wtf is culture?

For the last century, the most vibrant culture has been popular culture — the movies, hit songs, TV shows, fashion styles, smartphone apps, slang, foods, and memes that fill our leisure time.

Culture describes the conventions of a community, which guide individuals into regular behaviors and provide communal meanings and values.

In place of the human gatekeepers and curators of culture, the editors and DJs, we now have a set of algorithmic gatekeepers. While this shift has lowered many cultural barriers to entry, since anyone can make their work public online, it has also resulted in a kind of tyranny of real-time data. Attention becomes the only metric by which culture is

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The dismissal of TikTok suggests another source of confusion: these new cultural forms are challenging our ideas about how culture “should” be created and distributed. The Internet was supposed to democratize everything, do away with gatekeepers and in some cases, craft. We were prepared for that: the masses overtaking the institutions.

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For sociologist Georg Simmel, culture is “the development of human nature beyond its natural state.”

Art has both freshness and innate ambiguity; it avoids contributing to overfitting via stereotype. A nudge in one direction and it can veer to kitsch, a nudge in another and it can become too experimental and unduly alienating. Art exists in an uncanny valley of familiarity—art is like a dream that some higher being, more aesthetically sensitive,... See more

David Lewis's now canonical idea is that conventions form in the process of trying to solve coordination problems.

we use a single seven-letter expression to describe at least four diverse, and often oppositional parts of life: (1) high culture , (2) communal culture , (3) popular culture , and (4) organizational norms .

A belief in an aesthetic spectrum may be all that keeps a civilization from disappearing up its own brainstem.

In a world of infinite experience, it is the aesthete who is safest, not the ascetic. Abstinence will not work. The only cure for too much fiction is good fiction.