Ask HN: Are the 2020s the decade of peak homogenisation?

66 points by spiffotron 4 years ago | 97 comments

There's such a low cost of entry on most forms of digital media / art now that more people than ever just seem to be copying what's popular and adding to the non-stop barrage of beige unoriginality.

The Dribbble front page could all be the same designer at this point, electronic dance music particularly could be made completely interchangeably by any artist, no one seems to have their own design flair any more. Netflix / Disney etc seem to have copped onto one idea that works and just release the same tv show / movie over and over again with a slight tweak as it brings the money in without any worries.

Am I just now very old or is individuality in art and media now seen as a negative, whilst cookie-cutter straight-down-the-middle appeal-to-the-lowest-common-denominator-guff the only way to get ahead at the moment.

Eric_WVGG 4 years ago |

Most of the responses here are just sort of saying "no you're just old," but I wanna buck that and point to some actual differences between now and whenever you're marking the last stage of culture as.

Media consolidation we've evolved into is nuts. Disney has turned American national culture into a creamy smoothie, Sinclair and Clear Channel have made radio and television across municipalities into photocopied and rubber-stamped content, and the Internet killed local newspapers.

We used to have a monolithic mainstream culture and a handful of subcultures. There is still a mainstream, but the subcultures have proliferated, and now are so niche and rapidly evolving that they're difficult to even track as real. Meanwhile, Sunday night football and Simpsons reruns keep chugging along unchanged for decades.

Although it was the cultural left that warned against media consolidation, we basically have the Telecommunications Deregulation Act of 1994 to blame for a lot of this. So, thanks Bill.

tomc1985 4 years ago | |

Should note that subculture seems to have died out among the youngest set. My little sis claims her high school class didn't have cliques and she's currently "studying" goth culture like an anthropologist. (She wants to join them)

PaulHoule 4 years ago | | |

My son graduated from high school, possibly a pathological one, but it seemed the main subcultures were "black kids who like to jump over white kids", "fat kids who don't identify male or female", and "people who put up black lives matter signs in a place that last saw a black person in 2007".

If you actually knew them you'd know there are some atomized individuals who "think different" like the Chinese incel who was begging his mom to pay for plastic surgery. We keep rooting for him to run away from home and live in a "Fight Club" house. He dropped out of the blackpill cult he was in because he didn't want to associate with Indians, so now we're worried he'll fall in people who incite violence.

kpennell 4 years ago | | |

you might enjoy this read 'The internet didn’t kill counterculture—you just won’t find it on Instagram'

https://www.documentjournal.com/2021/01/the-internet-didnt-k...

randcraw 4 years ago | |

Actually, thank Ron as well. I blame the end of the Fairness Doctrine in 1987 for ending the open exchange of ideas and enabling the rise of polarized media oligopolies and local monopolies. Anything run only by giant corporations is soul killing. It's inescapable.

Craigslist and Google sealed the deal by eliminating ad revenue from the diverse media outlets that existed prior to 2000 (now long gone), thereby killing off all but the largest media outlets. Henceforth, all forms of entertainment has to be "giant corporate approved" in order to cut a distribution deal to sell the pap-ish drivel that corporate suits demand. Welcome to the machine, indeed.

dougmwne 4 years ago | |

I think there is also an environment consolidation that is driving this. People are very determined by their environment and experiences. Their art and creativity flows out of those experiences. They also respond to the demand for their art because they want the art to be viewed by many. With our hyper connected and globalized world, the environment that most people experience is getting more homogeneous. Likewise the immediate feedback of social media pushes people to only attempt to create art that will be well received. No more artists misunderstood during their lifetimes struggling to understand how to attract an audience. Just like big tech creates a winner take all market, big media and social media creates a narrow window of content being created and consumed.

And besides, if someone is out there making weird, novel, innovative and unpopular art, the algorithm will never show it to you.

nine_k 4 years ago | | |

I see how big media will only show mainstream content: they are the mainstream.

But what about user-curated content in communities such as Reddit? These are vote-based, not corporate-algorithm-based. I suspect you can find worthy unorthodox art there.

And of course if you need non-mainstream content, you have to actively look for it, and always have had, practically by definition.

mattbrewsbytes 4 years ago | |

Maybe its more commercialization ala moneyball metrics on all media. They get analytics that tell them certain content gets more ads, ads feed the bottom line so that is what they do. Same for movies or "free" content on video services like youtube, twitch, etc. those go by the number of views. They have optimized their revenue funnels and counter culture things just don't pay.

