Creativity
Late 20th century media was a universe of legible, cohesive objects—films, books, shows, albums, people—which audiences largely experienced as complete entities, not necessarily due to anyone’s preference but because this was the most practical way to read them. Today’s media is a tangle of streams, flows, and feeds that mingle promiscuously and of... See more
Drew Austin • Microdosing Life
An exponential surge in the mass of televisual images, and a commensurate increase in my ability to cut, paste, magnify, and combine them to suit my own fancy, can do nothing but render my interactive TC a more powerful enhancer and enabler of fantasy, my attraction to that fantasy stronger, the real experiences of which my TC offers more engaging
... See moreDavid Foster Wallace • A Supposedly Fun Thing I'll Never Do Again: Essays and Arguments
The Internet-Personality-as-Art is ephemeral, challenging, and doesn’t even register as a performance to most critics. Most of it is considered throwaway trash by casual viewers. Crucially, many of those viewers would be correct: not every social media personality is well-constructed, and not every example is art, in the same way not every movie is... See more
Default Friend • No, Culture is Not Stuck
Consider film and television, an easy target for cultural pessimists, and for good reason. The signs of decay are hard to ignore. If it’s not the slurry of superhero blockbusters, remakes and reboots, then it’s the straight-to-streaming slop. The familiar three-act structure, that is the craft of screenwriting, seems mysteriously missing from even ... See more
Default Friend • No, Culture is Not Stuck
Mainstream offerings are dominated by sensationalist non-fiction, formulaic and #BookTok-approved YA, and an endless parade of self-help. The few compelling books still being published for mainstream audiences occupy niche spaces, without the broad public engagement they once enjoyed. If intellectuals have always complained about the fragmentation ... See more
Default Friend • No, Culture is Not Stuck
TikTok sketch comedy is in the same lineage of theater. It invites a suspension of disbelief from the audience, creators often play multiple characters, rapidly switching between roles with nothing more than a change in voice, facial expression, or camera angle. And importantly, it’s funny. When the whole feed is taken together, it’s almost digital... See more
Default Friend • No, Culture is Not Stuck
However, the meaning that can be discerned from the words are mere trails, left behind by what cannot be expressed. People make books because they value words, but I think words are not themselves worthy.
Laozi • Laozi's Dao De Jing
The social media personality is one example of a new form. Personalities like Bronze Age Pervert, Caroline Calloway, Nara Smith, mukbanger Nikocado Avocado, or even Mr. Stuck Culture himself, Paul Skallas, are themselves continuous works of expression — not quite performance art, but something like it. They may also be influencers, or they may not ... See more
Default Friend • No, Culture is Not Stuck
The problem is that audiences are not so easily fooled, because they have internalized the entirety of artistic progress in the 20th century. They know when a song is just a jam and not a radical piece of transformative art. But in working to find intellectual content, even where there is none, critics were able to justify their placement of non-in... See more