Society has changed in a way that culture really hasn't caught up with. It's feels like it's becoming more and more stark, at least to me.
I notice this most when I watch any sort of media. We continually fall back on dated tropes that don't materially exist anymore. Yes, there's always been unrealistic elements in fiction and people have always have skewed ideas about the world, but now it seems even some of the most basic assumptions we have about life are completely untrue.
A few examples come to mind. The outsourcing of manufacturing has radically shifted the boundaries of "class" in a way that isn't reflected in Anglophone media. At the same time, certain professions have become intellectual enclaves with quite a high barrier to entry. When I see a television show featuring promising young doctors or fearless firefighters or brilliant scientists or grizzled working class heroes, I can't help but think most people are actually living out something far more like The Office.
The general public has also become less religious and less inclined to marry. Family structures have changed to the point that I struggle to relate when I see a nuclear family on screen. Increasingly young people are not in relationships and find it difficult to court for economic, practical, or social reasons. Just how quaint is it when you're watching a film and you see something simple as a group of friends hanging out in a shared "third space", i.e. somewhere that isn't home or work? Do those places even exist anymore, aside from those designed to siphon money from your pocket?
Counterculture has also strangely ceased to exist as economic options for artists and "alternative" types to survive while being creative dwindle into nothing. It feels like we don't even have useful stereotypes which exemplify certain ways of living, anymore. I don't mind living in an individualistic culture, but what is the point if the individual's choices are reduced to virtually zero?
This idea really hit home with me when watching a recent interview with Martin Scorsese at the British Film Institute. He was reflecting on Taxi Driver, maybe the single best cinematic portrait of an alienated, frustrated loner dealing with his pain in isolation. Scorsese said something which actually got to me, to paraphrase: "Back then this was my idea of a guy who doesn't fit in, is filled with rage, can't fit in to the effortless social interactions around him... unfortunately, now, it seems like most people, maybe two-thirds, are a lot like Travis."
Am I the only one that feels this way? Are we all becoming Travis Bickle?
Yes. I’ve not seen Taxi Driver, so I’ll skip over your analogy, but everyone feels alienated now in a way that they didn’t use to. I disagree with the assertion in that other thread that everything wrong in society and the economy is a post-pandemic side effect, but this definitely is. I always felt like a smartypants genius for having niche hobbies that I could only pursue at home, but it was nice to be able to go out when I wanted to. Now, everyone who was forced to stay home has figured out what I’ve been enjoying all these years, and when I want to go out, there’s nobody there. The people in pubs are either barflies, sex predators, or close-knit groups of friends who don’t want to meet new people. And while my suggestions to my own close-knit group would surely be more fun than the pub, nobody wants to go with me because they aren’t more fun than the amazing fun you can have at home wanking and telling teenage YouTubers to kill themselves (or whatever it is the rest of you do). People use the core of society to kick off and swim into the ocean of opportunity, but now that everyone has done that, there is no core and we’re all just treading water. And some of us, predictably, will drown.
I was talking to an old acquaintance in the gym the other day and he said he realised he now ‘has no friends’. I thought it was pathetic until I realised I don’t either. I don’t seek them out. I have a partner and child, go to work, socialise with my colleagues purely in a work setting, very occasionally go out for a drink with them, come home and look at screens for the rest of the day or exercise.
I don't want to go all tinfoil (I always say that before I go all tinfoil) but I feel like isolation, alienation, and atomisation is fundamentally part of the plan.
It isn't an unintended nasty side effect of the post-industrial neo-liberal hellscape, it's not down to the pandemic (although that likely did worsen it), it's literally a core feature. Isolated people are, quite simply, easier to manipulate. Easier to sell consumer bullshit to. Easier to draw into fake debates about bollocks. Easier to "drive engagement" with.
They want us all to be Travis Bickle, because Travis Bickle is the kind of bloke who, were he alive today, would be either sending all of his money to OnlyFans models for jars of piss, or religiously following Andrew Tate, and that's where the revenue is nowadays.
>>461207 >They want us all to be Travis Bickle, because Travis Bickle is the kind of bloke who, were he alive today, would be either sending all of his money to OnlyFans models for jars of piss, or religiously following Andrew Tate, and that's where the revenue is nowadays.
Why aren't the Travis Bickles of today killing pimps and politicians and how do we fix it?
>>461207 Why would the elites want us to give all our money to independent piss retailers instead of to them? Your theory doesn’t make sense. The only people who would benefit from such a scheme are girl gamers and Big Jar. And I know a guy named Big Jah and he’s not any kind of elite.
