This is why I insist on watching the Superbowl when all of my friends feel like they're supposed to be too cool for it. We live in a super fragmented society. It's nice to be part of one of the last things many people do at once.
Growing up, I was often bored and alienated by the fruits of the monoculture, but I loved every word of this essay.
It also reminded me of a thought I had earlier this week.
Most of the time people analyze culture, they focus on the political implications of the text itself, or the argument it's making. For example, Jeremiah Johnson's article on the Odyssey today ("The Odyssey proves the online right isn't conservative").
But culture also functions to bridge gaps of every sort: when you share an interest with someone, the enthusiasm connects you, and makes you more charitable to them.
I got into an argument online recently, with a political opponent from my community who I didn't know personally. It got heated, and I was not entirely cool. A few weeks later, we were at the same rock show. We talked after the opening act, unaware at first, excitedly trading favorite details of the performance we'd just seen.
We eventually realized our shared history, with a sudden sense of awkward, intense embarrassment, but worked through it and parted on friendly terms. A testament to our hotheaded stupidity survives online, but our subsequent interactions have been more constructive.
I know the NBC Thursday night lineup in the 1990s isn’t really the point of this post, but it remains a travesty that Newsradio wasn’t given the 8:30 slot. Apparently the head of scheduling, Preston Beckman, disliked the show. After being snubbed for the Thursday timeslot, Newsradio showrunner Paul Simms referred to the NBC Thursday lineup as a “double decker shit sandwich” in an incredible Rolling Stone interview.
You have no idea what it was like in the 1970s. There were only three networks, no cable. Almost everyone watched the Fonz and Archie Bunker. Primetime TV was a huge national event. It spanned everyone, black and white, rich and poor, even young and old. The grandkids watched shows like the Rockford files with their grandparents. It was very exciting, and it really drew people together. I talk about this all the time. And it extended to so many things. There weren’t 100 boutique kind of musics. There was a very limited number of radio stations, typically maybe three that young people would listen to. And for that matter, crucially, all of the major newspapers and TV news were reality based. There was no selecting your facts. We all shared the same basic facts, even if we had different opinions on what to do in response.
That's a pretty key X/Millennial cleave. I'm Matt's age, right on the cusp, and I can remember the Big Three, without Fox, but also was around cable TV my whole life, which shook things up considerably.
Currently rewatching the Rockford Files. What a great show - doesn't take itself too seriously, great writing, epic theme song and James Garner is just fantastic as Jim Rockford. How he was ever able to park that trailer by the beach in Malibu I'll never know. It was also David Chase's first foray into TV if I remember correctly.
“I know Europeans think this is because Americans are all short-attention-span adrenaline junkies, but there’s a genuine problem in my opinion with the fact that a team can often play a game to a draw despite playing markedly worse over the course of the game.”
The game doesn’t have enough scoring. Way too binary. One goal is a huge deal and often is a titanic struggle to overcome once a dedicated team has a lead. Also negatively stepping out at minute zero trying to get to penalties at minute 120 blows.
“My son also liked “The Rise of Skywalker,” which goes to show we may be in trouble as a society in the future.”
People apparently like the prequels now and feel nostalgia for them. They were dreck when they came out, but somehow surpassed in dreckness by the sequels.
Low-scoring games tend to be the result of (1) weaker teams holding out for a tie and (2) the knockout/tournament structure (be cautious!). Note that the group stage games tended to have more goals as do the table structures of most soccer leagues (which encourage winning).
There's also a lot of down time and players standing around, which is a complaint that Euros love to make about football. The running time does a good job of glossing over the stoppages, but a good deal of time is wasted with flopping, arguing with the refs, and set pieces among other things. I do appreciate that a game can be completed in 2 hours though.
I see your point about the binary part. Field goals handle that pretty nicely in the NFL.
On the other hand soccer has non-stop action and very few commercial breaks. And
surprisingly, the pace of scoring in world cup football is roughly the same as touchdowns in the NFL, if you calculate by scores per minute of elapsed time.
NFL Game ~ 5 tds over 195 minutes or so
WC Game ~ 2.7 goals over 110 minutes or so.
Those both come out to roughly 0.025 scores per minute, or one score every 40 minutes.
? The things that are bad about big tech (monopolization, winner-take-all dynamics) are even more true of monoculture. Other things in tech like open-source AI are our most plausible route to fixing this, unless you want to go against the culture gatekeepers’ lobbyists for copyright reform.
Monoculture does not arrange itself into tidy geographically-bound infrastructural units the way tech and data centers do. Half of terrorism is the existence of appealing targets. (Like, say, two towers in the heart of American culture that represent our country's economic dominance.)
