Something I noticed the other day is we've more stories, more news, more opinions, more outlets, more voices, more stuff that ever.
But the actual stuff the people seem to notice, has never felt more monocultured, more boring, more mainstream.
Today is an amazing example.
Some bloke from some deeply boring company, who nobody cares about, go caught doing something shitty on a Jumbo tron, and it becomes the fucking biggest story out there.
Over the last few months we've seen Amazon Prime day get endless coverage, hawk tuah girl, we see the same stories about MP's expenses, or LA wildfires, or Sam Altman getting fired, or the Iran bombing that may have been a whiff. Or Windsurf be bought by someone or something or whatever.
I'm not saying these new stories are small. I'm not saying that these things exist beyond our tribes. But I am saying within a medium sized group of people, almost everybody seems to be reading the same stuff, sharing the same stuff, having the same views. It's the same with Music, it's the same with Film, we've become incredibly boring, identical, every trends piece is the same, every funny meme is the same, every opinion.
How did something based around decentralization, end up completely destroying variety and driving really banal conformity.
Sorry, have to rush off, I have to do a post about how AI won't take your job, but someone using AI will. I have to state that things are faster than ever. I have to say "this is the worst AI will ever be", I have to write something about brand purpose at the speed of culture. I have to do a piece on why we'll all use agentic flows to buy things for us, or why Gen Alpha have no attention span or why personalization at scale is the future. Or anyone of the same 50 things that everyone seems to talk about,. And nobody ever thinks about.
“How did something based around decentralization, end up completely destroying variety and driving really banal conformity.”
Prince said the web was dead in the early 2000s if I recall correctly - I understood exactly what he meant. Even then you could see its trajectory was towards bland conformity - no more niches , no more weird net-art etc.
Spot on again. We have trained the world to survive in and exist on the attention economy. Only those being paid attention to can ever hope to benefit financially. Yet conflating what we’ve been taught is an emotional , psychological and requisite for self affirmation and success, we don’t realize the more we consume the more malnourished we become. I’m just glad none of this existed until decades after college and my young self. Remember all those Jonathan Kozol books on why Johnny can’t read? Why can t Johnny sit in a chair for more than 3 minutes without a Red Bull or dopamine stimulation?
Gerrit: Wow. You and I must be looking at very different stuff online. But if we have different interests (which is likely), then it makes sense that we would have different online experiences.
For my part, my twin passions are music and theoretical physics/foundations of physics, with an abiding interest in history, and the origin and nature of consciousness. That’s plenty to keep me engaged, stimulated, and inspired by the vast quantity of REAL information on the Intertubes.
To wit, the amount and quality of music available online to discover and learn from vastly exceeds my available time to view/hear it, let alone assimilate it all. Sit me down with a guitar and the apparently inexhaustible plethora of YouTube videos by musicians I respect and who inspire me, and I couldn’t possibly be bored.
As far as physics is concerned, we are in exciting times. There is…well, I don’t call it a crisis in fundamental physics, but others blow that horn to get attention. Nevertheless, the reign of quantum theory as an impenetrable mystery — and it has been sold that way for nearly a century — is beginning to crack. The great philosopher-physicists of the 20th century (such as Albert Einstein, Arthur Eddington, and John Bell) set a great example for those who appreciate the practical utility of successful theories, but also want to know “What does it actually MEAN?”.
Alas, the dominance (…or, dare I say it, quasi-tyranny) of idiosyncratic perspectives like the Copenhagen interpretation was accompanied by an unfortunate mentality that eschewed inquiries into the philosophically questionable aspects of that interpretation, as infamously codified in the mantra “Shut up and calculate.” The proposition that there might be other formulations that are more ontologically intuitive—yet, which provide the same utility for making testable predictions that actually work—has been dismissed for the last 100 years, and that edifice of deliberate ignorance is now seen as being just as wobbly, creaky, and intellectually impoverished as it has always seemed to me, and should seem to anyone who is interested in fundamental principles.
But now the emperor is now seen to be butt-naked. Inquiries into the nature of consciousness have yielded empirical evidence that strongly suggests that consciousness is a quantum phenomenon, but it has also shown that quantum mechanics as currently formulated cannot possibly be a complete theory, as famously asserted by no less an intellect than Nobel Prize winning physicist Sir Roger Penrose, who is among those who are probing physics at a fundamental level, challenging the “conventional wisdom”, and creating new theories that represent significant advances in fundamental knowledge.
