Submission Statement – How late capitalism and internet algorithms have captured the creation of pop culture, why TV's Golden Age was simply bait, where culture can still be found and what we can do to fight the sludge in the future. "Does something about modern pop culture feel somehow off? Not broken but stuck. A sense of stasis. There’s more content than ever before but less and less feels worth seeing or hearing.
"If we want a vibrant culture, we have to discard the idea that everything must last forever. We need the occasional artistic bowel movement. We need to make space for and to respect the initial fumblings of creatives."
https://mikecormack.substack.com/p/the-constipation-of-culture-why-nothing
12 Comments
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
I do not know what the post says the answer is, but it is fairly simple. We have more old people than we do young people, and they have significantly more buying power.
That is it , there is no mystery
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.
This constipation effect is caused by the market, not by the culture itself. Markets allocate scarce resources. Ideas are not scarce, thus monopolies are created to make ideas scarce in order to give them dollar values. These monopolies are called “copyright”and that is the cause of your constipation: the “temporary” monopolies that are used to manufacture dollar value of ideas intentionally and purposefully cause scarcity and enshrine the status quo.
Remix culture demonstrates this all-too-clearly. There are many artists who would love to create new works out of the fragmented pieces of the art that has gone before. They are hunted down by lawfirms and pushed into poverty or even jail by the courts that are there to defent the copyright monopolies’ financial interests. It’s happening all around you constantly.
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 manner 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 — like new musicians on Spotify would be preferably weighted and repeat established song compensation a demurrage or depreciated 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.