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Culture War Roundup for the week of January 22, 2024

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The internet has diminished the cultural isolation art and culture needs to gestate and develop organically leaving us with a choice between big budget, mass market, safe investment, market-led retreads or retro nostalgia for "authenticity". The shortfall is filled up with short-lived memes that people can latch onto and share but don't engender any feelings of lasting personal investment ("I was a let's go brandoner before it was cool and I'll remain one when the casuals have moved on").

There's a whole chapter in David W Marx's Status And Culture that covers this in some depth if you want to read something longer than Motte comments.

There's also the matter of consumer technology maturing and effectively stagnating. When technology phases into affordablity there's a lot of low-hanging fruit available, plus the promise of higher-hanging fruit as the tech improves, plus a residual barrier of entry to casual participants. Now everybody has a combined office/studio/library/theatre in their pocket whether they need it or not and its workings are locked behind bootloaders and signed certificates on one hand and hot-glued security screws and millimetre scale surface mounted components on the other. You either have to be a team of specialists or a border-line autist savant to meaningfully explore beyond the walls of the heavily populated omni-garden.