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PaperclipPerfector  9mo ago (text post)   26704 thread views

Culture War Roundup for the week of January 22, 2024

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Right now, we are at a place of polarization, yet all of our art sucks (my opinion obviously but it seems to be shared). If you look back at the last time our country was this divided in the 1960's, we saw some of the greatest output of music and literature we have ever seen. We had incredible artists like the Beatles among others. Then of course that was probably the peak of black culture with incredible artistic output that they will probably never reach again. This was probably the last time you saw many black musicians and guitarists be better than their white counterparts. If you take it back to the French Revolution, you saw some of the best political philosophy ever created such as with Rousseau. Political discord creates art and philosophy that has usually never been seen before, but today we don't see any of that. Even Monty Python is more subversive than anything we see today. Clockwork Orange was more subversive than anything we see today. Why aren't we seeing a peak in art again like the time should predict?

I'll give one good example of Trump so emotionally wounding previously sensible people that they produce good art.

At this point I'm hoping Trump gets reelected so they again feel so bad that they make a followup song.

But otherwise yes. Particularly comedy degraded so much.

I disagree that

all of our art sucks

There's plenty of good music.

For starters, The Beatles are boring. Maybe it's my zoomer ass not having grown up with them, but it's 4/4 pop-rock with uninteresting lyrics.

Little darlin', I feel that ice is slowly melting

Little darlin', it seems like years since it's been clear

Here comes the sun

Here comes the sun

And I say, it's alright

Which is...fine. It's easy listening music, maybe the production was impressive back then, but I don't feel it's stood the test of time.

The 21st century has brought a lot of innovative, unique, or masterfully composed music releasing.

Deathspell Omega's "The Furnaces of Palingenesia" is possibly the only sober depiction of the platonically ideal fascist society in humanity's art output. From a composition perspective, it's masterful, but I suspect people more schooled in music could explain why better than I could, so I'll just excerpt a couple lyrics.

From the song "The Fires of Frustration"

We will burn and not explain, and this will feel ecstatic

This exact mentality is present everywhere and I've never seen it summed up quite this succinctly. You see it in a Twitter mob ruining a life, a riot burning down a small business owner's life savings, a primitive tribe butchering its foes purely on instinct, a mass shooter waging war against the universe - encapsulated in a short statement that makes perfect sense, underpinned by echoing, growled vocals, a wall-of-sound guitar mass that has tantalizingly discernible melodies amidst the chaos, and impossibly frenetic drumming. It's art in its purest form, raw human reality given form.

Another quote from the song "Ad Arma", which I feel needs no accompanying commentary:

The perfectibility of human nature is infinite: we shall therefore nurture infinite dreams with infinite amounts of blood. Failures are therefore successes and mere steps on the triumphant march towards bliss

If this doesn't resonate with a Motteposter I don't know what will.

On the topic of violence, give Mili's "Dandelion Boys, Dandelion Girls" a listen.

At 1:53, the vocalist whispers

Whose child was I dreaming to pierce through the unworn tip of my bayonet?

As her voice grows in strength she sings, almost triumphantly,

Whose life had I decided was less worthy of respect?

Creedence Clearwater Revival and The Temptations, with Fortunate Son and War respectively, probably win the anti-war songs competition just through the test of time, but I would contend that Dandelion Boys, Dandelion Girls comes damn close in artistic merit, even if it falls far short in raw popularity.

Alright, that's a heavy topic, so let's go to more "fun" music. For now let's stay in the land of the rising sun with a Japanese electronic music producer:

Camellia's "Berserkerz' Warfare 345" is proof that music is still innovating. Nothing like this was even being conceived of in the days you speak of, but here it is now. It's purely digital, it's way too fast for your grandparents, your parents, or even your older siblings, and in the 60s drums were not doing this nonsense. We can debate quality or artistic merit, but it's certainly innovative, and it gets my blood pumping faster than anything released before this millennium. See also Skrillex's "Scary Monsters and Nice Sprites" EP, which spawned an entire genre of purely computer-generated piss-off-your-dad music, and was tremendously popular to boot. Electronic music existed well before this, but it wasn't anywhere near as belligerent, chaotic, or willing to subvert genre trends.

Oh dear. I've mostly gone off into niche genres. Even Skrillex's "Scary Monsters and Nice Sprites" (the most popular song off the EP of the same name), only has 195 million plays on Spotify, a pale shadow of The Beatles' "Here Comes the Sun" with over a billion, or Blue Oyster Cult's "Don't Fear The Reaper", a personal favorite of mine, with half a billion.

So let's talk popular music. Lil Nas X dropped "Old Town Road", which was catchy enough to get almost 1.5 billion plays on Spotify, and innovative enough to damn near spark a race war between rap and country fans. He then released "Industry Baby", which has more plays than Old Town Road, and is similarly earworm-y. I think it's a fascinating cultural artifact, because the music video (NSFW warning) is almost downright pornographic in an extremely morally degenerate manner. It features homoerotic black nudity in the context of "prison bitch" culture and a touch of Satanic imagery just for kicks, and somehow spawned next to no controversy. Debate its quality all you like, it's a useful cultural landmark - much like The Beatles.

I take issue with the statement

Then of course that was probably the peak of black culture with incredible artistic output that they will probably never reach again.

"End It" is a black-fronted punk/hardcore band that is blowing any traditionally white bands in the scene out of the water, in my opinion. "New Wage Slavery" transcends the entire discography of Knocked Loose or The Acacia Strain, both traditionally popular bands in those genre circles. And if you haven't heard of a little band called Death Grips, watch "I've Seen Footage" performed live and realize that black-fronted punk bands can captivate a majority-white audience of angry kids better than almost any white musician right now. These are my niche examples and entirely disregard the fact that black rappers can pull white crowds big enough that literal deaths occur.

Beyond music,

I don't watch many movies, so I can't speak to a 21st-century equivalent to Monty Python or Clockwork Orange. Despite that, I'll take a stab at movies that subvert expectations. In "The Departed", the finale where (spoilers) basically every major character dies is masterfully executed, and also subverted the shit out of my expectations. "You Were Never Really Here" is a movie about a mercenary with PTSD, and its inaugural fight scene presents itself like it's going to be a John Wick style one-man-army movie, only to cut to security cameras showing the protagonist vomiting at the doorway before muted, off-camera, implied, or out of focus violence occurs to all the nameless security guards. Subversive and brilliant.

I started compiling a list of literature like Peter Watts' "Blindsight" and John Scalzi's "Old Man's War", and then some YouTube content that has more or less supplanted things like SNL in my eyes like Almost Friday TV's sketch comedy, but it occurred to me that I'm not sure I've touched on your central argument.

Is any of this a peak in art?

That's a more fascinating question, and one I'm substantially less qualified to answer. Other posters, I think, have made reasoned arguments for whether a peak is occurring, will occur, or can occur due to technology fragmenting fandoms, and I don't wish to rehash their arguments here. But I take major issue with the statement

all our art sucks

because from my perspective it's simply not true. There's more and better art available to us than at any point in human history. We just can't tell what of it will stand the test of time yet.

There's more and better art available to us than at any point in human history. We just can't tell what of it will stand the test of time yet.

Excellent post overall, and not just because you included a Mili track. But I don't think you justified this line with your post, although I think you successfully demonstrated that music is not suffering the same disease as other areas of the entertainment industry. More certainly, but better?

The fact that there is too much variety is part of the problem too. Artists would like to pretend otherwise, but popularity plays a vital role in the determination of quality art, because art that "stands the test of time" is art that resonates with a lot of people. That was a lot easier to produce back when a) there were only four channels and three studios to choose from and b) content creators weren't forced to jam propaganda into everything.

Take your comedy example - pretty good production and decent joke structure, but being a youtube clip it can never have the reach of the kind of comedy that we used to get. You can't have memes spawned from memes spawned from memes based on the gay dream accusation sketch, because it just doesn't have that cultural reach. Music doesn't suffer this problem because of genres, which are being stripped from visual media as both financial and social factors force creators to colour within increasingly rigid lines.

So while I agree it's not fair to say all our art sucks, and there is some excellent stuff out there if you can find it, I do think our culturally iconic art sucks. Or more appropriately, our cultural icons aren't art any longer - they are just products.

In "The Departed", the finale where (spoilers) basically every major character dies is masterfully executed, and also subverted the shit out of my expectations.

