Culture Isn't Stagnating, You Guys Are Just Old

I've been meaning to write a post almost identical to this for a few months, in response to having listened to Mark Fisher's "The Slow Cancellation of the Future" lecture, but this says it better then I could have.

At the risk of sounding old (which, arguably, I am), things have actually gotten worse culturally speaking over the last decade or so. The ongoing relentless monetization of culture continues to accelerate and is one of the prime examples of not just stagnation but decline. Enshittification is not just about poorly performing software extracting dollars from our wallets but about how that imbalance between cost and value seems to have extended to nearly all realms of culture.

This doesn’t mean things weren’t bad in the 90s though. Or that stagnation/decline is new. All of this can be and is true at once —- culture is declining, it has been for a long time, AND we (just me?) are old.

> A possibly complementary take is that maybe mediums also just... have shelf lives? Like, if there's been no innovation in radio dramas or still life paintings of flowers or superhero comics over the past thirty years, it's not because we as a culture have lost the collective spark, you know?

I think this is a useful point! I was chatting to a french individual in aus recently, about the lack of culture in Brisbane. He responded that there was lots of great ballet, opera, ... - they used the word 'culture' for what I might call 'high culture'. I think this is indicative of the above point: a boomer has a certain concept of what culture is, from their experiences. A zoomer who interacts mostly with a digital world has a very different concept.

As part of the ageing, boomer, get off my lawn cohort, watching flared jeans on their fifth cycle round, I heartily echo the sentiment of this blog post. After all, it's the same threnody my grandparents made, as their kids explored Oxford bags and plus fours, listening to truly awful atonal modern music. What do these women think they'd get, cutting their hair short, wearing beach pajamas and smoking? They got old.

Anyway. Come up and see my etchings, after you've got off my lawn. Filthy, filthy etchings. The ones my great grandparents doubtless enjoyed too. Except nowadays, the etchings are photos by Andres Serrano or Robert Mapplethorpe.

"Midnight in Paris" is one of Owen Wilson's finest performances. Everybody harks back to a better time, and always has.

Even second time round Goth and Emo kids have a point to make.