Something that used to be popular was the concept of the Western Canon: a core reading list of timeless works for the ages, around which our collective culture revolved. But I don’t think such a thing exists or can exist any more, in our hyper-diverse, hyper-content-stuffed world. As the amount and availability of TV, music, books, films, etc. increases, the odds of meeting somebody who’s had a similar set of cultural inputs as you tends towards zero.
Tentpole stuff like Harry Potter is the only thing saving us from complete societal atomization where everybody is a stranger.
I am not the content I see. I don't watch movies or shows, I don't watch Douyin (TikTok), don't keep up with social media, I haven't read Harry Potter or watched Star Wars. I only watch a few small channels on Youtube, and I play Rocket League, and work on personal hobby projects (coding, photography, ceramics).
There are lots of people who I would consider myself to not be strangers with. You should be able to connect with people over things besides "tentpole" pop culture artifacts. You should be able to connect with people without any common cultural artifacts. People are interesting.
> You should be able to connect with people over things besides "tentpole" pop culture artifacts.
You can, of course. You're missing or ignoring the implication that one can have any kind of expectation about connecting with an arbitrary individual.
Personally, I think this is for the positive: acknowledging that you can't expect to connect with everyone seems healthy.
To me it seems like walking back on all the moral progress we've achieved. Today you don't expect it's possible to connect with everyone, tomorrow you deny humanity to anyone you can't imagine yourself connecting to.
I think it also depends on what kind of connections you want.
As somebody that really values comedy and a sense of humor, it becomes very obvious that humor is particularly dependent on having shared cultural references. For me, if a new relationship doesn’t having the touchstones that allow joking around it feels empty and sterile
I suppose this might be related to nerd culture decades ago. Scifi, fantasy and comic books for example were much more niche, you would be ostracized or ridiculed for showing interested in them openly. That was before those genres were appropriated by the mainstream. Before that, nerds would (with great effort) seek out other nerds in order to share the same appreciation for the hyper specific interests they had.
Now the average person discovered the joy of such hyper specific content, instead of the same lowest most common denominator mainstream shit. But it's also generational, older generations are very much constrained in their cultural consumption. What you described hasn't happened yet I don't think, but it might once everyone who still watches TV is dead.
Yes, well done, the canon is winning the most amount of scorn from academics, HOWEVER. The desire for quality will outlive them all, including big tent slop and long-tail slop.
Here's a popular culture take on the same theme. Jokes and sketch comedy.
"The three Yorkshiremen" monty python sketch. It's actually a sketch that some of the pythons did for another comedy sketch show some years before. As far as I know it's the only one they carried forward.
My parents could recite a 1940s radio comedy sketch about the phonetic alphabet and cockney rhyming slang which would probably make no sense to most people today, they'd carried it with them into the 70s and 80s.
An awful lot of contemporary humour simply fades away and maybe one or two key moment carries on.
Future generations may know Chaplin solely from a clip of modern times in the machine. Or know Lucille Ball treading grapes.
"But, tell that to the youth of today, they won't believe you"
Chaplin and Keaton (among others, like Lloyd) are still hilarious and their films technically impressive and full of movie-magic spectacle. I’ve watched a fair amount (certainly a ton more than most people) of silent film and IMO the comics are by far the most-accessible of the bunch to a modern audience, requiring minimal “education” on how to understand, appreciate, enjoy, or “read” them. They’re the only ones I’d unreservedly recommend to just about anyone who likes movies.
Very few dramatic silents are even close to as accessible—I’d say the ones that age second-best are those that lean art-film, but those are hindered by that entire genre being obscure and difficult to enjoy for most people, so while they may not be much more challenging to enjoy than a talkie art film and might deliver just as much quality as most of those can, that’s a fairly different bar to clear than enjoying a comedy or ordinary drama.
The comedies do seem to be surviving better, too, even if not as well as they deserve. The dramas survive in the public consciousness as a very-small number of well-known scenes or images (the rocket-in-the-moon’s-eye, the android from Metropolis) but reference most anything else from even those films, let alone other very-well-regarded but barely-watched-today movies, and nobody but a few film nerds will notice.
Some comedy works have endured, like Three Men in a Boat by Jerome K. Jerome (though it is helped by its huge influence on To Say Nothing of the Dog by Connie Willis).