Isn't that a remake of a Hong Kong movie with Chow Yun Fat, I'm nearly certain? Looked it up, it's Andy Lau but it is a Hong Kong movie remake.

I think much of this is "wow, first time I have ever seen this" but that doesn't mean it hasn't been done before. Crime/heist movies where "everybody dies at the end" include The Killers from 1964 and Get Carter from 1971.

Fast electronic is older than you think. Nothing against Camellia, but just for the one I know, DJ Sharpnel were making this style of music in 2001. Hell, Project Gabbangelion was in 1996. It almost makes more sense to view its current popularity as a revival.

(It's from 2005, but I really enjoy this best-of album.)

It's purely digital, it's way too fast for your grandparents, your parents, or even your older siblings, and in the 60s drums were not doing this nonsense.

True, why in the 50s our grandparents were only demurely dancing the waltz, yes? And true, this is a more demure version for TV from the early 60s (and evidence that sadly white people cannot dance) but it's not 'roses by the moonlight' type music either.

I'll agree nosebleed techno didn't happen in the 60s but again, that's not saying each generation did not have its moment of shocking the squares and the olds.

EDIT: That Camellia track gave me fond flashbacks to Einstürzende Neubauten, but yes, your parents generation (of which I'm probably part, if not quite old enough for the granny generation) would be shocked by current music 😁

Much like claiming Seinfeld is unfunny, or that Star Wars (1977) is overrated, characterizing the Beatles as "basic pop-rock" is doing them a disservice and missing the point. To the degree that they seem boring/cliche today (debatable IMO) it is only because we've all grown up listening to entire generations worth of other artists trying to emulate them.

As for the rest, I remain convinced that only real measure of "quality" when it comes to art is whether it remains relevant 50, 100, or 1,000 years after the fact. The Beatles seem to have ticked that checkbox, we'll see about Peter Watts.

Like the anecdote about the old lady who saw a Shakespeare play for the first time in her life, and said she didn't think much of it because it was full of quotations. The joke being, Shakespeare originated a lot of those, which later became so often used and so well-known that they were "well that's not very original, it's basic, isn't it?"

Indeed.

I'm gonna second this and add that I think there's a lot of great art coming around right now, of various degrees of relevance to current social issues, but a lot of it is in other media like anime, video games, and web video, and not merely familiar things like music and film.

On the topic of music, though, HEALTH's new album Rat Wars is shaping up to be something quite special; check out "DEMIGODS" and "ASHAMED."

it's way too fast for your grandparents, your parents, or even your older siblings [...] Electronic music existed well before this, but it wasn't anywhere near as belligerent, chaotic, or willing to subvert genre trends.

Moby made his 1000bpm track 30 years ago, and although he doesn't have any children at 58 he's old enough to be a grandfather. Pre electronic music there were people making experimental noise music using jackhammers.

The Camellia track sounds more developed but at base it's an iteration on the paradigm of making artificially intense music. It's not that it's too fast for the olds, it's that it's too fast full stop. There's a point of diminishing returns and there's a point beyond that of negative returns. Pushing the limits or indeed wilfully smashing them is, at this point, if not a stale idea then at least a very long way from radical and unfamiliar.

If you disagree that it's too fast you can increase the speed to 2x on YouTube, but I expect you'd agree it doesn't make it twice as good.

These days if you want to shock the olds you have to get a face tattoo and cut your dick off, and even that's just upping the ante on the kind of shit flinging, blood spilling, dick stroking, gender bending performance art that's been happening since the '60s. Radicalism just isn't radical anymore. It's been tried and where it hasn't been largely rejected the remainder has been assimilated.

that's just upping the ante on the kind of shit flinging, blood spilling, dick stroking, gender bending performance art that's been happening since the '60s

Screamin' Jay Hawkins from the 50s, Arthur Brown from the 60s, Alice Cooper in the 70s, The Cure etc. Goth sub-genre of New Wave in the 80s, Marilyn Manson in the 90s (and by then he to me was "seen it all before") - the beat goes on! I couldn't tell you who the most recent examples are since I'm too old to be following the Top 100 any more, I just sit in my rocking chair with my knitting and my Marsen Jules mp3s 😂

I disagree that it's too fast, and I would submit that making it 2x on YouTube doesn't make it better is an argument for it. This is music that is intended for that speed, not speed purely for speed's sake.

The point is that exploring our cultural frontiers diminishes the amount of territory left unexplored, and a lot of the charted territory has been marked as being of limited interest and value for more than a generation. We know the extremes are out there and most people choose the alternative not out of ignorance but out of preference.

Deathspell Omega's "The Furnaces of Palingenesia"

Maybe it's my Gen-X backside talking here, but metal? Yes, dear, I'm sure it's very nice, now here's your milk and cookies 😁

Let's tick off the bingo card:

SCARY BLACK! growly voice, fake Latin, pompous prog-rock pretentiousness in titles and subject matter, Gothick imagery, faux-Satanic imagery, horror imagery - check, check and check. And the music follows the same progression in sound, rhythm, speed, so on that is all the usual pattern of the genre.

I'm going to insult a lot of people's musical tastes here, and I'm genuinely sorry, but metal (in all its sub-genres and sub-sub-genres) is music for 14 year old boys. When you're in your young teens (be you male or female) you have this vast sense of your own importance and that includes deepity. I wrote my share of terrible sixth-form poetry at that age, I have no leg to stand on there.

Iron Maiden's Eddie was fun, though, they had that proper tongue-in-cheek not taking themselves 100% seriously that you do need for metal.

But now I am older, and if I want both novel and profound in music, I go here.

This is a beautiful piece. The piano has a an ethereal, sort of haunted sound to it, like something you'd hear faintly in the Hill House.

Yeah, Arvo Part is one of the modern composers I find listenable (Sir Harrison Birtwhistle may be rightly celebrated but I can't listen to anything of his longer than ten seconds or so before my ears start bleeding).

Erik Satie, as an older composer, I also like. I tend to find the French rather than the Germans more to my taste.

(Don't take from the above that I know anything about music, I don't, just "oh this sounds nice!")

but it's 4/4 pop-rock

That's such a mischaracterization of the Beatles. If you think that, then you simply haven't listened to the full span of their music, and I'll guess you're missing out on both middle and mid-late Beatles.

Quantitatively, they did so much stuff besides sticking to common time all the time. For examples of well-known Beatles tunes that do weird things from a metric perspective: She Said, Good Morning, All You Need is Love, Two of Us, Rain, We Can Work it Out, Revolution, Across the Universe. Even Here Comes the Sun, which you mention, is not just 4/4, listen to the part that goes "Sun, sun, sun, here it comes".

As far as it being "easy listening" is concerned, my god, some of their stuff is so experimental, it's even barely listenable to! Revolution 9 comes to mind. And there's every point in-between, as well. Listen to Sgt Pepper, and tell me that's easy listening. Mr Kite is haunting with eerie sound experiments. Sgt Pepper and Reprise really rock. Fixing A Hole is wistful and thought provoking. A Day in the Life is downright depressing.

Seconding your point on "Here Comes the Sun". My sister asked me and my brother to play it at her wedding, and I had to notate the entire melody on sheet music for my brother to play on the cello. Notating all of those time signature changes in the bridge was a nightmare, it's practically math rock.

That's such a mischaracterization of the Beatles. If you think that, then you simply haven't listened to the full span of their music, and I'll guess you're missing out on both middle and mid-late Beatles.

You're right, like I said I've barely listened to The Beatles, so I only had a shallow, pop-culture understanding of their music and some knowledge of their greatest hits. I gave a lot of what you mentioned a listen and some of it really stood out to me.

Sgt Pepper and the reprise are absolute jams. Sounds like Jimi Hendrix on guitar. I hate the rest of the album, it's musically impressive but just not for me. No accounting for taste.

Revolution 9 is super cool. I'm surprised I had never listened to this before. It's like an amalgamation of sounds from every odd, experimental song I've ever heard.

I'll leave the original comment unedited for posterity, but you're right, The Beatles are a lot more than what I knew of. Thanks!

Oh yeah, you should also check out I am the Walrus and Tomorrow Never Knows. Those would be like if Revolution 9 tried to be a little more like music.

Cool, I'm glad you gave them a listen!