The real problem is that the vast majority of socialization outside of our friendgroups **really** sucks. Most conversations at a party or with a new coworker are either incredibly dull, awkward or anxiety provoking and often all three. It's a generally unpleasant experience that occasionally pays off really highly and we make a new friend (and has positive social externalities). The problem is that the moment we have other fun things to do the temptation is always to just skip it and play on the phone or any of our other distraction.
Worse, since other people are doing the same we now get even less of a reward when we do give it a try. We really need cultural changes that strongly encourage some kind of social interaction to replace what we used to do out of pure boredom. The answer isn't to restrict our entertainment but to encourage us to socialize somehow other than boredom.
I disagree strongly that they really suck. People are histrionic and think if they have slightly awkward conversation because they don't share 98% of the same interests and philosophies with someone who doesn't become a lifelong friend that it is some traumatic waste of time.
But I think you are still basically correct that people see "meet other human beings" as a high variance activity and "consume screens at home" as a low variance activity.
And it is rational to a fairly large extent to prefer low variance things. (There's a reason lots of people invest in low variance things like saving accounts or bonds despite the lower expected returns!)
To be honest, I don't really see how anything changes this. Even extremely draconian regimes like China don't seem to be in a position to make the slightest dent in the downstream effects from this dynamic.
The British (and at least one generation of japanese) solved this with the tradition of excessive drinking. I'm not suggesting alcohol but a cultural norm of communal drug imbibing with a mild prohibition on using alone is one thing that works. Having people do labor together (I'd prefer an inducement) is another.
Ok fair really sucks was an exaggeration -- in expectation for an extrovert they are pretty good even with strangers but that's just because the good ones are worth a number of boring vaguely awkward ones. I do enjoy the occasional chat with my Uber driver and I remember the good ones but if I try to actually count most of the time the conversation is slightly boring or just uninteresting. When it goes well it outweighs several boring conversations but I still think most conversations are slightly worse than no conversation.
back in my day, many more days than most people here, we had the opportunity to combine our sitcom viewing with our sports viewing: Battle of the Network Stars. The three networks fielded all star teams of their most popular celebrities twice a year and they engaged in not very strenuous sports. And Howard Cosell, who was a very big deal sportscaster, officiated. It was a very big deal.
The lost monoculture is mostly incidental to the change in social interaction. The real issue is the lack of situations that force us to socialize and make friends.
If you forced people to interact (eg sent them to work and took away their phones etc) like we used to they would find something to talk about. We managed to talk about the weather and gossip for literally thousands of years, I don't think it really matters if we watch the same shows.
I certainly agree that channeling our loneliness into political anger is awful but trying to push everyone into shared media would just make that worse. If you want to fix the problem figure out how to get people to physically work on some common project. Maybe offer people a big tax rebate if they go out and work with their neighbors to repair the park or fill potholes -- it just needs to be a common goal that requires communication to achieve.
The British (and a generation of japanese men) choose excessive drinking and that works for them but if we want to go that way maybe we could find a slightly less harmful drug.
There's a bit of a chicken egg problem in that some monoculture events do themselves get people into one place. I was in a sports-focused restaurant for the World Cup Final and that definitely draws people physically together. I agree with the general point, though, that getting people together is the more critical thing.
But monoculture events are way worse at that than other kinds of events. The whole world is watching the world cup and only say 50k can be at the match.
There are conventions and meetups for every weird ass niche thing under the sun and virtually everyone has the chance to go to something they are into as a result. Indeed, I think all the niche non-mainstream get togethers etc is one of the few countervailing trends limiting the loneliness epidemic.
I remember when all my 6th-grade friends thought Nintendo was the bomb. I went to a sleepover where everyone gamed all night. I didn’t want to play — I didn’t like video games and would only have embarrassed myself flopping at them. Eight years later, I hated it when conversations got impoverished by Friends references. The premise was ridiculous: they could not have supported themselves in that apartment on their actual jobs. I refused to be disrespected by such sloppy writing — a good script doesn’t buckle when you poke at it.
But I absolutely loved discussing Starship Troopers with anyone who’d listen, and quite a few of my contemporaries did too. That was cool. The communal experience is only fun when the shared object is any good — the mass-culture version asks you to enjoy the togetherness and eat the mediocrity as the price of admission.
What we actually need isn’t a return to everyone watching the same forgettable show. It’s matching technology, so the people who love the thing that 0.5% of the population loves can find each other. I’m not anti-social. I just prefer interlocutors who talk about things that interest me.
