The Internet Is Saving Culture, Not Killing It
nytimes.com
nytimes.com
Before, if you were a writer, you could write for the neighbourhood paper or magazine and carve out a decent living (see: Hemingway, DFW, etc.) Now, unless you're a staff writer for the NYT or maybe 10 other 1%er sites, there's no way to make a living off subscription sites. They have killed local markets that have supported writers. Book sales are down. Newspaper sales are down. Literary magazine sales are non-existent. Anecdatum: I wrote a series of Medium posts this month with a Patreon link at the bottom: 70k hits, $0 donations. It's hard for me to imagine reaching 70k people with my writing in 1910 and still being a pauper.
Two things: this isn't necessarily all doom and gloom. There are probably more artists living than at any point in history. And the internet helps us reach more people than ever before.
However, bragging that the world's most popular newspaper is adding subscriptions and that another couple of creators are making $10,000 on Patreon does not a Renaissance make. Patreon's PR team is trying to spin something that—at least for writers—isn't happening. The needle is not moving.
But on the positive side, I think this gives us a helpful sign post on the way to UBI/post-scarcity society. Consider that one of the biggest political impediments to UBI is not just the puritan work ethic as applied to others, but perhaps even more fundamental is the individual's own need to feel useful. De-coupling creative output from ones livelihood does not necessarily have to be a terrible thing.
With the internet we've also sort of fostered a society that expects some content (music, blog posts, etc) to be dirt-cheap if not free, especially if it does not meet ever-increasing standards. This again leads to a race-to-the-bottom style market where you have to outproduce others to gain a following that might be willing to pay you something.
Saying that this is killing culture is like saying "nobody ever goes there, it's too crowded". Yes, the growth in supply is killing art as a job, but that's more a sign of a general transformation of all non-horrible jobs towards something that's not paid; as long as the planet has more than enough people who are willing and able to do that thing for free, it won't be a valid source of income except for rare exceptions.
So it's difficult to agree with your point that increasing standards and a larger pool of candidates create more quality. In my experience, quality artistic output is a time sink that arises from repeatedly generating and refining concepts and the media itself.
Is this any different, or even less desirable, than the patronage style of old, where only a relative few obtained artist-in-residence-style support from from the limited market of nobles and moneyed interests (who may have been maintaining stables of artisans as a conspicuous display of wealth rather than a specific interest in the artist or their works)? Have most artists and other creatives been surviving off income from their artistic endeavors for most of history?
It was probably true for top fine artists, but at a price of working on commission (i.e. clients dictating the content). For writers, philosophers and composers, I think it was much tougher. For example Chopin, even when he was a celebrity, was living largely off piano lessons. Rousseau made a living copying piano sheets.
As far as I remember Jean-Jacques wanted to make a living by being a musician and "copying piano sheets" and didn't want to depend on how well his books were selling. The reason being that had he started living off his books he would have felt compelled to write what his readers wanted to read, not what he really thought. At least that's what I remember from reading his Confessions.
They normally couldn't in pre-revolutionary France; The Great Cat Massacre has the details.
Contrast this with our current "golden age of television"--while costs are going down and quality is going up for viewers, the genuinely scarce and economically valuable skilled people who can make quality TV are being paid more. Overall the median salary for an artist today is higher than that of the average worker. You can believe that there are social issues that need to be overcome to improve the lives of people who work in and out of the arts, but it's hard to say that artists generally are living in "the worst of times"
And, of course, historically a large number of writers (those who weren't aristocratic dilettantes) had day jobs totally unrelated to writting. T.S. Eliot famously continuing to work in the sub-sub-basement of a bank for 3 years after publishing The Waste Land.
"To every age its art", as they wrote on some building in Vienna in the early 1900s. That is to say that maybe the literature represented by novels (and the associated ecosystem, like literary magazines) is behind us, there's nothing wrong with other art forms (video games, memes, twitter messages, social media posts, vlogs) taking its place. The same as classical music is almost dead, the art of painting is being confined to museums, cinema as we used to know it having been replaced by comics-related marketing materials and some made-for-fancy-festivals movies that nobody watches (thank God for TV series that have replaced what cinema used to be) etc etc.
Classical music isn't 'almost dead'. The art of painting has never not been confined to museums and art galleries. Cinema most certainly has not be replaced with blockbusters - there have always been mass market blockbusters and films for the intelligent at the same time.
