There Has Been a Drought of Cultural Greatness For Most of the 21st Century So Far

Human Mediocrity Will Pave the Way For AI Supremacy

Before we get started, let’s sniff out a potential straw man: please do not list examples of great films, books, etc. A drought does not mean a lack of water, it means there is not enough water for sustainable growth. I am aware of movies like The Master and Arrival as well as books like Rejection, and, yes, also, albums like Brat. There have not been enough of these great works to sustain their respective industries. Or rather the respective industries that miraculously eked these out have not nurtured more of these, opting to push out either infantile smash hits or paint-by-numbers culture war bait — often both. I doubt this will stop some of you from listing examples of great works from 2008 on, so fine. Engagement is engagement.

On January 27th,

Ross Barkan

Sam Kahn

and

Lou Bahet

launched a new culture review magazine called The Metropolitan Review. When it was announced on the main Substack feed, I reposted it with the message: “A new age of greatness is upon us.” Did I actually believe that? OK I may have oversold it. I do have faith in the new endeavor and I hope they succeed, and not just because they will publish one of my reviews in the coming weeks. But the message in the post was meant to be more of a spell; a bit of hyperstition. Manifesting, but for bald agoraphobes instead of apple-cheeked vloggers.

So will there be a new age of greatness? I hope it happens. It must happen.

From Already Happened:

There’s a potentially chilling long-term consequence of AGI: the creation of a permanently static society where existing power structures become immutable. Labour-replacing AI fundamentally changes the dynamics that have historically allowed human ambition to drive societal change. When AI can perfectly replicate any human talent and capital can trivially buy AI capabilities, the traditional paths for ambitious individuals to rise up and transform society disappear. Money becomes vastly more effective at achieving results, while human agency and talent become increasingly irrelevant. The result could be a neo-feudal system where pre-AGI wealth distributions become permanent, social mobility ends, and even democratic institutions lose their incentive to care about human welfare since human labour no longer matters.

Considering the current Cold War AI race with China, along with President Trump’s entourage of militant accelerationists, what seemed like a hypothetical at the time that piece was written seems all but assured now.

Pointless to bite our nails regarding AI, no? This essay not only gave me a chilling vision of a future where everyone is without purpose and trepanning fentanyl into each other’s skulls. As I feared for all the culture we might lose in the AIpocalypse, I looked at the past two decades and trembled. Reality TV, social media, pussy rap — it was as if all the trash culture of this century was a psyop to prepare us for the Grand Slopera we are about to enter. A common concern among AI doomers is how much agency humans currently have or will have in the future. Could we have been soulless automata ourselves this whole time? When was the last truly great cultural event? What happened to ambition?

This isn’t just a requiem for high art. Mass culture has been a rough slog. Movies from the start of the century were under the thumb of Marvel, Harry Potter and Tolkien. The idea of a packed theater of grown-ups watching a film about adults not frantically searching for stones or rings seems as quaint as Victorian adults gathering to watch a lecture. In the ‘90s, a director like Quentin Tarantino or Spike Lee was famous enough that they appeared on talk shows and had comedians impersonate them.

This cultural stagnation has not gone unremarked. A while back on Wisdom of Crowds, Katherine Dee and Matthew Gasda debated whether culture was stuck.

Matthew Gasda

said it most certainly was.

Katherine Dee

argued that it wasn’t, but it’s all on the Internet, in forms we can’t recognize.

As you all know, I love

Katherine Dee

and cite her frequently, but I respectfully disagree. Using the forms Dee has listed, I think it is only fair to see how they hold up to scrutiny. The cultural forms are:

Social Media Personality

Short-Form Sketch Comedy Videos

Big Name Fans

Memes

Mood Boards

Aesthetics

Luckily for us, all of these forms have been around for the past twenty years, so let’s turn back the the clock to 2005. What was the great mood board of 2005? What meme has gone unforgotten from the middle of the aughts? We can acknowledge that a Big Name Fan of the Twilight series created Fifty Shades of Grey. To argue that this is a great work of even pop lit is like saying Fear of Flying is a literary classic, as opposed to a book whose relevance is apparent only to the readers that made it a bestseller when it was first published.

