I’m sympathetic to the premise of general stagnation
My feeling is I think people underestimate quite how atypical it was to pursue musical and artistic counter culture in the 20th century when participation required an extreme level of commitment and risk
This confluence of committed weirdos happened to coincide with a booming new media industry that had a lot of excess funds circulating and intense market pressure for new things
These confluences rarely happen, and when they do you get golden periods of new ideas
People after the internet inherited all music and art as a kind of folk art past its heralded prime, ubiquitous and requiring little commitment at all, relegating its urgency in contrast to the new frontier and unanswered questions of networked life.
Small groups of committed weirdos always exist, and occasionally intersect with the birth of new industries establishing new forms and archetypes
Art for most of history was a kind of folk ritual intermittently punctuated by committed weirdos turning their attention there. It’s just that most millennials and older grew up in one of those rare times so we expect the arts to always be a site of rupture and reinvention
It’s not that Gen Z aren’t as brilliant and creative as any generation rather the old media tendency of looking to identify that spark specifically amongst people creating records or paintings is limited
The elder-anathema rebellion right under our noses is that music or paintings aren’t that big a deal to them, maybe just another modality to explore attention networks
I wrote a new piece for
@default_friend’s blog. I argue that Gen Z is trapped in a Borgesian archive, unable to establish a clear relationship to the cultural past. Link below 👇