The corporate consolidations have made it a conflict of interest for them to investigate themselves essentially (i.e. will you ever see stories on ABC that cast Disney in a bad light?)

You could say its ripe for a revolution but then you will have people asking how to monetize that revolution and you are back at the same problem.

krapp 4 years ago | | |

>Same for movies or "free" content on video services like youtube, twitch, etc. those go by the number of views. They have optimized their revenue funnels and counter culture things just don't pay.

I take it you haven't actually been on any of these platforms lately because there is an insane amount of niche content on all of them. In fact, catering to subculture and niche interests is what makes them successful.

Also, the commoditization of counterculture by mass media is a thing in general. Hip-hop, punk, anime, D&D, you name it.

scyzoryk_xyz 4 years ago | |

If only the USA was the center of the world then yeah we could blame a U.S. administration from the 90’s, but this homogenization effect can be seen globally.

I do agree with the rest of what you say - inter connectivity seems to have suppressed the local and the hyper local. The internet promised endless possibilities of niches, but the corporations who seized that opportunity have managed to do something strange to them…

dragonwriter 4 years ago | |

Ironically, you complaints about things that are different is...unoriginal.

> Media consolidation we've evolved into is nuts

Compared to when there were three major broadcast TV networks, that were also the major broadcast radio networks, that also owned many of the local stations?

> Disney has turned American national culture into a creamy smoothie

This complaint is older than many adults.

> Sinclair and Clear Channel have made radio and television across municipalities into photocopied and rubber-stamped content

Again, narrow controls of broadcast outlets isn't new, and they matter less now than ever.

> the Internet killed local newspapers.

Corporate consolidation and destruction of local newsrooms in centralized media operations killed local newspapers. In the 1970s-1980s. The internet swept away the dead husks of zombie mastheads that were satellite distributors of centralized content and revitalized the content of the survivors.

> the subcultures have proliferated, and now are so niche and rapidly evolving that they're difficult to even track a

That’s just “there’s a lot more originality available than before” in other words.

Eric_WVGG 4 years ago | | |

> Compared to when there were three major broadcast TV networks

You're not wrong, but crucially those three broadcast networks didn't run their own studios. They couldn't prefer their own, lowly-rated tv shows over more expensive, highly rated shows run by other studios.

lkxijlewlf 4 years ago | |

> ...have made radio and television across municipalities into photocopied and rubber-stamped content, and the Internet killed local newspapers.

I recall growing up in redacted 4 decades ago and there was a popular radio station that played top 40 that we all listened to. I remember being disappointed on a road trip and listening to the exact same radio station in another state but with different DJs.

jonjon10002 4 years ago | | |

Look up the history of FM broadcast automation for more on how this worked - it's fascinating. Starting in the 60s, companies like Drake-Chenault started implementing these Rube Goldberg-esque analog systems that involved tapes with subaudible tones at the ends of songs that would trigger a relay system playing other tapes or cartridges with commercials on them. Stations would subscribe to a service that would send them new tapes with the latest Top 40, AOR, or MOR hits, and then they'd record carts for local ads, weather, and news.

bluefirebrand 4 years ago | | |

Wanna know something even crazier?

There's a radio station here in City1 that has the same morning show hosts as the radio station in City2. They literally do two shows, or pre-record one, I'm not sure. They talk about local City1 news and such, so they try and make it relevant and local. But it's crazy! Are there no radio personalities in my city they could have hired?

Bonkers.

casralad 4 years ago |

No.

"Netflix / Disney etc seem to have copped onto one idea that works and just release the same tv show / movie over and over again with a slight tweak as it brings the money in without any worries."

This is the golden age of streaming. There's more diversity in show types on Netflix alone than across all platforms (movies, tv, direct to video) in the 90s. Paramount is almost entirely devoted to new Star Trek properties and HBO Max releases a new movie every month. If you aren't seeing innovation in story-telling its because you are a Philistine.

This question has real "kids today" energy.

mihaic 4 years ago |

You're probably right, but I'm not sure we've hit the peak yet. What I can't understand if why people can't accept that some periods actually are worse, and it's not a matter of preference. The fact that the music in the 70s was so much better than in the 50s seems almost obvious by any metric (diversity, modern airplay). It's possible that things won't hit again that density of output, like painting in the centuries after the Renaissance.

Broadly, I'm seeing this as being the age of "quality doesn't matter". The larger the market, the worse it is for you to be unique and different.

The great cultural product of the past usually had many cooks, that all had personality and a deeper understanding of the process (for music it was the studio musicians and sound engineers that added another level to the production, while movies had way more crew that often clashed with the director just to improve the end result -- like cinematographers and set designers).

