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> It seems impossible—after all, billions of dollars are spent every year by entertainment corporations in their quest for market dominance. Yet, despite this c

• lordnacho 4y ago
  Exactly right. Everything is boring because reliable is boring. A lot of what we see output by major cultural businesses is basically algorithmic: We need a well-known actor (so one of maybe 50), supported by some other known actors (several of a few hundred), in a story that's a continuation (so a dozen or so franchises), where he beats up a bad guy or two, doesn't die, and doesn't offend anyone. We'll add explosions, magical creatures, and physically impossible stunts, because people like that. We'll fill it up with either well known tropes or ironic spoofs of such for a bit of variety. Songs are similar. Make sure the chorus is good, repeat it a few times, don't make people wait too long before the memorable bit, add a featuring artist who is going to get their own release soon. What we saw in the past was people would try something new, and quite a lot of those things would crash and burn, but now and again you got a really great hit. Part of why I don't consume much mass culture is I see this algo all the time. It's a bit like a foodie who's seen all the ingredients and all the ways to cook them: you stop thinking this new dish is new, and you just want to appreciate a well-made thing, which is also something that fits in this formula, but doesn't require constant innovation, and crucially doesn't require constant consumption. Explore/exploit tends to exploit when there's a lot of money on the line. Same reason drugs are invented by little companies that get bought by the big ones.
• fuzzfactor 4y ago
  Yup, not just the entertainment business. It takes a different kind of vision to predict things which are orthogonal to past performance. In so many areas where corporate control has been consolidated, there is more complete dominance of bureaucratic hierarchies that just happen to more systematically exclude those rare innovators and creatives who could occasionally punch through to earth-shaking effect. The allowance for true innovation is almost extinct. The difference is it's nearly universal now. People like Thos. Edison and Nikola Tesla wouldn't have a chance today, they already had it difficult in their time where the downward pressure was already palpable, and each came very close to not having a worldwide imact, just like everyone else. Keep in mind their productivity was actually decimated by going against the current like this, so their known milestones & breakthroughs are only the tip of the iceberg compared to what "could have been" in a more supportive cultural environment. And that was then. Even in places which pride themselves in non-traditional corporate behavior, the same anti-creative characteristics have become generally acceptable by comparative example, all up and down the entire chain of command. Especially among the money people, increased greed is the antithesis of increased innovation. If the only thing you want to do with money is make more of the same, that's legitimate especially if you're in debt or something, but that's not how you make more of new other things which could turn out to be more valuable than money. People in general have gradually settled for so much less innovation, in exchange for the very little financial improvement that might result without such a distraction. And creatives who would have had a (already slim) chance in previous decades are having none of it. Woz dropped out when it started getting so bad you couldn't deny it. Plus "star-making machinery" itself became so much more prominent and more like an insiders lottery. The establishment of a mechanism which can "make anyone a star" ended up being needed just to get recognition for the occasional jaw-dropping talent. But once that mechanism is in place, there's almost no talent needed after that.