[HN Gopher] What Lasts and (Mostly) Doesn't Last
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What Lasts and (Mostly) Doesn't Last
Author : drdee
Score : 37 points
Date : 2024-08-24 06:44 UTC (2 days ago)
(HTM) web link (countercraft.substack.com)
(TXT) w3m dump (countercraft.substack.com)
| ggm wrote:
| Here's a popular culture take on the same theme. Jokes and sketch
| comedy.
|
| "The three Yorkshiremen" monty python sketch. It's actually a
| sketch that some of the pythons did for another comedy sketch
| show some years before. As far as I know it's the only one they
| carried forward.
|
| My parents could recite a 1940s radio comedy sketch about the
| phonetic alphabet and cockney rhyming slang which would probably
| make no sense to most people today, they'd carried it with them
| into the 70s and 80s.
|
| An awful lot of contemporary humour simply fades away and maybe
| one or two key moment carries on.
|
| Future generations may know Chaplin solely from a clip of modern
| times in the machine. Or know Lucille Ball treading grapes.
|
| "But, tell that to the youth of today, they won't believe you"
| niccl wrote:
| > My parents could recite a 1940s radio comedy sketch about the
| phonetic alphabet and cockney rhyming slang
|
| Was that the "'Ay for 'Orses" thing? I still know most of it,
| and never knew where it came from
| DonaldFisk wrote:
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cockney_Alphabet
| morley wrote:
| Some comedy works have endured, like Three Men in a Boat by
| Jerome K. Jerome (though it is helped by its huge influence on
| To Say Nothing of the Dog by Connie Willis).
| rblatz wrote:
| I'm in my 40s and have no idea what either of those things
| are.
| willcipriano wrote:
| The Stooges are timeless, we will be on mars and this will
| still be funny: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=DvVXRc_iDlY
|
| Most stuff just isn't that good.
| vundercind wrote:
| Chaplin and Keaton (among others, like Lloyd) are still
| hilarious and their films technically impressive and full of
| movie-magic spectacle. I've watched a fair amount (certainly a
| ton more than most people) of silent film and IMO the comics
| are by far the most-accessible of the bunch to a modern
| audience, requiring minimal "education" on how to understand,
| appreciate, enjoy, or "read" them. They're the only ones I'd
| unreservedly recommend to just about anyone who likes movies.
|
| Very few dramatic silents are even close to as accessible--I'd
| say the ones that age second-best are those that lean art-film,
| but those are hindered by that entire genre being obscure and
| difficult to enjoy for most people, so while they may not be
| much more challenging to enjoy than a talkie art film and might
| deliver just as much quality as most of those can, that's a
| fairly different bar to clear than enjoying a comedy or
| ordinary drama.
|
| The comedies do seem to be surviving better, too, even if not
| as well as they deserve. The dramas survive in the public
| consciousness as a very-small number of well-known scenes or
| images (the rocket-in-the-moon's-eye, the android from
| Metropolis) but reference most anything else from even those
| films, let alone other very-well-regarded but barely-watched-
| today movies, and nobody but a few film nerds will notice.
| chis wrote:
| Surprisingly great post. Works that last are often being
| championed by critics, gatekeepers, or the next generation of
| artists. On some level there's just too much great art in the
| world, and it's more fun to appreciate the same art as your peers
| instead of consuming only obscure pieces and having nobody to
| talk about them with.
| ineedaj0b wrote:
| Harry Potter will last. I have not read it but god it is
| everywhere. I cannot escape it, maybe it's less referenced in
| Asian cultures.
|
| Videogames: I don't play much. But Mario seems likely. Minecraft
| and Fortnite are very big right now, but they lack memorable main
| characters so I doubt they survive 25+ years.
|
| Music: None of my favorites but Kanye might have 1 song
| remembered in 50 years. I know friends who got into music
| creation all commend Kanye's 'ear'. His music does feel 'grand'
| more than any other artist I've heard but it's not my thing
| personally.
| jrochkind1 wrote:
| Yeah, it's more than a book now.
|
| Maybe nobody remembers the best-selling novels or authors from
| 1928 anymore, but who doesn't know 1928-debuting Mickey Mouse?
| tomjen3 wrote:
| I don't think Harry Potter will stand the test of time that
| well. In the world of Harry Potter, there are no cell phones,
| no internet, no Google and no AI. For my generation that was no
| issue at all when we got into the books, because the Internet
| were fairly obscure in 1997 (as in, not something you would use
| on a daily basis), Google was just a postdoc project and of
| course kids didn't have cellphones.
|
| 7 books later, it seemed fairly strange that the characters in
| this magical place didn't have access to the things we used
| every day.
