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I think it’s more like people want to enjoy the view without having to learn how to climb, which is a perfectly reasonable thing to want, even if it cheapens th

I think it’s more like people want to enjoy the view without having to learn how to climb, which is a perfectly reasonable thing to want, even if it cheapens the experience somewhat.

dxuh 1y ago
I'm afraid that in time people will forget that it's all about learning to climb.
- roenxi 1y ago
  That thinking is time honoured and never found much traction. For example, pretty much nobody knows how to grow their own food, make their own clothes, carve their own furniture or even drive a manual car. Hordes of tourists circle the globe bringing disrepute to all sorts of time honoured monuments of history's greatest. Skills and challenges which aren't needed get forgotten and are generally not missed.
  - deleted 1y ago
    [deleted]
  - globular-toast 1y ago
    None of those things you mention have been forgotten. Many people do all of those things not because they have to but because it is incredibly rewarding to learn and grow these skills. Convenience doesn't bring happiness. People will actively seek out challenges even when they seemingly have none. The trouble with things like climbing is there are only so many mountains to go around. We already can't walk in many places because of cars. I don't look forward to the day that similar vehicles can go up mountains. The existence of mass-produced clothing doesn't affect your ability to do your own knitting, though.
    - roenxi 1y ago
      I'm replying almost solely to observe that inconvenience also doesn't bring happiness. Happiness is achieved precisely by feeling happy in the setting that you find yourself in. People can train themselves to only feel happy when inconvenienced but that is doing a major disservice to themselves and those immediately around them. But that is something of a tangent and so I have a cover story for why I'm typing! > The trouble with things like climbing is there are only so many mountains to go around. This is taking the metaphor far too far. Nobody is literally taking mountains away from people.
  - kragen 1y ago
    I think the majority of people still know how to grow their own food. We only passed 50% of the population living in cities a few years ago. https://data.worldbank.org/indicator/SP.RUR.TOTL.ZS https://data.worldbank.org/indicator/SP.RUR.TOTL.ZS says 43% of the population is still rural, and I'm guessing about 80% of that 43% (32%) knows how to grow their own food. So do all the people who have moved from the country to the city over the last 40 years. There's a big gap between "pretty much nobody" and the reality, which is somewhere between one third and two thirds of everybody. You might want to reflect on exactly how your perception diverged so radically from reality. Do people in cities suffer from not being able to grow their own food and make their own clothes? I don't know for sure, but official statistics claim that, even today, they commit suicide at much higher rates despite having much less material scarcity. Robinsonades have been a popular genre of fiction for centuries, suggesting that people long for that kind of autonomy. Today, we also have zombie apocalypse fiction, RPGs, and preppers. From another angle, sports consist entirely of skills and challenges which aren't needed and never have been, suggesting that they don't get forgotten. Hobbies also consist of skills and challenges which aren't needed.
    - deleted 1y ago
      [deleted]
- s_dev 1y ago
  "It is not the mountain we conquer but ourselves." - Edmund Hillary. It's not about climbing.
  - globular-toast 1y ago
    Um, no, that quotation means literally the opposite: it is about the climbing, it's not about getting to the top of any particular mountain. What Hillary was getting at is we get satisfaction from learning, training, overcoming difficulties and limitations, and ultimately pushing ourselves to our limits. His limit was Everest, your limit might be Snowdon, but it's climbing it that matters, not just taking the train to the top and taking a selfie.
    - mavhc 1y ago
      Should we ban people from taking the train? They get a different experience, but they still get an experience
      - overfeed 1y ago
        No, but we should mercilessly laugh at them for calling themselves mountaineers when they are train-riders.
    - sdwr 1y ago
      He's saying that you can substitute any activity that combines danger, skill, and willpower for the mountain. It's literally not about the mountain, it's about how far you push yourself to reach a goal.
- fy20 1y ago
  I wonder if explorers from a few hundred years ago would say the same thing.
bspammer 1y ago
The cheapening of the experience is the whole point though. People are robbing themselves of the joy that can only come from putting yourself through hardship in pursuit of a goal. It’s not a moral judgement, that’s just how humans are wired. The lows make the highs higher.
- mgfist 1y ago
  What's better, seeing a beautiful view from the mountain after being driven up, or never seeing the view at all?
  - going_north 1y ago
    Maybe torturing the metaphor, but building a road up the mountain often ruins the view.
  - mrWiz 1y ago
