If you are under the age of 30 you may think things are normal. But to someone who has lived 3 decades or more you may notice something odd: we haven’t had a shift like we did in the past. Culture is frozen. Throughout the 20th century we had changes almost every decade. Changes in fashion, in music, in aesthetics, hairstyles, style of comedy, television shows and movies. It sort of felt like someone was directing society from the top down, dictating a big shift every 10 years to something new. A director. If I show you a photo or play you a song from the 20th century, you’d probably be able to guess the decade. It was that clean of a break.

But I haven’t felt that change since the mid 2000s

Corn Flakes, Stuck Culture, and the wrong type of undead

here is a second quote from the linked post:

AI generated content seems depressingly suited to a culture where everything is just a recycled version of the past, because that’s all AI can do – it can’t innovate, it can only replicate. It can produce text or images in the style of something that’s already been done, but it can’t create a new style because it can only use what already exists.

It’s never just one thing. It’s always a whole bunch of things that come together to build a perfect storm. Sometimes a whole bunch of harmless things interact to become a brand new horror. I would love to find a document from the future, in which a historian has dispassionately analyzed the shifts in culture from 1960 through 2030.