Just reading capitalist realism and listened to his talk that was linked in the current perusall reading series and I'd like to start a discussion about his ideas.
One major theme of Fisher seems to be the assessment, that culture has lost its forward momentum, that technology has progressed but culture stalled "we're basically watching 20th century entertainment on ever increasing resolution" or in regards to music that "the terms retro and nostalgia have lost their meaning, because now there is nothing else but them". And I'm not quite sure what to make out of this. One one hand I think this is somewhat plausible that a world, in which everything is instantly accessible and arbitrarily copy-able, would be overwhelmed by nostalgia for a time when there was still new and authentic stuff.
On the other hand, is this really the case? "In 15 years we went from the beatles to punk rock". Starting around 2000 somewhat staying in the genre we went from nu-metal to indie-soft-rock to ... whatever we have now. Idk if this is a good example. But to me this seems less self evident and more like a sort of vibe-ology. A mix of hipster-hopelessness and boomer "back in the day we had real ..." sentiment.
Please share your thoughts!
His music example isn't amazing but look at mainstream music. Here's the nominations for best rock album grammy: AC/DC, Chris Cornell, Foo Fighters, Black Pumas and Paul McCartney. Some of them are literally dead and all are creatively dead. Turn on a radio, stuff sounds exactly like it did 20 years ago, or a purposeful pastiche of what music sounded like 40 years ago.
Movies are the same, all based on 40 year old comics. I think he's pretty on the money.
Does a Grammy nomination really reflect the actual variety of new and interesting music out there though?
No not at all, but it's certainly symptomatic of what he's describing. Ultimately music has had it's barrier of entry lowered so much that there still is wild, exploratory music coming out, but music as it exists for probably 90% of the population is just top 40 so it's worth examining and reasonable to reach this conclusion.
I think movies make for a better example of cultural stagnation.