"People also rarely finish the books they read, which can be inferred from the fact people tend to be much more likely to quote passages from the beginning of a book."
Authors are often told to put the most important things they have to say at the beginning! So the beginning might end up being much more quotable.
This is a good article and I have to admit that the idea that much of the decline is downstream of the decline of literature is not something that I had previously considered. With that being said I think your dismissal of wokeness being a causal factor is off base.
If you look at something like film or TV it's very obvious "wokeness" played a key role. Hollywood systemically and intentionally purged white males from creative positions during the 2010s primarily for DEI reasons. Here's a twitter thread that shows the decline for TV, and one of the replies by Steve Sailer has further data that also encompasses the film industry. https://x.com/Scientific_Bird/status/1759700304725971342
White men have historically been responsible for the vast majority of great films and television shows in the US. I don't think it's a coincidence that reducing their industry participation coincides with a drop in quality.
>for DEI reasons. Here's a twitter thread that shows the decline for TV, and one of the replies by Steve Sailer has further data that also encompasses the film industry. https://x.com/Scientific_Bird/status/1759700304725971342
It’s very odd how while production values and quality have been consistently increasing in basically all the art forms you described (film, games, anime), writing quality has generally been stagnating or decreasing.
Large corporations should be selecting much harder on writing quality if they care about getting highly successful, in the same way they spend millions on actual production.
Even from a risk aware perspective, it’d almost certainly be worth it to gamble on some controversial writing than to guarantee subpar writing, when the reward for good writing is probably an order of magnitude for the corporation.
I imagine a large part of the issue may be writing quality is more of an average between the writers room than a sum of the writers room. If you have 100 animators, you’ll probably be able to make an animation around 100x better than if you just had one animator.
If you have 100 writers, you probably would’ve gotten something similar if you had just taken 1 and had them write the whole thing. For corporations, a large amount of writers at least mitigates the risk of one bad writer ruining everything, but it actively limits the variation you’d want to have a chance at a masterpiece.
I think this is why shows with a large amount of writers have a harder time being very high quality. The way you mitigate this is by off sourcing the writing to riskier markets where input costs are lower, aka literature. Therefore, as you say, the decline of reading and then of literary quality is what causes a decline in other forms of art.
Basically, in a standard corporation, there's very little incentive to be highly successful but a large incentive to not fail. Think of it as 3% raise if you succeed, 100% pay cut (fired) if you fail. So might as well aim for mediocrity
It's rather easy to explain: words and narratives are in collapse. Neither explain events accurately. Audiences feel this yet can't put it into words, nor can they share their ebbing sensory relance on these arbitrary tools. Short forms prove this changeover, yet the forms persist as economic revenue sources for legacy media.
" I think music has gotten better, if you ignore what rises to the top — electronic music is a richer form of expression than anything that came before it."
I think this gets to the subjectivity of this kind of enterprise. Anybody familiar with music theory will tell you popular music has gotten simpler and duller over time. I'm not sure what electronic music your thinking off that matches the richness of popular music before the 90s.
That's fair. Personally I don't listen to that much music, so my opinion on the matter isn't definitive.
Regarding electronic music, I like deadmau5, crystal castles, nhato, Teddyloid, Sidewalks and Skeletons, Pendulum, Feint, Daft Punk, and Grimes. Not niche but mainstream either; if you're talking about popular music then I would have to concede that 70s-90s were king. Didn't even like the radio stuff from the 00s-10s when I was a kid.
As a side note, the IQ projection charts suggest no major decline yet, but also that the number of very smart working age people will approach nearly zero by 2100?… in other words, it predicts that we should begin to see a major cultural decline driven by that?
I think the increased pace of anime has more to do with TV anime becoming almost exclusively 1-cour (11-13 episodes long) rather than 2-cour (22-26 episodes) as used to be the norm, than it has to do with streaming.
> "If less people are reading, that means that less people are writing, not just due to the lower demand, but also the fact that the skillsets overlap. More importantly, the demographic of individuals who tend to write the most books that become classics — White men — have vanished from major writing awards:"
Wouldn't the explanation that applies to every other industry also be more applicable here?
