Tech Is Eating Culture for Breakfast
There was a post on Farcaster recently talking about the movie Dazed & Confused and the time difference between when it was set and when it was released.
In many ways, it’s true.
As a teenager in the 1990s, the seventies felt like a lifetime ago. It was my parents’ era of flares and platform boots, vinyl records and novelty pop songs. It had little in common with the world I was growing up in.
For my children, looking back on the nineties probably feels the same. The pre-Internet world might as well be a hundred years ago.
Roll back two decades to the mid-2000s, though, and things look very familiar.
There’s a great article from Paul Skallas that talks about how culture has become stuck in the digital age:
Tech hasn’t so much frozen popular culture, though, as eaten it for breakfast.
It’s no surprise that Oasis, one of the last British bands to ride a cultural zeitgeist, have attracted so much attention for their reunion shows.
Now that we’re all creating our own soundtracks from the entire history of recorded music via Spotify and Apple Music, the chances of another band having the impact of someone like The Beatles seems impossible.
The same goes for all other areas of popular entertainment.
Nowadays, culture is curated for us algorithmically based on our likes and interests, not defined for us from above.
Our tech is shaping our influences on a very personal level, which is detaching us from our wider culture.
And because everything is available digitally for all-time, nothing feels like it’s of its time.
When movies made ten years ago look the same as movies made today, it’s hard to feel time moving on.
I thought this was part of growing older; that my parents must’ve felt the same way, but I don’t think it is.
If someone travelled back in time from 2034 to today, I bet you’d be hard pressed to tell they were from the future.