Culture is a System

January 2024

Philosophy

And the purpose of a system is what it does

Note: a condensed version of this essay exists as Cultural Moloch. If you want the long version, you're in the right place.

Alice: "Would you tell me, please, which way I ought to go from here?"
The Cheshire Cat: "That depends a good deal on where you want to get to."
Alice: "I don't much care where."
The Cheshire Cat: "Then it doesn't much matter which way you go."
Alice: "...So long as I get somewhere."
The Cheshire Cat: "Oh, you're sure to do that, if only you walk long enough."

Ariana Grande dropped a new song this month. What's interesting is that nothing about it sounds new at all.

'yes, and?' is an 80s-ish club house track, and is the first single in over 3 years from the 3rd biggest artist in the world. And someone on social media posted about it with a familiar complaint: why does everything sound the same now?

For me, this tweet broke the camel's back, and why there is now this essay for you to read. Because everyone was agreeing with it, and that's a good signal that something is wrong.

The thing is, I see questions like this one all the time. It's an interesting problem. And plenty of people are talking about it. You may have been sent the NYT op-ed 'Why Culture Has Come to a Standstill'. Maybe you follow Paul Skallas on twitter who has long been sounding the alarm for 'Stuck Culture'. The Age of Average made some waves with its relentless use of examples.

The standard explanations:

"Capitalism, but also laziness and mental vacancy, allows the powers that be (Corporations! Algorithms! Influencers!) to tell you what to do."

"Users of technology have been forced to contend with data-driven equations that try to anticipate their desires—and often get them wrong. What results is a state of docility that allows tech companies to curtail human experiences—human lives—for profit."

"The key factor can only be what happened to us at the start of this century: first, the plunge through our screens into an infinity of information; soon after, our submission to algorithmic recommendation engines."

Given the subject matter, you have to admit it's quite ironic how alike these all are. This sounds like a closed case right? Capitalist society → You are monetizable → Algorithm's goal is to keep you engaged → No room for things the algorithm doesn't understand.

But within those quotes there is a big clue telling you that something big remains unsolved. Here's a psychoanalytic heuristic that might be useful in future: if a thesis that is implied to be some kind of brutal truth allows you to feel good about yourself, then it is likely neither brutal nor true.

Because what gets left out of every single piece of analysis of cultural stagnation, without fail, is an actual psychological analysis of the actors within the system. Every single time, the sameness is diagnosed, and the buck is passed to some greater force. Which means it can't be your fault.

This is precisely why these theories are all wrong. At best, they are severely incomplete.

When I use the words 'actors within the system', I could just use the word 'us'. The people that create culture, that live culture, that know no existence without culture. I'm sure they'd be offended to find out the NYT thinks an algorithm has stripped them of all their passion under their noses in service of Silicon Valley. I know I was.

And with that misunderstanding in mind, I can say with confidence that calls to revive culture will invariably fall on deaf ears. Because culture is very much alive, it just has its own agenda, and it is always going to win.

I would best explain the system as 'the way things turn out' — the aggregating of everyone's desires. And I'm deriving your desires from the things you do, not the things you say.

The system is not capitalism. The system is not democracy. Switch out both of those things for their opposites and a lot of what I'm about to say would still hold. Because everyone involved is still a person.

Let's start really simple. I, an individual, want to get in shape. But it's cold outside and I'm hungover, so naturally I also want Uber Eats. That day I eat more calories than I burn. Now, to me, I still want to lose weight. But to the outside world, that wants to meet all of my wants at the same time, the correct conclusion is that I want to put on weight. Because how could it conclude anything else? All anyone else can see is my behaviour.

Spread this out to a population of people like me. I love music and want to listen to as much as I can, but I can't afford the fee Spotify would need to charge to pay artists fairly. So, the system wants streaming that leaves artists worse off. The system doesn't want it because it wants artists to lose out; it wants it because it's trying to fit the wants together.

This systemic outcome, while not explicitly desired by any single actor, is the cumulative effect of their combined desires and actions. There's no strings being pulled and there's no cabal. There's not even a motive. It's just us here.

The system is not 'them', it is 'us'. And you can't just leave.

No behaviour can be fully explained without an understanding of incentives. And sometimes, there isn't enough to go round. When we have separate interests, and have to guess at the other's behaviour, the rational thing to do is act fully in your own interest. This is Game Theory, and the Prisoner's Dilemma.

Now imagine there are around 8 billion people in the world. Imagine that we all have various incentives to be responding to at the same time. Imagine that not everyone can win. What sub-incentives can you not afford to care about if you want to ensure you don't get screwed?

