Honest Broker

The article talks about AI, but I think it's interesting that Ted Gioia ("Honest Broker"), similarly, talks about the lack of a counter-culture [1]. I propose that the avant-garde has been synonymous with deconstruction / meaninglessness and the Enlightenment project of personal freedom. Now that we've come to the place where anyone can define their own gender, or, indeed, choose to identify as a completely different species from Homo sapiens, where is there left to go? The avant-garde has been completed.

So if we want to look for the counter-culture or the new avant-garde, we're going to have to look somewhere else. I think that, in a culture that systematically stripped all meaning out of life by atomizing it--how can humanity have any meaning if even being human is up to each individual--I think things like religions which offer meaning are going to be very appealing. In today's culture, someone converting to, say, Eastern Orthodoxy (in the West) is very counter-cultural: they are old, odd, hierarchical, are insistent that truth rests not in ourselves but in God, and say that fulfillment comes from ordering our lives based on an external Other not our internal feelings; all of these are opposing current cultural values. Similarly, I think Jordan Peterson is part of the new counter-culture (not that he is E. Orthodox). However we aren't conditioned for "counter-cultural" to look like anything like that, because that has always been seen as "conservative" or "reactionary".…

See also: Stupidity: My Reading List for a 12-Week Course (and a Final Exam) By Ted Gioia https://www.honest-broker.com/p/stupidity-a-reading-list

Here’s Tuchman from “The March of Folly:”

Misgovernment is of four kinds, often in combination. They are: 1) tyranny or oppression, of which history provides so many well known examples that they do not need citing; 2) excessive ambition, such as Athens' attempted conquest of Sicily in the Peloponnesian War, Philip II's of England via the Armada, Germany's twice-attempted rule of Europe by a self-conceived master race, Japan's bid for an empire of Asia; 3) incompetence or decadence, as in the case of the late Roman empire, the last Romanovs and the last imperial dynasty of China; and finally 4) folly or perversity. This book is concerned with the last in a specific manifestation; that is, the pursuit of policy contrary to the self-interest of the constituency or state involved. Self-interest is whatever conduces to the welfare or advantage of the body being governed; folly is a policy that in these terms is counter-productive.

Original works of art that don't conform to the conventional norms of their time are likely to be panned by critics and ignored by the public at first. Only with the passage of time are we able to reevaluate more objectively those works of art which are truly original. In the cacophony of the moment, it's hard to distinguish genius from folly.

It happens with original music that doesn't conform to the norms of its day: https://www.honest-broker.com/p/why-did-the-beatles-get-so-many-bad

It happens with original paintings that don't conform to the norms of their day: https://medium.com/@parkwestgallery/park-west-gallery-review-picasso-147efeccdf31

It happens with original films that don't conform to the norms of their day: https://screenrant.com/great-movies-panned-critics/

By all accounts, "Megalopolis" is an original work of art that doesn't conform to today's conventional norms. Only with the passage of time will we be able to recognize if it is genius or folly.

> And then the web billionaires won’t even need to toss those few shekels at artists.

Why say "shekel" here instead of "dollar"? Or any other currency?

Given the context of the article, the choice of words is either extremely poor taste or an antisemitic dogwhistle

He does have another article [0] where he just hand-waves away LF Celine's antisemitism [1], so if I had to guess it's the latter

[0] https://www.honest-broker.com/p/the-most-cynical-novel-ever-written

[1] "The German officer and writer Ernst Jünger stated in his Paris war diaries that Céline told him on 7 December 1941 "of his consternation, his astonishment" that the Germans did not "exterminate" the French Jews." https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Louis-Ferdinand_C%C3%A9line#Antisemitism,_fascism_and_collaboration

That’s probably what the companies spending the money think, that they’re building a huge moat. There’s an alternative view. If there’s a bubble and all these companies are spending these huge sums on something that ends up not returning that much on that investment, and the models plateau and eventually smaller, cheaper, self-runnable open source versions get 90% of the way there, what’s going to happen to that moat? And the companies that over spent so much?

This article is a good example of the bear case https://www.honest-broker.com/p/is-the-bubble-bursting

Note that this is the exact opposite thesis of this article[1], which I remember seeing on HN a while ago. Rather than having no counterculture, it seems the mainstream is being eaten by a thousand countercultures.

We now have maybe millions of content creators jostling for views, rather than three letter TV stations showing the same templates shows. What gets you an audience isn’t uniformity, but being different in an interesting way.

[1] https://www.honest-broker.com/p/14-warning-signs-that-you-are-living