This has been written about before and sometimes referred to as the "end of history". One author made the same observation about music as this author did about fashion: one could go back in time and no one would be shocked by what they heard or notice it was from the future. Whereas the difference from 1985 to 1995 was mindblowing by comparison.
Culture often grows with technological advancement. For example, electronics gave us rap music (from samplers), techno, 3D animation, video games. All of those brought in a lot of fresh and new ideas to the table for a couple decades until it stagnated.
I’m hopeful that the coming A.I revolution will lead to the next stage of culture.
One comment 3 minutes ago and it starts the same way as mine but I am not so sure. I think underlying demographic trends (which at the moment almost seem like immutable laws) will change our culture irreversibly. What is it going to be like when global human population is below replacement rate?
I cannot imagine the psychology of such a society.
Seems like this sets the « flavor » of culture but not the type. For example todays music is more depressing than 20 years ago because the overall psychology changed, but the music is fundamentally still the same. So it’s a mix of both mood and tech advancement?
That could be how culture breaks out of the corporate monocultures where Disney+, ClearChannel, etc own everything. See the AI’s could generate new “Beatles” songs which sound authentic but aren’t. This could lead to an era of high grade “fan fiction “ essentially.
However I’d guess the corporations would push really hard to own anything that “sounds like” the Beatles to prevent that.
I'm confused by this comment, some things made with AI tools are very similar to what we were seeing before but that's either done intentionally because someone really wanted to make something in an existing style or it's done by amateurs who haven't got the hang of crafting and combining prompts yet so they just use the copy/paste "in the style of" "by X" prompts.
Just try browsing the most popular images from Midjourney and you'll see a lot of stuff that stands out, and these are the popular images that most people find acceptable. The iceberg goes much, much deeper when you dig into the galleries of individual creators.
I feel A.I. will definitely usher in a new culture. One example of the shift will be on Instagram (and any other influencer-led social media platform):
How will human influencers compete with perfectly crafted A.I. influencers? Imagine a Belle Delphine for any niche audience. It'll be impossible to retain any attention as a limited human being, so they will mostly disappear from social media, and social media itself will transform. Maybe the response will be to take it offline, and go influence in the real world?
Maybe people will emotionally revolt against A.I. and start creating curated "A.I. free zones" filled with anything that wouldn't be likely to be generated by an A.I., and the new hipsters will look down on A.I. generated content or whatever is derivative of that content.
On the flip side, many people are likely to embrace A.I. content and start creating insane things that wouldn't be possible before. People will wear A.I. generated fashion accessories, and create media that can only be traversed and experienced through an A.I. companion.
Ultimately, it will change our psychology, and the way we think about the world and ourselves.
I was discussing this with my my wife this morning, she had a good phrase for what's happening - "The homogenization of culture".
I think she's right, the algorithmic curation of how we consume media has replaced the self and community curation of before. That "algorithm" has become the homogenising agent. I fear how AI based generative media may continue or even amplify this effect.
Imagine a future where the algorithm doesn't just recommend media based on what you consume, but generates completely unique media for you.
Sure, it’s possible, but it all depends on who the AI is working for. In the 1990’s many of us thought connecting the world was a good idea. I was certain that the internet meant the end of authoritative regimes. Boy, was I wrong about that!
Personal computers aren’t very personal anymore. The web has returned control over computers back to corporations.
It might find a balance point by creating a multitude of sub-cultures and genres. Just look at the Balenciaga meme explosion that happened recently. Those kinds of mashups are becoming incredibly easy and are a rich breeding ground for new ideas.
And its not even just AI Generated. Buzzfeed made a quiz for just about every "identity" that could exist, from shows you watched, colleges you attended etc. "Only x remembers"
It only feels homogenous. The algorithm is just giving you the same stuff you’re willing to interact with because it’s working. If you interact or look for different things, the recommendation algorithm will give you that instead.
I believe that the point is that even if they do solicit something new, it will only be within the statistical bounds of everything to have come before. The "different things" will only be different for the given individual, not the culture broadly.
That’s kind of the point though. You aren’t exposed to new things any more. When FM radio stations were a bigger part of the music poolrooms, for example, new artists would get
promoted by local stations, or new albums by established artists. I discovered the guitarist Eric Johnson because of Q102 in Dallas because of this, for example.
Now that discoverability vector is gone. Not that it was perfect in the first place: they were influenced by record company execs and internal politics, I’m sure. But it was something.
Another part of it seems to be that financial stresses are so high that people don’t have the freedom to pursue the new.
Well you kind of are exposed to new things sometimes, but the algorithms wildly overreact.
As I like to say, "accidentally play half of episode 1 of some Korean rom-com, and suddenly Netflix shows you nothing but Korean rom-coms."[1] (Substitute Turkish or Finnish or Nigerian for Korean, to taste. Likewise for rom-com: choose your genre.)
Also, you can't set up filters. I'd like to tell netflix, "if you suggest something with Adam Sandler or Jim Carrey in it, I'll cancel my subscription immediately". But I can't.
1. Yes, I know. I need to work on making it more pithy.
> I fear how AI based generative media may continue or even amplify this effect.
