Old media feels new

Lately, I get the feeling that most of the entertainment I want to consume has already been made.

Once a coworker jokingly said “Why watch movies if all of them are some variation of Shakespeare’s plays?”, there’s some truth to that, most movies and shows follow the same arc, and you know what’s coming all along; Even when there are still many ways to say the same in beautiful and slightly different ways, repetition is something you can feel.

Which made me think “If the content is already made, maybe I can find it in other ways”, and maybe closer to the source. Most of the time the original is better than the reboot, and with this thought, I started to look for older content on archiving platforms.

I stumbled upon The Dick Van Dyke Show thanks to this article, and gave a try to the first episode.

I have to say I was completely entertained during the whole episode. Besides the “oddity” of being in black and white, the way it flows felt different; The actors complete their sentences, and other actors react within the same scene without any cuts! There’s some higher quality in their acting compared to contemporary shows, probably due to the cost of film and the difficulty of editing at the time, where they had to put more effort into doing their bits in one take than now where every pixel and sound can be edited.

Somehow a show from the 60s felt modern and connected me more to people that are far away from my generation. I used to think Seinfeld was a more innovative show when it came, creating this kind of sitcom, but turns out it’s not so different from The Dick Van Dyke show. Both have a protagonist with 2 friends that struggle with social situations and are comedians, while having similar locations. Both shows are good, but the similarities really surprised me.

The same happens with books that have been written even thousands of years ago. Meditations by Marcus Aurelius has the same issues we face nowadays. If written with modern language you could not see how ancient this book is. His problems are the same as our problems, we struggle the same way and not much has changed.

What I want to say is that there’s not so much disconnect between current and older generations, and their content is not so different from what we might find in the present.

Could be that my feeling of boredom with new content is simply Juvenoia, a term I learned in this great VSauce video, but in this case, I think my worry with content is justified. As it’s easier to produce content we are more likely to produce garbage, or simply to put less effort, which is basically why I’m not looking forward to consuming any AI-generated content.

Juvenoia: The fear or hostility directed by an older generation toward a younger one, or toward youth culture in general.

Right now I can find old media on Archive.org, directly on YouTube or even downloading it (I won’t feel bad for downloading a movie where most of the cast is already dead).

For reading, https://standardebooks.org/ provides me with many good books. You can even bulk download their library, which should basically supply a lifetime of books.

With this feeling, I stopped my Netflix subscription. I’m finding enough good free content to fill out my entertainment. The first issue I thought I would encounter is that there’s rarely people who consume the same content around me, and it’s definitely harder to talk with coworkers about shows, but due to fragmentation in streaming this was rarely happening.

Even popular shows that I enjoy and have become quite popular, Severance in this case is mostly unknown to my coworkers because it’s only available on Apple TV. I still enjoy new shows, but there’s a lot of old content already made that I can extract value.

Somehow taking this route feels more relaxing than going to the next popular thing, and humbles my thoughts about my generation being smarter simply because we have the internet now.

This Arthur C. Clarke video really says a lot about the imagination of past generations vs ours now.

That is why the future is so endlessly fascinating because try as we can, we’ll never outguess it.