Pander or Perish: The Bloody Reign of the Lowest Common Denominator

Why is there nothing cool to watch?

When is the last time you heard the phrase “Lowest Common Denominator” outside of a math class?

Back in the fabled 90s, most of the nerds I knew felt a touching optimism about the Internet: Finally, a text-based, democratic medium with a low barrier to entry (well, most people I knew around my age happened to still be too poor to get a computer, but at least you didn’t need to shoot a whole movie), where the smart people will rule!

Oh boy. I wish somebody could have told us about social media and the click economy, so all those nerds could get their depression crisis over with early.

I was kind of sour-grapes about the rich-kid internet anyway. But when I got my first real grown-up newspaper job in 2000, I was presented with an ancient, wheezing beige PC at my workstation whom I nicknamed “Bartleby,” because he preferred not to do most things related to his job.

I didn’t have quite enough compassion for Bartleby; I was excited about the job. A job which had long hours, but many of these hours, when they didn’t consist of tediously fact-checking restaurant or music listings with the aid of Bartleby (but more often, the telephone was more effective), consisted of waiting for copy to come in for us to proofread. So I got to exploring the Internet at last.

And damned if I didn’t watch everyone who entered it fall in and die.

Internet addiction was considered a concern at the time; now we’re all addicted to it, so nobody talks about it. Kind of like we no longer discuss the LCD. It’s the air we breathe.

And whenever we watch media, the air that anybody who’s smart enough to remember fractions breathes is BOREDOM.

But back then, still fresh with the memory of dominant nerd cultural objects like Red Dwarf, we were naive to the horrors of click-based online voting systems. If you published a clever article in the newspaper, people were eventually bound to read it, even if they found it annoyingly challenging and full of vocabulary, because when they were stuck on the bus, they didn’t have a pocket distractor to keep them stupidly happy. They had to read what we put in the damn newspaper, or bring a book or a Walkman, or just stare out the window, having their own thoughts.

Any of these things would teach them more than watching another video of people beating the shit out of each other.

But now that they have that option, they joyously seem to take it. So they don’t learn anything new. So they continue to click on the stupidest stuff. Which is a vote. And the stupid shit continually rises to the top.

I hate to say it, but if you can’t find anything cool to watch, and nobody is watching the cool thing you made—it’s just math. You should have used shorter words.

I don’t know whether this has been healthy for me or not, but I was forewarned.

I can’t find the piece—I’ll give a free subscription (once I get my bank nightmare straightened out and can actually ACCEPT subs, but that’s my private hell) to anyone who can locate it for me—but around 2003, the Scottish musician and artist Momus/Nick Currie wrote a brilliant if rather downer-y analysis of the then-existing hell of inertia in which we already lived. It became clear that if you hadn’t made it yet in the real world, you probably weren’t going to have much positive inertia online.

It might have been what we now call a psy-op, come to think of it; Momus was a big deal in the counterculture of the time, because he is brilliant, but as usual everybody thinks they should be the star, so there was already plenty of competition, and people trying to shoot him down. Well, duh; they wanna live too.

Nonetheless, the piece was prescient and compelling, using graphs and math and the whole nine yards, to show how his fame and inertia would result in anything he wrote online, regardless of quality, outperforming his fans’ posts, regardless of quality, simply because he already had the advantage of inertia over them.

It drove the kids on ILX nuts, like everything he did—back then, the Internet really was for shut-ins with a strong dislike for reality—but he turned out to be way more correct than even he seemed to suspect.

Because on top of the inertia, which keeps people who are already on top on top, we added the “likes” voting system: Thumbs up, this content gets seen by more people. Thumbs down, your ass gets buried.

And guess what stupid people like to do to stuff they don’t understand?

Sometimes I swear to god tech is just a massive revenge by geeks against the artists who didn’t sleep with them in high school. (Even if the artists had no idea the geeks were interested in them. Because… revenge! Is this a paranoid idea? Yeah. It’s more likely this was a case of not thinking about the consequences. Not everyone is Momus—not everyone can be smart AND an artist, much less a person who thinks about long-tail consequences.)

In any case, the “likes” system is a cast-iron wall against media that is actually interesting to anyone who is not, themselves, boring. I mean, have you heard the writing on Netflix lately? I re-subscribed because I find that shit to be the best possible medication for my insomnia.

I apologize if the following explanation is too explicit for my more clever readers. I don’t mean to insult your intelligence in a rant about the suppression of intelligence; I feel too cramped for that much recursiveness today. If you’ll excuse me for pointing out the mechanism, though? It is an idiot’s world. But it’s pretty simple math:

Everybody understands stupid stuff.

But the more clever, complicated, and subtle the writing becomes—ie, better, from the POV of an intelligent consoomer—in any given content, the less people will be eligible to like it, simply because they do not understand it.

So the “likes” system of social media drives the discourse to become dumber and dumber and dumber and dumber.

Oyeah, there are those of you who want to TRY to be smart and aware, in every era. And the Internet still facilitates this, just like it did back in 2000; there’s more information available than ever. More history podcasts. More YouTube videos about cutting-edge physics, biology, and linguistics!

But you have to already know what you are looking for.

You have to dig, because it is covered in so much LCD shit now. And where do you start digging when nobody has bothered to give you a basic, standard education?

Don’t get me started on a tangent about “student-driven education.” If I thought that was a good thing, I wouldn’t have dropped my entire life at the age of 30 to go get a Classics degree. Because I knew that I didn’t know enough to know what I didn’t know.

How is a child, newborn into this mess, supposed to figure THAT out?

We actually used to talk about the loweset common denominator… even in band names!

Many people seem content to simply float on the shit, exhausted, even if they aren’t the ones profiting from it, reveling in the latest comeuppance of Johnny Somali, oblivious to the fact that they could just as easily be learning about Cretan archaeology. Oblivious to the fact, it sometimes seems, that the past even exists.

If you don’t want a severely class-stratified society, which you can justify based on people’s own behavior (“Well, if you didn’t want to be a poor idiot, you should have looked beyond the endless sea of imbecilic distraction that was covering everything that might have helped you form a coherent worldview”)—well, I can think of an infinite number of better strategies than this unchained sea of LCD.

We want the Internet to be democratic, right? But do we also want it to be a massive, all-consuming singularity of stupidity?

Maybe don’t answer that. I already have a stomach ache today.