Why has American pop culture stagnated?

Noah Smith

Noahpinion, May 14, 2025

Abstract

American pop culture shows signs of stagnation, evidenced by the dominance of sequels and established franchises, and a public perception of past cultural peaks, although some formats like television continue to innovate. This stagnation is likely rooted in technological and economic shifts. Digital technologies, such as smartphones and algorithmic social media, may have fragmented attention spans and homogenized tastes, creating market demand for easily digestible content. Concurrently, established artistic formats may be exhausting their “low-hanging fruit” of easily discoverable novelty, leading to more incremental innovations. While some argue culture is merely shifting to new digital forms (e.g., short-form video, memes), the traditional avant-garde, crucial for boundary-pushing, appears diminished. This decline might stem from the internet disintermediating artistic communities, allowing creators direct mass-market access without needing peer validation, thus making the avant-garde more niche. These deep-seated technological factors suggest cultural stagnation is a complex issue to overcome. – AI-generated abstract.

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Quotes from this work

When I think about the avant-garde, I think about artists making art for other artists. If you make a painting that’s just a bunch of colored squares or splashes of paint on a canvas, an average person might not be able to tell your art from the efforts of a small child. But other artists will know that you’re trying to subvert the paradigm they’ve been working in — to make a statement about what art is. That’s the kind of thing that only one’s artistic peers understand.

Some artists will always want to make things for other artists to see and react to and judge. But I think that in the old days, many did it out of technological necessity.

Discovering good artists in the old days was a very difficult endeavor. Production companies and publishers had to spend a lot of effort scouting around, and then make a guess as to how a creator’s work would perform in the commercial sphere. An easy way to separate the wheat from the chaff was to basically use a peer review system — to use a creator’s standing in the artistic community as a proxy for whether they would sell to a more general audience.