Which, come to think of it, is why I like commenting here, though the censor bot is a real issue.
“What we actually need isn’t a return to everyone watching the same forgettable show. It’s matching technology, so the people who love the thing that 0.5% of the population loves can find each other. I’m not anti-social. I just prefer interlocutors who talk about things that interest me.”
maybe i’ll check them out. is there a thread for determinists who think causation is bullshit and want to talk about their novellas and the literary efforts of peers?
The actual matching technology needed here is denser urban cities with better transportation, so that it's easier to draw together a group of friends with niche interests for regular in-person gatherings.
That is an important technology, but it already exists. I lived in Atlanta for 16 years, within 3.5 miles of the capitol, and never really matched there. I’ve matched better either way peachtree city, which has pickleball and other adult sports.
Adult sports are good because you don’t have to talk about politics. I can’t talk about narratives without my political fires seeking in or massive self censorship, doing si with normies is problematic
LOL I am also a weirdo with niche interests! I also hated, and didn’t watch, “Friends,” and I don’t like sports, video games, scifi/fantasy, or watching tv. Unfortunately I vastly prefer socializing in person.
I like *playing* in a low-key manner but not watching. Unfortunately a lot of sports popular with my fellow Olds, like pickleball, are boring and don’t provide enough exercise.
Re: the ‘boringness’ of low scoring soccer matches. I would recommend watching more soccer throughout the year, rather than just tuning in once every 4 years. You’ll see the nuances that will allow you to follow the ball and observe the players and their placement and tactics for all 90 minutes and come away exhilarated or angry or frustrated or delighted even with a 0-0 score.
So pick a club team (‘Arsenal Forever; COYG’) and the season starts in a couple weeks! Hope my boys are rested after having carried this tournament on their shoulders! ;)
This is why I insist on watching the Superbowl when all of my friends feel like they're supposed to be too cool for it. We live in a super fragmented society. It's nice to be part of one of the last things many people do at once.
I will only say I wish for a monocultural thing about which we can talk that isn’t stupid old sportsball.
Please o please, Disney, sell the Star Wars franchise to someone else.
Growing up, I was often bored and alienated by the fruits of the monoculture, but I loved every word of this essay.
It also reminded me of a thought I had earlier this week.
Most of the time people analyze culture, they focus on the political implications of the text itself, or the argument it's making. For example, Jeremiah Johnson's article on the Odyssey today ("The Odyssey proves the online right isn't conservative").
But culture also functions to bridge gaps of every sort: when you share an interest with someone, the enthusiasm connects you, and makes you more charitable to them.
I got into an argument online recently, with a political opponent from my community who I didn't know personally. It got heated, and I was not entirely cool. A few weeks later, we were at the same rock show. We talked after the opening act, unaware at first, excitedly trading favorite details of the performance we'd just seen.
We eventually realized our shared history, with a sudden sense of awkward, intense embarrassment, but worked through it and parted on friendly terms. A testament to our hotheaded stupidity survives online, but our subsequent interactions have been more constructive.
> I participated in dozens of semi-ignorant conversations about the offside rule.
You may rest easy knowing there are never any enlightened conversations about the offside rule.
I know the NBC Thursday night lineup in the 1990s isn’t really the point of this post, but it remains a travesty that Newsradio wasn’t given the 8:30 slot. Apparently the head of scheduling, Preston Beckman, disliked the show. After being snubbed for the Thursday timeslot, Newsradio showrunner Paul Simms referred to the NBC Thursday lineup as a “double decker shit sandwich” in an incredible Rolling Stone interview.
You have no idea what it was like in the 1970s. There were only three networks, no cable. Almost everyone watched the Fonz and Archie Bunker. Primetime TV was a huge national event. It spanned everyone, black and white, rich and poor, even young and old. The grandkids watched shows like the Rockford files with their grandparents. It was very exciting, and it really drew people together. I talk about this all the time. And it extended to so many things. There weren’t 100 boutique kind of musics. There was a very limited number of radio stations, typically maybe three that young people would listen to. And for that matter, crucially, all of the major newspapers and TV news were reality based. There was no selecting your facts. We all shared the same basic facts, even if we had different opinions on what to do in response.
That's a pretty key X/Millennial cleave. I'm Matt's age, right on the cusp, and I can remember the Big Three, without Fox, but also was around cable TV my whole life, which shook things up considerably.
Currently rewatching the Rockford Files. What a great show - doesn't take itself too seriously, great writing, epic theme song and James Garner is just fantastic as Jim Rockford. How he was ever able to park that trailer by the beach in Malibu I'll never know. It was also David Chase's first foray into TV if I remember correctly.
