Comment by spicyusername
2 years ago
A very well written essay.
I very much agree with one of the conclusions:
> Fortunately, there’s a cure for our cultural anemia. While the top of the charts has been oligopolized, the bottom remains a vibrant anarchy. There are weird books and funky movies and bangers from across the sea. Two of the most interesting video games of the past decade put you in the role of an immigration officer and an insurance claims adjuster. Every strange thing, wonderful and terrible, is available to you, but they’ll die out if you don’t nourish them with your attention.
I found it funny that in an article pushing for variation, used two video games examples(https://papersplea.se/ & https://obradinn.com/) from the same author
To be fair, the only thing they have in common is the author. They are different in pretty much everything else, and absolutely unique experiences.
(This is the only time I can share this with you, but beware, spoiler alert. Papers Please - The Short Film: https://youtu.be/YFHHGETsxkE)
I came here to make this exact same comment, but I'm not surprised someone else beat me to it!
Maybe Papers Please and Undertale would make better examples.
This is the romantic view of the hundred (million) flowers blooming of a gatekeeper-liberated internet. I don't think it's a realistic "cure" given human nature.
Rather, I think David Foster Wallace's prediction has been proven out:
> ...this idea that the internet’s gonna become incredibly democratic? I mean if you’ve spent any time on the web, you know that it’s not gonna be, because that’s completely overwhelming. There are four trillion bits coming at you, 99% of them are shit, and it’s too much work to do triage to decide...We’re going to beg for [curation]. We are literally gonna pay for it.
After all...here we are on HN, hoping someone has curated the seething froth of new content into something manageable.
I don’t tend to consume curated art, other than the odd friend passing me musical recommendations.
Reviews and playlists are suspect to me. I also enjoy discovering and combing and deciding.
I’m extremely picky about music and cinema and books. Curated media rarely works out.
I never use Spotify and consider that sort of thing to be bad for music as an art for many reasons I won’t get into in this comment.
I’m a lifelong musician, multi instrumentalist etc… I have my tastes and preferences and desired directions of expansion of both (all, lol)
To me, as a former DJ, I drop the needle 3-4 times, skip around in the song, if I like some harmonic scenarios I am hearing I may stick around to hear how it develops and progresses. Given the harmonic constraints of an instrument etc, is there any variety of tone, harmonic structure, technique , texture, or is it just skulking away in a corner looking at its own navel… etc…
I realize that I’m atypical, but I’m also precisely a “music power user”. We don’t matter. The industry doesn’t care about progrock, jazz fusion, afrobeat, bebop, acid jazz, classical (except the Messiah on Christmas) samba, salsa, cumbia, or music in general, it cares about tracking armies of fan consumers across the internet, tabloid entertainment news, clothing, photos, videos, good looking people posing. Forget the music, these days it’s all image…
Only in art are experts thrown on the garbage heap while moneyed interests court the brains of those more easily duped simply due to less experience. I think this is where the competitive thing in music comes crashing hard into the reality that a good song and a really bad song can share the charts, but the bad song often remains longer…
Objectively bad, low effort, poorly structured, lacking a hook, etc, but marketing can keep it there as number one… unlike in UFC where your actual ability to fight matters.
This clearly illustrates that we went from a competency and competition of musical skill to one of marketing skill. Fair enough, but call a spade a spade
Does this mean I am old? Only if one disrespects the human race and human intellect so much that you would cheer the death of a sonic world from the warlike hand of visual glamour and stylized imagery.
A musician is just a kind of fashion photography model capable of making erudite hand gestures and choosing sponsors
Despite your closing sentences, I fear you might not be being remotely cynical enough here.
>Only in art are experts thrown on the garbage heap while moneyed interests court the brains of those more easily duped simply due to less experience.
The entire multidisciplinary world of Academia in general, would like a word. In particular the sciences. Try telling a PhD candidate fishing for research funding for a potentially climate-saving data/technology that experts are respected :-)
Do you know, I think you are right about one thing: we basically still need a search engine, but in many realms beyond textual content
So, question to all -- how have you found success at locating the fruits of this "vibrant anarchy?"
