Let me preface by saying that I have a guitar degree and play professionally, and I suck at Guitar Hero. There is very little in common between playing guitar and playing Guitar Hero, and the idea that if he could do one, why not spend the same time and do the other instead is hilariously wrong. Also, playing a Guitar Hero song at 200% speed and writing and recording a full album is an apples to oranges comparison, they have about as much in common as fencing and being able to cook great lasagna.
To your point, I don't see how this is any different than a lot of the goofy stuff people used to do for Guinness Book recognition, it's just on a larger scale. People have always done dumb things for attention. For what it's worth, in the time he spent working on this, most people just doomscroll on their phones, argue about things they have no exceptional insight about or power to change online, or any other manner of time wasting 21st century activities. So if "production" is the metric, and I hate that it is, he's producing more than most people do.
But using "produce something of value" as the metric of whether something is useful vs pointless is shaky reasoning. If this is the metric we're using, why bother to learn a language no one in your country speaks? Why bother reading philosophy books no one but philosophy majors care about? Why spend years getting a degree in a field that has very few jobs that don't pay much? "Value" is subjective, and this is doubly true in the hyper capitalistic times we're living in.
I agree with you though that this is a dystopian age for a lot of reasons including the ones you mention, and I really hope that the backlash that seems to be building against tech continues. Enjoyed reading this!
Great comment, you're right of course -sorry if unclear, the point of guitar hero is a *gateway drug* to being like "oh yeah this would be even more fun on the real thing" and getting out of the simulation and into that.
Guitar Hero and playing actual guitar are so different though that using GH as a "gateway drug" seems like a flawed methodology in my opinion. I'd be curious as to how many kids who have come to wanting to learn guitar after playing GH have actually stuck with it. Could be an interesting study.
Still, the fact that the simulation is so seductive and that there are powerful corporate interests heavily invested in as many people staying there for as long as possible is positively dystopian and seems like a nightmare version of the tobacco industry all over again.
The part I always come back to that you hit on here so well is just how empty this all is. None of it endures. This guy spent 9 months of his life dedicated to this so 99.9% of his viewers can get a 30 second dopamine hit on their phone's until they are on to the next one. In that 9 months he could have been so many long lasting connections and implemented wonderful practices to his life, but instead all he gets is a few days of notoriety if that, and what would constitute as "fans" will entirely forget about him in mere minutes.
It's what I've remarked so long on with Mr Beast, he has the cultural influence of a mega mega star, akin to a LeBron James, a Leonardo DiCaprio, a Taylor Swift, and yet in 20 years when he's old and irrelevant, I will be totally unable to tell my kids one single thing he did, and I imagine if I pull up on YouTube "Starving random stranger for $10,000 a day" they will be completely unimpressed. None of this lasts because there is no achievement, its like cheating on a test, Mr Beast gets the A and passes the class but next semester he won't have learned a single thing. If LeBron James retired tomorrow, we would still speak of his generational achievement and craft decades later. If Mr Beast "retired" (got canceled) tomorrow, his legacy would be that he "retired" (got canceled), because the only thing that matters for these people is "new". It's all so empty.
This reminds me of a thought I had decades ago when, as a child, I was deciding between magic or music as a hobby. Thankfully, I chose music, precisely because it's so much cooler. But then I had to wonder: What was it that made magic so uncool?
I reasoned that it must be primal. Sports are cool, because running fast, or hitting a bull's eye, makes you valuable to the tribe. Same with conjuring beautiful harmonies and rhythms, which even animals are drawn to. Or telling an intriguing story.
But with sleight-of-hand, others are impressed for five seconds, and that's all. It doesn't nourish the tribe, physically or spiritually. And pushing buttons on a controller shaped like a guitar feels even more useless.
Using Guitar Hero as a "gateway drug" seems like a flawed methodology though given how different they are. I'd be curious to know how many kids for whom that's the case actually stuck with the guitar.
The simulation is just so fucking seductive and there are corporate interests that are heavily invested on people staying there. To me, THAT'S the most dystopian part. It's like the tobacco industry all over again.
As I said over on the bad site, that streamer is a performance artist. We've had performance artists forever, ranging from street performers to dance, etc. To look at someone so amazing at performance art and think they should be a musician misses the point.
Many years ago there was a series of complaints from the poetry community that modern powers had no audience. Or at least not like the audience they had in prior generations. That was because they wanted poetry to stay the same. However, poetry had changed and was alive and well in places like rap and hip hop! It just didn't fit their idea of poetry.
The world changes and we need to change with it. Today kids want to be streamers, before they wanted to be professional athletes. Neither was very likely, but they just represent the desires of the time.
I hear you I just see a lot of these people and want more for them than to be performers in the spectacle. It just feels like such a tragedy. I'm glad others aren't so pessimistic on this
Roger Ebert used to dismiss video games as not an art form. There were some fascinating debates around it, and it really came down to his inability to perceive anything as art that didn't fit the definition he grew up with.
I use that as a lesson to constantly revisit my own definition of art and make sure I don't fall into the same trap. Video games are such a dominant cultural force, of course they would become a forum for art and expression. When I see videos like his, that's what I see - a new kind of artistic expression.
