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Full Transcript

Craig Mod: You’re listening to On Margins. I’m Craig Mod and it has been a very long time since we’ve had an episode on this podcast. The last five years, it’s been a busy five years. I’ve been writing books, my friends have been writing books, I’m going on big walks. The world has been healing from COVID. All sorts of things have been happening.

Crazy things, good things, weird things.

And my buddy W. David Marx, who I’ve known for over 20 years, fellow Japan resident, he has a new book out called Blank Space: A Cultural History of the 21st Century. This book helps explain a little of the crazy you and I may be feeling sometimes on a day-to-day basis, a little of that weariness about where things are heading.

And he does it through the lens of pop culture. And I love this book. It’s a great book. I blew through it. I took so many notes and it was a real pleasure to have David join me and spend a couple hours discussing his latest book, Blank Space.

Craig Mod: Hi, David. Hello. How you doing?

W. David Marx: I’m good. Thank you for having me.

Craig Mod: Thank you for coming. Thank you for writing this book. This book sort of radicalized me or it backed up what I’d already been thinking and feeling.

W. David Marx: Yeah. There’s a lot of that. Yep.

Craig Mod: And there’s a big part of this book that is very funny. I mean, every page I have either the word “ouch” or “LOL” written on almost every page.

Yeah. I mean, so much of it is you’re just quoting people like Kanye talking about the camera he wants to make, or Migos, the fact that a song where they spend a lot of time, they spend 40 minutes making an entire song. You end one chapter with the sentence, “Joseph Kony remains at large.”

W. David Marx: Yes, it’s true. Which you told me you had to fight to keep that in. There was a lot of jokes that got cut for space. ‘Cause it was too long and I went back and tried to make sure that those were in there because otherwise it’s like a Wikipedia page.

Craig Mod: Yeah. It’s very spicy.

I would describe this as a very spicy take on a lot of this stuff. There’s, your favorite arch nemesis is Goldman’s DJ.

W. David Marx: He’s the CEO, David Solomon, DJ D-Sol. He is the CEO of Goldman Sachs, which you may know as the storied investment bank, but he is also an EDM DJ.

And he spun at Lollapalooza.

Craig Mod: Yeah.

W. David Marx: Of which of course he did, because it’s the 21st century.

Craig Mod: Right? So like it’s just the whole book is, every other page has something like this on it. Jordan Peterson has a quote. It’s all quotes. That’s what, it’s not like you’re, you don’t have to, you’re not working to make these people look like idiots.

You’re just literally quoting what they’ve said. So Jordan Peterson has this quote, “Don’t Bother Children When They Are Skateboarding,” that’s the name of a chapter in his book.

W. David Marx: Yeah.

Craig Mod: But also, the whole thing about Jordan Peterson went into this coma. Do you have that in front of you of why he went into the coma?

Yeah, because I just want to get it, I want to get this right, which is that he drank a tiny bit of…

W. David Marx: Hold on, hold on, hold on. I have it marked in here. Let’s get it, let’s get it fully accurate so we know we’re not making this up because, I’ve got some, it’s in the last…

Craig Mod: It’s in the second to last chapter before the conclusion. Okay. Yeah, I’ve got so much stuff. “Boy’s Gone Wild.” There’s so much stuff in here marked up. Yeah, here we go. This is a pretty amazing passage. Okay. It says his meteoric rise was derailed by a series of medical crises after adopting an all-meat diet, which I think was raw meat.

It was like an all raw meat. Yeah. Yeah, I think so. Something insane. Right. At the urging of his daughter, he suffered an extreme reaction to a sip of apple cider containing sulfites, triggering what he described as an “overwhelming sense of impending doom.”

Sleepless for 25 days, prescribed benzodiazepines—which was made famous in the recent White Lotus series, season three. Very timely. Developed a dependency and sought an experimental detox treatment in Russia that involved an induced eight-day coma, after which he temporarily lost the ability to speak or read.

The reason why we’re sort of laughing about this is just because he’s such a ridiculous human being, right? He’s so righteous, he’s unwilling to engage in good faith conversations pretty much with anyone, right?

