Techno Poptimism and The Old Men Yelling At Clouds

On culture stuck and unstuck

Culture is much like an ever-flowing river: blue and beautiful in the distance beneath the Rayleigh scattering sun, less so when you’re bellied underwater with a mouthful of sediment. We call the mid 19th century the “golden age” of American literature but no one read Hawthorn, Dickinson, Whitman, or Moby Dick at the time. That there was any kind of American “Renaissance” happening was lost to anyone alive during its apex; Yankees seeking capital-C Culture best hop a packet to Europe. Only with a view from afar was this movement granted any romantic dignity. In this century as we’re deluged with torrents of vacuous content from omnipresent algorithms, so too is it easy to drown in nostalgia of a less dopamine consuming era. It’s therefore a healthy pursuit to see the river over the sediment, enjoying the pyrite for its gleam rather than inquiring what is and isn’t gold, and perhaps some of us gloomy and wistful men of a certain age should be told to snap out of it once in a while and just laugh at the funny video. I see no more ignoble aim than that in Katherine Dee’s rebuttal of various laments on our cultural inertia. I might even add to the rebuttal myself. Culture certainly is going somewhere. 

What often discords any discussion about “culture” as a whole is the broadness of the term. The “stuck culture” Skallas refers to is the similar looking iPhone and fashion of 2007¹ and Goia points to the last century’s most famous artists and franchises dominating the charts of film, music, video games, and theater today. As for me, if I ever see any kind of “cultural celebration,” I just want to know what’s on the menu. Fortunately, Sam Kahn added clarification:

It’s important to distinguish between culture and Culture. In addition to the capitalization, you can recognize ‘Culture’ by an upward tilt of the chin and a flaring of the nostrils every time the word is pronounced. Lower-case ‘culture,’ as Dee rightly notes, is everywhere — it’s what people talk about in the school cafeteria and what they’re doing when they veg in front of the television or scroll on their phones. Upper-case ‘Culture’ is an attempt to be better than oneself, to transcend. This does not necessarily mean being snooty or high-brow, but it’s recognized by an intensity and a certain concentration of energy — a concerted effort to say ‘this is the real me,’ ‘this is how I want to be remembered.’ A very good way to know when you’re dealing with Culture — and art — is through the framing, through a discrete sealing-off of the elevated work (e.g. the book-binding, the frame around the picture, the house lights going down at the start of the show, etc).

We might run into trouble here if we get too literal with this concept of framing, but this is a good start. You could not seal off a work that does not have a beginning, middle, and end. A vaudeville act, which Dee traces the lineage of many popular TikTok videos, has both. The video feed, as with any social feed, has no end and therefore no form, making its classification even as shallow entertainment shaky at best. Like vaudeville, you can also trace its lineage to stand up comedy, not least because a fair portion of these “funny” videos are just users miming audio clips from real standup comedy acts, adding their own inexpert facial expressions and gesticulations in place of the original performer’s, choosing clips that have already gone viral for a better chance at views. TikTok is unique in how overtly it rewards mimicry, resulting in feeds where you see the same “bit” multiple times performed by different users in the span of minutes. Replace the standup clip with a movie quote or song, mouthed lyrics as the punchline, and you have the most common video on TikTok. This direct copy and paste method of content generation is so ubiquitous to the app that you rarely see anyone call it out in the comments. Why would they? To do so would be to mistake the distraction economy for the entertainment industry, or worse, art.

Old media is dead, and we under-appreciate the new forms because they’re somehow ‘less legitimate’ than the old ones. The collaborative storytelling that goes into creating an Internet persona, algorithms, mood boards, and even certain types of uniquely online sketch comedy are all new or evolved art forms. And they’re thriving. We just don’t take them seriously. -

Katherine Dee

The techno-poptimists embrace their digital lobotomies: sometimes reservedly, sometimes with the fervor of a Gen X dad discovering Billie Eilish after years of struggling to relate to his daughter. The idea that Silicon Valley might hack us to a race of transcendent Übermensch after they’ve made enough phone apps isn’t hokey enough, these innovative new data miners and ad generators must be the new canvasses for Da Vincis we have yet to discover. Recently, I had a group of male teachers tell me in all earnestness that though their high school students could barely read at a third-grade level, they weren’t concerned at all for their overall cognitive or critical thinking capacities. They believed audio and video were fully viable replacements for text. One of them reasoned was that dialectics existed long before mass literacy and Socrates couldn’t read or write either. The earnestness in which he capitulated this argument would have made David Foster Wallace proud. Like Katherine Dee, he read James Joyce, a fair amount of philosophy, and in general was no philistine. He reasonable and smart man who wanted to believe in the future, to relate to his students rather than judge them, to believe we use technology in a way that is revolutionary rather than dulling, and probably understood he had to stretch credulity if he wanted to keep his good vibes. I might have pressed him and asked how fast philosophy progressed before the time of the printing press compared to after, or if the ancient Greeks were unique in their intellectual curiosity compared to other civilizations in a way that is similar to the cultural sphere his students inhabit. Instead, I just nodded and said, “oh yeah” and “for sure,” in the least derisory tone I could manage. I too didn’t want to be the old man yelling at clouds.

