Speculations on why socially observable time has stopped

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Speculations on why socially observable time has stopped

Postby 82_28 » Fri Dec 23, 2011 8:29 pm

I made some comment and was agreed with by others here awhile back, that you cannot see any "progress" in fashion any longer. For the life of me, I cannot remember what thread it was. Anyways, enjoy. Good and poignant article here.

You Say You Want a Devolution?

For most of the last century, America’s cultural landscape—its fashion, art, music, design, entertainment—changed dramatically every 20 years or so. But these days, even as technological and scientific leaps have continued to revolutionize life, popular style has been stuck on repeat, consuming the past instead of creating the new.

By Kurt Andersen Illustration by James Taylor
HOLD IT RIGHT THERE From the fedora to the Afro, styles have changed with the times. Unless you’re living in the 21st century.

The past is a foreign country. Only 20 years ago the World Wide Web was an obscure academic thingamajig. All personal computers were fancy stand-alone typewriters and calculators that showed only text (but no newspapers or magazines), played no video or music, offered no products to buy. E-mail (a new coinage) and cell phones were still novelties. Personal music players required cassettes or CDs. Nobody had seen a computer-animated feature film or computer-generated scenes with live actors, and DVDs didn’t exist. The human genome hadn’t been decoded, genetically modified food didn’t exist, and functional M.R.I. was a brand-new experimental research technique. Al-Qaeda and Osama bin Laden had never been mentioned in The New York Times. China’s economy was less than one-eighth of its current size. CNN was the only general-interest cable news channel. Moderate Republicans occupied the White House and ran the Senate’s G.O.P. caucus.

Since 1992, as the technological miracles and wonders have propagated and the political economy has transformed, the world has become radically and profoundly new. (And then there’s the miraculous drop in violent crime in the United States, by half.) Here is what’s odd: during these same 20 years, the appearance of the world (computers, TVs, telephones, and music players aside) has changed hardly at all, less than it did during any 20-year period for at least a century. The past is a foreign country, but the recent past—the 00s, the 90s, even a lot of the 80s—looks almost identical to the present. This is the First Great Paradox of Contemporary Cultural History.

Think about it. Picture it. Rewind any other 20-year chunk of 20th-century time. There’s no chance you would mistake a photograph or movie of Americans or an American city from 1972—giant sideburns, collars, and bell-bottoms, leisure suits and cigarettes, AMC Javelins and Matadors and Gremlins alongside Dodge Demons, Swingers, Plymouth Dusters, and Scamps—with images from 1992. Time-travel back another 20 years, before rock ’n’ roll and the Pill and Vietnam, when both sexes wore hats and cars were big and bulbous with late-moderne fenders and fins—again, unmistakably different, 1952 from 1972. You can keep doing it and see that the characteristic surfaces and sounds of each historical moment are absolutely distinct from those of 20 years earlier or later: the clothes, the hair, the cars, the advertising—all of it. It’s even true of the 19th century: practically no respectable American man wore a beard before the 1850s, for instance, but beards were almost obligatory in the 1870s, and then disappeared again by 1900. The modern sensibility has been defined by brief stylistic shelf lives, our minds trained to register the recent past as old-fashioned.
Madonna to Gaga

Go deeper and you see that just 20 years also made all the difference in serious cultural output. New York’s amazing new buildings of the 1930s (the Chrysler, the Empire State) look nothing like the amazing new buildings of the 1910s (Grand Central, Woolworth) or of the 1950s (the Seagram, U.N. headquarters). Anyone can instantly identify a 50s movie (On the Waterfront, The Bridge on the River Kwai) versus one from 20 years before (Grand Hotel, It Happened One Night) or 20 years after (Klute, A Clockwork Orange), or tell the difference between hit songs from 1992 (Sir Mix-a-Lot) and 1972 (Neil Young) and 1952 (Patti Page) and 1932 (Duke Ellington). When high-end literature was being redefined by James Joyce and Virginia Woolf, F. Scott Fitzgerald and Ernest Hemingway, great novels from just 20 years earlier—Henry James’s The Ambassadors, Edith Wharton’s The House of Mirth—seemed like relics of another age. And 20 years after Hemingway published his war novel For Whom the Bell Tolls a new war novel, Catch-22, made it seem preposterously antique.