W. David Marx: Yes. I mean, this is the subtext of the entire book. It’s like no one is willing to engage in real conversation. And this is all self-induced, right? This kind of pain that we’re reading about here because of his own kind of hubris and insanity.

Craig Mod: And I’m happy you noticed this because there isn’t another paragraph pointing this out. I give you what happened, and then you in your mind can decide if that was hubristic or not.

W. David Marx: Yeah. I mean, obviously what you’ve selected, there’s a certain amount of judgment behind it.

Craig Mod: Oh, yeah. Yeah. It’s subtle. I mean, but I’m just saying—

W. David Marx: You didn’t cut out the paragraph where I bang you with a hammer over any of these points.

Craig Mod: No. So I’d say on one hand, right, the book is very, there’s a lot of humor. It’s detached, but it’s gallows humor. Definitely. Which is pretty much entirely through the whole thing.

W. David Marx: But I mean, the first bit in the first chapter talking about 9/11 is talking about the first time I laughed after 9/11. ‘Cause I was in New York. I went into work, this must have been the 14th or something. 13th or 14th. And I was editing an issue of Token, and we went through the record reviews and I was on the record reviews page, and I saw the cover of The Coup, this rap group’s album Party Music, and the cover, if you’ve not seen it before, the original cover is Boots Riley who’s now, you know, a famous director, with what looks like a bomb detonator, but it’s a guitar tuner.

Okay? And then his DJ behind him holding up these drumsticks kind of in an X in triumph and behind them, they’re blowing up the World Trade towers. So just like imagine you see this as, like, somebody thought this was a good idea in, you know, June 2001. We want a cover that critiques capitalism, we’re gonna blow up the World Trade Center.

And it’s not even like the towers are blowing up simultaneously from the middle of the building. And so just that kind of gallows humor, I mean, for me it’s like it started this journey.

Craig Mod: Right. And so like the, you have the epigraph at the beginning, which is the Allen Iverson “practice” rant, which is amazing. Yeah. I mean, everyone knows practice. And your point is we live in a post-practice culture, or you define this book—

W. David Marx: I defined the 21st century as post-practice. So as this kind of, uh, ideology that we all hold now, which is that like, practice is bad. And that anyone should be able to do anything at any time, whatever they want. And it’s a deep ideology that we all hold now that is antithetical to anything that we believe before 2000.

Craig Mod: Right. And you say it’s the end of the “long 20th century,” quote unquote, right?

W. David Marx: Yeah.

Craig Mod: Can you talk a little bit about what that means? The “long 20th century”?

W. David Marx: Yeah, I mean, the idea is, and this is from, I think, a Marxist historian, Giovanni Arrighi, who wrote a book called The Long Twentieth Century, which is a very different book than mine. I just borrowed the term. But the idea is just that like historical epochs don’t line up cleanly with centuries. So like there’s a “long 19th century” which goes from like the French Revolution to World War I. And then the “long 20th century” is from World War I or like 1914 to the year 2000.

And the reason why I use that framework is because, first of all, I think it’s useful to think about these blocks of time of like cultural periods that go a little bit beyond the calendar. But also I wanted to set up this dichotomy of the 20th century was driven by mass culture. Like the 20th century for all of its bad things was actually relatively good at creating culture that a lot of people could access and enjoy.

It was a leveling in many ways of like cultural access. And it was a time period where tastemakers and cultural intermediaries—people who are professional critics, people who are DJs, people who are editors—decided what is good and what is bad and what people should care about. And I just wanted to set up that the 21st century is fundamentally different in that we’ve now moved to a culture that’s driven by individual choice and individual expression, that there are no longer gatekeepers in the same way, and that’s fundamentally changed what culture looks like and what kind of culture we have.

Craig Mod: And you, you actually define it very explicitly in the book as starting on September 11th, 2001.

W. David Marx: Yeah.

Craig Mod: Which is, you make a very convincing case, I mean—

W. David Marx: I mean, the, the way I, I think about it is like, there’s a sort of post 9/11 kind of culture that people talk about that’s the idea that we live in this kind of national security state and kind of very focused on the Middle East and terrorism and all this kind of stuff. But I think that like the real shift is more fundamental, which is that we moved into a culture that is focused on personal identity and personal expression and self-fulfillment in a way that’s fundamentally different than the 20th century.

