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The Decadent Society: How We Became the Victims of Our Own Success

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171–180 of 209 posts

Re: The Decadent Society: How We Became the Victims of Our Own Success

#171
post #2

Eh, I grew up with the faces on TV constantly blabbering about the "decadent West" and yet my country and most of the ex-USSR has deteriorated worse than any western one. My eyes kind of roll every time someone says decadent society as it reminds me of communist propaganda. Not seeing much of those four horsemen, either.

Decadence is a dumb and useless concept really - every damn time the society in decline considered something else irrelevant or actually helpful "decadence" while ignoring the actual cause of their downfall which they call "virtue". The infamous gladiatorial games which lead to multiple large scale insurrections were to "fight decadence" by trying to instill the military values they thought were important when really their expansionism and campaigns were a root of their downfall.

Decadence as a concept makes a good polemic but it isn't a good source of judging problems let alone solving them. It really just means "I the self-proclaimed moral authority dislike this direction of society!".

The closest to an "objective decadence-like concept" is an expectation of a way of life that cannot be sustained without significant damage. Cottage industry after the dawn of industrializarion would be "decadent" as factory volume beats them out and can no longer sustain the middle class lifestyle. Not exactly what comes to mix when one thinks decadence but it is a lifestyle made unsustainable. There is no "sin" to it but it just doesn't work anymore and trying to force it wouldn't work out well. Notably even that is subjective and depends upon means. Having less than 10% of the population involved in food production would be stupidly unsustainable before agricultural advances but is the first world norm today.

Re: The Decadent Society: How We Became the Victims of Our Own Success

#172
post #97

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The rate of change is approximately constant when you adjust for population growth: https://populationmatters.org/sites/default/files/styles/ful... Everything moves faster now because there are more people to move it. The rate/person is not that different. What we have seen since the late 90s is the collapse of musical creativity (at least in popular music... you can still find some creative music if you dig really h…

Interesting. But it's circular reasoning isn't it? "there were less people, so less innovation. Then there were more people, so more innovation. But now there's more people, but less innovation, so it must be a dark age" doesn't really work as a self-evident statement. You could make an argument that innovation follows the money. The innovation boom of the late 20th century correlates with the music industry profit b…

I think inovation is stagnant because of team work. No tongue in cheek. But when you take a look at the sea changinf inventions it has been the work of a nerd who was passionate for a prlonged period of time. Not a team which has to publish every brain-fart as a paper.

Universities favouring publish-or-perish are another dead end development.

Re: The Decadent Society: How We Became the Victims of Our Own Success

#173

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I for one look forward to our new techno-barbarian conquerers pouring out from Steppe.

did you mean these guys? (techno tree advanced) https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=jM8dCGIm6yc&t=27 or these? (techno genre) https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=FteYOA2cDkg (they're evidently sweeping out of the steppe in all directions: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=UvW8JEuIo58 )

If the fall of civilization means more 'songs' from The Hu, then maybe things won't be so bad.

Re: The Decadent Society: How We Became the Victims of Our Own Success

#174
post #86

Earlier quoted context omitted.

That's the part I completely agree with. Music is absolutely stuck. There have only been micro-genres, such as the many micro-genres of techno/EDM or hip hop. There has been nothing approaching the birth of hip hop, techno/rave, grunge, "alternative" rock, and so on. Those all came of age in the 70s, 80s, and 90s. For some reason after 2000 music died. My personal explanation is the collapse of the record industry. I…

The only part of this I really agree with is that the music industry is harming artists more than usual. It is a meme at least as old as jazz or even older (Baroque music was so-named because it was said to be lopsided, like a misshapen pearl) that music ain't what it used to be. There is still great music being made, and the really deep stuff has always gotten ignored by most people most of the time. Heck, I majored…

I dislike the stuff called music so much these days that I have started to listen to classical music. As a hardcore grunge and heavy metal addict I ever thought that hell would freeze before. But the nth remix of a 90 hit doesn't move me - nothing original in it.

I think time will tell us that a bar, alcohol and blue smoke will do more for creativity than a gym and health food all day long.

Re: The Decadent Society: How We Became the Victims of Our Own Success

#175

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Some video games that explore the human condition and could be said to be Art with the capital A: The Stanley Parable (deconstruction of what it is to play a game. It starts with a third person narration of your character being at work, pushing buttons all day without being quite sure why, and proceeds into multiple endings that deconstruct reality in quite creative ways that sometimes break the fourth wall) Braid (M…

Yeah like I said in another comment, I'm really not trying to deny the validity or value of individual games or anything like that. Portal is brilliant, and I really liked DA:O (though not quite as much as Baldur's Gate or Pillars of Eternity). I just think that the Shakespeare of the video game medium, whatever form that would even take, hasn't been born yet.

Yeah, that could be. It's a young genre and I think that paintings from before perspective became systematically understood are super awkward. That's a cool thought. I'm totally okay with blowing some hours to experience the Hamlet of games.

