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The Internet Is Saving Culture, Not Killing It

nytimes.com

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Re: The Internet Is Saving Culture, Not Killing It

#111

Post by paganel »

taway_1212 wrote: post #99
thwarted wrote: post #74

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

> Have most artists and other creatives been surviving off income from their artistic endeavors for most of history? 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 c…

> Rousseau made a living copying piano sheets.

As far as I remember Jean-Jacques wanted to make a living by being a musician and "copying piano sheets" and didn't want to depend on how well his books were selling. The reason being that had he started living off his books he would have felt compelled to write what his readers wanted to read, not what he really thought. At least that's what I remember from reading his Confessions.

Re: The Internet Is Saving Culture, Not Killing It

#112

Post by vtange »

shams93 wrote: post #80
fluxic wrote: post #32

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…

Its comical that Mark Cuban is saying that things like writing will be the jobs of the future after AI automates most jobs away. Writing and music were rendered virtually worthless by 1999, the so called "liberal arts jobs" were actually the first to go.

It's also funny he said that while playing up the power of machine learning and recent A.I. advances. I thought we already have algorithms that generate news articles, poetry and music?

Re: The Internet Is Saving Culture, Not Killing It

#113

Post by soperj »

fluxic wrote: post #32

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…

Is it really harder to make money though? You take the best of the best in painting from 150 years ago, and none of these people were very well off. Gaugain, Van Gogh, Matisse, Braque. These aren't people who lived luxurious lives.

Re: The Internet Is Saving Culture, Not Killing It

#114

Post by Ductapemaster »

erikpukinskis wrote: post #107
ska wrote: post #12

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

> 10000, 200, 20 You don't notice the pattern? The first big bump was 10,000 years go. The next one was 200 years ago. The third one was 20 years ago. It does seem like it takes less an less time for the world to work out what's unnecessary about social organizations. If I naively extrapolate, within decades we'll have period where we have profound cultural shifts every year or so, then every week. Frankly, I think w…

> If I naively extrapolate, within decades we'll have period where we have profound cultural shifts every year or so, then every week.

I think in reality there is some sort of lower bound here in what we consider "reality" today (the physical world, with its governments, etc). We already are seeing the internet as a place where revolutions happen on very short timescales, even overnight. This will only increase as VR takes hold of our minds and existence.

To be honest, I'm a little afraid of that. There is something to be said for change in the physical world and how profound big changes are, and I hope one does not transplant the other and that they evolve together. We still need infrastructure, places to live, and government to make the online/VR revolutions a possibility.

Re: The Internet Is Saving Culture, Not Killing It

#115

Post by examancer »

fluxic wrote: post #32

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…

On the flip side, there has never before been a point in history where one could make a good living riding miniature motorcycles around Omaha (https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCUPr-L6BprRHBS0EIBxciCA), crushing things with a hydraulic press (https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCcMDMoNu66_1Hwi5-MeiQgw), making robots that don't work (https://www.youtube.com/channel/UC3KEoMzNz8eYnwBC34RaKCQ), or wrapping assorted proteins in bacon (https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCYjk_zY-iYR8YNfJmuzd70A). This probably just furthers your point somehow, as I'm not sure how any of this benefits culture, but there are lots of emerging "artists" who are making surprising incomes in this strange strange new world.

Re: The Internet Is Saving Culture, Not Killing It

#116

Post by codexjourneys »

dinglejungle wrote: post #102
codexjourneys wrote: post #93

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Was discussing this with a friend, why Patreon seems so much more difficult than Kickstarter. Kickstarter has as its premise, "Make this cool thing happen." It's a specific product (usually) with a specific outcome, and contributors may feel invested in achieving that outcome. Patreon has as its premise, "Support this artist" (in many cases). It's more abstract, not tied to a particular product necessarily, and contr…

https://patreon.zendesk.com/hc/en-us/articles/204606295-What...

Cool, thanks! I think it's a little different from Kickstarter since with per-creation, supporters are still charged for every creation even if they may not like some of those creations. Whereas if I fund a Kickstarter for a board game, I'm choosing that specific project/creation.