I would def consider making one an art form, lots of that is highly artistic including things like mods and level design people come up with. Playing them is not really the case. It's a passive consumer life, not creator. Still better than watching TV for sure.
I like this. But I also define art as things that make you change your way of thinking. Not sure if all twitch streamers qualify (neither do all sculptors, to be clear)
We can all have our different definitions of art! Is a violist that plays Mozart an artist? They are playing a song anyone can play, they haven't written music. But, in the way they choose to play they create something new. Same thing here.
All this relativism. Yo Yo Ma and Itzakh Perlman will be sorry to know they could have skipped learning all those “songs” that anyone can play. Now you can be a great artist by twitch streaming.
Art is the domain of relativism since the meaning exists with personal preferences. My personal opinion is that performance art (including music) is art, just like this streamer is creating art. I choose not to believe art has to fit classical definitions.
The question I ask myself is "Who is funding these lifestyles?" Because only a tiny minority of content creators can self-fund. We currently have heated debate in the UK about the funding of disability benefits. And one of the perceptions is that people are claiming mental health issues, and wanting to be supported, whilst actually just wanting to sit at home and live in the manner your article describes.
Isn’t it possible this might one day turn out to be some kind of Bill James story? From reading Moneyball I got the impression he spent a lot of time in his youth on “useless” hobbies such as compiling baseball stats and entertaining his classmates, yet didn’t he end up being the source of baseball’s scientific revolution?
100%. Well said. Comparing the Tik Tok dance videos of today to the Sistine Chapel of the past makes me think we aren’t focusing on the right creative pursuits
Lack of mental RAM is a good way to put it and something else that probably needs to be fixed alongside a move to doing more valuable things with our time
to put another way - if audiences have the same attention span they do (mine has definitely decreased with my phone)... is there incentive to create deeper, more artistic content? Maybe the dating turnoff of this kind of content ha
You know, I know this steak doesn't exist. I know that when I put it in my mouth, the Matrix is telling my brain that it is juicy and delicious. After nine years, you know what I realize? Ignorance is bliss.
Let me preface by saying that I have a guitar degree and play professionally, and I suck at Guitar Hero. There is very little in common between playing guitar and playing Guitar Hero, and the idea that if he could do one, why not spend the same time and do the other instead is hilariously wrong. Also, playing a Guitar Hero song at 200% speed and writing and recording a full album is an apples to oranges comparison, they have about as much in common as fencing and being able to cook great lasagna.
To your point, I don't see how this is any different than a lot of the goofy stuff people used to do for Guinness Book recognition, it's just on a larger scale. People have always done dumb things for attention. For what it's worth, in the time he spent working on this, most people just doomscroll on their phones, argue about things they have no exceptional insight about or power to change online, or any other manner of time wasting 21st century activities. So if "production" is the metric, and I hate that it is, he's producing more than most people do.
But using "produce something of value" as the metric of whether something is useful vs pointless is shaky reasoning. If this is the metric we're using, why bother to learn a language no one in your country speaks? Why bother reading philosophy books no one but philosophy majors care about? Why spend years getting a degree in a field that has very few jobs that don't pay much? "Value" is subjective, and this is doubly true in the hyper capitalistic times we're living in.
I agree with you though that this is a dystopian age for a lot of reasons including the ones you mention, and I really hope that the backlash that seems to be building against tech continues. Enjoyed reading this!
Great comment, you're right of course -sorry if unclear, the point of guitar hero is a *gateway drug* to being like "oh yeah this would be even more fun on the real thing" and getting out of the simulation and into that.
Guitar Hero and playing actual guitar are so different though that using GH as a "gateway drug" seems like a flawed methodology in my opinion. I'd be curious as to how many kids who have come to wanting to learn guitar after playing GH have actually stuck with it. Could be an interesting study.
Still, the fact that the simulation is so seductive and that there are powerful corporate interests heavily invested in as many people staying there for as long as possible is positively dystopian and seems like a nightmare version of the tobacco industry all over again.
The part I always come back to that you hit on here so well is just how empty this all is. None of it endures. This guy spent 9 months of his life dedicated to this so 99.9% of his viewers can get a 30 second dopamine hit on their phone's until they are on to the next one. In that 9 months he could have been so many long lasting connections and implemented wonderful practices to his life, but instead all he gets is a few days of notoriety if that, and what would constitute as "fans" will entirely forget about him in mere minutes.
It's what I've remarked so long on with Mr Beast, he has the cultural influence of a mega mega star, akin to a LeBron James, a Leonardo DiCaprio, a Taylor Swift, and yet in 20 years when he's old and irrelevant, I will be totally unable to tell my kids one single thing he did, and I imagine if I pull up on YouTube "Starving random stranger for $10,000 a day" they will be completely unimpressed. None of this lasts because there is no achievement, its like cheating on a test, Mr Beast gets the A and passes the class but next semester he won't have learned a single thing. If LeBron James retired tomorrow, we would still speak of his generational achievement and craft decades later. If Mr Beast "retired" (got canceled) tomorrow, his legacy would be that he "retired" (got canceled), because the only thing that matters for these people is "new". It's all so empty.