And it’s also a culture that has, I would say, very little belief in expertise or institutions. And 9/11 was the kind of, I don’t think it necessarily caused all that, but it was the kind of starting point where all these things started to unfold. And it’s both political and cultural.

Craig Mod: Right. And then you end, you know, if we’re looking at the bookends of the scope of the book, you end on COVID, which was early 2020. So you have a nice, it’s almost 20 years, not quite 20 years, but almost 20 years between your bookends. And COVID is another, you know, definitive break, which then allows you to look back on this period as a, almost as a completed period. Or at least like we can delineate it now.

W. David Marx: Yeah, I mean I, I started writing the book during COVID and I had to wait until COVID was over to see whether COVID was a hard break or not. Because if it wasn’t a hard break, I was gonna have to have a different argument about the 21st century. But I think it was a hard break in the sense that a lot of the kind of ideology and values of the first 20 years were permanently damaged by COVID.

And I don’t think we’re going back to exactly how we were in 2019. I think a lot of the kind of optimism and the ideology of personal freedom and kind of this culture of individual choice really took a hit during COVID. And so it felt like a good endpoint to say, okay, we can look at this 20-year period as its own coherent thing.

Craig Mod: Yeah. And then you divide the book up into three parts, which is what I thought was really elegant. You have part one, which is “The Paradox of Open Culture,” part two, “The Incentive of Commercial Culture,” and part three, “The Nihilism of Digital Culture.” And I feel like you keep building on each part. Like you define, you set up the paradoxes in part one, and then part two, you really get into like the commercial aspects and incentives. And then part three, you’re like, okay, here’s how it all kind of comes together in this very dark way.

W. David Marx: Yeah. I mean, the structure of the book is meant to be, I’m giving you three different lenses to understand what happened in the 21st century. So the first one is about democratization, the second one is about commercialization, and the third one is about digitalization. And I think all three of these things happened simultaneously and they’re all interrelated.

But I wanted to separate them out so you could understand each one individually. And then hopefully by the end of the book, you can see how they all work together to create the culture that we have now. And I think that’s why I call it “blank space,” because I think the culture we have now is kind of empty in a lot of ways. It’s very full of activity, but it’s empty of meaning and substance.

Craig Mod: Yeah. I mean, the title Blank Space is really great. And I know you’ve talked about this elsewhere, but can you just explain briefly where that title comes from?

W. David Marx: Yeah, so it’s actually from a Taylor Swift song called “Blank Space,” which is from 2014. And the song is about, it’s a satire of how the media portrays her as this kind of serial dater who’s crazy and obsessed with relationships. And she’s kind of making fun of that portrayal.

But the reason I chose it is because I think the blank space of the 21st century is this idea that we have all this freedom and all this possibility, but we don’t know what to do with it. We have all these blank spaces that we’re supposed to fill with our own personal expression and our own personal identity, but we don’t have the tools or the guidance or the cultural infrastructure to do that well.

And so we end up filling it with kind of garbage or we end up filling it with things that don’t really matter. And I think that’s the paradox of the 21st century is that we have more freedom than ever before, but we’re more lost than ever before.

Craig Mod: Right. And I think one of the things that really struck me about the book is how much of this is driven by technology, obviously, but also by this ideology of openness and democratization that we all, like, we all thought was going to be good. Like we all thought, oh, if we just open everything up and let everyone participate, it’s going to be great.

And what you’re saying is like, well, actually, it turns out that that has all these unintended consequences that we didn’t think about. And now we’re living with those consequences.

W. David Marx: Yeah, I mean, I think the fundamental problem is that we thought that democratization was always good. And I think that’s a very American idea, right? Like we think democracy is good in politics, so democracy must be good in culture as well. But I think what we’ve learned is that culture and politics are different things.

And that cultural production requires a certain amount of expertise and a certain amount of gatekeeping and a certain amount of curation. And when you remove all of that and you just say, “everyone should be able to do whatever they want,” you end up with a lot of bad culture. And that’s what we have now.

Craig Mod: Right. And I think one of the things that’s so interesting about your book is that you’re not anti-technology, you’re not even anti-democratization necessarily. You’re just saying, “look, this is what happened, and we need to be aware of the consequences.”

