stagnation of culture - wip

Originally this was going to be a reply to a post by a friend, but as I wrote more and more, I thought it'd be of more utility to have this online - depending on whether it actually stays here for the next 5 years or not (i speak of ephemerality in the post itself), so we shall see.

> Hypercommodification
    if i was to go off vibes only, i think there's something to be said about broad cultural stagnation being a consequence of what i think of as hypercommodification - i.e. when everything is the product, including you, what do we sell anymore? who buys it? I'm looking at this through a lens critical of capitalism mostly because I think the internet as it stands can very clearly illustrate the inherent contradictions within capitalism (stagnation of wages, worsening living conditions/rising cost of living vs ever increasing corporate profits representative of the death drive towards infinite growth which is a fight against the tendency of the rate of profit to fall). 

the rise and fall (i say fall because I expect it to start now) of generative AI also plays into this and I think the adoption of which is just again a natural consequence of the hypercommodification of everything in our lives - only because it facilitates generation of... slop - text, media/visual art/music, whatever; remove the human element which is the hurdle in the journey for faster iteration times and therefore a shorter road to profit. For decades now the internet has sort of been in a tug of war with advertising - late in the game, maybe in the late 2000s/early 2010s, ads won, which is why the internet is in the state that it is now - as in a vehicle for advertisements. I don't mean to say that 25 years ago you couldn't use the internet to sell/buy stuff (craigslist, ebay, amazon etc) but those sites weren't really representative of 'the internet' as a sort of unexplored blank canvas where you could make things, create art, express your ideas in a way that is genuinely impossible to do so now. the sociocultural environment that guided early internet behavior/etiquette stands in direct opposition to the general zeitgeist of today. Think of algorithms, moderation, the information you post being ephemeral and whose existence depends entirely on the whims of whoever allows you to publish it - and you might rightly say that this has always been the case, to which I will agree but also put forward - did anyone really think that the current model we have for social interaction on the internet (twitter, facebook, reddit, discord) would diverge so far from, say, the models followed by messageboards and forums? i think the two categories are very different beasts especially when we factor in mass adoption of the internet as a utility, a basic one that is considered necessary to function in today's world. There is no more offline - you are 'online', or 'away', but unless you explicitly carve out a space for yourself in this increasingly connected world, the internet is your new umbilical cord.

> Mass culture adoption - pop culture, what is it?
    imo it's important to maybe lay out some baseline definitions of what's meant by 'culture'; it has to be said that much of what's remembered or memed about on the internet is very American and follows very American cultural norms - this is to be expected as Americans are still (i think) one of the largest online populations, and still continue to define what is thought of as 'internet culture' - even though it's not representative of America (i.e. equally constitutes all races, classes[this factor is particularly important], genders, occupations, whatnot); consider that in many countries, basic internet access is a luxury that then acts as a useful marker about what sort of person is able to express themselves online. Also something else to think about is how novel it is when something that is not Anglophone (English-speaking) breaks through the sort of mass Anglophone cultural barrier and is exposed to the largely English-speaking population. I also refer to this population as being made up of the users of massive information aggregating sites like Reddit, or Twitter, whatnot.
    
> The internet as an 'information highway' - people were not built to handle the constant streams of information
    The role of the internet as a generator of noise - the opposite of a filter. words mean things, except when they don't anymore - and I will lay the blame for this squarely on the nature of the internet and the way that it operates. The internet is a big 'yes, and' machine in that no matter what you say, there are at least 8 people out there who will be in your corner to the extent that they will burn down someone's house if that person disagrees with you. The internet sort of flattens and compresses the meanings/connotations of things into an unintelligible soup - and this is partly the result of platforms for discussion dying out in favor of incredibly fast-moving ones where communication isn't really the goal anymore. This is a broader point I want to mull over because if there's anything we really have lost on the internet, it's being able to talk 'to' each other instead of 'at' each other, mostly because discussion isn't profitable anymore - i.e. the economic model on which most of the internet has come to be based rewards interactions that are reactionary by nature - which is why, imo, the quality of whatever constitutes communication online now is largely meaningless garbage, definitely exacerbated by generative AI. This also leads into something I've talked about a lot beforehand - my loathing of the word 'content' because I think no other word is as perfect a distillation of hypercommodification and the idea that everything is a product to be marketed, bought, sold, valued relative only to how much profit it can generate, including your attention span, whoever reads this.

