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Truly lovely. Sometimes it’s a drag, but I’m glad I live at the end of the great era of popular art.
Why do you think this is the end of the great era of popular art?
I’m too tired to fully explicate this, but the idea in my head is something like this. The great era of popular art (movies and pop music [that is, anything from jazz to rock to rap – anything with a backbeat], mainly) that’s lasted for a century or so was the product of a few one-time technological innovations – the reliable recording of audio and images plus the ability to distribute those recordings en masse. Mechanically reproduced art, basically. As soon as these technologies became viable there was a great wave of cultural innovation. Genre after genre was created and explored by artist after artist.
Think of the way that rock music developed from a primitive (not in a bad sense) model in the 50′s, to something more fully fleshed out in the 60′s as artists figured out what rock was, to all sorts of weird and baroque experimentation in the 70′s. That’s crude, but you get the basic idea. In an incredibly short span of time artists were figuring out what rock music could be, what its limitations were. There have been spasms of creativity in rock music since, but it’s fair to say that rock has slowly been drying up as a source of innovation since the 70′s. Why? Well, like I said, artists figured out what rock music was. There was less scope for things that were both novel and good. It’s still possible to make great rock music, even albums that stand up with the original greats, but it’s harder to surprise. Not impossible, but harder and harder. And so the culture moves on. Just as importantly, Real Artists move on. The productive subcultures go away, one by one. Hence why people say that rock music is dead. It isn’t dead, but it is eternally senescent in much the same way that classical is. All rock is now made in reference to the past.
However, at some point it’s not just that individual genres are losing their potency, it’s that the whole grouping of genres enabled by this new mode of artistic production are losing their potency. Punk was an interesting challenge to an overblown status quo. Grunge was a less interesting challenge to an overblown status quo. The third time will be utterly predictable and boring. Rock and rap and electronica are all different, but the parallels are obvious and at some high level things start to blend together. It’s predictable. You can still make good movies, but it’s hard to make one that’s unpredictable. What was the last new movie that surprised you in that way? Even the languages of shock and irony become played out. You can’t get heavier than doom metal without going below the range of human hearing. You can’t get noisier than noise music, or more ambient than ambient. Both popular music and its more experimental derivatives have been explored at this point. Not totally, but to an ever-increasing degree.
It’s taken a century, but this is the end of the line for innovation in popular art, the end of the golden age.
Or so the theory in my head goes. The other option is that the rate of cultural innovation has genuinely permanently increased and that we’ll see new and interesting popular genres get churned out indefinitely. It’s possible – it’s hard to distinguish between an S-curve and an exponential one when you’re on it – but I’m doubtful. It would hardly be the first time a whole style of art similarly lost momentum. I already mentioned classical music. Think too of the deconstructive impulse of Modernism. Exhibiting a urinal in a gallery is a genuinely interesting gimmick, but only for the first time.
In the end, there’s only so much you can do with a backbeat. Or with the shot reverse shot.
Which isn’t to say that art is dead forever, mind. (Or that pop art is going away. It’s popular for a reason!) That sort of mindless declinism is just tedious. I have no doubt that there will be equally interesting artistic innovations sooner or later. Though it is hard to see from where. So far video games have fallen woefully short of being Art Art (even the best written games are terribly mediocre compared to anything else), and the internet has been useful for distribution but not really for artistic innovation, with minor exceptions. So I dunno, we’ll see. But I don’t think there will be another rock music.
(Thanks to @argumate for some of the ideas here. I don’t think I’ve written this post before, but who can be sure of that kind of thing anymore.)
The future is more art and more customization.
The use of algorithmic tools and other software allows for more creators to use less effort to create more art. That leads to a greater volume of art and a potentially faster exploration of micro-genres. These micro-genres will more closely suit the preferences of individual readers.
However, it is impossible for one individual to view all of this art. There simply isn’t enough time, even for a NEET.
This will allow shocks to occur when viewers leave their micro-genres in order to explore new ones.
/And if anybody pulls this off, let me know in three years.