Short-Form Sketch Comedy Videos were quite big in the ‘00s. The alternative comedy movement was so huge at the time, you couldn’t blame believers — like myself — for thinking these sketch videos, from Stella, from Human Giant, would be remembered as undeniable works of genius. Why did they whither? Besides the notorious shelf-life of comedy, there’s also the fact that the indie twerps that cherished these videos (d)evolved into guilty white liberals who would both defer to and contribute to the yass-ification of comedy for the past ten years, making the apolitical absurdism of these videos irrelevant to the people who liked them in the first place, let alone anyone outside the alt-comedy bubble. Also, like grunge, alt-comedy has aged poorly because both movements were reactionary. Grunge without the context of hair metal that it rebelled against is just brainy Black Sabbath. Alt-comedy without the context of club comedy hacks with ‘80s-style observational jokes — which they were the alternative to — is just Albert Brooks for the YouTube era.

The plainly obvious truth is there is nothing from the online culture of 2005 — or anything since — that has stood the test of time and can be called a great cultural work. Not Homestar Runner, much as I love it.¹ Not Dr. Horrible’s Sing Along Blog.

If we look at one of Dee’s cultural forms, we see the culprit: Social Media Personality. Typically, the blame for cultural stasis goes to the algorithm (what friend of the stack

Trafton Crandall

calls the “malgorithm”). But I am going to go back to

Stefan Kelly

‘s piece on AGI and ambition once more to single out the operative word: social.

Throughout human history, there have generally been two groups of people: those who have been content with comfort and those who strove for greatness. Most people of course are content with comfort. Since those people might be called “normies,” it stands to reason that those who strive for greatness (in science, athletics, culture, etc.) will often alienate the normal people. By definition those who strive like this cannot be in the majority. They sacrifice social acceptance in order to become physicists, Olympians, film directors, etc. Though these groups share different values, they complement each other. Regular people maintain society while those with the hunger help it evolve. As Kelly makes clear, both exist on a spectrum. An ambitious artist can fail, producing nothing great ever. That’s how the process works; we need all of the go-getters to try in order to increase the likelihood of creating the next big thing.

Now here’s where thing get tricky and interesting in the article: for most of human history, those without ambition ruled and there was no civilization. Most of the things that humans cherish — certainly humans who read this Substack — like art, music, theater, culture, civilization in general are, in the course of human history, recent inventions. For most of our history, we have been uncivilized brutes.

Erik Hoel

attributes this to the gossip trap: when human societies did not exceed the Dunbar number (150 people), these societies were hierarchical, but had no formal institutions and were driven primarily by gossip. Say someone wanted to invent fire by banging rocks together; in these societies, a couple of tribal jocks would bang the tribal nerd’s balls together for a goof and that would be that. After the Dunbar number was exceeded, that’s when weirdo inventors, artists, etc. could find their own people, creating and inventing away from the superstitious horde.

Hoel was smart enough to see the parallel between the gossip trap and social media. The court of public opinion — what I have called several times in the past The Church of the Other — has functioned like a modern-day gossip trap. If you want more on that, read the Hoel piece. But for the sake of our discussion let’s get to the meat: thanks to social media and the gossip trap, for maybe the first time in civilization’s history, culture has been created and driven by the “good enough” crowd while those who strive for greatness have few, if any, avenues left.

From W. David Marx’s Status and Culture:

For much of human history, storytelling was the exclusive privilege of designated elders, bookish scholars, and ambitious artists. To create motion pictures, aspiring filmmakers had to pay their dues at schools and in the industry before getting their hands on a camera. The internet opened storytelling to everyone, a development long beheld as a great democratic revolution. But this also has robbed nerds of their longtime monopoly on content creation and gatekeeping. When everyone is making content, teens have extended the high school hierarchy into their viewing habits: Why watch the weirdos when the cool girls are showing off their shopping hauls and class clowns are embarrassing their bros in epic pranks? Thus the very appeal of TikTok is its “mediocrity,” writes Vox’s Rebecca Jennings: “No one follows you because they expect you to be talented. They follow you because they like you.”