the optimization of online spaces as a host for this sort of capitalistic behavior is the most obvious sign of this hypercommodification. if we think about our own attention and focus as something that generates or signifies value, we can try and apply some Marxist thought here by exploring the basic relationship between those who control and profit off the excess value generated by work + capital (i.e. tools, factories, etc) and applying this relationship in a rough approximation to the online space. advertisers crave our attention towards products - the more attention the more perceived value a product has; thusly, capitalists who own the platforms that host advertisers have optimized and streamlined these platforms to ensure that the relationship between the consumer and the advertiser is as seamless as possible, and that there are as little possible avenues to escape this relationship -> see adblocking in general online but in places like YouTube or Twitter especially, where you have to pay to not see ads. now, you as a consumer don't see the benefits of advertising unless you place some value in the utility of the products that you buy after being advertised to. you don't have a stake in the companies who post the ads (in general cases) and so you basically only control the value that these advertisements are perceived to have to others. the trouble here is when this relationship gets rocky, and people opt out in favor of not seeing ads, or tolerating being constantly advertised to; or, lax moderation and clearly reactionary ideological elements within the moderation or administration of a platform result in the consequences of advertisers not wishing to show their ads on certain platforms (ads made up 90% of twitter's revenue in 2021, and it's been falling by 55% year over year since Elon bought it). 

Here is where I'd put the rise of generative AI as sort of an emergency stopgap feature on the part of the capitalists who run social media platforms and a tactic to reap the rewards of attention or eyeballs on products; fake profiles, bot accounts and meaningless slop constantly generated by an unthinking, unfeeling machine that has no conception of the words it puts to screen is sort of the technocratic ideal for a space-age capitalist who runs what I term as the world's front-page (sorry reddit, you're in second place for that title but are still plagued by the same problems). now, it seems like the bots have picked up the slack of the people who've left - they're tweeting/posting, replying to users and each other, having discussions, uploading pictures and videos... such a platform is operating the illusion of a vibrant and thriving userbase; but advertisers don't care about that since robots can't buy things. Ultimately, the number must go up, but it is cratering. In addition, most people can see through the mirage created by bot interactions pretty easily - it's telling when a tweet goes viral and the replies are full of bot accounts with blue checkmarks posting non sequitur slop because such engagement is monetized.
    
    
> mass culture adoption and the role of the internet
    I can only talk about my own experience here, but I do clearly recall the sort of youth zeitgeist maybe 20 or so years ago as being something that was largely countercultural, suspicious of authority, and rejected any form of categorization, or being boxed into a niche by external parties; you are you, and only you can define you. contrast that to what is seen as the sort of go-to behavior today, where it's expected that every single part of you or what makes up your personality (interests, hobbies, likes, dislikes, fears, love, gender identity) can be dissected and very clearly be placed into predefined categories or ideas which in all likelihood you have had no say in the definition of. in [current year] you are who you are based on rigidly defined categories that themselves exist in hierarchy with others within these categories. I'm not making a value judgement on this phenomenon, but it is something I've noticed - it's difficult to operate online by being just a person anymore, or a username who exists to publish/express ideas. The value of your ideas seems to have a direct correlation to how many boxes people can put you in, as well as the nature of the boxes themselves. I'm also not saying that for example the previously mentioned countercultural attitude/antiauthoritarian attitude wasn't seized upon and exploited ruthlessly by capitalist forces, because it was - if you were singing a protest song on MTV back in the day you sold out. But nowadays, it's very obvious that the opposite is the case. See the people who have wholeheartedly adopted language that came about through the inherent limitations of heavily moderated platforms where words are butchered and mutated almost beyond understanding because of fears that users will be suspended or banned - if you were on a forum 20 years ago, would you have started saying 'unalive' instead of suicide because you were afraid the jannies were going to boot you off the platform? Would you then have started saying it because you felt like it was important to replace this language because of 'sensitivity issues', or because it might upset people? The case of SomethingAwful doesn't apply here because the word filters are funny and not put in place to make sure advertisers don't leave. how did this become such a prevalent linguistic phenomenon? I sort of think we can approach examining it in the same way as we do with online slang on a more general basis because much of it originated from shorthand to bypass instant messaging filters like on IRC, or ICQ, etc; but at the same time, this feels different - there is a more corporatized mechanism behind the evolution of such language.