Combined with a loss in intergenerational experience transfer, no wonder it's memes that are the most original of all contemporary cultural products.

ishjoh 4 years ago | |

I tend to agree with your assessment that this is the age of "quality doesn't matter" but I would like to tweak it a little bit. This is the age where novelty is more important than quality.

Something new can be of the lowest quality imaginable, but something old still must be very high quality to get peoples attention.

Even here on hacker news where if a title doesn't have the year it was published there will be at least one comment with that information, and often it will later be added to the title.

mihaic 4 years ago | | |

Hmmm, I wonder if it might be a side-effect of people knowing that new things are crap, so might as well have the freshest crap.

On the other hand I was shocked when I heard people use "old movies" to refer to those of the 2000s, so maybe I've lost touch too much with mainstream tastes, and how these might have been altered when only consuming contemporary entertainment.

JoeyJoJoJr 4 years ago | |

Anime is obvious example where quality (at least in technical terms) peaked in the 80s/90s. My theory about declined quality of media is that there is a practical limit to what can be achieved in an art form, and creative minds will continue to explore and push boundaries until that limit is achieved. After the limit is achieved there is far less creative desire to explore that art form (until a change in the environment presents a new potential limit), and creatives looks to other mediums or art forms. For Anime the limit was Akira or Ghost in the Shell, for rock is was insane shredding on guitar, for TV it was Breaking Bad or GoT. YouTube still hasn’t hit its peak.

omarhaneef 4 years ago |

Everyone disagrees with you ... thereby demonstrating homogeneity ... proving you right?

Jokes aside, have you heard about this hypothesis that because TV and Video are transmitting the same (usually American) shows all over the world, they are also transmitting the "sensibility" and this leads to a "monoculture"?

Not saying I agree or disagree, but if you are interested, you should look it up.

Edit: found an updated look at the concerns in the age of streaming: https://www.vox.com/the-goods/2019/12/17/21024439/monocultur...

And this is their definition:

"What Was the Monoculture? The monoculture seems to refer to some ill-defined age of universality made up of everything from Johnny Carson hosting the Tonight Show to Friends, Seinfeld, and The Office — the 20th-century aegis of white, middlebrow American entertainment, usually starring white Americans. This was also the ascendant era of broadcast media in radio, film, and linear television (the term for cable and network TV that isn’t on-demand). Industry gatekeepers made top-down decisions about what content would be made and when it would be shown, resulting in a lack of diversity that is only now beginning to change.

Monoculture is a Pleasantville image of a lost togetherness that was maybe just an illusion in the first place, or a byproduct of socioeconomic hegemony. It wasn’t that everyone wanted to watch primetime Seinfeld, but that’s what was on, and it became universal by default."

flyingfences 4 years ago |

It would be wrong to say that there isn't unique creativity still out there. What's happened is that the mainstream drivel is now so pervasively marketed that everything else has been effectively pushed out of sight and out of mind.

I see it as a narrowing of a three-tier culture. It used to be that we shared a cultural "core" (shows, bands, books, etc. that /everybody/ knew) and beyond that there were cultures shared by large portions of us and beyond that niche subcultures shared by small groups of us. Recently, it seems to me that the core has been eroded (there's not much that /everybody/ knows any more), the larger cultures have been over-commercialized (Disney Drivel), and the smaller subcultures are starved for exposure. Despite what many of these "platforms" recite about "discovery", a person nowadays has to really search to find a bona-fide niche, a real, independent cultural community.

qiskit 4 years ago |

> There's such a low cost of entry on most forms of digital media / art now that more people than ever just seem to be copying what's popular and adding to the non-stop barrage of beige unoriginality.

There is low cost of entry, but all major platforms appeared to be manned by the same types of people. Who cares if it is easy to produce content when the censors demand conformity.

Consolidation/monopolization/globalism/etc has led to homogenization not just in the virtual world, but in the real world. All the cities in the world look alike. All the homes look alike. Everyone learns english and studies the same things. I watched a youtube vlog of the effects of sanctions on russia. A russian couple takes you to a russian mall and it's pretty much the exact same thing you'd find in any mall in the US. It's not like that just in russia but everywhere in the world. Why does burger king exist in japan, starbucks in france and mcdonalds in russia? The worst in many ways is china which mindlessly copied everything we did.

