Sublime
An inspiration engine for ideas
For my newsletter, I'm doing a three part, slightly technical manifesto about why we should view culture as an ecosystem, what gives people aesthetic pleasure, and why "poptimism" is inadequate as the basis for cultural criticism.
Part One is out:
https://t.co/xeIz1kqrFP
W. David Marxx.comThe hipster was an information-sorting algorithm: its job was to always have good taste . The hipster listened to bands you’d never heard of. The hipster drank beers brewed by Paraguayan Jesuits in the 1750s. The hipster thought Tarkovsky was for posers, and the only truly great late-Soviet filmmaker was Ali Khamraev. The hipster bought all his toi... See more
Sam Kriss • All the Nerds Are Dead - By Sam Kriss - Numb at the Lodge
This dialectic is muddy from the get-go, of course. It’s a version of the more familiar hipster trap: over time, the marginal labor of the bohemian experimentalist and taste-maker is swallowed up by the smug cartoon of the in-the-know consumer clone. But the near inevitability of this process also suggests that the first hipster was already part of... See more
Erik Davis • The Weird and the Banal
In the post-hipster era, you listened to what Spotify told you to listen to. If you read a book, it was because the precise pattern of blobby pastel-coloured shapes on its cover contained coded instructions to TikTok’s algorithm that sent it zooming to the top of your feed. Your tastes and preferences were decided for you by vast crystalline machin... See more
Sam Kriss • All the Nerds Are Dead - By Sam Kriss - Numb at the Lodge
Culture Is an Ecosystem: A Manifesto Towards a New Cultural Criticism
Culture: An Owner's Manualculture.ghost.io
In these conditions of ontological precarity, forgetting becomes an adaptive strategy.