Phenomenon 1: state capture. Five-over-one construction has become ubiquitous in new multifamily developments, leading one popular TikTok to describe a five-over-one building as the paradigmatic “gentrification building.” I have mixed feelings about five-over-one buildings. I live in one; it’s fine. In general, I approve of more multifamily construction, especially in high-cost, high-opportunity, transit-rich areas. The fact that some new construction is relatively ugly troubles me less than the fact that we don’t have enough housing of any type.
Some of these regulations are well-intentioned, but many are not, and their cumulative impact is disastrous. They drive up the cost of construction, which in turn pushes housing prices even higher. They reinforce residential segregation and car supremacy. And by imposing arbitrary limits on a city’s organic evolution — the ability of its residents to experiment with different built forms, different modes of transportation, and different architectural styles — they make our urban spaces uglier, less vibrant, and more sclerotic.
Phenomenon 2: “the shareholder revolution.” As the economist J. W. Mason writes, “For most of the 20th century, rentiers did not play an active role in the governance of ‘their’ corporations. But since the 1980s, there has been a dramatic power shift within US corporations, to the extent that the old managerial firm has been mostly replaced by the rentier-dominated firm.”
One critical difference between managers and rentiers is that managers have traditionally tied their careers to a specific industry, whereas rentiers are more likely to own a little bit of a number of companies spread out across the entire economy. This tendency to be involved in a little bit of everything has become even more pronounced during the era of asset-manager capitalism, and it means that the people who own, say, a publicly traded entertainment company often have no specific interest in the production of entertainment — let alone any specific knowledge of how and why entertainment gets produced.
The companies that manufacture our aesthetic universe are now almost wholly governed by people with no extra-economic investment in the businesses they oversee. If the line goes up, great; if the line goes down, they can simply liquidate their stake and move on to something else. Disney, Netflix, NBCUniversal, and all the rest are not businesses that make discrete cultural products; they are lines that are always either going up or going down. (...)
Phenomenon 4: the asset economy. In the 1970s, the glue that held the New Deal compact together — a rapidly expanding economy that could underwrite both high wages and high corporate profits — fell apart, resulting in a wage-price inflation spiral. As Lisa Adkins, Melinda Cooper, and Martijn Konings tell it in their book on the subject, the major states of the Anglosphere (America, the United Kingdom, and Australia) tamed stagflation by transitioning to an “asset economy” characterized by wage stagnation, consumer price stability, and rapid asset price inflation — the latter of which, it was hoped, would offset the wage stagnation through broadly available investment vehicles like homeownership.
In addition to the promise of asset democratization, part of the bargain with workers was that everyday consumer goods would become cheaper even as wages stagnated for the next forty-odd years. But an interesting thing has happened over that time: while the American market has been flooded with cheap goods from all over the world, the price of many actual necessities has continued to rise drastically. The costs of housing, education, and health care all have gone into the stratosphere; labor income, of course, has not kept up. The low cost of a pair of Skechers hardly seems compensatory.
This bargain has made it near impossible for people without inherited wealth to become full-time artists. But there’s another dynamic that I think is worth exploring: the consumption behavior of people who can barely afford housing and health care but whose dollar goes further than ever when it comes to hoovering up low-cost cultural output. As fixed costs have come to eat up more and more of household budgets, is it any wonder that a larger share of any remaining disposable income has gone toward low-quality consumables?
My own experience in that regard is somewhat typical of my generation and class. When I lived in Washington DC, circa 2017, I remember paying an exorbitant sum to live in a pretty nice apartment. I loved that apartment. I also furnished it pretty much exclusively with the most economical IKEA crap I could find. What was I supposed to do? After paying for the apartment itself, I didn’t exactly have a robust couch budget.
Make no mistake, I was in no sense deprived; I was a senior editor making a solid white-collar salary and living (as I said) in an apartment I really liked. But that’s exactly my point: when some of the basic elements of a professional-managerial-class lifestyle start to cost a lot more, members of the PMC are going to adjust by spending less on other elements. Some of them may develop the expertise and commitment to hunt out bargains on quality goods, but many more will default to what the market is most intent on serving them. Thus my IKEA and Amazon Prime furniture, my Uniqlo wardrobe and Warby Parker glasses.