Surprisingly great post. Works that last are often being championed by critics, gatekeepers, or the next generation of artists. On some level there's just too much great art in the world, and it's more fun to appreciate the same art as your peers instead of consuming only obscure pieces and having nobody to talk about them with.
I wonder how much of Lovecraft’s popularity has to do with the excellent Call of Cthulhu tabletop RPG (one of the generation of games that targeted everything wrong with Dungeons and Dragons) and how much it has to do with stories like that becoming so mainstream (e.g. any season of Sailor Moon is about some kind of supernatural-extraterrestrial invasion.)
First things first, let's take a glance back at Weird Tales, the pulp magazine that featured the works of Robert E. Howard and H.P. Lovecraft. This magazine eventually laid the groundwork for the cultural exchange that influenced their respective tabletop games. While their concurrent publishing surely pitted them against each other to varying degrees, it also contributed to the reciprocal public reception of their novel depictions of the human condition, psyche, and the surreal, metaphysical underbelly of reality.
One could conclude that the Cthulhu Mythos and the subsequent Neo-noir, Art Deco and Gothic subcultures were erected upon the very site of the largely forgotten ruins of what Lovecraft and his contemporaries authored or cinematized all those years ago, alongside their fashion and architectural underpinnings. The brewing resurgence closely coincided with WW2 coming to a close and leaving its wake a hankering for cultural reawakening. Lovecraft, having passed on with his work still largely unknown to most, but the work preserved by some stubbornly dedicated enthusiasts, and most notably one by the name of August Derleth, who took it upon himself to promote Lovecraft's work, with most of his efforts concentrated in the immediate closing of the theater of war, through a collection of anthologies and continued post-war efforts.
After a decades-long lasting lull that surrounded Lovecraft's yet to take place fandom it became apparent that no other horror carried in it the essence of the ominous sanity stretching terror that our human psyche very much invokes in us regarding the things beyond our senses and as such the monsters and their makeups began losing their footing in the battlegrounds of the mad brains - as Lovecraft's necromantically reconjured body of work congrued within us yet again.
Moving to the modern era of Sandy Petersen's lineage of Mythos, the game designer of Call of Cthulhu who most certainly understood the principles behind the source material and had the design sensibilities to instill these ideas into carryable game plans that bore fruit in communicating these rather novel ideas through the medium of socially unconventional means of self-expression that only such theatrical mode of eloquence as tabletop roleplaying games could hope to summon forth—especially during its formative years, around that era of cooperative gaming in 1981, as Call of Cthulhu's newly found pages were revealed for the new era of fans in the form of its Basic Role-Playing manual[0], published by the house of Chaosium.
The book not only revived H.P. Lovecraft’s work but also placed it under the looking glass of rigorous scrutiny in studying cultural malleability and the maddening hunt in uncovering the sensical faculties of the forgotten one's works. Petersen’s game revitalized the role-playing genre with its way to powerfully evoke imagery that conjures and warps our very subrealities, revealing the hidden: that even in our most orderly and structured boasts, the cosmos remains inscrutable as it coasts.
Harry Potter will last. I have not read it but god it is everywhere. I cannot escape it, maybe it's less referenced in Asian cultures.
Videogames: I don't play much. But Mario seems likely. Minecraft and Fortnite are very big right now, but they lack memorable main characters so I doubt they survive 25+ years.
Music: None of my favorites but Kanye might have 1 song remembered in 50 years. I know friends who got into music creation all commend Kanye's 'ear'. His music does feel 'grand' more than any other artist I've heard but it's not my thing personally.
Tough to say. I can’t remember the name right now but I was reading an essay from whitehead written about a hundred years ago and he was lamenting how popular some writer was the he considered awful. It struck me because I hadn’t heard the name before, and I’m pretty well-read.
There are oceans of forgotten works out there, we just——by definition——have forgot about them.
Yes Harry Potter has sold lots of books, but how do you compare that to black beauty? It sold maybe a 10th but in a time of smaller markets. People still know of black beauty but it isn’t a cultural force——more a peculiarity of the time.
For sure some things written this century will be around in the year 3000, it’s just impossible to say what.
I don't think Harry Potter will stand the test of time that well. In the world of Harry Potter, there are no cell phones, no internet, no Google and no AI. For my generation that was no issue at all when we got into the books, because the Internet were fairly obscure in 1997 (as in, not something you would use on a daily basis), Google was just a postdoc project and of course kids didn't have cellphones.