W. David Marx: Yeah, I mean, I think the key thing is that I’m not saying that democratization is bad. I’m saying that we need to think about what we actually want from democratization. Like, do we want more culture or do we want better culture? And I think we’ve been optimizing for more culture and we haven’t been thinking about whether that culture is actually good or meaningful or valuable.

And I think that’s the key question that we need to ask ourselves going forward is, what do we actually want from our culture? Do we want everyone to be able to participate, or do we want to have a culture that is actually good and meaningful and valuable to people?

Craig Mod: Right. And I think one of the things that really struck me is, you know, you talk about how in the 20th century, there was this whole infrastructure of cultural intermediaries, right? There were critics, there were editors, there were DJs, there were all these people whose job it was to say, “this is good, this is bad, you should care about this, you shouldn’t care about that.”

And in the 21st century, we’ve basically gotten rid of all of those people. We’ve said, “you don’t need those people anymore, you can decide for yourself what’s good and what’s bad.” And what you’re saying is that that’s actually a huge loss, because those people served a valuable function.

W. David Marx: Yeah, I mean, I think the key thing is that we thought that those people were just gatekeepers who were keeping people out. And there was some truth to that, right? Like there were definitely people who were being excluded from culture in the 20th century who shouldn’t have been excluded.

But what we didn’t realize is that those people also served a curatorial function. They were helping us navigate the overwhelming amount of culture that exists in the world. And when you remove those people, you’re left with just this overwhelming flood of content and you have no way to navigate it.

And I think that’s one of the big problems of the 21st century is that we have more content than ever before, but we have less guidance than ever before about what’s actually good and what’s actually worth our time.

Craig Mod: Right. And I think one of the things that you point out really effectively in the book is that the incentives have changed completely. Like in the 20th century, the incentive was to make something good because you had to get past the gatekeepers. Like you had to convince a publisher or a record label or a TV executive that your thing was good enough to put out into the world.

And in the 21st century, the incentive is just to make something that gets attention. It doesn’t matter if it’s good or bad, it just matters if it gets clicks or views or engagement.

W. David Marx: Yeah, I mean, I think that’s the key shift is that we’ve moved from a culture that’s driven by quality to a culture that’s driven by quantity. And the reason for that is because the business model has changed. In the 20th century, the business model was you sell a discrete product to someone. You sell them a record, you sell them a book, you sell them a movie ticket.

And so the incentive was to make that product as good as possible so that people would buy it. In the 21st century, the business model is advertising. And the way advertising works is you need eyeballs, you need attention, you need engagement. And so the incentive is not to make something good, the incentive is to make something that gets attention.

And those are two very different incentives and they lead to very different kinds of culture.

Craig Mod: Right. And I think one of the things that’s so depressing about the book, honestly, is that you make it very clear that this is not an accident. This is not like, “oops, we accidentally created a bad system.” This is like, the system is working exactly as it was designed to work.

The people who designed these systems understood what they were doing and they did it anyway because it was profitable. And I think that’s one of the things that makes it so hard to fix, right? Because it’s not like there’s a bug in the system that we can fix. The system is working as intended.

W. David Marx: Yeah, I mean, I think the key thing is that the people who built these systems, they weren’t thinking about culture. They were thinking about money. And that’s fine, like that’s what businesses do, they think about money. But the problem is that culture is now entirely dependent on these systems that were built to make money, not to make good culture.

And so we end up with culture that’s optimized for profit rather than optimized for quality or meaning or substance. And I think that’s the fundamental problem of the 21st century is that we’ve let commercial interests completely dominate our culture in a way that they didn’t in the 20th century.

Craig Mod: Right. And I think one of the things that you point out really effectively is that this affects everything. This isn’t just about pop music or TV shows or movies. This affects journalism, it affects politics, it affects how we understand the world.

W. David Marx: Yeah, I mean, I think the key thing is that once you understand that the incentive structure has changed, you can see how it affects everything. Like, why is journalism so clickbaity now? Because the business model is advertising and you need clicks. Why is politics so polarized now? Because the social media algorithms reward extreme content that gets engagement.

