If I can suggest a slight reframing -- the early internet had a different culture. Everyone was pretty much anonymous, pretty media-limited (text-centered), and sitting in front of a computer was something you could do for relatively short, discrete times of day. So no matter what you did (or even who you were) online, you were still pretty well-tied to your IRL identity most of the actual moments of your life. You could BE a node in a network, but the network could never take over and flatten you; you retained a texture and substance and meaning that the network couldn't erase.
What's most changed between then and now is that everyone online is tied to their real-life identities, we broadcast in such detail and so many details of the world have been documented that Twitch "stars" have to disguise the angles of their bedroom walls or someone will Zillow their way to their front door, and of course people are connected all the time. Which means you're now a node in a network that's been almost completely flattened and absorbed into the fabric of the larger machine. The machine is a profit-driven attention-attractor, with algorithms measuring "engagement" standing in for cultural mediators.
The "culture" this creates is one in which everyone is raised to believe they want to be famous. The desire for attention comes first, the "how can I GET that attention?" question comes after.
This is the flattening. Earlier un-flattened nodes (people!) had an idea of who they were and what they believed and what they wanted to create and if they created it they might step back and say, Yes, I want to Share This. But the new rules reversed that. Now it's "I share therefore I am; holy crap I haven't shared anything, I feel myself disappearing, I must share something or I will not exist, here I'll throw some crap together that caters to the algorithms' biases for grievance, conflict, memes, and *other things its seen before*, and oh sweet relief I've gotten likes, for five minutes I'll feel less insignificant.
So has our culture changed? Yes. I'd say MORE STUFF in general gets created (now that "content creation" is a phrase even eight year olds know), but MORE OF THAT STUFF is just sound and fury signifying nothing -- a tale told by an idiot, you might say. And I'd say those among us who are still somewhat grounded and aren't primarily driven by attention-seeking, who are creating art because we love it and mean it, we are kind of lost in that noise.
But I'd rather be lost in the noise than get my soul flattened into just more hype for ad-inflicted eyeballs. You look at the people who are most successful at internetting, and it's pretty clear, no one wants to become that.
I dig this analysis and I say this as a person who is compelled to talk about ideas, tastes and interest and far less compelled to be the star of my own documentary. Great comment!
This is a very uncool argument, but: on the one hand I'm sympathetic because a lot of stuff is admittedly very bland, and on the other hand I'm a Man of a Certain Age who grew up in an extremely uncool suburb and hearing other people talk about boredom makes me feel like Bane? Like, the new and scintillating is abundant, but it might require some effort that's a little at odds with the promise of the internet?
"Back in my day" I was excited to be able to buy an album at Blockbuster Music that I read about in an issue of Q at Barnes and Noble. My friends and I pooled money to buy overpriced anime at Suncoast. One Saturday afternoon one of our parents drove us into Houston to see Pi and we didn't shut up about it for at least a year.
Now I can watch a foreign gem like it's nothing. I can jump on Soundcloud or Bandcamp and hear a sound that has literally never existed before.
I didn't have the space to untangle this in the post but I think in complaints like Goldberg's sometimes there's a slippage between a few different categories whose role or presence has changed: "indie," as in independent; "avant-garde," as in sensibility- or boundary-pushing; "highbrow," as in intellectually demanding. Practically speaking all these categories often do overlap, so you understand why someone might not bother to separate them out, but it seems important to note that there are worthwhile distinctions to be made.
But all these things do still exist; there are still indie musicians and films; there are avant-garde artists, highbrow composers, etc. As you say, it just requires extra effort on the part of the audience to find and engage with these things -- they are all almost by definition difficult to locate and consume.
This is why I sort of think that what Goldberg is really complaining about (not to presume) isn't a lack of "indie stuff" bubbling up or "boundary-pushing" avant-garde art, but the hollowing out of the "middlebrow" -- just the whole category of quasi-intelligent, mass-market, adult-oriented stuff between Marvel movies and Buñuel, or between Max Martin and John Cage, or whatever. (The only place where the middlebrow really still seems to exist as the bulk of the market is in novels?) And I really do think that shifts in the economic and material conditions of cultural production serve as a better explanation for the decay of the middlebrow than shifts in consumption patterns.
Here's a hypothetical for you then: If David Lynch's timeline were pushed back by half a century or so and he was currently in film school, would any of us ever get the pleasure of seeing anything made by him? Or would he be saddled with 150k of student debt and then subjected to a market that has absolutely no mechanisms to reward his immense talent at his craft?