This isn’t just esoteric stuff, accessible only to Ph.D. physicists. Watch one (or more) of Sir Roger’s plentiful YouTube videos on Conformal Cyclic Cosmology(CCC), which he explains clearly with his own hand-drawn diagrams that any reasonably intelligent humanoid can understand—even non-physicists. It answers many questions that the conventional wisdom (the Standard Model) has insisted should not be asked, such as, “What happened before the Big Bang?” The stock answer has been, “There was no ‘before’ the Big Bang. Space and time were created with the Big Bang.”
That has always sounded like bullshit to me, and I’m a physicist. Turns out, according to Sir Roger’s CCC, that’s exactly what it is, and there is empirical evidence to support the theory. Hooray! Definitely NOT boring shit…well, to me anyway.
So what about quantum theory? Turns out, it’s not “wrong”; it’s just incomplete. It’s not the whole story. So, despite the persistent blathering of those who insist “Einstein was wrong!” (in his famous EPR paper), it turns out that he was exactly correct in concluding that quantum theory is incomplete. What’s more, although he wasn’t happy about what he called “spooky action at a distance” (non-locality), his EPR paper actually predicted quantum entanglement, which has been experimentally verified by Clauser, Aspect, and Zeilinger, who were awarded the 2022 Nobel Prize in physics for that work. (And incredibly, the Nobel Prize committee’s summary of what they proved is flat out wrong, as pointed out by Tim Maudlin, founder of the John Bell Institute for the Foundations of Physics.
I’m not kidding, and this is not just my opinion. Among the many, many folks who understand Bell’s Theorem, it’s a glaring embarrassment that the Nobel Committee got it wrong, only they’re evidently not smart enough to be embarrassed. From the perspective of one who understands the kind of frozen thinking that drives the predictable behaviors you identify in your Post, it’s actually pretty good comedy that the Nobel Committee is clueless. A quick perusal of the clown show they’ve made of the “Peace Prize” actually makes the physics gaffe somewhat predictable.
And we’re not even stuck with “the impenetrable mysteries of quantum theory”. A new formulation by theoretical physicist Jacob Barandes revolutionizes the ontological basis of quantum theory, replacing the standard mathematical abstraction of “Hilbert spaces” (which is unfathomable to yer average normal humanoid) with actual physical particles that have position and momentum, yet his reformulation yields exactly the same predictions as standard quantum mechanics!
What about the tyranny of string “theory” — in quotation marks because, unlike every other well-established, practical physical theory that is robustly corroborated and yields derivative technologies that are practical, useful, and improve people’s lives, string “theory” makes no predictions that can be experimentally tested. Yes, its purely mathematical formulations are clever, even elegant; but it proposes nothing that can actually be observed. For decades, up-and-coming physicists found that their career prospects were dim if their interests were not in or connected to string theory. And now, one of the founders and long-time, most die-hard proponents of string theory (Leonard Susskind) has finally admitted “We have to start over.” String theory isn’t dead, but it’s a sinking ship.
I could go on, but instead, if you have any interest in deep fundamental questions about nature, existence, consciousness, and physical reality, check out Curt Jainmungal’s Substack and YouTube channel called Theories of Everything. Definitely NOT formulaic bullshit.
I mentioned my interest in history. I’m currently resurrecting my long-standing interest in WW2—a subject I’ve been studying for the last 46 years. There’s certainly no shortage of credible sources online, but who are the REAL experts—the ones who are challenging the conventional wisdom, stripping away the propaganda, busting the myths, and getting down to the truth? Check out the YouTube channel Unauthorized History of the Pacific War, and you will see who they are: Seth Paridon, Jon Parshall, Dr. Richard Frank, Dr. Craig Symonds, John McManus, and many others—all of them credible, highly respected career historians whom you’ve probably never heard of, but who aren’t afraid to speak the truth with integrity.
But there’s another aspect of my online experience that is very much the opposite of boring: interacting with intelligent people in rational, civilized discourse between people who are NOT looking to score a “Gotcha” (you know…assholes), or get “likes”, amass subscribers, or market themselves. To be clear, I don’t disparage anyone who has built a following of paying customers who voluntarily pay for value received. I wish them all the success they hope for. I’m just not at the point in my life where that’s important to me. Making genuine connections is my interest, and I don’t want it to be “work”, if you know what I mean. I’m betting you do.
