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I realise this is a review, not the actual text. But still. This is utter bollocks. It's typical of non-technical "intellectuals" to completely ignore the main

I realise this is a review, not the actual text. But still. This is utter bollocks. It's typical of non-technical "intellectuals" to completely ignore the main areas of modern human progress, simply because they don't understand them. e.g. the whole discussion on Art completely ignores Video Games, which are undoubtedly Art, and also an area of rapid innovation and development. Yet they're usually dismissed out of hand because no-one who takes "Art" seriously plays them or understands them. The whole "we went to the moon and never went back" completely ignores the argument that the moon landing was, right from the start, an uneconomical publicity stunt. The exciting time is now, when space is starting to become economically viable and we have organisations making viable plans to colonise Mars. The Internet is taken for granted as a method of "chatting", and smartphones as a method of "taking selfies". Again, because the author doesn't understand what vast and wide-reaching achievements these are. Watching a Cambodian tuk-tuk driver watch a YouTube English lesson while parked up waiting for a fare is a modern marvel. Bringing communication and the spread of knowledge to anyone who wants it, wherever they are, is the most important thing to happen to humanity since the invention of agriculture. And yes, it's as disruptive to human societies as agriculture: we should expect our societies to be disturbed by it. The economic malaise is mostly a result of WW2. Europe was economically destroyed, and the US changed its entire economy to meet the demand (and the USSR moved its entire manufacturing base a thousand miles east in a year, an astounding thing to do). Recovering from that meant that growth was easy because it was coming from such a low base. We've hit the final point of that recovery, and growth isn't so easy any more. Not everything is perfect. There are some changes we need to make. But please let's not throw the baby out with the bathwater. And to anyone writing about modern society: if you don't understand technology, please stop fucking writing about it.