I guess my fear is that there is a great deal of creative energy that is stifled and destroyed by the current market. But that's just it, isn't it? It's a fear based on a feeling that what I'm seeing is not what we're capable of as a culture.
Or for that matter would he be compelled to take a full-time job at WPP or Omnicom to cover the precipitous cost of city living, and just become the world's weirdest advertising creative?
To be clear I'm not saying that there is as much great production out there as there possibly could be, or should be! I think one under-appreciated aspect of the dying middlebrow culture of Hollywood (or of big publishing) is that it created and sustained a distribution infrastructure (both physical and "cultural") that (sometimes) allowed "indie," "avant-garde," "highbrow," and other outsider, boundary-pushing, or challenging cultural work to find mass audiences, or at least bigger audiences than it is currently possible for that kind of stuff to find. (I don't know how empirically true this argument is TBH but it "feels right" and is emotionally appealing to me, so I'm sticking to it.)
Point taken. The technology of film making may be more accessible than ever, but we don't seem to have as much "space" for people experimenting with the craft.
When I was growing up in the 1960s, the big complaint at the time was the stifling nature of the big content creators and distributors - the studios, television networks, record companies and publishers. - that they were peddling a boring wasteland culture of stifling conformity and artistic blandness. If you wanted to find interesting stuff - movies, music, performance or literature - you had to do so in certain urban neighborhoods, usually guided by the local "underground" newspaper. This ferment was enabled by a combination of relatively low rents for the venues and artists, but also by the desire of those communities of creators and consumers for something different.
A number of things have changed. Those neighborhoods don't exist anymore. Big cities don't have much in the way of low rent. The technical costs of production have plummeted. In theory, more people can create more easily, but the whole network of promoters, gallery owners, off beat publishers, hole in the wall theaters has evaporated. There are online aggregators like Etsy, Youtube, Amazon, Bandcamp and others, but there is no Village Voice, Real Paper or name your hometown underground paper to publicize them.
They can be monetized, but the discovery process is awful. There could be all sorts of great stuff being created out there, but you can't search for "great stuff" on any of those aggregators and expect to get great stuff. If nothing else, it's too easy for scammers to game the keywords. Meanwhile, there is no market for underground curators and critics. How are things supposed to percolate into our awareness? Reddit?
I think your presumption tracks, which I guess makes not surfacing money as a big explainer all the stranger, given how easy a demonstration Warner Discovery is.
Maybe it’s because the two essays cited are more cultural critique rather than focusing on the actual technology underlying distribution methods but I was surprised to not see the words “algorithm” or “Big Data” appear anywhere.
When the primary funders of culture creation are driven solely by ROI and maximizing share value and the primary tools of distribution and discovery are powered by algorithms designed explicitly to give you more of what they think you like, nostalgia & homogeneity are unsurprising outcomes.
As a friend pointed out over email, the reason that "old songs" represent most of the "growth" in the music industry is that Spotify and other streaming services allow rights-holders to view and monetize the kind of at-home listening that would've previously been totally invisible. Where once no one but you would've known when you put on one of your old Rolling Stones records (or whatever) or year, now the labels and distributors can see how much old stuff is still being listened to, and plow more money into highlighting, repackaging, and otherwise promoting it.
Mark Fisher has a great essay about contemporary culture’s “boringness”
“You could argue that the boring is ubiquitous. For the most part, we’ve given up any expectation of being surprised by culture — and that goes for “experimental” culture as much as popular culture. Whether it is music that sounds like it could have come out twenty, thirty, forty years ago, Hollywood blockbusters that recycle and reboot concepts, characters and tropes that were exhausted long ago, or the tired gestures of so much contemporary art, the boring is everywhere. It is just that no one is bored — because there is no longer any subject capable of being bored. For boredom is a state of absorption — a state of high absorption, in fact, which is why it is such an oppressive feeling. Boredom consumes our being; we feel we will never escape it. But it is just this capacity for absorption that is now under attack, as a result of the constant dispersal of attention, which is integral to capitalist cyberspace. If boredom is a form of empty absorption, then more positive forms of absorption effectively counter it. But it is these forms of absorption which capitalism cannot deliver. Instead of absorbing us, it distracts from the boring.
