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Comment by pram | Hacker News Reader

If you’ve ever had first hand experience with being in an artistic/creative “scene” a lot of this is familiar. Especially on places like tumblr. There’s no shortage of self aggrandizing sociopaths all jockeying for status.

Most of the interactions are very transactional, based on favor trading and prestige. There’s tons of cliques that have pointless animosity towards others. The people themselves are usually very moody and depressive. It’s a very hostile and unpleasant environment.

I guess there’s nothing new under the sun!

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Yep, I used to do club promotion and DJ, and yeah, that's all very familiar. I started out as one of those ass-kissing hangers on, moved up to the point where I was playing fairly big gigs and knew important people, and suddenly people were kissing my ass, instead. It's a weird thing where the more successful you are, the more people are just willing to do stuff for you for free. There are a lot of people who have very little talent or very little to say, who nevertheless want to be heard, and a surprising amount of the entertainment industry is dedicated to taking money and time from them.

The difference between successful artists and wannabe's is vast. I once opened for one of the most popular djs in the world. He got paid something like $30,000. I got paid $200. For a gig that I bought $350 worth of records to play. And I'd have happily _paid_ for someone to give me that gig.

How big is the difference between successful and wannabe in terms of skill?

When I used to read twitter I'd see a lot of this where authors would get torn apart (often by other authors) for writing something that was allegedly racist or appropriating some other culture. At least in the real world you can tell that people like that are in the minority, but online, because the barrier to participate is so low, it can feel like everyone is against you.

Also, 1895 isn't that long ago. These aren't exactly writings from ancient Greece. Lets remember this was a couple years after Chicago's 1893 fair where a lot of what we consider modern was ushered in, albeit slowly. And in this period books like War and Peace and Dracula were published. I view this period pretty contemporaneous to modern American culture in many significant ways.

It's not just outside of living memory, nobody alive then was alive even 10 years ago. That's a reasonable definition of 'long time' in human terms.

It's a few years before Dracula. Frankenstein on the other hand would have been 68 years old and thus would have seemed like something written in the 1950's to us. I bring that up because we tend to compress history as the time spans are to large to really grasp.

1950 isn't that long ago, I've read books from that era in the last 12 months, even computer science papers from that era are not too uncommon.

CS is something of an outlier in that respect as it was so new a the time.

However, consider what percentage of those books / paper authors are still alive? If they where 35 then they would be 103 today.

“I have seen all the things that are done under the sun; all of them are meaningless, a chasing after the wind.“

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