hard times

Ever fret that we're living through a time of terrible cultural stagnation? Is it just you that's getting old, or is the music the kids are listening to really that shit? Why, what happened? These essays cover some similar ground, and the conclusions both reach are not a little depressing.

Mark Fisher's blog on the end of history and CGI spectre of the 2012 Olympics.

"Jameson and Baudrillard understood that this user-generated content, together with the concomitant retreat of the cultural elite that has enabled it, would not lead to new kinds of creativity, but to pastiche and retrospection. Just as the capitalist language of ‘diversity’ is a cover for new modes of homogeneity."

Alan Kirby's essay on pseudo-modernism.

"This pseudo-modern world, so frightening and seemingly uncontrollable, inevitably feeds a desire to return to the infantile playing with toys which also characterises the pseudo-modern cultural world. Here, the typical emotional state, radically superseding the hyper-consciousness of irony, is the trance – the state of being swallowed up by your activity. In place of the neurosis of modernism and the narcissism of postmodernism, pseudo-modernism takes the world away, by creating a new weightless nowhere of silent autism."