Toward that end, the vast majority of what I write on Substack is in Comments in reply to Posts, and in replies to Notes. Some of my replies are good enough to be Posts in their own right. In fact, I’ve been saving my replies in another app, and one of these days I’ll Postify ‘em. But the motivation for creating them was/is to respond to real people in a way that engages what they have written. It is almost never couched in terms of “disagree”. I respond to stuff that resonates with me. For example, your Post mentions discovering new ideas to which you have been referred by others. That’s exactly what I’m doing. I’ve found some great people on YouTube who distill, refer to, or promote others who are genuine experts, not so much by credentials (although those are plentiful), but by real-world experience. It has taken a while to separate the wheat from the chaff. but it’s definitely doable.
Anyhow, I’ve just scratched the surface of the online treasures that fascinate me. I realize that my interests are my own, and while I admit that I don’t understand why everyone isn’t interested in the stuff I find fascinating (heh…just kidding…sort of), I very definitely DO understand that everyone is different, and it is a stone-cold, hard fact that different people have different interests. Period. End of rap. The check’s in the mail. It’s just 10 minutes from here. Call me tomorrow. The dog ate my homework. 😎
Wait what? No. What makes you think generative ai is going to give you the best of the best of contemporary thought? I’m already divorced from Substack because I have a real life, so much of what you say I agree with. Generative ai might help you with traditional philosophy because there’s a lot of text to generate an answer from. But someone who’s good in the here and now is not going to come up.
I would still prefer to be introduced to ideas through people, and do find those recommendations do open other avenues. However, over the past month AI has introduced me to several new thinkers I didn't know existed. I wish I'd known of Byung-Chul Han work a decade ago. It took me describing to a GenAI what I was trying to do with my writing and requesting inspiration, that I stumbled across his books.
I think relying on GenAI, and on the internet alone to understand the world would be incredibly depressing. As I tell my daughter; it's by bumping into the world that we learn who we are and discover what we love. Everything else is there to feed your curiosity. Choose wisely where you spend your time and what you consume.
The Internet is food for LLMs. It's how they learn. It stopped being useful quite a while ago. There's no going back. Once they have all they need and can generate their own questions, we can get back to analog life. Finally!
Something I noticed the other day is we've more stories, more news, more opinions, more outlets, more voices, more stuff that ever.
But the actual stuff the people seem to notice, has never felt more monocultured, more boring, more mainstream.
Today is an amazing example.
Some bloke from some deeply boring company, who nobody cares about, go caught doing something shitty on a Jumbo tron, and it becomes the fucking biggest story out there.
Over the last few months we've seen Amazon Prime day get endless coverage, hawk tuah girl, we see the same stories about MP's expenses, or LA wildfires, or Sam Altman getting fired, or the Iran bombing that may have been a whiff. Or Windsurf be bought by someone or something or whatever.
I'm not saying these new stories are small. I'm not saying that these things exist beyond our tribes. But I am saying within a medium sized group of people, almost everybody seems to be reading the same stuff, sharing the same stuff, having the same views. It's the same with Music, it's the same with Film, we've become incredibly boring, identical, every trends piece is the same, every funny meme is the same, every opinion.
How did something based around decentralization, end up completely destroying variety and driving really banal conformity.
Sorry, have to rush off, I have to do a post about how AI won't take your job, but someone using AI will. I have to state that things are faster than ever. I have to say "this is the worst AI will ever be", I have to write something about brand purpose at the speed of culture. I have to do a piece on why we'll all use agentic flows to buy things for us, or why Gen Alpha have no attention span or why personalization at scale is the future. Or anyone of the same 50 things that everyone seems to talk about,. And nobody ever thinks about.
“How did something based around decentralization, end up completely destroying variety and driving really banal conformity.”
Prince said the web was dead in the early 2000s if I recall correctly - I understood exactly what he meant. Even then you could see its trajectory was towards bland conformity - no more niches , no more weird net-art etc.
Spot on again. We have trained the world to survive in and exist on the attention economy. Only those being paid attention to can ever hope to benefit financially. Yet conflating what we’ve been taught is an emotional , psychological and requisite for self affirmation and success, we don’t realize the more we consume the more malnourished we become. I’m just glad none of this existed until decades after college and my young self. Remember all those Jonathan Kozol books on why Johnny can’t read? Why can t Johnny sit in a chair for more than 3 minutes without a Red Bull or dopamine stimulation?