Here's an interesting, related link, that's very obviously coming from a certain perspective but still has things you can take [0].
Here are some strategies I use for books:
Go to the library and walk down a random shelf until a book calls to you. You can run your fingers down the spines and feel for the energy of the right book.
The opposite (however, somewhat sideways, rather than top-down) is pulling books from the "someone just returned this" section. And the books suggested by librarians.
I will also do full-text searches of my somewhat large library of ebooks, which gives equal weight to popular and unknown authors.
Randomness, with uncommon items weighted somewhat equal to common ones, and direct recommendations that bypass algorithmic feeds seem to work somewhat well for me as general strategies.
[0] https://www.epsilontheory.com/25-anti-mimetic-tactics-for-li...
> So, question to all -- how have you found success at locating the fruits of this "vibrant anarchy?"
I've found that live music offers one of the best mechanisms for this. You start out with interest in <major band>, and go see their show. They're on tour with <midsize band> opening for them. You like <midsize band>'s set, so you go see them when they headline a show a few months later. Since they're a smaller band, it's a smaller show, so they have <small band> opening for them. You like <small band>'s set so you later go see them play with <local band>, and so forth.
As the shows get smaller it becomes more common for there to be 3-4 bands on the bill, so the rate of exposure increases. Combine that with the greater sense of community that's common at smaller shows as well as mechanisms like Spotify's related artists and it becomes easier and easier to find new music the deeper you get.
It would be cool if a similar thing was more common with other art forms. What if more movies were preceded by a short from an up and coming director (like Pixar tends to do)? Trailers fill a similar role, but not quite the same. Or what if books included a few recommendations from the author rather than just a list of other books from the publisher?
That is a fantastic idea.
I always thought it would be interesting to have a compendium of "artists' artists." Like, ask some of the most talented people in a given genre to give their recommendations.
Sometimes you get this with longer-form interviews of artists, but those often have a lot of details to sift through.
For books, literary magazines are good: the good ones publish good authors, who recommend good authors. But they're clique-y and only sort of fill the role.
I have resorted to find individual curators of vibrant anarchy. Reddit and Youtube are the most common sources.
RedLetterMedia helps me find weird movies without any mainstream appeal. r/NearProg, r/ListenToThis and r/progmetal are how I find weird experimental rock artists.
For books, some subreddits has a 'I have finished book X, what should I read next?' thread. That's a good way to do Markov-Chain-esque random walk. Another is to simply rely on my favorite podcasters and bloggers. Books are a long commitment and hard to 'figure out' in a minute or an hour. So, I rarely resort to low quality and high coverage searchers like I do with music or TV media.
I did a project where I worked my way through the Dewey Decimal System, reading one book from each decade along the way. Other than the arbitrary choices of the first and last book on the shelves as I read through the DDC and one stretch of ten DDC classifications where there were only two choices of book to read, I did let myself choose from the books rather than making it purely random, but it was a great way to experience a wide variety of different topics over the course of seven(!) years.¹ https://www.dahosek.com/category/dewey-decimal-project/
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1. It’s possible that I might have finished a few months sooner had Covid-related library closures not slowed me down a bit in 2020.
Your ideas could potentially be encoded in a better ranking/recommender _algorithm_ ..
ie. recommenders using something akin to page-rank could/should inject some random items so as to allow new content to bubble up and good new content to be voted up.
It seems nature does something similar - copying DNA pretty accurately, yet allowing for some mutations to advance things and adapt to a changing environment.
That's why I love it when people find their weird media niche. You're a big fan of serialized LitRPG stories? Cool, I'm glad you found your thing out there! You like visual novels games? Neat. It's kind of sad that some obscure media interests are considered classy (ooo, old French art films!) and some are considered deeply embarrassing (eww, Harry Potter fanfic).
The system is so laser focused on very specific bits of media (these movies, these songs, these books, and that's it there is no other form of entertainment), that when people find something they really like in the big long tail of content, it's a cause for celebration.