Extracting stupid
From our collected nonsense (☕ spout-shout #2)
Just a random thought that I couldn’t keep in my brain.
My series on wealth is ongoing, but this is not part of it…
I watched a movie called Extraction 2 last night.
It apparently is the number 1 movie currently streaming on Netflix, in goodness-knows how many countries, and I'm as partial to trash as anyone, at times. But honestly, the script was just genuinely bad. It had some ok (‘well-known’) actors (‘faces and bodies’) in it; it looked ok from a cinematography perspective; and it ticked the action-movies boxes:
☑ Rugged hero who’s lost stuff (family/pets/friends/motivation)
☑ Bulletproof bad guys
☑ Bulletproof good guys, who can walk away from an unsecured vehicle crash at 80 kph, but are really inconvenienced by a pocketknife wound to the shoulder
☑ Explosions, and helicopters, and exploding helicopters
☑ No thought for innocents caught in the crossfire, but real tears shed for a team member despite their responsibility for countless intentional-and-accidental murders.
It was visually interesting: I noticed some pretty obvious, but still intriguing, use of reframed 360-camera shots during one action scene for example, and lots of fire and guns and stuff.
But it was just stupid.
I don’t know…it got some stars on Google Reviews, so maybe I was just in a bad mood? But, I feel like this has been the same story with essentially all these big-budget movies and shows that Netflix etc are churning out now. Stuff like ‘Red Notice’ and ‘Knives Out 2’ should have been pretty good—big name actors and directors; plenty of money on screen… A couple of episodes into the new season of Black Mirror and it looks to be not a patch on even the last Netflix season, let alone the original Channel-4 episodes.
I’m reserving my judgement on the remaining Black Mirror episodes, but the promise of huge content platforms, like Netflix, was supposed to be innovative content: Content that pushed boundaries of creativity, and propped up industry geniuses so they could make their ‘dream projects’; Content that funded new, risky, visionaries, out of subscriptions driven by ‘Big Bang Theory’ and ‘Friends’ reruns… After all, they clearly have money to throw at recognisable faces and names, blowing up luxury cars, and filming in Dubai and the Amalfi Coast. Why don’t they have the money to pay for decent scriptwriting, and production timelines that build in some ‘refinement time’?
Predictable stories, corny or too-clever lines, that neither move the narrative forward or encourage us to care about any characters, or even to assume the characters care about each other.
Now I’m not really disappointed in Extraction 2. I knew it was going to be pretty dumb machismo, designed to fill a quiet night on the couch while simultaneously doom-scrolling Tweedit. But it occurred to me that most movies, numerically, are like this: Churned out, or just bad. To a large degree, they have been since the heyday of physical Blockbuster stores. But back then, there were limits—mostly financial—on what got made. And, back then, the shit wore that badge proudly, with its terrible special effects and unnecessarily-scantily-clad females on the cover, half-obscured by a “$4 for 12-day-hire” sticker.
What we have now is A-list actors and directors making B-grade shit, using low-cost but still very-shiny 8K cameras; and even the special effects shots, contracted out to Fiverr.com, still look impressive!
And it’s not just streaming movies and TV. You can easily publish a book on Amazon; you can get it printed and bound with a nice-looking dust cover. It can be full of plot-holes and typos, but it will still look the part. If you’ve got some spare savings and an inferiority complex, you can even proxy-buy a bunch of your own books, or pay for some Facespace advertising, to push your ego-project up the charts and make it appear credible, for people who are only buying it for the Kindle thumbnail anyway… Kind-of like hiring a Hemsworth to pretty your turd-of-a-movie up to the top of the Netflix charts.
I really like the idea of democratising content. I’m here, writing on a platform that gives me that exact opportunity.
But, here, my writing needs to hold-up against a lot of other really great writers. A commitment to me is a commitment to rambling reads that bisect multiple subjects with questionable anecdotes.
You’ve never heard of me; I don’t have university tenure, or a best-selling fiction series. If I build up a loyal readership on here, it’s can only be because I’m writing genuine bangers!
A while back I watched a YouTube video from a clever musician and producer called Rick Beato. You can watch it below if you want (his choice of video thumbnail makes it appear way more stupid than it is… which is…kind-of… proving my point)
His video basically just demonstrates how long-established artists—the names you know, like Ed Sheeran, Taylor Swift and Rihanna—remain the kings and queens of Spotify. He points out how all the bright-young-thangs on TicTak, and other places, seem to be getting heaps of attention, but they’re not really.
Big margins from the biggest music acts used to fund experimental albums like Queen’s ‘A Night at the Opera’1, and the Beatles’ ‘Revolver’. And it allowed A&R2 people to hunt out innovative new acts, in dimly-lit clubs, and pay them for their first albums. Now, there’s little opportunity to innovate even if you’re big, because the money just goes to shareholders; and new acts simply pray they’ll go viral on the socials, so they can pay rent with the sponsored-post money from skin-cream, mattress, or VPN advertisers.
So, where does this leave us?
Well, I think the general concentration of the content-creation industry is bad. Obviously. But I also think the laziness of the concentrated content-creation industry is worse. They are clearly related—more competition is good for lazy industries—but they are different problems, if we look towards the future.
If you’ve been reading me for a while, you might have caught my series on AI. One thing that’s clear from the accessibility, low cost, and growing-power of generative AI, is AI will get used to do things like write movies and music. And, remember, generative AI is basically just a super-pattern organiser.
What worries me are the kinds of patterns we’re increasingly feeding AI. AI models have no starting point for the difference between ‘popular’ and ‘good’ like humans do. And, as time goes on, it will be mostly other-AI-generated patterns they’ll be analysing anyway.
If you’ve ever photocopied a photocopy—especially on an older photocopier—you’ll know each successive copy-of-a-copy gets worse. If we are starting with popular garbage, and then each successive generation of AI is scraping from the output of the previous AI generation, eventually no amount of money, or application of power, will produce anything except worse garbage.
There’s two problems with this. The first is, I don’t want to live in a boring world; I want my tastes to be challenged! But computer scientists also care about something else known as modal collapse, which (very simplistically) is when a system (or argument) can’t stand-up, because it is extrapolated from limiting foundational ideas. This is a problem if you front-load the ‘pattern of human experience’ with limited diversity—beige, formulaic popular-but-bad media. That lack of diverse patterns is going to bite us on the ass when we are fed an ever-narrowing selection of stuff; until we become unable to even be certain what good looks like.
You might think I’m over-reacting.
Maybe I am.
I’ve mentioned previously that creativity is a human drive which has no explicit reason, or need, to just go away. But, we do forget how to do things—we forgot how to make Roman concrete! So, we could forget what it’s like to have mind-expanding movies, music, and art.
Popular art is a smooth road to nowhere in particular. Popular AI-generated art is a circular road.
If you’re creating—for good—put your hiking boots on, and don’t be afraid to get lost.
-T
In addition to the ~6 minute long Bohemian Rhapsody, this album includes an impressive 8-minutes of ‘The Prophet’s Song’… This, from a band that was very accustomed to radio play.
Artist & Repertoire: basically the talent scouts in the music industry