Some fields are filled by people who are not even close to being decent in it. Contrast journalism and marketing for instance, with programming. In the latter, even fairly mediocre people cannot easily be replaced by people outside of the technical field, because there's a minimum level of rigor and computer literacy needed to even navigate a program, let alone write a good one.
Journalism and marketing on the other hand? You probably could replace a decent amount of people there by outsiders, as long as they are people who care enough to do the job well. This is certainly not true for the best ones in that field, but I suspect that the bulk of it is not that special. You could argue the same is true for programming, that it would only take perhaps two years for someone who is seriously committed to acquire the knowledge and skills to be in a somewhat average coding job, but still, we are talking about two years and not a few months.
I guess this boils down to the divide between fields with hard feedback, such as how a program which doesn't work simply crashes, or how dysfunctional plumbery will leak, and soft feedback, which can be bypassed with enough social capital.
It is also related to the concept, more than a concept but a reality, of bullshit jobs, which can only sustain themselves when the feedback of the job is soft and not hard. An electrician has to repair the infrastructure they were tasked with otherwise it simply doesn't work and thus they will get fired for it, while entire departments of HR, marketing, PR and other acronyms, can get away with doing essentially nothing. Jobs which will inevitably be the first ones to disappear as the decline of civilization ensues.
Non-fiction writing is not exactly a bullshit job, but I have begun to think that it's also something which invites tons of people who have nothing notable to say to get into it to build an audience. It might be the case that everyone has a book inside them, but whether it is a good book is another question altogether—though of course you cannot know until you try.
An interesting thing about non-fiction is that many people find that they can get away with taking in quotes from more insightful writers than themselves, stitch those quotes together in some semblance of linear order, and fill in the gap with some type of commentary. This is a rather abhorrent practice, only topped by the current trend of literal ai-generated books are flooding Kindle and other e-book stores, and I cannot think of any other field where it is possible to get away with barely having anything to say yourself.
Now that I think of it, it is possible to make "music" largely from samples, and be more popular than what you're taking samples from, but when it comes to ideas it feels significantly worse because music which makes heavy use of samples hardly aspires to be high-brow or reflective of deep quality, whereas many non-fiction authors present themselves as "intellectuals" and yet only know how to string together concepts from other authors, without anything to add for themselves.
Compare that to visual arts, where the act of tracing other art pretty much always makes the final result more stiff, less cohesive and kind of weird-looking in general. Or to fiction writing, which can of course be filled with tropes, scenes and characters from other stories, but which ultimately still needs to be painstakingly "painted" by the writer so to speak, a process of building and exposition which necessarily reveals the conscious quality of the author, or more often than not lack thereof. Which is to say, it's easy to hide your mediocrity in the process of quoting and stitching I have mentioned above, but in fiction, such a process would immediately reveal the writer's ineptitude, through flat dialogues, incoherent characters, boring plots and unsatisfying endings. Ideas are easy to borrow, but qualities are impossible to mimick.
The highly online "intellectuals" basically seem like machines which can spew out quotes and tweets, as they very often spend quite a lot of time on social media, and their writing feels more like a collection of notes on whatever they are reading, rather than a genuine process of synthesis.
We can say in general that the market is decent at solving technical problems, such as providing products at a cheap price and which work, but when it comes to products where quality is central, such as visual art, music, writing, comedy, and so on, you can bet that what is popular is good at playing the game of fashion, rather than embodying lasting qualities. There is always a new thing to look forward for people to consume, and let's just say it is rarely all that good, which is why I cannot imagine many of the famous creatives of our times to be remembered in the next century, or even the few decades ahead of us.
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2025-10-31