Ask HN: Are the 2020s the decade of peak homogenisation?

Media consolidation we've evolved into is nuts. Disney has turned American national culture into a creamy smoothie, Sinclair and Clear Channel have made radio and television across municipalities into photocopied and rubber-stamped content, and the Internet killed local newspapers.

We used to have a monolithic mainstream culture and a handful of subcultures. There is still a mainstream, but the subcultures have proliferated, and now are so niche and rapidly evolving that they're difficult to even track as real. Meanwhile, Sunday night football and Simpsons reruns keep chugging along unchanged for decades.

Although it was the cultural left that warned against media consolidation, we basically have the Telecommunications Deregulation Act of 1994 to blame for a lot of this. So, thanks Bill.

"Netflix / Disney etc seem to have copped onto one idea that works and just release the same tv show / movie over and over again with a slight tweak as it brings the money in without any worries."

This is the golden age of streaming. There's more diversity in show types on Netflix alone than across all platforms (movies, tv, direct to video) in the 90s. Paramount is almost entirely devoted to new Star Trek properties and HBO Max releases a new movie every month. If you aren't seeing innovation in story-telling its because you are a Philistine.

This question has real "kids today" energy.

Broadly, I'm seeing this as being the age of "quality doesn't matter". The larger the market, the worse it is for you to be unique and different.

The great cultural product of the past usually had many cooks, that all had personality and a deeper understanding of the process (for music it was the studio musicians and sound engineers that added another level to the production, while movies had way more crew that often clashed with the director just to improve the end result -- like cinematographers and set designers).

Combined with a loss in intergenerational experience transfer, no wonder it's memes that are the most original of all contemporary cultural products.

Jokes aside, have you heard about this hypothesis that because TV and Video are transmitting the same (usually American) shows all over the world, they are also transmitting the "sensibility" and this leads to a "monoculture"?

Not saying I agree or disagree, but if you are interested, you should look it up.

Edit: found an updated look at the concerns in the age of streaming: https://www.vox.com/the-goods/2019/12/17/21024439/monocultur...

And this is their definition:

"What Was the Monoculture? The monoculture seems to refer to some ill-defined age of universality made up of everything from Johnny Carson hosting the Tonight Show to Friends, Seinfeld, and The Office — the 20th-century aegis of white, middlebrow American entertainment, usually starring white Americans. This was also the ascendant era of broadcast media in radio, film, and linear television (the term for cable and network TV that isn’t on-demand). Industry gatekeepers made top-down decisions about what content would be made and when it would be shown, resulting in a lack of diversity that is only now beginning to change.

Monoculture is a Pleasantville image of a lost togetherness that was maybe just an illusion in the first place, or a byproduct of socioeconomic hegemony. It wasn’t that everyone wanted to watch primetime Seinfeld, but that’s what was on, and it became universal by default."

I see it as a narrowing of a three-tier culture. It used to be that we shared a cultural "core" (shows, bands, books, etc. that /everybody/ knew) and beyond that there were cultures shared by large portions of us and beyond that niche subcultures shared by small groups of us. Recently, it seems to me that the core has been eroded (there's not much that /everybody/ knows any more), the larger cultures have been over-commercialized (Disney Drivel), and the smaller subcultures are starved for exposure. Despite what many of these "platforms" recite about "discovery", a person nowadays has to really search to find a bona-fide niche, a real, independent cultural community.

There is low cost of entry, but all major platforms appeared to be manned by the same types of people. Who cares if it is easy to produce content when the censors demand conformity.

Consolidation/monopolization/globalism/etc has led to homogenization not just in the virtual world, but in the real world. All the cities in the world look alike. All the homes look alike. Everyone learns english and studies the same things. I watched a youtube vlog of the effects of sanctions on russia. A russian couple takes you to a russian mall and it's pretty much the exact same thing you'd find in any mall in the US. It's not like that just in russia but everywhere in the world. Why does burger king exist in japan, starbucks in france and mcdonalds in russia? The worst in many ways is china which mindlessly copied everything we did.

There was a time where I supported it for selfish reasons. If everyone spoke english and had american stores, it'd be easy for me as a visitor. And it was. But now, I find it pathetic and sad. Sadly, the homogenization will only accelerate as globalism gets even more entrenched.

