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Culture War Roundup for the week of January 22, 2024

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Right now, we are at a place of polarization, yet all of our art sucks (my opinion obviously but it seems to be shared). If you look back at the last time our country was this divided in the 1960's, we saw some of the greatest output of music and literature we have ever seen. We had incredible artists like the Beatles among others. Then of course that was probably the peak of black culture with incredible artistic output that they will probably never reach again. This was probably the last time you saw many black musicians and guitarists be better than their white counterparts. If you take it back to the French Revolution, you saw some of the best political philosophy ever created such as with Rousseau. Political discord creates art and philosophy that has usually never been seen before, but today we don't see any of that. Even Monty Python is more subversive than anything we see today. Clockwork Orange was more subversive than anything we see today. Why aren't we seeing a peak in art again like the time should predict?

yet all of our art sucks (my opinion obviously but it seems to be shared)

May I suggest that you might not be looking at the right place? Especially if your suggestions for new "art" comes from an soulless algorithm trying to prolong your engagement with a particular service. Because it will only present with more of the same stuff that you indicated with past behavior that you are willing to spend time on, it is not going to present something new because it means that you might disengage your attention. So either you stop using the algorithms or you find a way to trick the algorithms to present new stuff for you.

I don't use algorithms, in fact I took significant steps to escape them, and they've largely been successful. I use word-of-mouth, and there hasn't been any hype about anything in ages.

Everyone else is also trapped in the algorithms and in a mindset their personality is what they consume. Well one thing that personalization has put on its head is that the concept of "hype" is obsolete. The good thing is that you should decide for yourself what you enjoy and look for like minded people that enjoy the same "thing". Hype is about making you conform to the latest thing, and I've personally found that hype has been co-opted by big business to create artificial need, so I don't miss it.

Hype is about making you conform to the latest thing, and I've personally found that hype has been co-opted by big business to create artificial need, so I don't miss it.

That big business has tried to artificially generate hype for ages is a given, but if people like something they will get excited and will want to tell you all about it, so I don't think hype boils down to making you conform to the latest thing.

Also if you're going to offer "you're trapped in algorithms" as one side of the explanation, and "everyone else is trapped in algorithms" as the other, you've made your theory unfalsifiable.

Also if you're going to offer "you're trapped in algorithms" as one side of the explanation, and "everyone else is trapped in algorithms" as the other, you've made your theory unfalsifiable.

I'm aware of that I recreated Baudrillards reasoning why we can't escape Platos Cave, unlike him though I do believe escape is possible.

You have to find other people who aren't trapped in algorithms. Both of us have taken steps to try not to be trapped by algorithms. But the point I was trying to get across we need a critical mass of non-trapped people to get back to the old word of mouth to be effective again.