    To continue this metaphor, a while back my girlfriend and I went to Machu Picchu. We were taking a bus to the summit, but there was a landslide near the bottom of the mountain so everybody had to climb most of the way up. This led to it being eerily empty until people started trickling in, which certainly made it a better experience than the normal tourist swarm would have been. I can imagine AI art having a similar effect (creating a glut of images/logos/whatever that devalues ones made with care) but am hopeful that we'll get better at filtering the cream of the crop. In 5 years tons of things will have AI logos that would have been made by a graphic designer (or simply not made) in the past. That sucks for graphic designers who are out of a job, is good for people who get cheaper logos, and TBD for overall society who now has lots more "custom" logos etc to wade through.
  - augzodia 1y ago
    This discussion reminds me of Edward Abbey in Desert Solitaire advocating for not building roads in national parks to preserve the experience of true wilderness. Obviously having roads is a great boon to a park's accessibility, and the ability of people with different mobility needs to appreciate nature. But it also made me thoughtful to imagine the feeling of wonder at seeing bridalveil fall after hiking for days into a roadless yosemite valley; how much more special and impressive it would seem after that journey? This metaphorical tangent is pretty far removed from the original discussion, but how do you weigh the accessibility of a thing against how that accessibility changes its nature?
aredox 1y ago
People want to take a selfie at the top. No one is "enjoying the view" anymore - certainly not the shallow masses. It is enshittification.
- creata 1y ago
  > enshittification Tangentially, what does enshittification mean now? Quoting Wiktionary, at one point it meant "The phenomenon of online platforms gradually degrading the quality of their services, often by promoting advertisements and sponsored content, in order to increase profits" (coined by Doctorow), but now people seem to use it to mean... things becoming shit?
  - aredox 1y ago
    Things turning to shit? The word coined by Doctorow is new, but the phenomenon itself isn't (just talk to any car enthousiast).
  - hangsi 1y ago
    You are right. The grandparent post ironically uses word this in a cheapened, shallow way when they can use it freely in their own writing. You could argue this is the very sort of activity they were criticising when they posted! We are all vulnerable.
  - cdoctorow 1y ago
    See: https://pluralistic.net/2024/10/14/pearl-clutching/#this-toilet-has-no-central-nervous-system https://pluralistic.net/2024/10/14/pearl-clutching/#this-toi... > Second: the fact that a neologism is sometimes decoupled from its theoretical underpinnings and is used colloquially is a feature, not a bug. Many people apply the term "enshittification" very loosely indeed, to mean "something that is bad," without bothering to learn – or apply – the theoretical framework. This is good. This is what it means for a term to enter the lexicon: it takes on a life of its own. If 10,000,000 people use "enshittification" loosely and inspire 10% of their number to look up the longer, more theoretical work I've done on it, that is one million normies who have been sucked into a discourse that used to live exclusively in the world of the most wonkish and obscure practitioners. The only way to maintain a precise, theoretically grounded use of a term is to confine its usage to a small group of largely irrelevant insiders. Policing the use of "enshittification" is worse than a self-limiting move – it would be a self-inflicted wound.
creata 1y ago
It cheapens the experience a lot, but oh well, at least the experience is still there for the people who want it.
- eric_cc 1y ago
  Does it though? We are all constrained by the time cost of everything we do. Not everybody with a quick creative spark cares enough to sacrifice opportunities, dedicate time, skip sleep or whatever it may take to gain the skills needed to act on the creative spark. AI empowering the output is a beautiful thing.
- alickz 1y ago
  is art being cheap really such a problem? is it a net negative to society if the average person could produce so much art that it becomes post-scarce?
overfeed 1y ago
What cheapens the experience is the insistence of being called a "mountaineer" when a helicopter dropped you at the peak. This goes for "AI artists" and "astronauts" on commercial launches who glom on to unearned titles whose prestige was forged by countless professionals working very hard.
- thih9 1y ago
  Such is technological progress. AI generated images are only an extension of what e.g. photography has experienced in the last decades. We’ve had film cameras, then digital cameras, then smartphones, each of these commoditized image creation by a then-unthinkable factor. It’s an ongoing process, even if this leap seems especially big.
  - overfeed 1y ago
    Technological progress does not directly result in posers. As you noted, smartphones allowed anyone to record videos, but I'm yet to see any influencer or YouTuber call themselves a director or cinematographer. I suspect the wannabees exist in the narrow window when technology has expanded enough for non-professionals, but hasn't seen wide enough adoption that the man on the street will recognize the pretentious self-aggrandizement.
    - jakefromstatecs 1y ago
      > I'm yet to see any influencer or YouTuber call themselves a director or cinematographer You must not be looking very hard. There are many youtubers or influencers making indie films or shows. NigaHiga, Annoying Orange and Shane Dawson all made movies. Freddie Wong started out as a Youtuber and created Video Game High School.
      - fy20 1y ago
        Also look at the production quality that a single person can achieve today. Go to Amazon and drop a few grand on mics, lights, cameras and lenses. The result is production quality beating any 90s talk show, which would have taken a whole team to do.

