SITALWeek #403
Welcome to Stuff I Thought About Last Week, a personal collection of topics on tech, innovation, science, the digital economic transition, the finance industry, and whatever else made me think last week.
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In today’s post: this week, I travel back to the turn of the 20th century in order to examine the popularity and demise of Vaudeville to see what it can teach us about today's media landscape; then, I went a little further back to reflect on the 19th century's Romantic period of scientific discovery when scientists were boundary-pushing heroes and world-changing discoveries abounded.
Stuff about Innovation and Technology
“Will it Play in Peoria?”
As we trend toward infinite content generated by humans and AI, each creation’s reach, duration, value, and ability to make a mark in our collective culture is moving toward zero. This trend is something that I’ve detailed over the last several years (see Spiraling Content Meets Maxed-Out Attention; Digital Tribalism; The TikTokification of Consumption Habits, and Bite-Sized Storytelling), but we are clearly seeing the upshot of this cultural pivot coming to a head as writers and actors strike over their (largely justified) anxiety that they may have vastly diminished value in a future drowning in content.
As I survey the changing media landscape, I can’t stop thinking about Vaudeville, the most popular form of entertainment in the late 1800s and early 1900s. In the US, Vaudeville took the form of variety shows performed at local theaters. Here’s a little context on the scale of Vaudeville from Wikipedia:
By the late 1890s, vaudeville had large circuits, houses (small and large) in almost every sizable location, standardized booking, broad pools of skilled acts, and a loyal national following. One of the biggest circuits was Martin Beck's Orpheum Circuit. It incorporated in 1919 and brought together 45 vaudeville theatres in 36 cities throughout the United States and Canada and a large interest in two vaudeville circuits. Another major circuit was that of Alexander Pantages. In his heyday, Pantages owned more than 30 vaudeville theatres and controlled, through management contracts, perhaps 60 more in both the United States and Canada.
Vaudeville had broad appeal despite the rapidly diversifying melting pot of the US population. The phrase “will it play in Peoria?” (sometimes credited to Groucho Marx) comes from the Vaudeville concept that certain entertaining acts can do well regardless of the location or audience demographics (i.e., If it works in Peoria, Illinois, it will work anywhere). Vaudeville thus comprised the least common denominator of the shared interests of Americans at that time. Vaudeville was so popular that some of the top performers, like Houdini, are still globally recognizable legends today.
So, why am I thinking about Vaudeville? Every time I read about the strikes in Hollywood, I see a group of talented folks living in the past, clinging to something that doesn’t really seem to exist anymore in our rapidly changing world. In my mind, I imagined Vaudeville performers striking against powerful theater bookers for better pay and standards, and how futile that struggle would have been as cinematic theater took hold. Well, after some research, it turns out there was a union of Vaudeville performers, The White Rats, and they did go on strike against the folks that controlled the Vaudeville Managers Association. An early strike (in 1901) was successful, but their 1916 strike proved futile. By the 1910s, the rise of cinema screens and relatively cheaper movie tickets spelled the beginning of the end for Vaudeville. The ability to make recordings that could be shot once and reproduced and played many times was a massive technological disruption of a huge and culturally important industry. Sound familiar? Many of the early movie stars successfully transitioned from the Vaudeville circuit to the movie screen, including W.C. Fields, Mae West, Buster Keaton, The Marx Brothers, The Three Stooges, and Bob Hope, to name just a few; however, most Vaudeville performers left the spotlight and faded into distant memories. A similar pattern repeated with television disrupting movie theaters in the mid-20th century.
