Einreichungserklärung – Wie spät der Kapitalismus und Internetalgorithmen die Schaffung der Popkultur erfasst haben, warum das goldene Zeitalter des Fernsehens einfach Köder war, wo die Kultur noch gefunden werden kann und was wir tun können, um den Schlamm in Zukunft zu bekämpfen. "Fühlt sich etwas über die moderne Popkultur irgendwie an aus? Nicht gebrochen, aber gesteckt. Ein Gefühl der Stasis. Es gibt mehr Inhalte als je zuvor, aber immer weniger fühlt sich sehen oder hört.
"Wenn wir eine lebendige Kultur wollen, müssen wir die Idee verwerfen, dass alles ewig dauern muss. Wir brauchen die gelegentliche künstlerische Darmbewegung. Wir müssen Platz für die anfänglichen Fumblinge von Kreativen schaffen und respektieren."
https://mikecormack.substack.com/p/the-constipation-of-culture-why-nothing
31 Kommentare
Sorry, forgot to add a submission statement last time.
This idea is explained in great depth in the book „Derivative Media: How Wall Street Devours Culture“ by professor Andrew deWaard. The entire book is open access and free to read:
[https://www.ucpress.edu/books/derivative-media/paper](https://www.ucpress.edu/books/derivative-media/paper)
You have put wonderfully into words what every local artist I know has been struggling with.
Not an exhaustive list but without reading the article under this clickbait headline: Monetization, resistance to change, survivorship bias (forgetting all the failed trends of the past), and whatever the desire is to immediately attempt to assign a value to something new (e.g. grading sport team drafts immediately before players take the field) often done by people consumed by the first three reasons
This was a good read. As a creative visual and musical artist who lived through the 60s and produces today, there is certainly a cultural stranglehold continually developing that humankind may not escape.
However visual artists have, if anything, vision, and I can vouch for the fact that the creative nature of our species is alive and well, for now.
This is not the first time that the arts have been run through an algorithmic filter at the service of capital. The scale today may be planetwide, but at the height of byzantine era, Christianity was the algorithm that filtered art, music, and what were the seeds of entertainment even more profoundly than capitalism.
It can be argued that this lasted through centuries. But the perpetuation of today’s culture is hardly a foregone conclusion as is the continuation of civilization. It’s just that today’s algorithms are tasked with distracting humans from the unpleasant alternative. Toward which we are headed.
The TL;DR here is that a few powerful people have a stranglehold on culture, and they force us to hang on to established artists/IPs of the past (many of whom haven’t made anything worthwhile in decades) instead of creating new and great things. No chance is taken where money is to be made, but chances need to be taken if art is to thrive.
Art is dead, history is ended and media conglomerates are the devil incarnate. What else is new?
As another comment said, I think this is mostly a matter of survivorship bias+risk aversion. But I think the interesting question is, what would it take for internet art to be taken seriously? Webnovels as a whole are niche, but the western fandom (RoyalRoad, Webnovel, etc.) is downright anemic in comparison to the success of, say, Re:Zero or Solo Leveling.
Perhaps a favorable dynamic compensation model for emerging artists could help. New musicians on Spotify would be preferably weighted and repeat, established, or heavily sampled or remixed songs a depreciated or demurrage fee. Could be fun to see tax credits awarded to verifiably emerging or re-emerging artists to boost fresh ideas and culture.
No one gives two craps about anything I create which is original as an artist I have all the agency of a white good.
Just plugged in, neglected and used. End if creative story
There’s no culture anymore, let alone sub culture, it’s all consumerism and repetition
It’s all a bit of a post satire joke
Corporations control everything. EVERYTHING.
Our politics, our entertainment, and our finances.
Soon, they’ll have everything; our education. Our land, our, and our water leaving us with a dying world and destroyed ecosystem.
There’s a book out there by philosopher Mark Fisher called *The Ghosts Of My Life* in which he talks about cultural stagnation and the idea of a slow cancellation of the future. He argues that same things from the past are being constantly repackaged as new, leading to a deflation of expectations, thus the future we were promised failed to materialize.
