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Culture Is Stuck

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Re: Culture Is Stuck

#71

Post by playing_colours »

jjj123 wrote: post #66
prohobo wrote: post #31

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Can you share some of that stuff? Where are these great movies I've never heard of? Where are the great books - can't people publish on their own nowadays? I can attest to good music being made, but it's still very slow to evolve compared to the 2nd half of the 20th century.

There have been plenty of great, original movies post-2010 that push filmmaking in some way, they’re just overshadowed by the marvels of the world. Some of my recent favorites: Tar Sorry to Bother You Uncut Gems Get Out Tangerine/The Florida Project Dogtooth Mad God

How do you find them?

Re: Culture Is Stuck

#72

Post by Eddy_Viscosity2 »

nerdchum wrote: post #64
Eddy_Viscosity2 wrote: post #54

Earlier quoted context omitted.

But think of the landed aristocracy before the plague, or the rich in the US before WW2. They had things locked in hard and life was sweet. We're seeing that now with the current classes of the super rich. They are getting stuff locked in and life is absolutely amazing for them. What right does 99.9% of the people have to anything if it even remotely threatens their sweet sweet life?

I get your sarcasm and it was funny. The sad cynical part is if you think throughout all of human history, the rich have had their foot on the neck of the poor for almost all of it except for a few bright spots here and there.

This is true, and what's sadly also true is that the rich have always believed they were justified in having their foot on the neck on the poor. These reasons have changed over time, from 'divine right', to 'for their own good', to more recently because 'rich people will make better use of the wealth' (e.g. effective altruism).

Re: Culture Is Stuck

#73

Post by dbspin »

playing_colours wrote: post #68
dbspin wrote: post #44

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Re: publishing, sure you can self publish. But your job at that point is no longer as a writer. Your job is now marketing. The potential for people to see your work is directly related to your ability to sell it and arguably not at all related to your capacity to create it. It's not that good work isn't self published, its that there's nothing to make it stand out from the literary equivalent of drop shipping. The au…

Very interesting to learn a bit about Berlin’s culture scene. Do you write in German or English?

English, Berlins a terrible place to learn German! Huge proportion of the central 'ring' population is non-native and only have mediocre or non-existent German.

Re: Culture Is Stuck

#74

Post by friend_and_foe »

I think that final point is very very important for people to understand the gravity of.

In a dynamic environment, our minds interact with information in a bit of a stochastic way. Things change, evolve, we learn things, and a decade later we are different people. The algorithm, in an attempt to optimize your "happiness", tries to show you things you like already, or things similar people like, stuff like that. This introduces a positive feedback loop into what you're exposed to, a Newton's method for experience, honing you and everyone else in on an eventual monoculture of mediocrity. It prevents you from escaping, changing, you're constantly interacting with a mirror. It's effect on individuals, culture, societies, environments is not minimal, this is not a small adjustment to how the world works. Most of our entire sets of behaviors have drastically changed.

If you want to empower yourself to grow, you have to ditch the algorithms entirely. No YouTube recommendations, Spotify, google, Facebook, none of it. Just play playlists, read chronological feeds you've curated, copy paste URLs. Keep it simple. But ditch the algorithmic feeds, it is imperative that you do that, theyre very, very dangerous and cannot be fixed. Any positive feedback loop that curates what your mind absorbs based on what your mind has absorbed in the past will damage your psyche.

Re: Culture Is Stuck

#75

Post by criddell »

flappyeagle wrote: post #69
criddell wrote: post #27

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Look at fashion changes through 1965, 1975, 1985, 1995. You didn’t need to be discerning at all to spot differences through the decades.

You don’t need to be discerning at all to see the difference between 2003, 2013, and 2023.

Do you think if we picked a random issue of Vogue magazine from 1975, 1985, 2005, and 2015 and asked 100 people to guess which issue comes from which year, do you really think people would be just as likely to confuse 1975 and 1985 as 2005 and 2015?