The TV series you claim have 'replaced what cinema used to be' are a far cry from art, the Breaking Bads are few and far between and rubbish like Game of Thrones (occasionally well-shot but very poor for at least the last three seasons) is not art.
This is a bold and probably controversial assertion. I for one find it questionable on its face. Even limiting consideration only to literary art forms, the novel is not necessarily "the most artistic medium". For example William Shakespeare, widely held to be among the top literary artists ever to have worked in the English Language, worked in poetry and plays. And plays were a popular medium, analogous to television today, a way for a poet to make money-- It seems plausible to me that elite critics and artists in Shakespeare's time may have asserted (as you do about vlogs and social media posts) that plays were not art at all.
Art is what artists make of some medium-- potential new media like memes, and twitter messages and social media posts may not yet have been pushed to the level of art (and certainly not yet the level of great art), but artists have not (yet) had time much time to work with these new media...
We still have Radio NZ: Classical along with Radio NZ: National. This is the benefit of public service broadcasters, you know.
The algorithms that 'generate music' don't: they generate noise that sounds a little like music but is completely derivative and unoriginal.
Patreon has as its premise, "Support this artist" (in many cases). It's more abstract, not tied to a particular product necessarily, and contributors may feel more like they're donating to someone's rent money rather than bringing a product into reality.
What do you think? Would there be some way for Patreon to tie donations more directly to product creation, or would that undermine the people who are using Patreon?
I was thinking about this in the context of the John Wanamaker quote -- "Half the money I spend on advertising is wasted; the trouble is I don't know which half".
If online advertising becomes perfectly efficient, that might lead to a 50% (or more) reduction in the amount of funding available for ad-supported content.
False equivalence. 70k hits means that 70k people somehow reached your page. Most of the probably closed the browser/tab before even fully loading the page.
I think in 1910 it would have been like counting people passing by the newspaper stand as "hits".
I hope you're kidding and don't genuinely think that most people close links before fully loading the page on average.
Going from the moment when someone sees a link on the page to the moment when they decided to actually click it, to them waiting for the page to load and to the moment where they actually bother to scroll till the end... where by scroll I don't mean "Page Down/Page Down/...", but scrolling at a "reading pace".
I'm not saying it's the best way forward, but would it kill Twitter and Facebook and Snap to experiment with some of these models? It's working for content creators, why should social media platforms be any different?
At the very least, it makes sense to offer paid tiers of access for their APIs, which I get some of their "enterprise" clients are already doing, but certainly a great API is monetizable and worth paying for.
Now Facebook could turn into a paid service and pay its users more but then it would have much fewer users and then way less money to offer and now we're back to paying users little.
Seems like the current deal isn't such a bad one, Facebook connects a massive amount of people around the world including poor immigrants with their family (I know a few) and in exchange these users create value for Facebook. It's a voluntary win-win situation for both parties. Adults entering mutually beneficial deals with each others and enjoying it, what's wrong with that?
1: http://www.telegraph.co.uk/technology/facebook/11891353/How-...
The co-op concept doesn't require equal distribution of proceeds to participants. Nor does it require that the net distribution of proceeds equal the total value per user. Nor is incentivizing value creation on your platform a zero-sum game between facebook and content creators.
Right now I just don't want to be getting billed by a bajillion different people for all the content I consume. It's an administrative hassle.
Joke aside there is an overview page on Google play for subscriptions placed through apps from the play story. That's probably the closest to what you described.
Any possible competitor would need to embrace this model, as Ads only at a very large scale.
There have never been any barriers for creators. Folk art has always been a part of human societies.
There were barriers for mass dissemination of artistic works, but not the process of creation.
Mass media put the local artists out of business. Before the advent of radio and recorded music there were many more musicians and bands. Now everyone has to compete on a global level.
I would argue that in this new global digital attention economy that there is even more competition and even less room for local and alternative voices.
Live music profits are at an all time high but it is all concentrated at the top. The long tail is a fallacy.
In the 1960s and 1970s, a lot of people who started startups would have started bands instead. The music scene was where creativity happened. Maybe Mark Zuckerberg would have started a band.
Starting in the mid/late 1990s, creativity's frontier shifted to the Internet as it grew exponentially, and the music industry started changing as a result of massive free distribution. I think many bands were never started because the people who would have formed them were making web pages and startups instead.
That's just incorrect due to the sheer exponential increase of humans alive, not to mention the many cultural factors you are ignoring. Thousands of bands were started because kids heard old blues music over the radio and became inspired.
