Why Did Pop Culture Get So Boring? With W. David Marx

0:00Are we living in a cultural dark age? Sometime over the last quarter century in America, pop culture went from being innovative and exciting to downright bland and boring. It's become a point of fact that the monoculture died some time ago. But the question now, is anything ever going to replace it? This country was stone cold dead. Good day from Newsweek headquarters at the top of the World Trade Center in New York City. I'm Carlo Versano, and this is another edition of 1600. So today we're talking culture. This year, nearly 75 percent, three quarters of the top grossing movies worldwide were either remakes or sequels.

0:37The top film that is neither of those things? Minecraft, a movie about a video game for children. Last month, the number one country song in America was AI generated, made by an artist that doesn't even exist. Last year, the most talked about artwork was a banana taped to a wall that sold for six million dollars at auction. Four of the top five podcasts in this country are hosted by conservative pundits, including one who's been doing it for going on 20 years. The fifth is a celebrity who interviews other celebrities. So as we approach the end of the first quarter of the 21st century, there's a new book by the cultural critic David Marks, who argues that the last 25 years in America are perhaps best defined by the lack of meaningful art and culture that are being produced.

1:21From soulless corporatized slop to soulless AI slop to fleeting virality, Marx makes the case in a very strong way that pop culture has lost its ability to innovate somewhere along the way, leading to this void that a sort of right wing counterculture has tried with varying degrees of success to fill. So I have David with me now from all the way across the international dateline in Tokyo, where it is already tomorrow. David, thanks so much for getting up early and joining us. Thanks for having me. So the book is called Blank Space, A Cultural History of the 21st Century. The title, a wink to a very well-known Taylor Swift song, one of her bigger hits.

2:04What do you mean by blank space in the context of the book's thesis? So I started with the idea of just doing a cultural history of the 21st century the way that people used to write books about the 50s or 60s or 70s. And in trying to define these 25 years, I think one of the things that people started noticing in the middle was that there were not the kind of cultural changes, the epoch making cultural changes that people used to look back on. And the 20th century is a way of marking time and understanding how aesthetics and things are changing. And so this idea of a blank space was that feeling of being in a blur where nothing really feels like it's moving forward.

2:44And as I looked at this 25 years, what it really came down to was there's so much cultural activity and there's no question that culture is still playing such a big part in our lives. And so this is not a death of culture or an end of culture. It's simply that culture used to be very, very focused on cultural innovation itself, that musicians wanted to create new sounds, that filmmakers were interested in new techniques. Painters were obviously interested in expanding what painting means. and that has really disappeared. And so culture itself is being, is very successful as a form of distraction and entertainment.

3:18It's very successful as a way for people making money. There are more billionaires in culture than ever before. And culture is very, very strong as a vehicle for political action on both the left and the right. It's just that there's a blank space where that innovation used to be. And I think we've taken for granted how important that is for cultural health or what we look to culture for. No, that's a perfect encapsulation and sort of the lead into my my first question to you, which is so Hollywood seems to me to suffer from this sort of like collapse of cultural cachet. I mean, pop music, I guess you could argue maybe beats the movies, but this is the paradox to me.

3:58Right. It's never been easier to make stuff. You know, content is everywhere. Right. Content is king, as they say. You could shoot a feature length film on your iPhone. You can upload it to YouTube. And in theory, that film could be seen by more people that would see it in a movie theater with a distributor. So why hasn't that sort of lowering of barriers to entry produced more good work, I guess is the question. That is absolutely the paradox in our time. And, you know, it's good to remember, and I don't want to be too romantic about the 20th century to say that Hollywood was maximizing for innovation, or that pop music that manufactured pop idols, that new kids on the block were incredible, and now the Backstreet Boys were let down.

4:40You know, obviously there's been like a lot of very kitschy culture that is made for money throughout time. I think the difference is there were people on the margins who were rejecting that and saying, OK, we can figure out a way to get these tools of production and make something more interesting and force the market to move in our direction. And so, you know, again, the Scorsese or Coppola or even George Lucas at the very beginning. I mean, those were not people who they were they were using the studio system and they were using Hollywood to get done what they wanted. But they weren't obviously there to make Hollywood a lot of money at the beginning.

