My friend's article got some traction on Hacker News. I liked it too, and I found her views on that topic quite similar to my own. However, I want to develop this idea in the context of art and share some thoughts of my own.

We're truly experiencing a boring dystopia. Everything feels the same, or should I say, manufactured, controlled, and obvious. For some people, it might sound counterintuitive since we're also experiencing the biggest explosion and generation of new information through new means of media. And this information is being constantly fed to us through algorithms.

So one might say, how can we get bored when there's so much content available? Moreover, it's not just that we're being fed stuff we don't like: algorithms are trying to give us the information that we would mostly engage with, with our likes, comments, or just visual attention held for more than 6 seconds. She argues that algorithms play with our psychology by giving us content that we're not interested in, but content that makes us feel something, in most cases, anxious, frightened, or worried. Because such things push some gears in our brain. That's also true, but I'd like to emphasize content that closely matches our own interests, like hobbies, jobs, skills, etc.

The algorithm gives you tons of new content about, idk lol, whatever you like, music, for example. You start to engage with it through short-form videos and stories. You discover hundreds upon hundreds of new artists, with every single one trying to beat the algorithm by being the most creative, the most skilful, the most entertaining creator. In theory, some of these artists should resonate with your soul, making you more invested in this person, exploring their ideas, giving them credit, and becoming a fan in the future.

Yet, from my own experience of interacting with art in such a way, and from cold numbers that you can get by analysing their metrics, you, as such an artist, should expect zero to no results if we're talking about a timeframe longer than the lifespan of a now-so-popular fruit fly. And the reason is not their lack of talent or creativity, nor a basic concept of competition, which has been around us for ages.

And from a consumer's standpoint, you eventually get bored; everything feels the same, and you don't feel invested, although you might like the idea. Everything feels oversaturated; there's too much stuff in the world, so why should you pay attention? The best thing is to stay with what you've already found and learned.

So, in this article of mine, my point is not another washed-out, Substack-coded opinion about our problematic contemporary culture, TikTok consumerism, or AI slop. I watched dozens of videos and read dozens of articles about it, and they all feel the same. I definitely don't want to replicate those fools from Substack with their pretentious opinions that I've heard one billion times. Or liberal critics from YouTube, holding a small DJI mic in their hand, explaining a new TikTok trend by referring to some new "theory" book about gentrification. All of this is quite obvious.

The main question today is: Why has our world become so boring, despite constantly producing "new ideas and forms"? And for me, one of the reasons for that lies in one specific system: the algorithm. And in this article, I want to explore it from the views of two involved sides: the creator and the consumer.

CONSUMER: INDIVIDUAL DISCOVERY AGAINST CURATION

I think that the biggest problem is our current manner of interacting with art in the first place. What I'm talking about is the way of exploring new things, a crucial process in our daily life, and, speaking in more philosophical terms, a crucial way of understanding the world and ourselves in it. Before the mass implementation of algorithms, you had a static list of things that you followed, for example: posts from different Facebook groups you're subscribed to, videos from subscribed channels, posts from subscribed blogs, etc. You could also scroll almost infinitely through this huge amount of content. And of course, you could always use a search engine to find new stuff. And, to some extent, this content was constructing your understanding of some particular topic, or even the world in general.

So, to put it briefly, your personal experience was the sole creator of your tastes and ideas. And I'm not talking about exploring French New Wave cinema before the latest blockbuster movies. Even the most basic lack of a clear picture of structured narrative might benefit you and your soul. Ignorance is bliss to some extent, I think: by missing a landscape painting class, you might find yourself with your own style because you have zero idea of perspective (I love medieval art; how did you know?). Of course, such vision is less applicable to something rational and objective like science; don't get me wrong.

For that reason, I have always been a huge hater of any lists that should give you a "broad" "clear" image of something: /mu/ must-listen albums, /lit/ must-read books, fixated lists of artworks that "every decent artist should know about", 10 most important knitting techniques, 10 poses that will turn his dick into the cuckoo clock, and so on and so on. Furthermore, such lists and stories are often accompanied by fixated curation and explanation of why those artworks have so much value.

