Comment by nostrademons | Hacker News Reader

Comment by nostrademons | Hacker News Reader

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I'd encourage you to read Clay Shirky's essay "Gin, Television, and Social Surplus":

http://web.archive.org/web/20080708220257/http://www.shirky....

His observation is that for basically a generation after the industrial revolution began, all those folks who were forced out of a job by rising mechanization had nothing better to do but drink themselves into a stupor. It wasn't until they all died off (the essay says "woke up from that collective bender", but realistically, most drank themselves to death) that we got all the institutional structures of modernity - universities, nation-states, stable 9-5 jobs, labor unions, civic engagement, democracy, public education, etc.

And then once we did that, society went on another bender with TV and spent all the time surplus from their 40-hour work week watching MASH and Gilligan's Island. It's interesting to watch re-runs of Gilligan's Island on YouTube today, because the production quality & scriptwriting is basically on par with a YouTube webseries that a few college film students could put together with iMovie today.

People will remain people regardless of what toys you give them, and most are not going to do anything useful with those toys. But it's amazing today just how much creative output has increased, on all levels, relative to the world I entered in the 80s. I think the stat, when I was at Google, was that for every second of real-time that passes, 9 hours of video are uploaded to YouTube. Even if much of that consists of unboxing videos and pirated movies and music collections and gaming streams, that's still such a huge increase over the creative output of the TV-centric world of the 70s and 80s.

I really like your comment. Thanks!

I find myself in agreement and in strong disagreement at the same time. My fear is your thesis is just an extended form of whistling in the graveyard.

Yes, these patterns you mention hold true, and we'd be fools not to acknowledge them, but there's another pattern that you're missing out on: each generation of distraction devices is more engaging and more adaptive. Don't like what's playing in the symphony hall? Go down the street. Painful but doable. Don't like what's on the radio? Twist the dial. Much easier.

So it's not simply that mankind invents some cool new whizbang and then an entire generation zonks out, it's that mankind gets better and better at inventing Whizbangs that are more difficult to zonk out from. So let's assume, and I really hope you're right, that the pattern holds and 40 years from now we see some new rebirth in institutions and inventions. This round was more painful than the last. Much more painful. And the next round will be worse still. As AI slowly grows, it's going to go after the youth; the old folks are already hosed. So really it's game over once we find a way to hook new generations as they come along and keep them hooked.

Those other waves didn't work like this. I'd argue we're either already there -- or within 100 years of it happening. So yes, it's a beautiful thought and I wish you the best. I just can't find it in me to think of this as being a winning argument overall. In fact, your examples like Gilligan's Island are actually reverse examples. Cost of production of niche entertainment content means fewer people make less money targeting smaller audience segments. Doesn't take a genius to figure out that we're headed for machine-created custom content geared to the individual. Things automate. Digital things automate faster. This cyclical thing where new stuff comes along and distracts a generation will become continuous. The only question is when.

Is it actually getting more painful? The last round ended with a worldwide depression and the deaths of 60 million people, including two atom bombs. (I'm counting TV & radio as part of this round; the distractions in the last one included rum-running, flapper girls & jazz.) And as a percentage of population, even that was a fair bit less severe than crises of years past; even including WW2, there's a clear downward trend in number of war deaths per capita [1].

I think what you're describing is the hedonic treadmill. Happiness isn't designed, evolutionarily, to make us happy. It's designed to make us repeat the behaviors that led to our ancestors passing on their genes. So TV holds our attention because in our ancestral past, paying attention to moving objects was critical to our survival. Alcohol holds our attention because in the slightly-more-recent-past, drinking alcohol-laced water was a good way to ensure that pathogens in the water were killed. Sex & porn hold our attention because...well, self-explanatory. Nowadays, mindlessly clicking through Buzzfeed & HN holds our attention because in recent years paying attention to social trends has been critical for survival.

On a personal level, the way to achieve enlightenment is to realize that happiness is a construct of our genes & environment, and to decide to be happy regardless. Whistling in the graveyard, in other words. On a societal level, those addictive behaviors that don't actually lead to better survival will get flushed out of the gene/meme pool in the next major crisis, much like how past pasttimes like jousting, duels, and blood-feuds (and soon tobacco & fast food) became passe when they no longer led to status or survival.

[1] https://www.quora.com/What-was-the-most-devastating-war-in-h...

  It's interesting to watch re-runs of Gilligan's 
  Island on YouTube today, because the production 
  quality & scriptwriting is basically on par with 
  a YouTube webseries that a few college film students 
  could put together with iMovie today.

