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The Cargo Cult of the Ennui Engine

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Re: The Cargo Cult of the Ennui Engine

#51

Post by marcosdumay »

worrycue wrote: post #35
Aeolun wrote: post #33

Earlier quoted context omitted.

If people could do this conciously, we wouldn’t need this article.

I think the author is just asking us to vote more thoughtfully. Currently, especially on sites like Reddit, the upvote/downvote buttons are abused as agree/disagree buttons and are clicked with little thought. The recent troubles on Reddit have people talking about alternatives. An old site - one of the first voting based forums - was brought up, Slashdot. It has an interesting voting system. Only some people can vot…

> Only some people can vote - I forgot the requirements.

One day you would get on the site, and have 5 votes to spend. If you didn't spend them, they would go away and it would take a little longer to get more next time.

It was a really interesting system. People did act a bit more seriously when they had votes, and there was the metamoderation system for keeping them accountable. It was a little bit complex, but only long-term users would see it, and worked better than any other system I have seen on practice.

Re: The Cargo Cult of the Ennui Engine

#52

Post by kulahan »

5350-uiop-1130 wrote: post #40

i wish i had an interest in learning. i seem to prefer mindless consumption. is it just laziness and lack of discipline. im unmotivated to learn anything that doesnt have immediate practical value, like consumption has immediate reward.

Consumption is just engaging with something meaningless to get your dopamine instead of something meaningful. There's no reason you can't consume educational material that intrigues you.

Re: The Cargo Cult of the Ennui Engine

#54

Post by zafka »

meandthewallaby wrote: post #13
pipo234 wrote: post #4

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I, for one, learned a new word: Ennui. And I believe I finally understand what people mean when referring to a cargo cult. A tweet most definitely would not have sufficed. Thanks for the long read, interesting an well written. (And: true, I'm probably living under a rock for being so ignorant) :-)

Because of the curse of the autodidact, do note that "ennui" is pronounced "on-wee," as it comes from French ("ennui" is "boredom" in French). It is not, as I found out rather embarrassingly, "en-you-eye". Incidentally, I agree with you. While there could be some editing for length (oh well), the point was well made with a great example to start out with, and a bit of a discussion about some of the effects of being t…

Funny indeed. My wife was just making fun of me the other day becuase of the way I pronounced this. This was the answer to Wordle last week. I new the word by sight, but like a lot of us, had never heard it spoken. I sent her a link to this article just because ennui was embedded in the title :)

Re: The Cargo Cult of the Ennui Engine

#55

Post by still_grokking »

skywal_l wrote: post #47
com2kid wrote: post #44

> We favor videos that either are very short or don’t require dedicated focus, confident in the knowledge that we can move on to something else whenever we want to. We ignore thoughtfully composed “walls of text,” but we electronically applaud memetic image macros and single-sentence references that aren’t inherently entertaining or insightful The rise of long form YouTube videos and Podcasts directly contradicts thi…

I'll throw in Cathode Ray Dude [0] in there. It's hard to believe he will get 500K view on a 70 minutes video about some weird 90s hardware but he does. [0] https://www.youtube.com/@CathodeRayDude

Is there any demographic of his audience?

Given the topics on that channel I would guess most viewers are already older people who got struck with nostalgia (a typical phenomenon in elder people).

Gen Z and younger on the other hand seems to have in large parts just an attention span of a few seconds left. At least that's my personal experience. (I don't want to annoy anybody here, there are exceptions of course!)

Re: The Cargo Cult of the Ennui Engine

#56

Post by qubex »

rcktmrtn wrote: post #34

I liked most of this article and found it interesting. Maybe a bit long-winded, but like many people I've been thinking a lot about the same topic in recent years, struggling to break free of a certain mindset. Hearing the images and language how someone else feels when they describe that "machine" that keeps them captive is interesting -- a very "blind men and the elephant" experience. The cargo cult aspect is a new…

It struck me as “Capitalist Realism Lite”.

Re: The Cargo Cult of the Ennui Engine

#57

Post by spandrew »

=== Article === "Worst of all, we snarl at anyone who tries to help us out of the mire, and we decry attempts at pulling anyone else out. We make excuses for writing errors instead of correcting them, we overlook factual mistakes if addressing them would be inconvenient, and we sneer at the alleged pretension of so-called elitists who haven’t yet been ground into the dirt. The only thing that we ever really accomplish is a gradual yet consistent lowering of standards… because even a reasonable excuse is still an excuse, and it represents an opportunity for improvement that’s being cast aside." ====

We do? I don't recall anyone ever yelling at me for opening my Kindle at lunch and reading a chapter or two of Rules of Civility for 45 minutes as I scarf down the meatballs leftovers I prepped last night for me and my partner?