See also Skrillex's "Scary Monsters and Nice Sprites" EP, which spawned an entire genre of purely computer-generated piss-off-your-dad music, and was tremendously popular to boot.

Small correction: Dubstep was a thing in the UK since the early 2000s, Skrillex made it popular in America.

See also Skrillex's "Scary Monsters and Nice Sprites" EP, which spawned an entire genre of purely computer-generated piss-off-your-dad music

Yeah, I have to laugh at that, because I'm old enough to remember (and be the teen audience) for punk when it was punk, and not some trendy American sub-culture. I'm presumably the generation for the "pissed-off dads/moms" parenting age for the producers and consumers of this, and I have to say, I'm not feeling particularly pissed-off at that tune? Starts off with vaguely ska beat, goes into disco/vocaliser voice over mid-tier electronics?

Kid, my generation invented the "music is now electronic and drums have been replaced by synths" 🤣

This is part of it, though; every new generation thinks their parents are hopelessly unhip, out of touch, and shockable. The generations that grew up on rock and punk are the parents/grandparents of today, we lived through disco and the Second Summer of Love (Acid), you think some bap-bah beat is gonna piss us off?

Dubstep even made it to Eurovision in 2013. Now this is a song!

I think the main novel factor of the electronic music scene that started 2000-ish is the really high BPM, enabled by speeding up samples and using digital tracks. I don't think you'll ever see that in the mainstream. Dubstep is just a melodic direction, a kind of novel instrument, and thus can be absorbed, but if the rhythm is too fast for most people to even parse, it stops sounding like music entirely. So while that song uses dubby elements, I'd still fundamentally call it artsy pop-rock at heart. Which to be fair, goes for lots of current electronic music too.

Well, what constitutes the "mainstream"? This is our winning qualifier to send to Eurovision this year, and it's selected on "The Late, Late Show" which is a very conventional weekend chat show that has been going for decades and is now on its third host. If the Plain People Of Ireland (or those who bother voting) can select this, what does "mainstream" mean?

And if we're guessing Eurovision winners, I don't think this will do it. It fits in nicely with the "at least two or three quirky entries" grouping for Eurovision every year, may even make it to the final, but is not a winner. Not because it's too wacky or Gothick Threatening eek!, but just because "eh, nothing to stand out".

Yes, but do you cbat?

Never heard of it, not particularly improved my life to have heard it, but it's part tongue-in-cheek and part the spirit of 70s and 80s progressive noodling and self-indulgence lives on.

I'm not sure whether it fits better with Crazy Frog or Industrial. I think the Frog wins this one 😁

Scattered thoughts.

In favor of your thesis: There was something going on with the Western music during the Enlightenment. Mozart was a contemporary with the enlightenment. Beethoven started his career moving to Vienna right on cue with the War of the First Coalition.

Against: There was a great deal of unequivocally bad music, too. It was an era that produced Portsmouth Sinfonia (transgressive and subversive, but of the kind where you stare at the subversion too long).

Written by the victors: Did the adults in the 1960s music like the music that now gets called great? Did they think they were seeing a peak in art, or where they scratching their heads why nobody is making new subversive Lindy Hop. (I once met a guy who lamented how the big band exited the popular consciousness when rock become ascendant, and thus, last of good music died.)

Without numbers or any sort of statistical analysis, this sort of take is little more than "vibes". The 60s had the Beatles, but the modern day has Taylor Swift. How do we compare the two? It mostly seems like personal preference, so it's silly to imply it has much greater significance.

As another counterpoint, a different artistic field, video games, has been doing absolutely gangbusters over the last few years.

Why aren't we seeing a peak in art again like the time should predict?

I have more great art to consume that I have time for it. (I guess that is a good reminder to close Motte and read one of things I planned to read)

Two quotes come to mind:

Jordan Peterson's much-memed "There are cathedrals everywhere for those with eyes to see"

The Last Psychiatrist's "If you're reading it, it's for you"

It seems obvious to me that anyone with your attitude, living in the current digital age - where it has literally never been easier to create and disseminate works of art - is someone who is actively choosing the role of the curmudgeon. Consciously or not, you are allowing yourself to calcify, closing yourself off from experience, embracing the lazy "nothing is as good when as I was a teenager" mentality. The state of art hasn't meaningfully changed, but your brain and your habits and your openness to experience has. Fight it. Stop being lazy.

it has literally never been easier to create and disseminate works of art

The state of art hasn't meaningfully changed

Is the contention that the developments of the last couple decades that made things far easier than ever to create and disseminate works of art have not meaningfully changed the state of art? I think it could be true, but it's not obviously true to me, and it seems counterintuitive; surely the absolute explosion of both opportunities to develop one's craft and to disseminate the results of such work would cause a shift both in what types of people are creating art and what types of art those people are creating? But then again, depending on what "meaningfully" means in "meaningfully changed," all that shift might not amount to anything meaningful. In which case it raises the issue that the state of the art doesn't need to "meaningfully" change for this particular meaning of "meaningfully" to change how and how much enjoyment someone gets out of the art.

I will say, personally, I'm agnostic on this question. I think the quality of mainstream films has almost certainly gone down significantly, but I have no way of proving it or even meaningfully analyzing it. But much of the artistry in video has shifted to online video on places like YouTube or Twitch, which have entirely different forms of video art than a film or TV show. The commentary and reaction videos on YouTube are works of art, many of them are essentially professional-quality feature-length documentaries, and they're being pumped out at rates faster than ever before. The streams we see on Twitch or YouTube are essentially real-time reality shows and are works of performance art, again at never-before-seen volume and also production values that match professionals from just a generation ago. Are there some truly great works of art in here that equal the greatness of, I don't know, 2001: A Space Odyssey? Maybe, but it would certainly look very different from a film and likely be unrecognizable as great if judged by the standards of a scripted medium like film.

Then there's all the other mediums like 2D illustrations which has recently seen the hints of the advent of an era that would produce, to quote someone on this forum, IIRC, "beauty to cheap to meter," or video games which are almost a whole new medium altogether compared to a generation ago, and certainly compared to 2 generations ago. But does that mean we just get more and more technically impressive but compositionally/stylistically boring AI slop or addiction-optimized live service games?

Well, that's why I'm agnostic on the matter, I guess.

I think the issue is that getting your art in front of a substantial audience is an issue more than anything else. I can make and record a song, or even a movie or tv series and upload it fairly easily, I cannot so easily get around the gatekeepers and algorithms that control what people see.

Music is a shitty vehicle for political ideology and I thank the heavens there isn’t more of it. But, there has been some recent politically-conscious music. Have you seen the MGMT Little Dark Age memes? These were all over the place. From the lyrics: “Policemen swear to God, love seeping from their guns | I know my friends and I would probably turn and run | If you get out of bed, come find us heading for the bridge | Bring a stone, all the rage, my little dark age”. Vampire Weekend”s Unbearably White is gorgeous and quite political:

Discussing the track with The Sunday Times before its release, Koenig commented that "infighting among white people about who is marginally more or less white is not particularly interesting", and that the song partially explores that.[1] The phrase "unbearably white" had previously been used as a criticism of the band, in reference to their race

I don’t really care about black culture all too much but I’d bet many would tell you that today is the peak of black influence, with rap becoming truly global in a way that jazz only grazed.

You mention the Beatles, but they weren’t political as much as naive about the world (imagine).

Isn't Imagine just literally pro-communism? I agree that it's a naive perspective, but it's also very much a political one.

FWIW, that wasn't the Beatles, that was a Lennon solo project Ono collaboration.

Much of this is coincidental and I think this has less to do with the nation being divided, but rather entertainment being less fragmented back then, compared to today in which everything has been broken up into infinitesimal niches and channels like YouTube, SoundCloud, Spotify etc. (except for a few major acts like Taylor Swift). The Beatles blew up after being featured on the Ed Sullivan Show, which was a major cultural funnel, compared to the fragmentation seen today. Beatles music was apolitical compared to 17-18th century political philosophy.

The standard response to "modern music sucks" is that it's all survivorship bias, i.e., the music from the 60s that sucked was forgotten about. This could just as easily apply to political philosophy and everything else. Have you considered this possibility?

