There Has Been a Drought of Cultural Greatness For Most of the 21st Century So Far

Human Mediocrity Will Pave the Way For AI Supremacy

Before we get started, let’s sniff out a potential straw man: please do not list examples of great films, books, etc. A drought does not mean a lack of water, it means there is not enough water for sustainable growth. I am aware of movies like The Master and Arrival as well as books like Rejection, and, yes, also, albums like Brat. There have not been enough of these great works to sustain their respective industries. Or rather the respective industries that miraculously eked these out have not nurtured more of these, opting to push out either infantile smash hits or paint-by-numbers culture war bait — often both. I doubt this will stop some of you from listing examples of great works from 2008 on, so fine. Engagement is engagement.

On January 27th,

Ross Barkan

Sam Kahn

and

Lou Bahet

launched a new culture review magazine called The Metropolitan Review. When it was announced on the main Substack feed, I reposted it with the message: “A new age of greatness is upon us.” Did I actually believe that? OK I may have oversold it. I do have faith in the new endeavor and I hope they succeed, and not just because they will publish one of my reviews in the coming weeks. But the message in the post was meant to be more of a spell; a bit of hyperstition. Manifesting, but for bald agoraphobes instead of apple-cheeked vloggers.

So will there be a new age of greatness? I hope it happens. It must happen.

From Already Happened:

There’s a potentially chilling long-term consequence of AGI: the creation of a permanently static society where existing power structures become immutable. Labour-replacing AI fundamentally changes the dynamics that have historically allowed human ambition to drive societal change. When AI can perfectly replicate any human talent and capital can trivially buy AI capabilities, the traditional paths for ambitious individuals to rise up and transform society disappear. Money becomes vastly more effective at achieving results, while human agency and talent become increasingly irrelevant. The result could be a neo-feudal system where pre-AGI wealth distributions become permanent, social mobility ends, and even democratic institutions lose their incentive to care about human welfare since human labour no longer matters.

Considering the current Cold War AI race with China, along with President Trump’s entourage of militant accelerationists, what seemed like a hypothetical at the time that piece was written seems all but assured now.

Pointless to bite our nails regarding AI, no? This essay not only gave me a chilling vision of a future where everyone is without purpose and trepanning fentanyl into each other’s skulls. As I feared for all the culture we might lose in the AIpocalypse, I looked at the past two decades and trembled. Reality TV, social media, pussy rap — it was as if all the trash culture of this century was a psyop to prepare us for the Grand Slopera we are about to enter. A common concern among AI doomers is how much agency humans currently have or will have in the future. Could we have been soulless automata ourselves this whole time? When was the last truly great cultural event? What happened to ambition?

This isn’t just a requiem for high art. Mass culture has been a rough slog. Movies from the start of the century were under the thumb of Marvel, Harry Potter and Tolkien. The idea of a packed theater of grown-ups watching a film about adults not frantically searching for stones or rings seems as quaint as Victorian adults gathering to watch a lecture. In the ‘90s, a director like Quentin Tarantino or Spike Lee was famous enough that they appeared on talk shows and had comedians impersonate them.

This cultural stagnation has not gone unremarked. A while back on Wisdom of Crowds, Katherine Dee and Matthew Gasda debated whether culture was stuck.

Matthew Gasda

said it most certainly was.

Katherine Dee

argued that it wasn’t, but it’s all on the Internet, in forms we can’t recognize.

As you all know, I love

Katherine Dee

and cite her frequently, but I respectfully disagree. Using the forms Dee has listed, I think it is only fair to see how they hold up to scrutiny. The cultural forms are:

Social Media Personality

Short-Form Sketch Comedy Videos

Big Name Fans

Memes

Mood Boards

Aesthetics

Luckily for us, all of these forms have been around for the past twenty years, so let’s turn back the the clock to 2005. What was the great mood board of 2005? What meme has gone unforgotten from the middle of the aughts? We can acknowledge that a Big Name Fan of the Twilight series created Fifty Shades of Grey. To argue that this is a great work of even pop lit is like saying Fear of Flying is a literary classic, as opposed to a book whose relevance is apparent only to the readers that made it a bestseller when it was first published.

