No, Culture is Not Stuck - by Katherine Dee
Katherine Dee, also known by her pen name, “Default Friend,” is one of the most original culture commentators of her generation. She’s an Internet archaeologist, a fandom taxonomist, Marshall McLuhan’s clearest heir … a unique voice. She made her name with, among other things, a theory about how Tumblr changed US politics. Today, she is writing about the new forms of art and culture that the Internet has spawned.
As we covered on this week’s CrowdSource newsletter, many critics today believe that culture is at a standstill, decadent, and out of ideas. But Katherine believes that those critics are failing to notice a new kind of culture developing on social media. She makes her analysis in her usual, dispassionate way. She is less interested in making moral judgments than in making an accurate, objective description of what is going on. And what is going on is, for better or worse, fascinating.
The idea that culture is stagnating, as Ted Gioia puts it — or that it’s stuck, as Paul Skallas says — isn’t new. Neither is the observation that there’s something different about how bad things are in this particular moment. The cultural malaise is palpable and cross-generational. The complaints are more than just “old man yells at cloud.” Everyone feels it.
