Is There a Crisis of Seriousness? - by Ted Gioia - 0 views
www.honest-broker.com/...-there-a-crisis-of-seriousness
shared by Javier E on 14 Nov 24
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seriousness fake action entertainment authenticity culture crisis US history
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Back in 1996, critic Susan Sontag warned that seriousness was disappearing from society. She feared that the inherent laziness of consumerism was now permeating everything. Anything tough or demanding was bad for business
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And everything had been turned into a business—even intangibles like education and human flourishing.
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“The undermining of standards of seriousness is almost complete,” she declared, “with the ascendancy of a culture whose most intelligible, persuasive values are drawn from the entertainment industries.”
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In this frivolous new world, everything must be pleasing and inoffensive. Everything and everybody gets marketed like an exciting new product—even old, creepy politicians, or ancient film actors, or 80-year-old rock stars.
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Let’s stay with 1996 for a moment—because it was a turning point. Before that time, Susan Sontag had been very receptive to popular culture—movies, commercial music, and campy pop art. But each of these was becoming unrecognizable in their turn-of-the-century guises.
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These films were all different—but they had one thing in common: overwhelming special effects. In the final years of the twentieth century, computer technology had reached a level where massive levels of destruction could be shown on screen with an immediacy never before possible. Technology was setting the agenda for creativity. Everything else—script, directing, acting, was subservient to the computer-generated imagery. But 1996 was just the beginning of cinema as a digital spectacle. With each passing year, the artificial digital component has increased, and the real human element decreased. The advent of AI will now accelerate this even further. We may soon reach the point where nothing on the screen is real.
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Carlyle rightly mocks the citizens of France who, in those days, put so much trust in paper—whether the deceptive newspapers or the collapsing paper currency. Humans had once created a Stone Age and an Iron Age—but now settled for the Age of Paper.
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By implication, we live today in a digital age—or the Age of Less-Than-Paper. It doesn’t help that that cutting edge technologies are focused so much on deception—fake images, fake video, fake audio, fake books by fake authors, fake songs by fake musicians, fake news, fake everything.
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Fake is our leading candidate for word of the century. It captures almost everything relevant now in a single syllable.
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So are you surprised that everything in culture has a feeling of unreality right now? It’s like cotton candy that shrinks to nothing as soon as you put it in your mouth, just leaving a brief sickly sweet taste.
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Never before in history has authenticity been in such short supply. That’s so much the case, that the very word authenticity is mocked. (I will write about that more in the future.)
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This is the flip side of our culture of artificiality. Anything that threatens the dominant fakeness with reality stirs up an intense backlash. The dreamer does not want to awaken from the dream.
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Here’s the scariest part of the story: Most of this is by design. Our culture is now obsessed with deception and misdirection—and it’s not just on the movie screen anymore. You see it everywhere, from cosplay conventions to bands wearing masks to the misguided virtual reality mania.
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A psychoanalyst would say that the hostility here is displaced—like people who kick the dog because they hate their boss.
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In a cotton candy society, everything feels insubstantial:People go to war online—in toxic Twitter posts—but it’s a fake war with the angriest combatants typically hiding behind avatars.People seek love online, but even here the fakeness is toxic—hence many are catfished (a term that didn’t exist a few years ago) by scammers pretending to be a romantic interest. People not only work and play online, but even construct their selves online—which is where their identity increasingly resides.
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Ah, the word action. That’s fallen out of favor, too—another symptom worth noting. Here’s the Google analysis of its usage since the year 1900.
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The decline in the word action accelerated during the same period that saw the rise (shown above) in the word fake. They are mirror images of the same cultural shift.
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Participants at Normandy and Selma were taking action. But soup hurlers operate at a symbolic level, or (let’s be honest) a less-than-symbolic level—because these paintings have no connection in any way with the issues at stake.
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The targeted paintings aren’t appropriate symbols of the evil they are supposed to represent. In fact, they embody the exact opposite.
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It’s not mere coincidence that anger and violence are targeted at objects that are inescapablyrealtangibleuniqueauthentic (that word again!)produced by human hand
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In an age of fakery, people who operate without seriousness will inevitably focus their hostility on precisely these cherished objects.
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he cluelessness in Cupertino is understandable. The dominant companies in Silicon Valley are threatened by reality and seriousness—which are like Kryptonite to the digital agenda. So these mishaps are inevitable. Fakery is now a business model. Reality is its hated competitor.
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here’s the most salient fact of all: People who have their act together are now taking things very seriously in there own lives. They aren't waiting for guidance from an app from the Apple Store or a post from an influencer.
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let’s call them leaders—because that’s what they will be. And that’s such a better word than influencer.
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Five years from now, the cultural landscape will look much different. I expect a lot will change in just the next 12 months.