Local Lunatic Given Control of Personal Army, Made Absolute Leader of Toledo, Ohio, as “Emergency Measure”
Democratic Party Leaders Vow to Impeach Trump, Fight Trump Administration Over Unexplained Decision to Yield American City to Obscure Blogger
[Photo illustration: Obscure blogger “Mitigated Chaos” rides into city of Toledo at head of tank column, wearing “reimagined Union Army uniform”]
Blogger to head new “Metropolitan Planning Authority” as greater Toledo area declared tax-free “Special Development Administrative Zone” by Executive Order 15335
Your strengths:
* 45 minute drive to DTW, one of the best airports in the country. Yes, it’s a drive (so car ownership), but.
* There is an Amtrak station. And if you can ever convince Amtrak to run more than 1 train a day that shows up at 5AM (overnighters from DC to Chicago), you’re 2 hours from Cleveland, 4 from Chicago and Pittsburgh (evening trips), and 10-ish from DC (overnighter).
* You’re the corner of Lake Erie and every bit of economic activity out of Michigan and heading east is either rolling through you or through Canada.
Your weaknesses:
* White residents who remember why they all fled to Sylvania and their gorgeous suburban mansions in the first place, and spent 50 years getting their every bias confirmed and deepened by the evening news.
/Seriously, I get why you skipped over the racial/class aspects of this whole thing, but uh… that’s really critical. There’s two reasons why Ann Arbor works for this sort of thing, and Toledo does not.
It’s true - dealing with racial issues would require some pretty strong ideological support.
I think race/class issues could be mostly resolved, given the right conditions, but that the population largely do not believe in the necessary ideological supports required to accomplish this, or for that matter, to supply the necessary political energy for the necessary political policies.
The required measures would border on national separatist levels of energy.
On the other hand, Toledo was not chosen out of serious consideration, but for shtposting purposes due to required level of obscurity, position, etc.
On the third hand, the Great Lakes region has access to bulk long-range shipping.
/And if anybody pulls this off, let me know in three years.
Local Lunatic Given Control of Personal Army, Made Absolute Leader of Toledo, Ohio, as “Emergency Measure”
Democratic Party Leaders Vow to Impeach Trump, Fight Trump Administration Over Unexplained Decision to Yield American City to Obscure Blogger
[Photo illustration: Obscure blogger “Mitigated Chaos” rides into city of Toledo at head of tank column, wearing “reimagined Union Army uniform”]
Blogger to head new “Metropolitan Planning Authority” as greater Toledo area declared tax-free “Special Development Administrative Zone” by Executive Order 15335
@neoliberalism-nightly
this is okay, but the real question is the degree of non-viability of certain small cities, and the contingent nature of that viability on technological development and unspecified exogenous shocks
True, but I reckon it hurts less to move from Cornville, OH to Cleveland, OH than it does to move from Cornville, OH, to OverpricedBurough, NYC, NY.
[epistemic status: significant fatigue is being masked by caffeine and other effects]
The best time for your city to be built for efficiency is the year 1950, when it was initially laid out. The next best time for your city to be built for efficiency is now.
Rent - Housing is a very significant expense. It can range from 22%-50% of income. Every dollar that your citizens spend on housing is a dollar that they cannot spend on something else.
There must be enough housing units, but they must be built in a way that is intelligent, and which does not conflict with other goals of efficiency. The regulatory regime for both renovation and new housing construction must be both effective and efficient.
If median household income in your city is $50,000, each one point reduction in rent frees $500 per household per year. If the city has 500,000 households, this amounts to $250M annually, which could be
- spent on another government program (or infrastructure)
- used to potentially lower wages without lowering standard of living, making the city more competitive for employers
- allowed to escape untaxed, raising standard of living for citizens
Transport - In the US, a car costs over $8,000 a year. If the average household in our city has an income of $50,000, this is 16% of total annual income. At one car per household for 500,000 households, this amounts to $4,000M annually.
We can work to make car usage less frequent or necessary, which prolongs car lifespans and reduces accidents (and associated costs). However, the real binary is deciding whether to own a car at all.
For every 5% of our city that does not own a car, we free up $200M, minus the cost of our public transport network, to spend on something else that could be making our city more competitive, each year. If our public transport network were free, we could send 5% of our city’s population to university with this money (using a series of expiring loans that only have to be repaid if the person moves out of the city).
