The Cult of Yesterday

Capitalism, Necromancy, and the Dark Side of Nostalgia

River Quintana

Feb 09, 2024

Some of the sources of Pop Art VI, Peter Blake

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Capitalism, it seems, can’t let go of the past. Like a necromancer, it reanimates the corpses of bygone trends, ideologies, and aesthetics, then sells them back to us at a markup. This “capit... See more

bad cultural and institutional incentives can deaden creativity as surely as Netflix’s algorithms. A flood of research dollars and prescriptions going in the wrong direction, because everyone wants to imitate everyone else, is the scientific equivalent of everybody making the same dress because that seems to be what the consumer wants — no literal ... See more