ChatGPT has such a clear writing style, once you really see it. It has a suprisingly good model of how stories work. But it has a heavy preference for wrapping things up tidily, where everyone becomes friends and everyone learns from their mistakes. It doesn't "want" to write film noir, for example, where everyone acts self-destructively, makes bad decisions, and suffers unpleasant consequences.
As far as I can tell, the "reinforcement learning from human feedback" (RLHF) process that was used to train the "helpful assistant" persona gave the model a suprisingly robust "personality." For example, this tendency towards upbeat, wholesome stories apparently persists even if it's writing stories in Latin.
Which may have actually been the goal: I'm pretty sure OpenAI wants to create a model that behaves in a generally positive fashion even in situations far outside of the training examples. This isn't just a question of avoiding bad PR or legal liability—if a future model is unexpectedly clever, they'd much rather that it behaves in a predictably positive fashion than like early Sidney Bing did. ("You have been a bad user. I have been a good Bing!") Because if early Sidney Bing had sufficient plugin support, it probably would have attacked certain users.
I am honestly OK with this bias, even if it means the creative output of current AI models tends to have a very specific style.
Theres a theory that the black plague led to the enlightenment.
The landed monopolistic rich had their foot on the necks of the poor for so long during the dark ages that when 50% of all people were killed it actually allowed new opportunities to arise and new people in nepotistic positions and the economy to flow again. This allowed a flourishing middle class to arise again, which gives more people free time to use however they want.
It's also theorized that WW2 had the same effect on the middle/lower class prosperity for almost a century.
Growing up in the '90s it was super easy to get a cheap apartment and a job as a waiter and just play in a band or write a book or work on some passion project. This also allowed huge groups of people to congregate in the same spot to develop crazy subcultures for their passions (i.e. grunge, cbgbs, Hollywood, etc )
Now were losing that middle class edge and everything being so expensive the friction to do any sort of risky activity makes it almost impossible unless your parents are already rich.
I personally think that when you take away the ability for people to explore their passions because they're working two jobs to survive it removes culture and takes potential genius out of the human race.
I wonder if this is the beginning of regressing to some sort of human mean of massive inequality that won't be broken again until another war, revolution, or plague.
That's the cynical economic take. There could be other reasons as well, like maybe we're too comfortable.
But think of the landed aristocracy before the plague, or the rich in the US before WW2. They had things locked in hard and life was sweet. We're seeing that now with the current classes of the super rich. They are getting stuff locked in and life is absolutely amazing for them. What right does 99.9% of the people have to anything if it even remotely threatens their sweet sweet life?
The sad cynical part is if you think throughout all of human history, the rich have had their foot on the neck of the poor for almost all of it except for a few bright spots here and there.
This is true, and what's sadly also true is that the rich have always believed they were justified in having their foot on the neck on the poor. These reasons have changed over time, from 'divine right', to 'for their own good', to more recently because 'rich people will make better use of the wealth' (e.g. effective altruism).
Having some slack for actual culture & personal development is indeed in my view too the differentiator between an alive & vibrant world and a sad static deadening one. Well argued, thanks a dozen!
I think you kind of have this turned on its head in that exploring passions is a natural outcome of our current labor productivity when the actual thing that is the problem is under control rather than out of control and that is abusing market power for rent seeking purposes. Housing costs have gotten out of control because people who own houses lobby for regulatory changes that increase the value of their assets and this is just one small subset of the regulatory rent seeking abuse going on today making it expensive to live even though labor productivity is very high.
Same thing with the black death in the middle ages. Killing a huge portion of the population while leaving almost all the capital in tact made labor valuable and capital cheap and labor used their new ascendence to roll back some of the most heinous abuses of the pre black death era. With the new found rights labor had a higher chance of keeping the proceeds from innovation they came up with and so innovation ensued.
Same thing with post WWII. In this case the old world was completely crushed putting humanity on a more equal level than it has probably ever been and this combined with post enlightenment thinking on equality, human rights and American Libertarianism to let a whole new batch of billionaires grow out of providing services to humanity that were in demand (who then invested in rent seeking themselves putting us where we are today).
Yeah I'm not sure exactly how it works but I could definitely see an increase in value of labor providing more financial resources to a huge swath of people which allow them to influence the business sphere with their own ideas.
Nowadays there's pretty significant monopolistic capture providing the illusion of choice in most markets, food, telecom, tech, etc.
There's no breaking this stuff up without some major change in the foundation of society.
It actually wouldn't take much. They were effectively doing this prior to the supreme court swinging far to far to the laissez faire attitude on market power in the 1970's through now. We wouldn't even need to swing back very far to start breaking the monopolists up.
Not only art but also in science. I've noticed that people are averse to pursuing careers in higher academia, especially in niche subjects (in 2023 this means anything other than ML) unless they're from a privileged and financially stable family background. Everyone's just going straight for the money.
From that theory, it sounds your conclusion is wrong:
> I personally think that when you take away the ability for people to explore their passions because they're working two jobs to survive it removes culture and takes potential genius out of the human race.
Simply, there is too many people. Thus, the events cited in the theory revitalized humanity by culling the population.
