Can monoculture survive the algorithm? | Hacker News Reader

Can monoculture survive the algorithm?

vox.com

45 pointsportobello43 comments

As the article itself points out, monoculture itself was a technological phenomenon; mass broadcast of TV and radio with only a few channels. Even then it was only monoculture within a country, and we're globalized now. Returning to a monoculture will require both propaganda and suppression.

> Returning to a monoculture will require both propaganda and suppression Great firewall of China seems to be doing that.

You can see China trying to create a hegemonic Han monoculture: that's what the suppression of Tibet and Uighurs is directed towards.

It's what they've always done.

> Mastery of 1 set of texts

> Dogmatic adherence to a single school

> Promotion of those who regurgitate the above the best

It's yet to work for more than a few hundred years.

Has any power managed to rule for more than a few hundred years?

rome?

Especially if you include the Eastern Roman Empire which fell in 1453.

That's a bit of a broad generalization. As with all history it doesn't hold up under scrutiny.

In the 1200s, the empire split into 3 warring countries. The one that took Constantinople was considered the continuation of the Byzantine empire, but maybe it's more correct to think of it as a spiritual successor, than an actual unbroken reign of a single nation.

Which would put it at less than 1000 years of rule. So "a few hundred years" would still be an accurate upper bound.

Even if you take the 1200's as the end of the Empire, and ignore the Roman Republic and take 31 BC as the defacto start of rule of the Roman Emperor, you still are looking at over a millenia.

I guess if I'm a dictator worried about my legacy, I'd be okay with being remembered as "not quite as successful as Rome"

Several Chinese dynasties depending on where one draws the line on "a few"

I'd say Mesopotamia, Egypt, Ancient Rome, Holy Roman Empire.

I really don’t know much about it, but I think the Han identity is similar to whiteness in the US, right? A coalition of groups that not that long ago would not have considered themselves the “same.” The Chinese govt seems to consider constructing a unified Chinese identity pretty important, maybe anticipating that once they start failing to make the standard of living gains they’ve made over the past decades ethnic tensions could be destabilizing?

Or, they could just be racist.

Sometimes, call a kettle a kettle.

They briefly mention literature and I think that provides a good counterexample. Books are highly individual, and always have been long before streaming existing. Yet, there still manage to be runaway hits that everyone reads and talks about. The same could be true of streaming shows. Stranger Things managed it in the streaming era.

One could say that Stranger Things piggy-backed on a feeling of nostalgia for the shared monoculture of the '80s

The 80s is an interesting funnel for shared monoculture. Modern enough to be relatable today, distant enough to serve as a canvas to project all sorts of personal bias onto.

Personally I love the 80s lore and I think I loved the 80s as it happened as much as anyone can love something while still being inside it. It was just so palpably on the verge of so many things, the Cold War ending, (violently or peacefully, it was obvious it was going to end!), technology promising so much without the downsides being a reality to deal with, and the downsides projected in dystopia sci-fi were still cool downsides, not the mindnumbingly dreary, boring dystopia we create for ourselves now with FB, China and its ilk.

80s and 90s American culture seemed to have an edge of individualism and creativity that was fed to the corporate steamroller as media consolidated.

Can you imagine Disney producing Animaniacs?

While it's a good idea, at least for now I think the technological differences disrupt the parallels. For books, the only capital/tech barrier to entry is the singular entity of the book itself. The object of the book carries a complete copy of all the requisite information and a human interface for it with no further infrastructure requirements at all. It can additionally be read, than shared, sold, etc., with a life time of decades or more.

But at least for now, streaming shows are inherently silo'd. You must have a subscription at some particular service, and there aren't any real "meta-service" bundles either which makes it fragmented even compared to something like cable. They're ephemeral, harder to trade around, etc. It's a significant amount of friction vs a book isn't it? If there is buzz and word of mouth about a book, anybody can simply go and get a copy for the one-time outlay of that copy, or borrow one from a friend/family, or for that matter go to the library (we have an entire public service dedicated to free availability!). But if someone tells me about a great show they watched on a service I don't subscribe too, well, it's probably not going to be enough to get me to sign on. I'm feeling pretty sub'd out. Maybe I'll go check a torrent site or something, but maybe not. I can't just tune in on that channel and check it out, or duck into a book store and read the first chapter then grab it or not.

Books (and other low capex media in other countries for that matter) do show that huge culture-wide hits can emerge organically from enormous diversity and niche. But I wonder if the higher the technological barrier to entry the harder that is. It might be hard for it to happen without more cooperation between services, meta-services, a reemergence of some utterly dominating service/monopoly, or a legal imperative for interoperability or cross licensing after a delay.

Books are incredibly cheap to produce, so it's way easier (as in: less risky) to produce stories for niche communities through books rather than through movies.

Normal drivel from Vox.

Friends had a black version, Living Single (which came first) that rated huge for African Americans but non existent for whites, and vice versa.

Game of Thrones is a HBO flagship as they have always done. Marvel on the other hand is designed for the Chinese audience.

But I have no idea what that means in their markov chain of conflicting thought.

I'll go back to watching Netfix's The Witcher, based on a 2008 English novel translated from the 90's Polish novels because of a 2007 computer game and be happy whether Vox media critics are to good for it or not.

Based on a 1960s albino warrior mage (Elric of Melnibone) which is based on a 1920s albino pulp villain (Monsieur Zenith) who is really just based on Holmes' Moriarty.

The Witcher's DNA is very interesting.

This is about 15 years too late. We haven't been monocultural for a long time... hence the frequent grasp to reboot things for when we were more monocultural.