Consider the rise of 'influencers' who operate as the hypercapitalist ideal of a walking billboard. The morality of such an occupation is beyond the scope of this blog post but I want to ask - would such a pursuit have been popular 25-30 years ago, before the internet? As in, the sort of platonic ideal of the perfect consumer, whose identity is contingent upon the consumption of products and as a vehicle to advertise them. I'm not talking about salespeople, because they operate in more specific niches and are dedicated to selling 'things'; the difference here is that influencers sell you the idea of consumption as an identity, something you can try on and keep for yourself, something that's cool and good because a company gave them free stuff! This is sponsored by XYZ and you too can get some free stuff if you just do what I say! notice here again that I'm not criticizing the act of being sponsored itself - people have been doing that for decades; but would all that falls under the general umbrella of 'influencership' (think fitness influencers, makeup/beauty influencers, etc) have survived before the colossal communication shift that was the internet? what made this behaviour okay, and not just tolerable but profitable? That's the key word here because there's no way people who are otherwise completely unremarkable could be elevated to the status they are simply by virtue of telling you to buy things - it became profitable to do so. re: fitness/beauty/etc influencers - they're not really selling you on the occupation they pursue, are they? like the idea of being fit, or looking good, or getting better/having more fun gaming etc - and at the same time, it seems like there's more to it than 'buy product to improve life', because that feels somewhat reductive.

In terms of a shift or drift in cultural aesthetics, I think that's a bit of a tough call to make if we consider for example how the music/aesthetics/fashion sense of the 80s and 90s were influenced say by the countercultural movements of the late 60s and 70s. If we're going to argue against the idea that decades are sort of clearly defined as a consequence of retrospective, nostalgic blindness, i'd posit that decades bleed into one another as sort of a rolling wave of culture, music, art, fashion, aesthetics - wholly influenced by the real world factors that drive these human impulses. War, violence, famine, genocide, occupation, political corruption... none of these are new phenomena, and yet where are the protest songs re: the Palestinian genocide for example (other than Macklemore)? critiquing the 'Establishment' has never been a popular position (see being against the war in Iraq 20 years ago) but you would find redemption in the end; now, it's cool and hip to be a lapdog of the US empire as well as sponsoring whatever havoc it wreaks anywhere in the world. the malevolent, deliberate misuse and embrace of the language of oppression and human rights, that of 'liberalism' and corporate feelgoodspeak to package horrors beyond human comprehension is something i find fascinating in a terrifying way - and it comes back to what I talked about above with the practice of making sure one's entire identity and personality are as palatable to the tastes of the masses as possible to the point that your individual principles are completely stripped away; it doesn't matter what you say, really, but who you are when you say it.

I've been online since around 2001, but I only have clear memories of what the internet used to be like since roughly 2004 or so. Post 9/11 and the 2003 invasion of Iraq, a lot of what I saw online that really defined internet culture for me was stuff like South Park, Flash games/animations, raunchy humor lampooning W. Bush and the way he represented the USA to the rest of the world. This may not have been representative of the general American sentiment towards the war, but that just goes back to my point re: being able to post/express your views in a space that is largely unregulated and has a high signal:noise ratio plays a pivotal role in defining the cultural trajectory in that space because only certain people were online a lot/had access to a reliable, consistent internet connection either to produce or to consume whatever was produced. Now, the inverse is true, mostly because the general public exists sort of everywhere 'online' in some fashion or the other, even if they don't want to be there. The inverse is true for the aforementioned ratio as well, in that now there is so much noise that whatever signal is produced is largely mutated or drowned out before you get a chance to pass on your message, or express an idea. I think this is what we can term as the 'flattening' of culture, or what passed for 'culture' online. If we think about the internet as a simple system of input ---> [internet] ---> output, we've now far passed the threshold to which the internet can sort of handle any input in a way that allows it to process or generate meaningful output. regarding the mechanism with which we've sort of gotten used to throwing stuff at the internet as sort of a vague corollary to Plato's idea of mimesis (in that it's a mimicry or reflection of external culture), how can it be compared to what is now essentially autocannibalism? What is external culture, stuff that exists past/outside the internet that isn't immediately tainted or consumed by it and then spat out as something barely resembling itself? this process of self-consumption and mutation imo has gotten more and more frequent and radical where essentially the process itself acts to strip out any meaning from whatever input it receives and therefore whatever output is generated inherits this meaninglessness.