Ha ha! Woah, woah, woah, there. Hold on a second. You are biting off a chunk of effort and talent there, and throwing it in the trash, without considering some of the huge, huge, huge barriers to television production back in 1960's & 1970's. (...not Gilligan's Island, but MASH, kind of)

Film making used to be so absolutely and drastically different from the way it is now, and there was a lot of sacrificed wastage both in time and material, due to the level of technology and it's reliability back then.

Just to do things like little title sequences and animation, or audio production that didn't look horribly dubbed and poorly lip-synced required careful dedication and the effort of multiple people. All because of poor technology in general, a poverty of integrated circuitry, no software at all, and most post production being performed optically, in-camera and with practical effects. Indoor lighting alone was painfully costly, and doubly so, due to the level of technology of the day. The undertaking of some examples of matte paintings and set design of the era (again, not Gilligan's Island...) are kind of mind-blowing to read about.

There were also political aspects such as centralized access to broadcast networks, which were also subject to high technological overhead, dealing with analog signals and the limited reach of syndication across geographic regions.

You can't credit today's undergrad capabilities visible on youtube, and trash what used to require an army of people doing new things for the very first time, with the boon that off-the-shelf appliances and downloadable software make possible these days. It was a drastically different world 40+ years ago.

Sorry for the rant. This was an XKCD:386 moment for me. [0]

[0] https://www.xkcd.com/386

That's my point. Technology has advanced dramatically since the 60s and 70s. You used to need huge teams of highly-skilled technicians just to handle the mechanics of editing, lighting, sound-recording, special effects, etc. Now you need: iMovie and a cell phone. That's allowed small groups of college students to put out creative works on par with what a major studio could do 40 years ago.

Or to tie it back to the Facebook example that started this thread: I regularly have political discussions with my friends on Facebook (or with folks here on HN, for that matter). If I say something interesting, there's the chance for that to go viral through reshares. When I was a kid, my favorite part of the newspaper was the Op-Ed section, and I always wondered what you had to do to get featured in the Op-Eds. Now everybody has their own personal Op-Ed section, with their own audience, and the type of discourse that was previously reserved for institutionalized publications now happens routinely on the Internet.

It's just that standards have risen correspondingly, so instead of this seeming amazing, it just seems like everybody is shooting their mouth off. Which it is, of course, but people fail to realize just how huge an achievement everybody being able to shoot their mouth off is.

Ha ha, yes, or to put it another way, pretty much everyone can have their own personal Gilligan's Island.

I think GPS has progressed to the point that it would be difficult to stray far enough to get lost, or marooned for that matter, on a 3 hour cruise. That said, the likelihood you would not be able to communicate the boats location or be found by the massive influx in boat traffic would be low.

I think the point was that these days technology has made things so efficient and cheap that even college students can make a big production.

Of course it was harder and more expensive back in the day...but that also meant less competition and a smaller pool of talent.

What's interesting is that most (all?) do not. Everyone has the resources, for the most part, to produce high quality content, but most simply do not. We have all this potentially productive tech, and we waste it on mindless entertainment. Sadly, I think this is one of those moments which decide the winners and losers of tomorrow. If you, or your family, are sucked into entertainment, you (or they) are highly unlikely to discover or invent anything, or start a successful business.

All literate people are capable of writing books, too. But most do not.

The march of technology only changes the things that are not being created -- not the fact itself.

I mean, somebody has to consume all that entertainment (which you call "mindless")

We can't all be creators

This is a fallacy. Creation and consumption are not mutually exclusive. We can all be creators. We can't all be creators with global reach, but that doesn't mean we shouldn't all try. And the more people try, the higher the bar will raise.

Not to mention that all the "creators" I know also consume a way above average amount of 'entertainment'.

Well it still takes quite a lot of work and skill to produce high quality content. It's just more accessible now than it was. You have to write scripts, gather people, find the location, do makeup and costumes, have all the equipment(lights, cameras, audio, etc) and know how to use it, manage how you get paid through ads and sponsors, manage fans, and editing is huge time killer.

Entertainment can be mixed with education, and even the most successful people are not robots and do not work 24/7. How many times have you seen education gamified just here on HN? Did you see how popular the recent "Hidden Figures" historical drama got? There are countless books that have made huge changes on society, and it would have been hard to do that if they weren't at least somewhat entertaining.

I get that there's a lot of mindless media though. The Endless Scroll on Facebook is notorious for being a time suck.

The essay you linked is amazing. And it is a direct counter to grandparent's comment:

> And I'm willing to raise that to a general principle. It's better to do something than to do nothing. Even lolcats, even cute pictures of kittens made even cuter with the addition of cute captions, hold out an invitation to participation. When you see a lolcat, one of the things it says to the viewer is, "If you have some sans-serif fonts on your computer, you can play this game, too." And that's message--I can do that, too--is a big change.

This is a great essay

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