By contrast technological change is very logical, as innovations provide greater efficiency and conveniences at lower costs. Our ancestors adopted the spinning wheel not as a “fad,” but because it shortened the time required to twist fibers into yarn. From this perspective cultural change appears bizarre. What were Stu and his imitators hoping to accomplish with a moptop? What changed their taste? Neither evolutionary biology nor economics can explain this behavior—the moptop has no intrinsic value over other styles, nor offers more tactile pleasure. Was the moptop a form of self-expression? If so, how did everyone know what feeling this particular haircut expressed? And why would everyone seek to express the same emotions through the same haircut at the same time?

But cultural changes are never random, nor do they befall us as plagues. Trends happen because individuals choose to take up new behaviors. And when we examine the history of cultural change, there are clear patterns in how humans move from one practice to another. Sixty years before the moptop, social scientist William Graham Sumner seemingly predicted how it would rise and fall: “A new fashion of dress seems at first to be absurd, ungraceful, or indecent. After a time this first impression of it is so dulled that all conform to the fashion.” In almost all instances, new behaviors begin as an exclusive practice of smaller social groups—whether elites or outsiders—and then eventually spread to the wider population. This is true for the diffusion of superficial hairstyles but also applies to things not considered “fashions”: practical technologies like cars and hybrid seed corn, delicacies like chocolate and gin, political and spiritual beliefs, and the succession of artistic movements in modern art. The thing we call culture is always an aggregation of individual human behaviors, and if taste were the mere product of random idiosyncrasies and irrational psychologies, culture would display no patterns, only noise. The fact that preferences in these disparate fields follow a similar rhythm of change suggests there must be universal principles of human behavior at work—the presence of a “cultural gravity” nudging humans into the same collective behaviors at the same time.

Once we know how to identify conventions, we’ll find them everywhere. They manifest as customs, the tacit rules of a community. Customs can be so invisible within a group that we notice them only upon encountering alternative ways of life. “There are probably young men from Nevada,” writes the journalist Calvin Trillin, “who have to be drafted and sent to an out-of-state Army camp before they realize that all laundromats are not equipped with slot machines.” We are more cognizant of conventions when they take the form of norms and manners, because we may be reluctant to follow them. Meanwhile, traditions, like lederhosen and dirndl, are conventions anchored in historical precedence that serve as explicit symbols of the community. Beliefs can also have conventional elements. This is clear for superstitions: Americans fear the number 13, while Italians believe it’s lucky.

The principle of detachment means all status symbols require alibis—reasons for adoption other than status seeking. Beck listened to avant-garde noise for its aesthetic charms, not just to show off indie cred. Fancy cars always tout desirable features. The ultrapremium Eldorado Brougham Cadillacs of the late 1950s came with “anti-dive control, outriggers, pillarless styling, projectile-shaped gull-wing bumpers, [and] outboard exhaust ports.” Status symbols that lack credible alibis tend to fail: ankle watches were popular at the beginning of the twentieth century, but they’re not a practical way to tell time. Companies that produce luxury goods, from Louis Vuitton to Tiffany, Rolex, and Dom Perignon, understand the need for alibis, and their marketing provides detailed explanations of great craftsmanship, rare materials, unsurpassed comfort, and the highest levels of quality control. And yet, luxury goods never work as luxury goods based purely on functionality. They also must have status value. The philosopher Jean Baudrillard writes, “The functionality of goods comes afterward, adjusting itself to, rationalizing and at the same time repressing these fundamental structural mechanisms.” The best proof of this can be found in the fact that luxury goods that are initially exclusive to a small segment of the population, such as nutmeg or air-conditioning, cease to be luxuries once they’re widely available—despite their quality improving over time.

The career of Glenn O’Brien demonstrates the crucial role of the mass media in moving trends through the cultural ecosystem. Elite conventions stay exclusive unless the media expands the common knowledge to people of lower status tiers. The Condé Nast empire of magazines, from The New Yorker to Vogue, ascended in global culture by serving this very function: providing how-to guides for the upper middle classes outside of New York, London, and Paris to keep up with the latest urban trends. And by indicating which new conventions have cachet, the mass media triggers emulation from the heaviest consumers of media—namely, the professional and creative classes. “When the movies came,” writes the media theorist Marshall McLuhan, “the entire pattern of American life went on the screen as a nonstop ad. Whatever any actor or actress wore or used or ate was such an ad as had never been dreamed of.” Mass media, then, isn’t a neutral pipe that simply relays information, but a transformative tool that strengthens conventions by broadening common knowledge and adding status value.

