Television is going through another Golden Age, or so it is claimed. I disagree. It's true that television shows have higher budgets and look closer to cinematic productions every passing year. It's also true that more shows are produced and are readily available than ever before, courtesy of international streaming services like Netflix and the regional streaming outlets of major traditional broadcasters such as the BBC's iPlayer.
As the old saying goes, though, quantity is not quality. There is a lot of television to watch, and much of it looks impressive, but when you dig deeper into those myriad productions, beneath the aesthetics to judge how engaging the storytelling and compelling the characters, how many are even good, let alone great? How many feel like works of passion rather than another piece of flavourless content churned off the assembly line to be thoughtlessly consumed at speed before moving onto the next one? Why have emotionless executive jargon like 'content' and 'consume' become the lingua franca of the media industry? There are many answers, but one man at the heart of it all: J.J. Abrams. And as artificial intelligence expands its influence in all areas of modern life, it is time to accept what has secretly been clear all along: J.J. Abrams is an algorithm.
Abrams is best known for being co-creator of the television show, Lost, but has been around longer than that. His first writing credit came in 1990 on the Jim Belushi vehicle, Taking Care Of Business. As befitting its generic title, the film received underwhelming reviews, many noting its lack of ambition. Abrams went on to write Regarding Henry (1991), a sappy family drama starring Harrison Ford about a lawyer who survives a shooting and brings his family together in the process (tagline: 'The story of a man who had everything, and found something more'), followed by Forever Young (1992), a sappy family drama with time travel elements starring Mel Gibson (tagline: 'Fifty years ago he volunteered for an experiment, all in the name of love'), and Gone Fishin' (1997), a broad comedy starring Joe Pesci and Danny Glover.
Also happening in the 1990s was a boom of machine learning. Following the release of the first IBM PC in 1981, corporations and venture capital had been able to integrate computing into their businesses through so-called expert systems. These emulated rational inferencing based on vast banks of knowledge. At the end of the decade, preference shifted to a more mathematical approach based on pattern identification and statistics. To put it another way, artificial intelligence moved away from an attempt to recreate a human way of thinking and towards developing ways to allow machines to self-evolve their own capacity for analysing and interpreting the world through cold, objective data.
Abrams' early credits show a similar approach to writing. The common thread among reviews of those early films - Taking Care Of Business; Regarding Henry; Gone Fishin' - is that they are absolutely typical, mediocre examples of their genre. Abrams did not write screenplays, but interpreted the data of the most common and popular elements making up their respective genres and formulated them into something approaching a plot on the page.
The loglines (aka: plot summaries condensed into a sentence or two) of said films read like something produced by Google Translate. The words are familiar and with a bit of effort, their organisation can be interpreted in a semi-coherent way, yet on their own terms they appear the result of individual words being translated without any understanding of the underlying structure required to sensibly link them together. Observe:
The loglines (aka: plot summaries condensed into a sentence or two) of said films read like something produced by Google Translate. The words are familiar and with a bit of effort, their organisation can be interpreted in a semi-coherent way, yet on their own terms they appear the result of individual words being translated without any understanding of the underlying structure required to sensibly link them together. Observe:
Taking Care Of Business: Jimmy wins a ticket to the World Series but cannot make it there as he's serving his time in prison. He somehow manages to escape and takes over the identity of Barney, an advertising executive. (from Google)
As the Nineties progressed, the data-driven world of finance collided with politics and free-market consumerism. As outlined in one of my previous articles, The Case Against Centrism, public choice theory, at the centre of which is the belief that the market is a superior interpreter of a society's will than democracy, became the governing philosophy of the day, embraced by President Bill Clinton in the US and Prime Minister Tony Blair in the UK.
As the ethos of corporatist economics tightened its grip on everyday life, so too did the mechanical, emptily-efficient jargon through which that ethos expressed itself: the buzzword. As satirised in Scott Adams' office comic, Dilbert, buzzwords (sometimes 'execu-speak') was ostensibly a way for corporate executives to compress big concepts into efficient, highly technical soundbytes, but soon became a language all of its own divorced from any semblance of meaning and exclusively focused on making the user appear impressive: the application of this linguistic cleansing to social interactions became known as political correctness.
At the turn of the millennium, buzzwords had become an integral part of popular culture. Just as public choice in politics and the free markets reduced human values and decision-making to highly simplified, transient points of information, so too did buzzwords diminish creativity and art to a never-ending stream of evocative but shallow bits of advertising jargon. This was exemplified by the art of Damien Hurst and Tracy Emin, mass producers of artworks striking in the moment but utterly without meaning, lacking even the self-reflection on its own meaninglessness of Andy Warhol's work in the '60s. The modern art movement of the late nineties/early 2000s was buzzwords in visual form.
In 2004, J.J. Abrams had his defining hit, the TV show, Lost, co-created alongside Damon Lindelof. The show initially earnt rave reviews for its vast budget and the web of interlinking mysteries forming its serialised narrative structure. As the show continued into its later seasons, however, it became clear how few of those mysteries had any purpose beyond providing a striking image at the moment of their introduction.