Why is everyone trying to be an influencer now? Because that’s the only way to make money in the current system. So I think once you understand the incentive structure, you can see how it’s warped every aspect of our culture.

Craig Mod: Right. And I think one of the things that’s really interesting is that you also talk about how this affects individual psychology, right? Like it’s not just about the culture out there, it’s about how we internalize these values and how we start to think about ourselves.

W. David Marx: Yeah, I mean, I think the key thing is that we’ve all become kind of mini-entrepreneurs of the self, right? Like we’re all constantly thinking about our personal brand, we’re all constantly thinking about how to optimize our lives, we’re all constantly thinking about how to get more followers or more engagement or more attention.

And I think that’s really exhausting and I think it’s also kind of dehumanizing because it turns us all into these kind of commodified versions of ourselves where we’re constantly performing for an audience rather than just being ourselves.

Craig Mod: Yeah. I mean, I think one of the phrases that you use in the book that really stuck with me is “the burden of self-optimization.” Like we’re all constantly trying to optimize ourselves and our lives and our work and our relationships. And it’s exhausting.

W. David Marx: Yeah, I mean, I think that’s one of the key burdens of the 21st century is that we’re all supposed to be constantly improving ourselves and constantly optimizing ourselves. And there’s no endpoint to that. Like you can never be good enough, you can never be optimized enough.

And I think that’s really different from the 20th century where there was more of a sense of like, you get to a certain point in your life and then you’re done. Like you’ve achieved what you need to achieve and then you can just kind of coast. But now there’s this sense that you always have to be getting better and always have to be improving and always have to be optimizing. And I think that’s really exhausting for people.

Craig Mod: Right. And I think one of the things that you point out is that this is connected to this idea of everyone being able to do everything, right? Like the post-practice culture that you talk about at the beginning of the book.

W. David Marx: Yeah, I mean, I think the key thing is that we’ve gotten rid of the idea that you need to practice to get good at something. We’ve gotten rid of the idea that expertise matters. We’ve gotten rid of the idea that there’s a difference between someone who’s good at something and someone who’s not good at something.

And I think that’s really problematic because it means that we’re all constantly trying to do everything and we’re not actually good at any of it. And I think that’s one of the big problems of the 21st century is that we have a culture where everyone is a mediocre generalist rather than a culture where we have experts who are really good at specific things.

Craig Mod: Right. And I think one of the examples that you use in the book that I thought was really interesting is this idea of everyone being able to make music now with GarageBand or whatever. And your point is not that that’s bad, but that the output is mostly not very good.

W. David Marx: Yeah, I mean, I think the key thing is that democratization of the tools doesn’t mean democratization of the talent. Like just because everyone can make music now doesn’t mean everyone is good at making music. And I think we’ve confused those two things.

We’ve said, “oh, everyone has access to the tools, therefore everyone can make good music.” But that’s not true. Making good music requires talent and practice and expertise. And just because you have GarageBand doesn’t mean you’re going to make good music.

Craig Mod: Right. And I think one of the things that you point out is that the 20th century system, for all its flaws, did do a good job of filtering. Like the record labels, even though they were gatekeepers and even though they kept people out who shouldn’t have been kept out, they also did keep out a lot of people who weren’t very good.

W. David Marx: Yeah, I mean, I think that’s the key thing is that gatekeepers served two functions. One was they kept people out who should have been let in, and that’s bad. But the other function was they kept people out who weren’t very good, and that’s actually useful.

And I think we’ve thrown out both of those functions. We’ve said, “gatekeepers are bad, we don’t want any gatekeepers.” But what we didn’t realize is that we actually need some kind of filtering mechanism because otherwise we’re just drowning in mediocrity.

Craig Mod: Right. And I think one of the things that you talk about in the book is that the algorithms were supposed to be the new gatekeepers. Like we were told, “oh, don’t worry, you don’t need human gatekeepers anymore because the algorithm will surface the good stuff.”

W. David Marx: Yeah, and I think that’s been a complete failure. I mean, the algorithms don’t surface the good stuff, they surface the stuff that gets engagement. And those are two very different things. Like the stuff that gets engagement is often the most extreme stuff or the most clickbaity stuff or the most outrageous stuff.

