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Comment by BiteCode_dev | Hacker News Reader

Remind me of the florida keys syndrom where each generation think it's a great fishing spot but doesn't have a frame of reference for how much the fishes actually became less numerous and smaller:

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I get this feeling a lot when reading old books. People used to be…more interesting? Or at least there were more interesting places like Paris in the 20s. Today the “artistic” hubs in the world feel boring compared to NYC in the 80s or Paris circa 1890-1930, but you wouldn’t know it if you didn’t read the older books.

That's just a property of the fact that the interesting people all know each other and the uninteresting people don't know them. In some sense, Sam Altman, Emmett Shear, Eliezer Yudkowsky, Paul Graham, Elon Musk, John Carmack are in a shared sphere. And they are interesting whether you think they are smart or not.

You don't hear about John-Pierre Duvage from the coffee shop because he wasn't interesting. In the future, they will talk about the places where these people met.

Groupies always wonder where the musicians are. The musicians find each other easily.

Those people you mentioned are interesting and intelligent but I wouldn’t call them artistic, or diverse intellectually. And more importantly they aren’t “a scene”, in a physical place, like Paris or lower Manhattan were.

Their sphere almost certainly include the rest that those outside barely know of. For every well-known Aella in the group, there is someone more strange and esoteric with local influence only within. The strange and interesting are never as legible to their contemporaries as they are to those who come after because one's influence is only clear after one has sufficiently influenced.

A thing that strikes me is that people in the Bay Area frequently claim that it has nothing interesting, but my friends hosted a 30-person event locally that had musical compositions, art, and talks about all sorts of things. A local festival. No one outside us knew. I suspect that, like us, there are numerous groups of people out there and that this sort of stuff is common. Only those with breakout ideas make it out, but the groups themselves comprise individuals who, if you teased out their tales, would make good stories.

If my friend groups span libertarian billionaire techies and union working-class ironworkers, I must assume that the rest of these groups are similarly diverse.

For my part, I have found the Bay Area a fascinating place full of fascinating people. I am thankful to have found my way here. Sometimes I think not even Moll Flanders has lived more exciting a life than many of those I have met here.

What all those people have in common is wealthy, healthy, well-connected parents.

The role of alcohol, drugs, and other mind-altering substances in history can't be ignored. A lot of these fascinating people were intentionally and unintentionally drugging themselves.

Definitely a factor but I think the movement of social life online and away from physical spaces probably played a bigger role.

Many were also dealing with tuberculosis, and doing their best to square the wasting from TB with how their social class/status is supposed make them

Clay Shirky argued in Cognitive Surplus that excessive gin consumption was because those people were bored. It stopped when their job opportunities opened up.

IIRC, he was optimistic that media consumption would similarly dry up once people had more compelling options.

it's material and political. the most interesting people have enough resources to focus on non-survival tasks, and the individual or collective ability to act freely. today, people generally have higher expenses, less free time, and there are more cops. you'll still see interesting culture among

1. cities where living expenses are generally high, so discretionary spending is low, but a subculture has successfully secured low-cost housing or workspace somewhere the cops can't easily go.

2. rural areas where wages are generally low, so discretionary spending is low, but a subculture has successfully exploited region-exclusive exports or experiences somewhere the cops don't bother to go.

3. wealthy people

4. indigenous people that have resisted the incursion of wage labor and state power

> today, people generally have higher expenses, less free time, and there are more cops

Do you have sources for these?

I found the above comment an interesting thought, but then it raises the question -- how do you measure "interesting culture"?

All three statements are manifestly true. I'd only add that free time is bi-modal; under- and over-employed with few people (in the USA) having "just right" work-life balances.

Further, wrt "cops can't easily go", u/ruined might be riffing on ideas popularized by James C. Scott. eg The Art of Not Being Governed [2009] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Art_of_Not_Being_Governed

Read a (auto)biography of a person who grew up or spent considerable time in an area where you have experience. It's illuminating.

Because we are more socially interconnected, so the strings of society that keep us connected are also the ones constraining us. The "risk" of non-uniformity outweighs the gain for most people.

Back then, doing something that society deemes risky/provocative/condemns, as an artist, a musician, a politician would be seen or heard only by the people present, everyone else would have second or third hand accounts of it, and that would be maybe tomorrow, maybe the week after, maybe the month after.

You could get drunk in a tavern, get in a brawl and paint the owner's wife posing as a nude boar. The people who would know about it first hand would be only the people who directly saw it. Your boss wouldn't hear about it unless he is in direct contact with the people there, which would be rare.

Nowadays, getting in a brawl would end up with someone calling the cops immediately, someone posting it on instagram, someone calling your job to get you fired with probably a dozen articles next day "drunken fool fights local bar owner after insulting his wife".

These social constraints, the speed of information and the interconnectedness of it all is constraining us into uniformity, as behaviour against the graph is more and more ostracised - unless you have enough social capital to afford it, at which point it is rewarded.

So of course we are less interesting - we are being forced into uniformity.

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