At the regional level, our city should have good commercial (airport) and industrial (seaport, river, rail) transport options, for cost-effective shipping of raw materials and goods and cost-effective business meetings.
Regulations - Regulations do not have to be non-existent. If we let companies step all over our city too much, the resulting social and environmental damage will render the city uncompetitive, and the costs pushed off onto the citizens will lower their effect standard of living. However…
Our regulations should be predictable and easy to comply with. Companies can plan for costs that they can foresee, but unplanned costs are significantly more expensive. Additionally, while allowing companies to pollute without consequence pushes costs off on everyone else and may decrease net efficiency, any regulations beyond those which are necessary is a loss - it is a form of waste.
Infrastructure & City Services - We want our infrastructure and city services to be cost-effective, as again, any money we save can either be spent on something else, or spent on more city services. Nailing the efficiency on every other aspect of the city will help with this - if half of our city doesn’t own a car, we’re talking a potential average %8 decrease in the cost of our cops, clerks, and judges. If our rent is only %25 of income, compared to other cities we could be looking at at 45% of income, our cops might cost $14,000 less, or we could get cops that are $14,000 better, because they have an effective wage which is 28% higher.
Triage - As the city’s population is falling, however, we may want to look at in-city relocation programs for residents which would allow us to de-urbanize subsections of the city.
In particular, this would allow us to maintain service levels by keeping density high enough for infrastructure and city services to remain cost effective. Infrastructure in the de-urbanized areas would be shut off and no longer maintained, and buildings would be demolished to prevent the pro-crime effect of vacant buildings.
Attracting Talent - You probably won’t attract all the talent of the cool, hip places, like New York - but you don’t have to. If your city offers high quality of life with low cost of living (a profit for employees!), it can attract sensible, competent people that are attractive to employers that aren’t looking to skim the cream of the crop from the entire country in a desperate arms race of absurd rent prices along the coasts.
It probably still pays to develop a university that has excellence synergistic with a key industry in the area to build up a unique talent pool allowing for city specialization competitive globally (although this is still somewhat risky).
However, I’d like to reiterate the idea of conditional loans here, depending on how much funding the city has available. These would go to promising people pursuing degrees in key local industrial/commercial sectors, which would gradually be paid off by the city so long as they remained in the city, or until paid off completely. This allows us to build a talent pool which is unique to our city, providing an indirect subsidy for employers, employees, and potentially improved economic productivity.
(Low cost of living per quality of living also helps us attract professors for our university!)
How do we get there?
That, I think, is a very good question. It is economically infeasible to rebuild the city into a more efficient form all at once. You’d go bankrupt if you tried.
I think, aside from some of these matters that exist primarily at the municipal level, the answer is that we redevelop subsections of the city around principles of efficiency over time. This allows us to maintain a productive base to keep our city alive long enough to build the next one, and as we connect these areas together with public transport, the overall value of each one will improve.
For some locations, even a genius invested with absolute municipal power could not pull it off, as the fundamentals of the location are not viable within the current economic context, but IMO, it is likely that combining everyone into a few ultra-dense, ultra-high-rent coastal cities is not actually the most economically efficient possible use of resources.
Evil thoughts: Leave the rent conditions terrible in LA, SF, and NY in order to prolong the life of other metro areas.
Anonymous asked:
they most certainly did botch it, but i think it'd be worth looking at how exactly. i think you're working towards something worthwhile but there's got to be compromise regarding adaptations to high population densities and how tight-knit you can have your social groups. if you want, i'll see if i can find some passages that are particularly relevant, so you can get the gist without reading the whole thing?
But how would you send it on Anon? …I guess I better make some room in my askbox.
Anonymous asked:
Wouldn't Russian Marines arguably be amphibious steppe marauders?
So you’re here to be entered into the contest? We’ll need you to provide a blood sample so that your eligibility can be verified. Admittedly, I’m not sure if grey spheres can be either Mongolian or Filipino, but I suppose that’s up to the genetics company to determine, right?