This process infects the process of culture creation very deeply. Capitalism attaches itself to cultural signifiers like a virus and becomes a middle man for all social interaction. New culture usually emerges from scenes of energetic artists who are all immersed in their fields and making similar art. This is the process that’s disrupted by capitalism.
Scenes are formed less because people have less time to immerse themselves and are more atomized, so the social exchange doesn’t happen. When the scenes do form, people are incentivized to use preexisting cultural signifiers rather than create new ones. New signifiers fail to spread the majority of the time, so they’re not as useful to capital.
It’s this process of repeatedly encoding and decoding the same cultural signifiers that Capitalism uses to insert itself into culture like a dog who opens its mouth to get a better grip on the thing in between its teeth. But that process also degrades the signifiers over time like a video tape that’s been recorded over too many times.
Let’s think about Bruno Mars for a trivial example. His music and aesthetic isn’t about innovating any individual parts. The music that he borrows from belonged to its own cultural moment. All of those artists had their own imagery and sounds and life events and political relevance. That music’s meanings had been cemented in people’s minds. Those meanings are decoded into parts (ie funk guitars make you want to dance, the 80’s vocal reverb makes you feel happy, etc), shuffled up (the process of assembling these nostalgic elements into new songs), and then reencoded (the marketing and imagery surrounding the release of those songs). And each time the new meaning becomes less tethered to the original context, which makes the meaning less stable.
I always imagine it as a mycoidal web. This mindless thing that nevertheless manages to expand into all available space, sucking up nutrients as it does so.
I got a lot of this from the paper that the founder of buzzfeed wrote back when he was a Marxist. I’m pretty sure a lot of the theorists cited and discussed in that paper have a bunch of similar writings, particularly Deleuze.
You get the sort of capital and connections required to found buzzfeed and don’t fight the subsequent process. Once you get comfortable enough and immersed among other comfortable people, it takes active effort to retain that class consciousness.
This process infects the process of culture creation very deeply. Capitalism attaches itself to cultural signifiers like a virus and becomes a middle man for all social interaction. New culture usually emerges from scenes of energetic artists who are all immersed in their fields and making similar art. This is the process that’s disrupted by capitalism.
Scenes are formed less because people have less time to immerse themselves and are more atomized, so the social exchange doesn’t happen. When the scenes do form, people are incentivized to use preexisting cultural signifiers rather than create new ones. New signifiers fail to spread the majority of the time, so they’re not as useful to capital.
It’s this process of repeatedly encoding and decoding the same cultural signifiers that Capitalism uses to insert itself into culture like a dog who opens its mouth to get a better grip on the thing in between its teeth. But that process also degrades the signifiers over time like a video tape that’s been recorded over too many times.
Let’s think about Bruno Mars for a trivial example. His music and aesthetic isn’t about innovating any individual parts. The music that he borrows from belonged to its own cultural moment. All of those artists had their own imagery and sounds and life events and political relevance. That music’s meanings had been cemented in people’s minds. Those meanings are decoded into parts (ie funk guitars make you want to dance, the 80’s vocal reverb makes you feel happy, etc), shuffled up (the process of assembling these nostalgic elements into new songs), and then reencoded (the marketing and imagery surrounding the release of those songs). And each time the new meaning becomes less tethered to the original context, which makes the meaning less stable.
I always imagine it as a mycoidal web. This mindless thing that nevertheless manages to expand into all available space, sucking up nutrients as it does so.
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I got a lot of this from the paper that the founder of buzzfeed wrote back when he was a Marxist. I’m pretty sure a lot of the theorists cited and discussed in that paper have a bunch of similar writings, particularly Deleuze.
why would anyone stop being a Marxist?
You get the sort of capital and connections required to found buzzfeed and don’t fight the subsequent process. Once you get comfortable enough and immersed among other comfortable people, it takes active effort to retain that class consciousness.
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