“This is Bach, and it rocks/ It’s a rock block of Bach/ That he learned in the school/ Called the school of hard knocks” — Tenacious D
Has culture stagnated in the United States? Several writers say yes. Adam Mastroianni blames risk aversion tied to longer lives and lower background risk, arguing people and institutions avoid cultural risk. Ted Gioia blames entertainment monopolies and dopamine-hacking algorithms that concentrate attention and favor safe intellectual property over novelty. Both marshal data across books, movies, music, TV, and games showing sequels, remakes, and adaptations crowding out new work and popularity concentrating among a few hits.
The counterargument, made by Katherine Dee and Spencer Kornhaber, is that creativity has migrated to new formats: memes, short-form videos, podcasts, and other niche online spaces. That’s true to an extent, but it doesn’t fully explain why cheaper tools for making movies and music haven’t resulted in more widely recognized new work instead of an endless stream of reboots and sequels.
David Marx’s Blank Space: A Cultural History of the Twenty-First Century tries to map where internet-era culture has been and, by implication, where it might go. Mostly a narration of pop culture since 2000, the book covers the New York hipster scene, Pharrell and the Neptunes, Terry Richardson’s scandals, Paris Hilton and Kim Kardashian’s rise, poptimism, 4chan, the Obama-to-Trump arc, and the many small revolutions and disappointments of the era. Marx’s gift is making an encyclopedic set of cultural facts feel like a coherent story: the internet’s effect has often been toward bland uniformity and crass commercialism as subcultural innovations get harvested by the mainstream.
Marx’s narrative strengths are also his theoretical weaknesses. His vivid reconstructions of 2000s music, fashion, and scenes make that decade feel alive and distinct, which complicates arguments that the era was uniformly forgettable. He underplays film — missing that the 2000s were a strong period for indie cinema — and gives less attention to foreign cultural imports like anime and manga that reshaped US consumption. Those omissions matter because globalization can shift where innovation happens without implying cultural emptiness.
A deeper problem for any sweeping cultural history is the long tail: cultural consumption is increasingly dispersed. If everyone listens to a handful of mainstream bands, naming them defines the era. But if countless niche creators each reach small audiences, describing an era’s sound becomes harder. Marx often writes as a Gen X hipster who values the Nirvana moment — an indie upstart breaking the mainstream — but such revolts are exceptional, not normal. Most of cultural life has always been a mix of a dominant mainstream and many small communities who cultivate their own tastes.
That observation helps reconcile conflicting evidence. The distribution of cultural attention may be becoming more leptokurtic: more concentrated in the center while also supporting a richer, wider tail. In online video, graphic novels, TV, and fashion, niche creativity has exploded. The best new styles might be devised by a 21-year-old Japanese student, and the best YouTube or TikTok creators can thrive with tens of thousands of views rather than millions. Television has diversified into many mid-tier shows that cater to particular senses of humor or identity.
But other domains — books, traditional film, and music — feel flatter. Word-of-mouth and shared tastes should have led this reviewer to discover more great indie films and science-fiction novels in the 2020s; instead, discovery has been sparse. If many great works existed, they’d surface within these overlapping communities. The imbalance suggests stagnation in some fields even as others flourish.
So what explains this mixed picture? Marx and others point to cultural forces like poptimism, gatekeeping shifts, and the way mainstream platforms harvest subcultures. Mastroianni’s risk-aversion story explains some institutional conservatism. Gioia’s focus on monopoly power and attention algorithms explains how major platforms and companies can stunt mainstream innovation. But none of these fully accounts for why indie creativity seems lacking in certain media even as it blooms elsewhere.
A plausible complementary explanation is technological: new cultural forms often arise from new technologies. The electric guitar and pickup mic enabled decades of new music. Camera phones and short-form video created TikTok and its aesthetics. When a technology opens broad, discoverable possibilities, artists explore it and produce waves of novelty; once the relevant affordances are exhausted, progress slows and canonic forms settle in. That suggests cultural bursts are often tied to technological novelty and can be temporary.
This technological view is pessimistic because it links artistic innovation to technological progress — something not easily accelerated — and implies creative booms end as the low-hanging possibilities are mined. Yet technology also shapes attention and distribution: algorithms, platform incentives, and centralized services can make subculture exposure rapid, allowing mainstream actors to appropriate and blunt innovations. If artists must perform in the town square of mass social media, their distinctiveness can be flattened.
Marx’s prescriptions favor fragmenting internet attention to let subcultures incubate before mainstream harvesting, and restoring taste-making, gatekeeping, and criticism to give art time and context to develop. Fragmentation — the move away from mass social platforms toward private groups, niche communities, and decentralized interactions — could allow distinct scenes to grow without immediate assimilation. This aligns with arguments that the internet’s early promise of many micropublics was undermined by centralized discovery systems and that renewed fragmentation might be healthier for culture.
Other remedies Marx gestures to — stronger criticism, renewed gatekeeping, curated platforms — might help but are only sketched. The book succeeds as a readable, lively cultural history even if it lacks a detailed causal theory or a full roadmap for revival. For that, readers might wait for a follow-up that explicitly tackles prescriptions.
In short: culture in the 21st-century United States is neither universally dead nor uniformly vibrant. Some media and communities show extraordinary niche creativity, while others — notably books, many films, and parts of music — exhibit worrying stagnation. Causes are multiple: institutional risk aversion, platform monopolies and algorithms, the dynamics of the long tail, and the lifecycle of technological affordances. Restoring more robust cultural innovation likely requires both technological shifts (or new platforms) that enable fresh possibilities and social changes that let subcultures incubate without immediate commodification.
Blank Space is a spirited, readable account of these trends and worth reading for anyone who wants a coherent narrative of the internet-era cultural landscape. It tells where we’ve been; how to get where we should go remains the next book.