As the writers strained to come up with new questions to replace old, unanswerable ones, the show's once-celebrated mythology sank under its own weight, culminating in a 2010 finale as pretentious as its was vapid, retroactively grafting poorly-fitting and superficial ideas about existence and destiny to a story clearly never designed for them. The 2016 television version of Westworld, which Abrams executive-produces, would later attempt the same trick.
As the writers strained to come up with new questions to replace old, unanswerable ones, the show's once-celebrated mythology sank under its own weight, culminating in a 2010 finale as pretentious as its was vapid, retroactively grafting poorly-fitting and superficial ideas about existence and destiny to a story clearly never designed for them. The 2016 television version of Westworld, which Abrams executive-produces, would later attempt the same trick.
Abrams expounded his view on storytelling in a 2007 TED Talk about his love of narrative 'mystery boxes' (based on a sealed box of magical equipment he bought as a child) which he summarises as the idea that "mystery is more important than knowledge".
Leaving aside the questionable nature of this statement - that the purpose of a story is solely to surprise and create intrigue - in practice Abrams neglects that a narrative whose sole purpose is mystery must provide an answer. There are narratives which use mystery as a jumping-off point for bigger ambitions, notably David Lynch's Twin Peaks. Lynch famously resisted revealing who killed Laura Palmer, believing that mystery not to be the point of his show, merely the starting point. Tellingly, when Palmer's killer was revealed against Lynch's wishes in the second season, the show's quality and viewership rapidly plummeted.
Abrams' work, though, has no greater ambition than to be a factory line for his concept of mystery. As Lost proved, making mysteries without meaning the defining factor of your work means you aren't creating mysteries at all. Abrams might think he is being profound by never opening his box, but instead he is reducing it to an object of purely aesthetic decoration, designed to evoke without purpose.
Abrams' work, though, has no greater ambition than to be a factory line for his concept of mystery. As Lost proved, making mysteries without meaning the defining factor of your work means you aren't creating mysteries at all. Abrams might think he is being profound by never opening his box, but instead he is reducing it to an object of purely aesthetic decoration, designed to evoke without purpose.
The concept of buzzwords as a tool for cultural management evolved with the growth
of the internet age into the idea of keywords as a means of disseminating information on an increasingly vast and unwieldy
internet. Where buzzwords were fatuous and short-lived
neologisms, keywords are colder and more
clinical, stripping the creativity and humanity not only out of
the concepts, but the words invented to describe them: a
mirror of the evolution of artificial intelligence away from knowledge
and into data. It is also a mirror for the evolution of Abrams' writing style.
In his early days, Abrams' work was a collage of loosely assembled popular tropes and concepts, exemplified by Taking Care Of Business and Regarding Henry. With Lost,
those concepts were condensed into narratives formed of evanescent,
emptily evocative buzzwords. In his modern work, and those of
collaborators like Damon Lindelof and Alex Kurtzman, his buzzwords
became keywords, clinical data points employed to reflect a viewer's
desires back at them in a self-fulfilling circle.
Think of Abrams' interpretation of Star Wars, offering nothing but meaningless repeats of familiar characters and plotlines of earlier entries in the series. Think of his Star Trek movies, stripping out the series' curious and aspiring spirit to become an action-first Star Wars remodel - Abrams admitted he liked Wars, not Trek, as a child - populated by characters similar to their originators only in name and public image, rather than the nuances and depths which made them who they really were.
In one of Red Letter Media's reviews of Star Trek: Picard - one of the new Trek series created under the auspices of Abrams' collaborator Alex Kurtzman, who has gone further than Abrams in not just hollowing out Trek's soul, but consciously tearing down its fundamental values - hosts Mike Stoklasa and Rich Evans suggest that Picard simply takes the keywords that even non-fans know about Star Trek: The Next Generation and throws them on-screen as part of a plot assembled as a nostalgia delivery system, despite being incoherent and unsatisfying on its own terms.
In one of Red Letter Media's reviews of Star Trek: Picard - one of the new Trek series created under the auspices of Abrams' collaborator Alex Kurtzman, who has gone further than Abrams in not just hollowing out Trek's soul, but consciously tearing down its fundamental values - hosts Mike Stoklasa and Rich Evans suggest that Picard simply takes the keywords that even non-fans know about Star Trek: The Next Generation and throws them on-screen as part of a plot assembled as a nostalgia delivery system, despite being incoherent and unsatisfying on its own terms.
Keywords have become integral not only to how we find content - for that is all so much of it is - on the internet, but how that content is formed. On a mechanical level, companies like Google, Facebook and Pornhub are to thank for pioneering this system of organisation, but it was J.J. Abrams and his algorithmic writing style, evolving alongside the development of artificial intelligence over the past thirty years from knowledge-based emulation to keyword-driven pattern recognition, which transformed art into something to be mass-produced and distributed according to simplified, dehumanised data points.
Abrams, and those like Kurtzman and Lindelof who worked alongside him and replicated his system in such productions as Cowboys & Aliens, Prometheus and the Transformers movies, represents the first major success story of artificially intelligent content-producing software. His content, like his human form, is precisely designed to be easy to look at, clinically inoffensive and lacking any distinct signs of self: everything a statistically-average human can most easily consume and forget quickly enough to move onto the next thing. Welcome to the Golden Age.
(And did I mention that his production company is called Bad Robot? I rest my case.)
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