This is an incredibly myopic view of what's considered "culture." If you're only looking for culture on TV and mass media, then you're going to find products, because that's exactly what those things were designed and optimized to sell. But culture definitely still exists, and it's exactly where we left it: In the genuine interactions between the people around you.
this post was submitted on 06 Dec 2025
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I wasn't considering music or TV, but you've just tickled what I thought OP was talking about. With social media taking off a lot of our culture is online now.
We had a lot of fun sharing jokes and songs and parodies of things etc on YouTube. This gave way to mini-cults as people started getting popular, and started sponsored content. Somewhere along the way people stopped doing it for fun, and it started being "game the system by any means necessary to make it big enough to sell shit".
Its hard to put into exact words my issue, but it makes my soul ache.
Its not that crass commercialisation is dominating music, because that's been the case longer than ive been alive. It just feels like its reached too far. Its in too much of what we do. Maybe its just this generation that will feel this way. The "old folks" are pretty much out of the game and dont understand this newfangled Internet thing, and the kids are growing up in this world and itll just be normal.
The next thing is "ignore it, get offline, touch grass, go to your local bar and meet real people" but even that is tainted now. People you meet have strong opinions that have been planted in them by targeted bots on the Internet. Theres big signs placed all over the walls "FIND US ON SOCIAL MEDIA" because you need an Internet presence for your business to survive, which means they need to be mindful of what they present themselves as to appease the algorithm, and suddenly they're not real places for real people, they're another extension of this near-singular will.
Its too big a concept for me to put into words, and i might be overstating it or missing a core concept, but it scares a tiny bit of me a whole lot.
You don't seem to understand what I mean at all. I mean people who try to make a living from their creative work. Do you think that's still possible?
Of course it is. Has mostly always been that way, will probably be possible for quite some time.
Just not for every artist, also like always.
This. In the golden age of record sales (pretty much the time before tape recoders became a thing), there were also thousands of musicians for each one that could actually live off their art.
Since people love making art even when they don't make money off it, there's always been an oversupply of artists.
Same with all other kinds of entertainment. For each football superstar there's millions of kids who will never earn a cent for playing football. Same with painters, musicians and any other form of art.
I think you’re looking in the wrong places. Culture is everywhere. The mediums and groups of people that propagate culture shift over time, but humans are inherently creative and will always develop it.
Try looking in places where there is a focus on community, connection, and the art itself—not places that focus on producing “content” for profit.
Is Mozart's music culture?
He was doing his stuff almost 100% for profit and was seen as a sell-out by a lot of the musicians at his time. He wrote his songs in German instead of Latin because he wanted to make essentially pop songs that were sung by kids on the street, and the musical establishment derided him for it, because they didn't think what he was making was actually art.
Culture is around all the time, we’ve just denied ourselves the right to use it because we started believing people could own ideas and let copyright/IP laws act as a gateholder.
We will always have art because it is a fundamental human thing to do no matter if we do it for money or just for ourselves. What we lose is the potential output of artists who could make a living making great things all day every day and feed themselves doing it.
What makes you so sure, when there's not even the prospect of making a living from it anymore? Do you think most artists do it as a hobby?
Not as a hobby by choice. They would love to do it and pay the bills but given no other choice they will work some other 9 to 5 and work on their passion in their off time. That's why artists are always taken advantage of so often. They know artists do it because because they love it and can be paid and treated like shit. Just look at the video game industry.
This is very much it. If there's people doing it for free, that pushes the resale value down a lot.
The vast vast vast majority of artists create art with neither expectations of payment nor the ability to do it full time, yes.
Mass market products are still culture.
We all know art is hard, artists gotta starve
The real deal will always be there and never be easy. Fuck "content", fuck entertainment, fuck packaging yourself for sale. To know and be known is the most human thing there is. Genuine self-expression was never commercially viable and isn't going anywhere as long as there are two people to engage with one another. That's art. It's not something you can be "good with LLMs" at, no matter how technically proficient their output
The great superorganic, in modern terminology we might say the metaorganic, its above us all. Personality writ large. That which we learn and share, that which helps us survive into the future.
The question is what the future will look like when culture is created by machines. This is already very evident today with all the social media bots and the logic that directs the attention of the remaining human users. The result is already quite dystopian, don't you think?
In Cultural Relativism the truth is relative. It's not about moralizing right and wrong. That's politics. The problem with current reality is it's not sustainable. The dystopia is the failure, the contraction. We may not survive.
Agreed
Can’t wait for this thread to be deleted as OP realizes he’s a wee bit ignorant
It's not the actors.
It's the writers.