How the Village Voice Met Its Moment
Many regard early newspapers as cradles of modern democracy and human rights, and there’s obvious truth to that. But Innis worried that newspapers had a structural bias: They focused culture relentlessly on the present. To make money, newspapers had to train us to come back every day—to become convinced that if we stopped keeping up, stopped checki... See more
Clive Thompson • Social media is keeping us stuck in the moment
sari added
Many values of the early years of the internet, including openness, creativity, and connection, are deeply appealing now.
New_ Public • 💾 Why we’re nostalgic for the early web
Keely Adler added
It’s only when we establish ourselves on our terms — as Pitchfork , RIP, once did — that we build durable worlds of our own.
The prestige recession
Severin Matusek added
Today’s revolution has been defined by a set of very specific values: boundarylessness; speed; universal accessibility; an allergy to hierarchy, so much so that the weighting or preferring of some voices or products over others is seen as illegitimate; seeing one’s own words and face reflected back as part of a larger current; a commitment to grati... See more
Alana Newhouse • Everything Is Broken
Today it feels like we’re living through another important cultural shift—the decline of Twitter—and a new generation of networks is experimenting with new structures to try and capitalize on it. If we want to understand what’s next, it helps to ask: what caused the culture shift? What new structures would be better? And what will it feel like to u... See more
Nathan Baschez • Twitter Is Fragmenting
sari added
Big institutions used to have unquestioned control over the narrative. Their dominance once seemed eternal. But now, they’re losing their monopoly over the dissemination of ideas.
David Perell • What the Hell Is Going On?
sari added
"On or about December 1910 human character changed," Virginia Woolf famously declared. Gone, she wrote, were the old certainties, the old manners, the deference to nineteenth-century authority. Instead human beings—at least the ones in Woolf's circle—were starting to see the world as full of chaos and discontinuity. Einstein smashed the notion of a... See more
David Brooks • The Organization Kid
Juan Orbea added
The prestige recession
ystrickler.com
kev added
Instead, art and culture have been safely neutralized as interchangeable commercial objects just like everything else.
At its best, cultural criticism is love and art that exists to give love to other expressions of art. It’s beautiful in its indulgence. A positive feedback loop that gives everybody exactly what they desire. Gods, scribes, muses, an audience, a culmination. This is what we want out of art. Something that feels grand, meaningful, connected to the ages. That doesn’t happen on its own. It needs context, dedicated space, deeper knowledge, appreciation.