Harmony Korine’s Gummo (1997).
People online were talking about quality, which as a conversation invariably drifts toward complaints about repetition in the entertainment industry while also getting confused with related but distinct notions high art, gatekeepers, the canon. I nearly offered some kind of response to a well-known hack pundit, but held back – it's not worth it, obviously. Yet it's perhaps valuable to consider why it’s so easy to engage: a certain kind of pundit is not only prolific and timely, but states their thesis crudely enough to become quotable, inviting further responses. Careers are built this way.
Expertise, by contrast, is slow and laborious to acquire – and, crucially, is more demanding to consume. A lot of culture adopts this as both tone and style – Dwight Macdonald calls this midcult, aka the middlebrow – which offers the benefit of flattering its intended audience without burdening them. Lowbrow is more readily understood: slapstick comedy, crassness and so on. AI-generated slop might now be thrown into the same bucket, although that seems to miss many of the nuances at play.
Lately, I've been thinking about another adjacent category: low fidelity. I first encountered this term used in relation to culture by a kind of entertainment industry consultant. He was discussing cultural production and consumer choices as part of an argument that reframed quality not as something dictated by gatekeepers, but as a complex web of values that inform decision-making. If this sounds like an attempt to apply business logic to the inherently messy world of human cultural life, that's because it is. But stay with me.
It's illuminating to hear a capitalist mind grappling with the question of why a potential viewer would rather scroll through user-generated reels than engage with a high-budget television production they've already paid for via a streaming subscription. Here, quality – as defined by acting, writing, and production values – isn’t necessarily enough; or rather, those markers become devalued in relation to the others that social media introduces – relatability, novelty, speed – that redefine quality.
Low fidelity, typically describing a more basic or less detailed version, often intended as a test or sketch of an idea like a prototype, only appears briefly in his piece, misused as a synonym for low quality. Used in its appropriate context, low fidelity is an evocative sidestep of more familiar fixed categories of quality, less pejorative than descriptive. I’m not entirely sure why this stood out to me, but with time, it's gaining more traction for me.
Think of a weekly personal essay artfully pegged to whatever is trending in the moment, a 800-or-so word missive that is evocative and easily digestible – the correct balance of emotion and topicality, relatable while being informative: a subgenre of infotainment. Or a TikToker responding to another video or an article, simply relaying their thoughts without prior reflection or a script of any kind. Perhaps a semi-figurative painting that’s pleasing to look at, but also supposedly about identity and darker legacies of history – but it’s mostly pleasant to look at.
My examples here suggest a polemical intent – you might already predict what will follow: capitalism, the internet, or the capitalists behind the internet have so degraded the public sphere that artists and audiences are exhausted, running on fumes, and can do little less than little things.
There is a joy, of course, of receiving a snippet of something at the right time. The delight of a small plate of food would hardly be improved by more – a feast is a very different kind of dinner. I sneer at these short essays; I also read them. I’d rather rely on a single ‘content creator’ to present me well-selected things, rather than have to wade through the digital abyss myself. The promise of low fidelity culture is not that much – the limited costs it imposes, whether that’s time, focus or actual cash, are its greatest feature.
A constant source of distraction and novelty, low fidelity is easy to access, and is therefore a regular feature of contemporary life. Macdonald described masscult as ‘bad in a new way’, while low fidelity by contrast is good enough, always. The older forms of quality were attractive examples of status, and still are: it’s not uncommon for people to disparage their own habits as ‘brainrot’, directly invoking the idea that what they consume is bad for them in a literal and metaphorical sense. People both do and don’t believe their brains are actually rotting.
It used to be more common to argue for high art as something which improves us as individuals. Attending a museum, reading a serious book, whatever activity it is, simply being in the presence of good things was a worthy activity, like exercise or eating vegetables. That attitude is understood as elitist and old fashioned, replaced by a more common sense that art and literature are part of a healthy cultural diet that can easily accommodate controlled screen time, and enough video games and TV to be, for lack of a better phrase, normal.
What has disappeared from common vernacular is the hierarchical sense of culture – that some forms of culture are better and in a straightforwardly didactic sense, good for us. Brainrot speaks to the other dimension of this: that low-effort distraction is bad for us, damages our cognitive and social abilities, and might be an overlooked force of a dangerous rightward shift.
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Dwight Macdonald's Masscult and Midcult
https://tehne.com/assets/i/upload/event/macdonald-masscult-and-midcult.pdf
Doug Shapiro’s Quality is a Serious Problem