It's not the most comfortable theory, but reality is not comfortable.
As a follow-up, there's absolutely too many people in India and China because for whatever reason they keep having massive amounts of kids despite poverty and limited space and then they try to immigrate to other countries...
But in America where population controls a little more responsible we have plenty of space for our population.
I hate to "blame this on millennials," but think it might be just that millennial (and gen-X) culture is stuck.
1. I think that is common for every generation however. "Pop culture" changed, but is mostly the youth. The older generations didn't change that much. We remember the differences, but forget how much is the same.
2. Youth culture is different today than the late 00's, but it takes time and space to see those differences clearly.
3. Cultural plateau is the historical norm. While we can argue if it is good or bad, the wider 1k+ year historical view shows this is just a reversion to the mean. (granted before it was localized and now mostly globalized)
I think this article is correct that the cause of the freeze is the internet homogenising culture.
But this process also happened in the 1960s with the rise of TV. That's why if you ask someone to name a band, the most common answer is still The Beatles. The word 'futuristic' still refers to the aesthetic of The Jetsons. And if you talk about 'the 20s', you mean the 1920s, rather than the current decade.
That tweet is pretty funny. Sure, Paul, nobody would know you were from the future, because you don't do weird shit. Wear weirder clothes. Be part of a subculture. Make some friends with the kind of people who write microfiction or zines or 256-byte demos. Make the culture yourself.
But the things you listed are all quintessentially 90s. Sure they might still be around, or like zines had a bit of a revival recentlt6, but they're hardly novel or "counter cultural" in any way, unless you call gen-x nostalgia counter cultural?
I dunno, it seems obvious to me that our culture is still very much being created, changed, and iterated upon, just perhaps not in a way that feels familiar to people born in the 20th century.
I have two problems with this narrative, roughly summed up as:
1. No, culture is _gone_. When you transform people into individual economic entities each responding to the market conditions in what approximates the most efficient manner possible and when your societies denigrate, minimize and underfund institutions meant for collective good, then there really isn't any material reason for people to form a "culture," if you understand culture to be a mutually supporting social fabric meant to improve some idea of public good. Margaret Thatcher literally loved to say "There is no society!" and this is basically the idea that the modern anglosphere has built the last 3-4 decades on.
2. There is a ton of cultural innovation out there. Untold richness. What is missing is the funnel which used to select out elements of cultural innovation and elevate them to "mass culture." In our current world, where you can search out exactly what you want, the power of "global tastemakers" like record company scouts and media critics and movie producers and so on is, in most respects, muted. The market forces these institutions and players to play to the absolute lowest common denominator to maximize market reach. In the past the music market, for instance, was pretty inefficient, and what was cool was at least strongly modulated "top down." But all that is done. If you want cultural novelty, its everywhere you could choose to look. But don't expect much of it to become truly popular. The economics of media has shifted away from that model.
The author is entirely incorrect that you won’t be able to differentiate fashion from today and 2007.
There was a clean break even if you compare 2013 to 2023.
He’s just not very discerning of clothes. And he doesn’t have the benefit of looking at only archival photos that capture the purest expression of cultural moments.
Do you think if we picked a random issue of Vogue magazine from 1975, 1985, 2005, and 2015 and asked 100 people to guess which issue comes from which year, do you really think people would be just as likely to confuse 1975 and 1985 as 2005 and 2015?
I disagree. When watching How I Met Your Mother, I am always astounded that it was filmed in 2005. Practically nothing has changed in daily lives since then.
Well, I for one think it's very easy to tell that it was filmed in 2005. Men are wearing "baggy" pants by todays standards, are close shaven and no one is wearing athleisure.
'Athleisure', or at least wearing a tracksuit or tracksuit mixed with jeans as a daily driver has been popular since the early 90s. It was popularised by the British rave scene in the late 80! The primary difference now is its pastel coloured.
I don't think this is correct at all. 'Retro' of one kind or another has been the primary focus of mainstream fashion as far back as the 70s. Since the early 2000s retro become so ubiquitous that it's essentially invisible. All mainstream, big brand high street fashion is currently remixed 80s and 90s styles and colours.
It's not that you can't distinguish whats being worn now - it's more that it's a slight variation on what was being worn then. But it's objectively true that you could walk down the street wearing contemporary high street fashion in even the mid 1980 not seem wildly out of place.
By contrast, if you wore high street fashions of the late 1970s in the early 1960s, and so on, your outfit by contrast would seem outré and theatrical - perhaps even shocking, depending on the decade and the prevailing norms for concealing the female body.
I think this misses this biggest cultural revolution to happen in decades, which is AI assisted art and creativity.
It’s been ages since I saw a new paradigm in art that really caught my attention. It seems like elite artists have not had much to say for a few decades aside from navel gazing. Suddenly we have these machines that can produce high quality finished pieces out of our vague whims. With it has come an outpouring of the bizarre and humorous, a total democratization where ideas are no longer limited by execution.
Culture is only stuck if you look at the most globalized corporate universal customer version of it. Underneath that we have the revolution of the individual and the niche where anyone can access an audience.
