Thread by @balajis

Incredible meme potential. The cultural skyscraper as the new political compass.

This is remarkable on several levels.

- It's recent (note the mention of Game of Thrones), yet immediately archaic
- It has zero reference to math, physics, technology texts
- It ignores the descent of many formerly "high" institutions into clickbait

You can't get away from ranking. Otherwise Google wouldn't exist. But this exercise shows these ranks to be very much in flux, with important actors left completely off the map, as well as any acknowledgment of how much individual *disagreement* there would be about ranks.

Interesting items for a v2 ranking:

- The Feynman Lectures on Physics
- The Art of Computer Programming
- The smartest Twitter accounts, and the dumbest
- Websites beyond TMZ (GitHub, Twitch, 4Chan)
- Legacy media outlets in 2020 (where they are vs where they think they are!)

For example, if you take all the people who could understand the Feynman Lectures, they could probably appreciate Hamlet. But not conversely.

You could show this by exam, or maybe Turing Test equivalent.

So this imagined tower isn't even close. It's missing the cloud above.

By the way, every item on the list with the partial exception of GTA is consuming rather than producing.

It’s a 20th century broadcast state of mind. Culture as something you consume, that’s fed to you. As opposed to something you do, like “lift weights” or “fly drones.”