“This is Bach, and it rocks/ It’s a rock block of Bach/ That he learned in the school/ Called the school of hard knocks” — Tenacious D
Has culture stagnated, at least in the United States? There are a number of prominent writers who argue that it has. For example, Adam Mastroianni blames cultural stagnation on risk aversion resulting from longer lives and lower background risk:
Ted Gioia, meanwhile, blames risk-averse entertainment companies for monopolizing content with IP and using dopamine-hacking algorithms to monopolize consumers’ attention:
This being the 2020s, both writers bring plenty of data to support their arguments. I won’t recap it here, but basically, they look at various domains of cultural production like books, movies, music, TV, and games, and they show that:
- Old media products (including sequels, remakes, and adaptations) have taken over from new products.
- Popularity is now more concentrated among a small number of products.
I find that evidence to be fairly convincing. The counterargument, delivered by folks like Katherine Dee and Spencer Kornhaber, is that creative effort has shifted to new formats like memes, short-form videos, and podcasts. I think that’s definitely true, but I can’t help thinking that this explanation is insufficient.
Regardless of what’s happening on TikTok, the fact that the cost of making movies has declined by so much should mean that there are more good new movies being made; instead, we’re just getting flooded with sequels and remakes. Something else is going on, and maybe Mastroianni and/or Gioia are on to something.
But anyway, there’s another thinker that I particularly like to read on cultural issues, and that’s David Marx. Marx, in my opinion, is a woefully underrated thinker on culture. His first book, “Ametora” — about the history of postwar Japanese men’s fashion — is an absolute classic.
His second book, “Status and Culture“, is a much heavier and more complex tome that wrestles with the question of why people make art; it is also worth a read, although I think there are lots of things it overlooks.
Back in the spring of 2023, I met David in a park in Tokyo. We walked around, and he asked me what book I thought he should write next. I asked him to tell us where internet culture — and by extension, all of culture — should go from here.
He replied that if he were going to write a book like that, he would first have to write a cultural history of the 21st century; if we’re going to know where we ought to go, we need to understand where we’ve been.
“Blank Space: A Cultural History of the Twenty-First Century” is that book. Most of “Blank Space” is just a narration of all the important things that happened in American pop culture since the year 2000.
You can read all about the New York hipster scene, the startling influence of Pharrell Williams and the Neptunes, the debauchery of Terry Richardson, the savvy self-marketing of Paris Hilton and Kim Kardashian, and so on.
You can learn a bit about “poptimism” and 4chan memes. You can relive the excitement of the early Obama years and the disillusionment that followed the rise of Trump. And so on. It’s the kind of retrospective that TIME magazine used to do, but higher-quality and book-length — a good book to have on your shelf.
In most authors’ hands, just as in old issues of TIME, this would come off as a jumbled laundry list — just one damn cultural factoid after another. But David Marx’s talent as a writer is such that he can make it feel like a coherent story. In his telling, 21st century culture has been all about the internet, and the overall effect of the internet has been a trend toward bland uniformity and crass commercialism.
In fact, Marx’s skill at narrative history sometimes gets in the way of his attempts at grand theorizing. He’s so good at distilling the look and sound of the 2000s decade — hip-hop inspired streetwear, Neptunes tracks, and so on — that he ends up bringing the decade to life in vivid color. This ends up making it very difficult to think of the 2000s as a forgettable and bland period.
Other times, Marx’s own personal tastes lead to gaps in the narrative. He doesn’t deal much with film as a medium, and ends up missing the fact that the 2000s were a golden decade for indie film. Culture is not entirely defined by music and fashion.
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Marx also doesn’t deal much with the explosion of Japanese cultural imports to the US in the 2000s and 2010s — which is ironic, since that was the topic of his first book.
Even if you’re only telling the story of American culture, foreign imports are important, since they can crowd out domestic products — kids can go read manga instead of comic books, watch anime instead of American TV, and so on. Globalization isn’t the same as stagnation; even if the center of production moves offshore, something is still being produced and consumed.
These are nitpicks, but the book’s narrative methodology has a more serious weakness. The long tail interferes with any attempt to tell a coherent story of culture. If everyone listens to a few mainstream bands, you can name those bands and identify the sound of a decade; if everyone is listening to a tiny indie band that only they and 100 other people follow on Soundcloud, the task of describing the totality of those bands is hopeless.
Sometimes I feel that as a card-carrying Gen X hipster, Marx over-indexes on the Nirvana Moment — that day in early 1992 when a flannel-wearing post-punk band from Seattle dethroned Michael Jackson on the charts.
That was a cool moment, to be sure, as is any time that an indie upstart forces its way into the mainstream. But we can’t expect that to be the norm. Of the early 2020s, and the inability of TikTok creators to get rich, Marx writes:
Grassroots cultural activity posed little threat to the celebrity aristocracy of movies, TV, and supermodels. Only the mainstream could satisfy the eternal need for a shared culture…At best the monoculture could undergo slight cosmetic changes: a rotating cast of “royal houses” in the pop aristocracy rather than a true revolution.
But it seems to me that this is how things usually go. The reason it was so impressive and noteworthy that Nirvana dethroned Michael Jackson in 1992 is that that kind of thing almost never happens. Usually, the mainstream stays mainstream, and indie stays indie, and you never get to see your indie heroes overturn the firmament.
You just sit there enjoying them because they’re yours — your little piece of the long tail. Hipsters don’t have to be revolutionaries — you can just sit there being smug about how only you and your five friends know about the world’s greatest band, instead of fuming about how they never make it onto the Billboard Hot 100.
