Comment by blueboo
2 years ago
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