If you haven’t read it already, The Expulsion of the Other by Byung Chul Han discusses the terrorism of sameness and also the ‘smoothification’ (my term not his haha) of the world. He gets less into the mechanisms, but I thought your explanation of market research was very interesting and reifying. At the beginning of the piece I more so found myself thinking of ‘depth scaffolding’s’ occurring in interpersonal relationships. Sometimes it can be nice to not have someone too ‘figured out’ (not that that is truly possible). Great piece :)
Brilliant exegesis on the cultural landscapes that you have been exploring over the recent months and years. Thanks for taking the time and sharing your ideas with us all. Hear, hear to the Suboptimal Revolution!
Tl;dr: Constraints breed creativity. Comfort kills creativity. Wabi-sabi. Too many cooks spoil the broth. Variety is the spice of life. Every crack tells a story. Uniformity leads to mediocrity.
Questions remain:
Does equal temperament tuning, which democratizes an instrument, giving every note a chance to be a root, create more or less depth in music?
Does just intonation (tuning is optimized to a single root note for mathematically perfect harmonies) create less depth?
How often do we confuse depth-shallowness with dissonance-consonance?
Does social dissonance lead to the consumption of aesthetic blandness (something predictable to balance the turmoil)?
Why is the elephant in the room pink?
Are guitar frets an optimization? Should we remove them, or contort them (ala Sonic Youth, or Cage’s prepared pianos) to create depth?
When everyone uses AI, will some people gain recognition for rare “alternative AI tuning” discoveries which output compelling content?
Is vinyl hiss depth? Should I add a layer of vinyl hiss to my music so as to better capture the entire world in my expressions?
I think the answer to these questions has to do with thresholds of redundancy, which basically boils down to time. It's always cool to see someone take a well hardened well traveled constraint like a piano and exceed what we perceived to be it's capacity. And that will probably always remain some kind of revelation space - but these days, I don't know about you, but even when I see the most outrageously excellent cellist or something, whatever excess they can produce beyond the constraints Is non-revelatory. My only "surprise" in the case of cellist is when the cellist is a small child or perhaps I would be surprised if I saw a monkey playing the cello well… At that point we want new instruments or you want to put on the cello or you want to change The apparatus in some sense. so it's a phenomenological question and of course it varies from person to person but it does vary I think culturally in a way that we can mark along some kind of temporal axis.
Interestingly, my favorite music to listen to these days is what I call the “liminal” genre (no relation to the liminal web). Aesthetically, it tends to be low-key, semi-ambient, high level of novelty at the level of sound craft (quirky round synths, electroacoustic aberrations, soft percussion). It’s like musical haiku. And I know nothing about the artists. Sometimes it sounds like it could all be the same artist. (This is partly because there are no lead vocals.) And when I do take a moment to look at an artist profile (on Spotify) they usually do not have a picture of their person or much of a bio, if any. It’s just these semi-anonymous artists toiling away making their humble understated sonic worlds for people like me. Compliments of the algorithm.
I’ve been finding this funny because it’s kind of what everyone criticizes about streaming platforms: They’re shoving the common-denominator of an aesthetic down my throat, and I thoughtlessly consume it, and build no relation to the persona of the artists.
But I love it. And I like the music because, among other things, you can feel that it was made with love.
That’s not to say the criticisms of streaming aren’t legit — just that art will find a way to thrive in any environment, no matter the limitations, nor even the over-optimizations. Especially music. Which is why music is the best :)
Hurrah. Well said. Thank you. The ‘problem’ with democracy is just that. Democracy applied to equal justice for all under the law and right to vote? Sure. Great. Democracy applied to cultural life - books kids can read in school, abortion, standardized-testing-über-alles? Nyet, nein, not ok.
What you’ve described I’ve heard Tik Tokers call the “Grayification” or the “Gray Era” referring to the prevalence of gray in Ikea-like interior design which has become popular, but expanding broadly to the averaging and dulling of everything. The flattening.