7 books later, it seemed fairly strange that the characters in this magical place didn't have access to the things we used every day.
For kids born today? They will grow in the world where it is perfectly normal to talk with a computer that is smarter than they are. That will not be a wow experience like the first time you talked with an AI. It will be completely normal, entirely unsurprising, just like you expect there to be light when you push the light switch.
Their world will be far more magical than the one we grew up in. But Harry Potter is stuck in time, forever suspended in the late 1990's as some fly in amber.
Now imagine you pick up a book supposedly full of magic and many wonders. And then the characters have to search through books by reading them until they happen to find the piece of information they want. Thats already laughable to me. How much more so to kids who grew up with talking computers and touch screen phones? Where, of course, the pictures move and you can talk to them.
I could be entirely of base here, but one of the great things about the Harry Potter series was the feeling of Magic. Is the Magic going to be there for future generations?
> I don't think Harry Potter will stand the test of time that well. In the world of Harry Potter, there are no cell phones, no internet, no Google and no AI.
Books and stories that stand the test of time do so in spite of aging.
By that, I mean that $FOO is just so damn good that it captures the imagination completely and fully.
There were no television sets in Grimm fairy tales, and they're still being retold. There were no cellphones in Shrek, the last movie was made in 2019, and those ears are still recognisable to my child, born after 2019!
For books and stories to age well they don't need to be very relatable to the reader (although it helps), they need to be good!
A further argument is that, to be relatable, technology is not needed. There is not problem, right now, reading a book or a story written in 2024 that is set in (for example) 1960. Some very popular recent books/stories/movies/series were set in the 60s, 70s and 80s.
Being relatable is neither necessary nor sufficient to aging well.
Why did Shakespeare remain popular in the age of the atom bomb? Wasn't every new reader in the 1960s just thinking "Hey, why doesn't Macbeth just nuke Macduff?"
I don't think that Shakespeare's works have been popular (in the sense of many people wanting to voluntarily consume them) for many generations.
Yes, most people even today are familiar with those works to some extent, but that's just an artifact of those people being forced to consume those works repeatedly in high school and possibly again in college or university.
When I was in high school in Canada decades ago, almost none of the students liked studying those works. To most people, they were generally incomprehensible, and the stories and characters were nearly impossible to relate to or to care about.
A couple of the English teachers I had back then openly admitted to not like those works, too, and only taught them because the curriculum forced them to be taught.
Even among those who claim to "like Shakespeare", they seem to be driven more by wanting to feel "highbrow" rather than any genuine appreciation for the works.
> Even among those who claim to "like Shakespeare", they seem to be driven more by wanting to feel "highbrow" rather than any genuine appreciation for the works.
The main problem with Shakespeare is that we are reading something that is supposed to be performed.
A play strongly depends upon the actors to give it life.
I had this driven home when I was reading a script for some play I found particularly particularly boring. We got together to read it aloud for rehearsal, and I uttered some line that caused a couple of chuckles.
Wait, hold the phone! This character is supposed to be funny, and I, the actor, completely missed that from simply reading the script. Suddenly, I was rereading everything with a completely different tone in mind and paid a lot more attention to timing. The character suddenly had life where before it was simply flat.
I think this is what causes the disconnect about Shakespeare. The people who praise Shakespeare are projecting their experience(s) of a play over top of what they are reading while those who do not have that experience cannot understand what is so interesting.
> Even among those who claim to "like Shakespeare", they seem to be driven more by wanting to feel "highbrow" rather than any genuine appreciation for the works.
This is amusing because evidence suggests that at the time his works were not considered highbrow, and they seem to have been popular with a wide audience.
> This is amusing because evidence suggests that at the time his works were not considered highbrow, and they seem to have been popular with a wide audience.
Yeah. Shakespeare was the Justin Bieber of his time :-)
Good point. Harry Potter is about a friend group fighting evil in a world of magic. If there is no magic, if in fact that world is less magical than the real world, then a big part of the appeal of the book will be lost.
Magic is not a big part of Shakespear, and the part that is (Ghost, fairies) are most dissimilar to the magic we have since created.
I also think that Sherlock will continue to remain popular because the appeal of the stories - who did it and how did the detective figure that out - has not fundamentally changed.