Re: The Decadent Society: How We Became the Victims of Our Own Success

#176

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The only part of this I really agree with is that the music industry is harming artists more than usual. It is a meme at least as old as jazz or even older (Baroque music was so-named because it was said to be lopsided, like a misshapen pearl) that music ain't what it used to be. There is still great music being made, and the really deep stuff has always gotten ignored by most people most of the time. Heck, I majored…

I dislike the stuff called music so much these days that I have started to listen to classical music. As a hardcore grunge and heavy metal addict I ever thought that hell would freeze before. But the nth remix of a 90 hit doesn't move me - nothing original in it. I think time will tell us that a bar, alcohol and blue smoke will do more for creativity than a gym and health food all day long.

Classical can get pretty metal, for sure. :) Wagner and Mahler come to mind.

On a totally different note - have you listened to Them Crooked Vultures? John Paul Jones, formerly Led Zeppelin, playing distorted console steel is pretty wild.

Re: The Decadent Society: How We Became the Victims of Our Own Success

#177

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Some video games that explore the human condition and could be said to be Art with the capital A: The Stanley Parable (deconstruction of what it is to play a game. It starts with a third person narration of your character being at work, pushing buttons all day without being quite sure why, and proceeds into multiple endings that deconstruct reality in quite creative ways that sometimes break the fourth wall) Braid (M…

Yeah like I said in another comment, I'm really not trying to deny the validity or value of individual games or anything like that. Portal is brilliant, and I really liked DA:O (though not quite as much as Baldur's Gate or Pillars of Eternity). I just think that the Shakespeare of the video game medium, whatever form that would even take, hasn't been born yet.

Portal may be ok puzzle, but I just really fail to see that as some kind high art equivalent. I mean, it is fun for enough people for me to be sure it is something valuable, but calling it "exploring human condition" would be a massive stretch.

It is enjoyable puzzle that was big deal when puzzles like that were rare. But it is not a game you will show next generation of children so that they learn something about human condition or some such.

Re: The Decadent Society: How We Became the Victims of Our Own Success

#178

Earlier quoted context omitted.

A propos, there was a review on slatestarcodex for "Secular Cycles" effectively tracking the rise and fall of civilizations if I remember correctly. The argument is societies start to destabilize and stagnate once wealth concentrates to a certain point, after which war and strife levels the playing field once more. Except, we don't much expect that same sort of upheaval to happen today in Western society. All of whic…

That correlation might be reversed, though. The author of The Great Leveler makes the argument that in peaceful times, inequality almost always rises to the maximum level that society can bear. It remains that way until a destabilizing event occurs (plagues, state collapse, destructive revolution, mass-mobilization warfare) which decreases inequality (mostly through wealth destruction - the wealthy have the most to l…

Why "rather"? They don't contradict each other. The aforementioned argument I linked to suggests it's both.

Re: The Decadent Society: How We Became the Victims of Our Own Success

#179

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Video games are indeed a form of media, but I think it is misleading to say they are art in the same sense as this author intends. Art and mass entertainment are only superficially similar, and most video games are made to entertain. Video games are (generally) consumable goods created to provide an amount of temporary pleasure. Good art is recognized not just by beauty or the skill required to create it, but by its…

I would respectfully submit that you're talking from a standpoint of utter and complete ignorance about your subject. There are a thousand games that have an "ability to engage with some aspect of what it means to be human, in a way that is coherent, mature, and thought-provoking". I've been moved to tears by several (killing the dragon in Minecraft after literally months of effort, This War of Mine). Stupid things l…

Please stop calling names in HN comments. It's against the rules: https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html.

Nasty swipes like 'Have you ever heard of "classical" music?' aren't ok either (https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=24375636).

We're trying to have curious conversation here, not sharp elbows.

Re: The Decadent Society: How We Became the Victims of Our Own Success

#180

I realise this is a review, not the actual text. But still. This is utter bollocks. It's typical of non-technical "intellectuals" to completely ignore the main areas of modern human progress, simply because they don't understand them. e.g. the whole discussion on Art completely ignores Video Games, which are undoubtedly Art, and also an area of rapid innovation and development. Yet they're usually dismissed out of ha…

I agree in that I have major problems with the article, but disagree that somehow we are in this period of great innovation. I think this kind of argument always goes down two paths. First, someone says "things are terrible right now and it's the end." Then someone else says "no it isn't here's why things are actually great!" Sure we have access to more knowledge than ever - but have we seen the effects of such? Just…

> Sure we have access to more knowledge than ever - but have we seen the effects of such?

yeah this the disruption I mentioned. Our society is going to change because mass communication. Not all of that change is going to be good. All of that change is going to be resisted. The same was true for all changes in society, from feudalism to parliamentarianism to democracy, including electricity and steam power.

> Technologists face the same biases as anyone else.

I get that. But technologists tend to get clued-up about everything else before airing their opinions. For some reason, Art Critics especially, intellectuals seem to think it's OK for them to know everything about 19th century impressionism and nothing about Internet Protocol and still have a valid opinion about 21st century Art.

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