Contradictions abound; those of us who consume and participate in culture today—with our wallets, our words, our eyeballs, and our sneers—are all, at some level, hypocrites, complicit in the fortification of our own aesthetic prison.

Big Tech’s only concept of creative value is a quantifiable one: What’s good is what “does numbers,” generating likes, views, shares, reactions. “Engage, engage, engage” is the mantra of platform capitalism, where so much of what passes for culture is designed for the snap judgment, the jolt of dopamine, and the hyperemic rush rather than the... See more

Culture today is an endless repackaging of tested tropes into the technological equivalent of chaff, mere filler to keep the grazing consumer content.

The Stagnation Generation (anyone under 30, let’s say) is simultaneously overpoliced and unbound from almost all the taboos that shackled its generational predecessors.

The big platforms have benefited from good timing, planting their flags in cultural terra firma at the exact moment when economic inequality and the distance between political elites and voters are at their widest since the Gilded Age, and the misalignments of rentier capitalism—handing a greater and greater share of wealth to asset owners—mean... See more

Life expectancy and birth rates are falling; our governing institutions are as leaky and unreliable as the New York City subway; cheap rent, the historic precondition of artistic adventure, has all but disappeared from the country’s major urban centers; productivity growth is stuck in first gear; and for all the blather about “de-risking” and the... See more

Cultural stagnation does not spring solely from Silicon Valley’s manipulation of our habits of thought and action. It reflects much deeper issues at work in politics, the economy, social mores, and demographics

The algorithm’s success is to reduce the assessment of cultural quality to a question of culture’s popularity: “The rule of culture in Filterworld is: Go viral or die.”

Culture is always made, and never given.