'Artistic genius' is basically just a trick used to get a room full of strangers to all feel the same thing at once.
March 20, 2026
Original Paper
All You Need Is CKCS: Why Artists Engineer What Theorists Formalize
SSRN · 6213278
The Takeaway
This paper argues that mass-market hits like Beatles songs or popular films succeed not through pure aesthetic merit, but by using 'Common-Knowledge Coordination Signals' that minimize interpretive variance. These works function as psychological infrastructure, mathematically structured to synchronize the attention and interpretation of decentralized audiences at scale.
From the abstract
Cultural artifacts that achieve mass coordination-from Beatles songs to Yorgos Lanthimos films-share structural properties that transcend aesthetic merit: they function as Common-Knowledge Coordination Signals (CKCS) that reduce interpretive variance across decentralized audiences. This paper argues that artists have been engineering coordination infrastructure for centuries without formal language to describe their methods. Through analysis of music (The Beatles, Pink Floyd), comedy (Ricky Gerv