This is fascinating, but does the explanation need to be so ephemeral? My wife has worked in arts funding for years, and I think there’s a more mechanical explanation for this. Over the last decade, creator funding has split in two. Platforms like TikTok and YouTube run on a distributed model where value comes from volume and engagement. The old funding institutions (studios, record labels, arts councils) now chase only the biggest wins. (Their feedback also isn't currently scaleable, so bets have to be limited.)
In that older model, quality mattered because each project had to succeed on its own. In the platform model, quality barely matters because scale replaces curation and feedback is automatic. The platforms don't care if an individual Tik Tok is good or widely viewed. They only care about the aggregate. Funding is distributed based on contribution to the aggregate, not the quality of the work.
A huge share of creative effort now lives in an economy where quality has no financial reward, and the places that still reward it only do so for the largest possible bets.
Complaining about how sequels are swamping new stories is kind of another way of limiting what stories can be told. It implies that the only good story a character or setting can possibly have is the first one that ever happens to them. Sometimes characters and settings have far more than one good story in them. We shouldn't treat their potential as inherently exhausted by their first outing. Some characters, like Sherlock Holmes and Superman, are so protean that great stories can still be told about them decades after their creation. Some, like Thor and Hercules, are still capable of generating great works of art centuries or millenia after the first one was told.
Speaking of Thor and Hercules, I wonder if the culture of today is merely shifting back to the default mode of culture throughout history. The Ancient Greeks wrote tons of plays that riffed on well-known myths and historical events, rather than being completely original. Oral traditions across the world seem similar, building on existing tales. To what extent is today's "stagnation" merely regression to the mean?
But then you get a really interesting original take on one of those out-of-copyright casts of characters, like the series Kaos... and it gets cancelled. (I'm bitter about that one. It was so good!)
As someone married to an OG Star Trek fan who went to some of the very first conventions no one is complaining that there are too many sequels as such in that universe. (Obligatory mention that "Lower Decks" won the first Hugo for that franchise this century last year for its last episode which even worked as serious Star Trek) People are complaining that the sequels do not understand what made 20th century Star Trek great. If you have created a compelling spiritual and moral universe to hold the characters you can tell many, many new stories in that universe. The problem is getting lazy and telling the same story over and over or betraying the nature of that particular universe.
The trouble with Marvel and DC is that the first stories about the character may live but Marvel and DC have to come up with an infinite number of stories about that character.
On last "shifting back to the default mode of culture" - I just had before reading this the similar thought that there is quite a probable distortion around culture-critics expectations by taking say mid-60s-to-early-80s (or end 80s, whatever [feels weird as I recall as a kid constantly hearing how bland and commercial 80s were...]) as a permanent benchmark rather than a period where a certain set of technology and social change produced something like a sparkling water bottle that's been shaking spraying out when it's opened....
The one thing that becomes more apparent with every passing year is how "Raiders of the Lost Ark", which I thoroughly enjoyed as an elementary school kid in the early 90s with little formal understanding of film as a medium, is a timeless cinematic masterpiece.
Speak for yourself; I'm constantly finding super obscure, great music from no-name artists. This very well could be a difference in the genres we listen to, but stagnation in this specific place isn't what I'm seeing.
For reference, my scene of choice is the SoundCloud EDM scene.
Note that the synthesizer, drum machine, and mixer were the last instruments to be invented, so that tracks -- I don't think we've quite mined them out yet. I'm not much of an EDM guy myself, but my sense is that there was a peak of innovation in the late 00s and early 10s.
I actually have seen waves of innovations happening because of specific VST plugins coming out. For instance, the Color Bass subgenre is basically a bunch of producers going "what if we used Pitchmap on dubstep growls?" For a more recognizable example see Autotune.
I have the exact same feeling. Spotify's smart shuffle has helped me find many awesome (but small) bands, and I find myself going to small venues to listen to obscure bands way more often. The same with film and video games, where I feel that certain genres are just bustling with creativity. But you do have to go out of your way to find them, so if you're just chilling in the mainstream and waiting for a new Nirvana to dethrone Taylor Swift, that day may never come.