Perhaps the feeling most characteristic of our current moment is a mixture of boredom and compulsion. Even though we recognise that they are boring, we nevertheless feel compelled to do yet another Facebook quiz, to read yet another Buzzfeed list, to click on some celebrity gossip about someone we don’t even remotely care about. We endlessly move among the boring, but our nervous systems are so overstimulated that we never have the luxury of feeling bored. No one is bored, everything is boring.”
I think it comes down to oversaturation. In years past, entertainment and celebrity culture were seen as almost a higher power. Elusive, mysterious. You savoured any drop you got of it.
Now, with social media, everyone's 'real life' identity is tied to their online identity. It's easier than ever for people to churn out content (I'm aware of the irony of me having a substack), and for celebrities to be in our lives 24/7. Everyone has a mouth piece now, and it's getting too much in many ways.
So sorry I missed this until this moment! Thanks so much for the notice! FWIW we made our own tiny response to the current installment of the perennial boredom debate. It's a niche objection, but out of the gate I would object to any claim that starts with audience as the determinant of art. We can make it harder or easier to make or find art, but art ultimately comes from within. When it's reduced to its commercial determinants the spirit has left the building. Call me old fashioned … https://twitter.com/BookPostUSA/status/1567219470271238163
Here's a thought and it ties back to a psychological theory called the paradox of choice. In a nutshell, having too much choice may reduce happiness and increase anxiety because it forces a person to make more decisions. Could also lead to FOMO, but that's my suggestion. People may be seeking the familiar and conformity because it's an easier choice plus there is reinforcement arising from knowing that it's culturally acceptable.
I do find the idea of cultural sophistication no longer leading upward mobility to be quite plausible, too.
the thing I found most odd about the viral Hot Ones clip of Matt Damon lamenting no one buying DVDs anymore is that no one sharing it seemed to see themselves as part of their own problem.... which is kinda the way i feel when i hear people like Goldberg talk about how "bored" they are with "The Culture"...
Yes it did - or at least it fundamentally changed it, but I don't know how something like the internet could NOT have affected culture. Enjoyed the essay!
If I can suggest a slight reframing -- the early internet had a different culture. Everyone was pretty much anonymous, pretty media-limited (text-centered), and sitting in front of a computer was something you could do for relatively short, discrete times of day. So no matter what you did (or even who you were) online, you were still pretty well-tied to your IRL identity most of the actual moments of your life. You could BE a node in a network, but the network could never take over and flatten you; you retained a texture and substance and meaning that the network couldn't erase.
What's most changed between then and now is that everyone online is tied to their real-life identities, we broadcast in such detail and so many details of the world have been documented that Twitch "stars" have to disguise the angles of their bedroom walls or someone will Zillow their way to their front door, and of course people are connected all the time. Which means you're now a node in a network that's been almost completely flattened and absorbed into the fabric of the larger machine. The machine is a profit-driven attention-attractor, with algorithms measuring "engagement" standing in for cultural mediators.
The "culture" this creates is one in which everyone is raised to believe they want to be famous. The desire for attention comes first, the "how can I GET that attention?" question comes after.
This is the flattening. Earlier un-flattened nodes (people!) had an idea of who they were and what they believed and what they wanted to create and if they created it they might step back and say, Yes, I want to Share This. But the new rules reversed that. Now it's "I share therefore I am; holy crap I haven't shared anything, I feel myself disappearing, I must share something or I will not exist, here I'll throw some crap together that caters to the algorithms' biases for grievance, conflict, memes, and *other things its seen before*, and oh sweet relief I've gotten likes, for five minutes I'll feel less insignificant.
So has our culture changed? Yes. I'd say MORE STUFF in general gets created (now that "content creation" is a phrase even eight year olds know), but MORE OF THAT STUFF is just sound and fury signifying nothing -- a tale told by an idiot, you might say. And I'd say those among us who are still somewhat grounded and aren't primarily driven by attention-seeking, who are creating art because we love it and mean it, we are kind of lost in that noise.
But I'd rather be lost in the noise than get my soul flattened into just more hype for ad-inflicted eyeballs. You look at the people who are most successful at internetting, and it's pretty clear, no one wants to become that.
I dig this analysis and I say this as a person who is compelled to talk about ideas, tastes and interest and far less compelled to be the star of my own documentary. Great comment!
