Culture Is Stuck

The landed monopolistic rich had their foot on the necks of the poor for so long during the dark ages that when 50% of all people were killed it actually allowed new opportunities to arise and new people in nepotistic positions and the economy to flow again. This allowed a flourishing middle class to arise again, which gives more people free time to use however they want.

It's also theorized that WW2 had the same effect on the middle/lower class prosperity for almost a century.

Growing up in the '90s it was super easy to get a cheap apartment and a job as a waiter and just play in a band or write a book or work on some passion project. This also allowed huge groups of people to congregate in the same spot to develop crazy subcultures for their passions (i.e. grunge, cbgbs, Hollywood, etc )

Now were losing that middle class edge and everything being so expensive the friction to do any sort of risky activity makes it almost impossible unless your parents are already rich.

I personally think that when you take away the ability for people to explore their passions because they're working two jobs to survive it removes culture and takes potential genius out of the human race.

I wonder if this is the beginning of regressing to some sort of human mean of massive inequality that won't be broken again until another war, revolution, or plague.

That's the cynical economic take. There could be other reasons as well, like maybe we're too comfortable.

My own view as a writer and artist, is that there's a relatively consistent amount of creative innovation being done at any given time. It's access to it and promotion of it that varies.

Whats happened since the 90s is that rents have consistently risen - meaning physical scenes are enormously less likely to emerge, and (as the author rightly points out) algorithmic recommendations have both isolate people in their own bubbles of past preference and privileged big content. Big content has been selling the transmedia vision of wholly owned and diversified 'media properties' pretty consistently since then.

However - artists gonna art. Brilliant writing is out there, unpublished by the narrow coterie of MFA grad, politically unipolar editors running grant funded publications. Brilliant filmmaking is out there - and actually experiencing a renaissance thanks to cheap tools; but getting a mid budget opportunity, the pathway from zero / microbudget to mainstream director is now close to impossible. Incredible new music is out there, but spotify doesn't pay, and a social media audience is by definition drawn to repetitious, unchallenging, immediately accessible soothing or shocking material.

It's not the culture thats stuck, it's the media.

Also enormously relevant to all this is the spaces artists can display their work, and engage with one another. In Dublin in the early 2010s this played out rapidly. After the financial crisis there was a period of about four years where rents dropped precipitously. The explosion of art shows, participatory art spaces and public creativity was extraordinary. A city of 500k people had more than 40 open active public art spaces. It's all since disappeared - but the artists, performers and organisers who made it happen were alive before and lived on after. They just don't have the affordances necessary to create / promote that kind of work. Namely physical public facing spaces located in the city.

1. No, culture is _gone_. When you transform people into individual economic entities each responding to the market conditions in what approximates the most efficient manner possible and when your societies denigrate, minimize and underfund institutions meant for collective good, then there really isn't any material reason for people to form a "culture," if you understand culture to be a mutually supporting social fabric meant to improve some idea of public good. Margaret Thatcher literally loved to say "There is no society!" and this is basically the idea that the modern anglosphere has built the last 3-4 decades on.

2. There is a ton of cultural innovation out there. Untold richness. What is missing is the funnel which used to select out elements of cultural innovation and elevate them to "mass culture." In our current world, where you can search out exactly what you want, the power of "global tastemakers" like record company scouts and media critics and movie producers and so on is, in most respects, muted. The market forces these institutions and players to play to the absolute lowest common denominator to maximize market reach. In the past the music market, for instance, was pretty inefficient, and what was cool was at least strongly modulated "top down." But all that is done. If you want cultural novelty, its everywhere you could choose to look. But don't expect much of it to become truly popular. The economics of media has shifted away from that model.

I think she's right, the algorithmic curation of how we consume media has replaced the self and community curation of before. That "algorithm" has become the homogenising agent. I fear how AI based generative media may continue or even amplify this effect.

Imagine a future where the algorithm doesn't just recommend media based on what you consume, but generates completely unique media for you.

In a dynamic environment, our minds interact with information in a bit of a stochastic way. Things change, evolve, we learn things, and a decade later we are different people. The algorithm, in an attempt to optimize your "happiness", tries to show you things you like already, or things similar people like, stuff like that. This introduces a positive feedback loop into what you're exposed to, a Newton's method for experience, honing you and everyone else in on an eventual monoculture of mediocrity. It prevents you from escaping, changing, you're constantly interacting with a mirror. It's effect on individuals, culture, societies, environments is not minimal, this is not a small adjustment to how the world works. Most of our entire sets of behaviors have drastically changed.

If you want to empower yourself to grow, you have to ditch the algorithms entirely. No YouTube recommendations, Spotify, google, Facebook, none of it. Just play playlists, read chronological feeds you've curated, copy paste URLs. Keep it simple. But ditch the algorithmic feeds, it is imperative that you do that, theyre very, very dangerous and cannot be fixed. Any positive feedback loop that curates what your mind absorbs based on what your mind has absorbed in the past will damage your psyche.

There was a clean break even if you compare 2013 to 2023.

He’s just not very discerning of clothes. And he doesn’t have the benefit of looking at only archival photos that capture the purest expression of cultural moments.

1. I think that is common for every generation however. "Pop culture" changed, but is mostly the youth. The older generations didn't change that much. We remember the differences, but forget how much is the same. 2. Youth culture is different today than the late 00's, but it takes time and space to see those differences clearly. 3. Cultural plateau is the historical norm. While we can argue if it is good or bad, the wider 1k+ year historical view shows this is just a reversion to the mean. (granted before it was localized and now mostly globalized)

It’s been ages since I saw a new paradigm in art that really caught my attention. It seems like elite artists have not had much to say for a few decades aside from navel gazing. Suddenly we have these machines that can produce high quality finished pieces out of our vague whims. With it has come an outpouring of the bizarre and humorous, a total democratization where ideas are no longer limited by execution.

Culture is only stuck if you look at the most globalized corporate universal customer version of it. Underneath that we have the revolution of the individual and the niche where anyone can access an audience.

https://blog.nelhage.com/post/efficiency-vs-resiliency/ https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=35586607

With this metaphor collections of long appreciated arts become foundational while the fringe which may develop new aesthetics efficiently meets the needs of the cultural fringe while not being resilient as long term broadly appreciated artistic works.

Yeah, you can look at current blockbuster movies, and mostly see Marvel stuff, except that now there is a thing called "superhero fatigue" because it's not 2010 anymore.

In the meantime, the clothing has changed, the music has changed, the zeitgeist has changed, and new medias are Twitch, Tiktok and discord.

Algorithmic discovery requires you to do a little more work since there isn’t a single 18-64 demographic that’s the primary marketing demographic. Now it’s 24-27 year old woman with adhd and loves a list of 20 different things that gets targeting for advertising. The algorithms will give you what you ask for, so ask for different stuff.

But this process also happened in the 1960s with the rise of TV. That's why if you ask someone to name a band, the most common answer is still The Beatles. The word 'futuristic' still refers to the aesthetic of The Jetsons. And if you talk about 'the 20s', you mean the 1920s, rather than the current decade.

[1] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=aCgkLICTskQ