This is temporary.
We just happen to be in a situation where it is easy to make a derivative work while it still holds some value. As the amount of derivative works increase, their value will start to drop. We will reach a point where there is so much of it that no more value exists in it. At that point, only the actually new will still capture audiences.
Not that the truly new will hold much value either. It, too, will have to contend with lots of other stuff that people might like. We are experiencing the result of what I call:
The Content Problem
The creation of art and culture have always been the result of technological innovation. There was a man who lived 10000 years ago, who would have been the greatest composer to have ever lived. We don’t know his name because we hadn’t invented sheet music yet. Instead, we are stuck with Mozart. But almost no one actually listens to Mozart’s music. His music is called classical music, precisely because it is not-popular music.
What does popular music have that Mozart didn’t? A better storage technology. Sheet music has its limits.
This march of technology went on for a while with record players and cassette tapes. But we have come to the end of the innovation line. We have reached a point where we can now, and have been able for some time, to store and reproduce music perfectly. And we also now have a near infinite storage capacity.
What does the combination of perfect reproduction and infinite storage capacity do? It skyrockets supply.
We live in a world dominated by the law of supply and demand. As supply reaches infinity, prices must approach zero.
Books, music, TV shows, movies. It is now just a mad dash for the infinite content finish line. Who can generate the most stuff the quickest to milk the last bits of value from a dieing industry.
Agree with a lot of it, but the proposed fix seems a bit ironic though. Go to second hand book/record shops or to see a Guns n roses cover band to fix culture? Maybe anything is better than being spoonfed by an algorithm (and in the process, feeding money to it), but it just felt like reverting back to nostalgia as well, rather than falling forwards towards something new.
Art has become disposable; superfluous to our culture. Like civics or philosophy, nobody thinks they need it. The instant gratification and the high expectations/standards of the consumer direct the market. People are comfortable being treated like children. Too restless, too cynical, too touchy, and too isolated.
From our cars to the idiot box, there’s no need to struggle or challenge ourselves once the day is done. Authenticity is niche. Creating for oneself without hope of reward is perceived as masturbatory. Social media and AI are the worst kind of drugs—not simply crushing our critical thinking and imaginations, but also robbing us of our time. We have to start small all over again. We have to look in the mirror and judge accordingly.
I agree with many of the points in the essay, however…
The irony of inserting a complaint about struggling (but still managing) to get his book published when it is a listening guide to a band from the 70s, while also decrying the stranglehold legacy bands have over up and coming artists is hard to read past.
I would actually expect a request for established credibility (or a „platform“ as he puts it) when you want to write about something that’s been done to death than when you are writing something new and unique.
If you read about the publishing journeys of new authors, in particular in fiction, they do not need a social media presence let alone an established platform to get a deal.
Reading through the whole thing, the author seems stuck in the past. Yes there’s a lot of slop and re-used IPs, yes its harder and harder to get original voices heard through algorithm fed content and media executives. I also don’t want to see yet more derivative works and cash-grabs on existing IPs.
This article would have been better if the author had something new to say or a new voice or artist to promote, instead we get a valid but recycled rant about the staleness of modern culture.
A dude who wrote a book about Pink Floyd and thinks finding old Clash and Morrissey vinyls is a good thing is complaining about the stagnation of culture?
As he demonstrates – that’s not the problem. The problem is that people’s imaginations are colonised and oriented towards consumption and acquisition of the past *without them being aware of it.*
It’s politically useful to prevent new futures from being imagined. And the best way to do that is to keep reinforcing the past and the problems of the present.
I sometimes watch reaction videos on YouTube, where Gen Z kids watch the big movies from the 20th century: Jaws, The Shining, Superman, Blade Runner, Alien/Aliens, etc. They ALL are blown away and many lament what’s being discussed here: the lack of truly inspired storytelling in most of today’s mainstream movies.