There was a time where I supported it for selfish reasons. If everyone spoke english and had american stores, it'd be easy for me as a visitor. And it was. But now, I find it pathetic and sad. Sadly, the homogenization will only accelerate as globalism gets even more entrenched.

randcraw 4 years ago | |

A "low cost of entry" for creating new content ignores the "high cost of entry" to distribute it. To actually get eyeballs/ears, new media must somehow get noticed. That used to be done through the sponsorship of mainstream outlets like movie theaters, AM/FM radio and TV stations, etc. But the revenue of all of these has diminished greatly since the birth of WWW, making it ever harder to monetize new content, especially if its small niche isn't recognizable and thus promotable by moneyed distributors and advertisers. Successful art needs access to eyeballs, and before that can happen, it needs nontrivial promotion. While studio time may be dirt cheap today, it's the distribution that continues to be the rate limiter in selling your masterwork and making a living doing it.

jgod 4 years ago | |

The irony of the push for "diversity" everywhere is that it all gets averaged together over time, becoming more homogeneous. To increase diversity, you need zones of heterogeneity that express wider differences.

ishjoh 4 years ago | |

I think you've put your finger on something I've been thinking about for a while.

Why should I travel anywhere if everywhere looks the same as the place I left.

Barrin92 4 years ago |

In my opinion you're absolutely right and I'm relatively young. (that is to say I'm born in the 90s and grew up in the 2000s).

One big argument in the thread is that mass culture was always mediocre but I think that's just wrong. If I look at the music I like it's to a large degree electronic, rock, popular music from the 60s to late 80s. Bowie, Daft Punk, Clash, Aphex Twin, dozens more.

Same with videogames. People need to take a look at what was released in a single year like 1998. Banjo Kazooie, Starcraft, Half Life, Metal Gear Solid, Ocarina of Time, etc. They still milk these franchises right now, and they've barely made any new ones since. They used to actually invent new genres of games every year.

No different with movies. My favorite movies like Strangelove, Alien, 2001, Psycho, Godfather, all ordinary mass culture stuff but great. Virtually everything in the cinemas right now is awful in comparison.

And I literally cannot be accused of nostalgia because I wasn't even born. Not just is everything homogenous but it's old. Science fiction now consists of Blade Runner remakes and Dune and Star Wars and Cyberpunk frozen in the aesthetics that are half a century old.

For people who disagree I have basically a simple question. Can they name something that is as new in form to us right now as Blade Runner was back then, or as punk and electronic music were in the 70s and 80s?

AlwaysRock 4 years ago |

You're old and generalizing.

Finding good content always has and likely always will be like swimming in an ocean of mediocrity and clinging to a piece of floating weeknight saving originality. Often those are the things that survive the test of time while all the meh to okay content is forgotten about.

thot_experiment 4 years ago |

This is such a wild take to me, I feel like there's more cool art all over the internet than ever before. Maybe not as a percentage of the total but by absolute volume I feel like I'm constantly discovering cool/impressive artists of all sorts. I mean listen to Denzel Curry's last N albums for any value of N, they're all great and they're all different from one another.

Individual artists have more power than ever before to create art, maybe that doesn't work great to earn a living but we're still out there doing it making great shit. You just have to look for art in places that aren't spotify, dribble and instagram. Those are vehicles to make money, rarely does an artist staying true to their wild individualistic vision make money, change the industry etc. (though there are still obvious examples, Kanye comes to mind) but for every artist doing great work in the public eye there are a thousand you've never heard of because you don't put the time in to find them.

P.S. Limit copyright to like 10 years.

reducesuffering 4 years ago |

“electronic dance music particularly could be made completely interchangeably by any artist, no one seems to have their own design flair any more”

Very wrong. Streaming and DAWs have led to an explosion of creatives in a wide variety of directions. Not sure how you could view Kygo, Lil Uzi Vert, Bladee, Porter Robinson, Dylan Brady / 100 gecs, and Cashmere Cat as interchangeable.

patches11 4 years ago |

How much time have you spent looking for great, unique designers? Not just digital but physical too, on local messages boards, farmer's markets, at local schools?

How much time have you spent looking for unique "electronic dance music"? Have you gone to small local events showcasing house, techno, grime, etc? Have you found the small sections of the internet where people are innovating new electronic sounds?

How often do you search for unique audiovisual content creators? On the large sites sure, but everywhere in between?

A low cost of entry, combined with a low overhead to find something close to what you want, means that, sure, there is both a lot of sameness and that sameness seems to be staring you in the face.

When you look below the surface though, a huge amount of content is getting created, by people who in the past might not have been able to. Electronic music artists who couldn't afford physical synths, drum machines, and recording equipment. Visual artists who can do more with a phone than almost anyone with specialized cameras.