One possible framing, seen in Neil Howe's writings, is that there are two different kinds of "strife" periods, and they tend to alternate. The kind we saw in the 70s (and the Great Awakening) he and William Strauss termed a "prophetic" generation in young adulthood/artistic zenith, and the one we have now (and the 1930s - 1940s, and the Civil War) they term a "hero" generation in young to mid adulthood. The "prophets" tend to be more cultural and belief oriented, producing some interesting preachers, dreamers, stories, revivals, culturally important festivals, and whatnot. The "heroes" are more likely to produce moral certainty and the kind of war everyone (who recounts it later) is really sure included a Right Side of History.

I don't know whether these trends are real or illusory, and will not defend it, but find it interesting and suggestive.

I think part of it is that although the 1960s were a very politically polarized time culturally and politically in the West, and there was a lot of suffering such as that caused by the Vietnam war and race relations, there were also many things that gave people a sense of optimism:

  • The post-war economic boom was still going. You could aford to live in a big city on a manual laborer's wage, leaving your mind more or less free to focus on other things, and go play music in the evenings.
  • There was a sense that the fuddy-duddy old-school conservatives who ruled many of the country's establishments were being swept away or at least rendered irrelevant by sweeping socio-cultural changes.
  • The sexual revolution was in full swing, you could potentially experience all sort of sexual delights in relative openness that your grandparents' generation, even if they had access to such delights to begin with, would have had to induldge in furtively and possibly with a sense of guilt.
  • The psychedelic revolution was in full swing, people were getting into all sorts of drugs that can give a great sense of openness, appreciation for the beauty of the world, and optimism, at least temporarily. Those drugs are still available today of course, but one difference is that back in the 1960s one could actually hope that maybe these drugs could lead to a worldwide revolution in consciousness, whereas these days even those of us who are optimistic about psychedelics tend to view them as very useful tools but not likely to fundamentally revolutionalize global consciousness.
  • The interest in Eastern philosophy promised new modes of thinking and the possibility of some kind of radical enlightenment.
  • The New Age movement, which is fundamentally optimistic, was in full swing.
  • There was still a sense of optimism about the Soviet model and there was growing optimism about the potential of the third world, some of which was waging successful decolonization campaigns. If you disliked the American establishment, there were viable-seeming alternatives that you could point to.
  • The space race was making sci-fi fantasies about the utopian future seem like maybe they were actually attainable in the near future.

The West just isn’t close to seeing the same level of social and political chaos that it did in the 1960s and 1970s.

Part of that is extremely banal, it’s because young people are a much smaller proportion of the population than they were in generations where the fertility rate was 3.5. Old people in 2023 are much more powerful than old people were in 1968, and young people are much less powerful.

Secondly, there’s a collective social forgetting of that middle stage of the Cold War. People remember the beginning stages, from Yalta through nuclear testing through Korea and the Berlin Wall. And they remember the 80s to some extent, Reagan’s brinkmanship, a booming America facing a dying Soviet economy, the final collapse a few years later.

But the middle is forgotten. During the oil crisis there were influential Western thought leaders - and not communists - who publicly argued that the Cold War was unwinnable, and that the inevitable long term solution was some kind of synthesis between the Soviet and Western systems. Western economies were wracked by inflation and the oil crisis. The long aftermath of 1968 led to domestic political violence and chaos not seen in decades, crime shot up to previously unfathomable levels (when crime in the US spiked in 2020 and 2021, it was still much lower than the 80s and 90s peak; when crime started rising in the late 60s it kept going up and up without precedent, people thought it would rise forever).

The whole vibe was different, if you watch iconic movies from this era like Taxi Driver and Logan’s Run you can kind of get a glimpse of it. People really thought the world was ending. People today say they think the world is ending, but they don’t act like it the way they did in the ‘70s.

I've been watching a number of films from the 70's and it's remarkable how many end with the protagonist failing to accomplish their goals in a meaningful way.

  • Blowup: the protagonist fails to stop the assassination conspiracy and his girlfriend is killed.
  • Marathon Man: the protagonist foils the criminal conspiracy, but at the cost of both his and his brother's lives.
  • Network: the primary protagonist loses his girlfriend, his wife, his job, and all influence and the secondary protagonist is assassinated live on television by the antagonists
  • Parallax View: the protagonist fails to stop the assassination conspiracy and is killed
  • The Conversation: the protagonist fails to stop the assassination conspiracy he uncovers and is left paranoid and alone

I think there is a lot to the theory that the JFK/RFK assassinations deeply traumatized the Boomer generation in a way we may only be slowly recovering from.

I agree. And again, I think it's telling that the way young people today act if you look at things like zoomer/millennial 'hustle' culture, girlbossing, even lifting culture it's kind of a long-termist thing, it's about setting yourself up for some kind of future. It takes for granted that society is going to exist in much the same way 5, 10, 20 years from now without getting worse, such that personal improvement matters, and I don't think the 70s had that in the same way.

My parents knew people they'd grown up with (in comfortable, PMC families) who just dropped out of life, became hippies, joined communes, drug addicts, peaceniks, greenwich village layabouts/artists, wanderers through India or along the hippie trail, abandoned any putting down of roots because they just thought everyone was going to die. A far cry from the 21st century 'digital nomad' running a drop-shipping business and a 'travel hacking' instagram page from Bali who makes money by credit card referrals. Even many people who did choose the 'normal' path, went to medical school or law school and took well-paying jobs still thought the world was going to end, they just felt the weight of responsibility or didn't want to be poor until it happened.

It takes for granted that society is going to exist in much the same way 5, 10, 20 years from now without getting worse, such that personal improvement matters, and I don't think the 70s had that in the same way.

I like the point that you're making, but I think that this is only a partial explanation. There are a lot of people who are now preaching self-reliance/getting the bag/lifting not because they believe society is still going to exist in the same way in the future, but because of the opposite. They think that a lot of the existing support structures are going to go away, and in that context you absolutely want to be independently sustainable and as physically formidable as possible. The idea that society is going through the ragged steps of decline and fall that mark the end of every empire is an incredibly compelling argument for self-improvement.

It's funny how much of 20th century history hinges on oil.

Why did Japan attack Pearl Harbor? Oil.

Why did Germany's invasion of the USSR fail? Oil.

Why was the USSR thriving in the the 1970s while the US struggled? Oil.

Why did the USSR collapse in the 1980s while the US boomed? Oil.

Why has the U.S. economy doubled in size (fiat currency) relative to the Europe economy since 2007? Many reasons, but also... oil.

It's one critical item on the causal chain in most events, but it's an effect as much as it is a cause. For example, if your economy collapses and you are dependent on foreign oil, you probably won't have enough money or resources to buy enough foreign oil. This will cause problems, but the lack of oil was not the precipitating cause.

Well, energy keeps being one of the most crucial things when so much stuff is powered by it.

Another really big difference is that the choice of media was small. You had a single digit number of television networks, if you wanted to be a popular singer, you needed to go to a record company, any fiction with wider distribution than a mimeographed fanzine had to go through a major publisher, etc. Few cultural things had chances to become hits, but anything which did become a hit became so on a massive scale. You're never seeing another Beatles because the system no longer works that way.

If you take it back to the French Revolution, you saw some of the best political philosophy ever created such as with Rousseau

Rousseau influenced the French revolution but he died a decade before it happened and his best known books predate it by 30 years.

Even Monty Python is more subversive than anything we see today

Sam Hyde's World Peace was pretty funny, definitely subversive, and might have had a great run if it wasn't cancelled.

Sam Hyde is very much in that Gen X nihilistic early-90s cultural milieu though, it’s Jim Goad humor.

That's a good point about Rousseau. For some reason I was thinking he died in the 1790's off the top of my head. Regardless, he lived through a pretty tumultuous time of change (The Enlightenment) where the world became something completely new in his lifetime. Plus he had to deal with persecution from the old French regime for his views.

Option 1: the time doesn’t actually predict it, because “polarization” is not the same as “discord.”

Option 2: massive advances in information storage and search have stifled innovation. No need to write sci-fi speculating on gender roles when Ursula K LeGuin has already done it for you. Harder to make novel music when you have to delve into microtones instead of just slamming down a blues progression.

Option 3: “lol”. People do make weird sci-fi, complete with gender commentary. They do vicious, post-ironic synthesis satirizing previous generations. Adventure is out there. Oh, and

[the 60s were] the last time you saw many black musicians and guitarists be better than their white counterparts

I see you truly value the contributions of Vanilla Ice.