Of course, it’s even more perverse than that. Because if the people with even a little bit of disposable income are spending it on fast fashion and fiberboard furniture, that’s going to further erode the economic basis for doing anything higher quality or more ambitious. The cheapo stuff wins.
by Editors/Ned Resnikoff, N+1 | Read more:
Image: Wikipedia/Sk5893 [ed. See also: On Political and Cultural Boredom (Christian Lorentzen):]
"The outrage that was so evident in the summer of 2020 during the uprising after the murder of George Floyd was not only a response to police brutality but to the sitting president himself. That it was structurally encouraged by lockdown and work-at-home policies is obvious but not explanatory: it was simply convenient that people didn’t have to be in the office. At the virtual Democratic National Convention, the Biden campaign coopted images of the protests and set them to the tune of a corny late-period Bruce Springsteen song to make them palatable to the aging and provincial electorate. Kamala Harris insisted that Americans needed to “do the work” but indicated nothing about what that meant aside from voting for Biden. That protests have not continued during the Biden administration isn’t hard to understand. He has been given the benefit of the doubt. Liberal horror at the prospect of a Trump restoration is real. Yet the uprising could kick off again any day, and I bet if the GOP sweeps the midterms, it probably will. Until then we have political boredom, punctuated by random mass murders and regressive state legislation to do with reproduction and education. [ed. emphasis added]
Hand in hand with political boredom comes cultural boredom. Hollywood movies are boring. Television is boring. Pop music is boring. The art world is boring. Broadway is boring. Books from big publishing are boring. All of these industries are averse to risk and chase trends mindlessly. They ignore difficulty. They are humorless. Occasionally they try to make a buck by ginning up controversies, which are also deeply boring and highly repetitive."
And: Why Culture Sucks (Unpopular Front):]
"Max Read, also responded to this problem on his Substack, asking “Did the internet ruin culture?” and responding somewhat skeptically to the premise that culture is just wallowing in boredom—after all many people are happily consuming what’s being created today and any boredom just might represent the tastes of the bored cohort—but maintaining in so far as the notion has merit it has something to do with the way money is currently being made through cultural production. On the political right, Ross Douthat describes the present situation as “decadence,” a perennial complaint from conservatives that makes things sound lot more fun and sexy than they really actually are. A friend offered, “decadence without glamor,” which sounds about right. Another friend calls it “zero swag,” meaning a total lack of charisma or coolness.
My premise is that something is wrong. There’s something very slight and unsatisfying about recent film, television, art, architecture, design, fashion, cuisine—you name it. There are refreshing exceptions, of course, but they seem to quickly get counterfeited or compromised. Even mediocre genre movies that would’ve seemed unremarkable in past ages can seem like monuments of a lost civilization today. It often feels like we’re being fed the cultural equivalent of Soylent, a kind of nutrient-rich goo that we’re supposed to believe does the same thing as food. Enthusiasm about “vibe shifts” or the possible birth of a new avant-garde comes partially from the hope that something might actually change.
I’ve tried before to get at what exactly feels off a couple times, one time identifying the problem as “formlessness” and another calling it the Age of Blah, and associating it with the rise of content-mongering tech-bores like Elon Musk and Andrew Yang. I’ve called this “the general glut of the human spirit,” occasioned by overproduction of crap."
"Max Read, also responded to this problem on his Substack, asking “Did the internet ruin culture?” and responding somewhat skeptically to the premise that culture is just wallowing in boredom—after all many people are happily consuming what’s being created today and any boredom just might represent the tastes of the bored cohort—but maintaining in so far as the notion has merit it has something to do with the way money is currently being made through cultural production. On the political right, Ross Douthat describes the present situation as “decadence,” a perennial complaint from conservatives that makes things sound lot more fun and sexy than they really actually are. A friend offered, “decadence without glamor,” which sounds about right. Another friend calls it “zero swag,” meaning a total lack of charisma or coolness.
My premise is that something is wrong. There’s something very slight and unsatisfying about recent film, television, art, architecture, design, fashion, cuisine—you name it. There are refreshing exceptions, of course, but they seem to quickly get counterfeited or compromised. Even mediocre genre movies that would’ve seemed unremarkable in past ages can seem like monuments of a lost civilization today. It often feels like we’re being fed the cultural equivalent of Soylent, a kind of nutrient-rich goo that we’re supposed to believe does the same thing as food. Enthusiasm about “vibe shifts” or the possible birth of a new avant-garde comes partially from the hope that something might actually change.
I’ve tried before to get at what exactly feels off a couple times, one time identifying the problem as “formlessness” and another calling it the Age of Blah, and associating it with the rise of content-mongering tech-bores like Elon Musk and Andrew Yang. I’ve called this “the general glut of the human spirit,” occasioned by overproduction of crap."