caleb-allen 6y ago
Agreed. I was especially unconvinced at the arguments for "repetition", for example that today's music is separated from the 90s only by "nuance". What? Sure, from up close it may seem that way, but given 30 years I'm sure we can look back and very clearly see the style developments just as we can for the 70s and the 80s. It sounded to me like a case of "back in my day" but with incoherent arguments.
- api 6y ago
  That's the part I completely agree with. Music is absolutely stuck. There have only been micro-genres, such as the many micro-genres of techno/EDM or hip hop. There has been nothing approaching the birth of hip hop, techno/rave, grunge, "alternative" rock, and so on. Those all came of age in the 70s, 80s, and 90s. For some reason after 2000 music died. My personal explanation is the collapse of the record industry. I don't think it was due to piracy, though piracy didn't help. It was mostly due to the abandonment of the old practice of scouting for interesting new music in favor of producer-led manufactured pop. The suits wanted a more reliable way to produce marketable acts, and they got it... at the expense of virtually all innovation. The same thing happened to mainstream Hollywood studios who can now only make one movie. Of course it only works for a while. Now everyone is bored and nobody cares and listenership and movie attendance numbers are crashing. (This is always what happens when the bean counters run things. You get a short term bump in profit, but what they are really doing is cannibalizing the value of the enterprise in hidden ways. The body is basically digesting its own organs. Eventually you are left with a shell with no value.) Piracy did worsen this trend in the record industry. When the economic model starts to be threatened, a natural response is to become more conservative and cancel anything innovative. It's usually the wrong response, but it's a very normal human response to a feeling of threat or starvation.
  - bluetomcat 6y ago
    Music became largely teen-oriented by the late 90s and onwards. Spice Girls, Backstreet Boys, Britney Spears... fast forward to the 2010s and nothing has dramatically changed - Justin Bieber, Ariana Grande etc. Maybe it's a very profitable spot exploited by producers and songwriters.
    - api 6y ago
      When I was a teen in the early 90s I listened to Tool, Nirvana, emerging Techno/Rave, Rap, as well as older rock like Pink Floyd, The Beatles, Jimmy Hendrix, and King Crimson. I could keep going but that's a sampling. In college I got more into electronic and obscure hip hop, both of which were quite new and innovative at the time. I lost all interest in pop because that was the late 90s when all pop went to crap. All of that has held up pretty well because it was all good music. Nobody is going to remember the absolute dog shit pop that teens listen to today. It's boring, repetitive, devoid of deep emotion, and is basically the same song over and over. What I see is that many teens today (those who really like music) are listening to old music from the 60s-90s and very little new music. That's because their generation's music is objectively awful. I have seen studies that have quantified this via means such as Shannon information content. The content of popular music has been declining since the late 90s, and the similarity of songs and acts has been increasing.
voldacar 6y ago
Video games are indeed a form of media, but I think it is misleading to say they are art in the same sense as this author intends. Art and mass entertainment are only superficially similar, and most video games are made to entertain. Video games are (generally) consumable goods created to provide an amount of temporary pleasure. Good art is recognized not just by beauty or the skill required to create it, but by its ability to engage with some aspect of what it means to be human, in a way that is coherent, mature, and thought-provoking. There are no video game equivalents (yet, one would hope) of, say, Bach, Rembrandt, or Bernini. Maybe someday there will be, but not today. edit: To the downvoters, I'm saying all this as a pretty avid gamer. video games are a very young medium and a hopefully in a few centuries I will be wrong.
- marcus_holmes 6y ago
  I would respectfully submit that you're talking from a standpoint of utter and complete ignorance about your subject. There are a thousand games that have an "ability to engage with some aspect of what it means to be human, in a way that is coherent, mature, and thought-provoking". I've been moved to tears by several (killing the dragon in Minecraft after literally months of effort, This War of Mine). Stupid things like "Clicker Heroes" have reminded me that all life is inherently meaningless and all endeavour is ultimately futile, given meaning only by what we feel about it. Compare that to some of the utter crap that passes for High Art, and video games are way ahead in mature, thought-provoking exploration of what it means to be human.
  - voldacar 6y ago
    No we agree much more than you think. I really like minecraft, some of my greatest teen memories are of running a server with a bunch of my friends that had 40+ mods. I think the world is made better by minecraft's existence, and people have made all kinds of beautiful and artful things in minecraft. My point was not to say that there are no games that provide powerful, meaningful, beautiful experiences to the humans that play them. Such a claim would be absurd. What I am saying is that the game as a medium probably hasn't matured to the point where it can be compared to the Arts with a capital A, as they are historically understood. Precisely, I mean things like painting, sculpture, music, and literature. I am not the stupid kind of cultural elitist who would say that there is something inherent about the video game medium that would prevent it from rising to that level, I just think that empirically it hasn't happened yet, though in the long term I am quite hopeful. And yeah, contemporary "high art" has been in largely poor condition for quite some time. At least if the stuff that makes it into museums is any indication.
ntsplnkv2 6y ago
I agree in that I have major problems with the article, but disagree that somehow we are in this period of great innovation. I think this kind of argument always goes down two paths. First, someone says "things are terrible right now and it's the end." Then someone else says "no it isn't here's why things are actually great!" Sure we have access to more knowledge than ever - but have we seen the effects of such? Just the opposite - anti-science sentiment is as high as ever. How many people actually truly learn a language online? Downloading duolingo and using it for 2 weeks before giving up is not learning a new language. We overrate minutiae such as this. > if you don't understand technology, please stop fucking writing about it. HN is for openly discussing ideas. Technologists face the same biases as anyone else.
- marcus_holmes 6y ago
  > Sure we have access to more knowledge than ever - but have we seen the effects of such? yeah this the disruption I mentioned. Our society is going to change because mass communication. Not all of that change is going to be good. All of that change is going to be resisted. The same was true for all changes in society, from feudalism to parliamentarianism to democracy, including electricity and steam power. > Technologists face the same biases as anyone else. I get that. But technologists tend to get clued-up about everything else before airing their opinions. For some reason, Art Critics especially, intellectuals seem to think it's OK for them to know everything about 19th century impressionism and nothing about Internet Protocol and still have a valid opinion about 21st century Art.
  - ntsplnkv2 6y ago
    I don't think FaceTime has the societal impact you think it does. it's just the evolution of the phone - very nice, but doesn't solve our real challenges. When you think about it - the computer itself wasn't an insane concept since the 1950s. The technology evolved with major improvements much like anything else, like cars, planes, boats, etc, but the theory behind it pretty much remained the same. Once the right materials and manufacturing of chips were figured out, is it really much of a jump to guess we'd have amazing computers today? And without the Soviet Union around, it's much harder to solve the challenges we have because there isn't a big bad. The current conservative talking points of China do not carry the same weight because the entire nation's stock portfolios are reliant on cheap chinese factories. There is a general schizophrenia with our world today. Connected by so many things - email, instagram, video chat, cell phones, facebook. And yet depression is very high. People seem far more distant. We need more manufacturing here - but wal-mart and amazon dominate the retail market with cheap chinese goods and Americans can't get enough. Google gives us vast knowledge - and yet looking at tests from the 70s, most are far, far harder. Schools have gotten easier. Anti-vax has a powerful voice. I think technology contributes to this, but all in all I think it's not the sole cause. > I get that. But technologists tend to get clued-up about everything else before airing their opinions. For some reason, Art Critics especially, intellectuals seem to think it's OK for them to know everything about 19th century impressionism and nothing about Internet Protocol and still have a valid opinion about 21st century Art. I don't think knowing about IP has anything to do with one's ability to judge art. It's a slippery slope, or rather absurd, because art debates always go down the rabbit hole of "what is art"
N1H1L 6y ago
Yes absolutely. What qualifies Anish Kapoor's Bean for example as art above the Shadow of the Colossus? And there was an absolute explosion of written works only starting two centuries ago - due to mass scale printing. And even in books, fantasy is somehow not high literature - which is just gatekeeping at this point. In physics for example, computational modelling has been exploding. The availability of GPUs and ML based modelling has been rising rapidly too. Yet another point - when I was a MS student quantum computing was a pie in the sky fantasy - today it's an exploding field. Same for energy storage - the progress we have made there in the last decade is mind boggling. There is an effect that we humans cannot really accept - it takes time to really judge the quality of a work. And that time is often decades. Human beings are exceptionally poor at long term thinking (we have literally mountains of evidence for this) and yet stubbornly refuse to accept this limitation.

