What is the origin of the word involution?

The earliest "source" of the involution is a few photos of famous schools.

Some pictures of college students' "involution" in the circle of friends are like this: some people are reading books on bicycles, some people are full of books on dormitory beds, and some even write papers on computers while riding bicycles. These photos were first circulated among the principals of Tsinghua Peking University. Later, buzzwords such as "riding a bike to watch the computer" and "Tsinghua Wang Juan" appeared in hot searches, and related expression packs also appeared in many college students' social software.

The word "involution" comes from the book "Agricultural involution-the process of Indonesian ecological change" by American anthropologist Gilte. According to Gilte's definition, "involution" refers to the phenomenon that a social or cultural model stagnates or cannot be transformed into another advanced model after reaching a certain form at a certain stage of development.

This concept was first used to study rice agriculture in Java. In colonial and post-colonial Java, agricultural production remained unchanged for a long time, and did not develop, but simply reproduced repeatedly. Can not improve the unit per capita output value.

Involution is a popular online word, which originally refers to a phenomenon that a cultural pattern cannot be stabilized or transformed into a new form after reaching a certain final form, but can only become more complicated internally.

Through the Internet, many college students use it to refer to irrational internal competition or "voluntary" competition. Now, it refers to the phenomenon that peers compete to make more efforts to compete for limited resources, which leads to the decline of individual "income-effort ratio" It can be regarded as "inflation" of efforts.