This is a very uncool argument, but: on the one hand I'm sympathetic because a lot of stuff is admittedly very bland, and on the other hand I'm a Man of a Certain Age who grew up in an extremely uncool suburb and hearing other people talk about boredom makes me feel like Bane? Like, the new and scintillating is abundant, but it might require some effort that's a little at odds with the promise of the internet?
"Back in my day" I was excited to be able to buy an album at Blockbuster Music that I read about in an issue of Q at Barnes and Noble. My friends and I pooled money to buy overpriced anime at Suncoast. One Saturday afternoon one of our parents drove us into Houston to see Pi and we didn't shut up about it for at least a year.
Now I can watch a foreign gem like it's nothing. I can jump on Soundcloud or Bandcamp and hear a sound that has literally never existed before.
I didn't have the space to untangle this in the post but I think in complaints like Goldberg's sometimes there's a slippage between a few different categories whose role or presence has changed: "indie," as in independent; "avant-garde," as in sensibility- or boundary-pushing; "highbrow," as in intellectually demanding. Practically speaking all these categories often do overlap, so you understand why someone might not bother to separate them out, but it seems important to note that there are worthwhile distinctions to be made.
But all these things do still exist; there are still indie musicians and films; there are avant-garde artists, highbrow composers, etc. As you say, it just requires extra effort on the part of the audience to find and engage with these things -- they are all almost by definition difficult to locate and consume.
This is why I sort of think that what Goldberg is really complaining about (not to presume) isn't a lack of "indie stuff" bubbling up or "boundary-pushing" avant-garde art, but the hollowing out of the "middlebrow" -- just the whole category of quasi-intelligent, mass-market, adult-oriented stuff between Marvel movies and Buñuel, or between Max Martin and John Cage, or whatever. (The only place where the middlebrow really still seems to exist as the bulk of the market is in novels?) And I really do think that shifts in the economic and material conditions of cultural production serve as a better explanation for the decay of the middlebrow than shifts in consumption patterns.
Here's a hypothetical for you then: If David Lynch's timeline were pushed back by half a century or so and he was currently in film school, would any of us ever get the pleasure of seeing anything made by him? Or would he be saddled with 150k of student debt and then subjected to a market that has absolutely no mechanisms to reward his immense talent at his craft?
I guess my fear is that there is a great deal of creative energy that is stifled and destroyed by the current market. But that's just it, isn't it? It's a fear based on a feeling that what I'm seeing is not what we're capable of as a culture.
Or for that matter would he be compelled to take a full-time job at WPP or Omnicom to cover the precipitous cost of city living, and just become the world's weirdest advertising creative?
To be clear I'm not saying that there is as much great production out there as there possibly could be, or should be! I think one under-appreciated aspect of the dying middlebrow culture of Hollywood (or of big publishing) is that it created and sustained a distribution infrastructure (both physical and "cultural") that (sometimes) allowed "indie," "avant-garde," "highbrow," and other outsider, boundary-pushing, or challenging cultural work to find mass audiences, or at least bigger audiences than it is currently possible for that kind of stuff to find. (I don't know how empirically true this argument is TBH but it "feels right" and is emotionally appealing to me, so I'm sticking to it.)
Point taken. The technology of film making may be more accessible than ever, but we don't seem to have as much "space" for people experimenting with the craft.
When I was growing up in the 1960s, the big complaint at the time was the stifling nature of the big content creators and distributors - the studios, television networks, record companies and publishers. - that they were peddling a boring wasteland culture of stifling conformity and artistic blandness. If you wanted to find interesting stuff - movies, music, performance or literature - you had to do so in certain urban neighborhoods, usually guided by the local "underground" newspaper. This ferment was enabled by a combination of relatively low rents for the venues and artists, but also by the desire of those communities of creators and consumers for something different.
A number of things have changed. Those neighborhoods don't exist anymore. Big cities don't have much in the way of low rent. The technical costs of production have plummeted. In theory, more people can create more easily, but the whole network of promoters, gallery owners, off beat publishers, hole in the wall theaters has evaporated. There are online aggregators like Etsy, Youtube, Amazon, Bandcamp and others, but there is no Village Voice, Real Paper or name your hometown underground paper to publicize them.
They can be monetized, but the discovery process is awful. There could be all sorts of great stuff being created out there, but you can't search for "great stuff" on any of those aggregators and expect to get great stuff. If nothing else, it's too easy for scammers to game the keywords. Meanwhile, there is no market for underground curators and critics. How are things supposed to percolate into our awareness? Reddit?