Mass media and mass manufacturers, however, do speed up fashion cycles by ensuring we become aware of trends beyond what we can directly observe and by removing the obstacles to participation. This quickly turns little-known conventions into broad social norms. Companies are able to make this happen because they understand the fundamental human desire for status markers. Marxists complain that capitalism creates “false needs,” as capitalists chase “exchange value” over earnest “use value.” The flaw in this analysis is that a primary use for goods is marking social distinction.

The fifties boom is a clear example of the cultural phenomenon we call retro, defined by the music critic and historian Simon Reynolds as “a self-conscious fetish for period stylisation (in music, clothes, design) expressed creatively through pastiche and citation.” Where customs, traditions, classics, and canonized works involve a continuity of historical survival, retro describes a historical revival—a sudden reevaluation of transient artifacts and conventions. Unlike the high-culture rediscovery of forgotten genius or Renaissance obsessions with mythical golden ages, retro is the ironic use of kitsch from the recent past as novelties. “The retro sensibility,” writes Reynolds, “tends neither to idealise nor sentimentalise the past, but seeks to be amused and charmed by it.” While classics possess a near permanent cachet, retro grants new status value to discarded conventions. Before Sha Na Na, youth viewed 1950s vocal pop as goofy and embarrassing—silly songs with nonsense lyrics and simple chord changes that predated the rise of real music like the Beatles and Bob Dylan. But Sha Na Na’s ironic appropriation made doo-wop desirable again. Retro established an additional way for the past to take on new value in the present: nostalgia masquerading as innovation for use in the fashion cycle.

Before we explore the internet’s impact on culture, we must first heed the sociologist Duncan Watts’s warning: “The Internet isn’t really a thing at all. Rather, it’s shorthand for an entire period of history, and all the interlocking technological, economic, and social changes that happened therein.” As we know, technology doesn’t automatically change culture. People using that technology must move from old conventions to new ones. So we must look at both how the technological, economic, and social changes of the internet age set new parameters for our actions, and how we have adjusted our status strategies accordingly.

Rank-and-file members of tech companies share similar sensibilities with their billionaire executives: same habitus and black North Face down vest, but very different stock packages. They both prefer functional, authentic goods made with artisanal craftsmanship. There is goodness and beauty in sourdough rye, third-wave hand-drip single-origin coffee, apricot sour beers and session IPAs—all procured from shops with the highest crowdsourced ratings. The stripped-down “normcore” look of gray athleticwear that dominated in the early 2010s was based on the belief that the greatest lifestyle ornament is to not care about ornamentation at all. In 2016 the writer Kyle Chayka memorably revealed how this minimalist aesthetic took over interior design—the “AirSpace” look of austerity and texture-obsession. Airbnb rentals, writes Chayka, all have “white or bright accent walls, raw wood, Nespresso machines, Eames chairs, patterned rugs on bare floors, open shelving, the neutered Scandinavianism of HGTV.”

Both poptimism and “let people enjoy things” are part of the meta-sensibility behind postmodern culture: omnivore taste. The virtuous “cultured” individual should consume and like everything—not just high culture, but pop and indie, niche and mass, new and old, domestic and foreign, primitive and sophisticated. Where cultural capital exists, it is now “multicultural capital.” The most masterly wardrobes mix vintage Givenchy with Uniqlo. True gourmands appreciate the finest French haute cuisine, seek out the artery-blocking buttery dishes of neighborhood Parisian bistros, and wait in line for cronuts. In 1999 the writer John Seabrook labeled this omnivore culture “nobrow,” framing these changes as a logical extension of late-stage capitalism. In the old “townhouse” of New Yorker–era taste, “you got points for consistency in cultural preferences,” whereas in the “mega store” of MTV, “you got status for preferences that cut across the old hierarchical lines.”