5:13And so I think some of it is that there was a little bit of when it was hard to do something, it had more value and more people in some ways wanted to do it. And so once everyone could make a video, then making a video is not as valuable anymore. But more than that, it's that if you used to want to make a film, it was so hard that only the people who really cared about film as a medium would end up making something. It's like a built-in filter. Exactly. And so basically you're filtering out all of the people who are not going to try to maximize the film as a medium. And you're getting more and more people who are interested in pushing the form forward.

5:53I, you know, once, especially YouTube shows up and, and again, YouTube seemed like a place where, yes, you can make a film and distribute it and you'd be more professional artistic content. But what people notice is that they just talked to a camera and said, I went to forever 21 and here's the things I bought today. You got amazing response. And then as soon as the, the ad revenue sharing program popped up, it's like, oh, this is a job now. And so there's just an entire generation of young people who saw creative activity like video making or music making as a pathway to a career as an independent person outside of the corporate world who are not interested at all in the pushing the art of the medium forward, which is fine.

6:37And so, I mean, at some level, which is you get all this activity, but it's just, there's been, there's more people making things, but very much smaller percent of those people are interested in the artistry of it, which is, Again, something we used to rely on. They're there to get their bag, as the kids would say. Right. Whereas George Lucas was trying to make an incredible saga in Star Wars, and he ended up getting his bag. And or the degree to which they the way they were trying to impress each other or, you know, move up in status was to to make the coolest film or to do something that has never been done before.

7:12Whereas today it's very much. Yeah. I mean, what the dream is for a young person never have to have a corporate job. And so being an influencer or making YouTube videos is something where they can achieve, they can get the money and the glory at a very, very young age. And a lot of it's just about being relatable and not about being artistic. I remember there was a survey a couple of years ago that asked a bunch of, I guess they would be Gen Zers, a bunch of teenagers and preteens, what they wanted to be, what was the top career path that they wanted to be. And it was influencer by a wide margin, which to me was so depressing because when we were growing up, at least it was like astronaut or something.

7:53But I don't want to turn this into the kids these days. But at one point in the book, you have this great quote that I wrote down. With creators no longer required to pursue artistic excellence, culture became a lowest common denominator battle for attention, end quote. This to me is the crux of it, right? We have supplanted cultural innovation, as you say, with this economic model that rewards attention, it awards virality, and at the same time, the influence of our institutions has completely collapsed. So I get my question is, if you asked a working artist today, whether it's a screenwriter, a painter, whatever, do they value more a critical acclaim?

8:35Right. Would it be better for them and for their work to get a rave review in The New York Times or a mega viral TikTok? What do you think they'd say? I mean, I think what they would say is that they would love to get the critical review. it's just that you know so many artists who have the purest intentions who are making the great interesting art maybe they don't they get the review and it's it doesn't go anywhere from there it it is not fulfilling the way it used to be and so you know the the way to think about this is an ecosystem problem which is you could still have the creators trying to be creative and you could still have the mass market maybe not interested in what they're doing but it's that part in between which is there used to be critics who would go out of their way to overpraise the innovation on the margins and bring it into the system.

9:20And now it's like, if we have a kind of criticism that says, well, our job is really to think about this as sports. What are the major leagues of culture? Let's cover Taylor Swift because Taylor Swift, it doesn't matter if it's good or bad, it's people listen to her and therefore we need to cover it very seriously. Then, you know, even, even if they're trying to do things where they look at innovation on the margins, their, their attention and their space is being crowded out as well by the big, big artists. And so I think what to answer your question, I still believe in the pure intentions of a lot of creators.

9:52I mean, I think that there are creators who go into the system now who are not interested in innovation because that's not why, that's not the models they're following. That's not the people that they looked up to and said, wow, I want to do that. We're not, you know, Scorsese or Joan Didion or something, they were, you know, influencers on the internet. But at the same time, what are the rewards if you're being a really creative person and pursuing innovation, and it's a small audience, and you're not getting paid well, and you're not getting that much critical attention, then what are you getting?

