Thread by @L0m3z

This question of stagnating culture is a very good one. I try to answer this in the interview with @AuronMacintyre here:

Ultimately, it is technological I think, but maybe not in the ways that are obvious

https://twitter.com/KeithWoodsYT/status/1454792455447003138

The first part of this is the more straightforward one. @jamespoulos has talked about this. We have transitioned from the age of televisual fantasy to the age of perfect digital memory. Perfect memory means that everything is immediately available, everywhere and always

This saps the urgency for artistic creation. Whatever spiritual hunger drives the need to create, to explain and explore the world and its metaphysics, is sated freely and immediately, on demand. This resource glut has the effect of any resource glut--complacency and torpor

There is also the the sociological and political effects of globohomo, which are related to the tech but in a more oblique way. There is a misunderstanding about art that it thrives under conditions of perfect freedom, without constraints. This is wrong...

It is true that art is improved by broad tolerance for speech and expression--probably--but importantly art arises out of particular historical and cultural circumstances that are shared and tacitly understood by a society. This stuff is the ballast for any meaningful art.

It is a shared vernacular, a shared mythos, a shared spiritual life, rituals, archetypes, etc. At very bottom these things may be universalizable, but any artist is depending on the particular ways these things have been constituted over time w/in the context of a physical place

The goal of globohomo is to level all of these particularities. To bulldoze it all and construct on the ruins the great mall of (post)modernity. This ofc is the great lie about the Diversityism. The point is not preservation of distinction and difference, but total homo

While this is great for deracinating and atomizing the world's population so they can be herded into their pods and uploaded into digital purgatories, it destroys the foundations of art. Total homo has no mythos or referents, it has none of the unspoken stuff artists depends on

So what we get instead is the reheated thin gruel of the televisual fantasies that preceded this turn into globohomo. The pop-cultural ephemera of the 80's and 90's, kino as it was, *is* the foundational mythos for globohomo (or what passes as foundational mythos)

This is all they have. Having leveled or repudiated the complex and deep lattice work of our cultural particularities–notice the only cultures that are allowed to endure are those most weakly constituted–they have nothing to offer but ephemeral trash, plasticized shit