Men write fiction that appeals the most to men. If men are reading less, the demand for that male fiction is lower, so publishers don't care to promote male writers or even publish them.
Yes yes, men used to write those *classics*, and don't we need them now to be writing new ones? Well, would you read them? Did you read the old classics? Maybe you should start - while you're catching up in the literary tradition, a man might just write a new classic for you to enjoy.
> "This is also true for writing in American television: <Television series staffing table>"
Was there some significant change I missed, where creative staff for television are now hired by lottery? If you are trying to create a television series, will Big Hollywood step in and randomly assign a writer to you, kicking a Laquisha your way? Sincerely, are these bipoc women even being hired to make the shows you're looking forward to, or are they writing The Teenage Years Of Kendi Limited Series for Tubi?
Nonsense. Back in my day complainers mocked specific movies or TV-shows, some actual crew or cast. Now the complainers don't watch anything except social media and YouTube, so they have to rely on broad statistics to make their narrow claims.
Besides, I can't help but notice there is not as much change in the jobs of Executive Producer/Showrunner - what happened to the principle of responsibility flowing *up* the decision-making hierarchy? Who is hiring these terrible writers?
> "Some of this is just politics, but I think a lot of it is changes in incentives. The kind of introverted, smart, artistic people (regardless of gender or race) who would have written stuff like A Song of Ice and Fire are not writing anymore. They all went into tech (particularly AI, software, or game development), finance, influencing, or ghostwriting — fields that offer more lucrative opportunities. This talent reallocation has been going on for a long time, maybe as early as the 18th Century, but it’s intensified with the development of television and the internet."
Commercial fiction writing only really began in the mid 19th century, with cheap pulp paper. Not sure how this "talent reallocation" could begin before either the industry or market took shape.
This argument also fundamentally understands what writing is mostly like for writers today, and what it overwhelmingly was for past writers - something done on the side. Hardly any writers can ever make a career out of the art and not rely on supplemental income; out of those who did, most of them wrote genre fiction like A Song of Ice and Fire, not literary fiction.
A dude in tech doesn't need to sacrifice his career to write fiction on the side. If he doesn't write - he's either bad at it, or he doesn't care to do it.
> "I personally might not like the novel as a form of art, but it allows a single artistic mind to enforce their will onto the world. All great vision, all great stories — come from great and industrious geniuses, not institutions or groups. I suspect that part of it is due to the fact creative talent has a right tailed distribution: someone like Aldous Huxley is 10x more generative than the typical 99th percentile creative talent, but also because of the nature of thinking — it comes from one mind.
Because of the monocausal nature of creativity, top creative talent is less likely to find working at an institution attractive. It’s also true that, regardless of field, the best tend to go do their own thing anyway; there is nobody to slow them down or take the surplus of their labour. As such, the top creative talent that was previously writing novels or short stories is unlikely to have gone into the film industry. Can you imagine Franz Kafka working in Hollywood?"
I hardly understand this practice of ennobling a form of art you do not like and do not consume - are you not one of the people contributing to this decline in literacy you put forward?
This assumption how top creative talent would not want to work in an institution that constrains them is also asserted without thought. Of course, the powerful individuals in the institution have their own interests that conflict with an artist's vision, but that same institution also offers access to capital that artists do not possess on their own. Scorsese isn't making Silence by himself. If you think that technological advancement created better culture, then you need to square it with the fact that it's the institutions who have the most access to new technology, and the capital to hire other top talent.
And no, Kafka wouldn't be working in Hollywood - he wouldn't make it. The average Hollywood writer writes more in a year than he did in his entire life.
"People also rarely finish the books they read, which can be inferred from the fact people tend to be much more likely to quote passages from the beginning of a book."
Authors are often told to put the most important things they have to say at the beginning! So the beginning might end up being much more quotable.
The ideas of a book are also more novel to the reading when they start reading. So they are more likely to share them in the early part of the book
The Wire sucks
I honestly never watched it and listed it as an example
This is a good article and I have to admit that the idea that much of the decline is downstream of the decline of literature is not something that I had previously considered. With that being said I think your dismissal of wokeness being a causal factor is off base.
