I. History
It’s 2007. I realize there’s a gaping film pop culture void in my general knowledge. I’m constantly bombarded by friends referencing “royales with cheese” or Agent Smith and I have no idea what they are talking about. I decide it’s time to rectify this problem. It’s still early days on the internet, and after some investigating, I find several forums dedicated to posting links for illegally uploaded movies, sometimes even in 480p. I create a list, eventually stored on my brand new iPhone (it’s an iPod and a phone, can you imagine?). Every time someone mentions a movie, it goes on the list. Eventually I supplement with some torrenting, but the big break through is figuring out how to rip DVDs onto my computer. I get a Netflix account with the DVDs mailed to you (no late fees!). When the mail comes in, I rip it that day and send it back.
After several years I’ve seen hundreds of movies. Some classics like The Shining and Predator, but also a bunch of middling stuff that made it onto my list because it was the late 2000s and that’s what I heard was good (Mr. and Mrs. Smith, Æon Flux). Tokyo Drift will always be a guilty pleasure, but I know there have been better films. Yet despite the mountain of cinema I’ve seen, my list of movies to watch has actually gotten longer somehow…
It’s 2013. Actually, I need to read some more books. Sure, I had my libertarian awakening in high school after reading The Fountainhead and then tearing through Atlas Shrugged, Economics in One Lesson, and Capitalism and Freedom. But there’s so much more! Classic science fiction like Heinlein, Asimov, and Orson Scott Card that I never read. Modern fantasy like A Song of Ice and Fire which is a TV show now. And there’s a whole bunch of nonfiction I should catch up on. You ever realize how much useful stuff is actually *in* a textbook? It’s crazy. I wonder how I’ll read all this. Someone just sent me a link to something called “The Sequences”, I hope they’re short…
It’s 2017. They tell me the golden age of television is upon us. I was behind on Breaking Bad but was able to finish it a year or so after the actual show stopped airing. I’m caught up with Game of Thrones, which is the greatest television phenomenon ever created. Actually HBO is a behemoth right now. This first season of Westworld is breathtaking. So is True Detective. I need to get around to watching The Wire, The Sopranos, and The Americans eventually. I’ve also heard it’s worth going back to some network TV comedies like The Office, Parks and Recreation, and Community. There’s some cool animation happening too: I’ve been watching Rick and Morty and Archer but I want to watch Avatar: the Last Airbender. And Star Wars is now at Disney so I guess I need to watch The Clone Wars? Plus there’s this new series on SyFy called The Expanse which looks dope.
When will I have the time for this? I can’t believe I’d ever thought I’d finish my movie or reading list, I gotta put that on hold for these TV shows. At least I’m caught up on Stranger Things…
It’s 2020. There’s nothing to do but sit at home and consume more content. Maybe I should get back into videogames. Hmm I’ve got some 200 games in my Steam library, including, let me see….74 that I’ve apparently never played at all. If those aren’t good enough, I could always buy some more from the apparently 100,000 titles that are on the Steam store. Some of these are story based and will take a few to dozens of hours to complete. Some are open world games and can take hundreds. Some are different every time, encouraging replayability. Some are not story based at all, and instead focus on strategy or tactics. People sink thousands of hours into Crusader Kings or Stellaris. I recommended a friend Factorio and he disappeared for months.
If I don’t even want to purchase a game, there’s a plethora of esports titles where you can compete against other players. There isn’t really an “end” to the game, you just try to master them as a skill, like chess or bridge. There’s also crafting games like Minecraft, where not only is the game itself open-ended, you can create almost anything you want within it. Or if you wanted both crafting and esports, you’ve got Fortnite.
What about MMOs? World of Warcraft has a back catalog of 20 years of content. Final Fantasy XIV is big now, Runescape is still going strong. EVE Online if you want a second job. Each of these games could probably take over your life if you let it. And we haven’t even gotten to consoles; the PlayStation 5 and new Xboxes comes out later this year, but you can buy the previous generation consoles right now. There’s also a huge community working on making old games playable. It’s a legal gray area, but you can go and play hundreds of games from old consoles with emulation software, including some of the greatest games every created.
So I’ve got probably 5-10 thousand hours of content off the top of my head here and we haven’t even gotten to gaming in real life! Last year, before the pandemic I was playing board games with friends every other weekend. There are tons of amazing board games to check out, not just Catan. Of course, right now my friends are actually starting a new D&D campaign on Discord. I’ve never done that before but at a few hours a week, that should be pretty manageable…
It’s 2022. So it turns out at that first D&D session, the DM asked if we had seen an episode of Critical Role. I didn’t know what that was, so I looked it up. They had just posted to their YouTube channel episode 110 of “Campaign 2”. It was 4 hours long. Dear God. Now, I certainly haven’t consumed the thousands of hours of Critical Role content available (they’re now in the middle of Campaign 3 of course), but the dozen episodes I’ve seen are quite entertaining. It does however, have to compete with tons of other great content on YouTube. The YouTube fountain of content is itself probably bigger than any of the last content entries combined now that I think of it. I’m subscribed to some 50 channels, probably 20 of which I often watch with a few I watch every upload. I suspect I’m a YouTube outlier, but the quality of content you can find is incredible and generally better than anything on cable TV.
There’s just so much breadth. I follow PC hardware content, science and math channels, rocketry and space, gaming, that primitive technology guy and so much more that I never thought I’d be interested in. There’s this delightful Canadian guy who goes camping in weird places and his channel is just called “Camping with Steve”. I have zero interests in camping or going outdoors in general, and yet I watch every single one of his videos.
YouTube also pairs well with other content. There’s great breakdowns and additional background videos for many popular TV shows and movies. The Corridor Crew channels breaks down VFX and stunts in films, and I now often use their videos as inspiration for my ever growing movie list. If you play almost any game it’s worth checking YouTube for tips or setup tweaks that improve the gaming experience.