> I haven’t discovered a few cool indie films in the 2020s that no one else appreciates — I have discovered zero. The same goes for science fiction books (my genre of choice). That’s a strong indicator that there really just aren’t many out there; word of mouth is powerful, and lots of people share my general tastes, and word gets around.
Whoa whoa whoa. I’d claim both the core and the tail of sci fi are in an awesome place. As far as bestsellers go, there’s Ted Chiang, Yoon Ha Lee, Ada Palmer, Arkady Martine… I also see some great short stories on sci fi mag websites, eg from Isabel J. Kim.
And I think the tail has just spread out and become less legible. There’s some great work on Archive of Our Own, both fanfiction and original, but people wouldn’t know about it outside of small subcommunities (eg “rationalist fiction”).
For my personal tastes: Nostalgebraist, Bavitz, and Alexander Wales are out here doing awesome stuff, and I have to admit Yudkowsky cooked as well. There’s also a lot of energy in new internet-inflected media: webcomics, forum quests, indie video games. I find it impossible to look at Homestuck and think the sci fi tail is stagnating in the 21st century — it’s just migrating and evolving.
Unlike David Marx, I hate to be a critic. But I thought Palmer and Martine's series were not very good, and I haven't enjoyed many of the Hugo winners in recent decades. I love Lee and Chiang, but it's rarer to find those sort of standouts now IMO (and both did their best work one or two decades ago).
About webcomics I entirely agree, and I think that's because the technology is new!
I’m a big fan of Palmer and Martine - no accounting for taste :)
I did notice while writing that a lot of the stuff I consider the best is about a decade old. I’m not sure how much signal there is in that observation…I also haven’t been reading as much.
Tiny-budget indie games definitely feel like an area where tech is allowing for new & niche offerings. Eg I happen to like the fairly popular Fire Emblem series, and there’s a very active community making fan games for the series. That used to require romhacking but now there’s a nice open-source engine that’s much easier to use, and lots of open source sprite assets and such.
I imagine AI and vibe coding are going to make it much easier to make creative new game formats, too.
The barrier isn’t *writing* a book, it’s publishing a physical one and getting paid for it. megaword webfics like Worm or Worth the Candle (both excellent) are effectively a new form of indie-published book, financed by Patreon.
Also… I just realized Homestuck combines all four of these new media forms (webcomic, indie game, forum quest, million-word webfic). Truly an emblem of our times.
On science fiction: that's my sense as well, that creativity seems to have stalled. There's a lot of political sf which wins progressive attention and awards, but few titles which really stand out.
I'd point to horror as a genre counterexample. There are a few names who are gigantic sellers - King, Koontz, Rice - but a very lively fringe of creative work happening online and through small publishers.
So much of the political sf is unreadable because it's constantly hitting you over the head with the politics and that gets tiresome even if you agree with the political message. I can't help but feel a bit offended that the authors don't seem to trust me with a less obvious message.
I've been seeing that hit over the head big. The novel _Babel_, for example, at times reads like a social justice primer, with notes telling us which things are bad or signs of privilege.
_Half Built Garden_ obsessed so much over pronouns that finally one character made fun of it.
Whatever else has happened in the last decade or so, when it comes to TV, Gen X should be in Seventh Heaven. I know I am.
Most films produced now are way better than most films produced in the 70s, 80s or 90's. And complaining about the current slew of remakes and franchises? Seriously? There were 6, increasingly bad, Police Academy movies in the 80's. Bing Crosby and Bob Hope made 7 road movies. Even Shakespeare only did remakes.
If you're over 25, the latest music isn't for you. I liked 3 songs by Nirvana (one of them written by David Bowie and another by Leadbelly). I thought they palled by comparison with late 70's early 80's acts I loved when I was a teenager. I was probably wrong but remain firmly convinced of this.
Much of what people like Marx think of as risk aversion is just progress. If it took Bach losing 10 of his 20 children in infancy to produce a body of work that was the foundation stone of the German Classical tradition in music, he would probably have considered it a raw deal.
There are millions of new songs on Spotify every year. There is almost certainly something for you. ChatGPT is actually better at helping with music discovery than Spotify in my experience.