If you look at something like film or TV it's very obvious "wokeness" played a key role. Hollywood systemically and intentionally purged white males from creative positions during the 2010s primarily for DEI reasons. Here's a twitter thread that shows the decline for TV, and one of the replies by Steve Sailer has further data that also encompasses the film industry. https://x.com/Scientific_Bird/status/1759700304725971342
White men have historically been responsible for the vast majority of great films and television shows in the US. I don't think it's a coincidence that reducing their industry participation coincides with a drop in quality.
>for DEI reasons. Here's a twitter thread that shows the decline for TV, and one of the replies by Steve Sailer has further data that also encompasses the film industry. https://x.com/Scientific_Bird/status/1759700304725971342
Good link
It’s very odd how while production values and quality have been consistently increasing in basically all the art forms you described (film, games, anime), writing quality has generally been stagnating or decreasing.
Large corporations should be selecting much harder on writing quality if they care about getting highly successful, in the same way they spend millions on actual production.
Even from a risk aware perspective, it’d almost certainly be worth it to gamble on some controversial writing than to guarantee subpar writing, when the reward for good writing is probably an order of magnitude for the corporation.
I imagine a large part of the issue may be writing quality is more of an average between the writers room than a sum of the writers room. If you have 100 animators, you’ll probably be able to make an animation around 100x better than if you just had one animator.
If you have 100 writers, you probably would’ve gotten something similar if you had just taken 1 and had them write the whole thing. For corporations, a large amount of writers at least mitigates the risk of one bad writer ruining everything, but it actively limits the variation you’d want to have a chance at a masterpiece.
I think this is why shows with a large amount of writers have a harder time being very high quality. The way you mitigate this is by off sourcing the writing to riskier markets where input costs are lower, aka literature. Therefore, as you say, the decline of reading and then of literary quality is what causes a decline in other forms of art.
I wrote something about this a while back. Nothing to do with creativity, but just the general output of companies:
https://klaussimplifies.substack.com/p/mediocrity-in-labor
Basically, in a standard corporation, there's very little incentive to be highly successful but a large incentive to not fail. Think of it as 3% raise if you succeed, 100% pay cut (fired) if you fail. So might as well aim for mediocrity
It's rather easy to explain: words and narratives are in collapse. Neither explain events accurately. Audiences feel this yet can't put it into words, nor can they share their ebbing sensory relance on these arbitrary tools. Short forms prove this changeover, yet the forms persist as economic revenue sources for legacy media.
Theoria is a nice name, is Texhnolyze one of your top animes?
Yes, first to notice the link between the blog name and the anime :D
" I think music has gotten better, if you ignore what rises to the top — electronic music is a richer form of expression than anything that came before it."
I think this gets to the subjectivity of this kind of enterprise. Anybody familiar with music theory will tell you popular music has gotten simpler and duller over time. I'm not sure what electronic music your thinking off that matches the richness of popular music before the 90s.
That's fair. Personally I don't listen to that much music, so my opinion on the matter isn't definitive.
Regarding electronic music, I like deadmau5, crystal castles, nhato, Teddyloid, Sidewalks and Skeletons, Pendulum, Feint, Daft Punk, and Grimes. Not niche but mainstream either; if you're talking about popular music then I would have to concede that 70s-90s were king. Didn't even like the radio stuff from the 00s-10s when I was a kid.
Spotify replacing Radio was always destined to lead to the decline of pop and the rise of genre music
typo in paragraph starting with "Because of the monocausal nature of creativity," "regarldess" feel free 2 delete this comment
I can tell this is the synthesis of 1000s of hours of work good stuff!!!
Super interesting.
As a side note, the IQ projection charts suggest no major decline yet, but also that the number of very smart working age people will approach nearly zero by 2100?… in other words, it predicts that we should begin to see a major cultural decline driven by that?
Yes, though I don't think the decline will be as bad as the one observed, as fertility among the lower classes is plumetting.