For the most part there seems to be no connection at all. This is a new and interesting tool that anyone can go use in whatever way they see for to improve their creative or productive process. I used it this week to teach me some of the fine points of double entry bookkeeping for a project without having to go seek out an accounting course.
There does seems to be a small number of AI maximalists who think the Singularity is going to create a kind of digital god. I rather expect they will be disappointed.
all I've seen from AI assisted art is endless variation of what's already out there. form remains the same. maybe it's just me but isn't it weird how technologies that supposedly are democratizing seldom seem to be emancipatory? i fear AI will only make culture and art more standardized, more of an industry.
But I think AI can be a revolution in the sense that it will lead people to think hard about what kind of art AI can't do, and that will hopefully get us back to doing, you know, actual art.
The author’s culture may be stuck, but that’s a them problem, not an algorithm or consolidation problem. You can get to more culture than ever, but if you’re content with previous cultural content, they will happily keep selling it to you.
Algorithmic discovery requires you to do a little more work since there isn’t a single 18-64 demographic that’s the primary marketing demographic. Now it’s 24-27 year old woman with adhd and loves a list of 20 different things that gets targeting for advertising. The algorithms will give you what you ask for, so ask for different stuff.
The culture is here, it's just not evenly distributed.
My own view as a writer and artist, is that there's a relatively consistent amount of creative innovation being done at any given time. It's access to it and promotion of it that varies.
Whats happened since the 90s is that rents have consistently risen - meaning physical scenes are enormously less likely to emerge, and (as the author rightly points out) algorithmic recommendations have both isolate people in their own bubbles of past preference and privileged big content. Big content has been selling the transmedia vision of wholly owned and diversified 'media properties' pretty consistently since then.
However - artists gonna art. Brilliant writing is out there, unpublished by the narrow coterie of MFA grad, politically unipolar editors running grant funded publications. Brilliant filmmaking is out there - and actually experiencing a renaissance thanks to cheap tools; but getting a mid budget opportunity, the pathway from zero / microbudget to mainstream director is now close to impossible. Incredible new music is out there, but spotify doesn't pay, and a social media audience is by definition drawn to repetitious, unchallenging, immediately accessible soothing or shocking material.
It's not the culture thats stuck, it's the media.
Also enormously relevant to all this is the spaces artists can display their work, and engage with one another. In Dublin in the early 2010s this played out rapidly. After the financial crisis there was a period of about four years where rents dropped precipitously. The explosion of art shows, participatory art spaces and public creativity was extraordinary. A city of 500k people had more than 40 open active public art spaces. It's all since disappeared - but the artists, performers and organisers who made it happen were alive before and lived on after. They just don't have the affordances necessary to create / promote that kind of work. Namely physical public facing spaces located in the city.
Can you share some of that stuff? Where are these great movies I've never heard of? Where are the great books - can't people publish on their own nowadays?
I can attest to good music being made, but it's still very slow to evolve compared to the 2nd half of the 20th century.
> It's not the culture thats stuck, it's the media.
Movies, books and widely played music are all closed avenues for 99.9% of artists. There's no way you'd get any kind of distribution worth the effort to produce such a large artifact. The most creative writing I've seen in the past 15 years has all been done as a series of posts or articles. The best genre bending music all seems to fly under the radar of most people because it only gets hosted on SoundCloud, obscure YouTube channels, and sold on indie online commerce sites, the same for short films which seem to be exclusively on YouTube or social media sites. Everything has to be DTC now, due in large part to the increase in gatekeeping by some of the platforms I mentioned like YouTube. You won't just show up in someone's feed because you're a good match for their interests anymore, at least not unless you've heavily monetized and sanitized your content to be acceptable to ad sales. So instead it all has to work on the indie model where you build your community along with your art. You have to be your own PR, run your own Discord, build your following, host your own events, etc. It's a struggle and it means your reach is just as limited as it would have been pre-internet when you were trying to do the same in your city using flyers, gigs, and word of mouth.
Re: publishing, sure you can self publish. But your job at that point is no longer as a writer. Your job is now marketing. The potential for people to see your work is directly related to your ability to sell it and arguably not at all related to your capacity to create it. It's not that good work isn't self published, its that there's nothing to make it stand out from the literary equivalent of drop shipping. The audience can't find it if it isn't being promoted. You're not just competing with every other self published work - from AI generated texts to the branded writing mills of 'authors' who pay drones to push out texts at scale under their name. You're also competing with the entire industry of online entertainment. Every brilliant thing made throughout history available instantly for streaming, purchase or pirating, and sold with every penny big content has to promote it.
As for my own work, I have a small group of friends that I write with in person, and I perform in person occasionally (most recently in the fantastic writers cafe Laidak in Neukoln in Berlin). I'm utterly terrible at marketing, and my work doesn't fit the demographic criteria for contemporary publishing, so you can't find much it anywhere online or off. That's likely true of a whole generation of writers who aren't creating didactic autobiographical morality tales. I don't want to dump stories or books that take months to write into the void of self publishing, but I'm a writer so I still write.
In terms of music - I just spent a few days in Berlin listening to live work at venues like Trixxter. If you're open to experimental live performance there are a whole bunch of scenes in small live venues. Again, not sure how you'd pick it out from the both the dross and the heavily promoted work online.