And why would it be otherwise? In the beginning, social media was humble enough. Friendster and MySpace helped connect teenagers. Facebook helped connect college students. Even Twitter began as a large virtual group text. For that reason, all the personality types that grew out of these spaces were rooted in these social contexts: influencer, conspiracy theorists, livestreaming gamers. Some are more provocative than others, to be sure, but do any of them not have a corresponding personality type in everyday life? Influencers are pretty girls who brag about how they pulled off their looks with bargain prices; gamers who talk shit have been around before cameras were put in front of them; even conspiracy theorists, who certainly are the oddest in the social media cafeteria, would have been cranks at the bar without social media.

It is for this reason that Brad Troemel says Qanon is the great cultural work of the Internet age. In an age where popularity and attention — as opposed to quality and substance — are the only currency left, political theories are more legible than even slightly challenging artistic works. When a great writer, say, comes home for Thanksgiving, not surrounded by their literary peers, they can talk to their liberal aunt who owns an antique shop (if that writer is liberal of course). Political gossip is the lingua franca of social media and QAnon is the Mona Lisa of political gossip.

Social media has space for personalities, but not for artists. Not great ones, anyway. All the cultural figures that have been popular on social media have not been social media natives — they had the respect of their respective institutions before breaking big — and they all have works that were legible to the social media community. Back in 2014, then-famous podcast personality Ira Glass infamously complained that Shakespeare was not “relatable.” This has largely driven much of the social media gossip trap: the tyranny of relatability. The term “relatable” was not popular until the 2010s. Before then, being “unrelatable” — or weird — was OK. How “relatable” were Bowie or Prince? It’s not an accident that Lady Gaga waned in popularity and Taylor Swift rose in the ranks.

It seems like every film, show, book, etc. from 2008 onward has been legible on social media. Anything challenging has been mostly written off as pedantic and pretentious. Would that it were only applicable to intellectually difficult works. Any moral murkiness has also been thrown to the dung heap.

Why 2008? Social media was established in the early 2000s, but it wasn’t until Barack Obama’s campaign used social media to reach out to voters that the media establishment saw social media as a major cultural force to be reckoned with as opposed to a cyber-mall for slack-jawed teens.

For those of you not familiar with my Substack, I have been of the opinion that we have the potential for one of the greatest cultural moments since the 1960s. Well, just as I proudly bragged about how I predicted Trump’s victory, I humbly admit my optimistic hope for 2020s culture is on shakier ground. Unlike the '60s, there simply is not a drive or a demand for greatness.

Ross Barkan

writes:

The elite cultural institutions aren’t minting stars like they once did. The number of true Hollywood A-listers under the age of thirty is quite small, especially when compared to the count of inordinately famous actors and actresses who came of age in the 1980s through 2010s. Where is today’s Tom Cruise, Julia Roberts, George Clooney, Natalie Portman, Denzel Washington, Angelina Jolie, or Brad Pitt? Or the twenty-something who matches Jennifer Lawrence’s run of massive hits? What about the showrunner who is becoming Gen Z’s Lena Dunham? It can’t all be Timothée Chalamet and Zendaya, or Sydney Sweeney, who seems most famous for the anxious cultural reactions to her breasts. The auteurs aren’t breaking out, either. Francis Ford Coppola, Martin Scorsese, and George Lucas were all making major movies in their twenties and early thirties. No equivalent exists today—not even of Darren Aronofsky, whom I can take or leave. In pop, there are younger superstars, like Billie Eilish, Chappell Roan, and Sabrina Carpenter, but even there, it’s a paucity of genre options. There are no new rock stars, but it’s become even harder to find the breakout hip hop and rap heroes, chart-toppers who are redefining the culture for those under thirty. In music, as Ted Gioia has written, life itself is a nostalgia act, and much of the energy in the streaming era is funneled into legacy acts. The already famous devour the young.