One big argument in the thread is that mass culture was always mediocre but I think that's just wrong. If I look at the music I like it's to a large degree electronic, rock, popular music from the 60s to late 80s. Bowie, Daft Punk, Clash, Aphex Twin, dozens more.

Same with videogames. People need to take a look at what was released in a single year like 1998. Banjo Kazooie, Starcraft, Half Life, Metal Gear Solid, Ocarina of Time, etc. They still milk these franchises right now, and they've barely made any new ones since. They used to actually invent new genres of games every year.

No different with movies. My favorite movies like Strangelove, Alien, 2001, Psycho, Godfather, all ordinary mass culture stuff but great. Virtually everything in the cinemas right now is awful in comparison.

And I literally cannot be accused of nostalgia because I wasn't even born. Not just is everything homogenous but it's old. Science fiction now consists of Blade Runner remakes and Dune and Star Wars and Cyberpunk frozen in the aesthetics that are half a century old.

For people who disagree I have basically a simple question. Can they name something that is as new in form to us right now as Blade Runner was back then, or as punk and electronic music were in the 70s and 80s?

Finding good content always has and likely always will be like swimming in an ocean of mediocrity and clinging to a piece of floating weeknight saving originality. Often those are the things that survive the test of time while all the meh to okay content is forgotten about.

Individual artists have more power than ever before to create art, maybe that doesn't work great to earn a living but we're still out there doing it making great shit. You just have to look for art in places that aren't spotify, dribble and instagram. Those are vehicles to make money, rarely does an artist staying true to their wild individualistic vision make money, change the industry etc. (though there are still obvious examples, Kanye comes to mind) but for every artist doing great work in the public eye there are a thousand you've never heard of because you don't put the time in to find them.

P.S. Limit copyright to like 10 years.

Very wrong. Streaming and DAWs have led to an explosion of creatives in a wide variety of directions. Not sure how you could view Kygo, Lil Uzi Vert, Bladee, Porter Robinson, Dylan Brady / 100 gecs, and Cashmere Cat as interchangeable.

How much time have you spent looking for unique "electronic dance music"? Have you gone to small local events showcasing house, techno, grime, etc? Have you found the small sections of the internet where people are innovating new electronic sounds?

How often do you search for unique audiovisual content creators? On the large sites sure, but everywhere in between?

A low cost of entry, combined with a low overhead to find something close to what you want, means that, sure, there is both a lot of sameness and that sameness seems to be staring you in the face.

When you look below the surface though, a huge amount of content is getting created, by people who in the past might not have been able to. Electronic music artists who couldn't afford physical synths, drum machines, and recording equipment. Visual artists who can do more with a phone than almost anyone with specialized cameras.

So peak homogenisation? No.

Peak content output per person? Probably also no, it's still going up, but I suspect this is what you are observing.

That being said! If you're a totalitarian dictator in how you curate your feeds, you'll get the good stuff. Like, my YouTube feed has zero "surprised fucking stupid face" thumbnail channels. If I check incognito mode YouTube, that's all I ever see and it's all derivative, low effort. I have tech essays, writing essays, woodblock printing, photography tutorials and lots of other good stuff on my heavily curated feeds. I also make it a habit to follow up on creators recommendations.

There's effort in finding cool stuff... and to be fair, I feel there always was a certain amount of effort to find "the cool". So... maybe you're putting too much faith in the almighty algorithm.

If happen from handwriting to print, it happen from the printed press era to the TV era etc. That's honestly normal. Take planes: in the past be a pilot was not only expensive but just few are skilled enough and want enough to be trained for years to finally be called pilots. These days automation make piloting not much different than driving a car. It's perfectly natural that most pilots nowadays are almost interchangeable and not much skilled.

The issue is preserving at least some skilled to have some "masters" able to teach others just in case, because we can predict a bit the future but not more than a bit and re-learn things long lost in the past is far less easier than just being trained again by someone who know.