Now try to spot the big, obvious, defining differences between 2012 and 1992. Movies and literature and music have never changed less over a 20-year period. Lady Gaga has replaced Madonna, Adele has replaced Mariah Carey—both distinctions without a real difference—and Jay-Z and Wilco are still Jay-Z and Wilco. Except for certain details (no Google searches, no e-mail, no cell phones), ambitious fiction from 20 years ago (Doug Coupland’s Generation X, Neal Stephenson’s Snow Crash, Martin Amis’s Time’s Arrow) is in no way dated, and the sensibility and style of Joan Didion’s books from even 20 years before that seem plausibly circa-2012.
An Epiphany

The Aeron chair in which you’re sitting is identical to the Aeron chair in which I sat almost two decades ago, and this morning I boiled water for my coffee in the groovy Alessi kettle I bought a quarter-century ago. With rare exceptions, cars from the early 90s (and even the late 80s) don’t seem dated. Not long ago in the newspaper, I came across an archival photograph of Ian Schrager and Steve Rubell with a dozen of their young staff at Morgans, the Ur-boutique hotel, in 1985. It was an epiphany. Schrager’s dress shirt had no collar and some of the hair on his male employees was a bit unfashionably fluffy, but no one in the picture looks obviously, laughably dated by today’s standards. If you passed someone who looked like any of them, you wouldn’t think twice. Yet if, in 1990 or 1980 or 1970, you’d examined a comparable picture from 27 years earlier—from 1963 and 1953 and 1943, respectively—it would be a glimpse back into an unmistakably different world. A man or woman on the street in any year in the 20th century groomed and dressed in the manner of someone from 27 years earlier would look like a time traveler, an actor in costume, a freak. And until recently it didn’t take even that long for datedness to kick in: by the late 1980s, for instance, less than a decade after the previous decade had ended, the 1970s already looked ridiculous.

There are, of course, a few exceptions today—genuinely new cultural phenomena that aren’t digital phenomena—but so few that they prove the rule. Twenty years ago we had no dark, novelistic, amazing TV dramas, no Sopranos or Deadwood or The Wire or Breaking Bad. Recycling bins weren’t ubiquitous and all lightbulbs were incandescent. Men wore neckties more frequently. Fashionable women exposed less of their breasts and bra straps, and rarely wore ultra-high-heeled shoes. We were thinner, and fewer of us had tattoos or piercings. And that’s about it.

Not coincidentally, it was exactly 20 years ago that Francis Fukuyama published The End of History, his influential post-Cold War argument that liberal democracy had triumphed and become the undisputed evolutionary end point toward which every national system was inexorably moving: fundamental political ferment was over and done. Maybe yes, maybe no. But in the arts and entertainment and style realms, this bizarre Groundhog Day stasis of the last 20 years or so certainly feels like an end of cultural history.


Read the rest -- very excellent:

http://www.vanityfair.com/style/2012/01 ... 1201.print
There is no me. There is no you. There is all. There is no you. There is no me. And that is all. A profound acceptance of an enormous pageantry. A haunting certainty that the unifying principle of this universe is love. -- Propagandhi
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Re: Speculations on why socially observable time has stopped

Postby Nordic » Fri Dec 23, 2011 9:00 pm

Funny, I've been thinking about that very thing lately. I'm almost upon the 20th anniversary of my turning 30, which I did in 1992, soon after moving to Los Angeles (for the first time). And no, things have hardly changed at all. Bad guys in movies back then had pony tails. That's about it.

LA seems particularly bad about this. The supposedly hip rock stations here play 20 year old music constantly, specifically Nirvana, Smashing pumpkins and Red Hot Chile Peppers.

Its really kind of odd, and odder still that nobody seems to have noticed.
"He who wounds the ecosphere literally wounds God" -- Philip K. Dick
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Re: Speculations on why socially observable time has stopped

Postby jingofever » Fri Dec 23, 2011 9:05 pm

Twenty years ago we had no dark, novelistic, amazing TV dramas, no Sopranos or Deadwood or The Wire or Breaking Bad.

Twin Peaks?

The early 1990s in one picture:
Image

Those are probably Jordans he is wearing but the rest of the outfit no longer exists. Some of his clothes may be fluorescent. But who cares what kind of costumes people are wearing? Fashion isn't about clothing anymore. It's all fonts these days.
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Re: Speculations on why socially observable time has stopped

Postby MacCruiskeen » Fri Dec 23, 2011 9:10 pm

Maybe the culture is close to exhaustion? It might be worth thinking about. You can only go so far in one direction without eventually dying or (as Einstein pointed out) disappearing up your own arse.
"Ich kann gar nicht so viel fressen, wie ich kotzen möchte." - Max Liebermann,, Berlin, 1933

"Science is the belief in the ignorance of experts." - Richard Feynman, NYC, 1966

TESTDEMIC ➝ "CASE"DEMIC
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Re: Speculations on why socially observable time has stopped

Postby Simulist » Fri Dec 23, 2011 10:12 pm

The course of this civilization has run out of road.
"The most strongly enforced of all known taboos is the taboo against knowing who or what you really are behind the mask of your apparently separate, independent, and isolated ego."
    — Alan Watts
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Re: Speculations on why socially observable time has stopped

Postby slomo » Fri Dec 23, 2011 10:15 pm

Time has slowed down because we are so close to 2012. Now that Novelty is asymptoting to infinity, all other transient/orthogonal forms of novelty are converging to zero.
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Re: Speculations on why socially observable time has stopped

Postby Burnt Hill » Fri Dec 23, 2011 10:39 pm

Here is what’s odd: during these same 20 years, the appearance of the world (computers, TVs, telephones, and music players aside) has changed hardly at all, less than it did during any 20-year period for at least a century.

