culture
The prestige recession
ystrickler.com
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.
The Keatsian endeavor has never been popular, but is particularly unfashionable today. Religious fundamentalists reject it on the grounds that revelation and commitment are needed to orient oneself in the world. The amorality of a poet who is a “thoroughfare for all thoughts” risks heresy or destabilization. Tell me where you stand, where your... See more
Zohar Atkins • The Liberal Arts Are Dying Because Liberalism is Dying
Your milieu is not the same as your sister’s. It is an ever-shifting, individual configuration of information flows. The Twitter feed you have curated is a milieu. Your friend group (which is not the same as the friend groups of the other people in that group!) is a milieu.
It is by changing your milieu that you change yourself.
It is by changing your milieu that you change yourself.
Henrik Karlsson • First We Shape Our Social Graph; Then It Shapes Us
Streaming sites have thus transformed into enterprises whose business is not limited to the sale of music-related services, but relies increasingly upon the collection, aggregation, and exchange of user data. A key issue this article pursues concerns the changing status of music within the commercial strategies of online streaming. While previous... See more
Eric Drott • Music as a Technology of Surveillance
A reading revolution is taking place on this notorious message board, most famous for alt-right memes, anything-goes chatter, and large-scale coordinated pranks (several hoax bomb threats organised by the site have led to arrests and mass evacuations). Users operate under total anonymity and are subject to bare-bones moderation. Most of the... See more
How 4chan became the home of the elite reader
Online political debate mainly involves cherry-picking the most outlandish members of the enemy side and presenting them as indicative in order to make the entire side look crazy.
The culture war is essentially just each side sneering at the other side's lunatics.
The culture war is essentially just each side sneering at the other side's lunatics.