I feel like grandma here, wanting to say of Henry and Tim's positions on social status and the internet "You're both right", which is tricky since they disagree so directly.

Let me quote Henry: "People can opt out of status races where they are likely to lose, and opt in to status races that they are likely to win. Given a near infinity of possible status hierarchies, they can choose the ones that they do well in. But this argument presupposes that these different possible status hierarchies are disconnected from each other."

Henry is right that they are not disconnected, but I'd argue that they used to be tightly coupled (I think Tim's observation that "until recently, the national media provided something like a uniform yardstick for status" is spot on) but now they are increasingly loosely coupled.

To take two examples from Henry: the rise of BoingBoing, and the netroots leverage versus the DLC. Attention is a commodity market, and BB's success in that market is not a zero-sum game, meaning their newly carved out social status is largely new value for society, both in terms of their actual content, but also because they increase the diversity of what's available. (Full disclosure: other things being equal, I think diversity is in and of itself a primary good.)

Netroots vs. DLC, however, is another matter, because that is close to a zero-sum game. There is only one Democratic party, and what the netroots wins, the DLC loses, in terms of control of that one party. In this case, the status hierarchy is much more absolute.

So let me draw out a question implicit in Henry's use of the Brunching Shuttlecock Geek Hierarchy: note that, even in a chart of who looks down on whom, many of the arrows run both ways. A sample case: Erotic Fanfic Writers think they are above the Fanfic Writers Who Put Themselves In the Story, and F.W.W.P.T.I.T.S think they are above Erotic Fanfic Writers.

That kind of two-way arrow seems to me to be possible vis-a-vis BoingBoing (one can imagine BB readers think of Fark readers as puerile frat boys, and Fark readers think BB readers are hemp-wearing poseurs), but two-way arrows don't seem to me to be possible vis-a-vis the Democratic party. If (as seems possible) the DLC ends up in January of 2009 as a minor player in Democratic politics, there is no amount of self-assurance that can make up for the objective loss of power over a scarce resource.

So I think that Henry and Tim could argue forever, because each will be able to find places in the current milieu where outcomes are more or less zero-sum, and more tightly or loosely coupled to other people's perceptions.

What I'm more interested in is "Which situations can be changed by proliferating forms of status, and what which situations leave us stuck with zero-sum games?" My assumption is the answers "None, and all" or "All, and none", are both wrong, but I don't know what a more sophisticated answer looks like.