91–100 of 129 posts
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Yes, Ray Kurweil wrote about this. Technological progress increases at a logarithmic rate, so the time between major revolutions becomes smaller and smaller until it is continuous.
That would be exponential rate. Logarithmic means that the curve gets flatter over time, not steeper. :-)
When I was writing it I knew logarithmic didn't seem quite right but it was a pre-coffee comment.
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Yes, Ray Kurweil wrote about this. Technological progress increases at a logarithmic rate, so the time between major revolutions becomes smaller and smaller until it is continuous.
That would be exponential rate. Logarithmic means that the curve gets flatter over time, not steeper. :-)
When I was writing it I knew logarithmic didn't seem quite right but it was a pre-coffee comment.
Call me a pessimist, but as a content creator this piece came off as extremely out of touch. Yes: NYT is booming in subscriptions, and Patreon has carved out a nice little niche for supporting podcasters and YouTubers. But it's nowhere near the level of support artists have had for the last hundred years. Before, if you were a writer, you could write for the neighbourhood paper or magazine and carve out a decent livi…
Patreon has as its premise, "Support this artist" (in many cases). It's more abstract, not tied to a particular product necessarily, and contributors may feel more like they're donating to someone's rent money rather than bringing a product into reality.
What do you think? Would there be some way for Patreon to tie donations more directly to product creation, or would that undermine the people who are using Patreon?
Ever-lower barriers for creators? There have never been any barriers for creators. Folk art has always been a part of human societies. There were barriers for mass dissemination of artistic works, but not the process of creation. Mass media put the local artists out of business. Before the advent of radio and recorded music there were many more musicians and bands. Now everyone has to compete on a global level. I wou…
In the 1960s and 1970s, a lot of people who started startups would have started bands instead. The music scene was where creativity happened. Maybe Mark Zuckerberg would have started a band.
Starting in the mid/late 1990s, creativity's frontier shifted to the Internet as it grew exponentially, and the music industry started changing as a result of massive free distribution. I think many bands were never started because the people who would have formed them were making web pages and startups instead.
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I feel like the economy as a whole has been hit by this pattern. Call it "disruption","creative destruction", or whatever, but the general pattern has been that supply has gone up (it's never been easier to create content) while demand has remained constant (only so many eyeballs and so much time). Back then you could grow smoothly since there were always new people to reach, and only so much content for them to read…
With the internet we've also sort of fostered a society that expects some content (music, blog posts, etc) to be dirt-cheap if not free, especially if it does not meet ever-increasing standards. This again leads to a race-to-the-bottom style market where you have to outproduce others to gain a following that might be willing to pay you something. Is this any different, or even less desirable, than the patronage style…
They normally couldn't in pre-revolutionary France; The Great Cat Massacre has the details.
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Who cares if culture is growing if you can't connect to your neighbor over it? Culture is more than just hobbies. It's about identity.
This growth allows me to connect to distant people who share my culture and identity, instead to my physical neighbor with conflicting values. It opens up cultural niches that aren't viable in smaller communities or weren't viable before - something that won't have a critical mass to grow or even exist in a city of 100,000 people can have a thriving culture worldwide nowadays. Yes, we're losing the notion of a shared…
I don't think you're acknowledging the other side of the trade off: if you aren't interested in something popular, you're going to be effectively alone in spite of a torrent of options for interacting with others. Reducing popular culture to sub groups makes this much, much easier to encounter.
My friends call this "Facebook fatigue": looking at hundreds of friends and feeling alienated because of few shared interests.
Regardless, claiming that culture is "dead" or "thriving" seems to be missing from evidence.
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So we've got the agricultural revolution about 10,000 years ago, then the industrial revolution about 200 years ago. I can't think of any other separate event of equal impact. And you are suggesting that no only are we currently within a similar scale event (plausible, but hardly proven), and there will another two such magnitude events in the next 200 years? Or are you noting that we, and future generations, will al…
I think it is more likely that in 10,000 years we will see the "internet revolution" as part of the industrial revolution. It's only because we're in it that we can see it as separate things. For example, we now speak of a single "agricultural revolution", where in reality it would have spanned hundreds of years of had several different periods (discovering plants, discovering cattle, etc).
We're now shifting to a knowledge economy, and the internet has been transforming that. I think of this transformation as distinct from the Industrial Revolution (either the first or the second).
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I'm a professional musician living in Austin, TX. We are very lucky here to be living in a city that actively subsidizes live music, but this place is exceptional. At one time there was live music in every single pub in the country, if only just some drunk playing sing-a-longs on one of the ubiquitous pianos of the era. Nowadays the vast majority of restaurants, bars and private gatherings utilize recorded music inst…
OP may be overestimating importance of "national tour" too. I know for a fact that some supporting bands not only do not get any money fro ticket sales. They pay the main acts just to share stage with them. Some people go on expensive vacation to XYZ island, other people tour as a band...
It was a fantastic experience but it made me realize I didn't really like life on the road and that I needed a more secure source of income.
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I feel like the economy as a whole has been hit by this pattern. Call it "disruption","creative destruction", or whatever, but the general pattern has been that supply has gone up (it's never been easier to create content) while demand has remained constant (only so many eyeballs and so much time). Back then you could grow smoothly since there were always new people to reach, and only so much content for them to read…
With the internet we've also sort of fostered a society that expects some content (music, blog posts, etc) to be dirt-cheap if not free, especially if it does not meet ever-increasing standards. This again leads to a race-to-the-bottom style market where you have to outproduce others to gain a following that might be willing to pay you something. Is this any different, or even less desirable, than the patronage style…
It was probably true for top fine artists, but at a price of working on commission (i.e. clients dictating the content). For writers, philosophers and composers, I think it was much tougher. For example Chopin, even when he was a celebrity, was living largely off piano lessons. Rousseau made a living copying piano sheets.
You only have to spend a little time consuming digital media to understand that products that rely on advertisements for income suck. As soon as subscription services started offering ad-free versions of their product, I started buying them. I'm not saying it's the best way forward, but would it kill Twitter and Facebook and Snap to experiment with some of these models? It's working for content creators, why should s…
I'd be much more willing to sign on with subscription services if I could access and manage all of them with a single sign-on and payment scheme. (Basically like how a la carte cable service would work.) Right now I just don't want to be getting billed by a bajillion different people for all the content I consume. It's an administrative hassle.
Joke aside there is an overview page on Google play for subscriptions placed through apps from the play story. That's probably the closest to what you described.