Posted by zdw 4 days ago
> fewer and fewer of the artists and franchises own more and more of the market. Before 2000, for instance, only about 25% of top-grossing movies were prequels, sequels, spinoffs, etc. Now it’s 75%.
I think the explanation isn't a decrease in creativity as much as the fact that in the 1980s, there just weren't that many films you could make a sequel of. It's a relatively young industry. There are more films made today because the technology has gotten more accessible. The average film is probably fairly bland, but there are more weird outliers too.
The same goes for the "the internet isn't as interesting as it used to be" - there's more interesting content than before, but the volume of non-interesting stuff has grown much faster. It's now a commerce platform, not a research thing. But that doesn't mean that people aren't using the medium in creative ways.
Interesting to put these trends into the mix. It sort of tracks - but the teen birth rate was the one which stood out as really not tracking well.
https://www.freerangekids.com/short-sweet-how-we-got-to-heli...
I.e., decline of deviance might be causing helicopter parenting; or helicopter parenting might be causing the decline of deviance; or they may be reinforcing each other.
My impression is that, at least in the US, there are two contradictory trends overlapping and intermingling: extreme personal liberty (supremacy of "me" over "us"); and cultural enforcement of strict manners (e.g, around language and gender).
Half of this reads like a reactionary grasping at straws, throwing together a bunch of unrelated things to try and bemoan a "return to weird, but my version of weird". When in reality, the explanation is more straight forward: you're old man.
The culture is a live and well. I've lived through ircs and Discord groups. It's out there, it's just better gatekept to match the existing community now. Berghain doesn't just let in any sex pest. Furthermore, this is incredibly English speaking limited view of culture. Chinese and Japanese web culture is alive and well, you just don't know the language and so you can't participate.
The other reason for a lot of these shallow complaints - architecture being samey, websites being samey, branding being samey - is capitalism, which always as a rule tends towards consolidation. Things become same and boring because they figured out how to make money with it.
And using mass shootings as some sort of logical counter factual is some of the wildest, most insane strawmanning I've seen on the internet.
What a garbage article, I feel dumber for having read it. How in the world this guy manages to command a veneer of intellectualism is hilarious.
Yes culture is still going on many things are still happening, that's not being denied. The thesis is that deviance from societal norms is decreasing. The deviance that finds it's way into societal norms is what we look back at and consider new culture. Therefore the less the pot is stirring with deviance the less culture is evolving. Which I really think IS a valid point and reasoning. I don't think the author is wrong, at least not about what he is talking about.
BUT, I think the author is looking for deviance in some of the wrong places. I don't think it's age, but more of position, both societal, and geographic. Not unlike the accumulation of wealth, where the top percent has been increasing their share over time I think that deviance driven culture is accumulating in much the same fashion.
My guess is that the author lives somewhere in typical city-surrounded-by-suburbs-urban type area, where most people spend the bulk of their time in some sort of gainful employment that mostly benefits the wealthy. Typical weekends are spent paying attention to sports or music events and going out to eat at restaurants. Most people probably take a couple vacations to another area for a few days a year or maybe go on a cruise or something. Having a passport is common.
The examples and ideas he evaluates are deviance WITHIN that framework, but not deviance FROM that framework. In the past much of culture was spawned by that deviance, the deviance that exists within the idea of the typical urban/suburban worker.
Where deviance is abundantly evident today, that you could miss if you aren't in position is to be completely outside of that framework. That's the deviance today.
Some examples: The percentage of homeschooling children is rising rapidly. The number of SxS deaths annually is increasing at a huge rate. The adoption of eBikes, solar panels, off grid living, tiny homes, non-standard pets, lake culture, trail rides, guerilla playgrounds, CPNS, take-overs, pull up concerts, unlicnensed popups, dump truck beaches, etc. There's a TON Of deviance but it's concentrated around the same groups and it's coordinate but at the same time it ends up shutting people out that aren't in those groups, so it really is this sort of cultural accumulation that's not spread as evenly as it once was. And ultimately those situations ARE spawning new culture, trends, music, styles and products etc.
In the section at the end, he does admit that possibility:
The internet ethnographer Katherine Dee argues that the most interesting art is happening in domains we don’t yet consider “art”, like social media personalities, TikTok sketch comedy, and Pinterest mood boards.
https://culture.ghost.io/why-its-hard-to-argue-about-cultura...
I think that is true
But I also think he's right about movies, music, architecture, corporate logos, etc.
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off grid living, tiny homes, non-standard pets, lake culture, trail rides, guerilla playgrounds, CPNS, take-overs, pull up concerts, unlicnensed popups, dump truck beaches, etc
Hm interesting. It feels like the Internet has made off-grid living more feasible. Well I only know from YouTube :-/
But from watching those videos, it does seem like there is a ton of information that can be a matter of life and death ... which you can either find out (1) the hard way (2) from a book or a neighbor (the old ways), or (3) through the Internet !
So the Internet can make new(-ish) things more possible, but I also think it has a dampening/homogenizing effect, as many others said in this thread
This happened to the Roman Empire and it’s what’s happening to our current world order.