On Becoming Unpredictable

Watching Ken Burns: The American Revolution. You kind of know what you’re in for with the PBS stamp. Any of us with even a little Shane Gillis rattling around inside still look forward to the subject matter. I will offer a mild eye-roll to the, let’s call it, the Standard Accepted Lens of the Modern Documentary when it turns its lights onto a war fought some 250 years ago. The soft, assured tone that treats the past like it was always waiting to be interpreted by the present.

How confidently the modern mind supplies motives to those who would barely recognize the version of themselves being narrated, as if any life or time survives such scrutiny. Every rough instinct is moralized, a thick layer of contemporary ethics like German schmear on brick. It’s not malicious, but tired. An era retold for our modern sensibilities.

There’s a familiar pattern in that. Our expression has become predictable, and all drifts toward uniformity. They say no-one has a personality today. I think we’re too afraid to dare.

So much of my first love, music, has become the same. The production is clean, the structure flawless. A noticeable absence of surprise, like the soul of it shipped separately but never made it. Prediction machines have quickly found high competence at this material. And we’re not ready to discuss how much of what we call art is simply pattern-matching. The point-one-percenters like Bowie, Jagger and MJ built careers on doing something a reasonable algorithm would have flagged as an aberration. The rest is easy work for a prediction model.

Here’s to becoming unpredictable once again.