Eventually, by going through such lists and stories, you become bombarded with either someone else's subjective vision, rhetorically transformed into "sophisticated analysis", or, most of the time, rigid conformity of views and tastes. Just look at this clown Anthony Fantano and his fans: Poptimism (an abomination of our time), combined with snobbery and a feeling of competence in art criticism, created a group of the most obnoxious people with zero personal taste and hundreds of consumption preferences: They would rather buy Madvillainy album on vinyl (fresh, mint, in package) than listen to some demo through some old Blogspot download link. Yet, they can spend hours upon hours retranslating their deity's words, objections, conclusions, and X out of 10 ratings into the echo chamber, rarely being confronted by someone else.

Now, I think my idea becomes more obvious to some of my readers: By going through a predetermined path of exploration, you end up in a tiny, minuscule smoking room, which is, counterintuitively and against all projections, filled with millions of people who are having a boring conversation about the latest big tobacco news: the nuanced history of Marlboro's reds, new Gen Z obsession with vapes, the cultural significance of new Lucky Strikes, the death of filters, and other big-time sensations, wrapped into journalistic clickbait titles. And what's the most important:

None of those idiots actually smoke.

One might say that such fixed narration is as old as the world, that I exaggerate since we used to have such a way of thinking in the past, which presented us with the best music or art ever created or written. And that's completely true. Moreover, such a tradition of viewing and experiencing things was one of the most important drivers for new ideas and movements. Modern art tried to break away from traditional art, in the same way as postmodern art tried to break away from both; the same applies to theology, epistemology, etc.

I also think I should address some misconceptions that could arise from reading this article further: I don't believe the things we experience create us or fill us as thinking, sentient beings in a rigid, fixed way. Why? Well, because people are different, and such statement often serves as an objective explanation for a clearly moral judgment: Violent video games make us brutal and violent, LGBT "propaganda" changes our sexual or gender preferences, marijuana is a path towards heroin, and other deranged moralistic conservative talking points. The mind is such a complex mechanism that we can't be so sure about things and their effects on it. One thing might hurt one person while also giving joy to the other; I think it's quite simple.

ALGORITHM: THE OMNIPRESENT SLAVE OF TIME

Now, let's get back to our smoking room. As I said before, none of these people are smoking, but somehow, the fumes of nicotine are definitely there. And the most interesting part: the source of this smoke has changed.

What used to be a constant shift of different brands of cigarettes in the hand of one "profound and sophisticated" chain-smoker like Antony Fantano, exhaling his foul, nicotine-pumped breath inside the room through the entry door's keyhole, now presents itself as a typical smoke machine, one that you might find in every single dance club.

The only difference between this machine and the club one is that this machine could be described as such only at first glance: if you look inside, you will see a half-sentient monstrosity from the most deranged sci-fi horror movies. The apparatus, the judge, the jury in one single system, feeds on fear from people's minds and electricity from an old diesel generator. And I think I also should point out:

They forgot to take this stupid generator out of the smoking room. Moreover, the CO2 detector hasn't been working since the fall of MySpace.

Andy Warhol once famously said that in the future everyone will have 15 minutes of fame. Later he said: I'm bored with that line. I never use it anymore. My new line is, 'In fifteen minutes everybody will be famous.

I think the first statement is also quite boring (just as our modern life lol), but I think it shouldn't be dropped completely, but changed a little. In the future, everyone will have 6 seconds of fame. That's an approximate median amount of time that you should use to the max to grab someone's attention in 2026, according to TikTok's own metrics and available data online.

And for me, even such a statement is not contemporary enough. We can't have shit in 2026, obviously.

The fame is dictated by the algorithm that dances, jumps, and does other freaky gymnastics around that 6-second timeframe. So my final statement:

6 seconds is the only famous thing.

