Greetings from the future it's really f*cking boring
How the quantitative revolution has changed our culture, and the sinister implications for our future
Hi folks, Patrick Ryan here from Odin. We build powerful tools for VC’s, angels and founders to raise and deploy capital seamlessly. You can learn more about our mission here.
This is an image you may have seen doing the rounds at some point.
It shows, very clearly, how the quantitative revolution has affected basketball. When you run the numbers, the only places it makes sense to take a shot from are outside the D (3 points) or right next to the basket (2 points). As a result, nowadays every team in the NBA plays basketball this way.
But it is not just basketball (or, famously, baseball) that has adopted “moneyball”. Like an incredibly contagious virus, the philosophy of moneyball has rapidly spread, infecting the entirety of human culture.
And it’s making everything boring as f*ck.
In 2022, the 10 most popular films in the world included eight franchise sequels (Top Gun, Jurassic Park, Avatar, Minions, a Shrek spinout, three Marvel movies), and a rehash of Batman. In 2023, we got four sequels (two more Marvels, the umpteenth Fast and Furious instalment and Mission Impossible: Is it Possible Tom Cruise Is Still Making These Films) plus two spinouts from toys (Barbie, Super Mario). There was also a rehash of the Little Mermaid. To round things off, the angelic Timothée Chalamet brought us Wonka, a prequel to a film that was a rehash of a film that was a rehash of a book.
Barely anything original makes it into the charts any more. We get moneyball movies instead, reliable content that is kind of sh*t but comfortably familiar.
It’s the same story in music. The music industry has been getting steadily more data-driven (read: boring) since the early ‘90s. Studies indicate pop hits are getting more similar over time. Country is fast becoming one of the most popular music genres in the world, and it all sounds the same.
So no, it’s not just you.
Everything is getting more boring.1
Maybe non-traditional media is different?
Nah.
Thanks to short form video on TikTok, Youtube and Instagram, you are now fed a constant, frustratingly addictive stream of the-same-but-slightly-different video clips whenever you open your phone. In the battle to monopolise your time, these algorithms optimise for easy to consume mental fast food that they know you’ll like just enough to keep watching.
In spite of yourself, you are sucked in, scrolling and scrolling for just one more hit from the mind numbing bong of boring.
This whole industry is about to get a steroid injection. As AI becomes more ingrained in our culture, the media we create and the very paper we write on gets embedded with universal, data-driven, computer generated “intelligence". This can almost wholly replace human curation, creation and even relationships.
It is also where things start to get rather sinister.
Tiktok has recently been openly paying people to pump out really, really dumb conspiracy theory content generated with AI.
Last year, some lady “married” her chatbot.
We are not far from a place where the vast majority of images, videos, news articles, movies, food recipes, psychological counselling programs, educational syllabuses, conversations or whatever you can think of are being generated almost entirely by algorithms, based on simple prompts.
We are no longer creating. We are, in many ways, simply lending our voice to an algorithm. The world, as a result, becomes ever more shaped and optimised according to the goals of our corporate machine overlords. Their primary objective? To leverage the data you provide to generate profits.
The risk is that each of us will end up trapped in a dumbed down algorithmic bubble of our own creation, exposed to far fewer ideas that challenge us, or bring us outside of our comfort zone.
Everything you see taste feel think believe will be algorithmically predicted, narrowed, pre-ordained.
Sounds really f*cking boring.
I am, however, an optimist.
Things go in cycles. I do not think this will last.
What makes you uniquely human is, in many ways, the exact opposite of all of this. It is the way that your right brain - the chaotic, emotional, intuitive, creative, big-picture part of it - balances your left - the rational, orderly, linear process manager.
The part of you that feels things - joy, pain, love, humour, sadness and anger - is a key input in your ability to innovate. It will become increasingly valuable in a world that is saturated with data and sameness.2
In fact, this magic, when combined with AI, has the potential to unleash creativity and variety at never seen before scales. Things like this hilarious C3PO rap video can already be made by one person. We’ve come a long way from Will Smith eating spaghetti, in a very, very short space of time. The potential for the future is boundless.
I imagine the current excitement about AI feels a lot like the early days of the internet. A miraculous new technology promises a world where anything is possible, and anyone can be a part of it.
But the internet, and in many ways the world, came to be controlled by a small number of companies, and steered to serve their objectives. AI may well push us further down that path. This is, in fact, exactly what the VC firms backing Open AI, Anthropic et al. are betting on.3
What we must be careful to protect going forwards is our humanity.
Our emotions, our chaos, our randomness and its variety. The yin to AI’s yang.
We still don’t really understand how the human brain works. Is it plugged into some sort of universal consciousness substrate? Does it work via some form of quantum mechanics?
What is for certain is that it doesn’t work like a modern AI. You think, and create, in a very different, independent, unpredictable way.
And that is exactly what makes the world interesting.
PR
Don't give yourselves to brutes - men who despise you - enslave you - who regiment your lives - tell you what to do - what to think and what to feel!
Who drill you - diet you - treat you like cattle, use you as cannon fodder
Don't give yourselves to these unnatural men - machine men with machine minds and machine hearts!
You are not machines!
- Charlie Chaplin, “The Great Dictator”
P.S. Sorry I haven’t written anything in so long! Fatherhood and a bunch of changes in how we run things at Odin have kept me busy. I am planning a return to regular posts as of this week.
I am heavily indebted for this section of the article to a piece called “What Moneyball-for-Everything Has Done to American Culture” by Derek Thompson
If you want to dive deeper on the differences between the right brain and the left brain, and the way in which the left brain (order, rationality, systems thinking - basically more similar to a computer) has come to dominate modern culture, there’s a great documentary on Netflix about it called “The Divided Brain”. It’s based on a book called “the Master and His Emissary”.
The Master Switch by Tim Wu is a great book to check out on the way in which new technologies create cycles of openness followed by periods of control, and how the swings get bigger (and more dangerous) in the era of information technology.
The interesting stuff has always been on the edges. Punk rock started in dim little British nightclubs. From there it spread to other little nightclubs. Then it went mainstream, sold out, and died.
Popular culture has always been the enemy of creativity. But it still thrives where bored people try to do their own thing!
really enjoyed reading this, thank you!