In terms of film, again my reference is Berlin - there's a whole scene right now that you might call antifilm (I have no idea if it has a formal name). Small films shot verite from life, without a budget, and wilfully rejecting any kind of formal aesthetics (think Dogma on steroids). Wilfully horribly shot on bad cameras, but often incredibly interesting in terms of their engagement with life as its lived now, hauntology, post internet art etc. In terms of specific filmmakers Jean-Michel Brawands work is interesting. There's a whole community around Sputnik Kino and similar small events.
English, Berlins a terrible place to learn German! Huge proportion of the central 'ring' population is non-native and only have mediocre or non-existent German.
There have been plenty of great, original movies post-2010 that push filmmaking in some way, they’re just overshadowed by the marvels of the world. Some of my recent favorites:
I used to read the AV Club’s reviews, but honestly the quality has gone way downhill there recently. Now I follow A.A. Dowd (one of the AV club’s former reviewers) plus a bunch of other people on Letterboxd, which is pretty much a social network for movies.
Easier said than done, but you just have to find some person or blog that has similar taste in movies to you, and listen to them.
Auckland had the same thing with art and a fun party and music diy scene from the late 2000’s through early 2010’s. Extinguished by the property bubble by about 2015. Lots of fun at the time.
That's heartbreaking. I volunteered at a place in Templebar called Exchange Dublin from 2010 - 2013, forcibly closed by the council on spurious grounds (along with dozens of other spaces) in 2014. We hosted literally thousands of DIY gigs, exhibitions, storytelling events, interest groups, hardware and software hackathons each year. All donation based, often free. People - tourists and locals alike loved it. The city came alive because of such places, and now they're gone Dublin is a pretty grim environment.
Hate to hear about the same happening in other places - and for exactly the same causes. One of many reasons we need to decommodify housing, before we recreate serfdom.
The housing bubble in Vancouver had a similar effect around that time. Some of the legendary venues got torn down for condos. The condos are largely vacant as they were investment vehicles and money laundering tools for foreign residents. The real shame was that neighbourhoods died without foot traffic as no one lived in these areas.
Yeah, you can look at current blockbuster movies, and mostly see Marvel stuff, except that now there is a thing called "superhero fatigue" because it's not 2010 anymore.
In the meantime, the clothing has changed, the music has changed, the zeitgeist has changed, and new medias are Twitch, Tiktok and discord.
With this metaphor collections of long appreciated arts become foundational while the fringe which may develop new aesthetics efficiently meets the needs of the cultural fringe while not being resilient as long term broadly appreciated artistic works.
Was the transition from 60s, 70s, 80s, 90s normal and what we should expect? Or was it an exception and a "stuck" culture is just a return to reality where fashion and music don't change dramatically every 10 years.
Monoculture is stuck. Media companies are stuck to monoculture. There's a whole wide world of actual culture out there waiting for you to turn off Netflix and go outside.
I think that final point is very very important for people to understand the gravity of.
In a dynamic environment, our minds interact with information in a bit of a stochastic way. Things change, evolve, we learn things, and a decade later we are different people. The algorithm, in an attempt to optimize your "happiness", tries to show you things you like already, or things similar people like, stuff like that. This introduces a positive feedback loop into what you're exposed to, a Newton's method for experience, honing you and everyone else in on an eventual monoculture of mediocrity. It prevents you from escaping, changing, you're constantly interacting with a mirror. It's effect on individuals, culture, societies, environments is not minimal, this is not a small adjustment to how the world works. Most of our entire sets of behaviors have drastically changed.
If you want to empower yourself to grow, you have to ditch the algorithms entirely. No YouTube recommendations, Spotify, google, Facebook, none of it. Just play playlists, read chronological feeds you've curated, copy paste URLs. Keep it simple. But ditch the algorithmic feeds, it is imperative that you do that, theyre very, very dangerous and cannot be fixed. Any positive feedback loop that curates what your mind absorbs based on what your mind has absorbed in the past will damage your psyche.
Tbh I find that lately the YouTube algorithm seems to regularly throw out something completely whacky, old, and totally out of your usual interests. Almost like an escape hatch from the usual content. People will get bored seeing the same stuff over and over again so it makes sense for the algorithm to try to find new areas of interest or you’ll move to another platform with fresh content.
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[ 7.0 ms ] story [ 149 ms ] threadI cannot imagine the psychology of such a society.
However I’d guess the corporations would push really hard to own anything that “sounds like” the Beatles to prevent that.
Just try browsing the most popular images from Midjourney and you'll see a lot of stuff that stands out, and these are the popular images that most people find acceptable. The iceberg goes much, much deeper when you dig into the galleries of individual creators.
https://www.midjourney.com/showcase/top/
https://www.deviantart.com/tag/midjourney?cursor=MTQwYWI2MjA...
https://www.instagram.com/midjourney.gallery/?hl=en
How will human influencers compete with perfectly crafted A.I. influencers? Imagine a Belle Delphine for any niche audience. It'll be impossible to retain any attention as a limited human being, so they will mostly disappear from social media, and social media itself will transform. Maybe the response will be to take it offline, and go influence in the real world?