Short-Form Sketch Comedy Videos were quite big in the ‘00s. The alternative comedy movement was so huge at the time, you couldn’t blame believers — like myself — for thinking these sketch videos, from Stella, from Human Giant, would be remembered as undeniable works of genius. Why did they whither? Besides the notorious shelf-life of comedy, there’s also the fact that the indie twerps that cherished these videos (d)evolved into guilty white liberals who would both defer to and contribute to the yass-ification of comedy for the past ten years, making the apolitical absurdism of these videos irrelevant to the people who liked them in the first place, let alone anyone outside the alt-comedy bubble. Also, like grunge, alt-comedy has aged poorly because both movements were reactionary. Grunge without the context of hair metal that it rebelled against is just brainy Black Sabbath. Alt-comedy without the context of club comedy hacks with ‘80s-style observational jokes — which they were the alternative to — is just Albert Brooks for the YouTube era.

The plainly obvious truth is there is nothing from the online culture of 2005 — or anything since — that has stood the test of time and can be called a great cultural work. Not Homestar Runner, much as I love it.¹ Not Dr. Horrible’s Sing Along Blog.

If we look at one of Dee’s cultural forms, we see the culprit: Social Media Personality. Typically, the blame for cultural stasis goes to the algorithm (what friend of the stack

Trafton Crandall

calls the “malgorithm”). But I am going to go back to

Stefan Kelly

‘s piece on AGI and ambition once more to single out the operative word: social.

Throughout human history, there have generally been two groups of people: those who have been content with comfort and those who strove for greatness. Most people of course are content with comfort. Since those people might be called “normies,” it stands to reason that those who strive for greatness (in science, athletics, culture, etc.) will often alienate the normal people. By definition those who strive like this cannot be in the majority. They sacrifice social acceptance in order to become physicists, Olympians, film directors, etc. Though these groups share different values, they complement each other. Regular people maintain society while those with the hunger help it evolve. As Kelly makes clear, both exist on a spectrum. An ambitious artist can fail, producing nothing great ever. That’s how the process works; we need all of the go-getters to try in order to increase the likelihood of creating the next big thing.

Now here’s where thing get tricky and interesting in the article: for most of human history, those without ambition ruled and there was no civilization. Most of the things that humans cherish — certainly humans who read this Substack — like art, music, theater, culture, civilization in general are, in the course of human history, recent inventions. For most of our history, we have been uncivilized brutes.

Erik Hoel

attributes this to the gossip trap: when human societies did not exceed the Dunbar number (150 people), these societies were hierarchical, but had no formal institutions and were driven primarily by gossip. Say someone wanted to invent fire by banging rocks together; in these societies, a couple of tribal jocks would bang the tribal nerd’s balls together for a goof and that would be that. After the Dunbar number was exceeded, that’s when weirdo inventors, artists, etc. could find their own people, creating and inventing away from the superstitious horde.

Hoel was smart enough to see the parallel between the gossip trap and social media. The court of public opinion — what I have called several times in the past The Church of the Other — has functioned like a modern-day gossip trap. If you want more on that, read the Hoel piece. But for the sake of our discussion let’s get to the meat: thanks to social media and the gossip trap, for maybe the first time in civilization’s history, culture has been created and driven by the “good enough” crowd while those who strive for greatness have few, if any, avenues left.

From W. David Marx’s Status and Culture:

For much of human history, storytelling was the exclusive privilege of designated elders, bookish scholars, and ambitious artists. To create motion pictures, aspiring filmmakers had to pay their dues at schools and in the industry before getting their hands on a camera. The internet opened storytelling to everyone, a development long beheld as a great democratic revolution. But this also has robbed nerds of their longtime monopoly on content creation and gatekeeping. When everyone is making content, teens have extended the high school hierarchy into their viewing habits: Why watch the weirdos when the cool girls are showing off their shopping hauls and class clowns are embarrassing their bros in epic pranks? Thus the very appeal of TikTok is its “mediocrity,” writes Vox’s Rebecca Jennings: “No one follows you because they expect you to be talented. They follow you because they like you.”