Maybe I’m looking in the wrong places but it seems like most mainstream pop culture stuff — music, TV, movies have converged on what goes best for the algorithm and maximum viral exposure, rather than excellent craft, original ideas, or even completeness.

I think the internet is diminishing the creation of art because nothing can really gestate as a complete idea before it’s delivered. And because of the algorithm, only those things like what’s already popular get noticed. I’m hanging around authors and it appears that in order to even be considered for traditional publishers, you need a substantial media presence of at least 200-300 K followers to even be considered. It’s just not possible to simply create a new thing away from the mainstream of culture and have it be discovered later.

Could you clarify how “the algorithm” is contributing to this?

It seems to me that the algorithm is predicting what you want way better than TV execs in the 90s, and if you don’t like what you see then that’s on you.

The problem is in discovering things you might like that’s unlike what is out there now. It effectively keeps the avant- grade new stuff from being easily discovered. So because I llike Star Wars, the algorithm of whatever streaming service I use will show me more stuff like Star Wars and things that other fans of Star Wars like. This is good for people who produce formulaic stuff that fits the mold of “stuff Star Wars fans like.” It’s terrible if you’re making a film or TV show that’s not like Stuff Star Wars Fans Like. If I’m making something like Three Body Problem or X-Files or Stranger Things, unless something like that already has an audience or some hook to a name brand experience, it’s highly unlikely that you’ll find it. Which actively selects for people who can put their stuff into a formula similar to other things.

I think this is why there’s so much franchising of content. A show about a space academy might be interesting, but it’s a lot easier to sell it if you can stick Star Trek logos on it. Joker was mostly a mediation on an ordinary guy driven to madness by circumstances and lack of access to medical care. It had to be about Joker to be worth filming. And thus a shitty version of that story — but within a franchise— will reach a more mainstream audience and thus make money. A good, but independent film won’t.

This isn't a new phenomenon brought on by The Algorithm though. Producers since the dawn of cinema have seen franchises as an easy way to guarantee viewers, right? And perhaps more to the point: all your examples are content that is being decided by human producers in the human world of Hollywood -- these aren't decisions being made in Netflix or YouTube's spheres of influence.

There are maybe specific versions of this argument that are good (e.g. I've heard people complain YouTube penalizes creators if they produce too slowly (though an explicit Google search about this today suggests this is not the case)), but leveraging a brand to get views is a tale as old as viewership.

(Also it a bit tangential, but I really doubt the guy who originally had the idea for "Joker" actually wanted to tell a story about an ordinary guy driven to madness. They wanted to tell a story about the Joker, in the same way that the person who wrote "Wicked" wanted to tell a story about a specific popular villain, not a generic coming-of-age story about a social outcast in a magic school).

Algorithm seems to be the issue.

But people also need to be from a people, place, time, and culture, etc and not the global homogenized algorithm.

What makes say the Godfather good? They were American but a different people and you can tell a story about how they do things. They had bonds between family and business associates. I don’t think modern writing is even allowed to show cultural bonds in an ethnicity. What makes the wire good - they are a distinct people with bonds and relationships amongst themselves.

Now whether you are black, white, Asian but have all the same characteristics of a 120 IQ, if you need to fight you can fight, you vote Biden, hate rascists, are pro-choice, you eat at the same restaurants, and have the same memes.

What makes the wire good - they are a distinct people with bonds and relationships amongst themselves.

The wire had tons of inter ethnic bonds and relationships (Carver and Herc??) and wouldn't have been good without it.

Maybe I worded that poorly. They don’t have to be ethnic relationships to make a show good. You just need people to not be global homogenized people where everyone is the same. Ethnic just came to mind because they are distinctively not globalhomo.

I really enjoyed The Righteous Gemstones, largely for this reason. They're all living and filming in South Carolina, and the attention to cultural details is great.

Yeah, The Wire doesn't succeed because groups are overly distinct (though it often shows they are). It arguably succeeded because the writers aren't Nowheres.

They had careers before Hollywood and lived their whole lives in the region. The city feels like an actual place and not Vancouver in Yankee drag. Entire plotlines and direct quotes are ripped directly from their experience (Simon's Homicide is basically The Wire). So they have roots, a position that isn't just ideology. Many of the characters are basically real people or composites of them, so they aren't predictable hacky stereotypes (though a "woke" author would have had Herc and Carver's stories end the same way)

A lot of the writers and showrunners not only often have much weaker credentials than you'd think - and in fact may be selected for their inexperience but they seem to be the same sort of person who uprooted themselves, moved to Hollywood, learned the new emperor's religion and now repeat that as their way of bringing value and climbing the ranks. So, if they're faced with something they're not familiar with, why not just let ideology act as a shortcut? As we see with the recent Barbie news, it becomes even more insufferable when such people get a ton of validation from their audience for this behavior.

So you end up with so much of the media and the personalities in it sounding the same.

Yeah, I agree. Especially since many of the actors were from the street and some even had a serious criminal record. They just don't make them like that anymore.

The Safdie brothers do.

Example?

Two examples could be Julia Fox in Uncut gems and Arielle Holmes in Heaven knows what, but it's a more general thing, they cast plenty of non-actors essentially playing themselves.

Here is a short video that talks about it.

More comments

I think the artistic innovations of the 1960s are largely attributable to the technological innovations of the era. There was a huge amount of low-hanging technological fruit which was first picked in the 1960s, and it's much easier to create a fresh and exciting record when you're the first person to use a particular musical instrument or recording technique. The 1960s saw the introduction of:

  • The Moog synth (the first commercially available synth)
  • The Mellotron
  • The wah-wah pedal
  • The whammy bar
  • The fuzz box
  • Direct input of guitars
  • The cassette tape
  • The 8-track tape
  • Drum machines (the first pop song to use a drum machine was in 1969)
  • Multi-mic'd drum kits

Practically every time the Beatles entered the studio, there was a new game-changing invention waiting for them to play with. I've spent far more of the last ten years than I care to mention in recording studios, and the process for recording and mixing a rock song has not significantly changed in the last ten years. Whatever innovations there are tend to be incremental.

Two points:

  1. As others have said, there is a flowering of new thought and you (we) are it.
  2. Now that we have the internet, people are filling their unmet artistic needs through old and foreign media. I had a big creative moment in the early 2010s, I want to write books that portrayed unsubverted heroes, courage, love of country, the desire to protect what's precious to you in a decaying world... and I discovered that Japan had made loads of those stories, with much higher production values. Similarly, progressives kind of have to create new art because they dream of a world that doesn't exist yet, whereas counter-cultural conservatives already have the culture from the time they want to RETVRN to available for free to consume whenever they wish.

Because of the completeness of the victory of the progressives in the culture war. They hold the culture and the counter-culture, leaving no discord there.

The internet has diminished the cultural isolation art and culture needs to gestate and develop organically leaving us with a choice between big budget, mass market, safe investment, market-led retreads or retro nostalgia for "authenticity". The shortfall is filled up with short-lived memes that people can latch onto and share but don't engender any feelings of lasting personal investment ("I was a let's go brandoner before it was cool and I'll remain one when the casuals have moved on").

There's a whole chapter in David W Marx's Status And Culture that covers this in some depth if you want to read something longer than Motte comments.

There's also the matter of consumer technology maturing and effectively stagnating. When technology phases into affordablity there's a lot of low-hanging fruit available, plus the promise of higher-hanging fruit as the tech improves, plus a residual barrier of entry to casual participants. Now everybody has a combined office/studio/library/theatre in their pocket whether they need it or not and its workings are locked behind bootloaders and signed certificates on one hand and hot-glued security screws and millimetre scale surface mounted components on the other. You either have to be a team of specialists or a border-line autist savant to meaningfully explore beyond the walls of the heavily populated omni-garden.

One "theory" I heard was that recent history in the West - and to some extent also elsewhere - basically revolved around baby boomers, partly due to the fact that it is such a populous generation but also due to the fact that so many ideas got discredited as a result of first and second world wars.

  • The forties and fifties were the times when boomers were born, it was a time of rebuilding, family stability and security.

  • Sixties and seventies were the times when boomers were young adults full of rebellious energies, experimentation with sexuality and drugs and all that. It was the time of peace movements and mass refusal of military service in the name of communal love and peace and almost teenage ideals.