I'd wager there's more bands and venues than ever now and if anything, I'm seeing more and more people make a living off their music thanks to the network effects of social media combined with touring. I've watched two of my friend's bands - pretty weirdo stoner pop music - go on national tours supporting major acts (Of Montreal was one) and it most likely would've never happened if not for the exposure and channels of the internet.
In the 19th century there was a much higher percentage of people who could play rudimentary musical forms.
The quality of music and choice available to consumers has increased steadily. People would rather hear the best musicians in the world than the best musicians in their household or neighborhood.
There is plenty of historical research on this topic beyond the common sense explanation I'm offering here.
Amendeum:
I assume you live in a media hub like NYC, SF or LA, where there is a concentration of mass media professionals.
If you drive out to a small town you will find a very low number of local musicians. Before mass media there would have been a number of local music groups. Today people living in small towns listen to what the mass media professionals are making for them.
These are the same kind of basic economic principles that lead to any kind of concentrated specialization, and on a global scale, comparative advantage.
The decline in music-making over the past century has been astonishing, in small ways and large. Whistling used to be a common sound on the street, but is now almost extinct. Social singing is now a rarity and would be difficult to revive, because there is no longer a shared repertoire of song to draw from. A vast chasm has opened up between "musicians" and "non-musicians".
It is incredibly rewarding and gives me a very real sense of participating and contributing to my culture and community.
When I was a social media addict living my life through a screen while theoretically living in San Francisco I was frequently pulled down by bouts of depression.
Ever since I quit social media, got rid of my smartphone, discovered bluegrass and country music and moved to a place where these musical cultures are a fundamental part of society my life has gotten so much more rich and satisfying.
If "people would rather hear the best musicians in the world than the best musicians in their household or neighborhood" than why are local acts booming in places like Portland, ME? Why are small bands filling out the bottom portion of huge festivals or starting their own?
Your post reads to me like someone who doesn't seem very aware or involved in music and mostly gets their information from online source and so called historical research rather than first-hand live experience.
At one time there was live music in every single pub in the country, if only just some drunk playing sing-a-longs on one of the ubiquitous pianos of the era. Nowadays the vast majority of restaurants, bars and private gatherings utilize recorded music instead of a live band.
I am most definitely in direct competition with DJs for wedding gigs, and they have less costs and a greater range of song materials to choose from.
Your posts read like someone who is convinced that technological "progress" never has any negative repercussions.
It was a fantastic experience but it made me realize I didn't really like life on the road and that I needed a more secure source of income.
History folks. It repeats itself.
And you are suggesting that no only are we currently within a similar scale event (plausible, but hardly proven), and there will another two such magnitude events in the next 200 years?
Or are you noting that we, and future generations, will always think we are on the cusp of "great things" but for almost all cases will be wrong?
For example, we now speak of a single "agricultural revolution", where in reality it would have spanned hundreds of years of had several different periods (discovering plants, discovering cattle, etc).
We have had many revolutionary technological developments throughout the past 200 years, such as radio, flight, and computers. And it doesn't seem like we're really slowing down yet.
We're now shifting to a knowledge economy, and the internet has been transforming that. I think of this transformation as distinct from the Industrial Revolution (either the first or the second).
'Knowledge economy' is a myth anyway. The 'knowledge economy' produces nothing of actual physical value to people and .com bubble 2.0 will burst within 5 years.
Admittedly that probably can't be attributed to any one technology or idea, but I'd put that as a solid contender for a third entry in your list.
[EDIT] for a fourth I'd skip some of the other suggestions in this thread like the Enlightenment or Renaissance, and instead add The Printing Press.
For me the agricultural and industrial revolutions stand out as two inflection points, so if we are proposing lining up with them, we'd need pretty strong evidence. They both effectively fundamentally changed the way of life for the majority of humans on the planet.
Agree we are too close to say about our own rate of change.
You don't notice the pattern? The first big bump was 10,000 years go. The next one was 200 years ago. The third one was 20 years ago. It does seem like it takes less an less time for the world to work out what's unnecessary about social organizations. If I naively extrapolate, within decades we'll have period where we have profound cultural shifts every year or so, then every week.
Frankly, I think we're already in the once-a-year period it's just that profound social shifts aren't quite as newsworthy as they were in the nineties. And the adoption curves are still on the order of decades, so while there's a new game changing structures every year, it still takes 20 years for it to disseminate. But the successor to a structure is getting created almost faster than the original is getting disseminated.
