The entirety of capitalism is so much more insidious than just “capitalism buys something original and turns it into pastiche”. For capitalism and everyone living under it, the world is nothing but unrealized profit, waiting to be squeezed out. And once you have squeezed the world, its people and its thoughts for profit once, you squeeze it again and again and again. It’s not just art, it’s the world which has been dying. The world outside and inside us is less and less inspiring and alive than it has ever been. Instead of there being actual youth culture, capitalism sells every youth and every generation the same toys, the same music, the same clothes, but all with the message of “this is your music, your culture, don’t you want to be cool? this is your generation”. instead of actual historical progress the world gets divided by marketing trends, selling the same thing over and over and over again. there is no way in hell anyone could seriously tell me that our current art and media landscape is even a fraction as vital, creative and good as the 60s. That’s when things changed, when the capitalists realized they could sell everything like they did fashion, a year and a trend at a time. And now we’ve come to a point where technical progress has slowed and the (comparably) pure and unfiltered creativity that still managed to exist so many decades ago and that artists used as a well spring of ideas has run dry we’ll get nothing but slop. And the sad thing is that we are the stragglers that still care, for the average person there is no difference between slop and art. They don’t know that there is good music or bad music, or good films and bad films, that there is something more to art and to life than to just consume mindlessly. Maybe it was television that killed everything.

Capitalism’s ability to absorb and commodify culture and criticism is so all-consuming that if the writer of Squid Game knew what was going to happen before season 1, he would have called it out as being too on the nose.

Literally all the unhinged shit Orwell was saying about communism came true but under capitalism. Take an example from him and you can flip it for anglo style capitalism instead.

That’s why I’m a big art nouveau nerd. Authentic creativity is only possible once we’ve addressed Walter Benjamin’s critique in The Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction. Challenging it as a commodity, as a product of academies and patrons, and now as a ponzi scheme. Modernism and proletarian art are strangled by those things. Art should be like a garden city where there’s no clear distinction between the forest and the buildings. Municipally-enabled craftsmanship for public benefit, reflecting the local culture and natural setting, replacing every mass-produced object we can with art that values the real things around us.

It isn’t the endgame of modernism for me but that’s the bare minimum starting point to change the mass perception of art from generic consumption to participating in something radical. The result of my city’s urban forest is that people who know nothing about trees defend our municipal trees, plant them on volunteer days, and vote to expand the green spaces to continue the project that authentically represents their needs. I want that but with stained glass and stone engraving so people who now feel entitled to nature also feel entitled to beauty that only they can produce with the tools provided to them by the public they’re benefiting.

I feel like music is as good as it has ever been right now. Of course the good shit isn’t making money outside of the merch table so it’s a rough time for musicians. There’s amazing shit being written and filmed but they maybe get a couple million viewers/readers at best if it isn’t more Amazon or Netflix slop.

It isn’t that creativity is dying, we all have ideas and sometimes they’re realized quite well. It’s just that capitalism no longer rewards creativity and the energy we have to make our ideas real is depleted by 80 hour work weeks doing the most mindless shit.

This is a real doomer place to be as well… just wanted to put in a few good words for the resiliency of pure creativity. It’s buried alive by capitalism but it is alive down there.

the hopeful trumpets are coming for everything

Now your dreams will never again be so peaceful. You will see capital in your nights, like a nightmare, that presses you and threatens to crush you. With terrified eyes you will see it get fatter, like a monster with one hundred proboscises that feverishly search the pores of your body to suck your blood. And finally you will learn to assume its boundless and gigantic proportions, its appearance dark and terrible, with eyes and mouth of fire, morphing its suckers into enormous hopeful trumpets, within which you’ll see thousands of human beings disappear: men, women, children. Down your face will trickle the sweat of death, because your time, and that of your wife and your children will soon arrive. And your final moan will be drowned out by the happy sneering of the monster, glad with your state, so much richer, so much more inhumane.

—Carlo Cafiero, Summary of Marx’s Capital (1879)

I living in this age we do makes it seem this way, but that doesn’t mean that is the case. Everything is being fabricated/emulated to bend to the existing order- creativity and realness are out there if you look hard enough.

That’s the glass half full side of my brain

OK, people keep saying it seems that way, but if the way it seems is the same as what post people perceive as true, why does the difference matter? If you’re saying I can find creativity in this day and age if I know how to evade a ubiquitous profit-driven system that poisons all humanity, you are telling me to go on a fucking journey and hope I get lucky. How is that in and of itself not inherently wiping out creativity?

That’s the glass half empty side of my brain. And unfortunately that side seems to be much more reasonable, no matter how much it brings the vibe down and makes people uncomfortable. I guess this has helped me understand that it’s really hard to look at technology, unwavering support for capital everywhere and not immediately go full luddite. Because yeah technology is a tool, but what do you do when a tool becomes a system? You get fucking AI painting and writing music

to be less doomer, the Disco Elysium situation is more complicated than just “capital stole it from the developers” https://youtu.be/JGIGA8taN-M