  • The eighties and nineties were the times where boomers really came of age, it were the times of risk taking yuppies that proudly destroyed the old stuff in order to unleash creative destruction of this new tide of success hungry urban professionals. It is interesting to see that exactly at the time when boomers were in their most energetic years was also the time the society suddenly discovered that individualism and self-reliance is to be promoted. It was also the time where the society really leaned into gym culture worshiping this youthful vigor, it was the time of Gordon Gekko and Mitch Buchannon.

  • The Aughts and Tens are the decades of solidification of the previous achievements. At the same time it is the time of bailouts and growth of assets but also the time of glorification of all the ethos and views of how boomers see themselves, as paragons of Civil Rights virtue who carried the torch of progress forward. But maybe right now we should cut back on some of the stuff and strengthen our social security, healthcare and we should also do everything possible in order to save octogenarians from deadly virus. If the price is incarcerating pre-teen kids in their homes, that is the price boomers are willing to pay.

Now take the aforementioned with grain of salt, but once you see this it is kind of hard to unsee. Boomers collectively seem to have quite a grip on our societies to the extent that they literally shape the cultural lense of how society views itself for over half a century at least. One can even better see it if one for instance looks into statistics of average age of let's say US government officials. The first Baby Boomer president was Bill Clinton born in 1946 who became president in 1993 and we are going to have a president either born in 1946 or 1942 in 2024.

One "theory" I heard

Was it Tanner Greer?

A prior comment I made about hollywood movies on Boomer relationship to history:

Forrest Gump is the most extensive and obvious on the topic, giving us Forrest as Thesis, Jenny as Antithesis, and Forrest Jr. as literal Synthesis. Forrest is basically ok throughout American history (it’s telling that the avatar of the Boomer generation is a savant-retard too stupid to know what’s going on but too talented to be prevented from succeeding). Jenny is the failure of Thesis-society, molested as a child and seeking freedom through various ultimately unsatisfactory rebellions (the abusive SDS boyf at the Black Panther Party). Ultimately, they finally come together, Jenny dies representing the passing of the 1960s Antithesis, while Forrest takes Forrest Jr. to raise him to preserve the spirit of the 1960s in a way that will lead to a better world.

There was a whole genre of "relitigating the sixties" movies from the 1980s to 2008 or so. It was the thing for a high concept thoughtful blockbuster. Forrest Gump is the classic, Field of Dreams fits as well, Grease, Gilmore Girls, Almost Famous, That Thing You Do. Even series like Rambo follow that pattern, First Blood is straight sixties rebellion against the squares, First Blood II is synthesis with the Boomer Rambo emerging from prison to be harnessed to relitigate Vietnam and rescue his brethren, and the progressively weirder sequels represent a rising confidence/arrogance of the Washington Consensus synthesis of 1950s establishment and 1960s rebellion.

I disagree. We're in a golden age of artistic and political output, you just have to look harder for it. Everything from e/acc to esoteric Hitlerism, primitivism to safetyism, it's all there.

There's thousands of tiny, niche bands on youtube you'd never be able to find 20 years ago. Everyone and their dog has a substack these days, half the people on this forum do, a few (Kulak and TracingWoodgrains) are mildly influential thoughtleaders. We're literally doing novel political theory and discussion on this forum right now. Nobody could dream of anything like this in the 1960s.

Just because hollywood megacorps aren't making a bunch of great movies, it doesn't mean great art isn't being made. Webnovels, fan films, twitter, 4chan boards, discord servers, memes. There's more subversion than you can poke a stick at. With a decent GPU and very limited technical skills you can make your own art.

And there are new kinds of art. Dogecoin has a market cap of 11 billion USD, Shiba Inu is at 5 billion. What is that if not performance art on a grand scale? Art doesn't stay the same, you don't just get new kinds of old things. We had the Beatles, Star Wars, the Lord of the Rings, Top Gear and we're not going to get them again. When we do, they won't be at the level we remember.

Just because hollywood megacorps aren't making a bunch of great movies, it doesn't mean great art isn't being made. Webnovels, fan films, twitter, 4chan boards, discord servers, memes.

I agree there's new and exciting things happening in political discourse, but art is still lagging behind, unless I've missed some great niche stuff (but in my defense - it is niche...), and if 4chan, discord and memes are art, it's the absolutely most shallow form of it (with the possible exception of Capture The Flag, but that was already ages ago).

Niche stuff is where it’s at. Not just for the hipster cred thrill of getting there first, either! When the mass-market incentives break down, you get weird and wonderful nonsense. The discords, like the subreddits before them, or the single-topic forums which still hang on, aren’t themselves art. They are the vehicle which perpetuates art on the smallest scale.

Even outside of niche I think you’re still ignoring a lot of mainstream art.

What about the Golden Age of Television we’ve had this century? Before shows like The Sopranos and The Wire came along, TV programmes were mostly formulaic, episodic time-fillers and even the best were severely constrained by the need for each episode to be a self-contained narrative, and to stretch the budget across 24 episode per season. Now the most prestigious cinema has mostly migrated to the small screen and the shows we’ve gotten in the last 25 years could never have existed in the 20th century; the 90 minute Hollywood film is no longer as relevant and it’s normal that it peaked in the past.

What about video games? In terms of revenue they now completely dwarf Hollywood and the music industry combined and again the kinds of stories and experience we have today would have been completely impossible in the past. Games like Cyberpunk 2077, Baldur’s Gate 3, The Witcher 3 are amazing works of art not just in the visuals but in their narrative.

CG animation in general is an amazing new medium and I’m often impressed by even random animated shorts I find on YouTube, let alone big budget productions.

To me what you’re saying would be like a Medieval English bard time travelling to 20th century and complaining that we don’t make good art anymore because we haven’t produced any better epic poems since Beowulf; that’s normal, people move on to new mediums. And before you deride TV, video games and CG as “not real art”, know that previous generations said they exact same thing about films, photography, even novels. The written word was derided by the Ancient Greeks as causing forgetfulness and that true wisdom could only be taught orally; by their standards, the works of Rousseau or any modern philosopher would be worthless.

I’m sure that in the future when we’re all playing fully immersive virtual reality experiences, people will look to the current day with nostalgia and complain that art is dead because we don’t make good video games you can play on a flat screen anymore.

I agree to some extent with your post bit the narrative and the writing in general in BG3 was decidedly not amazing.

It's a great game but the narrative isn't the strong part.

What about the Golden Age of Television we’ve had this century?

Died a horrible death with the fifth season of GOT? What are the hot new shows nowadays?

What about video games?

Talk about formulaic... I couldn't make myself finish the Witcher 3, the writing was pretty good, but it didn't cut it for me as a game. By the time we got to Cyberpunk 2077, I was thoroughly burned out on AAA stuff so I never gave it a go, and never heard anything about it that would make me reconsider. Every once in a while some decent niche stuff comes out, but nothing "great".

CG animation in general is an amazing new medium and I’m often impressed by even random animated shorts I find on YouTube, let alone big budget productions.

Impressive how? Every once in a while I bump into something I consider pretty neat, but we were talking about "great".

And before you deride TV, video games and CG as “not real art”, know that previous generations said they exact same thing about films, photography, even novels.

That's not the issue. My definition of art is pretty expansive, to the point that I don't know if I could actually pin it down. Basically, anything meant to express something could be art (like I said I consider 4chan's Capture The Flag to be art, probably the best performance art I've ever seen, though I tend to hate performance art so maybe it's not saying much), and even then some things that weren't meant to express anything are sometimes taken as an expression of something, and maybe they're art too? Hell if I know, a question for the philosophers.

In another comment I mentioned hype, it might not be the best way to measure whether something is great, but it's something. The logic here is that if someone sees something they consider great, they'll talk your ear off about how awesome it is. The last great piece of art that I saw was Psycho Pass, I rewatch it periodically, and I could still write a several thousand word essay about how great it is. This is something people used to do all the time. I'll accept several-hour-long video essays if you tell me that Zoomers can't handle that much text, but show me something that shows how excited you are. In the last few years it seems like even paid shills don't have it in them to shill properly.

Died a horrible death with the fifth season of GOT? What are the hot new shows nowadays?