There's too many on Spotify. I need a filter, which I'm slightly ashamed to say, is now TV show themes and incidental music. I've discovered Benjamin Clementine, Wig Wam, Foxy Shazam, Portugal, the Man, The Tragically Hip, Brian Deady, Amy Stroup, Timber Timbre, Joy Crookes, Billie Eilish, Queens of the Stone Age, The Handsome Family, Zella Day and lots of others, this way. It works but it has low cred :-). Unlike the girl in The Tragically Hip's song, I'm behind by a century.
I wonder to what extent the culture-critic complaint on stagnation (which as myself 'Gen X' I seem to recall in my own youth) is a combination of (a) benchmarking against an unusual set of decades - 60s-70s/80s that is not really valid benchmarking, (b) memory bias (as you highlight - is it really supported by data that the ratios of sequal/remakes is different? maybe but I don't know real full data analytical is there), (c) elite culture production and elite culture preferences haveing run too far ahead of mass culture / popular culture evolution and there is a necessary catch-up and digestion.
Of course as a cultural heathen largely indifferent to all this (and not particularly deluding myself that my own very niche and odd preferences in music, etc. are really anything more than my own eccentricity)...
Yes, maybe so. On (a), you're absolutely right, the cultural acceleration of the 60s-80's was unique and unlikely to be matched. Today, going back 45 years in popular culture would get you to post-punk and the New Wave in music, Monty Python, Soap, Blade Runner and Alien - all of which still feel (or actually are) quite contemporary. But in 1980, going back another 40 years would take you to a world of crooners, Westerns and Dick Tracey where popular culture's only cutting edge was to be found in the marginalised or segregated black population in the US and the occasional Francophone singer with a taste for left-wing politics and the avant-garde - almost none of which felt relevant to the 1980's.
Halfway through “Blank Space” and Noah’s review is spot on. It’s very fun to recall and think about the pop-culture cornucopia. Not much general principle or “call to action,” but who cares? Enjoy the trip down recent-memory lane.
It would be interesting to think about the affect of recording technology on the filter of time. I posit that there has always been schlock art, but most of it is washed away by the filter of time. We are left with the outstanding pieces. Digital technology enables the preservation of all the schlock art. Curating is hard work. Few are willing to delete their own work. What we have lost is the filter of time.
I still feel as if the problem is primarily related to curation. Social media balkanization will help things develop, but that renders breaking out more difficult.
Perhaps its not the case with more labor intensive works like movies, but there's an excess of novels, comics, and with AI music. Nobody reads or listens to any of this. It's easier than ever to produce things and so many are, but consequentially each individual work has less value. This is, broadly, independent of quality. There are many historical examples of notable media that reached success years post release.
Our curators have lost prestige. This is probably the biggest difference between the 2010s and now - intersectionality as a value or even prerequisite has led to a same-ness in presented work. There are only so many immigrant or immigrant-allegory stories I can read after I put down my wolfman romance. But this is just the stuff that is promoted. Is the next DFW on AO3? I mean probably not, but they surely exist and are struggling to break out.
I’ve read that your musical taste solidifies around age 13-15. As a GenX-er myself, I was 15 in 1983 which was such an incredible year in music and movies that my GenZ daughter is now into stuff from that era in a big way. And sequels of movies that era are still being made today (Alien, Bladerunner, etc) But the cultural shifts started a decade earlier. Something happened in 1970 - birthrates dropped below replacement in most Western countries. The rise of gay culture may be a factor and the AIDS epidemic had enduring impact outside of gay culture making people much more sexually conservative - although nowhere near as much as kids today. Childless people tend to be more infantilized for longer. Since childhood never ends, people are in a constant state of nostalgia for a bygone time. Wokeism is a product of millennials and is a strange form of retro-conservatism and infantilism (micro aggressions, anxiety culture etc.)
This line strikes me: "a rotating cast of 'royal houses' in the pop aristocracy rather than a true revolution." Americans do have a love for aristos, which lies alongside our admiration for criminals, outlaws, and underdogs. In politics, we have a tendency to accept or celebrate families: the Bushes, Kennedys, Clintons, Trumps, Daleys. In pop culture we adore the elites - cf Downton Abbey fandom. The trick is for it to be the right elite, one we accept because of the nature of their work (sports or music stars) or due to their story or politics.
