13 ms·

Culture Is Stuck

69 points by samwillis 4y ago

SyzygistSix 4y ago
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.
dagorenouf 4y ago
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.
- Affric 4y ago
  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.
  - dagorenouf 4y ago
    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?
- andy81 4y ago
  I'm surprised at this take, since so far AI has mainly reduced the cost of creating content similar to what already exists.
  - elcritch 4y ago
    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.
  - throwaway4aday 4y ago
    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. https://www.midjourney.com/showcase/top/ https://www.midjourney.com/showcase/top/ https://www.deviantart.com/tag/midjourney?cursor=MTQwYWI2MjA9MSY1OTBhY2FkMD0wJmQxNzRiNmJjPU4lMkZB https://www.deviantart.com/tag/midjourney?cursor=MTQwYWI2MjA... https://www.instagram.com/midjourney.gallery/?hl=en https://www.instagram.com/midjourney.gallery/?hl=en
- prohobo 4y ago
  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.
  - flappyeagle 4y ago
    Nerds are likely to overestimate regular people’s desire to have extremely custom things, or the uniqueness of people’s taste overall. 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.
samwillis 4y ago
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.
- echelon 4y ago
  AI generative media is going to let single individuals create more than all human knowledge to this point. We're entering a Cambrian explosion on a personal level. The real worry is that we may never want to leave.
  - criddell 4y ago
    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.
- AnimalMuppet 4y ago
  AI generating personalized, unique media would not be homogenization. It would be the opposite - the death of shared culture.
  - throwaway4aday 4y ago
    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.
  - basch 4y ago
nerdchum 4y ago
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.
- akmarinov 4y ago
  WW2 was amazing for women’s rights
  - euroderf 4y ago
    Well, that was the theory. Rosie the Riveter and all that. But after the war, the old ways got back in the saddle. Same thing happened in the USSR. Wartime needs brought women into the industrial workplace; peace sent them back into the kitchen. So to speak.
  - nerdchum 4y ago
    it arguably paved the way for financial justice so that social justice could then follow. 1 million American men died so it wasnt awesome for men's rights
OscarCunningham 4y ago
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.
wilwade 4y ago
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)
NoraCodes 4y ago
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.
- r_hoods_ghost 4y ago
  Things which existed in the 90s. Zines. Check. Micro fiction. Check. Demo scene. Check...
  - NoraCodes 4y ago
    Sure, and big hairdos and synthesizers existed in the 60s, but we still associate them with the 80s.
    - prohobo 4y ago
      But I associate everything you listed with the 90s... Anyway, yes and no. Yes, create your own culture, but no I don't see much of that happening right now.
    - r_hoods_ghost 4y ago
      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?
EdwardDiego 4y ago
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.
nathan_compton 4y ago
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.
flappyeagle 4y ago
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.
- criddell 4y ago
  Look at fashion changes through 1965, 1975, 1985, 1995. You didn’t need to be discerning at all to spot differences through the decades.
  - flappyeagle 4y ago
    You don’t need to be discerning at all to see the difference between 2003, 2013, and 2023.
    - criddell 4y ago
      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?
- mach1ne 4y ago
  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.
  - xmcqdpt2 4y ago
    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.
    - 4y ago
dougmwne 4y ago
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.
- nottorp 4y ago
  Whats the difference between the current “AI” hype and a religion?
  - azangru 4y ago
    What's the similarity?:-) In the current AI hype, you can interact with the AI.
    - CRConrad 4y ago
      Still, what's the diff? The religious types have always claimed to be able to interact with their deities. (Seems to me the only difference is which party does the hallucinating.)
  - dougmwne 4y ago
    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.
- 4y ago
meeuwer 4y ago
Obligatory mention of Mark Fisher and his talk "The Slow Cancellation Of The Future". [1] [1] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=aCgkLICTskQ https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=aCgkLICTskQ
Olreich 4y ago
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.
dbspin 4y ago
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.
- prohobo 4y ago
  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.
  - throwaway4aday 4y ago
    > 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.
mablopoule 4y ago
This is such a silly take. 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.
m0llusk 4y ago
This is evocative of the efficiency against resilience balance mentioned in another front page article today: https://blog.nelhage.com/post/efficiency-vs-resiliency/ https://blog.nelhage.com/post/efficiency-vs-resiliency/ https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=35586607 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.
ericmcer 4y ago
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.
TrevorFSmith 4y ago
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.
friend_and_foe 4y ago
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.
- Gigachad 4y ago
  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.
pastapliiats 4y ago
the current culture is complaining about the culture, "back in my day", damn youngsters!