caleb-allen 6y ago

Agreed. I was especially unconvinced at the arguments for "repetition", for example that today's music is separated from the 90s only by "nuance". What? Sure, from up close it may seem that way, but given 30 years I'm sure we can look back and very clearly see the style developments just as we can for the 70s and the 80s. It sounded to me like a case of "back in my day" but with incoherent arguments.

api 6y ago
That's the part I completely agree with. Music is absolutely stuck. There have only been micro-genres, such as the many micro-genres of techno/EDM or hip hop. There has been nothing approaching the birth of hip hop, techno/rave, grunge, "alternative" rock, and so on. Those all came of age in the 70s, 80s, and 90s. For some reason after 2000 music died. My personal explanation is the collapse of the record industry. I don't think it was due to piracy, though piracy didn't help. It was mostly due to the abandonment of the old practice of scouting for interesting new music in favor of producer-led manufactured pop. The suits wanted a more reliable way to produce marketable acts, and they got it... at the expense of virtually all innovation. The same thing happened to mainstream Hollywood studios who can now only make one movie. Of course it only works for a while. Now everyone is bored and nobody cares and listenership and movie attendance numbers are crashing. (This is always what happens when the bean counters run things. You get a short term bump in profit, but what they are really doing is cannibalizing the value of the enterprise in hidden ways. The body is basically digesting its own organs. Eventually you are left with a shell with no value.) Piracy did worsen this trend in the record industry. When the economic model starts to be threatened, a natural response is to become more conservative and cancel anything innovative. It's usually the wrong response, but it's a very normal human response to a feeling of threat or starvation.
- bluetomcat 6y ago
  Music became largely teen-oriented by the late 90s and onwards. Spice Girls, Backstreet Boys, Britney Spears... fast forward to the 2010s and nothing has dramatically changed - Justin Bieber, Ariana Grande etc. Maybe it's a very profitable spot exploited by producers and songwriters.
  - api 6y ago
    When I was a teen in the early 90s I listened to Tool, Nirvana, emerging Techno/Rave, Rap, as well as older rock like Pink Floyd, The Beatles, Jimmy Hendrix, and King Crimson. I could keep going but that's a sampling. In college I got more into electronic and obscure hip hop, both of which were quite new and innovative at the time. I lost all interest in pop because that was the late 90s when all pop went to crap. All of that has held up pretty well because it was all good music. Nobody is going to remember the absolute dog shit pop that teens listen to today. It's boring, repetitive, devoid of deep emotion, and is basically the same song over and over. What I see is that many teens today (those who really like music) are listening to old music from the 60s-90s and very little new music. That's because their generation's music is objectively awful. I have seen studies that have quantified this via means such as Shannon information content. The content of popular music has been declining since the late 90s, and the similarity of songs and acts has been increasing.

voldacar 6y ago

Video games are indeed a form of media, but I think it is misleading to say they are art in the same sense as this author intends. Art and mass entertainment are only superficially similar, and most video games are made to entertain. Video games are (generally) consumable goods created to provide an amount of temporary pleasure. Good art is recognized not just by beauty or the skill required to create it, but by its ability to engage with some aspect of what it means to be human, in a way that is coherent, mature, and thought-provoking. There are no video game equivalents (yet, one would hope) of, say, Bach, Rembrandt, or Bernini. Maybe someday there will be, but not today. edit: To the downvoters, I'm saying all this as a pretty avid gamer. video games are a very young medium and a hopefully in a few centuries I will be wrong.