So peak homogenisation? No.

Peak content output per person? Probably also no, it's still going up, but I suspect this is what you are observing.

NoOneNew 4 years ago |

To be fair to both sides of this argument. Yes, if follow the "popular" of any of these sites... Jesus fucking Christ, it's incredibly bland and derivative. Even more so than what it was like in the 90s and 2000s with "popular media" at the time. Algorithms favor repetition, not originality.

That being said! If you're a totalitarian dictator in how you curate your feeds, you'll get the good stuff. Like, my YouTube feed has zero "surprised fucking stupid face" thumbnail channels. If I check incognito mode YouTube, that's all I ever see and it's all derivative, low effort. I have tech essays, writing essays, woodblock printing, photography tutorials and lots of other good stuff on my heavily curated feeds. I also make it a habit to follow up on creators recommendations.

There's effort in finding cool stuff... and to be fair, I feel there always was a certain amount of effort to find "the cool". So... maybe you're putting too much faith in the almighty algorithm.

kkfx 4 years ago |

I can't tell a date, but I see a common pattern from the past: every time a thing became popular, cheap and ready available a certain cohort of people predict (rightly) that this evolution will provoke a very bad drop in quality, effectiveness etc.

If happen from handwriting to print, it happen from the printed press era to the TV era etc. That's honestly normal. Take planes: in the past be a pilot was not only expensive but just few are skilled enough and want enough to be trained for years to finally be called pilots. These days automation make piloting not much different than driving a car. It's perfectly natural that most pilots nowadays are almost interchangeable and not much skilled.

The issue is preserving at least some skilled to have some "masters" able to teach others just in case, because we can predict a bit the future but not more than a bit and re-learn things long lost in the past is far less easier than just being trained again by someone who know.

Saying that there is a peak means that something is changing the trend now reverse, and well... I see no reverse so far. So I can answer no. But number of people who start ranting about the topic augment at a certain peace so perhaps we are approaching a peak, can't really answer, what I can say is that nothing last really long if it does not work that well so at a certain point in time movies that are just showcases of special effects, bot-written news, remixed music randomly etc will forcibly fade. A certain part of our society want homogenization for industrial/business/political purpose and that's in general not just about digital media: car's are standard and even the few carmakers on the market remaining makes agreements on common features, dress are essentially evolved to be the same in all cultures in daily life etc but when something in nature became homogeneous it start to be weak so...

ergonaught 4 years ago |

1) It's mob swarming behavior that drives every social/cultural trend everywhere, so no, that's not new. It's just received greater facilitation via technology.

2) It's what happens at every single intersection of profit and scale that we've encountered in human history to date, so no, that's not new. It's just received greater facilitation via technology.

3) It's what happens whenever the barrier to entry is lowered, so no, that's not new. It's just received greater facilitation via technology.

4) It is parasitic behavior driven by people and companies and etc who are focused primarily on extracting (wealth, revenue, profit, status, whatever) rather than creating/producing guided by some vision/purpose, and again, no, that isn't new. It's just received greater facilitation via technology.

tenebrisalietum 4 years ago |

Probably.

Art has long been a refuge for people who have other problems in life. Tech keeps looking for ways to ensnare eyeballs to ads and wallets to subscriptions.

If you combine the following three things:

- the number of people seeking refuge is increasing due to whatever you want to call the current social factors,

- modern digital art tools enable people to create aesthetically pleasant but not necessarily original things nearly instantly,

- these tools are modern tech properties owned by profit-seeking firms needing ROI in the modern financial landscape,

then you get what we have now.

This may seem like a bad thing, but it encourages new tools and when they get in the hands of truly capable artists, it's worth it.

Original stuff is out there, you just have to look hard. But you always had to look really hard for the good original stuff. For example: look at comic books pre-Internet. Most of them were very similar.

disambiguation 4 years ago |

> Netflix / Disney etc seem to have copped onto one idea that works

Reliable, low-risk, formulaic ROI is the inevitable, and terminal, outcome of mass production entertainment.

If you're looking for creative risk taking in Netflix and Disney then you're looking in the wrong places.

Rastonbury 4 years ago |

Thank goodness Netflix has competition, some of the stuff they put out absolute lowest common denominator crap. It's a good thing they are still funding solid and ambitious films and shows, as are Apple TV. I fear however when the pressure is on increase revenues, cookie-cutter algorithm driven production will crowd out good TV/films, I don't think this is happening yet.