Great piece. Also loved your use of the word “Hedgefundification.” And “Happy Hippy Hope Stuff.”
Nice one. Most of this resonates a lot with how I feel and my own experiences. It made me think while reading that the algorithms have not only contributed to the apathy of discovering through experience but they have also perpetuated this thing that I myself you use to do when I was younger.. which is bullshit in order to not feel "out of the loop" - it happens a lot with books. When someone asks another if they've read a certain book, if that person who is being asked has even heard of the book they might say they've read it. Same with a movie or album.. even though they haven't. The homogenization of art is allowing for this to be actually ok because the nuisances are being erased from creativity. The ease in which you describe of how technology is tricking human's into thinking that life is easier if you just download this app.. etc.
I do think however, that optimal as an idea for certain things is to be leaned into. For instance, I have been diving deep into the audiophile world over the last few years and I've been trying to break this fratty, pretentious bullshit wide open. For too long, the way people talk about how sound is communicated has been alienating those that just want to listen to music in a way that sounds good. Therefore I describe music delivery systems as ether optimal or not optimal. Not optimal would be things like ear buds or most car stereos and even many of the bluetooth speaker systems you can listen to music from. Optimal would be the other systems that allow for the listener to hear the music being communicated in as close a way as the creator intended. I avoid using words such as best or greatest when describing sound systems because that includes a layer of salesmanship that to be is meant more for personal preference.
Optimal in regards to being efficient in order to achieve a desired outcome is also something not to be made scared of.. at time ; )
Thanks for the comment! The issue with optimal sound quality is an interesting one. I used to have this joke about today’s retro vinyl manufacturers continuing to optimize vinyl production until they finally stumble upon ...the CD...40 years after the CD. There are certainly ways to experience a given thing like vinyl optimally. And you can optimize within a given domain like headphones. But regardless that optimization is necessarily going to homogenize the experience. And sometimes that’s a good thing! For instance you may always only want to hear music in the very same way because you have optimized it and you like it that way. And as I sort of allude to in this article but don’t really get fully into, the experience of a homogenized world is something we dearly crave, something which is closely associated with bliss. The optimal sonic experience in general is probably one which sends you into a mindless satisfaction. It is for me anyhow. And yet the irony is that those states, if they are persisted in, negate our ability to live.
resurrecting this comment thread by mentioning this video on how modern editors removed Freddie Hubbard's 'stank face' in the quest for optimisation and perfection, thus completely missing the point of jazz entirely https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zMJSzN2yPkI
The inefficiency thesis is incrorrect. I can't believe Jim even let this argument go unchallenged.
Efficiency is what makes new things possible. If you are criticizing efficiency, you have a lack of imagination.
To criticize the route to an identical outcome because it is a smarter route is itself an attack on Genius. The missing detail is that Genius is known both through improvements in efficiency and through creating things that were previously impossible. That is surprising that you only see one side of Genius.
Nice idea. I like to think as this self-same uniformity in a ambivalent manner tough, I think that there can be unity - as in being one with the mother in the womb - later in life without it being something like inertia or symbolic death, but in the aspect of Love, in the sense of a union by keeping integrity of the individual, of course its a paradox, how can two be one, and one be two, but nevertheless. As Kierkegaard says "the thinker without a paradox is like a lover without feeling". And in this idea you presented I think there is a fair bit of it, like how can something that has the connotation of optimality can be detrimental to life and its inherent dynamicity.
In this context, optimization sounds like optimization for mass markets, hence commodification.
By Hotelling's Law, we can appreciate how things often need to be smoothed out in order to scale, i.e. to be commodious to the mass market.
And, regrettably (thankfully?), 'the average of persons' is not the same thing as an 'average person', so there is a kind of tragedy of the commons when it comes to mass media taste.