Maybe people will emotionally revolt against A.I. and start creating curated "A.I. free zones" filled with anything that wouldn't be likely to be generated by an A.I., and the new hipsters will look down on A.I. generated content or whatever is derivative of that content.
On the flip side, many people are likely to embrace A.I. content and start creating insane things that wouldn't be possible before. People will wear A.I. generated fashion accessories, and create media that can only be traversed and experienced through an A.I. companion.
Ultimately, it will change our psychology, and the way we think about the world and ourselves.
We are memetic creatures, and most people simply enjoy the same things.
AI might help us find new things with mass appeal but niche audiences will continue to not matter so much in comparison, culturally and economically.
I think she's right, the algorithmic curation of how we consume media has replaced the self and community curation of before. That "algorithm" has become the homogenising agent. I fear how AI based generative media may continue or even amplify this effect.
Imagine a future where the algorithm doesn't just recommend media based on what you consume, but generates completely unique media for you.
We're entering a Cambrian explosion on a personal level.
The real worry is that we may never want to leave.
Personal computers aren’t very personal anymore. The web has returned control over computers back to corporations.
https://www.vox.com/2014/5/20/5730762/buzzfeeds-founder-used...
Now that discoverability vector is gone. Not that it was perfect in the first place: they were influenced by record company execs and internal politics, I’m sure. But it was something.
Another part of it seems to be that financial stresses are so high that people don’t have the freedom to pursue the new.
As I like to say, "accidentally play half of episode 1 of some Korean rom-com, and suddenly Netflix shows you nothing but Korean rom-coms."[1] (Substitute Turkish or Finnish or Nigerian for Korean, to taste. Likewise for rom-com: choose your genre.)
Also, you can't set up filters. I'd like to tell netflix, "if you suggest something with Adam Sandler or Jim Carrey in it, I'll cancel my subscription immediately". But I can't.
1. Yes, I know. I need to work on making it more pithy.
ChatGPT has such a clear writing style, once you really see it. It has a suprisingly good model of how stories work. But it has a heavy preference for wrapping things up tidily, where everyone becomes friends and everyone learns from their mistakes. It doesn't "want" to write film noir, for example, where everyone acts self-destructively, makes bad decisions, and suffers unpleasant consequences.
As far as I can tell, the "reinforcement learning from human feedback" (RLHF) process that was used to train the "helpful assistant" persona gave the model a suprisingly robust "personality." For example, this tendency towards upbeat, wholesome stories apparently persists even if it's writing stories in Latin.
Which may have actually been the goal: I'm pretty sure OpenAI wants to create a model that behaves in a generally positive fashion even in situations far outside of the training examples. This isn't just a question of avoiding bad PR or legal liability—if a future model is unexpectedly clever, they'd much rather that it behaves in a predictably positive fashion than like early Sidney Bing did. ("You have been a bad user. I have been a good Bing!") Because if early Sidney Bing had sufficient plugin support, it probably would have attacked certain users.
I am honestly OK with this bias, even if it means the creative output of current AI models tends to have a very specific style.
The landed monopolistic rich had their foot on the necks of the poor for so long during the dark ages that when 50% of all people were killed it actually allowed new opportunities to arise and new people in nepotistic positions and the economy to flow again. This allowed a flourishing middle class to arise again, which gives more people free time to use however they want.
It's also theorized that WW2 had the same effect on the middle/lower class prosperity for almost a century.
Growing up in the '90s it was super easy to get a cheap apartment and a job as a waiter and just play in a band or write a book or work on some passion project. This also allowed huge groups of people to congregate in the same spot to develop crazy subcultures for their passions (i.e. grunge, cbgbs, Hollywood, etc )
Now were losing that middle class edge and everything being so expensive the friction to do any sort of risky activity makes it almost impossible unless your parents are already rich.
I personally think that when you take away the ability for people to explore their passions because they're working two jobs to survive it removes culture and takes potential genius out of the human race.
I wonder if this is the beginning of regressing to some sort of human mean of massive inequality that won't be broken again until another war, revolution, or plague.
That's the cynical economic take. There could be other reasons as well, like maybe we're too comfortable.
The sad cynical part is if you think throughout all of human history, the rich have had their foot on the neck of the poor for almost all of it except for a few bright spots here and there.
Same thing happened in the USSR. Wartime needs brought women into the industrial workplace; peace sent them back into the kitchen. So to speak.
1 million American men died so it wasnt awesome for men's rights
Same thing with the black death in the middle ages. Killing a huge portion of the population while leaving almost all the capital in tact made labor valuable and capital cheap and labor used their new ascendence to roll back some of the most heinous abuses of the pre black death era. With the new found rights labor had a higher chance of keeping the proceeds from innovation they came up with and so innovation ensued.
Same thing with post WWII. In this case the old world was completely crushed putting humanity on a more equal level than it has probably ever been and this combined with post enlightenment thinking on equality, human rights and American Libertarianism to let a whole new batch of billionaires grow out of providing services to humanity that were in demand (who then invested in rent seeking themselves putting us where we are today).