I think it’s more like people want to enjoy the view without having to learn how to climb, which is a perfectly reasonable thing to want, even if it cheapens the experience somewhat.

dxuh 1y ago

I'm afraid that in time people will forget that it's all about learning to climb.

roenxi 1y ago
That thinking is time honoured and never found much traction. For example, pretty much nobody knows how to grow their own food, make their own clothes, carve their own furniture or even drive a manual car. Hordes of tourists circle the globe bringing disrepute to all sorts of time honoured monuments of history's greatest. Skills and challenges which aren't needed get forgotten and are generally not missed.
- deleted 1y ago
  [deleted]
- globular-toast 1y ago
  None of those things you mention have been forgotten. Many people do all of those things not because they have to but because it is incredibly rewarding to learn and grow these skills. Convenience doesn't bring happiness. People will actively seek out challenges even when they seemingly have none. The trouble with things like climbing is there are only so many mountains to go around. We already can't walk in many places because of cars. I don't look forward to the day that similar vehicles can go up mountains. The existence of mass-produced clothing doesn't affect your ability to do your own knitting, though.
  - roenxi 1y ago
    I'm replying almost solely to observe that inconvenience also doesn't bring happiness. Happiness is achieved precisely by feeling happy in the setting that you find yourself in. People can train themselves to only feel happy when inconvenienced but that is doing a major disservice to themselves and those immediately around them. But that is something of a tangent and so I have a cover story for why I'm typing! > The trouble with things like climbing is there are only so many mountains to go around. This is taking the metaphor far too far. Nobody is literally taking mountains away from people.
- kragen 1y ago
  I think the majority of people still know how to grow their own food. We only passed 50% of the population living in cities a few years ago. https://data.worldbank.org/indicator/SP.RUR.TOTL.ZS https://data.worldbank.org/indicator/SP.RUR.TOTL.ZS says 43% of the population is still rural, and I'm guessing about 80% of that 43% (32%) knows how to grow their own food. So do all the people who have moved from the country to the city over the last 40 years. There's a big gap between "pretty much nobody" and the reality, which is somewhere between one third and two thirds of everybody. You might want to reflect on exactly how your perception diverged so radically from reality. Do people in cities suffer from not being able to grow their own food and make their own clothes? I don't know for sure, but official statistics claim that, even today, they commit suicide at much higher rates despite having much less material scarcity. Robinsonades have been a popular genre of fiction for centuries, suggesting that people long for that kind of autonomy. Today, we also have zombie apocalypse fiction, RPGs, and preppers. From another angle, sports consist entirely of skills and challenges which aren't needed and never have been, suggesting that they don't get forgotten. Hobbies also consist of skills and challenges which aren't needed.
  - deleted 1y ago
    [deleted]
s_dev 1y ago
"It is not the mountain we conquer but ourselves." - Edmund Hillary. It's not about climbing.
- globular-toast 1y ago
  Um, no, that quotation means literally the opposite: it is about the climbing, it's not about getting to the top of any particular mountain. What Hillary was getting at is we get satisfaction from learning, training, overcoming difficulties and limitations, and ultimately pushing ourselves to our limits. His limit was Everest, your limit might be Snowdon, but it's climbing it that matters, not just taking the train to the top and taking a selfie.
  - mavhc 1y ago
    Should we ban people from taking the train? They get a different experience, but they still get an experience
    - overfeed 1y ago
      No, but we should mercilessly laugh at them for calling themselves mountaineers when they are train-riders.
  - sdwr 1y ago
    He's saying that you can substitute any activity that combines danger, skill, and willpower for the mountain. It's literally not about the mountain, it's about how far you push yourself to reach a goal.
fy20 1y ago
I wonder if explorers from a few hundred years ago would say the same thing.

bspammer 1y ago

The cheapening of the experience is the whole point though. People are robbing themselves of the joy that can only come from putting yourself through hardship in pursuit of a goal. It’s not a moral judgement, that’s just how humans are wired. The lows make the highs higher.