69 points by samwillis 4y ago

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.

dagorenouf 4y ago

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.

Affric 4y ago
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.
- dagorenouf 4y ago
  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?
andy81 4y ago
I'm surprised at this take, since so far AI has mainly reduced the cost of creating content similar to what already exists.
- elcritch 4y ago
  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.
- throwaway4aday 4y ago
  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. https://www.midjourney.com/showcase/top/ https://www.midjourney.com/showcase/top/ https://www.deviantart.com/tag/midjourney?cursor=MTQwYWI2MjA9MSY1OTBhY2FkMD0wJmQxNzRiNmJjPU4lMkZB https://www.deviantart.com/tag/midjourney?cursor=MTQwYWI2MjA... https://www.instagram.com/midjourney.gallery/?hl=en https://www.instagram.com/midjourney.gallery/?hl=en
prohobo 4y ago
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.
- flappyeagle 4y ago
  Nerds are likely to overestimate regular people’s desire to have extremely custom things, or the uniqueness of people’s taste overall. 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.

samwillis 4y ago

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.

echelon 4y ago
AI generative media is going to let single individuals create more than all human knowledge to this point. We're entering a Cambrian explosion on a personal level. The real worry is that we may never want to leave.
- criddell 4y ago
  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.
AnimalMuppet 4y ago
AI generating personalized, unique media would not be homogenization. It would be the opposite - the death of shared culture.
- throwaway4aday 4y ago
  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.
- basch 4y ago

nerdchum 4y ago

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.

akmarinov 4y ago
WW2 was amazing for women’s rights
- euroderf 4y ago
  Well, that was the theory. Rosie the Riveter and all that. But after the war, the old ways got back in the saddle. Same thing happened in the USSR. Wartime needs brought women into the industrial workplace; peace sent them back into the kitchen. So to speak.
- nerdchum 4y ago
  it arguably paved the way for financial justice so that social justice could then follow. 1 million American men died so it wasnt awesome for men's rights

OscarCunningham 4y ago

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.

wilwade 4y ago

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)

NoraCodes 4y ago

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.

r_hoods_ghost 4y ago
Things which existed in the 90s. Zines. Check. Micro fiction. Check. Demo scene. Check...
- NoraCodes 4y ago
  Sure, and big hairdos and synthesizers existed in the 60s, but we still associate them with the 80s.
  - prohobo 4y ago
    But I associate everything you listed with the 90s... Anyway, yes and no. Yes, create your own culture, but no I don't see much of that happening right now.
  - r_hoods_ghost 4y ago
    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?

EdwardDiego 4y ago

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.

nathan_compton 4y ago

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.

flappyeagle 4y ago

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.

criddell 4y ago
Look at fashion changes through 1965, 1975, 1985, 1995. You didn’t need to be discerning at all to spot differences through the decades.
- flappyeagle 4y ago
  You don’t need to be discerning at all to see the difference between 2003, 2013, and 2023.
  - criddell 4y ago
    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?
mach1ne 4y ago
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.
- xmcqdpt2 4y ago
  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.
  - 4y ago

dougmwne 4y ago

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.

nottorp 4y ago
Whats the difference between the current “AI” hype and a religion?
- azangru 4y ago
  What's the similarity?:-) In the current AI hype, you can interact with the AI.
  - CRConrad 4y ago
    Still, what's the diff? The religious types have always claimed to be able to interact with their deities. (Seems to me the only difference is which party does the hallucinating.)
- dougmwne 4y ago
  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.
4y ago

meeuwer 4y ago

Obligatory mention of Mark Fisher and his talk "The Slow Cancellation Of The Future". [1] [1] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=aCgkLICTskQ https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=aCgkLICTskQ

Olreich 4y ago

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.

dbspin 4y ago

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.

prohobo 4y ago
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.
- throwaway4aday 4y ago
  > 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.

mablopoule 4y ago

This is such a silly take. 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.

m0llusk 4y ago

This is evocative of the efficiency against resilience balance mentioned in another front page article today: https://blog.nelhage.com/post/efficiency-vs-resiliency/ https://blog.nelhage.com/post/efficiency-vs-resiliency/ https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=35586607 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.

ericmcer 4y ago

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.

TrevorFSmith 4y ago

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.

friend_and_foe 4y ago

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.

Gigachad 4y ago
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.

pastapliiats 4y ago

the current culture is complaining about the culture, "back in my day", damn youngsters!