Question: is there is a folly in wanting both popularity and depth? As an artist, you feel this tension, no?
i wouldn't call market research democratization of the process of production. (i agree that the methods of market research and a lot of other psychological research recreate self-feeding loops and realize their own starting premises, but this aside) what it seems you're referrring to as the democratic aspect of the process is that you're gathering data ("opinions", "evaluations", etc) from large numbers of people. however, the ones who own, use and manage the data (as a resource) are always companies - not the people. so there is no democratization of the process of production in my opinion.
also, i think difference should be valued as a collective resource, not in itself. so, if someone has a "unique" (whatever this might mean) skill, idea, knowledge - this is only valuable if there is a way to make it a resource for others. in this sense, (technological) artefacts are objectivizations of new processes, ideas, skills and means that -democratize- them, render them potentially accessible to others. this is society, civilization.
i don't think technology homogenizes, or renders things less deep because it's easier to produce something that previously took more effort to make. it only takes the creative operations to another level of complexity. e.g. now that you don't need to draw something yourself, you are possibliy working on a more abstract level, you address different creative questions simply. for instance memes are very complex units of meaning - they use both text and image AND a symbollic/semantic layer (they mobilize a context everyone understands). which is substantially more complex then a simple sign, like a letter or a word (which is an arbitrary physical pattern that becomes symbol through use in social interaction) - memes are already signs that become still newEr signs.
i think trends exist in a moment in time, it's the first period of collective learning/generalization of a new tool. and i don't think it prohibits innovation -as trends do change over time.
but i do agree that new technology changes who we are, and in fact with most of your points because you talk about the entertainment industry and everything is shaped by fishing for algorithms that yield most profit at a given time, so you end up producing movies or music or whatever like you would ketchup. but the object is a bit different there, from small scale artistic work (although art isnt unaffected). sorry for the long reply and if i may have misunderstood your points. and thanks, i enjoy reading 🪸
When you outsource decision making power to others and ask them “which would you prefer, this tomato sauce or that” or find out their preferences and then make adjustments accordingly, that is the democratization of the given process. Or I suppose you could come up with another word for it, but it is the same thing as finding out our preferences with regard to a political candidate or anything else. To make the issue even more concrete and similar between politics and consumerism, we know that a lot of the time people vote not on issues but on aesthetics. There’s a famous example in the first televised debate where the people watching television thought that Kennedy won the debate and the people listening to radio thought that Nixon want it. The people thought Kennedy won it because he looked more handsome etc.
But if you collect a bunch of user data or do a bunch of market research and then you do NOT make any adjustments based on that research, then sure, that’s not democratization. But presumably you do that research precisely so that you do take the views of the people into account and make adjustments accordingly. And if you do, that is by definition the process of democratization.
Even if we think of this purely phenomenologically in terms of the people “feeling“ that they have power, it is the case that when you go to an audience screening, or do taste testing, etc., that you indeed do feel that you have power. You are being asked your opinion. Same thing with yelp reviews and ratings systems. It not only is democratization in actuality, but it feels like it.
Another example of this is the flattening of beauty by plastic surgery and insta filters. It reshapes every woman’s face to become the one face that is the altered face, they all look pretty but they all look alike. It’s the face. I love seeing a woman who hasn’t succumbed to this, her quirks and imperfections elevate her, I feel like I can see her better than the girls with the face.
Didn’t mean to hit send yet- I think this idea of sub- optimal is really interesting- I suspect the psychology is related to the leveling of discourse and creation of echo chambers. People optimizing for expression of particular views and in group inclusion at the expense of actual conversation? Maybe... just has me thinking...
Thinking aloud, the argument can be made that we can optimize for anything, but while that’s theoretically true it’s not practically true - we don’t optimize for difficulty. So yes, echo o chambers, self-sameness, etc. and of course there is belonging in that...
speaking of suboptimal, do typois counrt? found several in the text, now fixed... see, its a compulsion.