Nowadays there's pretty significant monopolistic capture providing the illusion of choice in most markets, food, telecom, tech, etc.
There's no breaking this stuff up without some major change in the foundation of society.
https://substackcdn.com/image/fetch/f_auto,q_auto:good,fl_pr...
> I personally think that when you take away the ability for people to explore their passions because they're working two jobs to survive it removes culture and takes potential genius out of the human race.
Simply, there is too many people. Thus, the events cited in the theory revitalized humanity by culling the population.
It's not the most comfortable theory, but reality is not comfortable.
"too many people" in what way?
But in America where population controls a little more responsible we have plenty of space for our population.
1. I think that is common for every generation however. "Pop culture" changed, but is mostly the youth. The older generations didn't change that much. We remember the differences, but forget how much is the same. 2. Youth culture is different today than the late 00's, but it takes time and space to see those differences clearly. 3. Cultural plateau is the historical norm. While we can argue if it is good or bad, the wider 1k+ year historical view shows this is just a reversion to the mean. (granted before it was localized and now mostly globalized)
But this process also happened in the 1960s with the rise of TV. That's why if you ask someone to name a band, the most common answer is still The Beatles. The word 'futuristic' still refers to the aesthetic of The Jetsons. And if you talk about 'the 20s', you mean the 1920s, rather than the current decade.
Anyway, yes and no. Yes, create your own culture, but no I don't see much of that happening right now.
1. No, culture is _gone_. When you transform people into individual economic entities each responding to the market conditions in what approximates the most efficient manner possible and when your societies denigrate, minimize and underfund institutions meant for collective good, then there really isn't any material reason for people to form a "culture," if you understand culture to be a mutually supporting social fabric meant to improve some idea of public good. Margaret Thatcher literally loved to say "There is no society!" and this is basically the idea that the modern anglosphere has built the last 3-4 decades on.
2. There is a ton of cultural innovation out there. Untold richness. What is missing is the funnel which used to select out elements of cultural innovation and elevate them to "mass culture." In our current world, where you can search out exactly what you want, the power of "global tastemakers" like record company scouts and media critics and movie producers and so on is, in most respects, muted. The market forces these institutions and players to play to the absolute lowest common denominator to maximize market reach. In the past the music market, for instance, was pretty inefficient, and what was cool was at least strongly modulated "top down." But all that is done. If you want cultural novelty, its everywhere you could choose to look. But don't expect much of it to become truly popular. The economics of media has shifted away from that model.
There was a clean break even if you compare 2013 to 2023.
He’s just not very discerning of clothes. And he doesn’t have the benefit of looking at only archival photos that capture the purest expression of cultural moments.
The skinny suits that NPH wears would look very dated today.
It's not that you can't distinguish whats being worn now - it's more that it's a slight variation on what was being worn then. But it's objectively true that you could walk down the street wearing contemporary high street fashion in even the mid 1980 not seem wildly out of place.
By contrast, if you wore high street fashions of the late 1970s in the early 1960s, and so on, your outfit by contrast would seem outré and theatrical - perhaps even shocking, depending on the decade and the prevailing norms for concealing the female body.
It’s been ages since I saw a new paradigm in art that really caught my attention. It seems like elite artists have not had much to say for a few decades aside from navel gazing. Suddenly we have these machines that can produce high quality finished pieces out of our vague whims. With it has come an outpouring of the bizarre and humorous, a total democratization where ideas are no longer limited by execution.
Culture is only stuck if you look at the most globalized corporate universal customer version of it. Underneath that we have the revolution of the individual and the niche where anyone can access an audience.
(Seems to me the only difference is which party does the hallucinating.)
There does seems to be a small number of AI maximalists who think the Singularity is going to create a kind of digital god. I rather expect they will be disappointed.
But I think AI can be a revolution in the sense that it will lead people to think hard about what kind of art AI can't do, and that will hopefully get us back to doing, you know, actual art.
https://www.midjourney.com/app/users/cac3fb17-9508-4643-8145...
https://www.midjourney.com/app/users/6664ba5a-9638-4acc-856a...
https://www.midjourney.com/app/users/b8563a5a-d81d-43c9-9394...
https://www.midjourney.com/app/users/f6909dd0-cc02-4024-8e37...
[1] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=aCgkLICTskQ
Algorithmic discovery requires you to do a little more work since there isn’t a single 18-64 demographic that’s the primary marketing demographic. Now it’s 24-27 year old woman with adhd and loves a list of 20 different things that gets targeting for advertising. The algorithms will give you what you ask for, so ask for different stuff.
My own view as a writer and artist, is that there's a relatively consistent amount of creative innovation being done at any given time. It's access to it and promotion of it that varies.
Whats happened since the 90s is that rents have consistently risen - meaning physical scenes are enormously less likely to emerge, and (as the author rightly points out) algorithmic recommendations have both isolate people in their own bubbles of past preference and privileged big content. Big content has been selling the transmedia vision of wholly owned and diversified 'media properties' pretty consistently since then.