In the technocrats’ defense, it’s a little too easy to blame all our social atomization and the general culture decline the internet. To do so is to forget the effects of television on the latter half of 20th century. McLuhan predicted its adverse influence on our thought patterns long before dialup and predicted that literacy would be valued less and less in the world of audio-visual mediums until it dropped to the level of prehistoric tribal humans. Despite being dismissed by many as a cranky, nostalgic old man, his prediction was halfway true by the time of his death in 1980 when, less than two decades after figures like Bellow and Roth dominated Publisher’s Weekly, the reading public began to consume by the millions commercial landfill from brands like Danielle Steel and Stephen King. However much we might like to snicker at Colleen Hoover and the romantasy smut propped up by Booktok they are but a small step down in the decline of the medium from its condition a decade prior. Unparalleled remains the novel’s debasement than in the early decades of the conglomerate era when it became the domain of the booboisie. By the mid 1980s a rough third of America was functionally illiterate, with a frightening number of adults unable to read the warning labels on pesticide.² Presumably they still read Pet Sematary.

It’s hardly any wonder why the last generation of great writers: Toni Morrison, Cormac McCarthy, Don Delillo, Thomas Pynchon, were all from the Silent Generation, the last to have known a world before color TV. That these authors are still widely read at all is something of a miracle; McLuhan predicted reading books would be as common in America as reading Latin Poetry by the 2000s. It could be that the early text-based era of the internet might have bought literacy, or a form of it, some time. If there’s to be any distinguishment of a healthy or unhealthy capital C Culture, technology alone can’t be the barometer. Matthew Gasda in his own response to Dee’s article laid out a better mode of analysis:

Is it easier or harder for originals to find an audience? Are the different regions of cultural production talking to each other? Is there cross-pollination? Is there curiosity? Are audience and artist pushing each other to greater degrees of cultivation and sophistication, or is the cycle inverted: are artist and audience making each other dumber?

Any half-hearted writer studying the faintest degree of craft knows the answer to that last question: from lesson one onwards the goal is to make your writing as easy to comprehend as possible lest the reader put down your book from having to read. As for the state of more popular forms like TikTok and YouTube production, the most successful of them, Mr. Beast, might offer some insight from his onboarding manual.

Your goal here is to make the best YOUTUBE videos possible. That’s the

number one goal of this production company. It’s not to make the best produced

videos. Not to make the funniest videos. Not to make the best looking videos. Not

the highest quality videos.. It’s to make the best YOUTUBE videos possible.

It’s long been cliche to point that those who have dominated the current media landscape knows that the algorithm determines all, and to make any kind of audience you have to produce content for it. The only thing that makes Mr. Beast unique from any other creator is having mastered the game, and only in the complete abandonment of expression, the notion that what he was doing was in any way related to art, was he able to do so. His massive wealth and the poverty of his aesthetic betters is not something that can be blamed on a top-down culture industry. We made Mr. Beast. He’s giving us what we’ve always wanted.

In the end, humans have always been convenience seeking optimization machines to both the benefit and hindrance of our survival. All that’s unique about the digital age is the degree which technology enables our baser patterns, patterns that are often checked by what’s commonly denounced as “snobbery.” What this all points to is culture and Culture being neither “stuck” nor “thriving” under the noses of too snooty critics but rapidly accelerating on the same course it’s been on for over a century: the automation of man. Who will lament AI seizing control of the arts, when in both its production and consumption, we become indistinguishable from AI ourselves? There will be a day, surely not too long from now, when any poptimist whose wariness that their wistful nostalgia might rob them of their cultural currency will be forced to denounce the human as essential to art altogether. That a human hand be involved with any film, song, book or virtuosic Pinterest board will be as relevant to that era as analogue recorded music is to ours. “Human Made Art” will be the rallying cry of bitter aging hipsters, looked upon with the same brows we raise now for eighty-year-old filmmakers suggesting the MCU is not quite cinema. Perhaps those hoping to stay on the forefront of culture ten to fifteen years from now should immerse themselves in the radical new AI generated videos currently developing the cognitions of Gen Alpha babies everywhere. A lineage from Hemingway might even be found in “Pig Finger Family Song Baby Nursery Rhymes Colorful Cars Colors for Kids 45 Mins Collection Video” by the astute and cultured futurist.

1. I would argue the shift from millennial fashion circa 2007 to the fashion of 2017 was stark enough to be an early sign of our return to Victorian social mores, but that’s neither here nor there.

2. Kozol, J. (1985) Illiterate America. Plume.