What died with GOT was a singular, high quality show dominating pop culture, but there’s been spectacular shows since. Better Call Saul, Mr Robot, Dark, Queen’s Gambit are all post S5 of Game of Thrones, and in terms of ongoing shows, there’s Arcane, which is an artistic masterpiece that has no right to be based on League of Legends, there’s also Severance, Andor, two new Star Trek shows that are actually respectful of the source material, The Last of Us, 1883…

I’d argue TV is only getting better (although maybe the recent writer’s strike will put a stop to it). But the point was that we peaked in the 20th century, so even GoT disproves the argument despite only being good until 2014.

Talk about formulaic... I couldn't make myself finish the Witcher 3, the writing was pretty good, but it didn't cut it for me as a game. By the time we got to Cyberpunk 2077, I was thoroughly burned out on AAA stuff so I never gave it a go, and never heard anything about it that would make me reconsider. Every once in a while some decent niche stuff comes out, but nothing "great".

That’s a matter of personal taste then. Baldur’s Gate 3 is an incredible work and calling it “niche” would make that word meaningless given that it was the #1 best selling game on Steam on launch and won numerous high profile awards.

In another comment I mentioned hype, it might not be the best way to measure whether something is great, but it's something.

Sounds like a “vibecession” of art rather than any real artistic decline. Maybe you’re also just suffering from nostalgia?

Or maybe one of the problems is the death of a mainstream media culture, which I agree had its last major hurrah with Game of Thrones. There’s no single “hot new show” anymore, there’s a ton of shows with a few incredible ones amidst a sea of trash, and you can’t rely on what’s #1 to tell you what’s good or bad.

I’d argue TV is only getting better (although maybe the recent writer’s strike will put a stop to it).

O_o Honestly that statement seems indefensible to me, there is very little original material and so much of what we get pales in comparison to the source. You listed twelve shows, out of them a grand total of two were not based on pre-existing ip. And in my opinion, very few of them even understand the concept of respecting the source material, they are just varying levels of cargo culting what came before, because they are produced by creatively bankrupt corporations rlhfing every show into the same hr designed slop.

Edit: hyperbole toned down

Dark, Queen’s Gambit

Dark was meh, and I'm having a hard time believing that the girl-power fake bio-flic was "spectacular". The other ones I admittedly didn't watch, but how many things do I have to try and say they aren't any good before I'm allowed to say they're not making good things anymore.

there’s Arcane, which is an artistic masterpiece that has no right to be based on League of Legends, there’s also Severance, Andor, two new Star Trek shows that are actually respectful of the source material, The Last of Us, 1883…

I think we had someone geeking out over Arcane over here, so I can grant that one, I heard Andor and some of the latest Treks were good, but this was after a series of disappointments, so I'm not sure how high the bar is. The rest I hardly heard anyone talk about at all

Baldur’s Gate 3 is an incredible work and calling it “niche”

I agree it's not niche, but nothing I heard of it would classify it as incredible. It seems on par with all the other Forgotten Realms RPGs that came out over the last couple decades?

But the point was that we peaked in the 20th century, so even GoT disproves the argument despite only being good until 2014.

I don't know... The TV show was made in 2014, the books it's based on started in the 90's and themselves have been declining after the turn of the millennium, and it doesn't look like they will ever be finished.

Sounds like a “vibecession” of art rather than any real artistic decline. Maybe you’re also just suffering from nostalgia?

Not really, I prefer the unfamiliar to the familiar, and the constant attempts to cash in on nostalgia is what turned me off from modern culture to begin with. Even when I watch old stuff, most of it is from before my time.

Or maybe one of the problems is the death of a mainstream media culture, which I agree had its last major hurrah with Game of Thrones. There’s no single “hot new show” anymore, there’s a ton of shows with a few incredible ones amidst a sea of trash, and you can’t rely on what’s #1 to tell you what’s good or bad.

Maybe. I'm hardly one for longing to be part of the mainstream, but I do feel somewhat disturbed by the utter lack of excitement in normie culture. Can't help the feeling that it marks some form of cultural decline, even if there is good art still being produced.

It seems on par with all the other Forgotten Realms RPGs that came out over the last couple decades?

Its much much better than anything else FR the last two decades at least. Its a great and expansive game with overall mediocre/serviceable Larian writing (but this time with a few stand out moments that actually are good).

S'all opinions, but nearly all the new Trek stuff is awful to varying degrees. Strange New Worlds may the best of the bunch (not saying much) by virtue of not being a nihilistic, mean-spirited mess, but you get the impression the writers would rather be penning Buffy. I'm not dead set against a musical Trek episode, but when you have your Klingons mimicing KPop instead of Klingon Opera - without even the presence of Q to justify the absurdities - it's just a lollygag.

If you have any fondness for TNG, S3 of Picard is surprisingly decent, and probably the best sendoff for the cast under these current conditions. But even so, it feels more noteworthy as an impressive salvage operation given what came before. It's also bittersweet seeing the flame flickering on the candle again, knowing it's soon to be buried in turds as if to apologize for being decent for one single season.

Also, spoiler for the ending dilemma if you'd like a little thematic titillation: The youth of the Federation has been infiltrated and brainwashed by an alien enemy to destroy it from within. Space Boomers need to save the day.

Gotta say I found this pretty bold in today's age where media goes great lengths to kiss younger generations' asses, and I'm surprised I've barely even seen it discussed! There's no moment where the plucky young cadet winkingly upstages the Enterprise crew, thank fucking God.

What do you think about Lower decks?

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I think we had someone geeking out over Arcane over here, so I can grant that one, I heard Andor and some of the latest Treks were good, but this was after a series of disappointments, so I'm not sure how high the bar is. The rest I hardly heard anyone talk about at all...

In the case of Severance, that's legitimately a shame. It's really, really good. Arcane likewise was unbelievably fantastic.

yet all of our art sucks (my opinion obviously but it seems to be shared)

May I suggest that you might not be looking at the right place? Especially if your suggestions for new "art" comes from an soulless algorithm trying to prolong your engagement with a particular service. Because it will only present with more of the same stuff that you indicated with past behavior that you are willing to spend time on, it is not going to present something new because it means that you might disengage your attention. So either you stop using the algorithms or you find a way to trick the algorithms to present new stuff for you.

I don't use algorithms, in fact I took significant steps to escape them, and they've largely been successful. I use word-of-mouth, and there hasn't been any hype about anything in ages.

Everyone else is also trapped in the algorithms and in a mindset their personality is what they consume. Well one thing that personalization has put on its head is that the concept of "hype" is obsolete. The good thing is that you should decide for yourself what you enjoy and look for like minded people that enjoy the same "thing". Hype is about making you conform to the latest thing, and I've personally found that hype has been co-opted by big business to create artificial need, so I don't miss it.

Hype is about making you conform to the latest thing, and I've personally found that hype has been co-opted by big business to create artificial need, so I don't miss it.

That big business has tried to artificially generate hype for ages is a given, but if people like something they will get excited and will want to tell you all about it, so I don't think hype boils down to making you conform to the latest thing.

Also if you're going to offer "you're trapped in algorithms" as one side of the explanation, and "everyone else is trapped in algorithms" as the other, you've made your theory unfalsifiable.

Also if you're going to offer "you're trapped in algorithms" as one side of the explanation, and "everyone else is trapped in algorithms" as the other, you've made your theory unfalsifiable.

I'm aware of that I recreated Baudrillards reasoning why we can't escape Platos Cave, unlike him though I do believe escape is possible.

You have to find other people who aren't trapped in algorithms. Both of us have taken steps to try not to be trapped by algorithms. But the point I was trying to get across we need a critical mass of non-trapped people to get back to the old word of mouth to be effective again.

You know, I just realized that the second era of great music corresponds almost exactly to Thatcher's time as the UK PM. That can't be a coincidence.

I've noticed a similar thing to your observation when it comes to approaching doom. Back in the day the cold war and threat of nuclear annihilation inspired a whole bunch of great songs. Today the doom is climate change and we get... nothing.

Today the doom is climate change and we get... nothing.

Because we're all complicit. It's easy to protest against The Man with The Button, it's a lot harder if the enemy is our own inescapable lifestyle. Follow the logic through far enough and you're left with a choice between tech evangelism or retvrn to anti-natalism and depopulation.

The other alternative is to shrug and/or put your head in the sand, hence the "...nothing", or to argue that it's all fake, but that's limited by its reactionary nature. It doesn't advance an independent agenda.

We have had ample proof of nuclear weapons' destructive capacity.