In the ‘60s, great art was rewarded because…there was money in greatness. No matter how left-of-center a singer’s politics were, you didn’t even dream of them unless they could sing, write a song or play guitar. With no social media, there were no purity tests to suss out whether a fan of, say, Janis Joplin, was a feminist — let alone whether Joplin herself was.

This might help us understand why the woke era was such a terrible time for culture, but the politically progressive ‘60s and ‘70s were a great time. Simu Liu infamously claimed that the current era was more valuable than the Scorcese or Tarantino times because now people that looked like him had a better chance.Not only can I not imagine Bruce Lee shitting on Orson Welles; I cannot imagine Welles questioning Lee’s talent. But Liu and Lee worked off different metrics. Lee was more concerned with respect and excellence; Liu had no choice but to cash in his victim points for social media clout.

All this victim claiming/victim blaming is lucrative for the social media emperors of course. It’s not that big a surprise that Musk and Zuckerberg like Trump. Like Trump in his younger days, Musk and Zuck run casinos, so to speak. Social, like any good casino, makes money off losers, not winners. Creator programs cost these companies money; failed posts make them money, as long as the losers stick around to watch videos on how to make more engaging content.

Why exactly are we so addicted to slot machines of vicious, petty gossip? One reason I want to highlight comes from David Graeber’s Bullshit Jobs:

Yet even in the best of cases, the need to be on call, to spend at least a certain amount of energy looking over one's shoulder, maintaining a false front, never looking too obviously engrossed, the inability to fully collaborate with others —all this lends itself much more to a culture of computer games, YouTube rants, memes, and Twitter controversies than to, say, the rock 'n' roll bands, drug poetry, and experimental theater created under the midcentury welfare state.

Since social media is primarily consumed at the bullshit jobs most of us work, it makes sense that the content bears a closer resemblance to cubicle gossip than it does fearless exploration.

Bullshit jobs are also the reason why most want to become influencers. Influencers do not attract people who would have been actors or singers in another life; they attract workers who would have gone into real estate or opened a frozen yogurt shop; it’s less about pursuing a dream or a vision and more of a desperate lotto ticket to break away from the 9 to 5. As many have said, a lot of successful influencers are conservatives because they quit the shit job and won. A narrative of capitalist meritocracy — especially one based on hard work, as opposed to talent, which complicates the narrative — ensures that they feel nothing but disgust for those who need any sort of government aid or labor protections.

Besides which, now that they are entrepreneurs, they are less creative-minded than they are business-minded. This is by necessity. Ten years ago almost to the day,

William Deresiewicz

wrote in The Atlantic about the death of the artist and the birth of the creative entrepreneur. The article is as chilling now as when he wrote it — and only more relevant. While it can’t be said that all business owners have more in common with those who value comfort over those who would sacrifice all for their vision, it is necessarily true that business owners who only employ themselves will always choose their wallet over their heart.

And what a precarious business, by the way. As already noted, what social media personality has been famous for twenty years? Even the casino winners have to bust at some point. Marshall McLuhan is rightly celebrated now after years of inexplicable excommunication, but Harold Innis is an unjustly overlooked media theorist. One of his many invaluable concepts, which is explored in this great article by Nicholas Carr, is the conflict between time-biased media and space-biased media. Time-biased media is durable, but not as easily portable. Sounds like…most great cultural works, yes? Even books, portable on an individual level, become an unwieldy library when you amass enough of them. As you may have guessed — and as I have said before — anything online is space-biased. Since the Internet was not around in Innis’s day, he used the newspaper as an example of a space-biased medium.

