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Musings Report 2024-24 6-15-24 Imprisoned in the Bastille of Depleted Ideas, Hackneyed Plots and Stale Narratives
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Imprisoned in the Bastille of Depleted Ideas, Hackneyed Plots and Stale Narratives
Correspondent Tom D. recently recommended this thought-provoking essay: The Modern World Is Boring. Where are the heroes and the adventures now?
Tom described the essay as deploying "the paucity of science fiction writing as a proxy for the commodification of the world.
The future happens first in the imagination.
That imagination is expressed in stories; oral long ago, later written, today movies, tomorrow maybe on TikTok.
Despite free connectivity and dissemination, those stories have stagnated.
Visionaries who color outside the lines are vilified on a societal level.
That's nothing new; money, conformity, and mandatory validation of the Status Quo have long suppressed free thought.
But rarely has there been such a confluence of width and depth.
And without those stories, the world is dull, boring, without hope.
The innovative ideas are out there, held back by a dam erected by those protecting their position. A dam without a relief valve.
It's a hopeless strategy.
But for now, it is a boring world."
I have long pondered a thought experiment reflecting the stagnation of "The New", the core dynamic of Modernism: there's always something new and exciting speeding toward us.
Consider this timeline. The Beatles released their "final song" last year, 54 years after they recorded their last album in 1969. Both surviving Beatles--Paul McCartney and Ringo Starr--continue performing and selling music in their 80s. As recently as 2020, The Beatles were ranked #8 in Billboard's Top Paid Musicians, earning $12.7 million. (The pandemic lockdown cut touring short, so total industry earnings were down. Taylor Swift topped the list with a paltry $23 million.)
In 2021, The Strolling Bones--sorry, The Rolling Stones--earned $55 million, just behind Taylor Swift's $65 million. That's impressive, given the Stones have been recording songs since 1963--61 years ago.
Now consider these timelines transposed back to these bands' heyday in 1969. Imagine a band that last recorded an album in 1915 causing a media sensation 54 years later in 1969 by releasing a new song, and another band from that era placing #2 on the Billboard top earning acts in 1969. (1969 - 54 = 1915)
James Bond first appeared on the silver screen in 1962, 62 years ago. Transposing the timeline, this is equivalent of a film series that started in 1900 still raking in money in 1962.
Star Trek launched in 1966 and continues to be a durable film franchise, 58 years later, the equivalent of a 1908 film series still being a "tentpole" franchise for the industry in 1966.
Star Wars took the world by storm in 1977, and the franchise continues pumping out films 47 years later, the equivalent of a film franchise that started in 1930 still bringing in the big bucks in 1977.
Can we imagine anything from the 1910s, 1920s or 1930s continuing into the 1960s and 1970s as relevant cultural currency given the surplus of "new and exciting" in that era?
That we're still paying attention to the acts, music and film franchises from the 1960s and 1970s (and constantly mining as-yet unexploited tropes from that era) certainly suggests a culture bled dry of anything authentically new and exciting.
It suggests a culture that worships at the altar of low-risk profits via retreads and recycling of whatever was profitable in the past, jerking it back to life by emptying a needle of marketing stimulant into the comatose corpus of popular culture.
Jokes about Jurassic World #17 are now as limp as the worn-out franchises they lampoon, for they're no longer much of an exaggeration: Marvel Movie #72, coming soon!
Turning our attention to economics, we're still scratching marks in our dreary rat-infested Bastille cells under "Marxism" and "capitalism," beside graffiti etched in the plaster eons ago: the invisible hand, Theses on Feuerbach. "Adam Smith hath spoken" may even date from the late 1700s.
The political sphere is not merely stale, it has decayed to the point of being morbidly tedious. Tattered posters of Soviet-era slogans--the functional equivalent of today's politics--would at least provide a glimmer of nostalgia. The only excitement left is the announcement of how much Senator Pelosi skimmed in the stock market this quarter: only $20 million, hmm, she must be losing her touch....
In the categories of Hackneyed Plots and Stale Narratives, there is nary a bone that hasn't been picked clean. Even the World Economic Forum (WEF) is tapped out; slapping it around is as tiresome as watching a disaster film for the 15th time. The villains are boring, the cardboard heroes and heroines are boring, the metrics of "growth" that are ginned up every quarter are no longer risible--they're boring, too.
In summary: our institutions, ideas, plots, narratives and memes can no longer be parodied because everything has become a parody of its previous incarnation--a clueless self-parody, endlessly self-referential, endlessly copying a threadbare facsimile of itself in a tightly scripted parody of authenticity.
There is one ray of hope in this dishearteningly drab prison of Depleted Ideas, Hackneyed Plots and Stale Narratives: Punctuated Equilibrium.
Excuse me, I haven't heard of that band.
It would make a refreshingly obscure band name, but it's actually a concept from natural selection / evolution.
The basic idea behind Punctuated Equilibrium is that as long as conditions remain the same, evolution is best served by conserving the existing traits / genetic-epigenetic coding. Any genetic drift resulting from random mutations is left on the cutting room floor (i.e. does not make it into the species' genome) as unhelpful.
This is how species remain essentially unchanged for tens of millions of years. The conditions are the same, so their existing genetic coding--optimized long ago--remains the optimized option.
Sometimes conditions change slowly, and species add a few mutations here and there to adapt to the changes. For example, some species have already acquired adaptations better suited to human civilization.
Other times, conditions change rapidly, and species are placed under extreme selective pressure to adapt successfully or die off. The stability / equilibrium of the species is punctuated by a massive increase in mutations and experimentation as natural selection's process of testing which mutations / experiments / adaptations are better suited to the new conditions and conserving those that improve the species' survivability.