|
| For kids born today? They will grow in the world where it is
| perfectly normal to talk with a computer that is smarter than
| they are. That will not be a wow experience like the first time
| you talked with an AI. It will be completely normal, entirely
| unsurprising, just like you expect there to be light when you
| push the light switch.
|
| Their world will be far more magical than the one we grew up
| in. But Harry Potter is stuck in time, forever suspended in the
| late 1990's as some fly in amber.
|
| Now imagine you pick up a book supposedly full of magic and
| many wonders. And then the characters have to search through
| books by reading them until they happen to find the piece of
| information they want. Thats already laughable to me. How much
| more so to kids who grew up with talking computers and touch
| screen phones? Where, of course, the pictures move and you can
| talk to them.
|
| I could be entirely of base here, but one of the great things
| about the Harry Potter series was the feeling of Magic. Is the
| Magic going to be there for future generations?
| telotortium wrote:
| > And then the characters have to search through books by
| reading them until they happen to find the piece of
| information they want. Thats already laughable to me.
|
| If Google keeps on declining, that experience will become
| even more relevant in the future. Most of the information the
| kids need is in a book somewhere, but often in the restricted
| section or perhaps not in the library at all, which is quite
| analogous to the dark web or even just obscure websites that
| are either unindexed or downranked enough that they might as
| well be.
| tomjen3 wrote:
| Kids will use perplexity instead if Google does not surface
| enough good results.
| flyinghamster wrote:
| > Most of the information the kids need is in a book
| somewhere, but often in the restricted section or perhaps
| not in the library at all
|
| A problem that is getting worse with politically-motivated
| "protect the children" witch hunts bringing book bans to
| the Land of the Free. Nobody shooed me away from the grown-
| up side of the library when I was a kid.
| lelanthran wrote:
| > Nobody shooed me away from the grown-up side of the
| library when I was a kid.
|
| Me neither, but the grown-up side of the library back
| then did not have instructional books for teenagers on
| how to have homosexual intercourse.
|
| In fact, instructions on having intercourse of any sort
| weren't in the grown-up side of any library I went to in
| the 80s. I'd be very surprised if you went to a library
| that _did_ direct teens and younger to instructions on
| having intercourse.
| IncreasePosts wrote:
| Why did Shakespeare remain popular in the age of the atom
| bomb? Wasn't every new reader in the 1960s just thinking
| "Hey, why doesn't Macbeth just nuke Macduff?"
| tomjen3 wrote:
| Good point. Harry Potter is about a friend group fighting
| evil in a world of magic. If there is no magic, if in fact
| that world is less magical than the real world, then a big
| part of the appeal of the book will be lost.
|
| Magic is not a big part of Shakespear, and the part that is
| (Ghost, fairies) are most dissimilar to the magic we have
| since created.
|
| I also think that Sherlock will continue to remain popular
| because the appeal of the stories - who did it and how did
| the detective figure that out - has not fundamentally
| changed.
| js8 wrote:
| > I also think that Sherlock will continue to remain
| popular because the appeal of the stories
|
| I am not sure Sherlock stories are that good.. I think
| what is really compelling is Sherlock as a character (at
| least for me).
|
| So perhaps the answer is that the characters are what
| makes it compelling even today.
| VancouverMan wrote:
| I don't think that Shakespeare's works have been popular
| (in the sense of many people wanting to voluntarily consume
| them) for many generations.
|
| Yes, most people even today are familiar with those works
| to some extent, but that's just an artifact of those people
| being forced to consume those works repeatedly in high
| school and possibly again in college or university.
|
| When I was in high school in Canada decades ago, almost
| none of the students liked studying those works. To most
| people, they were generally incomprehensible, and the
| stories and characters were nearly impossible to relate to
| or to care about.
|
| A couple of the English teachers I had back then openly
| admitted to not like those works, too, and only taught them
| because the curriculum forced them to be taught.
|
| Even among those who claim to "like Shakespeare", they seem
| to be driven more by wanting to feel "highbrow" rather than
| any genuine appreciation for the works.
| mr_toad wrote:
| > Even among those who claim to "like Shakespeare", they
| seem to be driven more by wanting to feel "highbrow"
| rather than any genuine appreciation for the works.
|
| This is amusing because evidence suggests that at the
| time his works were not considered highbrow, and they
| seem to have been popular with a wide audience.
| mr_toad wrote:
| Shakespeare's reputation has grown over the centuries.
| While he was popular at the time he wasn't regarded by
| critics as the greatest English playwright until at least a
| hundred years after his death.
