Slop-py New Year

Nothing changes on New Year's Day

Happy New Year! There’ll always be some fun sponges who will try to tell you that it’s nothing worth bothering about, but I think they are dead wrong.

Of course, the Gregorian calendar is a man-made thing, representing Western cultural assumptions about when the year starts. But just because something is a human construct, that doesn’t mean that it doesn’t matter.

In general, it’s not always easy to tell when things start and end, even in retrospect. While we might have learned at school that the Second World War began on the 1st September 1939 with the German invasion of Poland, perhaps the Japanese invasion of Manchuria in 1931 or the Italian invasion of Abyssinia in 1935 are equally valid starting points? It may be that future historians may say that we are already in World War III, and that actions like Russia’s use of Iranian drones and the deployment of North Korean troops to Kursk will be looked on in the same way.

In the same way, nobody really knows when the COVID pandemic began¹. The announcement from the Wuhan Municipal Health Commission of an outbreak of pneumonia in the city, which took place five years ago today, may be as good a start point as anything else. But you could equally well argue for the first symptomatic case, perhaps in late November or early December 2019, or run the evolutionary tree backwards to a hypothetical date in October or November 2019 for a common viral ancestor. Nobody is ever going to agree. Again, perhaps in a year’s time we’ll be looking back on things that have already happened with bird flu in a similar spirit.

So if we can’t agree on the starting date for some of the most significant events of the last hundred years, it’s tempting to slip into some kind of postmodern “well anything can be true, so nothing matters” mindset. I think this would be a mistake.

At a time when AI slop risks becoming the dominant artform of the decade, we should do whatever we can to cling to things that are interesting and distinct. Just looking at UK supermarkets, I could order pizzas with Thai, Mexican, Indian, Greek, Japanese or even Scottish toppings, and it doesn’t feel unreasonable to wonder why? Thai and Mexican food is great, pizza is great, but do we really want to move to some kind of beige world where all varieties of foods are all available in the same flavours and varieties?

Or take movies. Depressingly, the top 13 films at the US box office in 2024 were all reboots or sequels. Compare that with 25 years ago. Sure, there was a Star Wars sequel at the top, but it was only the fourth ever such film and the first for 16 years, whereas now we’re up to a dozen Star Wars films and something like a hundred TV episodes set in the same universe. And below the Phantom Menace, the top 10 of 1999 included new and genuinely interesting things like The Sixth Sense, The Matrix and Blair Witch. It wasn’t perfect, but it felt like there was a market for creativity: hard-to-pigeonhole films like Fight Club, American Beauty, Eyes Wide Shut and Being John Malkovich took tens of millions of dollars, even back at 1999 cinema ticket prices. (For a longer read about the state of Netflix film making, I recommend “Casual Viewing: Why Netflix Looks Like That”)

It’s the same with books. To get published, you probably need an agent. The Penguin Books guide to getting an agent tells you to “Nail your one line pitch – is it Star Wars meets Bridget Jones?”. Can you imagine a then unpublished novelist having to pitch Catch-22, The Wasp Factory, The Lord of the Flies, Grimus or Frankenstein like that? If everything has to be carefully positioned relative to things that already exist, where is the room to be genuinely creative?

As well as flattening within genres, there’s a kind of generational homogeneity in the world of 2024, where tastes are shaped by The Algorithm as much as by contacts between friends. Teenagers, students, their parents, even their grandparents will all happily listen to Taylor Swift. Thanks to Tiktok, Gen Z is reviving the music of its parents’ generation, in a way that would never have happened in the 1960s or 70s. Barack Obama may be unusually cool for a 63 year old, but when he’s recommending Billie Eilish and Kendrick Lamar his playlist may not be so different from that of someone 50 years younger. It’s certainly hard to imagine Richard Nixon (born 1913) cueing up Blitzkrieg Bop in 1976 in the same way.

Perhaps all this is an inevitable consequence of technology bringing us together, which of course comes with countless benefits. But it’s hard not to feel sometimes that things, and even people, which are distinctive and unique are gradually being lost to us. Science fiction seer Arthur C. Clarke predicted this, when writing about the world of 3001AD:

Yet there had also been a loss; there were very few memorable characters in this society

All this homogenization has led to a fragmentation of experience. To be up with the latest cool TV shows, you’d need to subscribe to Netflix, Amazon, Disney+, Apple, Sky and many more. It’s no wonder that people don’t bother. Netflix apparently classifies its content, and by extension its viewers, into “thirty-six thousand microgenres”, representing a huge degree of audience balkanization. You could make it into the UK’s Christmas Day top ten TV shows by capturing less than 5% of the population, as the audience has split across platforms and spread out into the world of Instagram Reels and Youtube streamers. We can’t even agree which social media platforms we should meet on.

All of this Old Man Yells At Cloud view of the world is why I think it’s important to mark New Year. It’s great that we stake out a date as being something special amid all this homegeneity. Certainly the Gregorian calendar is arbitrary, and many people will celebrate on different dates. But nearly everyone will celebrate the beginning of a New Year on some day, and I think that’s important. I’ve argued before on this Substack that collective and synchronous experiences matter:

It’s no coincidence that we’ve developed these social rituals to get us through the darkest and most miserable time of the year

and this one is no exception. The fact that people in different timezones around the world are happy to launch fireworks to celebrate the Gregorian New Year makes it rare and distinctive. Outside things like the Olympics and the football World Cup, how many days are special like that?

My suggestion is that we all ignore the well-actuallying Neil deGrasse Tyson types, and we shouldn’t let the lack of astronomical signficance stop us from celebrating and reflecting. As I wrote a year ago, it’s a good time to make resolutions, in the spirit that

it’s good to be ambitious, but you shouldn’t be too hard on yourself.

And perhaps one of those could be for us to seek out experiences outside our comfort zone, to not just watch the next thing that Netflix recommends for you but to explore interesting directions as well? But of course, you shouldn’t be dictated to by me either - most of all, I’d just like to wish you all a Happy New Year!

1. Not that it stops people having strong opinions on the matter. It’s fine, you don’t need to tell me what you think.