If you haven’t read it already, The Expulsion of the Other by Byung Chul Han discusses the terrorism of sameness and also the ‘smoothification’ (my term not his haha) of the world. He gets less into the mechanisms, but I thought your explanation of market research was very interesting and reifying. At the beginning of the piece I more so found myself thinking of ‘depth scaffolding’s’ occurring in interpersonal relationships. Sometimes it can be nice to not have someone too ‘figured out’ (not that that is truly possible). Great piece :)
I like Han, will definitely check this out thanks
Brilliant exegesis on the cultural landscapes that you have been exploring over the recent months and years. Thanks for taking the time and sharing your ideas with us all. Hear, hear to the Suboptimal Revolution!
Appreciate it
Tl;dr: Constraints breed creativity. Comfort kills creativity. Wabi-sabi. Too many cooks spoil the broth. Variety is the spice of life. Every crack tells a story. Uniformity leads to mediocrity.
Questions remain:
Does equal temperament tuning, which democratizes an instrument, giving every note a chance to be a root, create more or less depth in music?
Does just intonation (tuning is optimized to a single root note for mathematically perfect harmonies) create less depth?
How often do we confuse depth-shallowness with dissonance-consonance?
Does social dissonance lead to the consumption of aesthetic blandness (something predictable to balance the turmoil)?
Why is the elephant in the room pink?
Are guitar frets an optimization? Should we remove them, or contort them (ala Sonic Youth, or Cage’s prepared pianos) to create depth?
When everyone uses AI, will some people gain recognition for rare “alternative AI tuning” discoveries which output compelling content?
Is vinyl hiss depth? Should I add a layer of vinyl hiss to my music so as to better capture the entire world in my expressions?
What’s the optimal level of sub-optimization?
I think the answer to these questions has to do with thresholds of redundancy, which basically boils down to time. It's always cool to see someone take a well hardened well traveled constraint like a piano and exceed what we perceived to be it's capacity. And that will probably always remain some kind of revelation space - but these days, I don't know about you, but even when I see the most outrageously excellent cellist or something, whatever excess they can produce beyond the constraints Is non-revelatory. My only "surprise" in the case of cellist is when the cellist is a small child or perhaps I would be surprised if I saw a monkey playing the cello well… At that point we want new instruments or you want to put on the cello or you want to change The apparatus in some sense. so it's a phenomenological question and of course it varies from person to person but it does vary I think culturally in a way that we can mark along some kind of temporal axis.
Interestingly, my favorite music to listen to these days is what I call the “liminal” genre (no relation to the liminal web). Aesthetically, it tends to be low-key, semi-ambient, high level of novelty at the level of sound craft (quirky round synths, electroacoustic aberrations, soft percussion). It’s like musical haiku. And I know nothing about the artists. Sometimes it sounds like it could all be the same artist. (This is partly because there are no lead vocals.) And when I do take a moment to look at an artist profile (on Spotify) they usually do not have a picture of their person or much of a bio, if any. It’s just these semi-anonymous artists toiling away making their humble understated sonic worlds for people like me. Compliments of the algorithm.
I’ve been finding this funny because it’s kind of what everyone criticizes about streaming platforms: They’re shoving the common-denominator of an aesthetic down my throat, and I thoughtlessly consume it, and build no relation to the persona of the artists.
But I love it. And I like the music because, among other things, you can feel that it was made with love.
That’s not to say the criticisms of streaming aren’t legit — just that art will find a way to thrive in any environment, no matter the limitations, nor even the over-optimizations. Especially music. Which is why music is the best :)
Hurrah. Well said. Thank you. The ‘problem’ with democracy is just that. Democracy applied to equal justice for all under the law and right to vote? Sure. Great. Democracy applied to cultural life - books kids can read in school, abortion, standardized-testing-über-alles? Nyet, nein, not ok.
What you’ve described I’ve heard Tik Tokers call the “Grayification” or the “Gray Era” referring to the prevalence of gray in Ikea-like interior design which has become popular, but expanding broadly to the averaging and dulling of everything. The flattening.
