Book Review: "Blank Space"

“This is Bach, and it rocks/ It’s a rock block of Bach/ That he learned in the school/ Called the school of hard knocks” — Tenacious D

Has culture stagnated, at least in the United States? There are a number of prominent writers who argue that it has. For example, Adam Mastroianni blames cultural stagnation on risk aversion resulting from longer lives and lower background risk:

Experimental History

The Decline of Deviance

People are less weird than they used to be. That might sound odd, but data from every sector of society is pointing strongly in the same direction: we’re in a recession of mischief, a crisis of conventionality, and an epidemic of the mundane. Deviance is on the decline…

Read more

a month ago · 1950 likes · 248 comments · Adam Mastroianni

Ted Gioia, meanwhile, blames risk-averse entertainment companies for monopolizing content with IP and using dopamine-hacking algorithms to monopolize consumers’ attention:

The Honest Broker

The State of the Culture, 2024

The President delivers a ‘State of the Union’ Speech every year, but that’s a snooze. Just look at your worthy representatives struggling to keep their eyes open. That’s because they’ve heard it all before…

Read more

2 years ago · 8729 likes · 637 comments · Ted Gioia

This being the 2020s, both writers bring plenty of data to support their arguments. I won’t recap it here, but basically, they look at various domains of cultural production like books, movies, music, TV, and games, and they show that:

• Old media products (including sequels, remakes, and adaptations) have taken over from new products.

• Popularity is now more concentrated among a small number of products.

I find that evidence to be fairly convincing. The counterargument, delivered by folks like Katherine Dee and Spencer Kornhaber, is that creative effort has shifted to new formats like memes, short-form videos, and podcasts. I think that’s definitely true, but I can’t help thinking that this explanation is insufficient. Regardless of what’s happening on TikTok, the fact that the cost of making movies has declined by so much should mean that there are more good new movies being made; instead, we’re just getting flooded with sequels and remakes. Something else is going on, and maybe Mastroianni and/or Gioia are on to something.

But anyway, there’s another thinker that I particularly like to read on cultural issues, and that’s David Marx. Marx, in my