Shakespeare’s reputation has grown over the centuries. While he was popular at the time he wasn’t regarded by critics as the greatest English playwright until at least a hundred years after his death.
My daughter recently read through the “Nancy Drew Diaries”. It turns out they took the original Nancy Drew books, including settings, and redid them in a cell phone/ early smartphone world, and they’re still fun. It’s an interesting concept!
As an aside from your core point about tech, I don't think Harry Potter's universe is particularly well-designed or thoughtful. I mean, I haven't actually read Harry Potter, but having watched the movies and talked to my son who has read the books a few times, the magic system seems entirely inconsistent and capricious, and is one of my bigger gripes with the story coming from more mature authors like Brandon Sanderson that build out much more consistent and believable fantasy worlds.
I have no idea whether this will affect the work's longevity, but it sure affects my desire to read it.
Yes! My son finished the books a couple of times over, but now is dedicated to HP fan fiction, entirely beause he read Harry Potter and the Methods of Rationality. It was a suggestion from a friend a few years back, but I very much appreciate you mentioning it here since it might be nice read for someone else as well.
> And then the characters have to search through books by reading them until they happen to find the piece of information they want. Thats already laughable to me.
If Google keeps on declining, that experience will become even more relevant in the future. Most of the information the kids need is in a book somewhere, but often in the restricted section or perhaps not in the library at all, which is quite analogous to the dark web or even just obscure websites that are either unindexed or downranked enough that they might as well be.
> Most of the information the kids need is in a book somewhere, but often in the restricted section or perhaps not in the library at all
A problem that is getting worse with politically-motivated "protect the children" witch hunts bringing book bans to the Land of the Free. Nobody shooed me away from the grown-up side of the library when I was a kid.
> Nobody shooed me away from the grown-up side of the library when I was a kid.
Me neither, but the grown-up side of the library back then did not have instructional books for teenagers on how to have homosexual intercourse.
In fact, instructions on having intercourse of any sort weren't in the grown-up side of any library I went to in the 80s. I'd be very surprised if you went to a library that did direct teens and younger to instructions on having intercourse.
Why is it a problem for teenagers to learn about sex? A thing that almost every human on earth engages in, with the desire to do so emerging in their teenage years… It seems completely obvious and normal.
> Why is it a problem for teenagers to learn about sex?
I didn't say it is. It's a problem when a group of adults outside of the formal education system wants to provide instructional material to children against their parents wishes.
I was pointing out that libraries make a call on what legal material to stock and what not to stock. The unstocked material is not in any sense of the word 'banned'.
I think the multimedia empire franchise explanation is more likely to explain which of those survive than pure popularity. Minecraft seems like it could be replaced by something else in the same genre, but MS is still actively developing it so maybe it will just evolve. But it seems likely to me new generations will want something for that niche. Something like Harry Potter seems more like the sort of thing that will last while the people who enjoy it live, but at the same time things like James Bond or Star Trek are outlasting their original fans so who knows.
With things like James Bond and Star Trek. Is what is popular their original iterations or later ones? With Star Trek Movies yes, but the original series? Or something reasonably modern like TNG and DS9.
Same could be asked with James Bond, how well do all of the movies do? Or is it some specific pieces that still somewhat resonate.
Minecraft is over 13 years old and still the most popular PC game in the world by monthly active users. Not sure if there are many games that can beat that record.
As a kid, I found translations of Enid Blyton's books, e.g. The famous five, in my mothers book case. They must have been huge in their time. For my generation (1980), these books are basically unknown. I found a bunch of lookalikes from other authors too.
I thought these would become extinct by now, but googling around for writing this post, I just find the BBC created a series about them recently. They're back!
There's a good book called, "But What If We're Wrong?" by Chuck Klosterman that explores the concept of how things we consider the "best" or "worst" of contemporaneous common knowledge may change over time.
One of his examples was how there are only a handful of classical music pieces that folks remember and consider "great" after a 100+ years have passed and yet there were many composers who were popular at the time they were composing. His question was, "out of the the works of rock-n-roll in the 1900s and early 2000s, how many will be remembered in 200 years time?" Will it be "Louie-Louie"? Something by Elvis? The Beatles? Beyonce?, the viral song 'what does the fox say?', something that is contemporaneously unknown but is discovered some time in the future?
Tentpole stuff like Harry Potter is the only thing saving us from complete societal atomization where everybody is a stranger.