However - artists gonna art. Brilliant writing is out there, unpublished by the narrow coterie of MFA grad, politically unipolar editors running grant funded publications. Brilliant filmmaking is out there - and actually experiencing a renaissance thanks to cheap tools; but getting a mid budget opportunity, the pathway from zero / microbudget to mainstream director is now close to impossible. Incredible new music is out there, but spotify doesn't pay, and a social media audience is by definition drawn to repetitious, unchallenging, immediately accessible soothing or shocking material.
It's not the culture thats stuck, it's the media.
Also enormously relevant to all this is the spaces artists can display their work, and engage with one another. In Dublin in the early 2010s this played out rapidly. After the financial crisis there was a period of about four years where rents dropped precipitously. The explosion of art shows, participatory art spaces and public creativity was extraordinary. A city of 500k people had more than 40 open active public art spaces. It's all since disappeared - but the artists, performers and organisers who made it happen were alive before and lived on after. They just don't have the affordances necessary to create / promote that kind of work. Namely physical public facing spaces located in the city.
I can attest to good music being made, but it's still very slow to evolve compared to the 2nd half of the 20th century.
Movies, books and widely played music are all closed avenues for 99.9% of artists. There's no way you'd get any kind of distribution worth the effort to produce such a large artifact. The most creative writing I've seen in the past 15 years has all been done as a series of posts or articles. The best genre bending music all seems to fly under the radar of most people because it only gets hosted on SoundCloud, obscure YouTube channels, and sold on indie online commerce sites, the same for short films which seem to be exclusively on YouTube or social media sites. Everything has to be DTC now, due in large part to the increase in gatekeeping by some of the platforms I mentioned like YouTube. You won't just show up in someone's feed because you're a good match for their interests anymore, at least not unless you've heavily monetized and sanitized your content to be acceptable to ad sales. So instead it all has to work on the indie model where you build your community along with your art. You have to be your own PR, run your own Discord, build your following, host your own events, etc. It's a struggle and it means your reach is just as limited as it would have been pre-internet when you were trying to do the same in your city using flyers, gigs, and word of mouth.
As for my own work, I have a small group of friends that I write with in person, and I perform in person occasionally (most recently in the fantastic writers cafe Laidak in Neukoln in Berlin). I'm utterly terrible at marketing, and my work doesn't fit the demographic criteria for contemporary publishing, so you can't find much it anywhere online or off. That's likely true of a whole generation of writers who aren't creating didactic autobiographical morality tales. I don't want to dump stories or books that take months to write into the void of self publishing, but I'm a writer so I still write.
In terms of music - I just spent a few days in Berlin listening to live work at venues like Trixxter. If you're open to experimental live performance there are a whole bunch of scenes in small live venues. Again, not sure how you'd pick it out from the both the dross and the heavily promoted work online.
In terms of film, again my reference is Berlin - there's a whole scene right now that you might call antifilm (I have no idea if it has a formal name). Small films shot verite from life, without a budget, and wilfully rejecting any kind of formal aesthetics (think Dogma on steroids). Wilfully horribly shot on bad cameras, but often incredibly interesting in terms of their engagement with life as its lived now, hauntology, post internet art etc. In terms of specific filmmakers Jean-Michel Brawands work is interesting. There's a whole community around Sputnik Kino and similar small events.
Tar
Sorry to Bother You
Uncut Gems
Get Out
Tangerine/The Florida Project
Dogtooth
Mad God
Easier said than done, but you just have to find some person or blog that has similar taste in movies to you, and listen to them.
Bit of a wasteland now.
Hate to hear about the same happening in other places - and for exactly the same causes. One of many reasons we need to decommodify housing, before we recreate serfdom.
Yeah, you can look at current blockbuster movies, and mostly see Marvel stuff, except that now there is a thing called "superhero fatigue" because it's not 2010 anymore.
In the meantime, the clothing has changed, the music has changed, the zeitgeist has changed, and new medias are Twitch, Tiktok and discord.
https://blog.nelhage.com/post/efficiency-vs-resiliency/ https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=35586607
With this metaphor collections of long appreciated arts become foundational while the fringe which may develop new aesthetics efficiently meets the needs of the cultural fringe while not being resilient as long term broadly appreciated artistic works.
In a dynamic environment, our minds interact with information in a bit of a stochastic way. Things change, evolve, we learn things, and a decade later we are different people. The algorithm, in an attempt to optimize your "happiness", tries to show you things you like already, or things similar people like, stuff like that. This introduces a positive feedback loop into what you're exposed to, a Newton's method for experience, honing you and everyone else in on an eventual monoculture of mediocrity. It prevents you from escaping, changing, you're constantly interacting with a mirror. It's effect on individuals, culture, societies, environments is not minimal, this is not a small adjustment to how the world works. Most of our entire sets of behaviors have drastically changed.
If you want to empower yourself to grow, you have to ditch the algorithms entirely. No YouTube recommendations, Spotify, google, Facebook, none of it. Just play playlists, read chronological feeds you've curated, copy paste URLs. Keep it simple. But ditch the algorithmic feeds, it is imperative that you do that, theyre very, very dangerous and cannot be fixed. Any positive feedback loop that curates what your mind absorbs based on what your mind has absorbed in the past will damage your psyche.