10:24I mean, and the other problem with this compared to in the previous century is everything is quantified now. And so it used to be that you could have a cool indie film that the right people knew, but it wasn't quantified of only 10 ,000 people have seen this. It was just the vague sense of the right people have seen this and that's what's good about it. And now if you have a video on the internet that the right 10 ,000 people have seen, but it compared to a 20 million view video, it just looks like loser content. It looks like something that is not as good or popular. And the other thing that indie culture had going for it in the 90s, in a sense, was this myth that if only distribution was better, more people would like this or enjoy it.

11:03It's just because they have trouble getting it to people. That's why it's not popular. But now there's no more excuse. I mean, anything you do could be seen by almost 2 billion people instantly online. So if it's not popular, we just assume, well, the internet's giving it a chance that it's not very good. Right. This goes into the algorithms thing, too. We're going to talk about in a second. I want to talk about one of the points you make. So it seems to me like, I don't know if we agree on this or not, you tell me, but the most interesting sort of subcultures or countercultures right now seem to be on the right.

11:38And I'm not saying that these subcultures are creating like good work or necessarily even interesting work, but they at least seem to be like where the heat of things are. Like it's where people are pushing boundaries, you know, whether it's, you know, 4chan and those sort of like dark web message boards or, you know, the dime square movement here in lower Manhattan, which is sort of fizzled out, but, you know, it was a big thing for a couple of years there during the pandemic. I guess you could argue sort of like the manosphere and the podcast world that Joe Rogan kind of runs. How did the left or liberals sort of lose the cultural ground to the right wing?

12:13I mean, that to me is just remarkable. So that in some ways is inevitable because normie, centrist, liberalism won the 1990s. And so you have the 20th century in which artists and subcultures all get their cultural energy from being transgressive against polite society. And polite society was parochial and generally conservative. It wasn't conservative the way you would say conservative now. But it was big business oriented and serious and sober. And so punk and the counterculture of the 60s, all of these things are rebelling against that and find this energy of saying polite society is suppressing us and we have to express ourselves.

13:00And that was exciting. And that transgressiveness really gets baked into consumer society. And then in the 90s, you get where alternative music and indie film become the main center of American culture. And then under Clinton, this kind of centrist liberalism becomes the dominant force. And so by the early 21st century, it's very clear that economic and cultural capital are really with knowledge workers who tend to be liberal. And so that from there, it flips everything where the transgressive act is to be politically incorrect. OK, so the suppression now is happening in this kind of liberal norms of inclusivity and nicety.

13:42And so young people, as they want to be transgressive for transgression's sake, it's really difficult to do that from the left. It's much more easy to do that from the right. And so, you know, the first, it's not necessarily that this started with Gavin McInnes' advice, but he was an early kind of person who succeeded at this, which is the Vice magazine in creating this dirtbag, hipster, hedonistic lifestyle in the early 21st century. It was very apolitical. The Indie Sleaze movement, right. It was, yeah, this beginning of kind of what's now called Indie Sleaze. But, you know, that was a movement that was very apolitical.

14:20I mean, it's almost this, the drugs were all about, you know, not thinking at all. In a sense, it was just very self-destructive and he mystic. And he started slipping in a lot of, you know, playing footsie with ironic bigotry and ironic racism and a little bit of pro Nazi things and kind of seeing how far he could push it to the degree, which then he was, you know, writing articles for the American conservative, trying to say that I'm going to convert young people to conservatism. That was seen as a big prank. But that he, I think, very early identified that the transgressiveness was much easier and more impactful from the right.

14:59And then 4chan, I think that, you know, those sites, too, were just people anonymously being terrible. And they just tended to realize that being racist or bigoted was a better way to do that than to be, you know, Marxist or something, you know, hard on the left. And so there's just something, I think, inherent when liberalism became the norms of polite society, then transgressiveness is just going to be a bit easier on the right. Now, the difference, I think, in the 20th century is we look back at these subcultures and countercultures and we say, wow, they were incredible because they led to all these things that ended up in consumer culture.

15:38There's no Apple computers without the counterculture, right? And so it's very easy to see the positive influence of it. At the time, obviously, these groups, you know, Teddy Boys or, you know, even hip hop or something were seen as not good influences on society. It's just later they became good. But it's because the creative class and the people in the media always found something really admirable about what was going on in the margins and brought it into society. I think one of the issues now is that these right wing subcultures are very hard to bring into consumer society. And so they've kind of stayed subcultural.