| ckemere wrote:
| My daughter recently read through the "Nancy Drew Diaries".
| It turns out they took the original Nancy Drew books,
| including settings, and redid them in a cell phone/ early
| smartphone world, and they're still fun. It's an interesting
| concept!
| lelanthran wrote:
| > I don't think Harry Potter will stand the test of time that
| well. In the world of Harry Potter, there are no cell phones,
| no internet, no Google and no AI.
|
| Books and stories that stand the test of time do so _in spite
| of_ aging.
|
| By that, I mean that $FOO is _just so damn good_ that it
| captures the imagination completely and fully.
|
| There were no television sets in Grimm fairy tales, and
| they're still being retold. There were no cellphones in
| Shrek, the last movie was made in 2019, _and those ears_ are
| still recognisable to my child, born after 2019!
|
| For books and stories to age well they don't _need_ to be
| very relatable to the reader (although it helps), they need
| to be _good!_
|
| A further argument is that, to be relatable, technology is
| not needed. There is not problem, right now, reading a book
| or a story written in 2024 that is set in (for example) 1960.
| Some very popular recent books/stories/movies/series were set
| in the 60s, 70s and 80s.
|
| Being relatable is neither necessary nor sufficient to aging
| well.
| rpdillon wrote:
| As an aside from your core point about tech, I don't think
| Harry Potter's universe is particularly well-designed or
| thoughtful. I mean, I haven't actually read Harry Potter, but
| having watched the movies and talked to my son who has read
| the books a few times, the magic system seems entirely
| inconsistent and capricious, and is one of my bigger gripes
| with the story coming from more mature authors like Brandon
| Sanderson that build out much more consistent and believable
| fantasy worlds.
|
| I have no idea whether this will affect the work's longevity,
| but it sure affects my desire to read it.
| loughnane wrote:
| Tough to say. I can't remember the name right now but I was
| reading an essay from whitehead written about a hundred years
| ago and he was lamenting how popular some writer was the he
| considered awful. It struck me because I hadn't heard the name
| before, and I'm pretty well-read.
|
| There are oceans of forgotten works out there, we just----by
| definition----have forgot about them.
|
| Yes Harry Potter has sold lots of books, but how do you compare
| that to black beauty? It sold maybe a 10th but in a time of
| smaller markets. People still know of black beauty but it isn't
| a cultural force----more a peculiarity of the time.
|
| For sure some things written this century will be around in the
| year 3000, it's just impossible to say what.
| PaulHoule wrote:
| My wife is a big fan but she was a horse crazy little girl
| who grew up to run a riding academy.
| jowea wrote:
| I think the multimedia empire franchise explanation is more
| likely to explain which of those survive than pure popularity.
| Minecraft seems like it could be replaced by something else in
| the same genre, but MS is still actively developing it so maybe
| it will just evolve. But it seems likely to me new generations
| will want something for that niche. Something like Harry Potter
| seems more like the sort of thing that will last while the
| people who enjoy it live, but at the same time things like
| James Bond or Star Trek are outlasting their original fans so
| who knows.
| oceanplexian wrote:
| Minecraft is over 13 years old and still the most popular PC
| game in the world by monthly active users. Not sure if there
| are many games that can beat that record.
| jrochkind1 wrote:
| Kind of makes me want to get forgotten best-selling novels of
| years past from the library to see what they are like!
| lolive wrote:
| The 1001 technics to quit (your favorite flavor of) Vi will last.
| hyperman1 wrote:
| As a kid, I found translations of Enid Blyton's books, e.g. The
| famous five, in my mothers book case. They must have been huge in
| their time. For my generation (1980), these books are basically
| unknown. I found a bunch of lookalikes from other authors too.
|
| I thought these would become extinct by now, but googling around
| for writing this post, I just find the BBC created a series about
| them recently. They're back!
| ksp-atlas wrote:
| Here in the UK, they're quite well known, maybe they just
| aren't in other places?
| jl6 wrote:
| Something that used to be popular was the concept of the Western
| Canon: a core reading list of timeless works for the ages, around
| which our collective culture revolved. But I don't think such a
| thing exists or can exist any more, in our hyper-diverse, hyper-
| content-stuffed world. As the amount and availability of TV,
| music, books, films, etc. increases, the odds of meeting somebody
| who's had a similar set of cultural inputs as you tends towards
| zero.
|
| Tentpole stuff like Harry Potter is the only thing saving us from
| complete societal atomization where everybody is a stranger.