Gerrit: Wow. You and I must be looking at very different stuff online. But if we have different interests (which is likely), then it makes sense that we would have different online experiences.
For my part, my twin passions are music and theoretical physics/foundations of physics, with an abiding interest in history, and the origin and nature of consciousness. That’s plenty to keep me engaged, stimulated, and inspired by the vast quantity of REAL information on the Intertubes.
To wit, the amount and quality of music available online to discover and learn from vastly exceeds my available time to view/hear it, let alone assimilate it all. Sit me down with a guitar and the apparently inexhaustible plethora of YouTube videos by musicians I respect and who inspire me, and I couldn’t possibly be bored.
As far as physics is concerned, we are in exciting times. There is…well, I don’t call it a crisis in fundamental physics, but others blow that horn to get attention. Nevertheless, the reign of quantum theory as an impenetrable mystery — and it has been sold that way for nearly a century — is beginning to crack. The great philosopher-physicists of the 20th century (such as Albert Einstein, Arthur Eddington, and John Bell) set a great example for those who appreciate the practical utility of successful theories, but also want to know “What does it actually MEAN?”.
Alas, the dominance (…or, dare I say it, quasi-tyranny) of idiosyncratic perspectives like the Copenhagen interpretation was accompanied by an unfortunate mentality that eschewed inquiries into the philosophically questionable aspects of that interpretation, as infamously codified in the mantra “Shut up and calculate.” The proposition that there might be other formulations that are more ontologically intuitive—yet, which provide the same utility for making testable predictions that actually work—has been dismissed for the last 100 years, and that edifice of deliberate ignorance is now seen as being just as wobbly, creaky, and intellectually impoverished as it has always seemed to me, and should seem to anyone who is interested in fundamental principles.
But now the emperor is now seen to be butt-naked. Inquiries into the nature of consciousness have yielded empirical evidence that strongly suggests that consciousness is a quantum phenomenon, but it has also shown that quantum mechanics as currently formulated cannot possibly be a complete theory, as famously asserted by no less an intellect than Nobel Prize winning physicist Sir Roger Penrose, who is among those who are probing physics at a fundamental level, challenging the “conventional wisdom”, and creating new theories that represent significant advances in fundamental knowledge.
This isn’t just esoteric stuff, accessible only to Ph.D. physicists. Watch one (or more) of Sir Roger’s plentiful YouTube videos on Conformal Cyclic Cosmology(CCC), which he explains clearly with his own hand-drawn diagrams that any reasonably intelligent humanoid can understand—even non-physicists. It answers many questions that the conventional wisdom (the Standard Model) has insisted should not be asked, such as, “What happened before the Big Bang?” The stock answer has been, “There was no ‘before’ the Big Bang. Space and time were created with the Big Bang.”
That has always sounded like bullshit to me, and I’m a physicist. Turns out, according to Sir Roger’s CCC, that’s exactly what it is, and there is empirical evidence to support the theory. Hooray! Definitely NOT boring shit…well, to me anyway.
So what about quantum theory? Turns out, it’s not “wrong”; it’s just incomplete. It’s not the whole story. So, despite the persistent blathering of those who insist “Einstein was wrong!” (in his famous EPR paper), it turns out that he was exactly correct in concluding that quantum theory is incomplete. What’s more, although he wasn’t happy about what he called “spooky action at a distance” (non-locality), his EPR paper actually predicted quantum entanglement, which has been experimentally verified by Clauser, Aspect, and Zeilinger, who were awarded the 2022 Nobel Prize in physics for that work. (And incredibly, the Nobel Prize committee’s summary of what they proved is flat out wrong, as pointed out by Tim Maudlin, founder of the John Bell Institute for the Foundations of Physics.
I’m not kidding, and this is not just my opinion. Among the many, many folks who understand Bell’s Theorem, it’s a glaring embarrassment that the Nobel Committee got it wrong, only they’re evidently not smart enough to be embarrassed. From the perspective of one who understands the kind of frozen thinking that drives the predictable behaviors you identify in your Post, it’s actually pretty good comedy that the Nobel Committee is clueless. A quick perusal of the clown show they’ve made of the “Peace Prize” actually makes the physics gaffe somewhat predictable.