Social media, like a newspaper, or better yet a magazine, puts every work inside it — whether its a song, a poem, a news clip, an unhinged rant about dryer sheets — within the context of the house style (with advertisements of course). This is great when it is The Village Voice. But social media is like Us Weekly or The National Enquirer. Whatever would work in a gossip rag would work on social media. Just look at the poems that go viral. How many of them go viral because of their voice or their playful innovations? Nope: one political group feels “seen,” while the opposition uses it to mock the newly-seen group. This fits the house style of social media.

Speaking of poetry, I owe a heartfelt apology to all the Dimes Square scenesters that tried to make a difference. A lot of what they created was transgressive for the sake of, but I will always respect those who try to be transgressive and great over those who are inoffensive and mediocre. That said, much of what they do cannot help but become social media slop. What’s more, despite its admirably aesthetic and formalist designs, by skewing right-wing to shock the libs, it ends up devolving into the conservative version of the gossip trap.

Now that I got my apology out the way, let’s look at the implications of the Internet, especially, social media, being space-biased instead of time-biased. This relative weightlessness could be why the Internet has not yet had its Birth of a Nation moment: a work that proves, beyond the shadow of a doubt, that art can survive and thrive inside the medium. Now I have mentioned in the past that television took a really long time to mature; it didn’t get great until The Sopranos. What I didn’t factor in was that The Sopranos was a response to a world overflowing with cornucopia after cornucopia of great music, great film, great literature, great art. One hundred years ago, cinema found its artistic footing. But as Matthew Gasda said:

A cultural optimist in the 1920s could walk into a movie theater and see that the ultra-new and ultra-popular was part of the same ecological process, the same ferment, that produced Joyce, Kafka, Picasso, and Louis Armstrong.

We cannot take for granted that every medium grows naturally because that simply is not true. Take radio. It would be moronic to say that radio was bad or that nothing great ever came out of it. But radio was limited in what it could contribute to world culture. Unlike most other mediums, radio began more ambitious and devolved over time. In the beginning, in addition to the talk shows and smash musical hits that it is known for today, there were plays, sitcoms and game shows. Now it is true that most of the radio dramas of the day, like “The Shadow” and “Flash Gordon,” were genre works and the hope was that one day there would be great radio dramas, much like Erich von Stroheim and F.W. Murnau were making great films. Nope: radio dramas, sitcoms and game shows were extinct thanks to TV and radio’s palette remained limited to music and talk ever since.

I do not expect the Internet’s development to completely mirror radio’s history. My point is that different media evolve in different ways and they do not always evolve in ways that benefit us, or in ways that are ultimately harmless. There are two things that must be countenanced regarding the gossip trap of social media. Unlike the gossip trap that came before civilization…hmm, how do I say this…this new gossip trap does not accurately reflect outside reality. It’s a virtual gossip trap that reflects virtual reality. So…yes, it is driven by people who want comfort and safety over risk and cultural advancement. But it does not reflect groups of people that actually have any magnitude offline. It boils down to what

Henry Farrell

calls “degraded democratic publics”:

[P]articular taboos (incest; choking) feature heavily in the presentation of Internet porn, not because they are the most popular among consumers, but because they are more likely to convert into paying customers. This, in turn, gives porn consumers, including teenagers, a highly distorted understanding of what other people want and expect from sex, that some of them then act on. In my terms, they look through a distorting technological lens on an imaginary sexual public to understand what is normal and expected, and what is not. This then shapes their interactions with others.

Farrell argues that similarly, we not only see extreme liberalism on social media, but extreme liberalism that grabs eyeballs. Trust me when I tell you that I am more concerned with class issues than identity politics, but a photo of a pretty trans woman will catch my eye — or drive a bigot’s engagement through rage — more than a Jacobin article will. Same with the dissident right, with the neoreactionaries. The funny thing about the conservatives that are excited about owning social media now is they are inheriting the very blind spot that made the liberals lose. Yes, Obama’s campaign used social media. But do we really believe that he would not have been president without it? Either term? Trump won in 2016.That’s when, of course, liberals realized the dangers of social media. But their Band-Aid was information management. By the time they realized that they were in the virtual gossip trap bubble, Trump won again. Staying in the now-conservative virtual gossip trap bubble will assure a devastating defeat sooner than later for the right.

