Media Saturation & Having Media Speak For Us
Also: Why Dune Feels Massive, NY Restaurant Reservations, and Honouring Your Work
2024 has given us many memory-holed albums: albums that *should* be popular, but just isn’t.
For an album to qualify as memory-holed, it must have a shot at being remembered. Therefore, it has to come from an act with a large platform. A big record label is involved. A team of publicists is on the case. The media arrives with a bounty of takes. All these things ensure a reasonable expectation that the public will care about an album. Except the public doesn’t care. They don’t care at all, spectacularly. A memory-holed album isn’t necessarily a bad album. It’s just an album that is wiped from our collective consciousness soon after it enters the world. It’s not a matter of love or hate, only indifference.
The film industry is also doing poorly with films like Furiosa and Fall Guy bombing against their budgets. The industry has not recovered since the peak of 2018. A pandemic and a mega strike in Hollywood is partly to blame for the struggling film industry. Brandon Sanderson has a pet theory that one of the reasons that films aren’t doing well, is because the trailer → theater attention pattern had been broken by the pandemic. In a world of abundant media, films stayed competitive because it included abundant previews in the distribution. You went to theater, saw a trailer, and then went again.
It all feels strange and people are wondering why some stuff is landing and why some stuff just isn’t.
Steven Hyden, in writing about memory-holed albums, poses the following. In part, it can be:
There is too much music. Attention spans are too short. Tech platforms are incentivized to push volume of songs over focusing on certain tracks that might deserve extra attention.
But, moreso he feels that:
The numbing and frankly dull familiarity of pop music in 2024. Here’s an honest question: How often are you surprised by what is popular? If you’re like me, the answer is “not often at all.” To be fair, this is true of all of pop culture. A feeling of déjà vu also pervades our movies and TV shows. We are in the middle of a prolonged, stagnant, “rerun” moment in so much of what we watch and listen to. And this naturally makes much of our art a lot less memorable.
The reality is, is that there *is* amazing music and amazing films released. It’s just that it in some years, the overlap between critical success and popularity is the same, and some years it isn’t. The latter is more interesting, because I think there’s something else going on. A sort of interstitial dust that gets kicked up and you have to squint to see how it will all settle.
Constance Grady thinks this is what is happening in TV.
A few years ago, there was an easy, healthy overlap between the kind of television beloved by those who talk about TV as professionals and the kind beloved by those who talk about TV as enthusiastic amateurs.
Eventually concluding:
Increasingly, I’ve come to think that the most interesting and exciting TV right now is happening in weird little niches that cultivate hyper-enthusiastic fandoms but never quite manage to dominate the conversation in a way that shows like Succession did. Last summer, I had a brief but passionate love affair with Mrs. Davis, a Peacock original limited series about a horse-riding nun on a mission to take down a world-dominating AI. It was batty and glorious and I never found anyone else who wanted to talk about it, but I loved it with my whole heart.
Maybe that’s what TV looks like right now: small shows that we love and keep close to ourselves like a favorite book, and big shows that we watch and talk about and immediately forget. It feels like it will be a while before a big show is good enough to change the way our TV ecosystem works all over again.
But, it’s not just film, tv, and the music industry. Debut novels are failing to launch. It’s believed that a book needs a strong persona, a following that is more than just the book.
Chayka believes that “you need enough people aware of your persona that they want to buy your book, regardless of what the book is,” but editors and publicists agree that a book needs a “there there” to have staying power, and that a persona without a substantial book won’t break out.
And 2024 has seen the biggest layoffs in the gaming industry to date.
One reason for the gaming layoffs is simply costs: it’s hard to compete in a world where we aren’t used to higher interest rates and a still recovering global economy post-covid.
But, it wouldn’t be fun if I just left it there, now would it? I’m trying to see if something else is going on. There’s a strange paradox where we feel there’s both a saturation of media and yet we’re seeing this strange separation of the overlap between popularity and sincere enjoyment. It’s a sign that something more is going on.
Here’s a theory I’ve pushed a lot: In an age of abundant media, the meta context matters way more than in the past. You can’t really brute-force successful media anymore. Even if it’s good, it has to be authentic. You can’t automate authenticity.
A media’s meta-story is important and it all starts with why it exists. Why must I care?
When you could win by merely having distribution, you *could* brute-force success more easily. But now, distribution is just having access to more dice rolls to get lucky from. When I think of recent breakout successes it comes from creators that are both using their medium well, but also present an approachable persona.
Fred Again’s recent sold-out show in LA is a testament to his ability to present his music through the lens of how we experience media today: the screens are vertical. It’s the smartphone viewport. It’s us, enhanced. And you can tell that it’s authentic.
And therein lies what I feel matters. We enjoy media by ourselves, but we also *use* media to communicate. Am I being spoken to by the piece of media, OR is the media speaking for me? In this era, the latter is increasingly more relevant because of the ability to share the extra context around the media (the fandom). It’s not that the piece of media has to have a particularly salient social message, but rather that the media can more readily stand in as a replacement for what we feel.
It’s saying to someone: if you want to understand me, listen to Fred Again…, NOT J-Lo’s new album. It’s saying, watch Challengers and NOT Furiosa. It’s different to the concept of media merely being controversial or a good topic for discussion, but that media can encapsulate a feeling better than we can speak it. Fourth Wing by Rebecca Yaros, one of 2023’s most popular books went viral because people on BookTok, simply said: “Stop what you are doing and read this”. A sort of plea from people asking them to read it so they can talk and connect about it.
