Cultural Dopes
Our culture seems to be spiraling into a feedback loop of homogenized thoughts and ideas, where originality is sidelined in favor of the predictable and the algorithmically optimized. In fact, one of those machines wrote the last 28 words, from “our culture seems” on.
Alt Lit | The Point Magazine
The entire postmodern sensibility, the feeling that we had somehow broken into an unprecedented new historical period where we understood that there was nothing new; that grand historical narratives of progress and liberation were meaningless; that everything now was simulation, ironic repetition, fragmentation and pastiche: all this only makes sen
... See moreDavid Graeber • The Utopia of Rules: On Technology, Stupidity, and the Secret Joys of Bureaucracy
As the individual experiences an ever-growing sense of acceleration provided by technological developments (new media and the “speeding up” of the infosphere) alongside a general decrease in security of past provisions and expectations (read: precarity, freelance positions, housing shortages, and increasing wealth disparities coexisting with rhetor... See more
Jess Henderson • Dude, where’s my 22nd century? – On the Burnout of Future Images
the platformization of culture and creativity makes it harder to imagine another way forward. The past plummets down a memory hole and the future is reduced to what a prediction market or recommendation algorithm anticipates. The present, meanwhile, becomes a fragmented slop bowl of takes and sensations that lead nowhere. We live in slop capitalism... See more
everything's computer, but how?
Brooklyn-based art collective MSCHF describes this phenomenon:
"No one talks about the future anymore. Instead, everything accelerates the present to a fever pitch, intensifying and weirding the dysfunctions of the current moment. There’s a hole where the future used to be, and all that remains is the increasingly spicy present."
Subversion as Creative Strategy
