Culture Isn't Stagnating, You Guys Are Just Old

10 Jan, 2026

People who talk about how culture is stagnating¹ all point to around the same arguments: movies are all sequels, books and music are getting simpler, Netflix ruining everything, delta between 1940 and 1970 culture huge but delta between 1995 and 2025 culture tiny, something something car colours. To all of which I respond, "okay, boomer."

Maybe You're Just Out of Touch

When I read a cultural stagnation piece, whenever I go and squint at the writer's profile description and their archives, I'm always sort of like, okay, I don't think you're capable of engaging with any of the below mediums as viable artistic forms:

• video games
• anime and manga
• webcomics and webfiction
• youtube videos, twitch streamers and the streamer extended universe
• participatory game worlds in eg minecraft and roblox
• internet memes
• music genres invented after 1995

Instead, the most I see is them waving a hand over the scary new medium and being like "oh sure, presumably there's some gems there, but let's be honest, most of it is going to be garbage". Might I point out that per Sturgeon's Law most movies and TV shows and mass market books are also garbage!

And the sad thing is that most of the guys writing about the cultural stagnation are like, millennials and Gen X? I know they have Steam accounts and spend 5 hours a day on YouTube! I know they're sophisticated enough that, if you ask them "hey do you think video games can be art", they will say yes. And yet. And yet!!!!!

It's so easy to point at any MrBeast video and be like "hey this is not that good". It's harder to be like "ok, here are the constraints of producing a YouTube video, let's look at some creators who have a strong vision, and see what interesting things they are doing within the constraints." (Justin Kuiper writes interesting posts outlining the devices of YouTube on his Substack, though sadly(?) he is focusing all of his media criticism efforts on Veggie Tales.)

I want to see the critics actually thinking through: what is this piece doing? What does it intend to do? How does it use the devices of the medium, and how does the medium extend and constrain it? In what ways is this medium not fertile soil? And how do the characteristics of the infertility compare to that of Hollywood, or the professional publishing industry?

And like, if no serious cultural critic is constitutionally capable of engaging with newer platforms (not that video games and anime and YouTube videos are even that new anymore!), including ones where a single creator can reach more people in a week than most films reach in their entire theatrical run, what are we even doing here.

Basically, before I take a "culture is stagnating" take seriously, I want to see proof of work by the critics. Have they spent actual time on TikTok, not as an anthropologist grimacing at the natives, or apologetically endorsing it as a guilty pleasure, but actually trying to understand what makes something work there? Have they read Homestuck? Can they articulate why Homura did nothing wrong?

Mediums Mature, and That's Fine

If the answer is no, their stagnation claim is really just "the mediums I'm familiar with are mature now," which is a much narrower thesis.

I've previously discussed the need to let AI art cook, because it takes like 30 years for a new medium to come into its own and leave the trap of trying to copy other, established mediums.

A possibly complementary take is that maybe mediums also just... have shelf lives?² Like, if there's been no innovation in radio dramas or still life paintings of flowers or superhero comics over the past thirty years, it's not because we as a culture have lost the collective spark, you know?

I unironically love divorced dad butt rock³, but I'm perfectly capable of recognizing that the genre wasn't that deep and was basically entirely mined out by the late 2000s. It's truly for the best that the next generation of divorced-dads-to-be went on to invent SoundCloud rap instead⁴.

And butt rock is one incredibly mid genre in one artistic medium, so it's not that surprising that it burnt itself out in like twenty years flat. I expect that it'll take much longer for an entire medium to be on its way to the glue factory, but the fact that it would end up there at all would not be surprising to me! And certainly some mediums would stick around longer than others; novels have existed in some form since the 17th century and it's still alive and kicking. But I wouldn't be surprised if TV as a medium goes the way of radio shows in less than three centuries' time, and if it does, I will not interpret it as any sort of indictment on the culture.

Which is all to say, I think if we look at the golden ages head to head, comparing, say, the delta in [movies, TV, and pop music] from 1940 and 1970 and the delta in [video games, internet memes⁵, and anime] between 1995 and 2025, I don't think one can actually make a slam dunk case one way or another about which has seen more progress during that 30 year timespan. Not to mention that YouTube didn't even exist until 2005, and there are new mediums still taking their first baby steps: VR, AI, live shows that are not lectures put on by the newer generation of public intellectuals, other stuff I'm too lame to know about.

Don't Even Try To Pocket Sand Me With Your Cultural Fragmentation Takes

A slightly more sophisticated argument is that culture is fragmenting, and this leads to cultural stagnation in like, the collective pop culture sphere or something. So even if pockets of innovation still persist, it's bad if the "mainstream" is a wasteland of nostalgia and quippy soundbites.

And I just... don't buy this either? I think:

• Survivorship bias is a hell of a thing (famously, Sugar Sugar by the Archies was crowned the Billboard number one song in 1969, the year the Beatles released both Yellow Submarine and Abbey Road)
• People have been ingesting slop since the beginning of mass culture (read Debord! Or at least the ACX book review entry!)
• At the same time, mass culture has never been as mass as one might have imagined it to have been. You probably have an uncle who's watched like only two movies in his life. That's normal, there's oodles of guys like him!

I also notice that the term "mass culture" has ossified in unfortunate ways, to mean precisely the mature mediums that might be stagnating. For example, Minecraft sold 350 million copies and GTAV sold 220 million, but video games hardly come up in discussion when it comes to mass culture at all. Webtoon has 150 million monthly active users, AO3's getting 93 million page views a day, and Roblox has 110 million daily active users. Are these numbers truly less mass than, like, the population of moviegoers or TV watchers?

I think the strongest possible take I'd endorse is something like: the big-budget prestige productions that boomers grew up with with have gotten more risk-averse through the decades, and the genuinely experimental stuff have migrated to cheaper mediums.

And sure I'll grant that! But I do not grant that 1) this isn't business as usual and 2) it's at all bad for the culture! It's good actually if the best creators are experimenting in lower-budget and newer mediums, because there are lower barriers to entry, and that's how you create cultures that are actually rich and alive and interesting.

So unironically I kinda think the only things stagnating are the cultural critics. Mythmaking within culture and about cultural formation is important and neglected! I'd love to see more critical engagement with video games and anime and webcomics, that take them seriously as cultural artifacts, in the style of Action Button and hbomberguy.

Maybe I'm wrong and we really are in some unprecedented cultural malaise. But if the best evidence for that claim requires me to ignore video games, dismiss YouTube as a creative medium, and pretend that 150 million monthly Webtoon users don't count as "culture", I am going to smack someone. The culture is fine. Go play Return of the Obra Dinn.

tl;dr It's 2026, culture is stagnating because there's no one at the New Yorker assigned to the Roblox beat.

(More interesting takes on this subject that I do not wholly endorse: Katherine Dee, Eric Hoel, Three Masks. Thanks to Markus for sparking this discussion.)

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