There are very few important essays. Meditations on Moloch is one of them.

In it, Scott Alexander draws on a wealth of examples of how systems that contain many entities often compel those entities to prioritise their own survival or success, even at the expense of the greater good. Individual interests can lead to societal costs.

Here's a scenario: there are just 100 different people posting Outfit of The Day style videos to TikTok. They have a total potential audience of 1 million people that they share equally. One day, one of them tries something new. They start their video in their underwear, and put their outfit on to a trending song. This hits viewers' dopamine receptors more effectively, and they start to reach into everyone else's share of the 1 million. So what does everyone else do? They also go with the underwear and music tactic, even if they think this is sacrificing what they liked about their original content. And they get their viewers back. Within 24 hours, order is restored and the 100 creators each have equal claims to the viewers. Except now, they all have to do more just to have the same position they had in the first place.

Scott: "In some competition optimizing for X, the opportunity arises to throw some other value under the bus for improved X. Those who take it prosper. Those who don't take it die out. Eventually, everyone's relative status is about the same as before, but everyone's absolute status is worse than before."

Moloch is the crippling force of coordination failure. When you see competition within a system, expect values to be ditched in order to optimise, and expect no one to be better off in the end.

Culture develops through memes — ideas that leap from brain to brain. Over time, it is the ones that are more sticky that survive and earn a place in the collective consciousness. Just like genes, memes can mutate and respond to pressure from the environment, all with the goal of self-replication. Some are better at this than others, and can spread faster.

Combining our observations of how memes compete and Molochian dynamics of competition: one meme is going to work out an advantage, and when they do, the rest of the memes will have to follow suit, or they're left for dead. This process invariably means they all have to shed parts of their makeup to stay afloat.

So what are the characteristics of an optimised meme? Here's a real behavioural biology experiment: tones of two different frequencies were played to two sets of fertile chicken eggs. When the hatched chicks were then tested for their preference for the tones, the chicks in each set consistently chose the tone that was played to them prenatally. They preferred something that was familiar.

This is analogous to what is a robust and reliable effect in human behaviour: the mere-exposure effect. 'People tend to develop liking or disliking for things merely because they are familiar with them.' Familiarity breeds liking. Advertisers get this. Pop music producers get this.

Crucially: the mere-exposure effect is strongest when you don't consciously realize it's happening.

Why do we unconsciously prefer the familiar? Because once you are fed and safe, the real human goal is certainty. Familiar things have already been factored into our representations of what an inherently uncertain universe consists of. They fit the model, and conform to expectation. Novel things don't, which means they are scary because the unfamiliar reminds us that nothing is certain. And that is the abyss from a psychological perspective.

What technology does is make the memetic game infinite very quickly. It converts 20 games happening in 20 stadiums with 4,000 seats, to having one game with 80,000. In the latter case, the standard you need to be at to be a player is higher, and the pressure to succeed feels much heavier. Anything that's not a well-oiled, easy to reproduce meme will not do.

And the bigger the competition, the less capacity memes have to care about anything other than familiarity.

Cultural variation isn't the outcome of the system, it is proof of resistance within the system. Newer technology hasn't created a new system that has a different goal to the old one, it has just pulled all of the resistance out of it.

I mentioned at the beginning that you can't just leave this situation. I really mean that. No amount of counter-signalling, echo-chambering or self-expression does the job. That's still playing the game.

There are two issues preventing anyone from solving cultural stasis:

I. The insistence that someone/something else is doing this to us.

II. The idea that algorithms prevent people from doing the things they really want.

Because most people can accept that the system tells you what to want. But the more important process happens first, when the system teaches you what it is to desire something in the first place. You define who you are by your place within the system. And you can't just leave.

The system optimizes itself towards you, but it's also feeding you the ideas of what you want in the first place. When we all have no flaws, we'll all look the same. So will our coffee-shops. So will our cars.

Algorithms flatten culture because to the system, this is optimisation. It thinks it is serving us but that is how we've told it to serve us.

Who's responsibility is it to save us? Don't let the ego play one final trick. Don't just hope that there is inevitably some new era of the digital where the joy returns. Don't think there's someone pressing this great stasis upon you.

It's not Sam Altman. It's not Google/TikTok/Elon Musk. It's not Joe Biden or Rishi Sunak. It's not Wall Street, and it's not Rupert Murdoch.

It's the system that they are all a part of. And as I've tried to explain, my friends, that includes you.

And you can't just leave.