If the species successfully makes it through the wormhole of intense selective pressure, and conditions restabilize, then the species' traits also restabilize / return to equilibrium. This is Punctuated Equilibrium.
This is not necessarily a smooth process. When the asteroid generated an "Impact Winter" 66 million years ago, the large dinosaurs could not adapt fast enough to survive. The smaller feathered dinosaurs managed to survive and evolve into birds.
Selective pressure occurs not just in the natural world but in human cultures / societies. When there's no selective pressure due to the stability of the conditions and the system, then there's no impetus for "let a thousand flowers bloom." But when conditions change rapidly, then human societies face the same choice as species: adapt or fade away.
Humans claim that Progress is linear: everything naturally gets better every day, in every way. Evolution isn't so picky: if contraction enables survival better than expansion, then contraction is selected. For example, the city of Rome's population fell from 500,000 to 10,000 as conditions changed.
From the human point of view of Progress always trending upward, this collapse could not be considered Progress. But from the evolutionary perspective, conditions changed and so the populace adapted to the selective pressure: since the means to support 500,000 people in Rome were no longer available, it was adapt or die: find some other way to live or pass away.
Humans also believe that "new" is always better. Once again, evolution isn't so picky. Long-buried "old traits" come to the fore again if they are better adapted to changing conditions.
We can see Punctuated Equilibrium at work in human societies. After tumultuous, traumatic wars and revolutions. once conditions stabilize, there is often a burst of creative experimentation, much like seeds sprouting in a once-forested area cleared by fire. Examples include post-revolutionary Russia and China and postwar Japan in the 20th century.
These periods of blossoming experimentation are often cut short by authoritarian regimes fearful of evolution leading people away from their control. When left to run their course, a new stability eventually takes hold and experimentation drifts to the margins of society. Eventually, this stability leads to stagnation as those seeking to maintain their power / control / wealth limit the threats posed by experimentation.
But once conditions change rapidly, the selective pressures mount and the status quo is faced with a quandary those at the top of the heap resist: adapt or die. Those benefiting from the crumbling status quo want adaptation to follow their wishes: adaptations are fine as long as they leave our wealth and power intact, as is.
That's not how evolution works. When conditions change, clinging on to existing traits / arrangements is the path to extinction. Claiming that the "new" (AI!) will enable to status quo to conserve its structure without any actual adaptation is illusory: it might turn out that "old traits" and structures are more functional in the changing conditions than "new traits."
Again, natural selection can't afford to be picky: Progress and "the new" will be left on the cutting room floor if they're less adaptive / functional than "old" structures and traits.
Contraction / collapse is Punctuated Equilibrium in action. Things change, we either adapt or struggle on until events overtake us.
It seems clear that we're in the period of stagnation, characterized by clinging on to a dysfunctional, maladaptive status quo, as if suppressing adaptation is "Progress" and something "new" will save the status quo without any of the tumult and uncertainty of Punctuated Equilibrium.
The selective pressures on the global system are increasing, but the real pressure has yet to be applied.
Highlights of the Blog
The Crises and Sacrifices Yet to Come 6/15/24
How Many Millennials Will Be Rich Enough to Buy the Boomers' Millions of Unaffordable Bungalows? 6/12/24
Financial Nihilism and the Collapsing American Dream 6/10/24
Podcasts:
Crisis, Sacrifice and the New Economy, with Emerson Fersch (1 hr)
Financial Nihilism, Inflation & The Collapsing American Dream with Gordon Long (42 min)
Best Thing That Happened To Me This Week
A reader posted this comment about my essay Our Crisis of Competence (DailyReckoning.com): "This has to be the most 'on -point', clearly elucidated, and insightful essay I have read in years. Every legislator and bureaucrat in the country should read it and then proceed to eliminate or at least cut their budgets by 50% or more. This would eliminate most of the ills that beset the country presently. Alas, I am not holding my breath. Congratulations."
What's on the Book Shelf
The books' Amazon pages are linked for the comments, but of course it's best to borrow the book from the local library if that's possible.
Currently reading:
The True and Only Heaven: Progress and Its Critics by Christopher Lasch -- a massive book that demands a careful read....
Mentioned by Readers:
What Has Government Done To Our Money? (via Timmy T.)
Haga's Law: Why Nothing Works and No One Can Fix It, and the More We Try, the Worse It Gets
From Left Field
NOTE TO NEW READERS: This list is not comprised of articles I agree with or that I judge to be correct or of the highest quality. It is representative of the content I find interesting as reflections of the current zeitgeist. The list is intended to be perused with an open, critical, occasionally amused mind.
Many links are behind paywalls. Most paywalled sites allow a few free articles per month if you register. It's the New Normal.
Surveillance pricing: They spy on you for many reasons, but also to rip you off.
The AI Revolution Is Already Losing Steam: The pace of innovation in AI is slowing, its usefulness is limited, and the cost of running it remains exorbitant
Big tech has distracted world from existential risk of AI, says top scientist
Global Debt Hit $315 Trillion in Q1 2024
From parched earth to landslides: crisis in the prosecco hills of Italy
A Substantial Chance Of A Major Financial Collapse & The End Of Offshored Industrialization
A 'perfect storm' is wiping out America's restaurants - here's why the Midwest is hardest hit by closures
China turns to private hackers as it cracks down on online activists on Tiananmen Square anniversary
Costco's Japan wages provide pathway to firing up nation's low pay, economy-- $9 an hour is "firing up" wages?....
A shrinking life: Why some Asian youth withdraw from the world
How Much Oil Remains for the World To Produce? -- long but thorough....
Amboy, population 0 — a Mojave Desert ghost town and Americana icon fights to survive
"To be successful at anything, the truth is you don’t have to be special. You just have to be what most people aren’t: consistent, determined and willing to work for it." Tom Brady
Thanks for reading--
charles |
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