I think that the "elite overproduction" narrative basically conforms to reality, I think that a lot of credential-elites are downwardly mobile, I think that a lot of them have turned to a kind of politico-cultural resentment to ameliorate their weakness to the narratives that they learned during their erstwhile ascendancy, I don't necessarily think that they've been defeated by a meritocracy, and I don't think that that reactionaries get to count this as a "win" for their worldview either.
Some aspects of this dynamic to highlight:
- the overproduced elites are the ones who are still trying to keep the culture war bubbling because they have sold their MFAs as a way to get clicks on LegacySite.com
- for these people, the worst-case economic catastrophe has already happened, and so they no longer have any fear of radical redistribution being imposed on the rest of the world, and might even see themselves as the beneficiaries
- they genuinely do not think in terms of labor or output
I don't know what happens in the long run, but I know that LegacySite.com is still losing money for its Nth owner and even Pitchfork is dead these days. It's getting harder and harder for these overproduced elites to leverage the MFA into a byline someplace. Hateclicks still sell ads, but not so many. TikTok doesn't really honor credentials.
The sun is low and it's getting cold.
So for practical purposes, this is what you see:
(combining the 1st and 2nd bullet) LegacySite.com publishes steady drumbeat of headlines promoting wildly unpopular politics, like reparations or degrowth, driving popular political conversation from discussions of the plausible to the fantastical
- (combining 2 and 3) a concept like "degrowth" is genuinely not appreciated by these the freelancers for LegacySite.com, whose personal catastophe has consisted in failure to launch to the middle class