Well, Just You Wait

In 1994, my family emigrated from the USSR to Canada. One of my earliest post-ESL memories is of describing a cartoon called Nu, Pogodi! to a classmate. The title translates roughly to “Well, Just You Wait!,” and each episode featured a chain-smoking Wolf persistently failing to catch his nemesis, the Hare. This Soviet Tom & Jerry was consummately important to me, but my classmate had no idea what I was talking about, and my detailed recitation of the Wolf’s hijinks only caused her to back slowly away. Yes, she sucked, insofar as a 5-year-old can suck, but still I felt very alone with that memory of Nu Pagodi!, and it made me kind of sad and insane. 

Last month, Mysterious Benedict Society co-star and horse Kristen Schaal tweeted about Disney+ pulling the show from its streaming platform: “Anyone know how to burn a dvd off a streamer so I can show my daughter this show someday?” The dream and promise of a universal digital media library was Clay Shirky and Chris Anderson’s “Long Tail,” the idea that with effectively unlimited storage and bandwidth all media could be available forever, because the large number of niche properties drive, in aggregate, as much demand as the few big hits. But studios have decided that amputating the long tail pays off in cost savings and tax breaks. Without any established plan for preserving streaming originals there’s a chance these works of art will be lost completely, or that they’ll never be available to view again, which for Kristin Schaal’s kids is effectively the same thing. 

It’s a truism that there’s no longer a “mainstream” pop culture—which is to say, a single shared pop culture. The disintegration happened slowly, with a proliferation of cable channels, and then all at once, with the internet’s explosion of social media, streaming platforms, and algorithmic feeds. Media scattered in an accelerating diaspora from living room to laptop to pocket. Print was first consolidated and then hollowed out to its present fragile shell spackled over with podcasts, newsletters, and websites. Instead of news, we have a “sanity-endangering overload” of takes. This splintering culture is “simultaneously unifying and fracturing;” if the loss of a monoculture fragments us, the rise of niche subcultures brings some of us back together, some of the time. 

In his 2019 Guardian article titled “Streaming has killed the mainstream,” journalist Simon Reynolds writes how the endless onslaught of content over the last decade caused a “memory-erosion effect” that muddled “what came out in the 2010s and in what sequence.” It’s difficult to remember landmark cultural moments with any distinction, harder still to distinguish between events themselves and the online discourse surrounding them. If memory “provides continuity from moment to moment, morning to evening, day to day, and year to year,” then the atemporal nature of streaming and the hyper-individualization of algorithmic feeds further fragment our already crumbling collective memory.  

In The Verge James Vincent surveyed the state of the newest catalyst for cultural enshittification: AI, specifically generative LLMs like ChatGPT.

These last two platforms, as Alex Pareene wrote in Defector, are two of the internet’s best resources because they are “volunteer run and donation based.” Real humans fill the “gaps of responsibility for maintaining valuable content that others rely on,” gaps that “represent actual holes in humanity’s knowledge,” wrote Professor Jonathan Zittrain.

Google plans to fill these gaps not with authoritative answers from knowledgeable humans but with a mish-mash of unsourced, stolen, and frequently incorrect content compiled by a bot. The company is “experimenting” with swapping search result links written by people for the Orwellian “Search Generative Experience” (SGE). Tom’s Hardware tech editor-in-chief Avram Piltch minces no words:

The worst-case result of the Search Generative Experience is an industrial strength Mandela effect generator: a system that answers every question with a confident hallucination cannibalized from familiar ideas and factoids that sorta sound right, but are subtly and arbitrarily warped. Every answer is both distinct and not quite correct.

One five-year-old loves Tom & Jerry, one loves Nu, Pogodi! Practically the same show, but still an unbridgeable cultural void without someone who has experienced both to translate. What if every five-year-old arrived at elementary school with a cultural identity made up of four years of unique, personalized, AI-generated media? What happens when every teenager’s favorite TV show has disappeared, its tiny share of fans scattered thinly across the globe? I’m afraid that more fragmentation will render us simply unable to understand one another, leaving everyone as alone and sad and insane as little Kindergarten me.

“It’s the past that tells us who we are. Without it we lose our identity,” said Steven Hawking. We need memory to learn from our past, contextualize our present, to create meaning. Likewise, some kind of collective memory is essential for cultural identity, for shared meaning. Without it, we lose each other. 

This is a strong closing statement for what turned out to be a conceptually cohesive month of work from Intern Mariam. Reader feedback has included sentiments such as: “I've really enjoyed Mariam's posts! She's great!” and “obsessed with Mariam Sharia – protect her at all costs,” and after editing her for a month I can only agree. She reports that she’s “always looking for some side work,” so if that stirs any ideas in your soul, you can reach her at [email protected].