Generative Monoculture

What, exactly, does excruciatingly monocultural generative content tell us?

While satire and parody acquire significance as a function of their grounding in the consensus reality of whichever time and place they reflect, and given that sum combinatorial complexity of interdependent cultural systems is incommensurable with any bounding measures or methods and “intelligent” machines we currently possess, it is perfectly reasonable to consider that ascendant narrative entities and representational or referential and relationally-networked communications systems persist and maximally self-propagate not as a quality of any prospective or nascent exceptionalism so much as by their effusive properties of exalted banality. A “dominant narrative” represents a lowest common denominator as central band of a probability distribution. It is not the pinnacle of achievement or even of any notion of success or accomplishment indicated by blind convergence towards any such systemic “attractor”; it is not evidence of a purposeful or necessary teleology.

Ascendant narratives thrive through relatable simplicity, not exceptionalism. Apparel, architecture, facial expressions, language use, behavioural idioms, social scenes reflect often (and generally) unacknowledged socioeconomic power relationships. Simplest, lowest energy, highest entropy solutions dominate. Machine learning amplifies existing cultural signals and the data of their training is very much like the artefacts themselves: they act as batteries for cultural and behavioural or regulatory reference.

Why and how this occurs is significantly more complex than will ever likely fit into the relative constraints of a personal blog post. Curiously, any one of us need not know how these processes occur to understand what they represent, what they “mean”. That’s the more interesting question: what, exactly, is replicating here? In short, it’s the recursive process of replicating the encoding of replication itself. This process maximally self-propagates, so it’s no surprise that kitsch, narrowband cultural assumptions, artefacts, actions, and idioms arrive and thrive as they do. These are each and all the minimally complex pseudo-algorithmic representations of a distributed and adaptively evolutionary encoding mechanism. (Language functions similarly.)

The TL;DR: Cultural information production and replication, viewed as whole systems, reproduce and maintain internal cohesion maximally through noise. Our engagement with this noise as a dominant sensibility (or anachronism!) is a function of entropy. The most common elements are those that recombine most efficiently, often being the simplest interfaces and encodings.

The fault is not in the technology, but in ourselves.

What do you think?