That's it, just those 6 seconds. No pop star, no big world event, no genre, no style, no meme. Only this number, the result of both a cold mathematical equation and naturalistic psychology, serves as the common denominator and, by itself, fills all the space around us. This number alone creates a global narrative based around itself. Imagine Antony Fantano but on the scale of a whole fucking planet, constantly giving you all the curation through every single topic. So why bother? The algorithm knows best: what to learn, what to discover, what to eat, how to think. Even if it's represented by real people and their 6-second spectacles, on Reddit, TikTok, YouTube, Facebook, you name it. And the algorithm is just a tool of capitalist realism, a codified formula of attention-value, condensed into time (6 seconds) and space (the internet).

CREATOR: THE ARTIST, THE MARKETER, THE CLOWN

And now, speaking about authors, artists, and other freaks like myself, our situation is both scary and pathetic. Because this narration that we've just talked about creates two mutually exclusive feelings in our hearts:

1. Everything is already explored by everyone. We're participants of one rigid monoculture, curated by the algorithm. We're united, we're connected. Everything is available as the source for our development and enjoyment.
2. Everyone is distanced and can't be explored properly. We're merely small gears, compacted into a 6-second timeframe and a 9:16 video frame. We feel so lonely; we feel alienated; we can't find our fanbase, our community.

Because now we have the same boss, the same judge, the same authority over our heads.

So, what most people do is accept those rules; they let this global monoculture narrative control their heads, ideas, and ambitions. You turn into a circus monkey that runs on the barrel 12 hours a day, trying to please this stupid, bored audience. And after a long day in the internet circus, the monkey gets back to its cave to calculate attention metrics and KPI of the latest posts. Rules are well known and defined by the market; all you have to do is follow the trend. However, tomorrow, running on a barrel will be considered old-fashioned, so the monkey starts swallowing swords, jumping through the hoops, and having sex with its colleague: an old castrated elephant.

There's definitely a limit to everything, except for the boredom that will stay in the minds of the audience, even after the circus eventually degenerates into an unrecognizable mess of 1-minute songs, viral painting techniques, and short-form Korean dramas.

I could end this article by giving advice to the readers, proposing a solution to this problem. But I don't think there's any other solution for a system that works like an automobile without brakes, constantly becoming more profound and better, changing its parts in real time. This metaphor is probably a cliché, but eventually, I think that this contemporary monster will crash into a huge rock or some other shit.

Maybe, let's just try to not involve ourselves with it, let's pretend that none of this happens. Let's get back to forums, to friendly meetings and small blogs about our beloved hobbies. Escapism and ignorance, you might say, but I'd rather stay out of touch than sacrifice my own vision, taste, and mental health for nothing.

Ironically, I'm ending this page with a quote that I found in one Instagram reel while I was researching stuff for this material.

"Social media is not designed for engagement with art. At best, it's an invitation, a teaser for your work. At worst, it's an archive of it. The architecture and the inner workings of social media prioritize pieces of information that create more traffic. This system is focused on benefiting itself. The more the content is able to generate discussion, shareability, likes, reposts, and a constant flow, the more valuable it becomes to the system that capitalizes on its users' attention. The more engaging the content, the more likely you are to stay a bit longer. Content then becomes a token of usefulness to that system, which is not necessarily bad in itself. It's just not made for art. The things that are shared most are the most relatable, universal things that many people find resonant. Other shareable things are controversial yet relevant to the current discussion or debate. And art is rarely, if ever, meant for that type of engagement. Art opens us up to something new, something different, something strange. And the impact of artistic work unfolds over time, because everything new and strange will be resisted at first. Art is supposed to change something in us, and in order to be changed by it, there should be more quiet before and after the engagement. Often, a piece of art falls right into the depths of our psyche to transform us over time, slowly. Art is creating new relations with the world for individuals, for collectives, for practitioners, and for consumers. And special conditions are needed for those relations to take hold. The conditions of social media are just not that."