Cyberspace and Megalopolis
CrowdSource 10.14.2024
Welcome to CrowdSource, your weekly guided tour of the latest intellectual disputes, ideological disagreements, and national debates that piqued our interest (or inflamed our passions). This week: the new culture inside our screens.
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Is Culture Stuck?
This question dominates a lot of commentary these days. Consider the dozens of replies to Katherine Dee’s WoC essay from last week.
Dee’s claim: “Culture isn’t stagnating; it’s evolving in ways that we’re struggling to recognize and appreciate.” Dee points to new cultural forms — novel-length fanfic, multiplatform Internet personas, vaudevillesque Tik Tok comedians — which are all native to cyberspace.
Dee has attracted a few critics:
Blame Capitalism. Critic
writes: “What if it is possible to lament that a beloved medium, one worth preserving, is deteriorating (largely because of market forces that it’s totally possible to resist) AND remain open to the idea that new forms of culture emerge all the time?” She elaborates: “I think market forces — namely, big publishers choosing to publish worse, wispier, and less robust fiction — are definitely responsible for the stagnation of fiction, in terms of its quality.”Too Trendy. Musicologist
laments: “Last week, a highly touted essay announced that, hey, it’s okay that the novel and film are dying, because (wait for it) … we now have cooler online stuff, like Instagram twerking videos and Twitter shitposting. … According to this emerging theory, influencers are themselves works of art — but you and I are just not savvy enough to grasp it yet.”Niche Culture. The Mind Scourge says: “Stuck culture isn’t that nothing new is being created, but rather that what remains of mass culture is stagnant. Niche — which is what the Internet is all about — [is] flourishing. … There’s space here for whatever interest imaginable. But it doesn’t scale. You can have a million followers on here, and yet be mostly invisible out in public.”
Megalopolis and Cultural Renewal
Worry over cultural decadence also drives the conversation around Francis Ford Coppola’s new film, Megalopolis.
The 120 million-dollar passion project was predicted to be either the tombstone of Coppola’s career, or a sign of an American renaissance. Hopeful scribblers can’t resist believing that it’s the latter. But they also can’t quite convince themselves that it was a great film:
“More a success than failure,” is
’s assessment. “Hollywood, the realm of retreads, has little to offer us anymore, and it seems we are going to choke on sequels of sequels and ever-duller IP ... Coppola cannot arrest this decline ... Creativity will arise elsewhere, from what has not been captured by sclerotic conglomerates. There is still a hunger for what is new and unusual. What is stuck can always come unstuck. Dynamism isn’t dead yet. Coppola is right about that.”“Floridly and brazenly youthful,” says movie critic Richard Brody. And yet: “The contradictions at the heart of Megalopolis — the incompatibility of the order of art and the loose ends of life, the artist’s unifying imperatives versus society’s centrifugal uncertainties — remain unexamined, unexplored, merely papered over in a mighty paean to harmony and progress through reason and inspiration. Still, for a hundred and twenty million, a kid can dream big.”
“Really, really interesting,” lauds
. He loves Coppola’s idea. Coppola’s execution, not so much: “The fact that Coppola intuited his way to a story that’s genuinely timely and shot through with complex political resonances but then just couldn’t quite make it work as cinematic art — well, that itself is a signifier of our times.”
From the Crowd
David Nassar on the podcast episode “Human Dignity and Beyond,” with
and :
Listening to
’s and ’ debate the rationale for a belief in human dignity made me think of ’s 2018 book Identity. Specifically, chapters 6 and 7 get into a similar discussion as the podcast. There is a lot in the book that digs into this meaty question of where our understanding of dignity comes from, but I'll quote one part about the implications of our inability to agree on the rationale for it.“The problem with this [expressive individualism] understanding of autonomy is that shared values serve the important function of making social life possible. If we do not agree on a minimal common culture, we cannot cooperate on shared tasks and will not regard the same institutions as legitimate: indeed we will not even be able to communicate with one another absent a common language with mutually understood meanings.”
Fukuyama goes on to point out that nationalism is a response to extreme autonomy. This got me to thinking that the idea of dignity was necessary for the development of the nation-state. The foundation was laid by Christianity in the West but then used by those with national interests to provide a rationale for the state. You can’t build the idea of a nation on slaves, they need autonomy.
This doesn’t change, to my mind, the contribution of Christian belief about fundamental human dignity nor does it diminish the contribution of philosophical thought that explores this discussion. What it does suggest to me is that when those who don’t believe in God, ask where the rationale for human dignity comes from they may have exposed something dangerous in Western history in the last 300 years. They may have exposed that either there is not a clear answer at all or that it is built on a very weak foundation that needs nationalism to support it, which can be exploited for all number of things.
John Wilson on “Why We Need Nightmares,” by
:
I have a hard time giving credence to anyone who does what they do but cannot articulate why they do it. Usually that’s a good indication they don't even realize what they are doing ... such is the wisdom of crowds.
[…]
I was imagining the anecdotes of people I care about, who don’t really engage with the fact they will die, and they don't really know what happens to them afterwards. (Knowing, not as a factual knowing, but as a confidence in conviction knowing.) These friends seem to me to be living shadow lives ... constantly in denial and seeking distraction from the hard realities of life. They are very much all for the here-and-now. But they do not know how to grieve when a loved one dies, they avoid pain and suffering at all costs, they prefer their soma, to borrow from Huxley.
At best these friends when asked, allude to some variation of Moralistic Therapeutic Deism, the sharpest of the bunch insist they are Atheists, but the contradictions left untouched are too many to count.
So, I guess that is the question ... what is an example of someone engaging an underlying feeling without words?
See you next week!
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I found Gioia’s response sort of (disappointingly) dismissive. I also think he missed the point. I don’t mean “slop," the worst engagementbait, but rather am exploring relatively novel storytelling forms native to the Internet. I maintain they’re real & important and I don't think handwaving it away with "Uh, she's saying influencers showing their ass on TikTok is art, *eyeroll*" is going to change their prominence.
I have mixed opinions about Megalopolis. We hear people compare ancient Rome and modern America, so it's interesting to see a filmmaker portray something like the Cataline conspiracy in New York. Coppola just tried to do too much with one film. I think the Roman allegory, and elements like homages to Fritz Lang, would have worked fine without sci-fi bits like stopping time and discovering a new element a la Ayn Rand. I'm sure it made sense in Coppola's head; unfortunately, the rest of us can't see completely inside it.