To me, podcasts also belong in the same space as YouTube videos; the barrier to entry is very low, the content breadth and magnitude is enormous, but it optimizes for much longer than typical videos. Checking recently and it appears I have some 100 hours of podcasts in my backlog. I love the 80000 Hours podcast, but the jokes about the episode lengths write themselves. Robert Wiblin must be stopped.
It’s 2024, there’s this new thing called Substack…
II. Freedom?
Am I honestly complaining about having too much content to consume? Is this actually a problem? I don’t always self-identify as a libertarian these days, but I certainly lean towards that tradition. Isn’t this the promise of a free society? People can create things for each other! Stories, games, true crime podcasts! You didn’t have this freedom if you lived in the Soviet Union or Nazi Germany, and you still don’t if you live in China, North Korea, or Cuba. Not only does liberal democracy allow for free enterprise and flourishing marketplace, but also a vast ecosystem of creativity and content generation. And many, in fact, make their living through selling their content.
Most weeks I listen to the Reason Roundtable podcast where the editors of the libertarian magazine Reason talk about the news and how much they hate the government, etc. They end each podcast with a full throated embrace of capitalism and discuss what they, as consumers, have been consuming this week. Each editor has their own quirks, but it’s typically much of what I’ve catalogued in the previous section and even more: travel, sports, music, museums, and whatever else is happening. I think this is actually underrated among libertarians who too often gripe and commiserate on what government ought not to do or where it ought not to interfere. Libertarians and classical liberals often don’t put forth a positive vision of the world because they are arguing for the unplanned and the unseen, which cannot be predicted beforehand.
But my story of overwhelmed inability to catch up is really just a story of abundance and pure creation. This must be celebrated! These are the fruits of a free society. To denigrate the content tsunami is to spit in the face of freedom.
Still, some part of me is uneasy. Perhaps if there’s too much to watch or listen or play, then I’ll just have to miss some things, and that’s ok. But I do have two objections. One is that there is a small externality: the more stuff there is, the less shared experiences I have with others. A large shared pop culture is rewarding. You can discuss content and stories with others who participate. But if everyone is listening to their own podcast or YouTube channels, we end up with less in common to discuss. Perhaps we stop hanging out entirely with other people if the content is so good and addictive.
And two, the future looks weird. Ben Thompson from Stratechery traces content platforms’ changing focus over the years. First, Facebook compiled user generated content from your friends and acquaintances in real life. Content was specific and clustered. Then we moved towards a larger broadcast model where followers would accumulate to big accounts. Instagram and Twitter got big on this model, but you saw YouTube and Facebook move towards this too. Eventually, there was so much content from the accounts you followed, social platforms started recommending and ranking all the content into a newsfeed so you didn’t necessarily see everything. The ranking algorithm started simply and became quite complex with machine learning models involved in larger and larger amounts of content to compile and rank.
YouTube was probably the first to start moving towards the next level, where content recommendations weren’t just coming from your subscriptions, but actually content across the whole site. TikTok really blew this open with an entirely algorithmically driven feed of short videos, and YouTube and Instagram quickly followed suit. You used to see big content aggregation Instagram or Facebook pages where you could view content from many people in one place. Now the platforms themselves find the content scattered on their site and deliver it directly to consumers (with the ad revenue) and skip the aggregation pages entirely. You no longer need to request to YouTube or TikTok to deliver the content from a given creator. The machine learning algorithms quickly figure out what you like and give you what you need without needing to find creators and subscribe or follow. It’s still there as an option, but it’s just another signal in the giant inference machine.
And now Ben Thompson argues the next step is going to be not just algorithmically selected content, but algorithmically generated content. Today, each person’s feed is different and specifically tailored to their interests as determined by a big ML model. But if the perfect content for your interests doesn’t exist (I cannot find a fictional documentary of alternate history where NBA has no salary cap and is run by the Yakuza), the algorithm can’t show it to you. But in the future, we could generate the content they want without needing someone to actually make it.
In some sense, this has always been what was happening: NBC paid for a pilot to make Star Trek in the 60s because they thought it would draw audiences. In the 2010s when Netflix saw that their short term cheap content licensing deals were not going to be renewed, they knew they had to start developing their own original content. Instead of just guessing as NBC execs had done in the 60s, they used their extensive understanding of their own customers to target specific genres of shows that they felt could do well on their platform. And thus we got big hits like Squid Game and Stranger Things, but also smaller things like Beasts of No Nation and Narcos. But a big enough difference in degree may really be a difference in kind.
For example, I’m curious about what is happening at Spotify. It is not against their terms of service to create AI music, and it seems that this is becoming cheap enough that I’m getting actual ads urging me to stream specific AI-generated music playlists on Spotify. Artists have long decried Spotify’s low royalties for streaming, but if generative AI is much cheaper, perhaps the future of the platform will be decidedly weighted in favor of generated music. Does the future look like a bunch of music enthusiasts who don’t even have a favorite artist?
In 10 years when your Kindle recs are all books generated directly for you that didn’t exist five minutes ago, and when your TikTok feed is custom made documentaries directed in the style of Jon Bois on exactly the thing you wanted to learn more about, are we going to be totally socially isolated in ways that we long for the 2020s? I want to say that the desire for real human interaction will push us to demand from our algorithms shared experiences, but the trend has consistently been in the other direction. As I said above, the content tsunami is a result of human liberalism and the free market; the default is that the tsunami gets bigger.
Of course, there is nothing older than people decrying the decline of the civilization within which they live, so who knows? Maybe people in the future will laugh at how small minded I’m being.
if a culture is not shared, is it really a culture?
Good post. Keep up content like this and it will definitely gain a following.