The virtual gossip trap is like a bizarro gossip trap. The one that came before civilization was comprised of families in villages. Any weirdos who wanted to invent or create anything different were ridiculed into submission. The virtual gossip trap, for much of its young history, was comprised of people who were shut out of families: trans people, careerist women, the types of people who were desperate to find connection online. This was and is beautiful, but it skewed what Democrats thought voters wanted for more years than they would care to admit. Look at MAGA nation now though. Just this past November, Trump was the populist champion. Now Musk he is a running a technofascist neoreactionary agenda that only has heat online. Show me one farmer that wouldn’t spit in Curtis Yarvin’s eye.

The second thing that must be countenanced regarding the gossip trap of social media: unlike the first one, this one threatens to end civilization. The first gossip trap consistently aborted civilization before it could even be born. Gossip Trap 2 can light it all up with a match.

We are at a very serious crossroads right now. We can either fight to revive culture or we can just put civilization to sleep — a sleep that wouldn't be too different from the slumber it was already in after jacking off to OnlyFans models on Instagram Reels.

Again, I wish

The Metropolitan Review

all the success. Not just because I stand to benefit from it²; the strength of the gossip trap has been accompanied by the weakness of criticism — another reason for our cultural drought. A critic’s job is to not only bring attention to great works that may be overlooked. It is also to reduce the value of mediocre bullshit. Social media does not only harm us by creating mediocre content; it also dulls our taste buds. Movies and books are revered not because they are high-quality, but because they are tolerant and kind (or because they are cruel and based now, I guess). Benson Boone’s music is not actually enjoyed by anybody; it helps create a dramatic soundtrack for a TikTok makeover video.

The implications of this are huge: because the Internet’s taste, through social media, has been shaped by likes and reposts instead of legitimate criticism, two things are possible: a) there might be great works of Internet culture over the past twenty years that have gone unsung because no one has given them the proper attention; b) because they have not been given their proper due, the likelihood of them vanishing on the incredible shrinking Internet without any attempt at preservation grows greater.

I tell you what, one thing about that there Internet, it sure is good at some absurd shit. Boy howdy! OK but how can we preserve deep fried memes and shit like that? Well absurd art was respected throughout the 20th century, especially during the Dadaist period. Marcel Duchamp’s Urinal was a…urinal. He didn’t make it himself either. It was a readymade. So why are we still talking about it now? Enough critics saw its significance at the time and after it was in danger of getting flushed…OK.

Aidan Walker

has passionately defended Skibidi Toilet as art;

Katherine Dee

reviews current websites, podcasts, etc. as legitimate cultural works. Why can’t they trawl through the piles of Internet slush that have accumulated and show us forgotten gems that are worthy of polishing?

So let’s summarize how we can expand, nurture and defend culture against the looming AI-pocalypse: starve the virtual gossip trap; preserve any great culture and ruthlessly criticize any weak offerings — there’s no politeness on the battlefield; develop and nurture culture in the dark forest, away from those who will otherwise be all too happy to stamp out the fire because they feel threatened.

This is, assuming, that those forgotten gems are still online. As the looming TikTok ban has made clear, the Internet is not the best place to preserve something. This does not only refer to Internet-only works. There are shows and movies that will never stream because they are stuck in licensing hell. If, in some nightmare scenario, the government decides to get rid of a book, Amazon can just delete it off your Kindle. As someone who lives in a small studio, it pains me to say that physical media may be the only shot at preservation of anything worth keeping.

