m likely striving for something tangible that appeals to my engineer mindset that isn’t now obsolete in the age of AI. It’s my career’s existentialism.
They were. The Acquired podcast on Rolex really opened my eyes to this whole world. They defined the playbook in the 1930s that Apple repeated in the 80s and especially 2000s.
I entered this cult last year. It’s been super fun to spot and infer from a distance, as you say, these hidden signals that men have chosen to spend $20,000 to $120,000 on.
G-Shock says “I do things that are so dangerous and so off the grid your Rolex or Apple Ultra would shatter and die”. And it’s true, out of my whole collection, that’s the one that will still be within a ms of true time 25 years after the power goes out after the nukes go off.
my g-shock frogman is 10+ years old, still sits by the window, charging itself everyday (solar powered), and it's the watch I would grab if the proverbial hit the fan. I'd grab my self-winding analog jlc watch too, just in case I needed it as a bribe (not sure which would be better as a bribe if that happens, maybe the g-shock!)
Your taste buds prefer the flavor, not the brand. If they changed their name to "Caramel Diet Fanta" but kept the recipe identical, you'd still enjoy the taste.
The New Coke brand failed because people didn't like the taste, not the other way around.
New Coke is a very interesting counterpoint to the brand focus, but on the other hand, they did at the time make a very big push of it being "New" Coke. Hard to tell what would've happened if they had just swapped out the formula.
I drink Diet Coke, which is basically the same formula that became New Coke with chemical sludge instead of sugar, and it tastes pretty good to my tongue to the point where I drink it over Coke Zero, the one closer to "the real thing".
Every time I drink a Coke (or any other soft drink), the brand's baggage (good and bad) is present. Unless you're doing a blind taste test, it's impossible to avoid that.
At Meta, when this mass push for the rename happened across the industry, a few people spent nearly the full year just shepherding the renaming of master to main, and white box/black box to allowlist/blocklist.
This let them claim huge diff counts and major contributions to DEI and get promos.
Seems like a bad faith question, unfortunate that it was asked multiple times. Blacklist is derived from a definition where black means "evil, bad, or undesirable". When you say that ink is black, you're using a different definition, which relates to color. I don't know if I see the objection to blackbox, which uses a definition of "unknown". Personally, I think the harm is small but I look to people of color for guidance and prefer the more descriptive deny-list where I can. Cuts down on possible confusion for non-native English speakers too.
Blacklist and Whitelist come from the behaviour of light on coloured surfaces. A black surface absorbs all light, a white reflects it. There is also Graylist.
I don't know of any connotation of black meaning "evil, bad, or undesirable". If anything black means "missing or vanished". Maybe that is different in your culture, but I never heard of it until now. Tons of things in everyday life are black including the most letters, signs and a lot of devices. The only thing that comes to my mind is tooth decay or pestilence, but that is hardly anything connotated with the colour per se.
A quick web search for "define black" and "etymology blacklist" readily finds "from black (adj.), here indicative of disgrace, censure, punishment (a sense attested from 1590s, in black book)" and several similar results. But I didn't immediately see an etymology based on absorbing light.
I'd be curious to see a regional reference that shows an absorb/reflect etymology.
The irony is that the term "Black" was precisely chosen by Black civil rights activists in the 1960s. This wasn't a term given by white people, it was specifically chosen by Blacks, because of its negative connotations. They wanted to embrace its negative connotations and turn it on its head, and that's where terms like "Black is beautiful" came from. They didn't want to be ashamed of it, that's why they embraced it. Black was not a term of shame, it was a term of power.
Now, the left wing activists have turned it on its head again, and now saying that the term "black" is shameful and racist. It's bizarre how ignorant people are who say the term "blacklist" is racist.
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