Ask HN: Are the 2020s the decade of peak homogenisation?
There's such a low cost of entry on most forms of digital media / art now that more people than ever just seem to be copying what's popular and adding to the non-stop barrage of beige unoriginality.
The Dribbble front page could all be the same designer at this point, electronic dance music particularly could be made completely interchangeably by any artist, no one seems to have their own design flair any more. Netflix / Disney etc seem to have copped onto one idea that works and just release the same tv show / movie over and over again with a slight tweak as it brings the money in without any worries.
Am I just now very old or is individuality in art and media now seen as a negative, whilst cookie-cutter straight-down-the-middle appeal-to-the-lowest-common-denominator-guff the only way to get ahead at the moment.
108 comments
[ 1.8 ms ] story [ 222 ms ] threadI try. But it's becoming harder and harder. When someone asks me my favourite TV/movie show I end up telling them something that is decade old. Something from time when I was still in college.
Lately I've been into the silents (Charlie Chaplin, Rudolph Valentino) but also Howard Hawkes movies not to mention things like
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Belle_de_Jour_(film) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Action_Jackson_(1988_film)
feel free to laugh but my son got the family (including my wife who teaches people to ride horses) to watch
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/My_Little_Pony:_Friendship_Is_...
... and then there are all the Gundam anime since Gundam 79, all the rest of Sliders, at least 200+ hours of video "in the queue".
I think how a few years back I would go see a movie like
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Guardians_of_the_Galaxy_(film)
in the theater. I was talking to my son the other day how we lost interest in Marvel and Star Wars movies... We never had a moment when we said "Marvel Sucks", but they rarely make it into the queue to watch on video. And going to the theater post-COVID seems implausible to me because I don't want to deal with disgusting popcorn mess.
I'm sure there are good movies made today, even more sure there are good TV shows, but they have to fight for every minute of view time they get.
Last week I watched 'Severance' on Apple TV. It was very good. Last night I watched the first episode of 'Tokyo Vice' on HBO Max and it was definitely good enough that I'll keep watching.
Sure, Billie Eilish sucks, but Wet Leg doesn't. (Apologies if you like Bilie Eilish, but art is subjective, not objective.) There's good stuff out there being made today, you just have to look for it.
We had the same argument yesterday in the thread, "Ask HN: When did tech stop being cool?" People responded the same, "It didn't, you're just old," and cited examples of cool technology. But in my opinion, the answer was the same: it's not that it stopped, but the volume has dropped. I think we could look at data of innovative startups and technologies and see the drop off -- not in terms of lack of existence but in terms of sheer volume of activity.
By the way, your examples are funny to me because, while I like both Wet Leg and Billie Eilish, to me the former is really fun but it's Billie who is doing something innovative, with a sort of ASMR vibe. Try "Everything I Wanted", "Billie Bossa Nova", "You Should See Me In a Crown" and "Ilomilo." Use high quality headphones or speakers at loud volume. There's something there.
Very wrong. Streaming and DAWs have led to an explosion of creatives in a wide variety of directions. Not sure how you could view Kygo, Lil Uzi Vert, Bladee, Porter Robinson, Dylan Brady / 100 gecs, and Cashmere Cat as interchangeable.
Finding good content always has and likely always will be like swimming in an ocean of mediocrity and clinging to a piece of floating weeknight saving originality. Often those are the things that survive the test of time while all the meh to okay content is forgotten about.
I don't think an individuality was in favor more yesterday then today.
I think that today we have an exponential growth of number of ways we consume some informations, while number of good ideas grows not that fast.
New, innovative, exciting cultural ideas come from small niche groups of people that are motivated by furthering those ideas. The further from those groups you get, the more easily-accessible, lowest common denominator, standardized and banal those ideas get.
I've found when I was young, more ideas were new to me, so I misattributed what really was standard and easy vs what was new and novel. But also, because so many ideas were new, and were new to my peers, if I did take an interest in one, I had a ready group of friends and colleagues that made finding the groups of people who truly were creating new ideas much easier.
As I age, if I haven't kept in touch with such innovative cultural groups, the ideas and media I am exposed to trends towards the standard and easily-mass-acceptible. And the fact that I have knowledge in those ideas already, makes it less likely for me to accidentally accept the mass-standardized ideas as novel.
But there absolutely are new cultural drivers out there. They just, clearly, aren't in the electronic dance music you're being exposed to. Innovative movie ideas aren't being pushed by Netflix and Disney. Etc
Art has long been a refuge for people who have other problems in life. Tech keeps looking for ways to ensnare eyeballs to ads and wallets to subscriptions.
If you combine the following three things:
- the number of people seeking refuge is increasing due to whatever you want to call the current social factors,
- modern digital art tools enable people to create aesthetically pleasant but not necessarily original things nearly instantly,
- these tools are modern tech properties owned by profit-seeking firms needing ROI in the modern financial landscape,
then you get what we have now.