The article is cathartic in nailing the Ennui Engine's downsides of cheap content. The lack of fact checking, or care put into basic literature. But most people aren't mindless zombies only surfing Tik Tok. You do a little of that. And a little of the other things you like. Cable Access TV was full of Better Call Saul quacks in the 90s, you know.

How many people genuinely read the newspaper in 1950 versus the funnies or the sports page? Wasn't that a staple joke in every sitcom? Yokels gonna yokel. New economies spin up. But NYTimes is still making a killing. The straggler media outlets adapt? And of course some terrifically fine middle sized agents unfortunately got pinched in the spinning of the universe at this juncture of Space–Time.

Re: The Cargo Cult of the Ennui Engine

#58

Post by com2kid »

majormajor wrote: post #50
com2kid wrote: post #44

> We favor videos that either are very short or don’t require dedicated focus, confident in the knowledge that we can move on to something else whenever we want to. We ignore thoughtfully composed “walls of text,” but we electronically applaud memetic image macros and single-sentence references that aren’t inherently entertaining or insightful The rise of long form YouTube videos and Podcasts directly contradicts thi…

What's your time frame on "long form articles are more popular than ever"? And are you using relative or absolute popularity? E.g. "medium form" articles in pop magazines were probably always more popular than longform ones in literary mags, but were they more relatively popular than "tweets" or "tiktok videos"? Would a three hour film like Doctor Zhivago ever sell 248 million tickets today? And that number has a low…

> Would a three hour film like Doctor Zhivago ever sell 248 million tickets today?

Avatar, Way Of The Water, a 3 hour movie, broke all sorts of sales records (though # of tickets sold data apparently isn't out yet).

Heck Avengers End Game was 3 hours long and it sold 351 million tickets.

I do think you get less of the repeat sales now days vs even in the 90s, just because there are so many more movies coming out, both in Cinema and on streaming platforms, but that doesn't say anything about people's willingness to attend long movies.

Re: The Cargo Cult of the Ennui Engine

#59

Post by dacryn »

com2kid wrote: post #58
majormajor wrote: post #50

Earlier quoted context omitted.

What's your time frame on "long form articles are more popular than ever"? And are you using relative or absolute popularity? E.g. "medium form" articles in pop magazines were probably always more popular than longform ones in literary mags, but were they more relatively popular than "tweets" or "tiktok videos"? Would a three hour film like Doctor Zhivago ever sell 248 million tickets today? And that number has a low…

> Would a three hour film like Doctor Zhivago ever sell 248 million tickets today? Avatar, Way Of The Water, a 3 hour movie, broke all sorts of sales records (though # of tickets sold data apparently isn't out yet). Heck Avengers End Game was 3 hours long and it sold 351 million tickets. I do think you get less of the repeat sales now days vs even in the 90s, just because there are so many more movies coming out, bot…

those are unfair comparisons.

They are franchises, not standalone projects. Much like you are more keen to see a video from a creator you have enjoyed in the past. The barrier to entry is lower.

And the avengers have comic books as well as an excuse to yourself that it's probably worth it to risk putting your time into watching the movie.

Now think of a random movie, I call it 'The study of Protastores' It's a made up name, it has the word study in it. Would you go and watch it if it was 3 hours long? You it would be a difficult pitch, even if it is the best movie ever and has an exciting thumbnail

Re: The Cargo Cult of the Ennui Engine

#60

Post by jdietrich »

majormajor wrote: post #50
com2kid wrote: post #44

> We favor videos that either are very short or don’t require dedicated focus, confident in the knowledge that we can move on to something else whenever we want to. We ignore thoughtfully composed “walls of text,” but we electronically applaud memetic image macros and single-sentence references that aren’t inherently entertaining or insightful The rise of long form YouTube videos and Podcasts directly contradicts thi…

What's your time frame on "long form articles are more popular than ever"? And are you using relative or absolute popularity? E.g. "medium form" articles in pop magazines were probably always more popular than longform ones in literary mags, but were they more relatively popular than "tweets" or "tiktok videos"? Would a three hour film like Doctor Zhivago ever sell 248 million tickets today? And that number has a low…

>Would a three hour film like Doctor Zhivago ever sell 248 million tickets today?

No, partly because the media landscape is much more fragmented with much more choice and partly because streaming services are now the natural destination for serious long-form drama. If you were a screenwriter pitching Doctor Zhivago today, you'd pitch it to Netflix. Nobody goes to the movies to watch a historical epic today, but nobody in the 1960s was binge-watching subtitled foreign drama on TV.

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