Lisa Jardine's book 'Worldly Goods' had a similar theory as your changing technology, offering "a radical interpretation of the Renaissance, arguing that the creation of culture during that time was inextricably tied to the creation of wealth -- that the expansion of commerce spurred the expansion of thought." One example I can recall included the increasing variety of dyes and other materials along key trade routes that inspired upcoming artists.
While social media may eventually create lots of tiny village squares for indie buskers, I feel like currently it's just harmonizing taste just like it's harmonizing political ideology. There is a certain human element that likes conformity...safety in numbers, perhaps? So we all end up following the same big artists, watching the same TV shows, etc., so we can talk about them with our friends and co-workers.
There are, I think, more options out there than before (thanks to streaming content), but it's paradoxically become harder to spend the time to find the gems within the bland, featureless rock. AI slop may even make this worse in the short term. It's become much harder to find real content on social media rather than bots or bot-like mindless drivel, and scrolling through Netflix's many but meager offerings feels not unlike flicking through a 100+ channel cable bundle. The fact that our attention spans have plummeted probably doesn't help either.
But hopefully, yes, one day we will settle around our own little subreddit campfires with fellow travelers, confident in our own superior taste.
More in general my everyday/week/year cultural consumption is dictated by the same safe tastemakers that I relied on when I was 30 and I am not willing to plough through all the crap to find what might really be speaking to young people now. I am reminded of William Deresiewicz's post that so much criticism is not only written for the dinner party, it could be written by it. For something new to come in it needs a subculture independent of the dinner party to nurture it and then eventually something from that subculture will spark the imaginations of the broader society.
This is fascinating, but does the explanation need to be so ephemeral? My wife has worked in arts funding for years, and I think there’s a more mechanical explanation for this. Over the last decade, creator funding has split in two. Platforms like TikTok and YouTube run on a distributed model where value comes from volume and engagement. The old funding institutions (studios, record labels, arts councils) now chase only the biggest wins. (Their feedback also isn't currently scaleable, so bets have to be limited.)
In that older model, quality mattered because each project had to succeed on its own. In the platform model, quality barely matters because scale replaces curation and feedback is automatic. The platforms don't care if an individual Tik Tok is good or widely viewed. They only care about the aggregate. Funding is distributed based on contribution to the aggregate, not the quality of the work.
A huge share of creative effort now lives in an economy where quality has no financial reward, and the places that still reward it only do so for the largest possible bets.
Sucks!
This is a great point
Complaining about how sequels are swamping new stories is kind of another way of limiting what stories can be told. It implies that the only good story a character or setting can possibly have is the first one that ever happens to them. Sometimes characters and settings have far more than one good story in them. We shouldn't treat their potential as inherently exhausted by their first outing. Some characters, like Sherlock Holmes and Superman, are so protean that great stories can still be told about them decades after their creation. Some, like Thor and Hercules, are still capable of generating great works of art centuries or millenia after the first one was told.
Speaking of Thor and Hercules, I wonder if the culture of today is merely shifting back to the default mode of culture throughout history. The Ancient Greeks wrote tons of plays that riffed on well-known myths and historical events, rather than being completely original. Oral traditions across the world seem similar, building on existing tales. To what extent is today's "stagnation" merely regression to the mean?
While many sequels and remakes are good, they are undeniably inherently less NEW than new IPs.
But then you get a really interesting original take on one of those out-of-copyright casts of characters, like the series Kaos... and it gets cancelled. (I'm bitter about that one. It was so good!)
I love that show. It’s been out of copy right for maybe a thousand years :)
As someone married to an OG Star Trek fan who went to some of the very first conventions no one is complaining that there are too many sequels as such in that universe. (Obligatory mention that "Lower Decks" won the first Hugo for that franchise this century last year for its last episode which even worked as serious Star Trek) People are complaining that the sequels do not understand what made 20th century Star Trek great. If you have created a compelling spiritual and moral universe to hold the characters you can tell many, many new stories in that universe. The problem is getting lazy and telling the same story over and over or betraying the nature of that particular universe.
