Contra Freddie de Boer on... Creativity I Guess

Maybe shorter

I hope everyone had a great Memorial Day weekend. Mine was spent largely away from writing, in preparation for a few weeks of cracking down on a project I have been working on in the background and will partially reveal by the end of the month. A few things were written that I want to comment on, and in rough order of temporal appearance, I am starting with two pieces from Freddie de Boer: “Perhaps the Barriers to Entry for Creative Work Have Become Too Low” and “Yes, I Got That Reference. But Who Cares?”

In “Perhaps the Barriers to Entry for Creative Work Have Become Too Low” makes a case for increasing the barriers to entry for distributing creative works. His argument is essentially that if you have some creative impulses nowadays you whip off a handful of YouTube videos, Twitter threads or blog posts, get your attention fix and that is the peak, whereas before if you really wanted to get in front of an audience you had to work really hard and produce something impressive and great, with the implication that we have a lot of crappy art but less good art these days because the artists are dissipating themselves on creating crap culture instead of great culture.

I worry that, now that the urge to create can be scratched by making a half-assed video in 10 minutes or by playing video games on Twitch for a couple hours, there’s no particular reason for people to dream bigger and invest more time, energy, and emotion into their work. Once upon a time, if you wanted to make a film that would be viewed by more than a few dozen people, you had little choice but to go through the process of getting that film released in at least some theaters - maybe at a festival or in arthouses or college screening rooms or something, but shown in theaters one way or another. And that was hard. There were barriers to entry. Those barriers in and of themselves weren’t good, but that reality meant that if you had a burning desire to reach others through that medium you had to really invest yourself. You didn’t half-ass making a movie when you had to get your hands on a hard-to-acquire camera and use expensive film and employ a crew and work hard to somehow get it in front of an audience.

Now, you can just make some lame YouTube video, and though everyone who watches it will forget it within a few days, you might well scratch the itch that in another era would compel you to do great work.

…

Of course there were intermediary stages; a band making a tape and passing it around to build buzz was once a rite of passage, for example, and I don’t think much is lost by moving that function to Bandcamp or Soundcloud. But the technological affordances of the digital era mean that you can create something and share it with a huge audience with zero gatekeeping and no hustle.

Gatekeepers and barriers to entry are necessary to get people to produce great art… hmmm.

Freddie closes with this:

I think there’s potentially a broader element to the dynamic I’m describing here - the internet’s structures create incentives for us all to try and be mildly popular with a large group of people, to gently amuse a bunch of strangers who will never really care about us, and that’s contrary to my basic definition of human flourishing. But setting that aside, I really worry that we’re being deprived of a new generation of artists by the easier and less ambitious substitute of making TikToks, telling jokes on Twitter, photographing your lunch for Instagram, and making ponderous and unconvincing video essays for YouTube.

I can sympathize with the concern that the internet tends to act like the bread of social nourishment: it is filling, but it isn’t really a meal, and if that’s all you eat it is really unhealthy. It is probably much better to have a few close family and friend relationships than a thousand internet friends, if one has to choose.

Yet that key concern, that we are not producing great artists because those would be artists are scratching their creative itch by doing crappy internet trash content is odd. So odd that I am tempted to say “See, socialists just don’t understand humans, or creation, or markets.” That would be unfair to Freddie, but man, it is tempting.

Why? Because it seems far more likely that if it was harder to toss stuff up online, we wouldn’t see more great works, but rather less work and more people just not being creative like that. In other words, if the price of being creative goes up, you get less creativity!

Those people who are making the subpar internet content Freddie dislikes are not secretly Michelangelo’s who would do something amazing if they weren’t wasting their time on TikTock. They are just people who get to do something creative and share it because it is easy to do so; if it were harder they just wouldn’t do anything particularly creative at all¹.