“I know Europeans think this is because Americans are all short-attention-span adrenaline junkies, but there’s a genuine problem in my opinion with the fact that a team can often play a game to a draw despite playing markedly worse over the course of the game.”
The game doesn’t have enough scoring. Way too binary. One goal is a huge deal and often is a titanic struggle to overcome once a dedicated team has a lead. Also negatively stepping out at minute zero trying to get to penalties at minute 120 blows.
“My son also liked “The Rise of Skywalker,” which goes to show we may be in trouble as a society in the future.”
People apparently like the prequels now and feel nostalgia for them. They were dreck when they came out, but somehow surpassed in dreckness by the sequels.
Low-scoring games tend to be the result of (1) weaker teams holding out for a tie and (2) the knockout/tournament structure (be cautious!). Note that the group stage games tended to have more goals as do the table structures of most soccer leagues (which encourage winning).
There's also a lot of down time and players standing around, which is a complaint that Euros love to make about football. The running time does a good job of glossing over the stoppages, but a good deal of time is wasted with flopping, arguing with the refs, and set pieces among other things. I do appreciate that a game can be completed in 2 hours though.
I see your point about the binary part. Field goals handle that pretty nicely in the NFL.
On the other hand soccer has non-stop action and very few commercial breaks. And
surprisingly, the pace of scoring in world cup football is roughly the same as touchdowns in the NFL, if you calculate by scores per minute of elapsed time.
NFL Game ~ 5 tds over 195 minutes or so
WC Game ~ 2.7 goals over 110 minutes or so.
Those both come out to roughly 0.025 scores per minute, or one score every 40 minutes.
Huh? There’s 60 minutes in an NFL game and 90 minutes in a World Cup game.
Air / broadcast time.
I'm guessing Wigan is talking about estimated real time, and not precise game time.
Tuner was excellent. I think it took a while for me to realize where the villains were from.
There's going to be a major anti-tech terrorist movement in this country in the next quarter century. This post contains the seeds of why.
? The things that are bad about big tech (monopolization, winner-take-all dynamics) are even more true of monoculture. Other things in tech like open-source AI are our most plausible route to fixing this, unless you want to go against the culture gatekeepers’ lobbyists for copyright reform.
Monoculture does not arrange itself into tidy geographically-bound infrastructural units the way tech and data centers do. Half of terrorism is the existence of appealing targets. (Like, say, two towers in the heart of American culture that represent our country's economic dominance.)
The real problem is that the vast majority of socialization outside of our friendgroups **really** sucks. Most conversations at a party or with a new coworker are either incredibly dull, awkward or anxiety provoking and often all three. It's a generally unpleasant experience that occasionally pays off really highly and we make a new friend (and has positive social externalities). The problem is that the moment we have other fun things to do the temptation is always to just skip it and play on the phone or any of our other distraction.
Worse, since other people are doing the same we now get even less of a reward when we do give it a try. We really need cultural changes that strongly encourage some kind of social interaction to replace what we used to do out of pure boredom. The answer isn't to restrict our entertainment but to encourage us to socialize somehow other than boredom.
I disagree strongly that they really suck. People are histrionic and think if they have slightly awkward conversation because they don't share 98% of the same interests and philosophies with someone who doesn't become a lifelong friend that it is some traumatic waste of time.
But I think you are still basically correct that people see "meet other human beings" as a high variance activity and "consume screens at home" as a low variance activity.
And it is rational to a fairly large extent to prefer low variance things. (There's a reason lots of people invest in low variance things like saving accounts or bonds despite the lower expected returns!)
To be honest, I don't really see how anything changes this. Even extremely draconian regimes like China don't seem to be in a position to make the slightest dent in the downstream effects from this dynamic.
The British (and at least one generation of japanese) solved this with the tradition of excessive drinking. I'm not suggesting alcohol but a cultural norm of communal drug imbibing with a mild prohibition on using alone is one thing that works. Having people do labor together (I'd prefer an inducement) is another.
Ok fair really sucks was an exaggeration -- in expectation for an extrovert they are pretty good even with strangers but that's just because the good ones are worth a number of boring vaguely awkward ones. I do enjoy the occasional chat with my Uber driver and I remember the good ones but if I try to actually count most of the time the conversation is slightly boring or just uninteresting. When it goes well it outweighs several boring conversations but I still think most conversations are slightly worse than no conversation.
Wait, are the comments now defaulting to “newest first?” If so, I applaud this development!