The trouble with Marvel and DC is that the first stories about the character may live but Marvel and DC have to come up with an infinite number of stories about that character.
On last "shifting back to the default mode of culture" - I just had before reading this the similar thought that there is quite a probable distortion around culture-critics expectations by taking say mid-60s-to-early-80s (or end 80s, whatever [feels weird as I recall as a kid constantly hearing how bland and commercial 80s were...]) as a permanent benchmark rather than a period where a certain set of technology and social change produced something like a sparkling water bottle that's been shaking spraying out when it's opened....
Not usual, not sustained....
The one thing that becomes more apparent with every passing year is how "Raiders of the Lost Ark", which I thoroughly enjoyed as an elementary school kid in the early 90s with little formal understanding of film as a medium, is a timeless cinematic masterpiece.
Speak for yourself; I'm constantly finding super obscure, great music from no-name artists. This very well could be a difference in the genres we listen to, but stagnation in this specific place isn't what I'm seeing.
For reference, my scene of choice is the SoundCloud EDM scene.
Note that the synthesizer, drum machine, and mixer were the last instruments to be invented, so that tracks -- I don't think we've quite mined them out yet. I'm not much of an EDM guy myself, but my sense is that there was a peak of innovation in the late 00s and early 10s.
I actually have seen waves of innovations happening because of specific VST plugins coming out. For instance, the Color Bass subgenre is basically a bunch of producers going "what if we used Pitchmap on dubstep growls?" For a more recognizable example see Autotune.
I have the exact same feeling. Spotify's smart shuffle has helped me find many awesome (but small) bands, and I find myself going to small venues to listen to obscure bands way more often. The same with film and video games, where I feel that certain genres are just bustling with creativity. But you do have to go out of your way to find them, so if you're just chilling in the mainstream and waiting for a new Nirvana to dethrone Taylor Swift, that day may never come.
> I haven’t discovered a few cool indie films in the 2020s that no one else appreciates — I have discovered zero. The same goes for science fiction books (my genre of choice). That’s a strong indicator that there really just aren’t many out there; word of mouth is powerful, and lots of people share my general tastes, and word gets around.
Whoa whoa whoa. I’d claim both the core and the tail of sci fi are in an awesome place. As far as bestsellers go, there’s Ted Chiang, Yoon Ha Lee, Ada Palmer, Arkady Martine… I also see some great short stories on sci fi mag websites, eg from Isabel J. Kim.
And I think the tail has just spread out and become less legible. There’s some great work on Archive of Our Own, both fanfiction and original, but people wouldn’t know about it outside of small subcommunities (eg “rationalist fiction”).
For my personal tastes: Nostalgebraist, Bavitz, and Alexander Wales are out here doing awesome stuff, and I have to admit Yudkowsky cooked as well. There’s also a lot of energy in new internet-inflected media: webcomics, forum quests, indie video games. I find it impossible to look at Homestuck and think the sci fi tail is stagnating in the 21st century — it’s just migrating and evolving.
Unlike David Marx, I hate to be a critic. But I thought Palmer and Martine's series were not very good, and I haven't enjoyed many of the Hugo winners in recent decades. I love Lee and Chiang, but it's rarer to find those sort of standouts now IMO (and both did their best work one or two decades ago).
About webcomics I entirely agree, and I think that's because the technology is new!
I’m a big fan of Palmer and Martine - no accounting for taste :)
I did notice while writing that a lot of the stuff I consider the best is about a decade old. I’m not sure how much signal there is in that observation…I also haven’t been reading as much.
Tiny-budget indie games definitely feel like an area where tech is allowing for new & niche offerings. Eg I happen to like the fairly popular Fire Emblem series, and there’s a very active community making fan games for the series. That used to require romhacking but now there’s a nice open-source engine that’s much easier to use, and lots of open source sprite assets and such.
I imagine AI and vibe coding are going to make it much easier to make creative new game formats, too.
