The Age of Cultural Stagnation

Okay.

 

Intriguing

Rocket River

 

Big yikes, bro. Pam is snack fire, frfr

 

That's CAP. She IS mid. Simping for Pam is huge L. Karen though - she stood on that business.

 

drag me

 

This conversation is definitely a sign of cultural regression

 

I don't feel that way at all

 

I’ve read another piece talking about this exact same thing in design. As an architect and someone who travels a lot it is noticeable how a hip cafe in Singapore will have similar decor and cutesy signs like a hip cafe in Iceland. A lot of this has to do with globalization and also the spread of English.

I brought this up about Dubai but a lot of global commercial culture now is what the French Philosopher Jean Baudrillard called “simulacra”. That so much is referential that much of design and branding is a reference to a reference. Or a simulation of a simulation. A such at the mall of the Burj Khalifa in Dubai you can get Dunkin Donuts, Five Guys burgers but not authentic local cuisine. The very appeal of the mall is that it could be a mall in Phoenix, Hong Kong or Sydney. It is placeless.

 

I have stated before in conversations with co-workers and friends that fashion wise everything has been done. There is nothing you can really do. Everything to an extent is just an amalgamation of what has already been done mixed together. Music is like this to an extent as well.

 

Agree to an extent, there aren't huge fashion trends anymore. Piercings are getting crazier and crazier. Lots of hair colors. Lots of accessorizing. A LOT more tattoos than ever. I guess it's just more '**** it, Imma do what I want' more than any other time.

And those stupid broccoli-head haircuts.

 

No worries. I geek out about this topic too.

Your link is a book review of Kyle Chayka's book. If anyone is interested in it, Chayka wrote a thought provoking article on Guardian that explains enough to make the review make more sense: The tyranny of the algorithm: why every coffee shop looks the same

I'll cut my thoughts brief unless there is interest.

That one line explains away all cultural "progress" of past decades where tastemakers in Mad Men ad agencies or retail product rooms heaped onto us Bellbottoms, Furbies, and platform shoes. The internet democratized this. Ads in TV commercials and radios also lost influence, and the feedback for trends went from months in a city to days and from years in a state to days.

I can't blame Big Tech for the algos. Many are nasty that force you to either fight, ****, or go awww, but the algos in Filterworld generally follow the Power Laws described by Shirkey before this millennium. In a fully democratic system, the best "ideas" (websites by Shirkey) win the largest share rather than the equal share. FB, Google, Amazon, pr0n sites, etc get 90-95% of the traffic while the remaining sites get the remaining 5-10%.

Algos aggregate data, all data then funnel you into categories. A skeptic could complain about "Open Sourcing" the algo, but it's still a boatload of data that promotes winners and losers.

Definitely the latter for the writer. For all his talk about culture, he never really defines what consumerism is. Aside from it's nasty soul stealing, mercenary image of a boogeyman, consumerism represents aspirations of choice, time/cost efficiencies, with the glorification of leisure, luxury, and affluence.

Culture can be about the interaction of consumed products, but it's more focused on output and producing things. Something I didn't see this guy mention contributing to at all.

A lot of the latter part of the article makes him sound like a bored and jaded millennial who wants "deprived" Zoomers, aka Stagnation Generation, to "make moar culture." I don't use tiktok or get it, but to claim it has zero culture means I'm even older for saying that than admitting that I don't use it.

It's not that algos made Big Tech colonize culture. It's more like ads and the people who purchase ad space (baristas, airbnb tenants...) now have better tools to see what reaches the most people in the best way with stats to back it up.

If you don't like your results, then fine tune them.

Or if you a Culture Assteete, you could make your own culture. Those 50 to 500 people who subscribe and follow will appreciate you. But if you blow up to 500k subs, gasp...please don't sell out to the imperialist algo! Our culture is at stake!

 

That was the piece I was referring to in my post.

This isn't a new problem and consumerist mass culture has been an issue since the 1950's and writers like Baudrillard, Jane Jacobs and Kenneth Galbraith have been worry about how such culture is both very successful but can wipe out local or coopt local culture. Other writers like Chuck Palahnuik have warned about how emasculating it is in both very much the gender sense but also in a wider sense of removing originality and

 

and... Meaning?

The latest challenge is different in the sense that cultural trends doesn't necessarily begin from the top to bottom and bottom-up influencers are just as relevant. With power scaling, there are more low level YouTube commenters than blog writers with a masters in literature.

I doubt crocs would be a thing without the internet. There's no way it would be in stores or for a star to wear something ugly from startup.