whatever happens to be the latest term for pathologising your life experience. Everything is flattened, simplified. I worried that being immersed in it was making me think this way too.

But this obviously contributed to a feeling of decline in the long-run, because mass culture continued to do the thing it always does: avoid artistic innovation in order to maximize profit. But once poptimism established that only the mainstream "mattered," it set up audiences to judge the health of culture on its least artistic output. If we have... See more