This is an incredibly myopic view of what's considered "culture." If you're only looking for culture on TV and mass media, then you're going to find products, because that's exactly what those things were designed and optimized to sell. But culture definitely still exists, and it's exactly where we left it: In the genuine interactions between the people around you.
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I think you’re looking in the wrong places. Culture is everywhere. The mediums and groups of people that propagate culture shift over time, but humans are inherently creative and will always develop it.
Try looking in places where there is a focus on community, connection, and the art itself—not places that focus on producing “content” for profit.
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Is Mozart's music culture?
He was doing his stuff almost 100% for profit and was seen as a sell-out by a lot of the musicians at his time. He wrote his songs in German instead of Latin because he wanted to make essentially pop songs that were sung by kids on the street, and the musical establishment derided him for it, because they didn't think what he was making was actually art.
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We will always have art because it is a fundamental human thing to do no matter if we do it for money or just for ourselves. What we lose is the potential output of artists who could make a living making great things all day every day and feed themselves doing it.
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We all know art is hard, artists gotta starve
The real deal will always be there and never be easy. Fuck "content", fuck entertainment, fuck packaging yourself for sale. To know and be known is the most human thing there is. Genuine self-expression was never commercially viable and isn't going anywhere as long as there are two people to engage with one another. That's art. It's not something you can be "good with LLMs" at, no matter how technically proficient their output
Can’t wait for this thread to be deleted as OP realizes he’s a wee bit ignorant
Mass market products are still culture.
It's not the actors.
It's the writers.
The great superorganic, in modern terminology we might say the metaorganic, its above us all. Personality writ large. That which we learn and share, that which helps us survive into the future.
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