Drifting into monoculture
I’m reviewing cloud backup and services for work and am feeling the same way I do every time I do a bunch of reviews of software in the same category: all of these apps are slowly becoming the same. The backup applications are all adding cloud syncing features; the cloud syncing apps are all adding backup features. They’re converging.
In the media industry there’s a concept called channel drift. The basic idea is that TV channels change over time. Sometimes the change is dramatic, like when the Outdoor Life Network acquired the rights to NHL games, noticed those games got higher ratings than documentaries about fishing, and basically became a generic sports station overnight. (Today it’s called NBCSN.)
More often, though, this change is gradual. A lot of the channels that existed in the 90s (back when people actually watched TV channels) had a specific kind of content. MTV, for example, played music videos. The History Channel played history documentaries. Now both of those channels basically air only reality TV shows. This wasn’t anyone’s plan—both stations just tried a few shows, realized it made them more money for less effort, and then kept doing that until it’s impossible to tell whether the hotel-room TV is tuned to MTV or the History Channel. They drifted into the same, numerically optimized, idea.
There was a time when I thought the internet would upend this homogenization by making it easy for anyone to share their weird creations with the world. That was before the rise of social networks and widespread A/B testing. Now channel drift is everywhere. Have you noticed that every news site is running the same headlines about Elon Musk and Twitter right now? There’s a reason for that: they’re getting traffic. The numbers drive the topics, and over time everything becomes the same.
Derek Thompson, writing for The Atlantic, recently explained how a similar force shaped baseball, to the point where every team plays more-or-less identical strategies:
I think what happened is that baseball was colonized by math and got solved like an equation. The analytics revolution, which began with the movement known as Moneyball, led to a series of offensive and defensive adjustments that were, let’s say, catastrophically successful. Seeking strikeouts, managers increased the number of pitchers per game and pushed up the average velocity and spin rate per pitcher. Hitters responded by increasing the launch angles of their swings, raising the odds of a home run, but making strikeouts more likely as well. These decisions were all legal, and more important, they were all correct from an analytical and strategic standpoint. Smarties approached baseball like an equation, optimized for Y, solved for X, and proved in the process that a solved sport is a worse one. The sport that I fell in love with doesn’t really exist anymore.
The article goes on to say the same thing is happening in music, film, and TV—we’re retreading the same ideas, again and again.
Another article that’s stuck in my head compares and contrasts two shows that I’ve yet to watch: House of the Dragon and The Lord of The Rings: The Rings of Power. Kathryn VanArendonk, writing for Vulture, starts the article by saying in theory these two shows have very different worldviews but are driven by the same commercial impulse:
Both series are presented as shining new jewels in the streaming pantheon, and they are! Nearing the end of their first seasons, though, it’s painfully clear that they are conservative plays, efforts to make and remake things that were already successful and serve them to audiences again, like last night’s roast chicken turned into today’s chicken salad. Don’t get me wrong — I am fond of chicken salad. There is always a place for it, and TV, with its seasonal structures and yearslong productions, is a particularly apt medium for the familiar thing that returns in slightly new iterations. Still, House of the Dragon and The Rings of Power resemble smooth replicas rather than exciting new reworkings. That A/B test sensation comes out of their cultural proximity but also because the shows shine with the unmistakable shellac of extensive market testing.
So much of our culture has that shellac right now. I’m sick of it. I’m ready for shit to get weird again. How can we speed that process up? Email me if you have any ideas.
Stuff I Wrote
- Google Chrome’s new tab page is a mess. Here’s how to make it better. PopSci Google started putting ads in the new tab page which annoyed me so I wrote a thing.
- 3 ways to avoid falling down a YouTube rabbit hole PopSci YouTube is designed to waste as much of your time as possible. You can fight back.
- How to Make Slack Look and Feel Like Discord WIRED Just because you’re at work doesn’t mean you can’t feel like you’re having fun.
- Elephant Drive review PCMag This is the first cloud storage review from a batch I’ve been working on. Stay tuned.
Stuff I Did
It finally rained out here! The smell of smoke went away and, more importantly, we managed to find some mushrooms. Look at this haul:
I’m also thinking about brewing some pumpkin ale before thanksgiving. I should buy those ingredients soon.
Thoughts on social media versus newsletters
I’ve been thinking a lot about how I need to change my relationship with social media. This article by Max Read gave voice to an idea I’ve had for a while:
> But something that has become very clear to me over the last year is that Twitter isn’t just a waste of time, it’s where good ideas go to die. If I were still on Twitter, many of the most popular posts I’ve written this year would have ended up as an uncompensated, half-thought-through tweet or three – questions or glib observations fizzling out somewhere in the feed. Instead they became three-quarters-of-the-way-thought-through 1600-word newsletter columns with jokes decent enough to entice new subscribers.
I don’t have near the audience Max does, but I have been turning more thoughts that I would previously have tweeted into the abyss are instead here, in a newsletter that over a hundred of you actually read. I hear back from you all the time, which I love so much.
I hope we can keep growing this little community.