[fwipsy]

Recently rereading William Gibson's "Pattern Recognition" and I'm struck by his belief that certain art or memes are objectively good and destined for virality. I think both Gibson and this author are wrong. No content is intrinsically destined for success. There are countless amazing artists, available to anyone. Any sort of quality, insight, talent, novelty are table stakes. If someone is big, they're either extremely lucky, they got in on the ground floor, or there's marketing money behind them.

[balamatom]

>objectively good

>destined for virality

Antonyms, in my book.

>Any sort of quality, insight, talent, novelty are table stakes

So that's why I ain't seeing much of those lately. You sayin' someone left 'em on the table?

>If someone is big, they're either extremely lucky, they got in on the ground floor, or there's marketing money behind them.

Yes. Meaning, if you're big, I simply do not wish to hear about you or what you have to express; you're simply the thing that ascribes to the money its value.

Relatedly, an ancient saying: "I do not happen to be a connoiseur of the different flavours of excrement".

[fwipsy]

The objective parts of quality (technical skill) are fairly easy to saturate, most serious artists do so, but it's not sufficient to be successful.

Objective quality is common, but it sounds like you've just defined subjective quality to exclude anything mainstream.

You're right that Gibson would not have defined quality and virality to be the same. I should have used "or" in that sentence. However, he still seems to believe that they depend on properties of the content: some things have broad appeal, some things have genuine quality, some things have neither or both, and their success depends on that. I think it's all a crapshoot.

[RugnirViking]

Your definition, that most art (or even things in general) are of roughly the same quality above some bar of competency is... Difficult to defend.

There are things that are just better than others. Sometimes it's because they take much longer to make (time, materials etc). Other times it's because they go into a new direction (inventions, new genres). Not all things doing these are good. In fact generally, spending more time on something or trying new things results in overbaked garbage. It's genuinely rare and special to hit upon a combination of all three - competent, new, and with high investment put into it.

Just spend time thinking about airport novels, or the countless pop artists the music industry tries to push that get no traction. Or failed hollywood blockbusters. Quality matters.

[fwipsy]

Not of the same quality, just that the objective parts of quality have been mastered by many people. What sets art apart beyond that is individual taste. "Newness" is definitely subjective; it depends on what you've seen before (though it is correlated for people within a culture.)

I suspect that you criticize airport novels, pop music, cliched movies because they are similar to stuff you've seen before. (I hope that you've tried them, and aren't just criticizing them on the perception that they're lowbrow.) But people who hadn't seen them before could still enjoy them.

You eat at a Michelin-starred restaurant. I eat a bowl of oatmeal and I enjoy it just as much. What makes your meal better?

[RugnirViking]

I understand the hypothetical argument that you could enjoy a simple meal, a simple life, etc. And there are many that do - but that doesn't mean some things aren't preferable to other things to some people. It just shows that people's preferences are different.

But generally, we see that given the choice, people do rate art differently. That people prefer certain things to other things more often than chance. Some of it is perhaps cultural, sure. But does that really undermine the point? The trick of making good art/products whatever is literally hitting a thing a large group of people like. It's not cheating to try and make people of your culture, or any specific culture or subculture, like it. That's actually kinda most of the point.

You really can distinguish between a competent but otherwise uninteresting thing and something truly special by just like... Putting it out there. Many things that were widely distributed were not especially well liked, and others remain literal classics. Why?

[fwipsy]

Sounds like you mostly agree. We're not a monoculture. Mainstream culture is a compromise - consists of things that many people like, but not many people's favorite.

It's a little silly to say "mainstream is crap! Why doesn't the better stuff rise to the top?" It's because people don't agree on what's better.

[andrewflnr]

Not antonyms. Some good art goes viral on its own merits. But certainly not synonyms either.

[ghtbircshotbe]

Lately when I watch a video on YouTube, every single one of the recommended videos is AI slop. Not sure what the next 5 years holds. It does make me question the argument that bad AI generated content is equivalent to bad human generated content. And they all have hundreds of thousands of views, another mystery.

[AJ007]

A dirty secret is the algorithms can't differentiate real users from fake. The universe of content is so large now, if you don't start with a fake audience you go nowhere. Slop rises to the top, because slopfarms can spend all their money on the farming rather than the content. It's even worse if you look at short form video because it's trivial to clone anything that went viral and alter the message, no real human or attractive 20 year old American required.

If content requires a real human network for transmission, the cost of transmitting slop is your own reputation within your network. A bunch of bots circle jerking each other can't sell concert tickets or much of anything.

The idea that some artist is exceptionally talented and good and they deserve to be famous or sell out concerts is a myth. There are so many exceptionally skilled singers, songwriters, and musicians that are all unknowns. Many who are more talented than (insert famous living or dead pop star here.)

I think this is part of the reason why the AI ruins creativity is overblown. The music-art-talent pyramid always meant a tiny percent at the top walked away with all of the money. Look at the numbers from the last screen actor's guild strike, the majority of actors earn at or below minimum wage. It's a new world, and the old one people believe deserves to continue perpetually existed in but a blink of human civilization.

[balamatom]

>A dirty secret is the algorithms can't differentiate real users from fake.

The mainstream platforms exist for the fake users, not for the real ones.

Before they could make "fake users" out of real people (by teaching them to enjoy the taste of mental effluvia); now they've factored out the people (since humans prefer actual nutrients).