Even the criticism itself must be preserved. There was a lot of great indie rock in the ‘00s, but with many of the music blogs that made the bands prominent now either dead or forgotten, do we remember what we listened to even? It’s all on a iPod somewhere in an old bookbag…

Like

The Metropolitan Review

, I agree there’s been a lack of valuable criticism at major media institutions — for the past thirteen years, according to Vox. Dating back to when the positive critical consensus for Girls shifted after the (say it with me) virtual gossip trap that we called Twitter expressed widespread resentment for Lena Dunham not checking her privilege or casting minorities. Immediately, Dunham added Donald Glover in season two and critics were hypercritical of all subsequent non-Glover seasons. It didn’t end there. Poptimism was already gaining momentum in the early 2010s music critic establishment, but fan armies for Beyonce and Taylor Swift intimidated critics who did not fall in line by writing positive reviews for their albums, giving it even more legitimacy. After the #oscarssowhite Twitter campaign of 2015, critics that lauded Lalaland were eventually drowned out by writers that denigrated it to favor Moonlight, which had Black characters. Moonlight was and is the better film, but I can’t imagine director Barry Jenkins being happy that his film got the Oscar gold in order to lower the Twitter torches and pitchforks. With social media at the center, movies, television, books, art, all culture was brought down to its level. For what? Will we remember The Help or Hidden Figures as great films years from now? How about the (neo)reactionary alt-lit that is currently burning up Frog Twitter? Will these transgressive works make sense outside the context of an overly sensitive liberal literary establishment? Or will they go the way of grunge and alt-comedy?

OK fine social media is a gossip trap got it. I’m crying uncle over here. Now what?

Some good news: since social media is now owned universally by Trump supporters, people are leaving social media. A proposal offered by the likes of

Yancey Strickler

,

Joshua Citarella

and — yes —

Katherine Dee

is the dark forest. For those who don’t know, the dark forest is a type of online engagement in which artists, thinkers, etc. develop their ideas in smaller communities away from the mainstream, on Discord servers or Substack group chats. This Dazed article is critical of the idea, stating that it will lead to further fragmentation, with more insular bubbles proliferating. This is a straw man argument. The idea is not to stay in the dark forest. It’s to retreat and regroup. Those who doubt the efficacy of this need only look back at the hipster movement of the ‘00s. The relative lack of scrutiny that ‘00s hipsters got online compared to the ‘20s scenesters meant that the former had a greater cultural impact. Again, much of this hipster culture has gone forgotten now because the music blogosphere went into extinction, but it would have never developed to begin with under the microscope of the virtual gossip trap.

The best dark forest of all, of course, is live performance, which resides in the mesoculture. A new live performance trend that has me excited is the idea of an antimemetic event. If the tone of much “clearnet” social media is “wow look at this cool thing I did,” the subtext of antimemetic performance, which does not document live events online — thus maintaining aloofness towards virality — is “play it cool and don’t tell too many people or we will need to find a new treehouse.”

So let’s summarize how we can expand, nurture and defend culture against the looming AI-pocalypse: starve the virtual gossip trap; preserve any great culture and ruthlessly criticize any weak offerings — there’s no politeness on the battlefield; develop and nurture culture in the dark forest, away from the those who will otherwise be all too happy to stamp out the fire because they feel threatened.

Stefan Kelly

mentions in the piece that the happy-go-lucky people will be indifferent to the threat of AGI in the future. That may be. As it stands now, great writers and journalists are also downplaying the warning signs. I love

Ross Barkan

and

kate lindsay

— enough to pay for subscriptions to their Substacks — but I can only assume they are overly skeptical because their standards are too high. Quick reminder: no one is saying AI will make great art; it can make mediocre content, which the attention economy runs on now. The entirety of this post has (hopefully) shown how social media mediocrity has loomed over greatness, which has cowered in the corner, patiently looking for rocks to bang together. AI may not crap out the Great American Novel, but social media feeds are not clogged with the Great American Novel. As I commented on Kelly’s piece, “people who simply want contentment will be drawn -- are drawn-- to AI companions and are outsourcing simple family/community life to chatbots, snuggling up to the glow of their phone in a cozy dystopia.” Or they will post AI slop and say, “Wow, look at what AI can do,” like its their child prodigy.