What of the evidence mustered by Mastroianni and Gioia, that popularity is becoming concentrated among a smaller and smaller set of cultural aristocrats? This doesn’t disprove the idea of the long tail. It may be that the distribution of taste is becoming more leptokurtotic — more concentrated at the center, but more widely distributed at the fringes:
In the worlds of online video, graphic novels, TV, and fashion, this is almost certainly what is happening. The best fashion styles in the world are not being shown on the runway at Paris Fashion Week; they are created by some 21-year-old Japanese fashion student who woke up in an odd mood.
The best YouTube videos have only 10k or maybe 100k views, and the best TikTok videos probably have a lot less than that. And in my opinion, there are more awesome niche graphic novels being made now than ever before, even though each one has a relatively small audience. (Update: As a commenter pointed out, webcomics are another medium experiencing an explosion of creativity right now.)
As for television, in the 1990s everyone watched Seinfeld and Frasier and Friends, and a few people had heard of The State or Mad TV, but in the 2010s there was an explosion of mid-sized comedy shows that catered to more niche senses of humor — Party Down, Key & Peele, Kim’s Convenience, Letterkenny, Parks & Recreation, and so on.
But in some other domains, like books, traditional film, and music, this is almost certainly not what’s happening. Unlike with YouTube videos, 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. The same is true of musical artists, to a lesser degree; I discover a few awesome new ones here and there, but in general there were a lot more cool niche indie artists in earlier decades.[1] If more existed, I would find them.
I’m thus playing a bit of devil’s advocate here. The stagnation that Marx, Mastroianni and Gioia perceive is real, even if it’s not evenly distributed. The bland omnivorous taste that Marx complains about is a very real thing in the age of social media. Taylor Swift may be our modern Michael Jackson, but there’s no Nirvana to challenge her.
Meanwhile, Dee and Kornhaber’s argument that memes are the true art of the modern age rings a bit hollow — I’ve seen more memes than I can count, and while a few of them are clever, almost none are brilliant, and the overwhelming majority are just boring political shouting.
So yes, Marx is right, even though he’s not completely right. The utter dominance of boring unoriginal pablum in music, film and literature cries out for an explanation. Michael Jackson was the King of Pop, but his sound was still original.
Indiana Jones was a blockbuster hit, but it was wildly creative and incredibly fun. What movie can we say that about today? Slowly, one cultural medium after another is having the life squeezed out of it by some nefarious force, even if others are still going strong.
What is that force? Unlike David, I’m highly skeptical of the idea that culture moves autonomously — I don’t think that as a society, we just suddenly decide to do things differently. Marx’s story works great as a narrative, but less well as a causal theory — you can’t just call on people to be less “poptimist” and expect any real results.
Mastroianni’s hypothesis about risk aversion is somewhat plausible — who wants to be a starving artist when you can design characters for Reddit and make six figures? But the gradual upward creep of risk aversion can’t explain why some cultural fields have flowered with creativity in recent decades.
As for Gioia’s hypotheses about monopoly power and predatory algorithms, this might explain why the mainstream is more stagnant, but it can’t explain why there are so few great indie bands in the age of Soundcloud.
My own personal guess is that at least part of this force must be technological in nature. I wrote about this idea back in May. I won’t reiterate my whole argument — this post is supposed to be a review of David Marx’s book, so I don’t want to make it all about my own ideas.
But the basic thesis is that novel cultural production comes from novel technology — that when we invent the pickup mic, we predictably get several decades of electric guitar music, as people play around and discover what things are possible with electric guitars. But eventually, the space of cultural possibilities opened up by a new technology gets “mined out”, progress falters, and a canon gets canonized.
This idea explains why string orchestras are cover bands — the basic technology of violins and flutes and oboes was mostly perfected centuries ago, so classical music progresses only glacially. It can also potentially explain the unevenness of cultural creativity in recent decades.
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Obviously, short form video became great when camera phones became ubiquitous. Books, on the other hand, are only a little easier to write than before (thanks to word processors replacing typewriters), so it makes sense that creativity in literature might be flagging a bit.
This technological explanation is fairly pessimistic. It ties artistic output to technological progress, which we don’t really know how to accelerate. And worse, it implies that every burst of cultural creativity is inherently temporary.
But I doubt this is the only way that technology affects artistic output. In the chapter of “Blank Space” on how to restore cultural creativity, Marx calls for a more fragmented internet culture that allows subcultures to flourish before their innovations get harvested by the mainstream.
Writers like Steven Viney [2] and Yomi Adegoke have long complained that subcultural distinctiveness is impossible in the age of the internet. If artists can only make art while standing in the middle of the town square, you’re going to get more boring art.
I couldn’t agree more — and that’s why I think the ongoing fragmentation of the internet away from mass social media and into small private group chats is going to be healthy for cultural output.
Most of Marx’s other recommendations for restoring cultural innovation revolve around the idea of restoring taste, gatekeeping and criticism to pop culture. While I can imagine that this might help, the idea is only vaguely sketched out in the final pages.
“Blank Space” works well as a history, but doesn’t have much time for prescriptions. For that, we’ll have to wait for a future David Marx book — the one I requested back in the park in 2023.
I’m sure that when that one comes out, it will be great. In the meantime, “Blank Space” is a fun read, and you should buy it.
Notes1 Perhaps this is because I’ve gotten older and my tastes have ossified. But if so, why do I feel like this is such a golden age for TV and graphic novels and short-form video? Why would being an old fogey only ossify one’s taste in music and film, but not in other media?
2 Viney’s contribution here is dripping with irony, since he wrote his article for Vice, a magazine whose whole reason for existence was to find obscure subcultures and use the internet to expose those subcultures to the mainstream.
This article was first published on Noah Smith’s Noahpinion Substack and is republished with kind permission. Become a Noahopinion subscriber here.
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