Art as a Leading Indicator

...and some of my own Adolescence

The optimal record of history is simply everything that happened in reality etched down in the infinite log of an angel’s notepad. So does historiography exist for the omniscient? I don’t see how it could, if you know the exact state of the world as it unfolds, there is no need for different philosophies or approaches of how to interpret condensed information.

Does art exist for the omniscient? If you can have a direct feed of all information from reality into your system, is there still an aesthetic beauty in lower dimensional representation? Or does the very concept of art and aesthetics fundamentally require missing information to take on any meaning? Unfortunately I don’t know of any omniscient beings, so I can’t ask them.

The way I think about art though is as higher-dimensional compression. This is a little hand-wavy, but if mainstream history and historiography are the first few dimensions when decomposing reality itself, can we think of art as the “deep cut” dimensions?

When you compress a complex system into something we can readily understand, you have to choose which dimensions to preserve. Mainstream history keeps the obvious ones—wars, elections, GDP, the stuff that shows up in textbooks. These are real and important, but they’re legible and easier to document.

I think of art as often existing in a less legible zone. The subtle changes in people’s interactions, or preferences before any larger change takes place, that only the most observant aesthete catches and embeds into a piece of writing. Only the greatest artists can learn the functions to observe this information and map it to art.

Some forms of classic art, perhaps Bach as the most famous example, represents the highest echelon of expression, encoding the subtleties of human experience into the mathematical expression of sound. It is remarkable due to the excellence of the craft, even if you don’t appreciate the music.

The more subtle the signal you’re trying to capture, the more experimental you often need to get, which is why the line between visionary and pretentious is so hard to draw.

Let me detour back to 2005. I was sitting in a high school photography class with this group of girls. They were weird and alternative and really pretty and we were friends, kind of. We would listen to Interpol in the dark room. None of them have kids today, and in retrospect you could have predicted that they wouldn’t in 2005. The forecast of the decline of that birth rate curve could have been observed in that class, even though it wasn’t in the time-series yet.

How do you notice the start of a trend? My friends were leading indicators. Wanting to have kids was strange and embarrassing. No one really discussed wanting kids. So-called New-Atheism was weirdly popular, and any appeals to religious reasons for having kids was the sort of thing the odd religious kids did. This isn’t normal, but it seemed normal to me. Macro shifts as nothing more than the logical sum of countless individual choices. I could sense it then, something had shifted in the culture.

Forecasting birth rates isn’t just a time-series problem, it’s also hidden inside the stories people told themselves that year. There is the actual compression of artifacts at the time. While statisticians looked at realizations in the data, artists were staring at their own suburbs, trying to distill the feeling into film.

There are lots of theories as to why birth rates are declining. I think though that part of the cultural understanding here would require reverse engineering what was going on in the minds of the kids, and of their parents, of the millennial generation. If you look at a descriptive view of the cultural trends of my adolescence, few of them look particularly indicative of fertility.

In the late 90s American Beauty was released and a decade later The Suburbs by Arcade Fire. Both were about a sense of suburban anomie. There’s this scene in American Beauty where the reserved new kid videos a plastic bag floating in the air, remarking on its immense beauty. It’s deliberately sardonic, but the entire film expresses this weird sense of absurd disconnect between family life, and beauty, and sex.

My own adolescence was fine, but It captured a distinct lack of beauty and community endemic to my own childhood. As well as the start of a sense of unmet yearning with Kevin Spacey’s character lusting after his teenage daughter’s friend. Hindsight is filled with bias, but you can see the children of this generation of unsatisfied and divorced parents metastasizing into an OnlyFans obsessed childless generation.

Shortly after I graduated high school, Arcade Fire released their third album The Suburbs, which was described as a “letter from the suburbs”. In the title track “So can you understand / That I want a daughter while I’m still young? / I want to hold her hand / And show her some beauty before this damage is done.”

Our dominant culture at the time was bitter and cynical about family and parenthood. The causes of my cohort’s disaffection are deeply complex, and art can’t operationalize every explanation, but perhaps not so dissimilar from other areas of forecasting, the weaker more deeply embedded signals hold predictive power.

There is this journey a lot of young rational minded men take, myself included, where the rational certainties of their adolescence give way to a more tempered belief in their ability to reason through humanity.

In Anna Karenina, there was this land owner, in his 20s or so, who constructed a new style of farming he called “rational farming”. He wanted to incentivize the peasants and teach them how profit-sharing works, and tried to inspire an excitement at the prospect of mutual riches. But the system was too different from their cultural history and entrepreneurship. Their conception of work and life was one that had developed throughout serfdom, and was antagonistic at its very core. They were fundamentally suspicious of land-owners, uneducated, and viewed every elaborate new plan as one that was zero-sum.

He guessed that if they were “rational”, they would want to participate in his so-called rational-farming system. But his prediction of the peasants’ model was wrong. He didn’t know what they wanted or how they would use their prior knowledge of the world to interpret his economic view of the world. Unfortunately, Russian agriculture after serfdom wasn’t able to bring an entrepreneurial system to the peasants. By the end of the 19^th century it was the worst agricultural system throughout all of Europe. And by the 1930s the centrally planned Soviet model of agriculture resulted in the deaths of around six million or so people, depending on how you count it.

Anna Karenina of course is nominally a piece of fiction. In a more complete way though it was a piece of social science research. It captures the deep latent space of empirical economics that doesn’t exactly fit in more formal models. What Tolstoy was capturing here though was not only the nascent observations that resulted in the catastrophic famines, but the subtle errors in reasoning that repeat through time.

Tolstoy of course wasn’t predicting the Holodomor; but he was isolating the trust-mismatch dimension that later exploded when scaled by Soviet planners.

Staying on the topic of Russia, there was this field of Sovietology before the fall of the Soviet Union. Sovietologists studied soviet culture, cinema, music, art, really everything distinct about their country. They did this basically, in an abstract sense, to avoid nuclear war. The Soviet empire was this looming existential threat with its own complex culture and social structure. If you are in a bipolar world with two super-powers, you better understand your opponent.

So if you’re a Sovietologist at the time, you’re probably sitting down and watching Stalker, or reading War and Peace, and taking notes, in some abstract sense to try and better understand this other culture and their values to hopefully not die in a nuclear war. If War and Peace had been all about dying in glorious Jihad, rather than basically why you should have kids, they would want to know that.

So we can establish pretty easily that you should read Russian literature out of self-interest to avoid nuclear war. To understand their art, is to understand the subtleties of their philosophy and how they live. It’s an encoding mechanism of how they filter reality that can’t be captured as easily in other forms.

There’s a version of this essay that ends with a modest claim, which is art is useful for forecasting because it captures signals that formal models miss. This is instrumentally true, but it also is a weaker form of what I believe to be true.

I don’t think art only predicts the future, but it can also bring different futures into being. It’s not uncommon for forecasts to themselves alter the future, and this is what I saw growing up. In American Beauty I mentioned that scene where the kid was obsessed with the beauty in a floating plastic bag. It’s funny, because the scene is mocking the pretentiousness of high school videographers and artists. It’s also incredibly sad, capturing this feeling of isolation and lack of artistic optimism in the suburbs. The only place he finds transcendental beauty is in a piece of garbage by his house.

I didn’t really see what I was looking for in how to live the life I wanted until I looked backwards. In these old stories about WWII, or reflections on life by Tolstoy, there were these themes that they obsessed over, which is the value in a life built on family, relationships, and sincerity. I almost found them by accident, or at least brute force.

In a media landscape where everything was self-referentially ironic, everyone decided life is cringe, and was embarrassed to commit to the bit of ‘working hard and having a family.’ Even when they did it, it was postponed and mocked. Most discourse on kids is about performative self-care and how it’s hard, which, sure, it is.

When I was 23 and living in San Francisco I was hit by this existential angst that suffocated all life out of me for a solid month. I remember talking to people at work wondering “do they not realize they’re going to die?” I stopped listening to music, exercising, or doing anything. I would walk back home and cry in my bed and dissociate from the world.

I felt I was missing some sort of context. The mythology of my time (of our time?) was WWII. Of course, I never went to war. But I could have gone to war. This counter-factual version of myself who had gone to war would, presumably, have had a depth of insight into the meaning of life my coddled self lacked. Shouldn’t I then read stories of the men who did go to war, and copy them?

So I sort of did. I rewatched the entire series of Band of Brothers in bed every day after work. When someone is pushed to the brink and looks death in the face every night, what do they want? There is this one episode, it focuses on a medic trying almost hopelessly to save people in his platoon. He keeps returning to the front and trying to bring wounded men back, and keeps failing. Then tries again. It’s the same in The Lord of the Rings, you see the same thing in Boromir fighting against overwhelming odds. It’s this glimpse into a past artistic world of deep, sincere sacrifice, with no ironic wink.

I eventually decided I probably should move back to Seattle to spend more time with my family, and even create one of my own, because that seems to be what people desire when they undergo extreme hardship. That’s what everyone wants when they’re pushed to the end, the proverbial simple life on the farm. So that’s what I decided I needed. I couldn’t have argued myself into it. I had to see it first, in stories old enough that they hadn’t learned to be embarrassed yet.