This is why people talk about the singularity. If these trends continue, it means we're headed towards a moment of "max everything". Opinions differ on what max everything will look like. I don't think "AI superintelligence" will be a thing, others do. But it doesn't seem crazy to expect things will look very alien.
We're headed towards one, globally connected, mind. Some will opt in, and life will look very different for them. Some will opt out and things will more or less freeze in a vaguely 20th century form. So I guess in that sense "everything will be different" and "nothing will change" are both right, depending on what kinds of person you are.
I think in reality there is some sort of lower bound here in what we consider "reality" today (the physical world, with its governments, etc). We already are seeing the internet as a place where revolutions happen on very short timescales, even overnight. This will only increase as VR takes hold of our minds and existence.
To be honest, I'm a little afraid of that. There is something to be said for change in the physical world and how profound big changes are, and I hope one does not transplant the other and that they evolve together. We still need infrastructure, places to live, and government to make the online/VR revolutions a possibility.
Maybe the skills required to lead a revolution can only be formed while living as a child under the system that the revolution is against. And so any empire you create is at least safe for 20 years, until a new generation of kids come up having never known anything else, and tear it down.
I think a lot about that when I look at Bitcoin, Ethereum, etc. The blockchain completely changed how I think about computer science, and while I think it's revolutionary, I don't think it can really take off until a whole generation of students can go through their PhDs to solve some of the major problems. We see that happening now in the Ethereum community.
I see it in myself too... The web was just emerging as I was coming of age. It promised to revolutionize society, but in the 20 years since, we have seen the ways it failed to do that. Those of us who grew up immersed in the web are currently working feverishly to attack the corruption that has resisted it.
I actually have little doubt we'll succeed at democratizing access to things like information, credit, and public safety, but I can also see the ways in which we are creating a new bubble of impossibility. I can see how children growing up in the world I'm creating may have a hard time making mistakes and causing collateral damage, which could stifle exploration. I can see how groupthink can become unmoored from reality in scary ways...
And sometimes I wonder if my generation, even with this exponentially accellerating technology and culture, won't really be able to solve those problems because we didn't grow up in them. Not in the same way.
In that sense, I think the 20 year clock that advances a little each generation will still be a reasonable characterization of post-singularity life.
When I was writing it I knew logarithmic didn't seem quite right but it was a pre-coffee comment.
Do you see two more such (distinct) events in the next 200 years? To me that is completely implausible, so was trying to determine if I had misread.
CRISPR is an overview of what the revolution may look like. This technology may offers possibilities to hack DNA, this would be a huge revolution in term of health, but also totally change our world. Until now the medicine was trying to fix the body deficiencies by applying corrections afterwards. When we will reach DNA hacking capabilities, it would open the possibility to fix the real genetic cause of a disease even beforehand. It may be used to increase lifespan or boost human performance. Maybe it will be called the medical revolution?
It's not a game we can play forever though... the toys are much bigger now and globally impactful. If we can't figure this shit out before we run out of resources or spoil the planet for our civilization (or just nuke ourselves) we are done as an advanced society.
Also, running old games in DOS Box is often a finicky process that requires some tinkering for every game. That's one of the reasons GOG.com took off so rapidly. People are gladly paying several bucks to save themselves the trouble of messing with configs and reading forums about game's quirks.
This isn't a huge deterrent in case of games, but it will be a huge deterrent for retro-browsing, because the whole point to the Web is its interconnectedness. Plus, there are many more websites than there are games.
For instance, UCLA has a great old lecture series from the '60s they've been digitizing: https://www.findlectures.com/?p=1&collection1=UCLA%20Archive...
There are a ton of other places doing this. Once these types of projects are funded once, they can be available pretty much forever, because they are drop in the bucket for youtube, which seems tremendously cost effective.
In that interpretation, the internet can only be an accelerating force; driving society forward into greater levels of social consciousness.
[1]: A relevant XKCD comes to mind https://xkcd.com/915/
Not necessarily. Take evolutionary processes. Diversity arises in part from isolation. This is why the Galapagos are such a crazy local ecosystem. The Internet globalises all communication -- it is easy to see how this can lead to more "bandwidth" as you say, but less actual cultural output.
I agree that the mediums of communication of a society have a significant effect on the culture the users, but is "culture" something that can really be objectively quantified?
Perhaps it may be more accurate to say that the speed in which a culture lives is related to the speed of communication.