I disagree with electronic music though, loads of people listen to pop radio music or mainstream bigroom EDM (it all sounds the same but its been like that since the start) but you can still find great new music in almost any genre you want. It's not as if all the great producers are starting to sound the same.

kasey_junk 4 years ago |

I’m seeing more diversity in music than any time in the past 30 years. Genres are effectively dead as musicians break all the previous borders.

eimrine 4 years ago |

> is individuality in art and media now seen as a negative

I don't think an individuality was in favor more yesterday then today.

I think that today we have an exponential growth of number of ways we consume some informations, while number of good ideas grows not that fast.

narrator 4 years ago |

If you go looking for it, there is a vast coral reef of diversity beneath the surface where only the 5 media companies that control the mainstream sit.

The best entry into this underworld is podcasting. There are literally millions of podcasts now on every conceivable niche topic and they are so cheap to distribute that there isn't a single dominant aggregator like YouTube. If you can deal with that medium, you'll find a whole universe of creativity.

If you have Android, you can get the Doggcatcher podcasting app ,which doesn't tie to a single aggregator, and explore the vast intellectual underworld yourself.

agent008t 4 years ago |

There are two things going on here simultaneously:

1. 'Mainstream' culture - what you hear on the radio or in gyms, see in cinemas, etc. - is getting increasingly homogeneous as it has to cater to the lowest global denominator. This is both because of greater global reach, and because:

2. "Non-mainstream" culture - stuff you have to explicitly look for, and will have relatively small audiences - is doing great. In the sense that there are tons of content out there for all tastes, you can easily access it, but BECAUSE there is something out there for everyone, mostly it has very small market shares and will remain that way.

So there is both consolidation of mainstream and fragmentation of non-mainstream that reinforce each other. The problem is, it makes mainstream stuff worse, more bland (has to appeal to lowest common denominator), and it makes non-mainstream stuff appear niche and unpopular (because each individual niche is unpopular).

As an example - amazing new music being released in the NewRetroWave genre. But you'll never hear it unless you look for it, while 'mainstream' music in the charts is junk. That leads to the feelings of alienation, that today's culture is worse etc. - and it is true. Because of the small reach, you will never hear a retrowave band playing live in an expensive arena with top quality sound engineers. If you are into that kind of music, you will never feel a part of a generation that is into it, because everyone in this generation is into their own niche thing.

happytoexplain 4 years ago |

>is individuality in art and media now seen as a negative

Perhaps by successful corporations in contexts where "doing what works" is the safer bet (like you said, Disney). But of course it's not seen that way by individuals.

Overall I think you're just perceiving popular culture, not artistic mediums in general. E.g. for your point about EDM, maybe you're thinking of the music you hear in clubs or web radio, but the blanket indictment of EDM you've put forward is not correct I think.

dogman144 4 years ago |

I can't find a good link for it at the moment. There are schools of thought that see the trend of "cookie-cutter creativity" as you say and point to a byproduct of digital capitalism as the cause:

The feedback loops in our system function in such a way that edge-case creativity, the fun and weird stuff that via an incubation period eventually evolve into Nirvana, the Dead, Films (not movies), Warhol, get digested and broadcast to the broader culture too quickly for the creativity to actually develop. We get a mediocre version of it as a result. Put another way, its hard for a counter-culture to develop because Tiktok, Insta, FB, Netflix production pipelines, etc.

The Society of the Spectacle is a dense but short book that covers parts of this feeling - "Debord traces the development of a modern society in which authentic social life has been replaced with its representation..." [0]

Also, Moxie Marlinspike talks about something similar with Signal in that by having end-to-end private chats, it allows that safe space but in a digital context for ideas to develop between trusted parties, which then leads into creativity (or I suppose extremism etc).

[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Society_of_the_Spectacle

fullshark 4 years ago |

I think what we are seeing is an inability for truly original/groundbreaking works to gain traction because of cultural fragmentation. So it's possible it's out there I just don't know it but it's not that simple. This phenomenon is leading to less investment in those types of works from money holders / creators as the odds of a breakthrough has shrunk and that's creating a negative feedback loop.

ep103 4 years ago |

I don't think its age or a change in media currently.

New, innovative, exciting cultural ideas come from small niche groups of people that are motivated by furthering those ideas. The further from those groups you get, the more easily-accessible, lowest common denominator, standardized and banal those ideas get.

I've found when I was young, more ideas were new to me, so I misattributed what really was standard and easy vs what was new and novel. But also, because so many ideas were new, and were new to my peers, if I did take an interest in one, I had a ready group of friends and colleagues that made finding the groups of people who truly were creating new ideas much easier.

