What Lasts and (Mostly) Doesn't Last

Something that used to be popular was the concept of the Western Canon: a core reading list of timeless works for the ages, around which our collective culture revolved. But I don’t think such a thing exists or can exist any more, in our hyper-diverse, hyper-content-stuffed world. As the amount and availability of TV, music, books, films, etc. increases, the odds of meeting somebody who’s had a similar set of cultural inputs as you tends towards zero.

Tentpole stuff like Harry Potter is the only thing saving us from complete societal atomization where everybody is a stranger.

Here's a popular culture take on the same theme. Jokes and sketch comedy.

"The three Yorkshiremen" monty python sketch. It's actually a sketch that some of the pythons did for another comedy sketch show some years before. As far as I know it's the only one they carried forward.

My parents could recite a 1940s radio comedy sketch about the phonetic alphabet and cockney rhyming slang which would probably make no sense to most people today, they'd carried it with them into the 70s and 80s.

An awful lot of contemporary humour simply fades away and maybe one or two key moment carries on.

Future generations may know Chaplin solely from a clip of modern times in the machine. Or know Lucille Ball treading grapes.

"But, tell that to the youth of today, they won't believe you"

Surprisingly great post. Works that last are often being championed by critics, gatekeepers, or the next generation of artists. On some level there's just too much great art in the world, and it's more fun to appreciate the same art as your peers instead of consuming only obscure pieces and having nobody to talk about them with.

I wonder how much of Lovecraft’s popularity has to do with the excellent Call of Cthulhu tabletop RPG (one of the generation of games that targeted everything wrong with Dungeons and Dragons) and how much it has to do with stories like that becoming so mainstream (e.g. any season of Sailor Moon is about some kind of supernatural-extraterrestrial invasion.)

Harry Potter will last. I have not read it but god it is everywhere. I cannot escape it, maybe it's less referenced in Asian cultures.

Videogames: I don't play much. But Mario seems likely. Minecraft and Fortnite are very big right now, but they lack memorable main characters so I doubt they survive 25+ years.

Music: None of my favorites but Kanye might have 1 song remembered in 50 years. I know friends who got into music creation all commend Kanye's 'ear'. His music does feel 'grand' more than any other artist I've heard but it's not my thing personally.

As a kid, I found translations of Enid Blyton's books, e.g. The famous five, in my mothers book case. They must have been huge in their time. For my generation (1980), these books are basically unknown. I found a bunch of lookalikes from other authors too.

I thought these would become extinct by now, but googling around for writing this post, I just find the BBC created a series about them recently. They're back!

There's a good book called, "But What If We're Wrong?" by Chuck Klosterman that explores the concept of how things we consider the "best" or "worst" of contemporaneous common knowledge may change over time.

One of his examples was how there are only a handful of classical music pieces that folks remember and consider "great" after a 100+ years have passed and yet there were many composers who were popular at the time they were composing. His question was, "out of the the works of rock-n-roll in the 1900s and early 2000s, how many will be remembered in 200 years time?" Will it be "Louie-Louie"? Something by Elvis? The Beatles? Beyonce?, the viral song 'what does the fox say?', something that is contemporaneously unknown but is discovered some time in the future?

Kind of makes me want to get forgotten best-selling novels of years past from the library to see what they are like!

That this resonates with a bunch of hackers is kinda funny - code is such an ephemeral medium.

The 1001 technics to quit (your favorite flavor of) Vi will last.