The End Of Culture

"Thou shalt not make a machine in the likeness of a human mind" - Orange Catholic Bible

Retromania is the name of a book written by pop music writer, Simon Reynolds. Published in 2011, Retromania is about the tendency of early 21st century pop music to parody, pastiche, remix and re-make earlier styles, to a degree that simply did not happen in the past.

The 50s, the 60s, the 70s, the 80s and even the 90s had distinctive musical scenes. Even naming the decade is enough for most people to call to mind particular styles and the acts associated with them. Roughly coinciding with the dawn of the new millennium and the rise of the Internet, that all slowed to a crawl and, in a lot of instances, circled back on itself.

Hollywood has always put money ahead of art but, in spite of what cynics will tell you, the current dearth of original stories has never been so stark. Sequels were always cash-ins. It is only over recent decades that they have become an industry mainstay. In 2011, nine of the top 10 highest grossing films of the year were sequels. The only exception was The Smurfs, an adaptation of the children's television show and comic book series.

To that end, the format that really defines our era is the mash-up. Retreads, reboots and remakes were ascendant in the first decade of this new century but the rise of the Marvel Cinematic Universe and the return of the Star Wars franchise—combined with the digital de-aging technology, pioneered by Industrial Light & Magic—added considerable fuel to the nostalgia fire.

When Disney bought Lucasfilm and ILM, it was not just buying Star Wars; the work that Lucas had done in bringing dead actors back to the silver screen in the form of digital composites was just as significant. The House of Mouse has made integrating these creations into existing brands a core part of its corporate strategy.

An early outing for these synthetic puppets was a chocolate advert featuring the likeness of Audrey Hepburn. Rogue One: A Star Wars Story, featuring actors wearing digital masks of the deceased Peter Cushing and the (then living) young Carrie Fisher, is better known—and of course the Marvel films have used the technology to provide a curious kind of continuity, allowing much older actors to play younger incarnations of their characters in earlier eras.

That too is now reaching something like its final form with the trailer for the new Indiana Jones film featuring a very respectable depiction of a much younger Harrison Ford.

Seeing cutting edge digital rendering technology used as a means of rehashing and remaking the past leads one to reflect on possibly the ultimate manifestation of the mash-up: AI systems such as GPT and Stable Diffusion. Soon we might be able to watch machine created films, featuring digital recreations of characters from existing franchises.

GPT has been trained on an enormous corpus of writing and Stable Diffusion and similar software are improving all the time but ‘prompting’ a machine to spit out mash-ups is the snake coiling around and eating its own tail. AI models cannot create, even if their outputs are novel. By definition, these systems are synthesising based on statistical inferences.

Given the 21st century's already existing propensity for retromania, I am left wondering if this is its nadir or if the nostalgia that is already everywhere is only a foreshadow of the artificiality the rise of the bots portends.