And we’re not even stuck with “the impenetrable mysteries of quantum theory”. A new formulation by theoretical physicist Jacob Barandes revolutionizes the ontological basis of quantum theory, replacing the standard mathematical abstraction of “Hilbert spaces” (which is unfathomable to yer average normal humanoid) with actual physical particles that have position and momentum, yet his reformulation yields exactly the same predictions as standard quantum mechanics!
What about the tyranny of string “theory” — in quotation marks because, unlike every other well-established, practical physical theory that is robustly corroborated and yields derivative technologies that are practical, useful, and improve people’s lives, string “theory” makes no predictions that can be experimentally tested. Yes, its purely mathematical formulations are clever, even elegant; but it proposes nothing that can actually be observed. For decades, up-and-coming physicists found that their career prospects were dim if their interests were not in or connected to string theory. And now, one of the founders and long-time, most die-hard proponents of string theory (Leonard Susskind) has finally admitted “We have to start over.” String theory isn’t dead, but it’s a sinking ship.
I could go on, but instead, if you have any interest in deep fundamental questions about nature, existence, consciousness, and physical reality, check out Curt Jainmungal’s Substack and YouTube channel called Theories of Everything. Definitely NOT formulaic bullshit.
I mentioned my interest in history. I’m currently resurrecting my long-standing interest in WW2—a subject I’ve been studying for the last 46 years. There’s certainly no shortage of credible sources online, but who are the REAL experts—the ones who are challenging the conventional wisdom, stripping away the propaganda, busting the myths, and getting down to the truth? Check out the YouTube channel Unauthorized History of the Pacific War, and you will see who they are: Seth Paridon, Jon Parshall, Dr. Richard Frank, Dr. Craig Symonds, John McManus, and many others—all of them credible, highly respected career historians whom you’ve probably never heard of, but who aren’t afraid to speak the truth with integrity.
But there’s another aspect of my online experience that is very much the opposite of boring: interacting with intelligent people in rational, civilized discourse between people who are NOT looking to score a “Gotcha” (you know…assholes), or get “likes”, amass subscribers, or market themselves. To be clear, I don’t disparage anyone who has built a following of paying customers who voluntarily pay for value received. I wish them all the success they hope for. I’m just not at the point in my life where that’s important to me. Making genuine connections is my interest, and I don’t want it to be “work”, if you know what I mean. I’m betting you do.
Toward that end, the vast majority of what I write on Substack is in Comments in reply to Posts, and in replies to Notes. Some of my replies are good enough to be Posts in their own right. In fact, I’ve been saving my replies in another app, and one of these days I’ll Postify ‘em. But the motivation for creating them was/is to respond to real people in a way that engages what they have written. It is almost never couched in terms of “disagree”. I respond to stuff that resonates with me. For example, your Post mentions discovering new ideas to which you have been referred by others. That’s exactly what I’m doing. I’ve found some great people on YouTube who distill, refer to, or promote others who are genuine experts, not so much by credentials (although those are plentiful), but by real-world experience. It has taken a while to separate the wheat from the chaff. but it’s definitely doable.
Anyhow, I’ve just scratched the surface of the online treasures that fascinate me. I realize that my interests are my own, and while I admit that I don’t understand why everyone isn’t interested in the stuff I find fascinating (heh…just kidding…sort of), I very definitely DO understand that everyone is different, and it is a stone-cold, hard fact that different people have different interests. Period. End of rap. The check’s in the mail. It’s just 10 minutes from here. Call me tomorrow. The dog ate my homework. 😎
Wait what? No. What makes you think generative ai is going to give you the best of the best of contemporary thought? I’m already divorced from Substack because I have a real life, so much of what you say I agree with. Generative ai might help you with traditional philosophy because there’s a lot of text to generate an answer from. But someone who’s good in the here and now is not going to come up.
Hi Aron. I don't disagree.
I would still prefer to be introduced to ideas through people, and do find those recommendations do open other avenues. However, over the past month AI has introduced me to several new thinkers I didn't know existed. I wish I'd known of Byung-Chul Han work a decade ago. It took me describing to a GenAI what I was trying to do with my writing and requesting inspiration, that I stumbled across his books.
I think relying on GenAI, and on the internet alone to understand the world would be incredibly depressing. As I tell my daughter; it's by bumping into the world that we learn who we are and discover what we love. Everything else is there to feed your curiosity. Choose wisely where you spend your time and what you consume.
The Internet is food for LLMs. It's how they learn. It stopped being useful quite a while ago. There's no going back. Once they have all they need and can generate their own questions, we can get back to analog life. Finally!