Hollywood artists are concerned that they will lose their livelihood and control/copyright of their work (or their very identity in the case of actors) to AI (see also last week’s post about copyright complexities). However, the proliferation and devaluation of content means there’s no easy recourse for addressing these issues – in a real sense, the world has already moved on, leaving Hollywood adrift. What is the value of a copyright on something that exists for a small moment in time and then disappears into the hazy past? What would have been the value of a copyright on a Vaudeville act once audiences had moved on to cinema? What’s the current value of a Hollywood blockbuster (or a Netflix streaming series) if it speeds through the cultural zeitgeist faster than anyone can remember? I’m a Hollywood junky – I love movies, movie history, and television. I don’t want to see an artistic medium that I love slowly fade away like the Vaudeville acts of a century ago. But, I also need to be open to the idea that the fate of Hollywood is to become a shrinking piece of the broadening media landscape (which may also be happening with sports and music). But, of course, I also love to be proven wrong, and I need look no further than this weekend’s Barbenheimer or the billion-dollar Taylor Swift world tour (that is currently so popular that the Federal Reserve is writing about it) for evidence that big movies and big acts still have cultural sway. Taylor Swift can indeed play in Peoria. Hollywood is one of the first industries to be significantly impacted by AI, and I spend a lot of time thinking about how it’s going to play out because I believe most professions are going to face a similar Vaudeville moment in the not-too-distant future. In reality, Vaudeville is a metaphor for my own anxieties as I am stuck between the past that I am hesitant to let go of and the future I am fearful to fully embrace. We will all find ourselves in the position of defending our identity and attempting to preserve our value in the working world. The sooner we all start thinking about how to transcend and add value alongside AI, the better. The most important trait will be adaptability. Hollywood went through a major adaptation and revival in the 1970s in response to the threat from television, but the threat from AI is going to require much bigger changes in order to maintain relevance with viewers.
AI Age of Wonder
One of the things I am most excited about with AI is the potential for accelerated scientific discovery. I was trying to think of good historical examples of when our society was on the cusp of such transformative potential (as I haven’t found post-Industrial-Age metaphors for AI terribly helpful). I happened to notice a book on my shelf, next to my lamented copy of Gödel, Escher, Bach, that I read over a decade ago titled The Age of Wonder. The book describes the Romantic age of science in the 19th century – the second scientific revolution that was inspired by artistic Romanticism. The Romantic movement was a period marked by an interest in and an awe for the natural world. The 1800s saw Darwin’s theory of natural selection, the discovery of electromagnetism, germ theory, the telephone, etc. Scientists were heroes, but also sometimes seen as pressing boundaries too far – Mary Shelley’s 1818 character of Dr. Frankenstein is the most obvious such example. This so-called Age of Wonder saw a vast amount of scientific discovery that also entered into and impacted the common culture. While (from our current standpoint) it was a relatively slow progression of scientific discovery and communication, it likely seemed fast paced to those caught in its wake, with discoveries having dramatic impacts on society. If I contrast this period with the world today, it seems like we could have an AI Age of Wonder several orders of magnitude greater in both the number and speed of discoveries. This increased amplitude and compressed timeframe is likely to have extremely unpredictable outcomes. For example, there is a good article in Forbes laying out the potential impact of AI on biology in the coming years – from allowing novel protein design to tackle a host of health, agricultural, and environmental problems to one day designing entire living organisms from scratch. I’ve also mentioned some far-out revolutions that might be pulled in, like fusion power and quantum computing.
Stuff About Demographics, the Economy, and Investing
Wealth Compression?
Contrary to the popular narrative of ever rising inequality, there appears to be growing evidence that the opposite might be true. The Atlantic reports that the recent beneficiaries of economic growth have disproportionately been workers under 40 without college degrees: “Even after accounting for inflation, Autor shows, the bottom quarter of American workers has seen a significant boost in income for the first time in years. The scholar who previously wrote about the ‘polarization’ in the U.S. workforce now concludes that the American economy is experiencing an ‘unexpected compression’. In other words, the wealth gap is narrowing with surprising speed.” Further, I’d speculate that a devaluing of many white collar jobs due to the increased capabilities of LLMs could lead to more compression between income levels in the coming years, and hopefully many new opportunities for growth and productivity.
✌️-Brad
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