marcus_holmes 6y ago
I would respectfully submit that you're talking from a standpoint of utter and complete ignorance about your subject. There are a thousand games that have an "ability to engage with some aspect of what it means to be human, in a way that is coherent, mature, and thought-provoking". I've been moved to tears by several (killing the dragon in Minecraft after literally months of effort, This War of Mine). Stupid things like "Clicker Heroes" have reminded me that all life is inherently meaningless and all endeavour is ultimately futile, given meaning only by what we feel about it. Compare that to some of the utter crap that passes for High Art, and video games are way ahead in mature, thought-provoking exploration of what it means to be human.
- voldacar 6y ago
  No we agree much more than you think. I really like minecraft, some of my greatest teen memories are of running a server with a bunch of my friends that had 40+ mods. I think the world is made better by minecraft's existence, and people have made all kinds of beautiful and artful things in minecraft. My point was not to say that there are no games that provide powerful, meaningful, beautiful experiences to the humans that play them. Such a claim would be absurd. What I am saying is that the game as a medium probably hasn't matured to the point where it can be compared to the Arts with a capital A, as they are historically understood. Precisely, I mean things like painting, sculpture, music, and literature. I am not the stupid kind of cultural elitist who would say that there is something inherent about the video game medium that would prevent it from rising to that level, I just think that empirically it hasn't happened yet, though in the long term I am quite hopeful. And yeah, contemporary "high art" has been in largely poor condition for quite some time. At least if the stuff that makes it into museums is any indication.

ntsplnkv2 6y ago

I agree in that I have major problems with the article, but disagree that somehow we are in this period of great innovation. I think this kind of argument always goes down two paths. First, someone says "things are terrible right now and it's the end." Then someone else says "no it isn't here's why things are actually great!" Sure we have access to more knowledge than ever - but have we seen the effects of such? Just the opposite - anti-science sentiment is as high as ever. How many people actually truly learn a language online? Downloading duolingo and using it for 2 weeks before giving up is not learning a new language. We overrate minutiae such as this. > if you don't understand technology, please stop fucking writing about it. HN is for openly discussing ideas. Technologists face the same biases as anyone else.

marcus_holmes 6y ago
> Sure we have access to more knowledge than ever - but have we seen the effects of such? yeah this the disruption I mentioned. Our society is going to change because mass communication. Not all of that change is going to be good. All of that change is going to be resisted. The same was true for all changes in society, from feudalism to parliamentarianism to democracy, including electricity and steam power. > Technologists face the same biases as anyone else. I get that. But technologists tend to get clued-up about everything else before airing their opinions. For some reason, Art Critics especially, intellectuals seem to think it's OK for them to know everything about 19th century impressionism and nothing about Internet Protocol and still have a valid opinion about 21st century Art.
- ntsplnkv2 6y ago
  I don't think FaceTime has the societal impact you think it does. it's just the evolution of the phone - very nice, but doesn't solve our real challenges. When you think about it - the computer itself wasn't an insane concept since the 1950s. The technology evolved with major improvements much like anything else, like cars, planes, boats, etc, but the theory behind it pretty much remained the same. Once the right materials and manufacturing of chips were figured out, is it really much of a jump to guess we'd have amazing computers today? And without the Soviet Union around, it's much harder to solve the challenges we have because there isn't a big bad. The current conservative talking points of China do not carry the same weight because the entire nation's stock portfolios are reliant on cheap chinese factories. There is a general schizophrenia with our world today. Connected by so many things - email, instagram, video chat, cell phones, facebook. And yet depression is very high. People seem far more distant. We need more manufacturing here - but wal-mart and amazon dominate the retail market with cheap chinese goods and Americans can't get enough. Google gives us vast knowledge - and yet looking at tests from the 70s, most are far, far harder. Schools have gotten easier. Anti-vax has a powerful voice. I think technology contributes to this, but all in all I think it's not the sole cause. > I get that. But technologists tend to get clued-up about everything else before airing their opinions. For some reason, Art Critics especially, intellectuals seem to think it's OK for them to know everything about 19th century impressionism and nothing about Internet Protocol and still have a valid opinion about 21st century Art. I don't think knowing about IP has anything to do with one's ability to judge art. It's a slippery slope, or rather absurd, because art debates always go down the rabbit hole of "what is art"

N1H1L 6y ago

Yes absolutely. What qualifies Anish Kapoor's Bean for example as art above the Shadow of the Colossus? And there was an absolute explosion of written works only starting two centuries ago - due to mass scale printing. And even in books, fantasy is somehow not high literature - which is just gatekeeping at this point. In physics for example, computational modelling has been exploding. The availability of GPUs and ML based modelling has been rising rapidly too. Yet another point - when I was a MS student quantum computing was a pie in the sky fantasy - today it's an exploding field. Same for energy storage - the progress we have made there in the last decade is mind boggling. There is an effect that we humans cannot really accept - it takes time to really judge the quality of a work. And that time is often decades. Human beings are exceptionally poor at long term thinking (we have literally mountains of evidence for this) and yet stubbornly refuse to accept this limitation.