The Future of Pop Culture in a Digital Age

In Ghosts of My Life (2014), the late Mark Fisher revisits Sapphire and Steel, a science-fiction show that aired in Britain in the 1970s. He remarks upon the way "time just got mixed, jumbled up, together, making no sort of sense. [This] slippage of discrete time periods into one another, was throughout the series the major symptom of time breaking down" (p.5).

The show becomes a harbinger of our era, as digital technology steadily dissolves clear distinctions between past and present. In a digital age, cultural time seems increasingly to have no boundaries, no fixed points that demarcate then from now, and no obvious pathway back to the wide-open spaces of the 1960s and 1970s. There is just so much stuff now that it is harder to make sense of it, to winnow the great from the good from the pet rocks.

Fisher was ultimately pessimistic about how digital technology, in his words, precipitates a slow collapse of the future. Because he is such a good writer, Fisher persuades the reader that, culturally, it is probably all downhill from here. There will still be great music, great writing, and great bands, but no one--beyond a few carefully selected and curated superstars who are as tightly controlled as Madame Tussaud's wax figures--will be able to earn a living, let alone subvert the onward march of the machine.

I find a lot of what Fisher has to say important . When I see that "James Dean" is scheduled to appear soon in a movie called Back to Eden, for example, I'm torn between curiosity and a sense that something has gone very wrong in Hollywood. I am also grateful that I am not a 22 year old actor who has to compete not only with all the other talent out there already, but with James Dean, Humphrey Bogart, and Marilyn Monroe.

Still, a science fiction movie in the 21st century that features James Dean going on a cross-country journey through the United States is admittedly a form of a new content and, dare I say it, quite creative in its way. The law of opportunity costs tells us that if this movie gets made, one that would feature a new, young actor goes begging, but since when have actors ever had any guarantees?

Perhaps it is not a question of better or worse, but a question of trade-offs. As a Gen-Xer, Fisher resonates with me, and I could make an argument that mainstream culture (a la the 1960s) generates openings for collective politics in a way that digitized, personalized, segmented, and committee-tested culture does not.

That said, Simon Reynolds in The Guardian (see link) brings something important to this party when he writes that our "scattered and shattered" monoculture may yet see "new possibilities emerge out of the rubble of the mainstream." What do you think?

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