Great piece. Also loved your use of the word “Hedgefundification.” And “Happy Hippy Hope Stuff.”
Nice one. Most of this resonates a lot with how I feel and my own experiences. It made me think while reading that the algorithms have not only contributed to the apathy of discovering through experience but they have also perpetuated this thing that I myself you use to do when I was younger.. which is bullshit in order to not feel "out of the loop" - it happens a lot with books. When someone asks another if they've read a certain book, if that person who is being asked has even heard of the book they might say they've read it. Same with a movie or album.. even though they haven't. The homogenization of art is allowing for this to be actually ok because the nuisances are being erased from creativity. The ease in which you describe of how technology is tricking human's into thinking that life is easier if you just download this app.. etc.
I do think however, that optimal as an idea for certain things is to be leaned into. For instance, I have been diving deep into the audiophile world over the last few years and I've been trying to break this fratty, pretentious bullshit wide open. For too long, the way people talk about how sound is communicated has been alienating those that just want to listen to music in a way that sounds good. Therefore I describe music delivery systems as ether optimal or not optimal. Not optimal would be things like ear buds or most car stereos and even many of the bluetooth speaker systems you can listen to music from. Optimal would be the other systems that allow for the listener to hear the music being communicated in as close a way as the creator intended. I avoid using words such as best or greatest when describing sound systems because that includes a layer of salesmanship that to be is meant more for personal preference.
Optimal in regards to being efficient in order to achieve a desired outcome is also something not to be made scared of.. at time ; )
Thank you for this Alex
Thanks for the comment! The issue with optimal sound quality is an interesting one. I used to have this joke about today’s retro vinyl manufacturers continuing to optimize vinyl production until they finally stumble upon ...the CD...40 years after the CD. There are certainly ways to experience a given thing like vinyl optimally. And you can optimize within a given domain like headphones. But regardless that optimization is necessarily going to homogenize the experience. And sometimes that’s a good thing! For instance you may always only want to hear music in the very same way because you have optimized it and you like it that way. And as I sort of allude to in this article but don’t really get fully into, the experience of a homogenized world is something we dearly crave, something which is closely associated with bliss. The optimal sonic experience in general is probably one which sends you into a mindless satisfaction. It is for me anyhow. And yet the irony is that those states, if they are persisted in, negate our ability to live.
resurrecting this comment thread by mentioning this video on how modern editors removed Freddie Hubbard's 'stank face' in the quest for optimisation and perfection, thus completely missing the point of jazz entirely https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zMJSzN2yPkI
Genius is not about being wrong, it's about being write on a different level.
Truth told through fiction, as an example.
Listening to the Jim Rutt show https://www.jimruttshow.com/alex-ebert/
The inefficiency thesis is incrorrect. I can't believe Jim even let this argument go unchallenged.
Efficiency is what makes new things possible. If you are criticizing efficiency, you have a lack of imagination.
To criticize the route to an identical outcome because it is a smarter route is itself an attack on Genius. The missing detail is that Genius is known both through improvements in efficiency and through creating things that were previously impossible. That is surprising that you only see one side of Genius.
Nice idea. I like to think as this self-same uniformity in a ambivalent manner tough, I think that there can be unity - as in being one with the mother in the womb - later in life without it being something like inertia or symbolic death, but in the aspect of Love, in the sense of a union by keeping integrity of the individual, of course its a paradox, how can two be one, and one be two, but nevertheless. As Kierkegaard says "the thinker without a paradox is like a lover without feeling". And in this idea you presented I think there is a fair bit of it, like how can something that has the connotation of optimality can be detrimental to life and its inherent dynamicity.
In this context, optimization sounds like optimization for mass markets, hence commodification.
By Hotelling's Law, we can appreciate how things often need to be smoothed out in order to scale, i.e. to be commodious to the mass market.
And, regrettably (thankfully?), 'the average of persons' is not the same thing as an 'average person', so there is a kind of tragedy of the commons when it comes to mass media taste.