Meanwhile, the actual impact of climate change can, by one so willing, be ignored entirely with little ill effect, and the catastrophe scenarios spun up about it come from people with the air of the stereotypical madman claiming that "the end is nigh".

Nah, Nuclear Armageddon was a psyop. Yes, it would suck to have nuke dropped on your head, but not much more so than an artillery shell, or a conventional bomb or missile. It was probably even more exaggerated than the impact of climate change.

not much more so than an artillery shell

This doesn't matter at all. The aggregate effect of nukes dropped on every major city (which, factually, is what would happen) would be the total collapse of the modern agricultural-industrial machine, which would mean mass death in the 80%+ range. This counts as a nuclear apocalypse by any definition.

The aggregate effect of nukes dropped on every major city (which, factually, is what would happen) would be the total collapse of the modern agricultural-industrial machine, which would mean mass death in the 80%+ range.

  1. The modern agricultural-industrial machine exists to feed the cities, if the cities are gone, there's no need for so much food
  2. Every major city worldwide or in the first world? The latter is more likely, and while the destruction of St. Louis would disrupt the supply of new GM seed stock, Brazil and India could jumpstart their own agritech rather quickly.

What you are forgetting about is the effects of 800 or so 380 kiloton ground bursts hitting the missile fields in Montana and North Dakota, and the ensuing massive fallout cloud likely blowing southward right into the breadbasket of the country (breadbasket of the world—those crops feed like 1.2 billion people)

while the destruction of St. Louis would disrupt the supply of new GM seed stock, Brazil and India could jumpstart their own agritech rather quickly.

No lawsuits from Montsanto if we irradiate the lawyers first! <taps head>

I'm going to press doubt on that one. If you're maximizing spite, rather than military advantage, you can drop nukes on major cities, and rack up the body count, you can drop them on essential infrastrructure and increase it even more, but I don't think the entire arsenal of the USSR could collapse American industry and agriculture.

The effects of the radiation etc. are perhaps somewhat exaggerated, but nuclear weapons are still incredibly destructive. A single nuke can drop on more heads than a thousand conventional artillery shells, bombs or missiles.

Sure, there were a lot of wild tales about nuclear war that remained just that or even ended up discredited, like setting the atmosphere on fire or causing nuclear winter.

But the degree of destruction that global nuclear war would have caused can be roughly extrapolated by anyone who knows what happened to those two Japanese towns plus the further development of nuclear weapons and the increased size of the stockpiles, whereas the impact of climate change is all error bars and "take my word for it".

The fate of Hiroshima and Nagasaki arguably forms a part of why nuclear mythos is so exaggerated, though. Even if we don't consider the whole symbolic implication of two little bombs forcing mighty Japan to surrender, the dawn of atomic age etc., Hiroshima and Nagasaki aren't all that representative of what would happen now; the Japanese tradition of paper-based construction meant the houses went up in flames even more easily than comparative European homes of the period, and the further development of nuclear weapons has been accompanied with developments in population protection (sturdier housing, still-extant shelters etc).

Also, while there's obviously bigger nukes and stockpiles than in 1945, people probably also have a wrong image of these in the other direction; once I started looking into this, I (used to nuke strength being measured in megatons) was surprised, for instance, to learn that according to most recent American estimates Russia does not have any nukes of 1 Mt or higher in power and that the Russian nuclear stockpile is a bit over 10 % of the height of Cold War (I had of course known it had gone down, but still, while it probably still packs a punch, it's not of destroy-the-world capability, even if one would expect all of them to work, not be intercepted, not fall to a first strike or a second strike etc.)

ICBMs, MIRVs and more accurate missiles basically made multi-megaton nukes obsolete. You get much better destructive power over an area if you spread a bunch of 100 kton nukes over it instead of concentrating all that power at a single point because of the three dimensional nature of the explosion.

Certainly, the point just being that people have a completely facile image of the raw power of current nukes. In "nuclear demonstration" maps like this, the nuke used to "demonstrate" a potential nuclear war is literally the 100 Mt Tsar Bomba - a device that literally only existed in the planning stages and was not even tested, and would not have remotely resembled your average Soviet nuclear warhead even in the height of the Cold War.

This is true insomuch as you will be dead in all 4 cases, but it's a rather facile observation considering the differences in magnitude of destructive power, not to mention the very serious dangers posed by radioactive fallout.

A full scale nuclear war between east and west in the mid to late cold war (assuming both sides launch their own weapons) would have resulted in the deaths of the majority of the population of all the countries involved, with any population centre worth mentioning being the target of multiple nuclear weapons, as well as sites of strategic importance such as airports, military installations, major hubs of industry, etc. The less important parts of the country that still remain would be very likely covered in radioactive fallout from the (relatively) close detonation of the aforementioned hundreds of nuclear weapons, which would kill a large proportion of the population in a matter of weeks, water, soil and food would be contaminated. Societal collapse would be unavoidable, those that managed to survive the first few months would still find themselves at a greatly increased risk for various cancers and their children would have a substantially increased risk of birth defects.

All of this is without mentioning the as of yet unforseen consequences of detonating tens of thousands of nuclear weapons at once, which I am going to assume would probably not be great.

Themotte likes to talk about "skin in the game" a lot, well if you want a good example of that then I'd point you to the fact that most nuclear planners and those informed about the nature of nuclear war stopped trying to build bomb shelters or bolt holes for themselves and their families at some point in the 60s.

Societal collapse would be unavoidable, those that managed to survive the first few months would still find themselves at a greatly increased risk for various cancers and their children would have a substantially increased risk of birth defects.

This experiment has been run, and IIRC Hiroshima and Nagasaki’s elevated cancer rates aren’t incompatible with both of them being modern industrial societies.

Don't cancer rates vary quite a bit geographically even without nuclear fallout? IIRC Australia has absurd skin cancer rates, but hasn't seen widespread panic and fleeing from this danger. "Twice as likely to die of skin cancer" is concerning and unfortunate, but still not a huge absolute risk.

Yes, although ‘White people with heavy sunshine and lots of beaches’ is the obvious reason there- cancer rates seem mostly to correlate geographically with explanatory variables.

The less important parts of the country that still remain would be very likely covered in radioactive fallout from the (relatively) close detonation of the aforementioned hundreds of nuclear weapons, which would kill a large proportion of the population in a matter of weeks, water, soil and food would be contaminated. Societal collapse would be unavoidable, those that managed to survive the first few months would still find themselves at a greatly increased risk for various cancers and their children would have a substantially increased risk of birth defects.

That's the part that's hugely overblown, and instilling the fear of this scenario was an absolute psyop. Yes, with a large enough arsenal you could inflict millions of deaths, and targeting industrial centers would indirectly result in millions more. Fallout poisoning water and soil in the hinterlands would scarcely be a factor.

I'm also not sure that massive strikes against population centers would be nearly as common as predicted, at least once targeting was good enough to hit something smaller than "that city over there" (although I imagine it would depend on the exact scenario) but even at the height of the Cold War, there were just so many military targets to hit that maximizing for casualties instead of enemy military capability was arguably not the smartest play. Unfortunately a lot of military targets are colocated with large population centers.

But people read the "number of nuclear weapons" and forget that during the Cold War we were planning, at various points, of using those weapons on military targets, and not just bases, but ships, submarines, troop formations, and enemy aircraft – hence the development of nuclear-tipped torpedoes, air-to-air missiles, artillery shells, and anti-ship missiles.

Fallout and radiation poisoning could be bad if someone deliberately tried to maximize it, but conventional nuclear weapons just aren't as dirty as people seem to think. People survived Hiroshima within a thousand feet of ground zero. The guy who survived Hiroshima and Nagasaki suffered from radiation poisoning...and lived to be 93.

There's a grand majesty to the concept of nuclear annihilation that the slower-operating climate change scenarios just don't provide.

This Finnish climate change themed metal album (lyrics also in Finnish, mind) is pretty good IMHO but the scenario it presents is frankly self-evidently ludicrous (a plane trying to find a place to land in Europe that has LITERALLY been entirely covered by water Great Flood -style).

This Finnish climate change themed metal album (lyrics also in Finnish, mind) is pretty good IMHO

If Sm3tana is truly the best climate change can offer for metal, I'll take nuclear annihilation over it any day.

Political discord creates art and philosophy that has usually never been seen before, but today we don't see any of that.

Maybe we really are at the end of history?

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