This may seem like a bad thing, but it encourages new tools and when they get in the hands of truly capable artists, it's worth it.
Original stuff is out there, you just have to look hard. But you always had to look really hard for the good original stuff. For example: look at comic books pre-Internet. Most of them were very similar.
"Netflix / Disney etc seem to have copped onto one idea that works and just release the same tv show / movie over and over again with a slight tweak as it brings the money in without any worries."
This is the golden age of streaming. There's more diversity in show types on Netflix alone than across all platforms (movies, tv, direct to video) in the 90s. Paramount is almost entirely devoted to new Star Trek properties and HBO Max releases a new movie every month. If you aren't seeing innovation in story-telling its because you are a Philistine.
This question has real "kids today" energy.
There are different flavors of crap, but still all crap.
You’re just on the side that likes that kind of crap.
Kids today. :)
No golden age there.
and bollywood is obsessed with copying hollywood
In the past year or so, from memory:
- The Father 2020
- Titan 2021
- Another Round 2020
- Charlatan 2020
- Climax 2019
All of them are European movies and have been recognized internationally. None of them are even remotely close to copying another film. You can say that you don’t like or care about these movies but there is a lot of diversity in European productions.
To clarify, while there is more "good" TV now, through a mainstream view of any platform it really does all look like the same damn crap all over the place.
As an aside, you should check out "Everything Everywhere All At Once".
People believe music, movies and video are dead despite services like Soundcloud and Youtube.
People believe game devlopment is dead despite the explosion (in both quality and quantity) of indie gaming.
People believe movies are dead despite Netflix and streaming.
People still talk about television, theaters and newspapers as if they were relevant.
The quality of everything is going up, but everything is shit now.
I really am starting to wonder if Hacker News is just where old hackers go to yell at clouds.
> television, theaters and newspapers
in comparison, those had not consolidated into 1 or 2 brands, there were thousands of them worldwide and that matters, because it allowed obscure sub-cultures, which are the spices that then find their way into the global soup of western culture. Subcultures need a bubble to evolve in.
I think this is wrong. The average quality of everything is plummeting. Markets across the board are being flooded with shit.
But there are some strongholds out there resisting this race to the bottom, and there are soulful indie projects that weren't possible before.
If you were capable of producing something that wasn't shit, it's generally easier. But it's also easier for everyone to flood the market with shit.
The rough is expanding faster than the diamonds.
I disagree with electronic music though, loads of people listen to pop radio music or mainstream bigroom EDM (it all sounds the same but its been like that since the start) but you can still find great new music in almost any genre you want. It's not as if all the great producers are starting to sound the same.
Perhaps by successful corporations in contexts where "doing what works" is the safer bet (like you said, Disney). But of course it's not seen that way by individuals.
Overall I think you're just perceiving popular culture, not artistic mediums in general. E.g. for your point about EDM, maybe you're thinking of the music you hear in clubs or web radio, but the blanket indictment of EDM you've put forward is not correct I think.
Disney is definitely more guilty of what you're saying because they have a massive back catalog and get by mostly by buying existing IP or rebooting their own.
The feedback loops in our system function in such a way that edge-case creativity, the fun and weird stuff that via an incubation period eventually evolve into Nirvana, the Dead, Films (not movies), Warhol, get digested and broadcast to the broader culture too quickly for the creativity to actually develop. We get a mediocre version of it as a result. Put another way, its hard for a counter-culture to develop because Tiktok, Insta, FB, Netflix production pipelines, etc.
The Society of the Spectacle is a dense but short book that covers parts of this feeling - "Debord traces the development of a modern society in which authentic social life has been replaced with its representation..." [0]
Also, Moxie Marlinspike talks about something similar with Signal in that by having end-to-end private chats, it allows that safe space but in a digital context for ideas to develop between trusted parties, which then leads into creativity (or I suppose extremism etc).
[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Society_of_the_Spectacle
Media consolidation we've evolved into is nuts. Disney has turned American national culture into a creamy smoothie, Sinclair and Clear Channel have made radio and television across municipalities into photocopied and rubber-stamped content, and the Internet killed local newspapers.
We used to have a monolithic mainstream culture and a handful of subcultures. There is still a mainstream, but the subcultures have proliferated, and now are so niche and rapidly evolving that they're difficult to even track as real. Meanwhile, Sunday night football and Simpsons reruns keep chugging along unchanged for decades.
Although it was the cultural left that warned against media consolidation, we basically have the Telecommunications Deregulation Act of 1994 to blame for a lot of this. So, thanks Bill.
If you actually knew them you'd know there are some atomized individuals who "think different" like the Chinese incel who was begging his mom to pay for plastic surgery. We keep rooting for him to run away from home and live in a "Fight Club" house. He dropped out of the blackpill cult he was in because he didn't want to associate with Indians, so now we're worried he'll fall in people who incite violence.
https://www.documentjournal.com/2021/01/the-internet-didnt-k...
> Media consolidation we've evolved into is nuts
Compared to when there were three major broadcast TV networks, that were also the major broadcast radio networks, that also owned many of the local stations?
> Disney has turned American national culture into a creamy smoothie
This complaint is older than many adults.
> Sinclair and Clear Channel have made radio and television across municipalities into photocopied and rubber-stamped content
Again, narrow controls of broadcast outlets isn't new, and they matter less now than ever.
> the Internet killed local newspapers.
Corporate consolidation and destruction of local newsrooms in centralized media operations killed local newspapers. In the 1970s-1980s. The internet swept away the dead husks of zombie mastheads that were satellite distributors of centralized content and revitalized the content of the survivors.
> the subcultures have proliferated, and now are so niche and rapidly evolving that they're difficult to even track a
That’s just “there’s a lot more originality available than before” in other words.
You're not wrong, but crucially those three broadcast networks didn't run their own studios. They couldn't prefer their own, lowly-rated tv shows over more expensive, highly rated shows run by other studios.
Yes, they did (starting before they even were TV networks; NBC Studios has been around since the 1930s), though they also purchased outside content.
Just like the (more than three) major streaming services.
> They couldn't prefer their own, lowly-rated tv shows over more expensive, highly rated shows run by other studios.
Yes, they could. And did.
And besides, if someone is out there making weird, novel, innovative and unpopular art, the algorithm will never show it to you.
But what about user-curated content in communities such as Reddit? These are vote-based, not corporate-algorithm-based. I suspect you can find worthy unorthodox art there.
And of course if you need non-mainstream content, you have to actively look for it, and always have had, practically by definition.
People seek out novel and interesting things - there are subreddits and networks of subreddits dedicated to that. Popularity algorithms aren't monolithic, they take trends like novelty into account.
I recall growing up in redacted 4 decades ago and there was a popular radio station that played top 40 that we all listened to. I remember being disappointed on a road trip and listening to the exact same radio station in another state but with different DJs.
See also: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Broadcast_automation
There's a radio station here in City1 that has the same morning show hosts as the radio station in City2. They literally do two shows, or pre-record one, I'm not sure. They talk about local City1 news and such, so they try and make it relevant and local. But it's crazy! Are there no radio personalities in my city they could have hired?
Bonkers.
Anyways the morning show is "Willy in the Morning" and it's in three markets now, Vancouver, Calgary and Edmonton.
I grew up listening to Vancouver radio stations so it was a bit surprising when I heard some radio personalities I recognized in Calgary.
Source on three markets:
https://broadcastdialogue.com/corus-extends-reach-of-willy-i...
Craigslist and Google sealed the deal by eliminating ad revenue from the diverse media outlets that existed prior to 2000 (now long gone), thereby killing off all but the largest media outlets. Henceforth, all forms of entertainment has to be "giant corporate approved" in order to cut a distribution deal to sell the pap-ish drivel that corporate suits demand. Welcome to the machine, indeed.
The corporate consolidations have made it a conflict of interest for them to investigate themselves essentially (i.e. will you ever see stories on ABC that cast Disney in a bad light?)
You could say its ripe for a revolution but then you will have people asking how to monetize that revolution and you are back at the same problem.
I take it you haven't actually been on any of these platforms lately because there is an insane amount of niche content on all of them. In fact, catering to subculture and niche interests is what makes them successful.
Also, the commoditization of counterculture by mass media is a thing in general. Hip-hop, punk, anime, D&D, you name it.
Any new person into a space has to mimic others that are successful in order to get views - copying thumbnail formats, topics, video length, "putting links in the description in case you're interested" (aka buy stuff with my affiliate code), etc.
This leads to content within a niche forming a monolithic format/topics because they are all following the same "what works" roadmap for every channel in that niche. Everything is for profit, to do things counter to that means it is unseen, except rare cases like LockPickingLawyer but even his stuff is now pushing the products they make.
I do agree with the rest of what you say - inter connectivity seems to have suppressed the local and the hyper local. The internet promised endless possibilities of niches, but the corporations who seized that opportunity have managed to do something strange to them…
Majority of people will only watch what is trending, it creates a feedback cycle that perpetuates that kind of content which is popular with the mainstream. And whatever is mainstream is usually homogenised and boring.
As someone who watches quite a lot of movies, I always felt that they peaked sometime in the 70s.
But creativity and innovation are minor signals, outliers. Probabilistic search as used by AI and ML detects not outliers, but the peak of the bell curve, the patterns that are recognizable and most popular. If you hoped to find something unusual or unrecognizable or rare, AI/ML/statistics are the wrong tools to do that. To a naive AI algorithm, good outliers look no different from bad ones, so both will be overlooked in your search results.
The kids are going to run their mouths about your age. Ignore them.