Question: is there is a folly in wanting both popularity and depth? As an artist, you feel this tension, no?
i wouldn't call market research democratization of the process of production. (i agree that the methods of market research and a lot of other psychological research recreate self-feeding loops and realize their own starting premises, but this aside) what it seems you're referrring to as the democratic aspect of the process is that you're gathering data ("opinions", "evaluations", etc) from large numbers of people. however, the ones who own, use and manage the data (as a resource) are always companies - not the people. so there is no democratization of the process of production in my opinion.
also, i think difference should be valued as a collective resource, not in itself. so, if someone has a "unique" (whatever this might mean) skill, idea, knowledge - this is only valuable if there is a way to make it a resource for others. in this sense, (technological) artefacts are objectivizations of new processes, ideas, skills and means that -democratize- them, render them potentially accessible to others. this is society, civilization.
i don't think technology homogenizes, or renders things less deep because it's easier to produce something that previously took more effort to make. it only takes the creative operations to another level of complexity. e.g. now that you don't need to draw something yourself, you are possibliy working on a more abstract level, you address different creative questions simply. for instance memes are very complex units of meaning - they use both text and image AND a symbollic/semantic layer (they mobilize a context everyone understands). which is substantially more complex then a simple sign, like a letter or a word (which is an arbitrary physical pattern that becomes symbol through use in social interaction) - memes are already signs that become still newEr signs.
i think trends exist in a moment in time, it's the first period of collective learning/generalization of a new tool. and i don't think it prohibits innovation -as trends do change over time.
but i do agree that new technology changes who we are, and in fact with most of your points because you talk about the entertainment industry and everything is shaped by fishing for algorithms that yield most profit at a given time, so you end up producing movies or music or whatever like you would ketchup. but the object is a bit different there, from small scale artistic work (although art isnt unaffected). sorry for the long reply and if i may have misunderstood your points. and thanks, i enjoy reading 🪸
When you outsource decision making power to others and ask them “which would you prefer, this tomato sauce or that” or find out their preferences and then make adjustments accordingly, that is the democratization of the given process. Or I suppose you could come up with another word for it, but it is the same thing as finding out our preferences with regard to a political candidate or anything else. To make the issue even more concrete and similar between politics and consumerism, we know that a lot of the time people vote not on issues but on aesthetics. There’s a famous example in the first televised debate where the people watching television thought that Kennedy won the debate and the people listening to radio thought that Nixon want it. The people thought Kennedy won it because he looked more handsome etc.
But if you collect a bunch of user data or do a bunch of market research and then you do NOT make any adjustments based on that research, then sure, that’s not democratization. But presumably you do that research precisely so that you do take the views of the people into account and make adjustments accordingly. And if you do, that is by definition the process of democratization.
Even if we think of this purely phenomenologically in terms of the people “feeling“ that they have power, it is the case that when you go to an audience screening, or do taste testing, etc., that you indeed do feel that you have power. You are being asked your opinion. Same thing with yelp reviews and ratings systems. It not only is democratization in actuality, but it feels like it.
Another example of this is the flattening of beauty by plastic surgery and insta filters. It reshapes every woman’s face to become the one face that is the altered face, they all look pretty but they all look alike. It’s the face. I love seeing a woman who hasn’t succumbed to this, her quirks and imperfections elevate her, I feel like I can see her better than the girls with the face.
You’re welcome
Didn’t mean to hit send yet- I think this idea of sub- optimal is really interesting- I suspect the psychology is related to the leveling of discourse and creation of echo chambers. People optimizing for expression of particular views and in group inclusion at the expense of actual conversation? Maybe... just has me thinking...
Thinking aloud, the argument can be made that we can optimize for anything, but while that’s theoretically true it’s not practically true - we don’t optimize for difficulty. So yes, echo o chambers, self-sameness, etc. and of course there is belonging in that...