As I age, if I haven't kept in touch with such innovative cultural groups, the ideas and media I am exposed to trends towards the standard and easily-mass-acceptible. And the fact that I have knowledge in those ideas already, makes it less likely for me to accidentally accept the mass-standardized ideas as novel.

But there absolutely are new cultural drivers out there. They just, clearly, aren't in the electronic dance music you're being exposed to. Innovative movie ideas aren't being pushed by Netflix and Disney. Etc

muzani 4 years ago |

Well, you're comparing it to the mainstream. I think it's more because things have become more algorithmic.

If you search recipes on Google, you'll get a lot of mediocre 4.7 star recipes. YouTube actually gives better results because it can't be SEOed as easily; we still don't have content creators who put 80% of the budget into marketing.

Disney+ actually has a lot of incredible stuff. I've been watching Pixar shorts more than many other things lately. But this stuff doesn't get into the front page. Same goes for say, TikTok or Google Play. You'll have to dig deeper.

Netflix I feel is on a downturn where they stop showing niche things like Adventure Time and My Little Pony and churn out formulaic original content designed to get people hooked, and lower their costs. Which why a lot of it leans towards sex and shock.

There is a solution that nobody really does: manual content curation. The catch is you can't aim to make lots of money, because once you do, you become the mainstream front page.

mouzogu 4 years ago |

I think part of this is due to the algorithmic nature of so many of these platforms.

Majority of people will only watch what is trending, it creates a feedback cycle that perpetuates that kind of content which is popular with the mainstream. And whatever is mainstream is usually homogenised and boring.

As someone who watches quite a lot of movies, I always felt that they peaked sometime in the 70s.

randcraw 4 years ago | |

Yes, I agree that the heavy reliance on algorithms by media sources today are a big part of the problem in finding new fare that's worthwhile. This is one of the major demerits of AI and machine learning -- pattern recognizers learn and highlight only the major signals they already know -- the peak of the bell curve dominates search results. If the mainstream is not what you want, you hired the wrong travel guide.

But creativity and innovation are minor signals, outliers. Probabilistic search as used by AI and ML detects not outliers, but the peak of the bell curve, the patterns that are recognizable and most popular. If you hoped to find something unusual or unrecognizable or rare, AI/ML/statistics are the wrong tools to do that. To a naive AI algorithm, good outliers look no different from bad ones, so both will be overlooked in your search results.

nonameiguess 4 years ago |

I can't agree. Just with Netflix, they have mountains of pretty original content. As soon as something does well, it does get endlessly copied, but that doesn't change that the initial innovation is still happening. Shows like Dark, Russian Doll, Arcane, immediately had copycats, but were pretty great and different and likely never would have been made if not for Netflix's "throw money at every artist in the world and throw crap against the wall to see what sticks" content strategy.

Disney is definitely more guilty of what you're saying because they have a massive back catalog and get by mostly by buying existing IP or rebooting their own.

dgellow 4 years ago |

If you're looking at the dominant platforms or artists then yes, of course, things look the same. But there is an infinite amount of diversity if you look around.

For example if you dislike Netflix / Disney approach, you have platforms such as MUBI (https://mubi.com/) where you have handpicked selections of worldwide movies, with lot of more artsy and unusual styles.

Regarding music I cannot even start to imagine how you can say this, there is almost no limit to how many different genre and niche, unique content is available even just on Youtube or Bandcamp.

PaulHoule 4 years ago |

I'd think that people have said this about the 1950s, 1960s, 1970s, 1980s, ...

quaintdev 4 years ago | |

When my father use to say this I used to be like I will change with time and like the stuff that current generation likes.

I try. But it's becoming harder and harder. When someone asks me my favourite TV/movie show I end up telling them something that is decade old. Something from time when I was still in college.

twmiller 4 years ago | | |

I'm older than dirt.

Last week I watched 'Severance' on Apple TV. It was very good. Last night I watched the first episode of 'Tokyo Vice' on HBO Max and it was definitely good enough that I'll keep watching.

Sure, Billie Eilish sucks, but Wet Leg doesn't. (Apologies if you like Bilie Eilish, but art is subjective, not objective.) There's good stuff out there being made today, you just have to look for it.

tenebrisalietum 4 years ago | | |

TV is dead. Young people aren't watching it. Big cinema is mostly dead. Streaming and social media has made mass culture a thing of the past. You're going to have to pick a bubble like everyone else.

mikewarot 4 years ago |

Mainstream media is homogenized pabulum, designed not to offend anyone, especially the advertisers. But how many people actually watch the mainstream media any more? I certainly don't, and I'm old. (58)

There's too much good stuff out there with AvE, This Old Tony, Beau of the Fifth Column, Post 10, Joe Pieczynski, and all the rest of the 582 Youtube channels that I've found so far.