Just so we’re clear, when we speak of “AI,” we are not simply talking about fighting machines; we are targeting the tech wizards behind the curtain. Travis Diehl in Spike Magazine:

Established culture can’t match the zeal of crypto evangelists and accelerationists and shitposters. To borrow a phrase from former artist Daniel Keller, they have the “sloptimism.”

If you need enough proof, perhaps you haven’t read the news story about how Elon Musk wants to replace government workers with AI. If these people think America can survive under AI’s watch, why not a Hollywood film?

The fight against AI will be a fight to the finish. One that may last us the rest of our existence as a species. As

Stefan Kelly

and others have said, AI does not only threaten the ambitious, but those who want to lead simple lives with their families. The odds and the likelihood of victory are irrelevant: if you can’t see the glory in going down fighting, get out of the way. “Fighting” means being bold and not letting anyone get the best of you; it is not the same thing as nihilistic violence. The threat of AI doom has so far inspired fear and violence; hopelessness and despair. The UHC shooter story may have given voice to a lot of rage, but it is tragic. This behavior, inspired by AI bots denying insurance claims, is a symptom not a cure.

This clip from “The Office” is a fine example of what the fight may look like. Typically, Michael Scott is comically inept. But in the episode “Local Ad,” he is quixotic. Corporate hires a creative team to make an ad for the Scranton branch. Of course it’s boilerplate: a nondescript guy walking around a big box store looking for paper, overacting his confusion — cut to the workers of the local branch waving at the camera. The delusional Michael Scott, naturally, wants to make his own version. They do end up playing ball with corporate and the whole office watches the local spot at a nearby bar. In an effort to console a despondent Michael Scott — and of course to show off his girlfriend Pam’s talent — Jim gives the bartender the DVD of the “Michael Scott director’s cut.” Yes, there are several awkward touches (who would seriously believe “Hometown Boy Wins Race” would be the headline of even the smallest local paper); yes, Vangelis’s theme to Chariots of Fire was too expensive to clear, but goddamit, everyone in the bar knew their version — dumber but more ambitious and heartfelt — was better than the focus-group researched corporate slop they just watched. What’s more, Scott’s arrogance in forcing the project unwittingly nurtures Pam’s actual talent for drawing. Her animation of the logo wows the crowd.

Has anything great ever not had the potential to not be a big miss? Sgt. Pepper’s could have been an album where The Beatles become an Edwardian fictional band for no reason. Citizen Kane could have been about a fat rich guy who misses his sled. The right environment nurtured both.

Just because I have been, for the past two years, breathlessly hopeful for a cultural explosion that has not been seen since the ‘60s, does not mean I have to overcompensate by pretending there has been no greatness this year. Just before New Year’s, I predicted that 2025 might see the beginning of a renaissance. Already, Ethel Cain released a classic album and Severance's second season might raise the bar for streaming the way The Sopranos did for television more than twenty five years ago. But signs of hope are not reasons to rest. Perverts is not a blockbuster album and Severance is not a water-cooler show yet.

So I changed my mind. Sorry

The Metropolitan Review

but a new age of greatness is not upon us. Not yet. But you — we — better fight to the finish to make sure it is. Otherwise, like the song says, if this is it, I’m signing off.

If You Liked This, Read:

No Art, Just Vibes

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1. The fact that most of you reading are unfamiliar with Homestar Runner proves my point. From 2003, when it had its viral Trogdor moment, till now, I can’t tell you how many Millennials are unfamiliar, let alone Gen Zers.

2. Much as I want to put this in the main body of the text, it is already getting unweildy, although it is only fitting I suppose that I mention a writer who uses footnotes often like

John Pistelli

in the footnotes. Of all the criticism that I read so far in

The Metropolitan Review

, his essay on Bruce Wagner is my favorite. I will read some of his work as soon as I get a chance.