The barrier isn’t *writing* a book, it’s publishing a physical one and getting paid for it. megaword webfics like Worm or Worth the Candle (both excellent) are effectively a new form of indie-published book, financed by Patreon.
Also… I just realized Homestuck combines all four of these new media forms (webcomic, indie game, forum quest, million-word webfic). Truly an emblem of our times.
Check out dungeon crawler carl and diaries of a murderbot, both in Barnes and noble and great.
On science fiction: that's my sense as well, that creativity seems to have stalled. There's a lot of political sf which wins progressive attention and awards, but few titles which really stand out.
I'd point to horror as a genre counterexample. There are a few names who are gigantic sellers - King, Koontz, Rice - but a very lively fringe of creative work happening online and through small publishers.
So much of the political sf is unreadable because it's constantly hitting you over the head with the politics and that gets tiresome even if you agree with the political message. I can't help but feel a bit offended that the authors don't seem to trust me with a less obvious message.
I've been seeing that hit over the head big. The novel _Babel_, for example, at times reads like a social justice primer, with notes telling us which things are bad or signs of privilege.
_Half Built Garden_ obsessed so much over pronouns that finally one character made fun of it.
Whatever else has happened in the last decade or so, when it comes to TV, Gen X should be in Seventh Heaven. I know I am.
Most films produced now are way better than most films produced in the 70s, 80s or 90's. And complaining about the current slew of remakes and franchises? Seriously? There were 6, increasingly bad, Police Academy movies in the 80's. Bing Crosby and Bob Hope made 7 road movies. Even Shakespeare only did remakes.
If you're over 25, the latest music isn't for you. I liked 3 songs by Nirvana (one of them written by David Bowie and another by Leadbelly). I thought they palled by comparison with late 70's early 80's acts I loved when I was a teenager. I was probably wrong but remain firmly convinced of this.
Much of what people like Marx think of as risk aversion is just progress. If it took Bach losing 10 of his 20 children in infancy to produce a body of work that was the foundation stone of the German Classical tradition in music, he would probably have considered it a raw deal.
There are millions of new songs on Spotify every year. There is almost certainly something for you. ChatGPT is actually better at helping with music discovery than Spotify in my experience.
There's too many on Spotify. I need a filter, which I'm slightly ashamed to say, is now TV show themes and incidental music. I've discovered Benjamin Clementine, Wig Wam, Foxy Shazam, Portugal, the Man, The Tragically Hip, Brian Deady, Amy Stroup, Timber Timbre, Joy Crookes, Billie Eilish, Queens of the Stone Age, The Handsome Family, Zella Day and lots of others, this way. It works but it has low cred :-). Unlike the girl in The Tragically Hip's song, I'm behind by a century.
I wonder to what extent the culture-critic complaint on stagnation (which as myself 'Gen X' I seem to recall in my own youth) is a combination of (a) benchmarking against an unusual set of decades - 60s-70s/80s that is not really valid benchmarking, (b) memory bias (as you highlight - is it really supported by data that the ratios of sequal/remakes is different? maybe but I don't know real full data analytical is there), (c) elite culture production and elite culture preferences haveing run too far ahead of mass culture / popular culture evolution and there is a necessary catch-up and digestion.
Of course as a cultural heathen largely indifferent to all this (and not particularly deluding myself that my own very niche and odd preferences in music, etc. are really anything more than my own eccentricity)...
Yes, maybe so. On (a), you're absolutely right, the cultural acceleration of the 60s-80's was unique and unlikely to be matched. Today, going back 45 years in popular culture would get you to post-punk and the New Wave in music, Monty Python, Soap, Blade Runner and Alien - all of which still feel (or actually are) quite contemporary. But in 1980, going back another 40 years would take you to a world of crooners, Westerns and Dick Tracey where popular culture's only cutting edge was to be found in the marginalised or segregated black population in the US and the occasional Francophone singer with a taste for left-wing politics and the avant-garde - almost none of which felt relevant to the 1980's.
Halfway through “Blank Space” and Noah’s review is spot on. It’s very fun to recall and think about the pop-culture cornucopia. Not much general principle or “call to action,” but who cares? Enjoy the trip down recent-memory lane.
