Flattened by Mass Society

All This Cultural Flattening, Oppressive Corporatism, Paranoia and Malaise Should Be Familiar to the First-Wave Boomers Who Fought It

Some announcements: I recently wrote a review of the Mike White (director and showrunner of “The White Lotus”) 2000 film comedy Chuck and Buck for Default.Blog. Thanks to

Katherine Dee

for the opportunity and thanks to

Andrew Sullivan

for linking to it. I also recently got interviewed by

Ben Dietz

for his latest SIC installment. Here is the embed for that interview.

Hope you enjoy my outside contributions and hope you like my latest Cross Current post!

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More radically, Mills’s The Power Elite (1956) made the argument that history was in the hands of irresponsible corporate, political, and military circles. But even the less radical—usually ex-radical—critics agreed that authentic community and tradition were being flattened by a “mass society.”

— Todd Gitlin, The Sixties: Years of Hope, Days of Rage

More than two years ago, when I first compared our current situation to the fifties and the early sixties, I was primarily focused on how pop culture seemed stuck. I called it “zombie media.”

The Rise of Zombie Media

When I was reading SDS legend Todd Gitlin’s mesmerizing book The Sixties: Years of Hope, Days of Rage (by several country miles the best analysis and explanation for how the sixties became the sixties), the excerpt above struck me. The parallels between our current moment and the period from the fifties to the pre-Aquarian sixties are way more numerous than I had previously realized.

Right now there are so many great books about how our life and society have been flattened by capitalism, specifically by Big Tech.

Kyle Chayka

‘s Filterworld, Christine Rosen’s The Extinction of Experience, Richard Seymour’s The Twittering Machine and Jenny O’Dell’s How to Do Nothing come to mind. As Gitlin says in his book, David Reisman wrote The Lonely Crowd , about how corporate, industrial America was responsible for stifling conformity. Vance Packard wrote The Hidden Persuaders, about subliminal messaging in mass media advertising. Numerous other books were written, including The Crack in the Picture Window, Must You Conform? and The Insolent Chariots. Plainly, the fifties knew that the fifties sucked. The malaise and group think were apparent to everyone except those who only watched Ozzie and Harriet and I Love Lucy. A large group, to be sure, but it can’t be said that the sixties counterculture only precedent was the beatniks movement. Mad magazine might well have been to first-wave boomers what shitpost memes are to today’s youth.

There could only be so much criticism of course. The fifties were known for McCarthyism. To understand our current moment with Trump term 2 ¹ it is better to look back at 1950s America than 1930s Germany. Particularly since Roy Cohn was an ally to both Joseph McCarthy and Donald Trump. The same engine that drove the language policing wokeness of the 2010s has now fueled such Trump overreaches as Mahmoud Khalil’s detention. It’s almost like a new rebranding of woke: red woke. What’s more, much like there were Democrats too timid to fight McCarthyism, for fear of being criticized, censorship has now become a bipartisan cause. There is a particular focus on censorship of pro-Gaza speech. Whether this leads to a decrease in anti-Zionist protests remains to be seen.²

What probably won’t die down on TikTok is the amount of pro-China alt-left content creators. Like the space race between the USSR and the USA, there is an AI war (and, to a lesser known but more important extent, a quantum war) between America and China. The tariffs are just a battle in that current war. Though Elon Musk is not anti-China by any stretch (he does do business there) Musk and Zuckerberg benefit from Trump thinking they will help him America get a leg up in the tech race. Like the counterculture in the late sixties and early seventies, the current left-leaning dissidents are not rooting for America. ³ But the rebels back then were not actively rooting for Russia like the current crop is for China. That is new.

OK so our current moment is like the fifties. So what? Much about our current moment (from Trump to AI to quantum computing to Musk’s DOGE) feels completely unprecedented. Much of it is. But it is reassuring to know that not only have we been through a similar moment in history but we got through it. Let’s be clear about some differences: the economy was much better; civic life and public life were much stronger. Those are the positive differences. Times were worse still though, and in ways that do not parallel ours. Segregation was legal for much of the fifties. Trans people were brought to mental hospitals. Women were expected to be Suzy Homemakers.

The solutions to these last few problems, along with the general problems that do echo our current state, found their solutions in the sixties. The thrill of the sixties needs the context of the fifties to make sense. The industrial age capitalist conformity found responses not only on campuses and in rock concerts, art galleries and protests. Madison Avenue had its own revolution. McCarthyism waned in popularity as the hearings were televised; politicians censured Joseph McCarthy in kind. The space race fizzled out over time as both the USSR and the US had unruly populations that were fed up with the intergalactic pissing contest and wanted to afford toast and butter again.

It won’t be as easy as copying down the answers from the history book. I maintain that creatively we will see a similar explosion of greatness; one that hopefully makes this post look laughably bleak. On the subject of culture, let us remember that, though the next cultural supernova might be as great if not greater than that of the 1960s, it cannot — it will not — look the same. When

Aidan Walker

says brainrot memes are valid, I may not agree but I am also 49 years old. I can only hope that creativity and genius exist in forms many cannot recognize, as

Katherine Dee

said. Our current Red Woke Red Scare will not end easily. Israel is a huge pillar of American empire. It will take a lot of narrative realignment for any push-back on the current strain of McCarthyism. As it stands though, no other protest movement will receive as much scrutiny and retribution from the Trump regime as the Gaza movement, dramatically raising its street cred and elevating it to become the front line against T2.⁴ The Cold War tech race, like the space race of the ‘50s, seems to be the source of many doomsday scenarios in the press. But as of this writing there are two things that might seriously halt the great human displacement: OpenAI is reportedly trying to make a social platform so it can harvest user data for free create a community of people who love making AI images and videos; AI may become prohibitively expensive over the next few years, dramatically reducing it user base, even on a corporate level.

One more parallel between the fifties and now; let’s quote Gitlin again:

Movie attendance shrank, largely because of competition from television, but campuses and museums spawned film (not just movie) societies, and by the late Fifties, amid the overall decline, Americans were for the first time getting to see a good number of foreign films: the British comedies starring Alec Guinness and Peter Sellers; Brigitte Bardot; then, in the cosmopolitan centers and university towns, Bergman, Fellini, the French New Wave, even the Russians.

The similarities here are too obvious to write about. Since this is being published on a Sunday morning though and I can only imagine that recent events have increased the hangovers among my readership, I’ll indulge you: no one in the fifties would have bet on a New Hollywood emerging. Some may laugh when I bet that another one might resurface. Perhaps it will be without the studio system. Thanks to Netflix, and its global viewership (in addition to its avoidance of playing ball with the WGA, etc) there have been a greater number of popular foreign films, TV shows and documentaries. As I stated elsewhere, it is good that our culture is getting less insular, especially during MAGA’s apparent hegemony.

I am hopeful that I am wrong and that

Ross Barkan

Ted Gioia

John Pistelli

Sam Jennings

and

Jon Baskin

are right about a return to Romanticism. But there is a major stumbling block to that. I plan on writing about that in my next Substack piece. If you want an idea of what it is about, click here for the part of the video interview above where I talk about it and watch the manic episode exploration unfold. I hope I can turn that into something coherent soon.

1. T2?

2. I am in 12 step recovery. My betting days are behind me.

3. As if my point needed proof, there is a viral video of Katy Perry on Blue Origin with Gil Scott Heron’s “Whitey on the Moon” as the soundtrack

4. Yeah, T2. I like it. It works.