He welcomed me into his suburban-Texas home and showed me to a sunlit library. At the center of the room, arranged neatly on a countertop, stood 41 books. These, he said, were the books I needed to read.
Gioia’s contributions to this lineage of doomsaying have made him into something of an internet celebrity. For most of his career, he was best-known for writing about jazz. But with his Substack newsletter, The Honest Broker, he’s attracted a large and avid readership by taking on contemporary culture—and arguing that it’s terrible. America’s “creative energy” has been sapped, he told me, and the results can be seen in the diminished quality of arts and entertainment, with knock-on effects to the country’s happiness and even its political stability.
He’s not alone in fearing that we’ve entered a cultural dark age. According to a recent YouGov poll, Americans rate the 2020s as the worst decade in a century for music, movies, fashion, TV, and sports. A 2023 story in The New York Times Magazine declared that we’re in the “least innovative, least transformative, least pioneering century for culture since the invention of the printing press.” An art critic for The Guardian recently proclaimed that “the avant garde is dead.”
What’s so jarring about these declarations of malaise is that we should, logically, be in a renaissance. The internet has caused a Cambrian explosion of creative expression by allowing artists to execute and distribute their visions with unprecedented ease. More than 500 scripted TV shows get made every year; streaming services reportedly add about 100,000 songs every day. We have podcasts that cater to every niche passion and video games of novelistic sophistication. Technology companies like to say that they’ve democratized the arts, enabling exciting collisions of ideas from unlikely talents. Yet no one seems very happy about the results.
To a certain extent, such negativity may simply reflect an innate human tendency to fret about decline. Some of the most liberating developments in history have first triggered fears of social stultification. The advent of the printing press caused 15th-century thinkers to complain of mass distraction. In 1964, The Atlantic published an essay predicting, not unpersuasively, that rock and roll would only foster conformity and consumerism in young Americans.
For as long as I have been a critic at this magazine, I’ve tried to cut against the declinist impulse. The year I started the job, 2011, was a turning point of sorts: Spotify launched in America that July; Netflix debuted its first original series soon after. The brainy rock bands that I’d grown up loving—Radiohead, Wilco—were starting to fade in importance, but pop, hip-hop, and electronic music were cross-pollinating in fascinating ways. Understanding change, and appreciating how human creativity flourishes anew in each era, always seemed to be the point of the job.
Yet the 2020s have tested my optimism. The chaos of TikTok, the disruption of the pandemic, and the threat of AI have destabilized any coherent story of progress driving the arts forward. In its place, a narrative of decay has taken hold, evangelized by critics such as Gioia. They’re citing very real problems: Hollywood’s regurgitation of intellectual property; partisan culture wars hijacking actual culture; unsustainable economic conditions for artists; the addicting, distracting effects of modern technology.
I wanted to meet with some of the most articulate pessimists to test the validity of their ideas, and to see whether a story other than decline might yet be told. Previous periods of change have yielded great artistic breakthroughs: Industrialization begat Romanticism; World War I awakened the modernists. Either something similar is happening now and we’re not yet able to see it, or we really have, at last, slid into the wasteland. (....)
Stagnation
Cyniscism
Acceleration