It would be interesting to think about the affect of recording technology on the filter of time. I posit that there has always been schlock art, but most of it is washed away by the filter of time. We are left with the outstanding pieces. Digital technology enables the preservation of all the schlock art. Curating is hard work. Few are willing to delete their own work. What we have lost is the filter of time.
I still feel as if the problem is primarily related to curation. Social media balkanization will help things develop, but that renders breaking out more difficult.
Perhaps its not the case with more labor intensive works like movies, but there's an excess of novels, comics, and with AI music. Nobody reads or listens to any of this. It's easier than ever to produce things and so many are, but consequentially each individual work has less value. This is, broadly, independent of quality. There are many historical examples of notable media that reached success years post release.
Our curators have lost prestige. This is probably the biggest difference between the 2010s and now - intersectionality as a value or even prerequisite has led to a same-ness in presented work. There are only so many immigrant or immigrant-allegory stories I can read after I put down my wolfman romance. But this is just the stuff that is promoted. Is the next DFW on AO3? I mean probably not, but they surely exist and are struggling to break out.
I’ve read that your musical taste solidifies around age 13-15. As a GenX-er myself, I was 15 in 1983 which was such an incredible year in music and movies that my GenZ daughter is now into stuff from that era in a big way. And sequels of movies that era are still being made today (Alien, Bladerunner, etc) But the cultural shifts started a decade earlier. Something happened in 1970 - birthrates dropped below replacement in most Western countries. The rise of gay culture may be a factor and the AIDS epidemic had enduring impact outside of gay culture making people much more sexually conservative - although nowhere near as much as kids today. Childless people tend to be more infantilized for longer. Since childhood never ends, people are in a constant state of nostalgia for a bygone time. Wokeism is a product of millennials and is a strange form of retro-conservatism and infantilism (micro aggressions, anxiety culture etc.)
This line strikes me: "a rotating cast of 'royal houses' in the pop aristocracy rather than a true revolution." Americans do have a love for aristos, which lies alongside our admiration for criminals, outlaws, and underdogs. In politics, we have a tendency to accept or celebrate families: the Bushes, Kennedys, Clintons, Trumps, Daleys. In pop culture we adore the elites - cf Downton Abbey fandom. The trick is for it to be the right elite, one we accept because of the nature of their work (sports or music stars) or due to their story or politics.
Lisa Jardine's book 'Worldly Goods' had a similar theory as your changing technology, offering "a radical interpretation of the Renaissance, arguing that the creation of culture during that time was inextricably tied to the creation of wealth -- that the expansion of commerce spurred the expansion of thought." One example I can recall included the increasing variety of dyes and other materials along key trade routes that inspired upcoming artists.
Absolutely, exploration created a new world unlike anything Europeans had ever seen and thought had to try to adjust to it
While social media may eventually create lots of tiny village squares for indie buskers, I feel like currently it's just harmonizing taste just like it's harmonizing political ideology. There is a certain human element that likes conformity...safety in numbers, perhaps? So we all end up following the same big artists, watching the same TV shows, etc., so we can talk about them with our friends and co-workers.
There are, I think, more options out there than before (thanks to streaming content), but it's paradoxically become harder to spend the time to find the gems within the bland, featureless rock. AI slop may even make this worse in the short term. It's become much harder to find real content on social media rather than bots or bot-like mindless drivel, and scrolling through Netflix's many but meager offerings feels not unlike flicking through a 100+ channel cable bundle. The fact that our attention spans have plummeted probably doesn't help either.
But hopefully, yes, one day we will settle around our own little subreddit campfires with fellow travelers, confident in our own superior taste.
Why would one focus on pop culture, which seems to me more enshittified culture than culture itself.
More in general my everyday/week/year cultural consumption is dictated by the same safe tastemakers that I relied on when I was 30 and I am not willing to plough through all the crap to find what might really be speaking to young people now. I am reminded of William Deresiewicz's post that so much criticism is not only written for the dinner party, it could be written by it. For something new to come in it needs a subculture independent of the dinner party to nurture it and then eventually something from that subculture will spark the imaginations of the broader society.