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Comment by quotemstr | Hacker News Reader

Imagine how alienating it must be to have no common cultural touchstones to share with other people.

We're already there when it comes to music. We have a lot of virtuoso musicianship today. You want top-tier jazz? You can find it. Bossa Nova? Yep. Orchestral arrangements? Those too. Blues and old-school rock? Still being made. But we no longer have music as a common cultural touchstone: everything's been atomized to hell, fragmented into perfectly-curated Spotify ML-recommended playlists. People no longer use music to connect to each other. It's more about individual hedonic enjoyment.

As goes music, so goes all entertainment and all media. When everything is perfectly tailored to each individual's preferences, what we're left with isn't so much culture (which in its essence is about commonality) as much as aesthetic pornography.

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>People no longer use music to connect to each other. It's more about individual hedonic enjoyment.

I find this line of thought interesting because sharing music is a significant part of how I connect with my best friend. We each keep managing to find new music the other likes but hasn't heard yet.

I also use it to connect with my family. My dad, brother, and I have lots of overlap. My mom, not so much, but I still wrack my brain looking for something in my list that fits with her preferences so we can both enjoy the music.

Ultimately, rather than it being one circle of "good music", we each have our own circle of what we like and connecting then becomes about finding the overlap of our circles. Like figuring out food for a group of people, or basically any other situation that requires compromise.

Although yeah, music services now are tailoring to individuals, I think you could decompose an individual's preferences into weighted tags, essentially (likes distorted guitars, loves complex melodic lines, etc), and then to generate a playlist for a group of people you just find the most common overlaps of their tags and generate a playlist from that. Maybe my mom also likes complex melodies, but prefers pianos. So we arrive at a compromise on jazz piano.

Pandora is ideally positioned for this with their Music Genome Project, but in my view they've largely squandered the opportunity and ceded their advantage to Spotify.

I'm not convinced that we need huge proprietary time-wasters to have conversations with each other. There are circumstances in life when long TV shows may be fun and entertaining, but watching them shouldn't be expected. With my family, and random people met in places, I talk about real life that we have in common or wider societal trends. This can be instructive (about what people think) even if very light. I remember a guy complaining before an unrelated class that "computer people hunched over keyboards will take over everything". Little did he know.

You can say that real life stuff can be hot and divisive, but then pop culture can also. See how new Star Wars and recent blockbusters generated controversy and online culture wars. Handling people with opinions, and your own opinions, is a valuable skill nonetheless.

I am into music as well, as in listening to albums and records collecting, and am very happy that I don't have to know or listen to anything "mainstream" in particular. Free exploration is so much more pleasurable. I do share some of my tastes with people around me, but really a different little thing with each person.

Common cultural touch stones are more thigs like the St James Bible" the Classics etc.

In the Uk it might be Last night of the Proms, Dr Who , Queens Speech, Test Cricket on the Radio, world service weather reports etc

You don't need 'common cultural touch stones' when you have shared real life experiences.

When you take away all other shared experience, what remains is politics, the nuts and bolts of running a society. We've seen a surge in political extremism lately; one thing that drives political extremism in general is the inability to share non-political experiences with one's political opponents.

People who put time into things recognize others who do the same. Music curation democratization through spotify etc. just means that you can get good results without putting in the time digging.

If you want to connect with others based on your own curations, you need to show of your process, show that you put time into things.

A comparable complexity of digging and recording your own tapes back in the day would translate to running your own music channel or site, and connecting directly with underground artists on sites like Soundcloud or Bandcamp. If you want to do this you have to put in your time, like back in the day. Democratization through digitalization just shifts things to a different level.

People no longer use music to connect to each other. It's more about individual hedonic enjoyment.

The metal subculture is alive and well and just as much a community as it was 20 years ago. Or maybe that’s just here in Wales where we don’t believe in progress for its own sake. That’s for London folk.

That's a community built for the purpose of appreciating that specific kind of music. That's fine, but I'm talking about being able to talk about music with random people I've met for non-music purposes. It's no longer possible to do so.

I just don't agree. What's Old Town Road if not a common cultural touchstone?

History ended, now culture, what to do...

Computer archeology comes to rescue them all.

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