In the last 20 years, I've gone from being completely obsessed with baseball, to not watching until the postseason, to basically never watching but loving old stats, to yawning from afar as the game disappears into a cloud of strikeouts punctuated by solo home runs. https://twitter.com/HotlineJosh/status/1391825088232759296

A theory.

Few years ago, I wrote The Shazam Effect about how the big data revolution in music was leading to more repetitive music and radio playlists

https://www.theatlantic.com/magazine/archive/2014/12/the-shazam-effect/382237/

As the industry learned about ppl's tastes, they realized ppl just want the same thing over and over.

What does the Shazam Effect have to do with baseball?

Well, when a handful of cultural producers get "smart" about what works in their industry, the formula gets shared widely, and as strategies homogenize, the entertainment product becomes more boring.

When every baseball team realizes it's optimal to increase pitching velocity and launch angle, you get a cloud of Ks punctuated with HRs.

When every basketball team realizes that 3 points is 50% more than 2 points, you get a leaguewide blitz of 3s.

By the same token, when radio DJs recognize that ppl tune out new songs, you get more repetetive playlists. When every movie studio realizes that mass audiences are neophobic and mostly buy tickets to sequels, adaptations, and reboots, you get ... well, you know what you get.

Maybe I'm just getting old.

Or maybe the cultural & entertainment industries were never supposed to be this smart, and the quantitative revolution in entertainment is a living creature that consumes data and excretes homogeneity.