16:16And with that, it just feels like it's not refreshing the system the way that the countercultures in the 20th century did. But it's just so interesting to me because it's like these conservative influencers, you follow them on Twitter or X or whatever, and they're basically just like parroting the talking points of the ruling class of the president. It's fascinating to me because it's like we had this liberal cultural hegemony for so long. And now, as we were just talking about, Gen Z, it's cooler to be a conservative than a liberal, which is crazy to me. Growing up, the lamest thing you could be as a Republican.

16:49Right. But now, as you just mentioned, you know, the left is sort of full of these sort of like preening moralists. The right is at least kind of like making funny memes, I guess. My question here, to the extent I have a question, is aren't memes sort of where the cultural output, the cultural heat is now, like for better or worse? yeah i mean there there's that uh there's a the kind of meta meme that the left can't meme right that you know memeing itself is somehow uh the right wing is in our form i guess yeah um and so yeah i mean look i this book was public this book was published to you know in november 2025 and i had to stop i had to put my pin down at some point so they could publish it and it was about april 2025 but um you know the book ends with trump being inaugurated and a lot of people talking about resistance is cringe and it is cool to be right wing.

17:39And I think that's a big difference between now in 2016. In 2016, the election of Trump in some ways made the professional class and consumer economy all double down on resistance and anti-Trumpism. And now there was much more ambiguity about that, just I think because resistance did become old hat in a way. Right. But I would say there's a big difference between the beginning of this year and the end of this year, which is that I don't know if I would say it's as clear anymore that being right wing is cool. And in exactly what you said, which is that once the right took political power again, well, it's really hard to make the argument that, you know, we're fighting the system.

18:21But at the same time, I mean, I think at least on the right, the understanding is that these liberal values have infected everything. So even if we have political power as the right, then we can't change. The Libs still own the culture. Yeah. The Libs like own people's brains. And so therefore we have to like keep fighting. But yeah, it does become more and more ridiculous just as not only do you have the political power on the right almost solidly, you know, across all the branches of government in the United States, but then also the tech platforms, which had been a form of resistance in the past, or at least really were proponents of liberal values, of also, you know, they're there at the inauguration bowing down to Trump as well.

19:02So it's hard to look at society and say that, yeah, really, this is this big liberal conspiracy. But and then, you know, some of the fracturing on the right, I think, is coming out of that, which is that Trump built this big tent in 2024, you know, across whether it's, you know, the manosphere or really clear, you know, Groyper kind of hardcore right wing, Barstool conservatism, just this whole big group all based on this anti-liberal sentiment. But then the problem is once you take power, that kind of falls apart because they all have their own interests. And now it's about, you know, what should Trump be doing in power rather than just fighting the bad guys and liberals?

19:43Right. And you're seeing, you know, in polling now, You're seeing all of the not all of them, but a big chunk of these young, you know, young people who probably weren't necessarily Republicans who swung towards Trump last year are breaking with him, probably for some of the points that you mentioned, which is like it's just it's not cool to be like a cheerleader for the president. You know, also plenty of other reasons for, you know, because of Trump of who he is. But I want to stick with something you said about the tech platforms. How much of the problem that you have sort of astutely diagnosed in this book is just that we have let these algorithms wash over us and just run our lives, right?

20:19The tech platforms killed off boredom, right? All of our consumption of art and culture now is just the infinite doom scroll, art, politics, satire, comedy. It's all condensed into just the same feed. but boredom i mean to me boredom is what births creativity like all of my most creative moments happen you know when i'm either walking down the street not listening to my airpods or you know just kind of thinking right it's like we've we've given up on thinking yeah i mean so uh i agree i i think that the algorithms have not helped and you know khalachika's got this great book filter world that it's specifically what an algorithm does to your taste you know compared to the past.

21:04The thing that was really useful about doing this book to be 2001 to 2025 is that the algorithms, let's say, really dominate our cultural experiences from the middle of the 2010s forward, or maybe, you know, slightly earlier, but especially with TikTok, you know, purely algorithm driven platform that is much later in time. I think that a lot of these problems started before you can blame the algorithms and that you can only see that once you go back and look at it. And so the algorithms and the tech platforms have, in the fact that they were no longer a sideshow to culture, but the center of culture certainly exacerbated these trends.