This reminds me of a thought I had decades ago when, as a child, I was deciding between magic or music as a hobby. Thankfully, I chose music, precisely because it's so much cooler. But then I had to wonder: What was it that made magic so uncool?
I reasoned that it must be primal. Sports are cool, because running fast, or hitting a bull's eye, makes you valuable to the tribe. Same with conjuring beautiful harmonies and rhythms, which even animals are drawn to. Or telling an intriguing story.
But with sleight-of-hand, others are impressed for five seconds, and that's all. It doesn't nourish the tribe, physically or spiritually. And pushing buttons on a controller shaped like a guitar feels even more useless.
The real dystopia is the irrelevance of content as long as we click.
Using Guitar Hero as a "gateway drug" seems like a flawed methodology though given how different they are. I'd be curious to know how many kids for whom that's the case actually stuck with the guitar.
The simulation is just so fucking seductive and there are corporate interests that are heavily invested on people staying there. To me, THAT'S the most dystopian part. It's like the tobacco industry all over again.
As I said over on the bad site, that streamer is a performance artist. We've had performance artists forever, ranging from street performers to dance, etc. To look at someone so amazing at performance art and think they should be a musician misses the point.
Many years ago there was a series of complaints from the poetry community that modern powers had no audience. Or at least not like the audience they had in prior generations. That was because they wanted poetry to stay the same. However, poetry had changed and was alive and well in places like rap and hip hop! It just didn't fit their idea of poetry.
The world changes and we need to change with it. Today kids want to be streamers, before they wanted to be professional athletes. Neither was very likely, but they just represent the desires of the time.
I hear you I just see a lot of these people and want more for them than to be performers in the spectacle. It just feels like such a tragedy. I'm glad others aren't so pessimistic on this
Roger Ebert used to dismiss video games as not an art form. There were some fascinating debates around it, and it really came down to his inability to perceive anything as art that didn't fit the definition he grew up with.
I use that as a lesson to constantly revisit my own definition of art and make sure I don't fall into the same trap. Video games are such a dominant cultural force, of course they would become a forum for art and expression. When I see videos like his, that's what I see - a new kind of artistic expression.
I would def consider making one an art form, lots of that is highly artistic including things like mods and level design people come up with. Playing them is not really the case. It's a passive consumer life, not creator. Still better than watching TV for sure.
I like this. But I also define art as things that make you change your way of thinking. Not sure if all twitch streamers qualify (neither do all sculptors, to be clear)
We can all have our different definitions of art! Is a violist that plays Mozart an artist? They are playing a song anyone can play, they haven't written music. But, in the way they choose to play they create something new. Same thing here.
All this relativism. Yo Yo Ma and Itzakh Perlman will be sorry to know they could have skipped learning all those “songs” that anyone can play. Now you can be a great artist by twitch streaming.
Art is the domain of relativism since the meaning exists with personal preferences. My personal opinion is that performance art (including music) is art, just like this streamer is creating art. I choose not to believe art has to fit classical definitions.
Fantastic article 💪🤓
Thank you for putting into words my disdain for those individuals, in a way I could never articulate myself.
The question I ask myself is "Who is funding these lifestyles?" Because only a tiny minority of content creators can self-fund. We currently have heated debate in the UK about the funding of disability benefits. And one of the perceptions is that people are claiming mental health issues, and wanting to be supported, whilst actually just wanting to sit at home and live in the manner your article describes.
Isn’t it possible this might one day turn out to be some kind of Bill James story? From reading Moneyball I got the impression he spent a lot of time in his youth on “useless” hobbies such as compiling baseball stats and entertaining his classmates, yet didn’t he end up being the source of baseball’s scientific revolution?
Wow…what a piece Adam!
100%. Well said. Comparing the Tik Tok dance videos of today to the Sistine Chapel of the past makes me think we aren’t focusing on the right creative pursuits
Lack of mental RAM is a good way to put it and something else that probably needs to be fixed alongside a move to doing more valuable things with our time
to put another way - if audiences have the same attention span they do (mine has definitely decreased with my phone)... is there incentive to create deeper, more artistic content? Maybe the dating turnoff of this kind of content ha
Everyone needs to work on this, myself included - we can't let technology hijack our attention
need attention rehab. I don't know how I would take a standardized test these days
You know, I know this steak doesn't exist. I know that when I put it in my mouth, the Matrix is telling my brain that it is juicy and delicious. After nine years, you know what I realize? Ignorance is bliss.
you would still rather live in the real world - it's more of an adventure
The dream has become their reality. Who are you to judge?
IDK it's nihilism to not care about anything, enough of that, at least we can nudge the world better sometimes
They care. It's just not our generally agreed upon reality they care about.
Two weekends ago I walked the Beltline in Atlanta and lost count of how many streamers I saw.
What an illusion of importance and shitty way to miss a beautiful spring day.
When I see these ridiculous acts go viral, I like to ask myself: "how many people did the exact same thing, but only got 5 views?"
If the thing we saw seems crazy, it's good to remember that... IT'S MUCH WORSE for far more people!