The story mentions modern day successors in the form of winklepickers which were apparently a highlight of 1950's/1960's fashion [0][1]. I'm predicting a resurgence in the early 2020's until the TSA declares them a menace to airport security at which point they fall out of favour again until the early 2050's.
I had read the term "winklepicker" a few times in the past, with no photo or description, and just assumed it was the snappy British equivalent of the American "clamdigger" -- a sort of short pants you'd wear collecting mollusks.
A classic example of "what you know that just ain't so."
I didn't know there was a connection! I wonder if the US highway shields also somehow kept an "older" design language while in Europe things "progressed" more easily to more modernist forms.
The pointy shoes are a shibboleth. They identify a group not despite their impracticality but because of it. Another example is the belief in miracles, the more unlikely the better, because it is the absurdity of the belief that distinguishes you from unbelievers.
There are oodles of such shibboleths in modern times, particularly in politics. Just think of any political proposition that is absurd on its face and more absurd on reflection. If it's still widely supported by a particular group that may well be because of its group-identifying absurdity rather than despite it.
But it is often not a scam of any kind, but sincerely accepted by adherents. This kind of cognitive flexibility goes a long way toward explaining modern politics and not so modern religions. I suspect pointy shoes may have been the same, with their wearer's convinced of their inherent value.
> not despite their impracticality but because of it
This isn't part of the definition of a shibboleth, as I understand it. A shibboleth is simply a marker of group identity (the original case was the speaker's accent when pronouncing the word 'shibboleth').
You seem to be referring to something more analogous to peacock feathers, where hewing to some practice in spite of its impracticality signals the depth of one's commitment.
OK, but it's a better marker of group identity the more peculiar it is to that group. So absurdity or impracticality are common characteristics of effective shibboleths because they make the marker a better discriminator with fewer false positives.
Pretty sure flat earth is a parody right? No one actually believes that do they? It’s like the flying spaghetti monster or the church of the subgenius.
Regular people aren't as interested in space exploration as nerds tend to be, so where we could point to dozens of things that wouldn't make sense or would be much more complicated if Earth was flat, their only basis for this belief is "because the society (school, in particular) says so". Within this group of people, I'm sure there's a subset for which that basis is not enough against their belief that society/scientists/rich are out to get them.
> "I encourage you to go to a flat earth meeting or conference."
Selection bias. Of course the trolls wouldn't bother going to such a meeting. The proportion of true believers at a conference says nothing about the proportion of true believers in the general public.
One of my old friends got sucked down the rabbit hole of YouTube conspiracies. Someone who was once fairly normal now believes in all kinds of crazy things, including flat Earth. It's definitely a growing belief.
This isn't really a conspiracy, this is the "cognitive infiltration" technique advocated by Cass Sunstein. Basically, even if the government doesn't like conspiracy theories (especially ones around purported government action/inaction like 9/11 truthers, JFK assassination, etc) they can't ban it or punish people due to the First Amendment. Therefore the best approach for discrediting them is infiltrating the movements and pushing them to even more bizarre extremes, so that "normies" will not become interested in what they're peddling.
Some people believe it. Some people are trolling. Some people were trolling and realized all the power and influence they have by continuing to troll.
The primary common aspect is distrust of the word government.
There are very inquisitive and scientific people in the Flat Earth community that simply distrust particular sources, but simultaneously jump to conclusions that are opposite of that source. So they are interested in proving or disproving the same thing, but they are handicapped because they can't simply reproduce existing scientific research, they have to categorically reject that too simply because the state was involved in funding or agreeing with the research.
Eventually they do run interesting experiments that undermine their flat earth theories, but they are still trying to prove the earth is flat, instead of trying to prove the shape of the earth and accepting where-ever that leads them. This is distinct of how science is supposed to be done, but some of their experiments are clever.
I did not bother reading the article, but the title made me think of signaling. "I can afford them, and I don't even need to work for that so I don't care how impractical they are".
"Elegant dress serves its purpose of elegance not only in that it is expensive, but also because it is the insignia of leisure," Thorsten Veblen wrote in his classic "The Theory of the Leisure Class" (1899). "It not only shows that the wearer is able to consume a relatively large value, but it argues at the same time that he consumes without producing."
My first thought looking at the examples in the article was that the soles of the shoes don't look much thicker than the uppers.
I read an article not too long ago about how the medieval walking style was different than today. The author believed it was more "toe-centered" [0] primarily because of thin-soled shoes.