There is a sleeping giant of an audience out there who are being ignored by data and profit obsessed execs. Pity.
And in the process denying innumerable artists of fulfilment, volition and agency
No bloody respect from the powerful to the rest of us
I went to a Club recently that we used to go to 15 years ago. It was my first time Back on a club in a few years. Even though the crowd was super young they basically played the exact Same Songs they did when we were young. I was pretty surprised that club music seemed to be stuck in early 2000s music
The Internet began as a way for independent artists and thinkers to get their stuff out there. It was a free and democratic way for people to create, distribute, and consume media. Media conglomerates and corporations of course swept in a monopolized, monetized, and eventually slapped an algorithm on it. Now everyone is just consuming whatever serves a product up the synergetic chain of franchises and amusement parks. Capitalism is no longer about being innovative and making a product that provides value to the consumer; it’s about how corporations and apps can streamline the process to squeeze out as much money from the consumer with doing the least amount work and providing just enough value to keep them on the subscription model, constantly edging the worse offering by A/B testing the last straw on everyone’s back.
The way I framed this especially in the context of Modern Media and Hollywood in Particular: They have decided the space at the forfront of culture instead to be managers. The artists don’t run the institutions and the ones that do are utterly untouched by the idea that human experience is anything but bought.
I respectfully submit the following theory: the most creative minds today are not in the „culture“ game. They are in advanced digital pursuits. If in „culture“ you include all things digital/networked, you will find that there is almost too much that is new. Making record albums and movies is not the thing right now.
Who here listens to BandCamp more than Spotify and Apple Music? Folks literally ignore the new original artist to consumer vibes despite having access. It’s all a popularity contest now.
The thing is though, what is there actually new to be done?
Is someone really going to come along and be the ’next‘ (insert name here) Nirvana? Pink Floyd? Queen? All of those bands and projects came from a time and a place that has been left behind and isn’t coming back. Ever.
I don’t see what this amounts to more than a narcissistic injury. Ok you didn’t get to be David Bowie. Big deal. The world moved on. Find something new to do.
Bowie himself said in the 90s that if he was a teenager he wouldn’t even go into music. He’d be more interested in the possibilities of the internet.
I don’t even see why it’s an issue.
‚Creativity‘ if that’s what is the obsession these days still exists. It’s in philosophy. It’s in podcasts. It’s in video games. It’s in all sorts of places.
I realized this last Halloween. For the first time in years I was at a house giving out candy, and all the kids were dressed as characters from MY childhood. It was kinda sad.
Mark Fisher’s essays and books cover this topic in really good detail too
I call it the star trek holodeck problem. Now for real life reasons its too damn expensive to create a future culutre to populate the star trek universe, but the end resut is all our characters and reading books and lisitneing to music from centries before thier time….and there is no „contemporary “ culture.
Such that its seems that everone is spendng thier time in the holodeck recreating the past and noone is creating anything new.
I took a 15 year break from gaming until last year. Did find it surprising that most the big title games were basically continuations of games from my youth. That being said, luckily I found gaming is not too hard to find fresh, original media through indie developers and the small communities online – music and film on the other hand I’ve found it much harder
I haven’t read the article, is it maximizing profits? I bet its macimizing profits.
It seems to be the reason for most things.
Maybe part of the problem is that we have so much pop culture out there but not in the way you think, even if something was only inspired by another thing and not, like, a reboot/remake/sequel/whatever, it’s hard to be perceived as 100% original when there’s much more stuff out there to influence artists and therefore for artists‘ haters to accuse them of ripping off
What a great article. It talked about some things ive been thinking about for a few years, but put into words i was never really in a place to be able to find.
Modern pop culture really is a zombieland. And while i love a lot of the music of the 70s and 80s, id never pay hundreds or thousands of dollars to see those bands live today… Most of them, anyway. Gong might be an exception, though i dont think theyd ever charge that kind of money for a GA admission ticket.
MAKE ROOM FOR THE NEW BLOOD!