Yeah, it was even on the wane as early as the 70s. Not sure why this article acts like it’s a new thing. “Monoculture” has been dead and buried for a long time, and that’s not a bad thing. The solution to unity isn’t “a return to monoculture”—it’s determining the right composition and interfacing between pluralities.

I first thought this was a reference to 'monoculture' in the agriculture sector, and I'm also concerned about it surviving the algorithm.

Regardless the state of algorithms, it does seem interesting that 2019 was the coincidental end time for a significant chapter of the Marvel movies, the Star Wars (first) sequel trilogy, and Game of Thrones. Let's hope that means we'll at least get some different types of adaptations come 2020.

TL;DR (from a skim, as I couldn’t stick with this rambling mess for long):

The front page of Reddit and the water cooler at Vox HQ are both depressing, boring places, especially since Game of Thrones ended and there’s nothing mainstream enough to fill that void.

There’s other stuff to talk about! Try listening to your coworkers about their personal interests!

I always felt like talking about television was terribly boring.

I hope it does not. Imagine how isolating it might feel to be the one person who does not like watching Game of Thrones.

Imagine how alienating it must be to have no common cultural touchstones to share with other people.

We're already there when it comes to music. We have a lot of virtuoso musicianship today. You want top-tier jazz? You can find it. Bossa Nova? Yep. Orchestral arrangements? Those too. Blues and old-school rock? Still being made. But we no longer have music as a common cultural touchstone: everything's been atomized to hell, fragmented into perfectly-curated Spotify ML-recommended playlists. People no longer use music to connect to each other. It's more about individual hedonic enjoyment.

As goes music, so goes all entertainment and all media. When everything is perfectly tailored to each individual's preferences, what we're left with isn't so much culture (which in its essence is about commonality) as much as aesthetic pornography.

History ended, now culture, what to do...

Computer archeology comes to rescue them all.

I'm not convinced that we need huge proprietary time-wasters to have conversations with each other. There are circumstances in life when long TV shows may be fun and entertaining, but watching them shouldn't be expected. With my family, and random people met in places, I talk about real life that we have in common or wider societal trends. This can be instructive (about what people think) even if very light. I remember a guy complaining before an unrelated class that "computer people hunched over keyboards will take over everything". Little did he know.

You can say that real life stuff can be hot and divisive, but then pop culture can also. See how new Star Wars and recent blockbusters generated controversy and online culture wars. Handling people with opinions, and your own opinions, is a valuable skill nonetheless.

I am into music as well, as in listening to albums and records collecting, and am very happy that I don't have to know or listen to anything "mainstream" in particular. Free exploration is so much more pleasurable. I do share some of my tastes with people around me, but really a different little thing with each person.

Common cultural touch stones are more thigs like the St James Bible" the Classics etc.

In the Uk it might be Last night of the Proms, Dr Who , Queens Speech, Test Cricket on the Radio, world service weather reports etc

You don't need 'common cultural touch stones' when you have shared real life experiences.

When you take away all other shared experience, what remains is politics, the nuts and bolts of running a society. We've seen a surge in political extremism lately; one thing that drives political extremism in general is the inability to share non-political experiences with one's political opponents.

>People no longer use music to connect to each other. It's more about individual hedonic enjoyment.

I find this line of thought interesting because sharing music is a significant part of how I connect with my best friend. We each keep managing to find new music the other likes but hasn't heard yet.

I also use it to connect with my family. My dad, brother, and I have lots of overlap. My mom, not so much, but I still wrack my brain looking for something in my list that fits with her preferences so we can both enjoy the music.

Ultimately, rather than it being one circle of "good music", we each have our own circle of what we like and connecting then becomes about finding the overlap of our circles. Like figuring out food for a group of people, or basically any other situation that requires compromise.

Although yeah, music services now are tailoring to individuals, I think you could decompose an individual's preferences into weighted tags, essentially (likes distorted guitars, loves complex melodic lines, etc), and then to generate a playlist for a group of people you just find the most common overlaps of their tags and generate a playlist from that. Maybe my mom also likes complex melodies, but prefers pianos. So we arrive at a compromise on jazz piano.

Pandora is ideally positioned for this with their Music Genome Project, but in my view they've largely squandered the opportunity and ceded their advantage to Spotify.

People no longer use music to connect to each other. It's more about individual hedonic enjoyment.

The metal subculture is alive and well and just as much a community as it was 20 years ago. Or maybe that’s just here in Wales where we don’t believe in progress for its own sake. That’s for London folk.

That's a community built for the purpose of appreciating that specific kind of music. That's fine, but I'm talking about being able to talk about music with random people I've met for non-music purposes. It's no longer possible to do so.

People who put time into things recognize others who do the same. Music curation democratization through spotify etc. just means that you can get good results without putting in the time digging.

If you want to connect with others based on your own curations, you need to show of your process, show that you put time into things.

A comparable complexity of digging and recording your own tapes back in the day would translate to running your own music channel or site, and connecting directly with underground artists on sites like Soundcloud or Bandcamp. If you want to do this you have to put in your time, like back in the day. Democratization through digitalization just shifts things to a different level.

I just don't agree. What's Old Town Road if not a common cultural touchstone?

GOT is an outlier, in that its unusual for "civilian's/ muggles" to watch such a niche fantasy series.

When I read the books my thought was this is for trufans who have a much broader knowledge of the Fantasy cannon than even the average sf/f fan.

The sort of person who has read "on fairy tales" slogged through Dunsanny etc.

I'm perfectly happy, thanks. Though to be fair, I tell people I'm saving it for a time when I'm really ill and I need something to do for a month.

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