Culture Is Stuck

1. I think that is common for every generation however. "Pop culture" changed, but is mostly the youth. The older generations didn't change that much. We remember the differences, but forget how much is the same. 2. Youth culture is different today than the late 00's, but it takes time and space to see those differences clearly. 3. Cultural plateau is the historical norm. While we can argue if it is good or bad, the wider 1k+ year historical view shows this is just a reversion to the mean. (granted before it was localized and now mostly globalized)

But this process also happened in the 1960s with the rise of TV. That's why if you ask someone to name a band, the most common answer is still The Beatles. The word 'futuristic' still refers to the aesthetic of The Jetsons. And if you talk about 'the 20s', you mean the 1920s, rather than the current decade.

We are memetic creatures, and most people simply enjoy the same things.

AI might help us find new things with mass appeal but niche audiences will continue to not matter so much in comparison, culturally and economically.

1. No, culture is _gone_. When you transform people into individual economic entities each responding to the market conditions in what approximates the most efficient manner possible and when your societies denigrate, minimize and underfund institutions meant for collective good, then there really isn't any material reason for people to form a "culture," if you understand culture to be a mutually supporting social fabric meant to improve some idea of public good. Margaret Thatcher literally loved to say "There is no society!" and this is basically the idea that the modern anglosphere has built the last 3-4 decades on.

2. There is a ton of cultural innovation out there. Untold richness. What is missing is the funnel which used to select out elements of cultural innovation and elevate them to "mass culture." In our current world, where you can search out exactly what you want, the power of "global tastemakers" like record company scouts and media critics and movie producers and so on is, in most respects, muted. The market forces these institutions and players to play to the absolute lowest common denominator to maximize market reach. In the past the music market, for instance, was pretty inefficient, and what was cool was at least strongly modulated "top down." But all that is done. If you want cultural novelty, its everywhere you could choose to look. But don't expect much of it to become truly popular. The economics of media has shifted away from that model.

It’s been ages since I saw a new paradigm in art that really caught my attention. It seems like elite artists have not had much to say for a few decades aside from navel gazing. Suddenly we have these machines that can produce high quality finished pieces out of our vague whims. With it has come an outpouring of the bizarre and humorous, a total democratization where ideas are no longer limited by execution.

Culture is only stuck if you look at the most globalized corporate universal customer version of it. Underneath that we have the revolution of the individual and the niche where anyone can access an audience.