Review: Everything Bad is Good for You

Everything Bad is to Better Angels as Johnson is to Pinker as Pop Culture is to Violence. That is to say, Everything Bad is a sweeping and powerful attack on the "we're all idiots now" narrative. Games teach us- not just button skills or better eyesight (though they DO do that)- an entire set of cognitive skills that allow us to recognize patterns and make better sense of the world. TV shows are increasingly more complicated, and technology bolsters their complexity. This complexity is due to the fact that humans are generally smart. We're NOT all idiots. Likewise, the best movies of the 00's are complicated, twisting tales that turn our brain on. Even reality TV, the pseudogame shows that aren't really "reality" are much better than they were in the 90s or 80s.

Sure, elite culture isn't getting any better or more complex, but so what?

Interesting, Everything Bad stands the test of time (about another 8 years). The success of Breaking Bad, House of Cards, Netflix, and online streaming are all trends that Johnson pretty much guessed at in 2006. Stories are more complicated, require us to think more about them, and expand our horizons. Hell, even the sitcoms that the author had no access to- the Big Bang Theory and How I Met Your Mother- validate the claim that pop culture is more and more useful.

Johnson did not guess things like Twitter or Facebook or Reddit, which reward easily digestible content, would attempt to thwart the new pop culture. But his guess that we'd tend towards more complicated social systems? Surely those image macros that pave the surface of the internet have a technical complexity, one that relates to pop culture and gives it the "meme-like" power it was supposed to have

Either way, good book. A summary of it could be, "My Star Trek is more sophisticated than my mom's Star Trek because I'm smarter because I was raised in a more system-rich environment."