All good media is like that. Forgettable media is media that if you ask someone you care about to enjoy it, they wouldn’t get closer to understanding who you are. Popular media is media that has closed this gap to a wide group of people. It’s media that speaks for many of us. Popular media doesn’t have to be good, it just needs to say something well enough such that we don’t have to. This was always important, but when there is so much noise today, it’s become essential.
It strikes me even more when you consider the role media has taken as a secular replacement for group identity. We’re disenchanted and media tries to fill that hole. Everything has an attached sub-reddit, “discourse”, and fandom.
I sometimes wonder whether conspiracy theories are an attempt to re-enchant the world in a distorted way.
It’s like religion knocking on the door and trying to come back in a strange and distorted form. A sense of mystery beyond our own understanding of the world. If you ever talk to conspiracy theorists, that’s the sense you get from them. A sort of almost romantic sense of awe that there is this dark mysterious thing that a rational thing could never penetrate. That’s sort of religious.
Maybe what’s trying to get back into our world is enchantment, and the only way it can come back in is in these strange distorted ways.
Constance Grady thinks that the anti-hero TV show fell away with the advent of the 2016 Trump presidency. Now, in 2024, with peak TV being in a limbo period, and given this theory above, it’s likely that we’re all feeling something and that our media hasn’t given it a voice yet. We’re in a holding pattern, enjoying small shows, indie music, and indie games that speak for us in small niche doses. Last year’s Barbenheimer was an example of a cross-over event in popularity and critical success: one metamodern film about excessive consumerism, feminism, and the theme that ideas live forever. Another film about the past that still spoke to the existential angst percolating today. Themes that are readily wandering around in the psyches of the Western populace.
What’s next? Increasingly, media speaks for us. What are hoping to say to each other?
Bonus Content!
Had a super productive week, working on my novel. Did a day where I wrote 3000 words. Last week I was struggling with a paragraph the entire day, and now this. Really great feeling. It usually happens when the book is falling into place. I feel like I’m getting super close to rounding out draft 1. Mostly likely in July! I’m getting more and more excited about it. I also watched A24’s Civil War this week. Damn, I felt it came super close to being a stellar film if only it stuck more closely to its theme of the role of a reporter and the truth: that tension of the obligation to tell the unbiased truth vs the obligation to not be neutral.
Making Dune Look Massive
Speaking of context… I thought this video explained it so well as to why Dune always feels so “massive”: it constantly keeps humans in frame. Such a simple trick and metaphorically probably something that you could re-use in other context that isn’t just film.
2024 US Election Models
If you’re like me and enjoy modelling, Manifold has a great post on all the places to “watch” the forecasts of the 2024 US elections. From prediction markets to established poll modelling.
Dig in!
Roguelikes & Progression
The gaming genre I’ve been gravitating towards recently has been roguelikes/roguelites. I enjoy the feeling of progression (whether it’s only based on skill or through upgrades) and feel like I can fit in as many plays as time allows. Playing these on a plane always feels like hours melt by. It’s just a really interesting genre in terms of mechanism/game design and I keep thinking/wondering if some of these ideas can be applied to other domains, especially in how it reframes failure.
This video gives a decent intro. ht Chase.
New York Restaurant Reservations Drama
I’ve been following this drama in New York where people had been selling restaurant reservations. Hey, if you make it easier to do something, it always introduces new sets of problems. 😅
It finally looks like NY did something about it. If you sell a reservation you can be fined up to $1000 per violation.
Kinda wish congestion pricing was also as uncontroversial.
Self-Promotion & Honouring Your Work
I’m one of those people that struggled a lot with self-promotion and have been trying to get better at it. I don’t want to feel like I’m using the goodwill I have with people I care about and forcing them to do something for me. In other words, trying to not be a burden.
wrote about this and referenced Tyler The Creator.I find myself tapping into Tyler’s fire constantly. Promotion isn’t a chore. It’s a gift. A chance for us to celebrate the effort we and others put into our work. We shouldn’t shy away from it or treat it like a burden. Relish it as an opportunity to honor something we worked hard to make that we believe in.
I love that. Celebrating and honouring your work.
October Drift - Demons
I feel like I post too much electronic music on here. So, thought I’d share an underrated rock band that I’ve been enjoying the past few years. They have a new album coming out soon!
“I miss you like I miss a cigarette. Miss you like a setting sun.”
Nice capstone to end this week’s newsletter! Enjoy a lovely sunset. See you all next week.
Simon
Hi Simon,
Reading your insights felt like watching the world through a kaleidoscope—fragmented yet revealing patterns within the chaos. The notion of media speaking for us instead of just to us is striking. Perhaps it’s not just about authenticity but about the resonance, like finding harmony in dissonance. What if the real magic lies in those niches where sincerity meets obscurity, forming the unsung ballads of our time?
Silent revolutions are happening elsewhere. Each person makes their own response at home. From one artist speaking to millions, we are moving to a model where artist and audience are one. In the middle is the machine.
Warm regards,
Eva
I agree with niches getting more popular because they “speak” in place of us, but I think a piece of the puzzle is informed consent (or something like that if it even can exist). With this I mean the audience being informed of the influence placed upon them. Barbenheimer is a great example: Both movies (individually) had the potential to be what you talk about, an organic mix between what the public at large wanted to be said, and a truly mainstream popular product.
The Barbenheimer phenomenon, however, I think took away this magic, precisely because it was so clearly manufactured “upstairs” out of fear of failing movie theatre sales. No informed consent, the public was mostly guided like sheep to the “event” by paid influencers, empty media pieces, and actors working overtime to shove it down your throat on social media.
It worked as a short term solution, which is what matters to the production companies, but I hardly see either Barbie or Oppenheimer being talked about as anything other than two other expensive movies of the year 202X, with as much cultural impact as Furiosa, or the latest action comedy starring John Cena.