In Culture Is Not About Esthetics, Gwern argues that the supply of high-quality art from the past now exceeds the capacity of any individual to experience it. Someone who reads one award-winning science-fiction novel each week could spend nearly a decade working through only the winners and major contenders of the Hugo and Nebula Awards—and that is a tiny slice of a single genre.
Expanding to other genres produces a reading list longer than most people’s lifetimes. The same imbalance appears in other media: music, movies, television. The past contains enough proven material to occupy anyone indefinitely. If the sole goal were to extract as much artistic value as possible, a rational consumer would stay in the archives: the old material has known value, while new work is an uncertain bet.
Yet new work offers two advantages that older media cannot match: synchrony with other people and contact with the present world.
People implicitly coordinate their attention, which tends to converge on a small set of new releases. When a show releases weekly episodes, or when a movie enters theaters, it creates a period in which many people encounter the same story and ideas at roughly the same time. This produces a form of immediate common ground. Two strangers can ask each other what they are watching right now because the answer is likely to overlap. Asking about everything they have ever watched also produces overlap, but finding it requires far more work.
The shared timing also shapes the experience itself. A serial story released in intervals fosters anticipation, speculation, and collective interpretation. These reactions depend on the shared delay between releases. They disappear when the entire work arrives at once or when the viewer discovers it years later. For example, you simply had to be present during the Drake-Kendrick rap beef to fully experience the rapid back-and-forth; hearing the tracks long after the fact lacks the same impact. Even disappointment can create a bond: two people who disliked the same plot twist during the week can commiserate while the reactions are still fresh.
The work matters, but the synchronized attention surrounding it matters as well.
New media can depict the world that exists at the time of its creation. A story produced today can incorporate technologies, social tensions, and everyday habits that did not exist decades ago. An 18th-century analogue to Black Mirror would not merely look different; it would lack the conceptual material—networked surveillance, algorithmic behavior-shaping, ubiquitous data trails—that makes the show meaningful to a modern audience.
Satire, in particular, draws power from its proximity to current conditions. Its targets lose meaning as those conditions recede into history. Even non-satirical work gains resonance by engaging with the problems and patterns that shape contemporary life.
Recent media offers something the archive of older work, no matter how high-quality, cannot: it lets people experience the same stories at the same moment without explicit coordination, and it reflects the state of the world they inhabit. For anyone who values experiencing stories together with others or seeing the present world reflected in media, new work deserves a place alongside the old.