There's a ton of great stuff out there, you don't even have to look very hard to find it. If all else fails there's r/mealtimevideos to help point you in the right direction over on reddit.

lifeformed 4 years ago |

You're just looking at places where people want to appeal to a mass audience. Dribble, radio EDM, Disney, it's all going to be the pop-culture average. Just look slightly deeper for content.

ComradePhil 4 years ago |

I personally believe it's more varied than ever (simply because there has never been a time when there was more interaction between very different people and ideas)... but as we get old, our mental models get more and more outdated. It can see more variation if you give the data it has been trained with but fewer variation when it comes to new unfamilar data (everything new seems more similar to each other just by being different from what we know).

playing_colours 4 years ago |

I believe a lot of interesting and original content is created these days: books, music, games. The problem is it is difficult to find them. They are not in the top of Google search or reddit. “Best original fiction 2022” query will not work.

Can anyone share some recommendations how you find original indie books, games, music?

gunfighthacksaw 4 years ago |

I’ve been getting into the hyperpop genre because it’s an interesting (sometimes) avant-garde take on the homogeneity of modern culture.

If you don’t like the aesthetic of late 90s-early 00s bubblegum europop you probably won’t enjoy it, but the self-awareness and latent darkness make it interesting in my eyes.

Tycho 4 years ago |

Independence of the media seems to be rapidly deteriorating. Once some idiots decided that “misinformation” caused things like Brexit, they acquiesced to the state’s desire to arrogate all media reporting, because, after all, letting people make up their own minds clearly wasn’t working. The coverage of the war in Ukraine is the ultimate exemplar of this, and alarming because it’s not as if the average Western citizen has any stake in it, any vote to cast.

geodel 4 years ago |

The way I see it is once things have been understood in sufficient details all people working on creating those things have come to same conclusions when facing same evolutionary/economic/social forces. Hence they all look same more or less.

jdrc 4 years ago |

it s the paradox of globalization and no borders. in a world constrained, people might pay more attention to the local artist, who in turn gets a chance to evolve her art which garners her more local attention in a virtuous loop. In a global world people ignore the local artist for the high-sugar, global-optimum artist who has no incentive to evolve because her audience is already massive so why jinx it. Even if audience churn is fast, the audience is so big, practically endless. The local artists knows she cant win so she just copies the global optimum to sound familiar.

dragonwriter 4 years ago |

I’ve literally heard this “everything is the same now, there used to be more creativity” consistently long enough that the good times people point to now are often decades in to when I had been hearing the complaint.

ess3 4 years ago |

I think maybe more it’s the peak of platformization which all regress to the mean. There’s still a lot of interesting things to find, it’s just a lot harder and you have to venture off the main platforms quite a bit.

p1mrx 4 years ago |

Apparently you haven't seen https://i.imgur.com/7IIhRsk.mp4

hackermanve 4 years ago |

I think is something about perspectives, with a little help globalization, but, out there some artist are transforming the meaning of "art"

thefz 4 years ago |

No. At least, not outside the US, where this problem seems particularly rooted.

tomc1985 4 years ago |

> Am I just now very old

The kids are going to run their mouths about your age. Ignore them.

robonerd 4 years ago |

Using the word "peak" to describe anything with a social component is nonsense, essentially soothsaying. The term 'peak oil' at least is rooted in empirical analysis of consumption and production of a tangible resource. But 'peak capitalism' or 'peak homogenization' are both far too presumptuous to have real meaning. The truth is we have no idea how much further these things will go. Ten years ago some of my friends were telling me we were at peak capitalism. If that was the peak 10 years ago, then what are we at now? The trends they claim were peaking 10 years ago have only continued, they didn't peak. You can't read the future, so you can't pinpoint this sort of peak except in retrospect.

If you think 'something's GOT to give' you might be right, but when? When is anybody's guess.

drewcoo 4 years ago |

Why did I expect this to be about rampant censorship?

Ok, downvote me already.

MrMan 4 years ago |

I dont feel this way at all and I am old, so

ushakov 4 years ago |

i recommend the book: The Culture Industry

https://www.amazon.com/Culture-Industry-Selected-Routledge-C...

basically what happened is capitalism and capitalism means that companies and individuals seek out creating goods that make the most instead of contributing to culture

this is the answer to why all music sounds the same and all art looks the same