It's not like they aren't willing to commit violence, they kill plenty of American high schoolers. And we have occasional ones like that guy killing the MP for Batley. But again, I suspect it is by design that their rage is misdirected in impotent directions.
The people who own the platforms make ridiculous amounts of money off those sorts of new-age celebrity "influencer" types.
That's part of the beauty of it, it allows the elites to hide behind the curtain, keep their influence out of sight and out of mind, while people focus on the public faces who are, essentially, just modern day court jesters. They're still making a killing even from the content that purports itself to be anti-establishment.
Even though the situation that society is in feels quite new, your point about culture being unable to reflect society is I feel, among many other things, to do with that our idea of what 'reality' is, is based more an more on science. As in, the idea that for something to be 'real' and 'valid' it has to be scientifically quantifiable. I'm not talking about astrophysics and chemistry etc., rather I'm talking using data to constantly revise and disprove the ideas we have about our existence.
I think people feel as though great works of art have to react to current experiences and create something new from them, but how is one meant to do that when so many of us have concluded that being devoted to a spiritual belief (be it religion or highly personal understanding of life which doesn't reflect material reality) is just buying into a falsehood that cannot be proven, and doesn't match the modern day standards of relevance?
I'm not saying that artists in the past began by thinking 'alright, I'm going to make something relevant now', but I think their understanding of how the world worked meant that they didn't feel as though their work had to 'quantify' the world they lived in, and I believe that that is the only way people now imagine they could make a really serious piece of art that goes beyond good technique or mere feeling. That they have to live up to a standard that just doesn't have anything to do with art, and feel that they need to view themselves through a lens of scientific observation before they can consider the validity of their personal feelings.
I'm not complaining about an unfair world here, and I know that many problems with the quality of art and media is to do with logistical and institutional things. I am just trying to put into words my view on a specific part of the problem you're talking about.
There's still an awful lot that science can't or hasn't yet figured out how to teach us. Film and literature is a perfect avenue to explore more metaphysical aspects of existence like that, but by its very nature that means it would be more abstract and complex, and thus automatically have less mass market appeal.
Which really, gets to the crux of the matter, I think. You are probably hinting towards exactly this in your last paragraph, but art these days has to be made first and foremost as a business enterprise. It has to "resonate" with ordinary people, or at least just provide them with what they want to see and hear; it's less about provoking thought and interpretation as just plain providing people a temporary relief from boredom.
What we have these days is art as an industry. Individual creativity is limited at the best of times under such circumstances, but compounding the problem is that the economics of the situation mean you only have a pretty small and specific subsection of the populace even capable of entering the arts, and earning a livelihood within that industry. This has been one of the worst disasters of modern times in my opinion. If you look at the problem in journalism where the only people who make it into the profession are posho wankers who could afford to do an unpaid internship, and thus their sheltered worldview is the one we see reflected in the media, it's just the same in the arts.
Look at the music scene. There are scant few grassroots success stories any more- You don't have any Pulps or Artic Monkeyses genuinely making it big from a humble background in a post-industrial wasteland, you just have middle class wankers like Ed Sheeran who came from a well off family already, and could afford to LARP as the starving musician until he got that lucky break of making contact with the right person. And that's even with the accessibility and affordability of the technology we have now that makes a bedroom musician capable of making music completely on par with the most expensive and prestigious LA studios. Just imagine how bad the more classical fields of art are to make a living in.
>>461248 As I said, I'm aware of the institutional problems of making art nowadays, and I do understand it causes more problems for creative people than any philosophical issues would. However, even if we did have a fairer institutional set up for young artists, I think that, especially for visual artists and writers, they would still face the kind of crisis of doubt I was talking about previously, which I believe is enforced by modernity, in whichever system we live by.
But yes, I think the system we have does discourage promising people who would probably otherwise have the strength and will to overcome the problems I brought up, and probably wouldn't have quite such strong nihilism if the material world wasn't so unpromising. But also I think the justifications for the current system come from the same sort of thinking, which disregards things which aren't materially essential, I mentioned in my last post.
>>461288 All you rosbifs care about is reviving indie bands that go "oh oh oh, OH" in slightly regional accents, you haven't got the intellect to appreciate racist novels and films directed by rapists, no wonder you reject my argument.
You're just jealous because we've got legends like the Arctic Chiefs while France's entire contribution to the world is Daft Punk, who are a pair of charlatans anyhow.