mgfist 1y ago
What's better, seeing a beautiful view from the mountain after being driven up, or never seeing the view at all?
- going_north 1y ago
  Maybe torturing the metaphor, but building a road up the mountain often ruins the view.
- mrWiz 1y ago
  To continue this metaphor, a while back my girlfriend and I went to Machu Picchu. We were taking a bus to the summit, but there was a landslide near the bottom of the mountain so everybody had to climb most of the way up. This led to it being eerily empty until people started trickling in, which certainly made it a better experience than the normal tourist swarm would have been. I can imagine AI art having a similar effect (creating a glut of images/logos/whatever that devalues ones made with care) but am hopeful that we'll get better at filtering the cream of the crop. In 5 years tons of things will have AI logos that would have been made by a graphic designer (or simply not made) in the past. That sucks for graphic designers who are out of a job, is good for people who get cheaper logos, and TBD for overall society who now has lots more "custom" logos etc to wade through.
- augzodia 1y ago
  This discussion reminds me of Edward Abbey in Desert Solitaire advocating for not building roads in national parks to preserve the experience of true wilderness. Obviously having roads is a great boon to a park's accessibility, and the ability of people with different mobility needs to appreciate nature. But it also made me thoughtful to imagine the feeling of wonder at seeing bridalveil fall after hiking for days into a roadless yosemite valley; how much more special and impressive it would seem after that journey? This metaphorical tangent is pretty far removed from the original discussion, but how do you weigh the accessibility of a thing against how that accessibility changes its nature?

aredox 1y ago

People want to take a selfie at the top. No one is "enjoying the view" anymore - certainly not the shallow masses. It is enshittification.

creata 1y ago
> enshittification Tangentially, what does enshittification mean now? Quoting Wiktionary, at one point it meant "The phenomenon of online platforms gradually degrading the quality of their services, often by promoting advertisements and sponsored content, in order to increase profits" (coined by Doctorow), but now people seem to use it to mean... things becoming shit?
- aredox 1y ago
  Things turning to shit? The word coined by Doctorow is new, but the phenomenon itself isn't (just talk to any car enthousiast).
- hangsi 1y ago
  You are right. The grandparent post ironically uses word this in a cheapened, shallow way when they can use it freely in their own writing. You could argue this is the very sort of activity they were criticising when they posted! We are all vulnerable.
- cdoctorow 1y ago
  See: https://pluralistic.net/2024/10/14/pearl-clutching/#this-toilet-has-no-central-nervous-system https://pluralistic.net/2024/10/14/pearl-clutching/#this-toi... > Second: the fact that a neologism is sometimes decoupled from its theoretical underpinnings and is used colloquially is a feature, not a bug. Many people apply the term "enshittification" very loosely indeed, to mean "something that is bad," without bothering to learn – or apply – the theoretical framework. This is good. This is what it means for a term to enter the lexicon: it takes on a life of its own. If 10,000,000 people use "enshittification" loosely and inspire 10% of their number to look up the longer, more theoretical work I've done on it, that is one million normies who have been sucked into a discourse that used to live exclusively in the world of the most wonkish and obscure practitioners. The only way to maintain a precise, theoretically grounded use of a term is to confine its usage to a small group of largely irrelevant insiders. Policing the use of "enshittification" is worse than a self-limiting move – it would be a self-inflicted wound.

creata 1y ago

It cheapens the experience a lot, but oh well, at least the experience is still there for the people who want it.

eric_cc 1y ago
Does it though? We are all constrained by the time cost of everything we do. Not everybody with a quick creative spark cares enough to sacrifice opportunities, dedicate time, skip sleep or whatever it may take to gain the skills needed to act on the creative spark. AI empowering the output is a beautiful thing.
alickz 1y ago
is art being cheap really such a problem? is it a net negative to society if the average person could produce so much art that it becomes post-scarce?

overfeed 1y ago

What cheapens the experience is the insistence of being called a "mountaineer" when a helicopter dropped you at the peak. This goes for "AI artists" and "astronauts" on commercial launches who glom on to unearned titles whose prestige was forged by countless professionals working very hard.

thih9 1y ago
Such is technological progress. AI generated images are only an extension of what e.g. photography has experienced in the last decades. We’ve had film cameras, then digital cameras, then smartphones, each of these commoditized image creation by a then-unthinkable factor. It’s an ongoing process, even if this leap seems especially big.
- overfeed 1y ago
  Technological progress does not directly result in posers. As you noted, smartphones allowed anyone to record videos, but I'm yet to see any influencer or YouTuber call themselves a director or cinematographer. I suspect the wannabees exist in the narrow window when technology has expanded enough for non-professionals, but hasn't seen wide enough adoption that the man on the street will recognize the pretentious self-aggrandizement.
  - jakefromstatecs 1y ago
    > I'm yet to see any influencer or YouTuber call themselves a director or cinematographer You must not be looking very hard. There are many youtubers or influencers making indie films or shows. NigaHiga, Annoying Orange and Shane Dawson all made movies. Freddie Wong started out as a Youtuber and created Video Game High School.
    - fy20 1y ago
      Also look at the production quality that a single person can achieve today. Go to Amazon and drop a few grand on mics, lights, cameras and lenses. The result is production quality beating any 90s talk show, which would have taken a whole team to do.