Re: The Internet Is Saving Culture, Not Killing It

#117

Post by erikpukinskis »

Ductapemaster wrote: post #114
erikpukinskis wrote: post #107

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 10000, 200, 20 You don't notice the pattern? The first big bump was 10,000 years go. The next one was 200 years ago. The third one was 20 years ago. It does seem like it takes less an less time for the world to work out what's unnecessary about social organizations. If I naively extrapolate, within decades we'll have period where we have profound cultural shifts every year or so, then every week. Frankly, I think w…

> If I naively extrapolate, within decades we'll have period where we have profound cultural shifts every year or so, then every week. I think in reality there is some sort of lower bound here in what we consider "reality" today (the physical world, with its governments, etc). We already are seeing the internet as a place where revolutions happen on very short timescales, even overnight. This will only increase as VR…

It's funny, when I re-read my comment, I notice the bit about adoption cycles, and I wonder if maybe there isn't a 20 year lower bound on these revolutions, because certain ideas can only be cemented in a person at certain stages of their life.

Maybe the skills required to lead a revolution can only be formed while living as a child under the system that the revolution is against. And so any empire you create is at least safe for 20 years, until a new generation of kids come up having never known anything else, and tear it down.

I think a lot about that when I look at Bitcoin, Ethereum, etc. The blockchain completely changed how I think about computer science, and while I think it's revolutionary, I don't think it can really take off until a whole generation of students can go through their PhDs to solve some of the major problems. We see that happening now in the Ethereum community.

I see it in myself too... The web was just emerging as I was coming of age. It promised to revolutionize society, but in the 20 years since, we have seen the ways it failed to do that. Those of us who grew up immersed in the web are currently working feverishly to attack the corruption that has resisted it.

I actually have little doubt we'll succeed at democratizing access to things like information, credit, and public safety, but I can also see the ways in which we are creating a new bubble of impossibility. I can see how children growing up in the world I'm creating may have a hard time making mistakes and causing collateral damage, which could stifle exploration. I can see how groupthink can become unmoored from reality in scary ways...

And sometimes I wonder if my generation, even with this exponentially accellerating technology and culture, won't really be able to solve those problems because we didn't grow up in them. Not in the same way.

In that sense, I think the 20 year clock that advances a little each generation will still be a reasonable characterization of post-singularity life.

Re: The Internet Is Saving Culture, Not Killing It

#118

Post by milesrout »

dasil003 wrote: post #51
fluxic wrote: post #32

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…

The landscape is shifting yes, and it's harder to make money. But consider that the last 150 years of mass literacy and spare time to consume vast quantities of media is already a historical anomaly. If you look at the sheer quantity of culture produced and consumed, it's hard to see it as anything but a golden age. The fact that it's harder to make money in these conditions makes perfect economic sense. But on the p…

Whether or not you think that 'the last 150 years [...] is a historical anomaly' is irrelevant. The fact is that it was better, and there's no legitimate reason that it should now be worse except for the anticompetitive actions of a few big corporations that loss lead by providing expensive-to-produce services for free to eliminate competition.

Re: The Internet Is Saving Culture, Not Killing It

#119

Post by milesrout »

paganel wrote: post #110
fluxic wrote: post #32

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…

> Literary magazine sales are non-existent. "To every age its art", as they wrote on some building in Vienna in the early 1900s. That is to say that maybe the literature represented by novels (and the associated ecosystem, like literary magazines) is behind us, there's nothing wrong with other art forms (video games, memes, twitter messages, social media posts, vlogs) taking its place. The same as classical music is…

If you genuinely think that video games, 'memes', twitter messages, social media posts or vlogs are art at all, let alone art on the level of the fucking literary novel, literally the most artistic medium of all time, then you're part of the problem.

Classical music isn't 'almost dead'. The art of painting has never not been confined to museums and art galleries. Cinema most certainly has not be replaced with blockbusters - there have always been mass market blockbusters and films for the intelligent at the same time.

The TV series you claim have 'replaced what cinema used to be' are a far cry from art, the Breaking Bads are few and far between and rubbish like Game of Thrones (occasionally well-shot but very poor for at least the last three seasons) is not art.

Re: The Internet Is Saving Culture, Not Killing It

#120

Post by milesrout »

vtange wrote: post #112
shams93 wrote: post #80

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Its comical that Mark Cuban is saying that things like writing will be the jobs of the future after AI automates most jobs away. Writing and music were rendered virtually worthless by 1999, the so called "liberal arts jobs" were actually the first to go.

It's also funny he said that while playing up the power of machine learning and recent A.I. advances. I thought we already have algorithms that generate news articles, poetry and music?

The algorithms that 'generate news articles' don't: they abbreviate news articles.

The algorithms that 'generate music' don't: they generate noise that sounds a little like music but is completely derivative and unoriginal.

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