I think your presumption tracks, which I guess makes not surfacing money as a big explainer all the stranger, given how easy a demonstration Warner Discovery is.
Maybe it’s because the two essays cited are more cultural critique rather than focusing on the actual technology underlying distribution methods but I was surprised to not see the words “algorithm” or “Big Data” appear anywhere.
When the primary funders of culture creation are driven solely by ROI and maximizing share value and the primary tools of distribution and discovery are powered by algorithms designed explicitly to give you more of what they think you like, nostalgia & homogeneity are unsurprising outcomes.
As a friend pointed out over email, the reason that "old songs" represent most of the "growth" in the music industry is that Spotify and other streaming services allow rights-holders to view and monetize the kind of at-home listening that would've previously been totally invisible. Where once no one but you would've known when you put on one of your old Rolling Stones records (or whatever) or year, now the labels and distributors can see how much old stuff is still being listened to, and plow more money into highlighting, repackaging, and otherwise promoting it.
"Power law" should be in there somewhere as well.
Mark Fisher has a great essay about contemporary culture’s “boringness”
“You could argue that the boring is ubiquitous. For the most part, we’ve given up any expectation of being surprised by culture — and that goes for “experimental” culture as much as popular culture. Whether it is music that sounds like it could have come out twenty, thirty, forty years ago, Hollywood blockbusters that recycle and reboot concepts, characters and tropes that were exhausted long ago, or the tired gestures of so much contemporary art, the boring is everywhere. It is just that no one is bored — because there is no longer any subject capable of being bored. For boredom is a state of absorption — a state of high absorption, in fact, which is why it is such an oppressive feeling. Boredom consumes our being; we feel we will never escape it. But it is just this capacity for absorption that is now under attack, as a result of the constant dispersal of attention, which is integral to capitalist cyberspace. If boredom is a form of empty absorption, then more positive forms of absorption effectively counter it. But it is these forms of absorption which capitalism cannot deliver. Instead of absorbing us, it distracts from the boring.
Perhaps the feeling most characteristic of our current moment is a mixture of boredom and compulsion. Even though we recognise that they are boring, we nevertheless feel compelled to do yet another Facebook quiz, to read yet another Buzzfeed list, to click on some celebrity gossip about someone we don’t even remotely care about. We endlessly move among the boring, but our nervous systems are so overstimulated that we never have the luxury of feeling bored. No one is bored, everything is boring.”
I think it comes down to oversaturation. In years past, entertainment and celebrity culture were seen as almost a higher power. Elusive, mysterious. You savoured any drop you got of it.
Now, with social media, everyone's 'real life' identity is tied to their online identity. It's easier than ever for people to churn out content (I'm aware of the irony of me having a substack), and for celebrities to be in our lives 24/7. Everyone has a mouth piece now, and it's getting too much in many ways.
Too many cooks spoil the broth, so to speak!
So sorry I missed this until this moment! Thanks so much for the notice! FWIW we made our own tiny response to the current installment of the perennial boredom debate. It's a niche objection, but out of the gate I would object to any claim that starts with audience as the determinant of art. We can make it harder or easier to make or find art, but art ultimately comes from within. When it's reduced to its commercial determinants the spirit has left the building. Call me old fashioned … https://twitter.com/BookPostUSA/status/1567219470271238163
On a modestly related note, would be curious to hear your thoughts about PREY.
Here's a thought and it ties back to a psychological theory called the paradox of choice. In a nutshell, having too much choice may reduce happiness and increase anxiety because it forces a person to make more decisions. Could also lead to FOMO, but that's my suggestion. People may be seeking the familiar and conformity because it's an easier choice plus there is reinforcement arising from knowing that it's culturally acceptable.
I do find the idea of cultural sophistication no longer leading upward mobility to be quite plausible, too.
This was great. Thank you.
For anyone seeking entertainment aimed at adults, I recommend checking out the new Scenes From A Marriage with Isaac and Chastain.
as you predicted, got the letter at the end of my shift- just finished it after dinner
Enjoy the holiday everyone
the thing I found most odd about the viral Hot Ones clip of Matt Damon lamenting no one buying DVDs anymore is that no one sharing it seemed to see themselves as part of their own problem.... which is kinda the way i feel when i hear people like Goldberg talk about how "bored" they are with "The Culture"...
Yes it did - or at least it fundamentally changed it, but I don't know how something like the internet could NOT have affected culture. Enjoyed the essay!