Beyond Money: The Architecture of Cultural Capital

Today, I want to talk about the subtleties of capital, and it’s role in the world.

When most of us hear the word capital, the first thing we think of is money, which is economic capital. And it makes sense - it’s the kind of capital that is most directly tied to our ability to survive and thrive in the world. Whether implicitly or explicitly, it’s what most people associate with success.

Money provides optionality and leverage. And both optionality and leverage are tied to time. Having options gives a person agency (I can choose to do one thing rather than another) and leverage allows you to do more with less, which is also a form of agency (rather than doing everything myself, I can invest in additional resources to help me in my cause). Both are useful, but rationally speaking, they are not an end.

Now, to get economic capital, in theory, you have to provide value. Personally, I would define value as being a product of work and creativity, whether that be artistic or technological. And often, that’s how reality works. But not always.

Pierre Bourdieu was a 20th-century French philosopher who had a theory of capital in which he saw society as being an exchange between four different kinds of capital: economic, yes, but also social, cultural, and symbolic.

Social capital is who you know. I think anyone who has worked in a large organization or looked around in the world knows that, on average, someone’s network tends to matter more than pure meritocracy. If you know the right people, you get let into the right doors, and from there, you can exchange your social capital for economic capital, without providing too much value at all. Accumulating real social capital is generally a game of tact, some ass-kissing, and calculated reciprocity, but it’s one that works.

The more interesting of Bourdieu’s distinctions to me, however, is cultural capital and its relation to symbolic capital. Cultural capital is essentially the knowledge a society values, and this knowledge is usually what is transformed into work and creativity in exchange for the other kinds of capital in the world, and we tend to sense, signal, and absorb cultural capital in three ways: through our body, through our surrounding objects, and through institutional credentials.

Much of our knowledge is signaled through our objects and our institutions. How someone dresses and the way they design the environments in their life, say, like their home are two examples of objects that tell you things about a person. Their appearance signals what they value and something about what they have to offer to the world on some subconscious level, and it’s something people intuitively judge. Institutional affiliations like where someone went to school or where they worked do the same, and these are more collectively agreed upon markers.

Now, the abstractions of the objects and the institutions that people identify with eventually begin to be embedded and stored in their body over time. We can often sense this in someone based on how they carry themselves and how they interact with their surroundings. And when someone satisfies our intuition for what is respected by the larger society, we tend to assign them with symbolic capital, which is a sense of style and status - a natural aura that radiates a kind of uniqueness, and that uniqueness is a feeling that translates into other forms of capital.

I think one of the most interesting things about the internet is that it is reducing the bias inherent in cultural capital. Compared to social capital, cultural capital is indeed more meritocratic, but in subtle ways, it also suffers from the shortcomings of the systems of the objects and the institutions that it affiliates with, which form their own networks based on social capital rather than work and creativity. Instead of seeing an individual as whatever institution they identify with, the internet sees the individual directly, because their work can be judged directly. There are no gatekeepers, and that allows individuality and knowledge to flourish based on merit.

The internet, too, of course, has its shortcomings. It’s still early in its path. It’s generally noisy, and there is a lot of easy distraction out there, but even so, it’s given us all of the world’s knowledge at our fingertips, and that unleashes opportunity on a global scale in a way that nothing ever has before.

Most of my own thinking, for example, has been influenced either by writers that died many years ago, or random people thinking out loud on blogs on the internet, with not really much in between. I don’t really follow legacy media, and beyond a few key areas of research coming out of certain academic circles, I find that my attention is best deployed elsewhere. And that’s, in a way, incredibly refreshing.

There has never been a better time to accumulate cultural capital, and there has never been a better time to shape it according to your own sense of style, to highlight and capitalize on your own personal individuality. And I think that’s exciting, and all of this is going to become more and more apparent as time goes on. Slowly, more value will increasingly shift towards work and creativity.

So, I’ll leave you with the following question: What does cultural capital mean to you, and how are you shaping your information streams to fit your taste?

Most of my own thinking, for example, have been influenced either by writers that died many years ago, or random people thinking out loud on blogs on the internet, with not really much in between. I don’t really follow legacy media, and beyond a few key areas of research coming out of certain academic circles, I find that my attention is best deployed elsewhere. And that’s, in a way, incredibly refreshing.