More likely that higher barriers to entry would lower the total great work produced. Freddie does recognize that many potential talents don’t produce anything great because they never got the chance. He fails to consider, however, how many great talents produced great works only after producing a lot of less great works. Art is a process of practice and refinement, and generally what holds people back is not “I wasted all my creative energy on this remunerative but low quality work and now I am satisfied” but rather “I spend time working on my art, or I can work a job and eat. I can’t do both.” Sure, all YouTubers start out making low quality stuff, and many never get better, but others certainly do and go on to make wonderful things. Should we compare that to, say, Disney’s artistic creation process where already popular franchises are handed to those who have produced little through a process of gatekeeping and barriers to entry (Hollywood) only to destroy what value existed?

Freddie concludes ”The question that occurs to me, though, is whether I would have published my first book at 29 instead of 39 if I had never had the opportunity to blog?”

I suspect the answer is that he never would have written a book, and might not even be a writer today had he not gotten his start blogging, a start that opened up many well kept gates for him.

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Speaking of Disney and everything in movies and TV being awful, I think Freddie gets the problem entirely backwards when addressing the phenomenon of “Referencing something else pop culture makes this good, right? That’s all we need, right?”

He is right, of course, that modern movies are awful, and worse, manage to be awful while leaning really hard into nostalgia for older films, often being straight up remakes.

What he gets wrong is this:

What makes this so much worse is all the goddamn reverence this type of media is stuffed with. The Force Awakens is so fucking reverential to the original Star Wars films it seriously undermines my enjoyment of what’s a well-crafted piece of pop entertainment. (“You knew Luke Skywalker?!?”) The recent Ghostbusters reboot was just sickeningly up its own ass with its worshipful reverence for the original films.

Here Freddie has it exactly backwards: the writers, producers and directors of the Disney Star Wars, Amazon’s Rings of Power, the last, what, 10 Marvel properties, Star Trek, any recent Ghostbusters, etc. have absolutely zero reverence for the source material. Half the time it is not even obvious they have watched or read the original, and they certainly don’t understand why it was good. They don’t remake/reboot/tack on sequels to those movies because they love and revere them, they do it because they know the films were popular and they can bank on that.

Take the Disney Star Wars films². Is it really reverential to either Star Wars or the fans to bring back the old heroes, dance them around being weak and pathetic, then kill them off without even putting all three in the same room together once? Is that showing a lot of respect? When the story lines make so little sense with the established universe to the point you have to ask “Did they just forget, or did they never know?” is that reverence? No one who cares about Han Solo as a character is interested in where he got his blaster; that’s the kind of thing someone who isn’t a fan and doesn’t give a damn about the story thinks fans are interested in.

Now, granted, there are lots of fans who do respond to “I know that thing! I am excited to see the thing I know!” That’s why this ploy works as well as it does. That’s why sequels get made in the first place: we like a set of characters in a story, and we want more stories about those characters. We like a setting, and want more stories exploring that setting. That sort of thing is essentially why series and genres exist.

That is entirely separate from reverence, however. Tossing in lots of references to the 80’s in Stranger Things isn’t due to reverence for the 80’s, but rather cheap little “Oh yea, I remember that!” thrill for the audience. By itself that’s fine, on par with doing any period piece and putting in little details that only some people notice. Done well it really helps set the tone. Done poorly and people notice and get taken out of things.

Reverence, however, is sticking to the source material, understanding why it was good and only changing what is necessary. Reverence is making sure your story takes the other stories in the series into account and creating a cohesive whole, instead of a sucking plot blackhole.

Reverence is saying “These movies are great, I can’t possibly improve upon them. Let’s make something else, and tell our own stories with our own messages.”

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So yea, if you want to make good art, start small doing little stuff that is easy and rewarding, do it a lot so you get better, work on what you love, and don’t just remake something good if you don’t love it. You don’t need to write the Lord of the Rings your first time putting pen to paper, which is fortunate because you won’t. You don’t need to avoid all references and reworking the works you love, because we all learn by imitation. The worst thing you can do, however, is work on what you don’t like just because someone else loves it and you think you can make a quick buck. That’s the death of creativity, right there.

1. Or would crochet at home or something. They wouldn’t become world renowned artists is my point.

2. Please!