Now journalism, I agree with. But it requires time and investment.
I'd love to see journalists experiment with perhaps a more wiki-like model of reporting, where you have one page for a certain topic which gets updated (new stuff at the top or otherwise readily visible).
A wiki-style document, updated as the story unfolds, organized so that anyone can get an overview and then drill down into the details, seems like a really good idea. Some JavaScript and such could allow stories to be viewed chronologically, by topic, keyword, etc. (Something like TiddlyWiki could be a good place to start.)
I guess I see value in news as "here are some issues that people are talking about, go find more info if you want to learn more"
The problem is that most news falls outside the circle of control for the people reading it: it makes people worry, but in practice they can't or won't do anything about it. There's no point in worrying about something if you don't intend to act on it. But that runs counter to the notion of "get people worried to get more eyeballs watching".
Very little news actually does that. Watch a TV news program, or read a newspaper, and try to imagine what the call to action is on each story. For most stories, there isn't any, other than "Worry more!" or "Resent these people!" or "Get annoyed!".
> Though, I agree it doesn't seem to work well in practice. I wonder what could change to make that happen.
Build a source of news whose fundamental premise is "if it doesn't have a specific call to action that people can act on if they care about it (and that in practice people do actually act on), it doesn't get published".
Although I kind of agree with you, what about problems that don't have a clear, actionable response by most people? Although those are probably rare, I'd personally want to know about them and decide for myself.
There would be a point if there was a possible actionable response that most people wouldn't want to do, but that would be up to them to decide.
However, if it doesn't have an actionable response, then there's nothing to decide, except whether to experience useless and unproductive worrying or not.
There may be some problems that are not solvable by you but need an organized intervention from a government, but they generally have a clear, actionable response, i.e. act to get elected representatives that will try to solve the problem. However, something that truly doesn't have an actionable response - i.e. "someone slaughtered a dozen schoolkids halfway across the globe" is a viable headline, but not really a problem that can be solved nor (generally) even a useful source of information about risks, as the likely inferred knowledge from titles like these generally has no correlation with reality.
Ten years ago, I donated regularly to charities that would enable micro-funding for people living in third-world countries. A $10 donation would buy some chickens for a woman in South America, who could turn a profit on the eggs and eventually pay the loan back. I thought it was a fantastic idea.
Today, I find I'm funding everyone's projects. I pay a $2/month for a serialized zombie radio drama I listen to on my morning run. $4/month contributes to one of my favorite weekly science podcasts. $4/month to Amazon gets me unlimited streaming music on my Alexa. I think nothing of paying $3 for a phone app I might play once or twice before getting distracted by the next shining new thing.
Culturally, even without this micro-funding, we are swamped in culture. My DeviantArt feed overwhelms me with more amazing art than I have time to appreciate. The same is true of books, shows and films both professionally-made and independent. As a result we are drowning in culture, but dividing into micro-cultures as individual. Twenty years ago, everyone had the common cultural experiences of watching the same shows and movies. Today, we no longer can take those common-cultural references for granted. I'm not saying that's a bad thing, just an observation.
Culture is more than just hobbies. It's about identity.
It opens up cultural niches that aren't viable in smaller communities or weren't viable before - something that won't have a critical mass to grow or even exist in a city of 100,000 people can have a thriving culture worldwide nowadays.
Yes, we're losing the notion of a shared monolithic identity kept together by mass media keeping "everyone" (or 3-4 major groups/demographics each) in a nation on the same page culturally. While it does mean that the society is becoming less united, this is increasing diversity and bringing the culture towards the individual differences in taste; I believe that in the end this trend is a good thing, both for the individual people and culture at large.
I don't think you're acknowledging the other side of the trade off: if you aren't interested in something popular, you're going to be effectively alone in spite of a torrent of options for interacting with others. Reducing popular culture to sub groups makes this much, much easier to encounter.
My friends call this "Facebook fatigue": looking at hundreds of friends and feeling alienated because of few shared interests.
Regardless, claiming that culture is "dead" or "thriving" seems to be missing from evidence.
Terrible play, questionable subject matter and worse fans, but still... a good point. There's nothing wrong with culture as a concept to live through, but as a point of discussion it's akin to a discussion of religion or dreams.
So I think we need a better shorthand for this - just so we all know what we're really saying.
So I'd agree with this. The internet is responsible for my bands success.
It helps content creators to disseminate their content, but increases the variance of content quality.