JustinHanagan

JustinHanagan, 1 month ago

First of all, thank you for the fantastic feedback.

We live in a society that commodifies everything, and as human-made content becomes rarer, more people like Veritsaium will be presented with more and increasingly lucrative opportunities to sell bits and pieces of their authenticity for manufactured content (be it by AI or a marketing team), while new people that could be like Veritsaium will be drowned out by the heaps of bullshit clogging up the web.

This is exactly the point I was trying to make in the last section, except I used MrBeast as an example because I felt like it was easier for readers to accept his propensity for cutting corners to make a buck. But yes, I agree, things will get worse. Before it was common knowledge that cigarettes caused cancer, a whole lot of people had to get cancer.

I also think it's important to remember that people don't actually follow Veritasium directly. They follow him indirectly by means of YouTube. If people could actually follow him directly he wouldn't need to worry about competing with AI crap for the attention of YouTube's algorithm. But of course, YouTube would never allow that.

JustinHanagan, 1 month ago

Very good point! He'll be in a reasonably good place when YouTube goes to shit.

JustinHanagan, 3 months ago (edited 3 months ago)

Something I think about a lot is how the "hipster" movement in the early 2000s was extremely anti- consumer culture. They were building easy to repair "fixie" bikes instead of driving cars, they were brewing their own beer and buying/mending clothes they bought second hand. They were moving to abandoned factory loft apartments in similarly abandoned urban areas.

Then, the artists living in lofts, making zines and and knitting sweaters got priced out. And now in pop culture the term "hipster" has largely replaced "yuppie" to mean an elitist, snobby, and extremely pro consumer culture sort of person, which is basically the opposite of what the young people in the early 2000s were doing. I'm not a conspiracy theorist but I have to imagine that the big corps saw the movement as a threat, and did an classic rebrand on them, like car companies did with the minivan to sell more SUVs.

JustinHanagan, 3 months ago (edited 3 months ago)

You're not wrong but that's not at all what the essay is about. I actually anticipated this how-shall-we-say reddity response in the post itself:

Before you dismiss me as a curmudgeonly millennial in nostalgia-colored glasses, realize that I am not implying that art that falls closer to the “challenging” side of the accessibility spectrum has gone away, or that it has a smaller market share, only that it does not bleed into the mainstream as often as it once did.

JustinHanagan, 3 months ago

For sure, they also don't congregate in Williamsburg much anymore.

JustinHanagan, 3 months ago (edited 3 months ago)

I mean, I explain it in the essay. But picture a Venn Diagram with a big "mainstream" circle, and smaller "artsy fartsy" circle. Now picture them slightly further apart so the overlapping area is smaller, but the circles remain the same size.

Don't get me wrong, if you told me weird and challenging art indeed does have a smaller percentage of the market share than it used to, I would believe you, that's just not what the essay is about, and I also don't have that data to back it up anyway.

JustinHanagan, 3 months ago

Yeah I understood with what they were saying, it's just not at all what the actual post is about.

JustinHanagan, 3 months ago (edited 3 months ago)

Eh, what you've identified as the thesis is actually just a butt-covering footnote to prevent Reddit-style "ackchually" comments. When I wrote it I was still submitting posts to Reddit. I guess that's on me for assuming the central point was more obvious.

JustinHanagan, 3 months ago

My first reaction was that this excerpt reminds me of a piece I wrote two years ago called "The Airbnb-ification of the arts", about how artists looking to make a career out of art are forced to cater to an algorithm that favors comfortable predictability over depth or uniqueness. My essay was heavily inspired by Kyle Chayka's famous 2016 essay "Welcome to Airspace".

Jokes on me for not reading the byline because it turns out Kyle wrote the book this excerpt is from! lol good for him. Looking forward to reading it.

I'm curious to know if he has a presence on Mastodon or any other Social Web apps, he's a really great writer I'd like to follow.

JustinHanagan, 3 months ago

The feedback loop is the most disturbing part, IMO. You have an algorithm deciding what gets popular, which means creatives hoping to be financially sustainable have to cater to it to some degree, which reinforces the algorithm and removes a little bit of uniqueness from society.

Creative people have always had to consider"what sells" to some degree if they want to make money from their effort, but we've gone beyond artists making "art with some degrees of marketability" into making products called "art" with little of the emotional/intellectual "challenge' that comes with unique works.

JustinHanagan, 3 months ago

Haha I know that made me chuckle too

JustinHanagan, 4 months ago

Wow, I've never heard music with such a stunning lack of soul before! 10/10 I bought every album.

JustinHanagan, 4 months ago

It's unfortunatley really, really hard to get noticed whatsoever as an artist without social media these days if you don't have any industry connections.

JustinHanagan, 4 months ago

Exactly. FTA:

"Trust and safety” departments are kinda like “Human Resources” departments. They exist to help the company avoid expensive lawsuits and expensive PR blunders. These departments, I assume, are comprised of good-hearted people who care deeply about their work and the well being of others. But they are fighting a battle that the companies do not actually want to end.

JustinHanagan, 4 months ago (edited 4 months ago)

When I switched to Substack it was just a Mailchimp alternative (I don't think Mailchimp moderates what they send out either). They were a service, not a platform. But since then Substack has added a lot of social elements. And now that I've been made aware of their stance, I'm planning my exit ASAP.

JustinHanagan, 4 months ago

Exactly, well said.

JustinHanagan, 4 months ago

It's literally in the article lol

JustinHanagan, 5 months ago

I actually did jump into the replies and went back and forth with him a bit and I do think he (finally) understood the FOSS perspective. I think a lot of people get very hung up on this concept of a customer-product relationship and for some people it's a very hard mindset to break out of. I often forget that while "FOSS" is software, the "free software movement" is not really about software, it's political.