The USA's biggest export is our culture...like it or not. Think of movies, music, etc. Some of it is intangible.
> The USA's biggest export is our culture...like it or not. Think of movies, music, etc. Some of it is intangible.
Yeah, but that's not high culture. It's mass-market culture that makes a lot of money.
I think what the GP is referring to as "culture" is high culture--the kind of stuff that is not popular and requires subsidies and special effort to sustain.
It's also one of those phrases where people insist that's not what it means. You can see this bizzare battle playing out on its wikipedia page:
> In popular usage, the term high culture identifies the culture either of the upper class (an aristocracy) or of a status class (the intelligentsia); high culture also identifies a society’s common repository of broad-range knowledge and tradition (folk culture) that transcends the social-class system of the society.
Libraries used to keep archives of old newspapers and publications on microfilm, and anyone who needed to research something could go and look through those archives. The IA holds a similar function today - but it's the only one with its breadth and age. If we lose the IA, we lose a lot of important historical information.
Newspapers very frequently maintain and provide public access to their own online archives now. That's also not a function the IA is even especially good at--its coverage is spotty, and unless you have an old URL, it's very hard to find stuff in the IA.
The one unique thing the IA does is have is a broad and deep collection of internet ephemera.
That's what I was referring to. Blogs especially are an important source of historical information from this period that will not exist in newspaper archives -- and many of those have appeared and disappeared in the last 20 years. IA is the only record we have of much of that.
This is actually the worst way to preserve newspapers. There are two major problems:
1. It's their own content. Sometimes they find old content embarrassing and hide it.
2. Sometimes newspapers shut down. When that happens, the archive disappears! This defeats the whole purpose of archival.
Indeed, but that’s not the definition of “high culture” as proposed a few posts up, so I don’t see how it’s relevant to the thread.
If we look to the mainstream,the movies,music etc are all commercial. There's a reason a studio would rather make another Marvel movie than something more meaningful. That's not to say that -only- Marvel movies are made, and they are very entertaining, but the -reason- they are made at all us economic.
For software we celebrate money-raised, MRR, user numbers and engagement. We dont celebrate programs for their life-impact. We don't celebrate the software used yo design the James Webb telescope. Or the software in an MRI machine. We don't throw VC levels of funding at prosthetics, things that have value beyond just ygr monetary, even more so when the monetary value is near-nil, just like the IA.
I say all this not to change it, at a fundamental level it can't be changed, bug rather to understand it.
and i'd dispute that entertainment is our #1 export. not all exports are on the books; i'd bet arms is our real #1 export.
1. See page 22-23 of https://www.bea.gov/sites/default/files/2023-02/trad1222.pdf
2. FY2022 had $51.9B of sales to foreign militaries and $153.7B direct commercial sales, for a total of $205.6B: https://www.state.gov/fiscal-year-2022-u-s-arms-transfers-an...
> You can look this information up pretty easily.
if you read what i wrote carefully you'll see you can't just look this information up pretty easily.
They give dollars and get resources and services.
That's like saying fiat currency is just as valuable as lithium deposits. It's the hubris of the West.
Empires that over-expand and seize too much sow the seeds of their own military destruction. Economic empires backed by ever-increasing military become overwhelming and then define any pushback as terrorism. What you end up with is a planetary-scale protection racket. Please do not construe this as an endorsement of other would-be hegemonies.