This post is a collection of a few thoughts I've had stewing in my head for a while now, first properly put into words in my DMs with @anthony. It is solely my view of things. Much of it is probably inconsistent, or based on skewed / outdated perceptions.
A pet theory of mine is that we've hit peak "independence" in art in the developed world. The internet-connection of all aspects of society has dispersed local status hierarchies, causing a brain drain away from immediately unfruitful endeavors and impairing the ability for "scenes" to develop on their own. While this no doubt creates great opportunities for a few independent artists, it condemns many, many more to languish in obscurity, demoralizing them before they can hone their craft into something unique.
This "flattening" applies to many more aspects than just cultural production. It also applies to science, economic development, and social class, depriving many of the less productive regions of the developed world (and, w/ the advent of mass immigration, the entire world) of competent scientists and managers. Consider the aspirations of elite Americans in the early 20th century...
... as opposed to those of today's cosmopolitan elite; the class whose children engage in a drawn-out, gruesome self-sacrifice to the Moloch of "academic achievement", in which they are expected to meticulously optimize their lives from ages four to eighteen for the consumption of college admissions officers, in the hopes of going to MIT, Stanford, or one of the Ivies. The few children who pass this gauntlet "win" the "opportunity" to "earn" the "privilege" of spending the first decade of their working lives in Harvard Law School, Silicon Valley, Wall Street, or another cramped crucible of high-stress hyper-competition. The human capital that used to go to developing local politics, business, and infrastructure has been redirected to jostling over a handful of jobs in trendy megacities.
Back to cultural production: I think it's undergone a similar process, albeit lagging the class one on account of the lower barrier to entry. Think of music, for instance, and the power it had only a few decades ago. Entire subcultures would form around style of music and adopt the attitudes of what they listened to: punks, goths, emos, rivetheads, etc... these groups no longer exist, except in pastiche. Digital music and streaming services were the music-subculture killers. Sure, they allow people to discover new music from obscure nooks of the world, or many decades ago; but at the cost of divorcing the music from its original presentation and context, turning it into nothing but sound, devoid of intentionality, impossible to rally around.
Video games are the same. I'd say "independence" in video games peaked in the mid-2000s. It was a golden age of novel game concepts, community / mod-based online multiplayer, flash games, tie-ins and "gamifications" of niche subjects (admittedly with a lot of shovelware thrown in). New games releases manage to surprise me less and less with each passing year, as the breakout success of a few titles - Minecraft, CS:GO, whatever the first "Ubisoft-core" sandbox games - has prompted everyone to start imitating them.
Most AAA game titles nowadays are converging towards a particular combination of public matchmaking / gacha microtransactions / long-term RPG elements, one designed to milk as much gachabux out of whales as humanly possible while aggravating the perpetual graphics pissing contest (hardcore users buy expensive gaming rigs -> games increase in graphical fidelity to appeal to them -> barrier to entry to play AND produce these games increases, making the games studios more reliant on the hard core and less likely to take risks).
I'd like to reiterate what all of these degradations have in common: people in the middle rungs of the hierarchy - the "feudal lords", higher-ups of their own small scenes - try to cozy up to those on the very top, using the same platforms and imitating aspects of their behavior, and, in doing so, lose the idiosyncracies that made them valuable and interesting in the first place. A homogenous, "flattened" global culture is the result.
I'll leave you with this post by agnostic, which describes the decline of subcultures and "wholesome" media-centric interaction more cogently than my meandering textwalls ever could:
A pet theory of mine is that we've hit peak "independence" in art in the developed world. The internet-connection of all aspects of society has dispersed local status hierarchies, causing a brain drain away from immediately unfruitful endeavors and impairing the ability for "scenes" to develop on their own. While this no doubt creates great opportunities for a few independent artists, it condemns many, many more to languish in obscurity, demoralizing them before they can hone their craft into something unique.
This "flattening" applies to many more aspects than just cultural production. It also applies to science, economic development, and social class, depriving many of the less productive regions of the developed world (and, w/ the advent of mass immigration, the entire world) of competent scientists and managers. Consider the aspirations of elite Americans in the early 20th century...
Quote:In living memory, every major city in the United States had its own old money families with their own clubs and their own rituals and their own social and economic networks. Often the money was not very old, going back to a real estate killing or a mining fortune or an oil strike a generation or two before. Even so, the heirs and heiresses set themselves up as a local aristocracy.
[...]
The status of Harvard and Yale as prestigious national rather than regional universities is relatively recent. A few generations ago, it was assumed that the sons of the local gentry (this was before coeducation began in the 1960s and 1970s) would remain in the area and rise to high office in local and state business, politics, and philanthropy—goals that were best served if they attended a local elite college and joined the right fraternity, rather than being educated in some other part of the country. College was about upper-class socialization, not learning, which is why parochial patricians favored regional colleges and universities. If your family was in the local social register, that was much more important than whether you went to an Ivy League college or a local college or no college at all.
... as opposed to those of today's cosmopolitan elite; the class whose children engage in a drawn-out, gruesome self-sacrifice to the Moloch of "academic achievement", in which they are expected to meticulously optimize their lives from ages four to eighteen for the consumption of college admissions officers, in the hopes of going to MIT, Stanford, or one of the Ivies. The few children who pass this gauntlet "win" the "opportunity" to "earn" the "privilege" of spending the first decade of their working lives in Harvard Law School, Silicon Valley, Wall Street, or another cramped crucible of high-stress hyper-competition. The human capital that used to go to developing local politics, business, and infrastructure has been redirected to jostling over a handful of jobs in trendy megacities.
Back to cultural production: I think it's undergone a similar process, albeit lagging the class one on account of the lower barrier to entry. Think of music, for instance, and the power it had only a few decades ago. Entire subcultures would form around style of music and adopt the attitudes of what they listened to: punks, goths, emos, rivetheads, etc... these groups no longer exist, except in pastiche. Digital music and streaming services were the music-subculture killers. Sure, they allow people to discover new music from obscure nooks of the world, or many decades ago; but at the cost of divorcing the music from its original presentation and context, turning it into nothing but sound, devoid of intentionality, impossible to rally around.
Video games are the same. I'd say "independence" in video games peaked in the mid-2000s. It was a golden age of novel game concepts, community / mod-based online multiplayer, flash games, tie-ins and "gamifications" of niche subjects (admittedly with a lot of shovelware thrown in). New games releases manage to surprise me less and less with each passing year, as the breakout success of a few titles - Minecraft, CS:GO, whatever the first "Ubisoft-core" sandbox games - has prompted everyone to start imitating them.
Most AAA game titles nowadays are converging towards a particular combination of public matchmaking / gacha microtransactions / long-term RPG elements, one designed to milk as much gachabux out of whales as humanly possible while aggravating the perpetual graphics pissing contest (hardcore users buy expensive gaming rigs -> games increase in graphical fidelity to appeal to them -> barrier to entry to play AND produce these games increases, making the games studios more reliant on the hard core and less likely to take risks).
I'd like to reiterate what all of these degradations have in common: people in the middle rungs of the hierarchy - the "feudal lords", higher-ups of their own small scenes - try to cozy up to those on the very top, using the same platforms and imitating aspects of their behavior, and, in doing so, lose the idiosyncracies that made them valuable and interesting in the first place. A homogenous, "flattened" global culture is the result.
I'll leave you with this post by agnostic, which describes the decline of subcultures and "wholesome" media-centric interaction more cogently than my meandering textwalls ever could: