Most people don't care about quality

My friend, the photographer Paul Clarke has an uncanny eye for detail. Every single shot he publishes is beautiful - they capture life in a way that I don't have the language to describe. I'm quite content to point my phone at someone, use the default settings, and grab a snap. My photos lack composition, clarity, focus, mise-en-scène, proper lighting and a thousand-and-one details that I've never even thought of.

Paul has published an essay about official photographs of politicians. In it, he expertly points out the various deficiencies of some of them and where they show a distinct lack of quality.

But, here's the thing, I don't think anyone other than a photographer would notice or care about those "problems".

If you're a website designer, you're always noticing "jank" on other sites. Your skin crawls at the poor kerning, the FOUT, the lack of keyboard navigation, improper contrast ratio, and a dozen other flaws. 99% of users just don't care. It doesn't impact them in any meaningful way.

A decade ago, I ranted about how designers were chasing a perfection which would never be noticed by non-experts. You may take pride in your craft, but the majority of people physically cannot notice the difference between good and bad design. Not even subconsciously.

I include myself in this maddening desire for unnoticeable perfection. I've got several rants about things most people would find inconsequential. There are things which I know to be important in terms of technical correctness, but which most people couldn't give a shit about.

There's a brilliant essay by Will Tavlin called "Casual Viewing - Why Netflix looks like that".

In it, the author (correctly and fairly) skewers Netflix's model of producing huge amounts of low-quality content for an undiscerning audience. The creatives recoil in horror and the æsthetic choices, poor scripting, and lack of creative pizazz. Everything is mediocre at best and that's destroying the creative industries.

But, much like designers fretting about getting things Pixel Perfect or photographers complaining about background composition or musicians ranting about the loudness wars - the hoi polloi just don't care.

And, frankly, who can blame them? Take this quote from the Netflix essay:

The difference between Netflix and its predecessors is that the older studios had a business model that rewarded cinematic expertise and craft.

Bluntly, I don't think that's true. Look at the amount of movies Elvis was in. A couple of good ones, sure. But the majority are literally just "This demographic will pay a dollar to see Elvis on screen; so put him on screen". You only need to look at the various lists of highest grossing movies to see that the viewing public don't necessarily reward expertise and craft.

In an essay called "Fraught Pleasures: Domestic Trauma and Cinephilia in American Culture", the author points out that in the movie "Scream" (a movie ostensibly about movies) nobody goes to the cinema. Their entertainment is schlocky VHS tapes of low-budget and low-quality horror films. The nearest they get to discussing the quality of movie making is when one character recommends renting "All The Right Moves" because:

If you pause it at just the right place, you can see [Tom Cruise’s] penis!

Quality!

Netflix, so the essay argues, has perfected the art of designing content for "casual viewing". Something you can have on in the background while cooking, playing a game, or doom-scrolling.

Several screenwriters who’ve worked for the streamer told me a common note from company executives is “have this character announce what they’re doing so that viewers who have this program on in the background can follow along.”

So? Not everything should be hard work. After a long day, most people don't want to work for their leisure. People don't want to expend cognitive energy on interpreting what a story means. Forget Subtext - People Don't Even Get Surtext.

We also have the problem that close to 100% of culture is now readily available to us. Why take a risk on something new when you could watch something guaranteed to be good? An executive at Amazon's streaming division recalls receiving an email which said:

‘here are the one hundred movies that people are watching most on Amazon SVOD today by the minute.’ It was always a lot of Tom Cruise sci-fi movies, action movies from the ’90s and aughts, and Talladega Nights.

You want to get everyone dancing at your party. Do you put on some experimental music that no one has heard of? No - you stick on ABBA and watch the dance-floor fill up.

Want something with a guaranteed number of chuckles-per-minute? Friends is there for you.

When you visit Paris, do you go to some little art gallery showcasing new artists or do you visit Le Louvre? You, like everyone else, bask in front of the Mona Lisa.

Finally, we reach the inevitble endgame of Netflix. Cut out the authors, actors, directors, make-up artists, sound designers, and the hundreds of other unionised parasites involved in making a modern show. Go straight to AI and create an infinite and endless stream of algorithmically-designed crowd-pleasing content.

Streaming platforms are the only place where this [AI Generated] garbage makes any sense — a place where it would never be watched at all.

Hard disagree. Not because I think AI slop is good; but because the audience doesn't care. Most people don't notice the wires on the special effects. They can't see that the lighting is wrong on the CGI shot. The lead actor's shitty accent passes without comment.

I'm not trying to slur people when I say that the majority are unsophisticated - because I include myself amongst them.

Audiophiles complain about MP3 compression and crappy headphones. Most of us just want to listen to our tunes, not listen to the equipment.

Cinephiles complain about poorly calibrated projectors and or motion smoothing on TVs. Most of us just want to crunch popcorn and see big explosions.

Fact-checkers complain about fictional quotes from famous people. Most of us just want a daily dose of something that sounds like wisdom.

Pornographers complain about the move from gorgeous celluloid to low fidelity videotape. Most of us just want to rent a VHS rather than visit a cinema for our extra-special-personal-time.

Fashionistas decry the homogeneity of modern dress. Most of us think jeans and a t-shirt are basically fine.

Is the quality of pizza better from a tiny restaurant hidden away in an Italian village using only fresh ingredients? I'm sure it is. But Domino's delivers something good enough, cheap enough, and hot enough.

Next year, your pizza will be topped with cheap 3D printed "meat" and, while chefs will decry it as an affront to culinary perfection, it'll be cheap and tasty. Besides, you're munching on it while chatting to friends and watching something dopey on Netflix. Call it the rise of "Casual Eating".