21:42But before that, there was already a movement against the kind of innovation that I'm talking about. So, I mean, just even in the early 2000s, way before algorithms, before anyone had a smartphone, TMZ, the internet was this place for niche interests. And then you get the kind of wave of Paris Hilton and TMZ. And suddenly the internet is really getting its growth by being a gossip site instead, you know, an engine for gossip rather than for niche interest. So those things happened much earlier. But it does seem like algorithms have made it worse. And I think people are now really trying to figure out how to move away from it.

22:25And I keep hearing people say things like, I can't wait till I'm rich enough not to have a smartphone. And I think about that a lot. And I know some extremely successful people who don't have a smartphone and have a guy who has a smartphone. Yeah, exactly. That's the marker of like real success now, right? Like you're not actually tied to any of this stuff. Exactly. So I think I think that that to me says that, you know, tastes are we've we've peaked in terms of how much the algorithms can can control everything. And obviously, if you're a passive consumer, you're going to still be sucked into this.

22:59But I do think there's a movement that people realize this is this is not healthy and good. And there's some movement away from it. We just had on the tech critic Ed Zitron. I don't know if you follow his work, but he's a big sort of A.I. AI skeptics. And we were talking about, you know, is maybe the upshot of this sort of weird moment we're in right now is everything just becomes AI slop and people are just like, you know what, I can't tell what's real or fake. It's all a trap. I don't, I'm just, I'm done with this. I agree. So the counter argument to your thesis that I've seen out there sort of is that, you know, you argue that cultural innovation is dead because the internet and tech sort of like fractured things to a degree, pushing us into these silos, as we just talked about, that there's no more monoculture, but isn't that, you know, pluralism in itself a form of innovation, right?

23:46The argument is like, you know, you can find any niche subculture you want on the internet. You don't need the arbiters of taste. You don't need the New York Times, you know, critic to tell you what's quote unquote, you know, good and worth your time. What do you sort of say to that? So my last book, Status and Culture, goes into this in more detail. But I think one of our myths about culture and art is that we look at it and we think we're having this pure experience with the thing itself. A good song is just a good song. A good TV show is a good TV show. But the social context is so important for imbuing value in artworks.

24:21And so, so much of loving some new band or some new film is just the groundswell of knowing that people with the same taste have also seen the same thing and like it. And it's an unconscious process. So it's not necessarily that we're all waiting for other people to say it's good before we think it's good. But if you have a buffet where everything is good and you have your own thing, but you don't know what everyone else is eating and you don't know if they think it's good. It's just a kind of isolating atomized experience. And so that social framework for culture is so key. And so if you have this big pluralistic, what I call the omnivore monoculture, there's like everything's in it.

25:00You can listen to country. You can listen to rap. you listen to techno, you listen to rock, whatever it is. But no one, you don't know if anyone else is listening to the same things or liking the same things, then it all just feels a little like a blur. And I think that's been the issue that we live in a time in which there's no narrative of this was in and then this was in and this was in, or there's fewer of those markers. And I think we've underestimated again, how much in the 20th century, when we look back, like uh those markers were what what gave us the story that made us feel like there was some sort of cultural progression and i'm watching uh beatles anthology again for like i don't know the sixth time on disney right now and i mean that whole story is about this band that you know they did this song and then they added feedback and they did this song where they added indian music you know so it's an entire story of cultural innovation and you're watching your And that's why the Beatles story is the best pop culture story of all time, because you're watching the entire 60s happen within a band.

26:04And that band was slightly reacting, but they were also the band that pushed these things forward. The Indian things came into music through the Beatles. The Beatles weren't reacting to another trend. And so if you have everything and you can have everything at all time and you don't have any kind of sense of narrative, then culture just feels less interesting is the problem. It reminds me of that great scene in Mad Men when Don Draper gets the, you know, his girlfriend or his wife, hands him the LP for, he puts on Tomorrow Never Knows and he just doesn't get it. He can't even get through the whole song, right?