ZachWeinersmith

ZachWeinersmith, 18 days ago

On a vaguely more serious note, an ethicist friend told me that arguing future lives have at least some moral status brings out a lot of anger, and I didn't believe him! Maybe I'm being naive, but the slope between that claim and some sort of Handmaid's Tale hellscape doesn't seem so slippery to me?

ZachWeinersmith, 19 days ago

@flameeyes WOW, amazing, thanks!

ZachWeinersmith, 19 days ago

One from Cory Doctorow, and others, is to essentially have government intercession to prevent rent-seeking. The tech solutions I've heard tend to focus on some kind of tokenization. I honestly don't know what will work, and one thing that worries me is that I think we content-suppliers see more rot than consumers. That is, we're saying "but arrrrrrrt" while people are actually getting lots of media they like for free.

ZachWeinersmith, 19 days ago

In other words, my worry is that on some fundamental level evil social media (or whatever) will always win because they're supply what the consumer wants, or anyway is engaged by. One reads stories about GenZ wanting to drop out of obsessive media culture, but I have no sense that this is the norm.

And I think as long as most entertainment comes through these filters, it's going to be hard to live in a golden age of good work. It'll necessarily be more disposable algorithm-tripping stuff.

ZachWeinersmith, 19 days ago

To my mind the ideal ecosystem for creativity has certain qualities, e.g.

1. There's a large artistic "middle class," meaning that although there may be big stars, people doing solid work, or still learning their craft, can make enough money to focus on their work.

2. Getting work viewed is less about advertising than about quality, meaning that most tastemakers should care about what's lasting more than what's zeitgeisty.

ZachWeinersmith, 19 days ago (edited 19 days ago)

3. There should be enough money coming into the system to support many axes of diversity among creators in order to encourage more new weird stuff.

4. Consumers have to actually care about the difference between what is amusing and what is good - the artistic equivalence to the difference between another candy bar and a healthy meal.

5. The locus of great art should be among the public, not universities or restricted environments.

ZachWeinersmith, 19 days ago

There's likely more, but my point is that all this stuff seems to me to be pretty straightforward, and much of the current ecosystem is against all this stuff. The rise of social media means you have e.g. people getting millions of readers on facebook and deriving literally zero revenue from it, unless they're willing to also do a little dance to get people to buy a t-shirt. Young artists now spend countless hours learning platform algorithms, rather than craft.

ZachWeinersmith, 19 days ago

In retrospect, what was best for me about the early internet was that although there was competition and we cared about reader numbers and so on, because there weren't big aggregators or modern social media, your only paths forward were making stuff people liked and making friends among peers. Emotionally, aesthetically, I might even say morally, it was better. But you need money to attract and sustain more artists.

ZachWeinersmith, 19 days ago

Anyway, I don't know the solution. Artists can't really unionize en masse because social media could just murder most careers. And anyway, we're too disorganized and dispersed. But as a for instance, if social media networks had to pay 1% of revenue made from ads posted next to artist's creations, on their own sites on the platform, billions would pour into the arts, meaning more full-time careers, more learning, more books.

ZachWeinersmith, 19 days ago

As an unnecessary addendum, it really irritates me that people would you such a fraught quotation without bothering to look up the paragraph from which it hails. This is a problem endemic in research literature and a good demonstration of why you can't trust a secondary source about a primary source. Nobody can do infinite deep dives on everything, but you certainly can for quotations from widely available documents!

ZachWeinersmith, 20 days ago

@Rgsharpe This is how social apes work.

Ape 1: I am best ape.
Ape 2: I am best ape.
Audience: Which is best ape?!
fighting

ZachWeinersmith, 23 days ago

@floby Thanks! What do the hyphens do in this context?

ZachWeinersmith, 23 days ago

@floby Interesting! Is this common or mostly a literary thing?