Remix Culture • (raw)
sha256sum: 1d32c490821ad213da8cb8c83774b58846304425950de97dafc22c79252e4f7f
As a prediction, I think this is has some merit, but as a cultural critique this is diarrhetic. The central issue is the elevation of trash and remix culture - which is the crux of the spiritual Dionysian rot of the 2010s and its consequences; social media is remix culture, Roblox is remix culture, and it culminates in an experience like Fortnite, which is a completely incoherent and creatively bankrupt digital experience where you play as a vtuber model and battle Darth Vader at a digital Travis Scott concert, the whole thing serving as an advertising engine to hock washed properties to 13 year olds. It culminates in a culture on and offline full of references and dearth of true experience, it generates Marvel quipslop. The Metaverse died in the crib because it was steeped in the trash economy - Zuckerberg’s vision was not Snow Crash or Cyberdecks or Hologames but the dream of living in an infinite Facebook; the true Metaverse is born not when technology reaches the point of universal abiogenesis, but when people dare to make original work again, because everyone is terminally stuck in the past, referential, morose about it, depressed because nothing new has happened since 2001. But new things have happened - it’s just easier to contextualize technological progress in terms of grift, culture war in terms of the World Wars, geopolitics in terms of Hollywood. This is a distinctly American problem, of course, but by proxy it’s the world’s problem. Slop is not the unbidden horde, Western man, soul is! If there is nothing new, honest, or genuine to imagine, what is the future but the past? And so it makes little sense to me to frame this as an unbidden dialectic against progress or against the rise of true art or whatever. This dialectic is already well underway: production has mass-produced cultural works, reduced them to the lowest common denominator, and centralized them into a grand metaverse, and we call it playstation, we call it Steam, we call it newgrounds. This is history! No, what’s worth noticing is that the unprecedented hatred for modern technology is a seething, deep-seated reaction to what has until now been deemed the march of History, the reduction of identity and experience to the lowest common denominator, and that the traditionalists resisting this movement produce nothing but memecoins and NFTslop and “what if Portal in Mario”. Since the traditionalists are overwhelmingly the pro-AI faction, a very important truth is being missed: there now exists artificial life, and novel forms of art and culture and experience are available today. You do not have to further the slop nexus for this, and in doing so, you are a decade and a half behind the curve. It makes little sense to talk about game engines being easier to use, or the price of visual art going to zero; it’s 2026, a dog could make Fortnite. Dispense with your platonism and make something new. Or play Getting Over Mario at https://glop.it/#release=45685d06-9d75-4508-a243-9c51418bec0b