I think the increased pace of anime has more to do with TV anime becoming almost exclusively 1-cour (11-13 episodes long) rather than 2-cour (22-26 episodes) as used to be the norm, than it has to do with streaming.
Most of the points are misses, to go over a few:
> "If less people are reading, that means that less people are writing, not just due to the lower demand, but also the fact that the skillsets overlap. More importantly, the demographic of individuals who tend to write the most books that become classics — White men — have vanished from major writing awards:"
Wouldn't the explanation that applies to every other industry also be more applicable here?
Men write fiction that appeals the most to men. If men are reading less, the demand for that male fiction is lower, so publishers don't care to promote male writers or even publish them.
Yes yes, men used to write those *classics*, and don't we need them now to be writing new ones? Well, would you read them? Did you read the old classics? Maybe you should start - while you're catching up in the literary tradition, a man might just write a new classic for you to enjoy.
> "This is also true for writing in American television: <Television series staffing table>"
Was there some significant change I missed, where creative staff for television are now hired by lottery? If you are trying to create a television series, will Big Hollywood step in and randomly assign a writer to you, kicking a Laquisha your way? Sincerely, are these bipoc women even being hired to make the shows you're looking forward to, or are they writing The Teenage Years Of Kendi Limited Series for Tubi?
Nonsense. Back in my day complainers mocked specific movies or TV-shows, some actual crew or cast. Now the complainers don't watch anything except social media and YouTube, so they have to rely on broad statistics to make their narrow claims.
Besides, I can't help but notice there is not as much change in the jobs of Executive Producer/Showrunner - what happened to the principle of responsibility flowing *up* the decision-making hierarchy? Who is hiring these terrible writers?
> "Some of this is just politics, but I think a lot of it is changes in incentives. The kind of introverted, smart, artistic people (regardless of gender or race) who would have written stuff like A Song of Ice and Fire are not writing anymore. They all went into tech (particularly AI, software, or game development), finance, influencing, or ghostwriting — fields that offer more lucrative opportunities. This talent reallocation has been going on for a long time, maybe as early as the 18th Century, but it’s intensified with the development of television and the internet."
Commercial fiction writing only really began in the mid 19th century, with cheap pulp paper. Not sure how this "talent reallocation" could begin before either the industry or market took shape.
This argument also fundamentally understands what writing is mostly like for writers today, and what it overwhelmingly was for past writers - something done on the side. Hardly any writers can ever make a career out of the art and not rely on supplemental income; out of those who did, most of them wrote genre fiction like A Song of Ice and Fire, not literary fiction.
A dude in tech doesn't need to sacrifice his career to write fiction on the side. If he doesn't write - he's either bad at it, or he doesn't care to do it.
> "I personally might not like the novel as a form of art, but it allows a single artistic mind to enforce their will onto the world. All great vision, all great stories — come from great and industrious geniuses, not institutions or groups. I suspect that part of it is due to the fact creative talent has a right tailed distribution: someone like Aldous Huxley is 10x more generative than the typical 99th percentile creative talent, but also because of the nature of thinking — it comes from one mind.
Because of the monocausal nature of creativity, top creative talent is less likely to find working at an institution attractive. It’s also true that, regardless of field, the best tend to go do their own thing anyway; there is nobody to slow them down or take the surplus of their labour. As such, the top creative talent that was previously writing novels or short stories is unlikely to have gone into the film industry. Can you imagine Franz Kafka working in Hollywood?"
I hardly understand this practice of ennobling a form of art you do not like and do not consume - are you not one of the people contributing to this decline in literacy you put forward?
This assumption how top creative talent would not want to work in an institution that constrains them is also asserted without thought. Of course, the powerful individuals in the institution have their own interests that conflict with an artist's vision, but that same institution also offers access to capital that artists do not possess on their own. Scorsese isn't making Silence by himself. If you think that technological advancement created better culture, then you need to square it with the fact that it's the institutions who have the most access to new technology, and the capital to hire other top talent.
And no, Kafka wouldn't be working in Hollywood - he wouldn't make it. The average Hollywood writer writes more in a year than he did in his entire life.
I expanded on anime because it's the medium I know best.