Saying that there is a peak means that something is changing the trend now reverse, and well... I see no reverse so far. So I can answer no. But number of people who start ranting about the topic augment at a certain peace so perhaps we are approaching a peak, can't really answer, what I can say is that nothing last really long if it does not work that well so at a certain point in time movies that are just showcases of special effects, bot-written news, remixed music randomly etc will forcibly fade. A certain part of our society want homogenization for industrial/business/political purpose and that's in general not just about digital media: car's are standard and even the few carmakers on the market remaining makes agreements on common features, dress are essentially evolved to be the same in all cultures in daily life etc but when something in nature became homogeneous it start to be weak so...

2) It's what happens at every single intersection of profit and scale that we've encountered in human history to date, so no, that's not new. It's just received greater facilitation via technology.

3) It's what happens whenever the barrier to entry is lowered, so no, that's not new. It's just received greater facilitation via technology.

4) It is parasitic behavior driven by people and companies and etc who are focused primarily on extracting (wealth, revenue, profit, status, whatever) rather than creating/producing guided by some vision/purpose, and again, no, that isn't new. It's just received greater facilitation via technology.

Art has long been a refuge for people who have other problems in life. Tech keeps looking for ways to ensnare eyeballs to ads and wallets to subscriptions.

If you combine the following three things:

- the number of people seeking refuge is increasing due to whatever you want to call the current social factors,

- modern digital art tools enable people to create aesthetically pleasant but not necessarily original things nearly instantly,

- these tools are modern tech properties owned by profit-seeking firms needing ROI in the modern financial landscape,

then you get what we have now.

This may seem like a bad thing, but it encourages new tools and when they get in the hands of truly capable artists, it's worth it.

Original stuff is out there, you just have to look hard. But you always had to look really hard for the good original stuff. For example: look at comic books pre-Internet. Most of them were very similar.

Reliable, low-risk, formulaic ROI is the inevitable, and terminal, outcome of mass production entertainment.

If you're looking for creative risk taking in Netflix and Disney then you're looking in the wrong places.

I disagree with electronic music though, loads of people listen to pop radio music or mainstream bigroom EDM (it all sounds the same but its been like that since the start) but you can still find great new music in almost any genre you want. It's not as if all the great producers are starting to sound the same.

I don't think an individuality was in favor more yesterday then today.

I think that today we have an exponential growth of number of ways we consume some informations, while number of good ideas grows not that fast.

The best entry into this underworld is podcasting. There are literally millions of podcasts now on every conceivable niche topic and they are so cheap to distribute that there isn't a single dominant aggregator like YouTube. If you can deal with that medium, you'll find a whole universe of creativity.

If you have Android, you can get the Doggcatcher podcasting app ,which doesn't tie to a single aggregator, and explore the vast intellectual underworld yourself.

1. 'Mainstream' culture - what you hear on the radio or in gyms, see in cinemas, etc. - is getting increasingly homogeneous as it has to cater to the lowest global denominator. This is both because of greater global reach, and because:

2. "Non-mainstream" culture - stuff you have to explicitly look for, and will have relatively small audiences - is doing great. In the sense that there are tons of content out there for all tastes, you can easily access it, but BECAUSE there is something out there for everyone, mostly it has very small market shares and will remain that way.

So there is both consolidation of mainstream and fragmentation of non-mainstream that reinforce each other. The problem is, it makes mainstream stuff worse, more bland (has to appeal to lowest common denominator), and it makes non-mainstream stuff appear niche and unpopular (because each individual niche is unpopular).

As an example - amazing new music being released in the NewRetroWave genre. But you'll never hear it unless you look for it, while 'mainstream' music in the charts is junk. That leads to the feelings of alienation, that today's culture is worse etc. - and it is true. Because of the small reach, you will never hear a retrowave band playing live in an expensive arena with top quality sound engineers. If you are into that kind of music, you will never feel a part of a generation that is into it, because everyone in this generation is into their own niche thing.

Perhaps by successful corporations in contexts where "doing what works" is the safer bet (like you said, Disney). But of course it's not seen that way by individuals.

Overall I think you're just perceiving popular culture, not artistic mediums in general. E.g. for your point about EDM, maybe you're thinking of the music you hear in clubs or web radio, but the blanket indictment of EDM you've put forward is not correct I think.