| Zambyte wrote:
| I am not the content I see. I don't watch movies or shows, I
| don't watch Douyin (TikTok), don't keep up with social media, I
| haven't read Harry Potter or watched Star Wars. I only watch a
| few small channels on Youtube, and I play Rocket League, and
| work on personal hobby projects (coding, photography,
| ceramics).
|
| There are lots of people who I would consider myself to not be
| strangers with. You should be able to connect with people over
| things besides "tentpole" pop culture artifacts. You should be
| able to connect with people without _any_ common cultural
| artifacts. People are interesting.
| darby_nine wrote:
| > You should be able to connect with people over things
| besides "tentpole" pop culture artifacts.
|
| You can, of course. You're missing or ignoring the
| implication that one can have _any_ kind of expectation about
| connecting with an arbitrary individual.
|
| Personally, I think this is for the positive: acknowledging
| that you can't expect to connect with everyone seems healthy.
| TeMPOraL wrote:
| To me it seems like walking back on all the moral progress
| we've achieved. Today you don't expect it's possible to
| connect with everyone, tomorrow you deny humanity to anyone
| you can't imagine yourself connecting to.
| fellowniusmonk wrote:
| I've connected meaningfully with people I don't even
| share a language or religion with, so IDK, I think humans
| are more positively socially minded than your post leads
| me to believe you think. It's possible that existing but
| recent (3k years or less) causes of division will go away
| and we'll all treat each others as interesting
| individuals instead of "Othering" people. Maybe the
| current structures are the problem. Who has the
| observational data to say otherwise?
|
| Deep things are often universal. I think tentpole or
| normative social experiences are most useful for
| disengaged or myopic individuals.
|
| For my first job I HAD to read NFL Power Rankings and go
| to Church to be able to be "recognized" as a human and
| part of the corporate team, people who didn't were fired
| aggressively (it was not a healthy work environment.)
|
| I personally think that the edge of human progress and
| "gain" has always been heavily weighted towards people
| who are "Open", whether it's being willing to tolerate
| wolves at the refuse pile on the edge of camp and attempt
| to befriend them, or being willing to travel to new
| locations.
|
| As rote work and rubber stamp activities decrease in
| market penetration the general populace could and should
| learn to connect at these deeper human levels.
|
| This issue does raise concerns and probably DOES warrant
| a new and shorter shared western corpus.
|
| But... I was homeschooled and any node/info that I could
| use to connect to another persons node was one I
| cultivated because I was raised as an alien with little
| to no incidental exposure to normative behavior or an
| understanding of shared childhood, pop culture or
| historical experience.
|
| As someone who values connectivity and shared experience
| and is very effortful in that pursuit perhaps I
| underestimate genpops ability to adapt.
|
| I also think that private social media platform silos
| make discovery very difficult, it's probably sacrosanct
| but I do wonder if a non-corporatist social media as a
| utility would help ensure shared platforms and
| experiences.
|
| Or maybe we DON'T want that and the isolation will serve
| as an intellectual dispora that pushes new volumes of
| innovation and we won't have to keep relying on
| entrenched leaders dying before innovation can occur.
| parpfish wrote:
| I think it also depends on what kind of connections you want.
|
| As somebody that really values comedy and a sense of humor,
| it becomes very obvious that humor is particularly dependent
| on having shared cultural references. For me, if a new
| relationship doesn't having the touchstones that allow joking
| around it feels empty and sterile
| darby_nine wrote:
| > Tentpole stuff like Harry Potter is the only thing saving us
| from complete societal atomization where everybody is a
| stranger.
|
| This can even increase alienation if you don't resonate with
| the source material.
| PaulHoule wrote:
| I wonder how much of Lovecraft's popularity has to do with the
| excellent _Call of Cthulhu_ tabletop RPG (one of the generation
| of games that targeted everything wrong with _Dungeons and
| Dragons_ ) and how much it has to do with stories like that
| becoming so mainstream (e.g. any season of _Sailor Moon_ is about
| some kind of supernatural-extraterrestrial invasion.)
| fredmcgubbins wrote:
| There's a good book called, "But What If We're Wrong?" by Chuck
| Klosterman that explores the concept of how things we consider
| the "best" or "worst" of contemporaneous common knowledge may
| change over time.
|
| One of his examples was how there are only a handful of classical
| music pieces that folks remember and consider "great" after a
| 100+ years have passed and yet there were many composers who were
| popular at the time they were composing. His question was, "out
| of the the works of rock-n-roll in the 1900s and early 2000s, how
| many will be remembered in 200 years time?" Will it be "Louie-
| Louie"? Something by Elvis? The Beatles? Beyonce?, the viral song
| 'what does the fox say?', something that is contemporaneously
| unknown but is discovered some time in the future?
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