Re: Culture Is Stuck

#76

Post by snapplebobapple »

nerdchum wrote: post #9

Theres a theory that the black plague led to the enlightenment. The landed monopolistic rich had their foot on the necks of the poor for so long during the dark ages that when 50% of all people were killed it actually allowed new opportunities to arise and new people in nepotistic positions and the economy to flow again. This allowed a flourishing middle class to arise again, which gives more people free time to use…

I think you kind of have this turned on its head in that exploring passions is a natural outcome of our current labor productivity when the actual thing that is the problem is under control rather than out of control and that is abusing market power for rent seeking purposes. Housing costs have gotten out of control because people who own houses lobby for regulatory changes that increase the value of their assets and this is just one small subset of the regulatory rent seeking abuse going on today making it expensive to live even though labor productivity is very high.

Same thing with the black death in the middle ages. Killing a huge portion of the population while leaving almost all the capital in tact made labor valuable and capital cheap and labor used their new ascendence to roll back some of the most heinous abuses of the pre black death era. With the new found rights labor had a higher chance of keeping the proceeds from innovation they came up with and so innovation ensued.

Same thing with post WWII. In this case the old world was completely crushed putting humanity on a more equal level than it has probably ever been and this combined with post enlightenment thinking on equality, human rights and American Libertarianism to let a whole new batch of billionaires grow out of providing services to humanity that were in demand (who then invested in rent seeking themselves putting us where we are today).

Re: Culture Is Stuck

#77

Post by nerdchum »

snapplebobapple wrote: post #76
nerdchum wrote: post #9

Theres a theory that the black plague led to the enlightenment. The landed monopolistic rich had their foot on the necks of the poor for so long during the dark ages that when 50% of all people were killed it actually allowed new opportunities to arise and new people in nepotistic positions and the economy to flow again. This allowed a flourishing middle class to arise again, which gives more people free time to use…

I think you kind of have this turned on its head in that exploring passions is a natural outcome of our current labor productivity when the actual thing that is the problem is under control rather than out of control and that is abusing market power for rent seeking purposes. Housing costs have gotten out of control because people who own houses lobby for regulatory changes that increase the value of their assets and…

Yeah I'm not sure exactly how it works but I could definitely see an increase in value of labor providing more financial resources to a huge swath of people which allow them to influence the business sphere with their own ideas.

Nowadays there's pretty significant monopolistic capture providing the illusion of choice in most markets, food, telecom, tech, etc.

There's no breaking this stuff up without some major change in the foundation of society.

https://substackcdn.com/image/fetch/f_auto,q_auto:good,fl_pr...

Re: Culture Is Stuck

#78

Post by Gigachad »

friend_and_foe wrote: post #74

I think that final point is very very important for people to understand the gravity of. In a dynamic environment, our minds interact with information in a bit of a stochastic way. Things change, evolve, we learn things, and a decade later we are different people. The algorithm, in an attempt to optimize your "happiness", tries to show you things you like already, or things similar people like, stuff like that. This…

Tbh I find that lately the YouTube algorithm seems to regularly throw out something completely whacky, old, and totally out of your usual interests. Almost like an escape hatch from the usual content. People will get bored seeing the same stuff over and over again so it makes sense for the algorithm to try to find new areas of interest or you’ll move to another platform with fresh content.

Re: Culture Is Stuck

#79

Post by roncesvalles »

nerdchum wrote: post #9

Theres a theory that the black plague led to the enlightenment. The landed monopolistic rich had their foot on the necks of the poor for so long during the dark ages that when 50% of all people were killed it actually allowed new opportunities to arise and new people in nepotistic positions and the economy to flow again. This allowed a flourishing middle class to arise again, which gives more people free time to use…

Not only art but also in science. I've noticed that people are averse to pursuing careers in higher academia, especially in niche subjects (in 2023 this means anything other than ML) unless they're from a privileged and financially stable family background. Everyone's just going straight for the money.

Re: Culture Is Stuck

#80

Post by jjj123 »

playing_colours wrote: post #71
jjj123 wrote: post #66

Earlier quoted context omitted.

There have been plenty of great, original movies post-2010 that push filmmaking in some way, they’re just overshadowed by the marvels of the world. Some of my recent favorites: Tar Sorry to Bother You Uncut Gems Get Out Tangerine/The Florida Project Dogtooth Mad God

How do you find them?

I used to read the AV Club’s reviews, but honestly the quality has gone way downhill there recently. Now I follow A.A. Dowd (one of the AV club’s former reviewers) plus a bunch of other people on Letterboxd, which is pretty much a social network for movies.

Easier said than done, but you just have to find some person or blog that has similar taste in movies to you, and listen to them.

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