The feedback loops in our system function in such a way that edge-case creativity, the fun and weird stuff that via an incubation period eventually evolve into Nirvana, the Dead, Films (not movies), Warhol, get digested and broadcast to the broader culture too quickly for the creativity to actually develop. We get a mediocre version of it as a result. Put another way, its hard for a counter-culture to develop because Tiktok, Insta, FB, Netflix production pipelines, etc.

The Society of the Spectacle is a dense but short book that covers parts of this feeling - "Debord traces the development of a modern society in which authentic social life has been replaced with its representation..." [0]

Also, Moxie Marlinspike talks about something similar with Signal in that by having end-to-end private chats, it allows that safe space but in a digital context for ideas to develop between trusted parties, which then leads into creativity (or I suppose extremism etc).

[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Society_of_the_Spectacle

New, innovative, exciting cultural ideas come from small niche groups of people that are motivated by furthering those ideas. The further from those groups you get, the more easily-accessible, lowest common denominator, standardized and banal those ideas get.

I've found when I was young, more ideas were new to me, so I misattributed what really was standard and easy vs what was new and novel. But also, because so many ideas were new, and were new to my peers, if I did take an interest in one, I had a ready group of friends and colleagues that made finding the groups of people who truly were creating new ideas much easier.

As I age, if I haven't kept in touch with such innovative cultural groups, the ideas and media I am exposed to trends towards the standard and easily-mass-acceptible. And the fact that I have knowledge in those ideas already, makes it less likely for me to accidentally accept the mass-standardized ideas as novel.

But there absolutely are new cultural drivers out there. They just, clearly, aren't in the electronic dance music you're being exposed to. Innovative movie ideas aren't being pushed by Netflix and Disney. Etc

If you search recipes on Google, you'll get a lot of mediocre 4.7 star recipes. YouTube actually gives better results because it can't be SEOed as easily; we still don't have content creators who put 80% of the budget into marketing.

Disney+ actually has a lot of incredible stuff. I've been watching Pixar shorts more than many other things lately. But this stuff doesn't get into the front page. Same goes for say, TikTok or Google Play. You'll have to dig deeper.

Netflix I feel is on a downturn where they stop showing niche things like Adventure Time and My Little Pony and churn out formulaic original content designed to get people hooked, and lower their costs. Which why a lot of it leans towards sex and shock.

There is a solution that nobody really does: manual content curation. The catch is you can't aim to make lots of money, because once you do, you become the mainstream front page.

Majority of people will only watch what is trending, it creates a feedback cycle that perpetuates that kind of content which is popular with the mainstream. And whatever is mainstream is usually homogenised and boring.

As someone who watches quite a lot of movies, I always felt that they peaked sometime in the 70s.

Disney is definitely more guilty of what you're saying because they have a massive back catalog and get by mostly by buying existing IP or rebooting their own.

For example if you dislike Netflix / Disney approach, you have platforms such as MUBI (https://mubi.com/) where you have handpicked selections of worldwide movies, with lot of more artsy and unusual styles.

Regarding music I cannot even start to imagine how you can say this, there is almost no limit to how many different genre and niche, unique content is available even just on Youtube or Bandcamp.

There's too much good stuff out there with AvE, This Old Tony, Beau of the Fifth Column, Post 10, Joe Pieczynski, and all the rest of the 582 Youtube channels that I've found so far.

There's a ton of great stuff out there, you don't even have to look very hard to find it. If all else fails there's r/mealtimevideos to help point you in the right direction over on reddit.

Can anyone share some recommendations how you find original indie books, games, music?

If you don’t like the aesthetic of late 90s-early 00s bubblegum europop you probably won’t enjoy it, but the self-awareness and latent darkness make it interesting in my eyes.

The kids are going to run their mouths about your age. Ignore them.

If you think 'something's GOT to give' you might be right, but when? When is anybody's guess.

Ok, downvote me already.

https://www.amazon.com/Culture-Industry-Selected-Routledge-C...

basically what happened is capitalism and capitalism means that companies and individuals seek out creating goods that make the most instead of contributing to culture

this is the answer to why all music sounds the same and all art looks the same