Your Cultural Stagnation Starter Pack
+ my notes on what's happening
One of my favorite topics lately is whether our culture is stagnating, or if we’re all just doing that thing people do when they hit their late 30s or early 40s, find a little “expertise” and “platform,” and suddenly decide the whole world peaked the moment they stopped listening to new bands.
There’s even been polling on this and apparently everyone thinks culture is worse in the 2020s. Respondents selected it as the “worst” (or among the worst) when asked about their opinion on modern culture for movies, fashion, music, etc.
But:
We’ve never had more art being made
We’ve never had more tools to make it
We’ve never had more access to everything
If you think this is a fascinating topic, and would like to "do your own research” as the kids say, here’s the best of what I found.1
Your Cultural Stagnation Starter Pack
1. Ted Gioia
He’s basically the spirit animal of the “culture is dying” movement and writes about it constantly.
Gioia’s central thesis: the market loves the past more than the present, and that’s suffocating new art.
2. Derek Thompson — The Monoculture / Stagnation Files
Derek Thompson used to be at The Atlantic (and they love this topic) and Derek writes or talks about this a lot.
“Is Pop Culture Worse Than Ever?” (Plain English podcast)
A lively walk through the cultural-doomer argument.
“A Grand Unified Theory of Cultural Stagnation” (podcast with Adam Mastroiannisee more below). Thompson + Mastroianni team up to map out how we got here and what it means.
3. “Is This the Worst-Ever Era of American Pop Culture?” — Spencer Kornhaber (The Atlantic, 2025)
A huge reported piece (at The Atlantic!) where Kornhaber interviews all the cultural doomers… and then gently disagrees with them. My favorite thing on the topic.
4. “The Decline of Deviance” — Adam Mastroianni
A fun, sharp explanation of why weirdness feels rarer: visibility + risk + norms = “risk-less uniqueness.”
5. Why Culture Has Come to a Standstill - Jason Farago (NY Times, 2023)
The article argues that culture feels stale not because creativity has vanished, but because the systems that distribute it reward safe, familiar work and make even new art feel recycled.
6. Filterworld — Kyle Chayka (2024)
Algorithms flatten everything. This is why every coffeeshop across the world looks the same. I like this book, it’s good!
7. Blank Space — W. David Marx (2025)
Post-2000 culture hasn’t really invented many new genres but is mostly remixing. I just started this book earlier this week, and it came out a few weeks ago.
3 Reasons Why Culture Has Stagnated
Here’s a summary of their arguments:
1. Markets reward safety, not surprise
Streaming, private equity, and consolidation turned culture into a risk-averse business. Studios, labels, and investors want predictable outcomes. Artists and creators are pushed toward formats that already work.
New art costs money
Old art is already paid for
Nostalgia has a built-in audience
Sequels and reboots outperform experiments
This is Gioia’s core argument. The modern culture industry behaves like a rental property portfolio: keep squeezing what you already own.
2. Algorithms flatten taste
Algorithms serve:
more of what you already like
at the tempo you already like
in the aesthetic you already like
The system is optimized for comfort food, not risk. New things are downgraded because it disrupts engagement. On the opposite side, familiarity keeps you scrolling.
3. Social visibility makes weirdness risky
We live in a hyper-visible world where everything gets screenshotted and judged. Every deviation becomes a debate and every misstep becomes a quote-tweet. This is Mastroianni’s argument. It’s risk-less uniqueness, and people want to stand out without being called out.
3 Reasons Why Culture Hasn’t Stagnated
1. The cool stuff moved to the edges
K-pop, hyperpop, SoundCloud rap, microgenres, anime-adjacent electronica, weirdo TikTok comedy, Scandinavian crime, Korean thrillers.
The center looks stale
The edges are thriving
Global culture is outrunning American culture
2. The forms changed
Culture is no longer defined by albums, novels, Oscar-bait films, or big radio hits.
It’s now defined by:
short-form video
memes
lore and world-building
multi-platform storytelling
maximalist editing
remix culture
We keep measuring cultural innovation with 1990 metrics.
3. The 2020s produced some of the best mainstream hits in decades
Examples:
Everything Everywhere All at Once
Barbie and Oppenheimer
Beyoncé’s Renaissance and Cowboy Carter
Olivia Rodrigo, Chappell Roan, Taylor Swift
But it’s true that the big stuff got even bigger. But as Derek Thompson noted in his interview with Mastroianni, fewer and fewer artists own more and more of the market.
My take…
I keep circling these three ideas:
1. Culture creation is thriving, just not from America
We are not the center of global taste anymore.
K-pop, Korean dramas, Japanese animation, European noir, Afrobeats, Latin pop.
These places are experimenting, they are culturally confident, and they still believe in ambition, scale, and newness.
2. America’s culture feels smaller because it is smaller.
Fragmented. Personalized. Micro-targeted. Smaller doesn’t mean worse, but the production and impact is muted.
We will never again have a “Seinfeld moment” or a “Thriller moment.”
Now culture looks like:
niche fandoms
tiny subcultures
private Discords
algorithmic rabbit holes
micro-platform celebrities
But perhaps we “perfected” the comedy genre with The Office or Friends and now we’re actively perfecting short-form video. But new stuff like Yellowstone keeps chugging away. I’m sure we’ll look back at this time with some fondness, and identify a few things that we missed while in the middle of it.
3. America got distracted…
We are absorbed by:
politics that never end
phones that never stop pinging
work that bleeds into every hour
Big cultural movements require leisure, community, and shared references.
We do not really have those anymore. Or we have them, but in different worlds, on different platforms, with almost no overlap.
4. But we also know too much…
We have enough ideas. Really too many ideas, surrounded by too many opinions. Every thought comes pre-loaded with commentary, hot takes, and an angry comment section.
Creators see what everyone else is doing, what everyone else hates, and all the ways their work could go wrong before they even begin.
Originality starts to feel risky. So people self-censor and default to what already works.
The confidence to chase them gets crushed by knowing too much, too soon. I’ve felt this in my own work: why start when you can immediately access something that will probably be better than what you can do? It takes more motivation than it used to.
When I zoom out, I don’t actually think culture is getting worse. I think it’s getting wider. Maybe the real story isn’t that culture has stagnated, but that it has scattered, multiplied, and slipped past the old gatekeepers. Maybe it’s less a decline and more a redistribution. And maybe the real challenge now isn’t producing art, but finding the time and attention to notice what’s already growing around us.
Keep going.
Most of these I have read or skimmed or have bought