The emptiness of literature written for the market
I am moving from the tech world into long form fiction, so I find the intersection of fiction and comments from folks on HN interesting.<p>Definitions matter. To me, art is emotional impact over time. Good art can impact you emotionally from hundreds of years ago. Bad art doesn&#x27;t even hold your attention all the way through the presentation. (The impact does not have to be positive or negative; some of the best art can really bum you out)<p>I was watching an interview with an animator a while back. What did he think of all the new cool animation tools?<p>He gushed over the awesome tech and the wonderful talent that&#x27;s out today. It&#x27;s amazing and incredible compared to just a few decades ago.<p>Then he said something very interesting. After making sure folks realized he wasn&#x27;t criticizing all modern animation, he said that he thought it all kind of looked the same. It was all perfect, and all perfect in the same way.<p>We have seen this happen to fiction over the last 50-70 years. Even when it&#x27;s good, it&#x27;s all kinda the same anymore. It&#x27;s different and excellent, but in the same ways all fiction is. It&#x27;s not unusual when experiencing a book or movie to get all hyped up by what you expect the experience to be, to gush while experiencing it how awesome it was, and to have no recollection at all even a month later what was so good about it.<p>If you want to feel sad for art, drop in on a reddit post where somebody asks &quot;What&#x27;s the best X?&quot; where X can be a book, movie, podcast, etc.<p>It&#x27;s all stuff over the past ten years, and it always is. We are in a state of perpetual forgetting and recycling canned emotions. The classics aren&#x27;t the classics because they&#x27;re better. They&#x27;re the classics because they encourage us to create the same level of quality material. Sometimes they do so over our lifetime.<p>This is all marketing&#x2F;commoditization at work, of course, and I&#x27;m not negative long-term. I think most artists see this. But there&#x27;s a hella lot of denial going on, mostly from folks looking to pump up the next plasticine marketing special effects kabuki dance.