Yes they are! I was all ready to praise The Management for this change in the next evening thread, and I will do so again then!
back in my day, many more days than most people here, we had the opportunity to combine our sitcom viewing with our sports viewing: Battle of the Network Stars. The three networks fielded all star teams of their most popular celebrities twice a year and they engaged in not very strenuous sports. And Howard Cosell, who was a very big deal sportscaster, officiated. It was a very big deal.
The lost monoculture is mostly incidental to the change in social interaction. The real issue is the lack of situations that force us to socialize and make friends.
If you forced people to interact (eg sent them to work and took away their phones etc) like we used to they would find something to talk about. We managed to talk about the weather and gossip for literally thousands of years, I don't think it really matters if we watch the same shows.
I certainly agree that channeling our loneliness into political anger is awful but trying to push everyone into shared media would just make that worse. If you want to fix the problem figure out how to get people to physically work on some common project. Maybe offer people a big tax rebate if they go out and work with their neighbors to repair the park or fill potholes -- it just needs to be a common goal that requires communication to achieve.
The British (and a generation of japanese men) choose excessive drinking and that works for them but if we want to go that way maybe we could find a slightly less harmful drug.
There's a bit of a chicken egg problem in that some monoculture events do themselves get people into one place. I was in a sports-focused restaurant for the World Cup Final and that definitely draws people physically together. I agree with the general point, though, that getting people together is the more critical thing.
But monoculture events are way worse at that than other kinds of events. The whole world is watching the world cup and only say 50k can be at the match.
There are conventions and meetups for every weird ass niche thing under the sun and virtually everyone has the chance to go to something they are into as a result. Indeed, I think all the niche non-mainstream get togethers etc is one of the few countervailing trends limiting the loneliness epidemic.
Matt is outing himself as a conformist.
I remember when all my 6th-grade friends thought Nintendo was the bomb. I went to a sleepover where everyone gamed all night. I didn’t want to play — I didn’t like video games and would only have embarrassed myself flopping at them. Eight years later, I hated it when conversations got impoverished by Friends references. The premise was ridiculous: they could not have supported themselves in that apartment on their actual jobs. I refused to be disrespected by such sloppy writing — a good script doesn’t buckle when you poke at it.
But I absolutely loved discussing Starship Troopers with anyone who’d listen, and quite a few of my contemporaries did too. That was cool. The communal experience is only fun when the shared object is any good — the mass-culture version asks you to enjoy the togetherness and eat the mediocrity as the price of admission.
What we actually need isn’t a return to everyone watching the same forgettable show. It’s matching technology, so the people who love the thing that 0.5% of the population loves can find each other. I’m not anti-social. I just prefer interlocutors who talk about things that interest me.
Which, come to think of it, is why I like commenting here, though the censor bot is a real issue.
“What we actually need isn’t a return to everyone watching the same forgettable show. It’s matching technology, so the people who love the thing that 0.5% of the population loves can find each other. I’m not anti-social. I just prefer interlocutors who talk about things that interest me.”
Reddit and Discord exist.
maybe i’ll check them out. is there a thread for determinists who think causation is bullshit and want to talk about their novellas and the literary efforts of peers?
I think you could *definitely* find like-minded people on reddit
The actual matching technology needed here is denser urban cities with better transportation, so that it's easier to draw together a group of friends with niche interests for regular in-person gatherings.
That is an important technology, but it already exists. I lived in Atlanta for 16 years, within 3.5 miles of the capitol, and never really matched there. I’ve matched better either way peachtree city, which has pickleball and other adult sports.
Adult sports are good because you don’t have to talk about politics. I can’t talk about narratives without my political fires seeking in or massive self censorship, doing si with normies is problematic
LOL I am also a weirdo with niche interests! I also hated, and didn’t watch, “Friends,” and I don’t like sports, video games, scifi/fantasy, or watching tv. Unfortunately I vastly prefer socializing in person.
I like sports but only if they provide good fodder for exercise.
I like *playing* in a low-key manner but not watching. Unfortunately a lot of sports popular with my fellow Olds, like pickleball, are boring and don’t provide enough exercise.
If pickleball isn’t enough exercise, try singles. A proper match against a decent opponent will get your pulse up
Re: the ‘boringness’ of low scoring soccer matches. I would recommend watching more soccer throughout the year, rather than just tuning in once every 4 years. You’ll see the nuances that will allow you to follow the ball and observe the players and their placement and tactics for all 90 minutes and come away exhilarated or angry or frustrated or delighted even with a 0-0 score.
So pick a club team (‘Arsenal Forever; COYG’) and the season starts in a couple weeks! Hope my boys are rested after having carried this tournament on their shoulders! ;)