The world still hates creative people

The internet used to surface cool and creative things, now it mostly doesn't

A wasteland of the imagination, as well as reality

I’m traveling this week, and perhaps because I’m not at my home setup, with local music files and media configuration I’ve built to create a healthy personal space, I’m depressed at the world we’re subjected to by default. So we’re doing another cultural take today, this time on a conclusion I don’t know how to escape from: the world hates creative people and badly wishes to demoralize them. I’m unsure what other conclusion to come to.

There was a time when art was something worth dying for, or at least committing your life to. Picture Michelangelo suffering back-breaking positions in service of a church ceiling, or Sylvia Plath hunched over a typewriter, pouring the last of herself into words that would outlive her. Maybe it was never precisely like this, but at least the stories had weight. Where are the modern versions? They exist, but you don’t know about them. No one really cares. We just want more founder stories of entrepreneurship wins and capital raises, because why would we need more artists? AI can do that, the bugmen believe.

Of course, if you look closely art is still being made. A song here, a film there, an article that doesn’t totally insult your intelligence. But the overwhelming sense if you’re paying attention is that art is dead. Or at least, as a social function, it has been so thoroughly strangled by the forces of modernity it can no longer breathe free air. The internet briefly gave it life, but the light is dwindling.

The reasons are quite clear to me. Short-form social media reduced attention spans to the point anything requiring more than a few seconds of engagement is met with suspicion, if not outright hostility. Social media was once a place where links to interesting creative work might be discovered, followed, discussed. Now all these platforms throttle external links, if they allow them at all, because why share the work of tens if not hundreds of thousands of great artists? The incentives are increasingly structured around keeping users trapped in a state of infinite scroll, ingesting bite-sized dopamine hits instead of seeking out depth, challenge, or originality. Most of these users are spiritually obese.

Good Tweet from Lindyman, and of course note the actual link is a DM ...as that would be suppressed if shared.

Mainstream media doesn’t help. The culture pages of major publications, once a space where critics could introduce challenging new works, now function as little more than PR departments for pre-existing IP and slop-churning pop stars. Did you know there’s a new Marvel movie out? Of course you did, because the same 5 headlines about it have been published 100 times by a sprawling empire of the same publications and people. A copy of a copy, as the narrator in Fight Club noted. Every cultural conversation is shaped by optimization, which means only familiar, already popular manufactured stars and ideas are allowed to surface. Even if a person were to create something of genuine artistic value, the odds of it reaching an audience outside a niche echo chamber are slim, rounding to zero. The internet used to champion the weird and iconoclast, now it amplifies for the normies.

All of this leads to the larger question of why anyone would bother. The only incentives left for making art are personal/intrinsic. Which of course can be powerful. Someone somewhere will always be compelled to create, just as you can still find a bird singing even if alone in a barren wasteland. But the environment required to shape a thriving artistic culture includes the possibility of discovery, meaningful feedback and some kind of extrinsic reward. Sadly, these are all functionally nonexistent. You might create for yourself, but eventually you’ll realize that sharing is an act of futility. Nobody is waiting, nobody is listening, and the great machine of modernity has no interest in what you have to say, unless it’s a meme or remixing something already in the news. “Show me the incentive and I'll show you the outcome” as Charlie Munger (rest in peace) liked to say.

So the cycle feeds itself. Many highly creative people stop sharing, because why would they? Overt shilling and pandering to algos is corrosive to the creative soul. I have seen many an artist friend who made incredible work just stop at some point, and at least one reason why is clear: the world provided insufficient signal for them to keep going. So we get to a point nearly all new creative is either industrially produced and focus-grouped into oblivion, silly memetic art, or actually cool work buried in a digital wasteland, unseen and invisible because an algorithm didn’t know what to do with it. From a convenience standpoint, because life is of course just a matter of convenience, few seek out cool things on their own. And thus we arrive where we are now: an era where art still technically exists, but only as a ghost of what it might have been.

Is there hope? I’m never sure how to answer this in talks with friends when I share why I think the world is in poor shape on this dimension. Some recent positive developments include platforms like Bluesky not algo-suppressing hyperlinks (it’s the best thing they’ve done, we hope other platforms follow) Kathleen Kennedy leaving Disney and perhaps hope AI accelerates us to a world where people appreciate human-created (perfectly imperfect) works once again.

You’ll note the examples of things I’m optimistic about are basically agnostic of any political choices or ideology. That’s because the path to a more creative world isn’t “right” or “left” it’s simply towards choices that incentivize more and better creative work that improves our lives. But most of it is decidedly apolitical and I think great art actually thrives in a world less obsessed with politics, because everything is running well and so people don’t feel much need to spend time here. It’s also going to be a difficult journey because I don’t think many really care about what’s happening, or have much desire to fix it. I hope to be wrong about this and one day the world will value interesting work, creative people and their stories again.