Thats an awful lot to ignore in order to claim socially observable time has stopped.
What about the prevalence of tatoos, piercings and brands?
What about rap music in our culture? Really, rock music is dead and its us older folks listening to that classic rock mentioned.
What about extreme sports and "reality" tv?
I got on the bus the other day and over half the riders were wearing headphones and staring down at their
hands, playing with technogadgets.
It doesnt get much more socially observable than that.
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Re: Speculations on why socially observable time has stopped

Postby 2012 Countdown » Fri Dec 23, 2011 10:45 pm

Yes I remember that one too (but not the title). I can't recall if I posted in it, but recall great entries by a few people.
George Carlin ~ "Its called 'The American Dream', because you have to be asleep to believe it."
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=acLW1vFO-2Q
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Re: Speculations on why socially observable time has stopped

Postby Hugh Manatee Wins » Fri Dec 23, 2011 11:17 pm

The formula of available labor vs demand was shifted in the 1970s by
> computers, automazation
> feminism, bigger workforce
> Reich-wing backlash against the Lefty Sixties-early Seventies by CIA institutions and media.

A global Operation Condor has been in place for decades now.
And academic lefties still prattle about "corporations." :wallhead:
CIA runs mainstream media since WWII:
news rooms, movies/TV, publishing
...
Disney is CIA for kidz!
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Re: Speculations on why socially observable time has stopped

Postby Burnt Hill » Fri Dec 23, 2011 11:27 pm

Hugh Manatee Wins wrote:The formula of available labor vs demand was shifted in the 1970s by
> computers, automazation
> feminism, bigger workforce
> Reich-wing backlash against the Lefty Sixties-early Seventies by CIA institutions and media.

A global Operation Condor has been in place for decades now.
And academic lefties still prattle about "corporations." :wallhead:

so how does this confirm or deny whether "popular style has been stuck in repeat"?
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Re: Speculations on why socially observable time has stopped

Postby Hugh Manatee Wins » Fri Dec 23, 2011 11:32 pm

Burnt Hill wrote:
Hugh Manatee Wins wrote:The formula of available labor vs demand was shifted in the 1970s by
> computers, automazation
> feminism, bigger workforce
> Reich-wing backlash against the Lefty Sixties-early Seventies by CIA institutions and media.

A global Operation Condor has been in place for decades now.
And academic lefties still prattle about "corporations." :wallhead:

so how does this confirm or deny whether "popular style has been stuck in repeat"?


Because media control has dominated social norms more and more in values, beliefs, and attitudes for purposes of social control.
And this puts "popular style" on the back-burner as a superficial carrier-wave of aesthetic interests not as important as keeping fascism going.
CIA runs mainstream media since WWII:
news rooms, movies/TV, publishing
...
Disney is CIA for kidz!
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Re: Speculations on why socially observable time has stopped

Postby Burnt Hill » Fri Dec 23, 2011 11:39 pm

Hugh Manatee Wins wrote:
Burnt Hill wrote:
Hugh Manatee Wins wrote:The formula of available labor vs demand was shifted in the 1970s by
> computers, automazation
> feminism, bigger workforce
> Reich-wing backlash against the Lefty Sixties-early Seventies by CIA institutions and media.

A global Operation Condor has been in place for decades now.
And academic lefties still prattle about "corporations." :wallhead:

so how does this confirm or deny whether "popular style has been stuck in repeat"?


Because media control has dominated social norms more and more in values, beliefs, and attitudes for purposes of social control.
And this puts "popular style" on the back-burner as a superficial carrier-wave of aesthetic interests not as important as keeping fascism going.

Yes. A strong sense of robotic mind control creeps in when I see people with their gadgets, and hear of their obsessions with FaceBook.
This is still a social "change" from 20 years ago, and very observable, though I see what you mean, thank you.
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Re: Speculations on why socially observable time has stopped

Postby Jeff » Sat Dec 24, 2011 12:13 am

Digital reproduction has greatly confused my ability to place something in time.

My baby pictures look ancient. Baby pictures of the last ten years or so, they could have been taken ten years ago or today. I can't tell.
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Re: Speculations on why socially observable time has stopped

Postby norton ash » Sat Dec 24, 2011 12:37 am

Good article, I constantly feel time-warped.

I'll channel graze into music programs, documentaries, or video and have to wait for clues as to whether they're from the 80's, somewhere in between, or present day.

Watched a bit of Apocalypse Now and it was weird seeing Martin Sheen, Harrison Ford and Laurence Fishburne as young men, because that film still looks, sounds and feels recent, and it's 34 years old.

It's like a long, braking cultural skid that started in the 80's. And by braking, I think something has chosen it, is engineering against progress and efforts to change course.
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