And that’s not necessarily the best stuff. So I think we’ve learned that algorithms are not a good replacement for human curation and human judgment.

Craig Mod: Right. And I think one of the things that you point out really effectively in the book is that this is by design. Like the algorithm is designed to maximize engagement, not to maximize quality. And the reason it’s designed that way is because engagement is what drives advertising revenue.

W. David Marx: Yeah, exactly. I mean, the algorithm is doing exactly what it was designed to do, which is to maximize engagement so that people stay on the platform longer so that they see more ads so that the company makes more money. And that’s fine from a business perspective, but it’s terrible from a cultural perspective.

Because what you end up with is a culture that’s optimized for keeping your attention rather than a culture that’s optimized for quality or meaning or substance.

Craig Mod: Right. And I think one of the things that really struck me about the book is how much of this connects to the attention economy, right? Like the fundamental problem is that attention has become the most valuable commodity.

W. David Marx: Yeah, I mean, I think that’s the key shift of the 21st century is that we’ve moved from an economy where the scarce resource was distribution to an economy where the scarce resource is attention. In the 20th century, the hard part was getting your content out there. Like you had to get a record deal or you had to get a book published or you had to get your movie distributed.

In the 21st century, distribution is basically free. Anyone can put anything on the internet. But attention is scarce because there’s so much content out there that people’s attention is the limiting factor. And so we’ve built an entire economy around capturing and monetizing people’s attention.

Craig Mod: Right. And I think one of the things that you point out is that this has really warped our culture in fundamental ways. Like it’s changed what kind of content gets made, it’s changed how content gets made, it’s changed who gets rewarded.

W. David Marx: Yeah, I mean, I think the key thing is that when attention is the scarce resource, you get content that’s optimized for grabbing attention, not content that’s optimized for quality. And so you get a lot of clickbait, you get a lot of outrage, you get a lot of sensationalism.

And you also get content that’s very short and very shallow because people’s attention spans are short. So you get TikToks and Instagram stories and tweets rather than long-form journalism or novels or albums.

Craig Mod: Right. And I think one of the things that you talk about in the book that I thought was really interesting is this idea of the “perpetual present.” Can you talk a little bit about that?

W. David Marx: Yeah, I mean, the perpetual present is this idea that we’re all living in this constant now where nothing ever really ends and nothing ever really begins. Like in the 20th century, there was more of a sense of cultural moments. Like you had albums that came out and they were events and everyone talked about them and then they were over.

Or you had TV shows that had seasons and they would come on at a certain time and everyone would watch them together. And there was this sense of shared cultural moments. In the 21st century, everything is always available all the time. And so there’s no sense of scarcity, there’s no sense of anticipation, there’s no sense of endings.

And I think that makes culture feel kind of flat and meaningless because there’s no sense of buildup or payoff. Everything is just constantly there and constantly available.

Craig Mod: Right. And I think one of the things that you point out is that this also means that nothing ever really goes away. Like old controversies just keep resurfacing, old content just keeps getting recirculated.

W. David Marx: Yeah, I mean, I think that’s one of the weird things about the internet is that everything is permanent and nothing is permanent at the same time. Like your old tweets are always there and they can always come back to haunt you. But also nothing really sticks around in people’s consciousness for very long because there’s always new content coming.

So you have this weird situation where everything is archived forever but also nothing really matters for more than a few days.

Craig Mod: Right. And I think one of the things that you talk about in the book is how this affects our sense of history and our sense of progress. Like we can’t really build on things anymore because nothing ever really settles.

W. David Marx: Yeah, I mean, I think that’s one of the big problems of the perpetual present is that we can’t really have progress in the same way that we used to. Like in the 20th century, you could have movements that built on each other. Like you had modernism and then you had post-modernism and then you had whatever came after that.

But in the 21st century, everything is just kind of happening at the same time and nothing really builds on anything else. And I think that makes it really hard to have any sense of cultural progress or cultural development.

Craig Mod: Right. And I think one of the things that you point out is that this is connected to this idea of nostalgia, right? Like we’re all constantly recycling old culture rather than creating new culture.

W. David Marx: Yeah, I mean, I think the 21st century has been incredibly nostalgic. Like we’re constantly doing reboots and remakes and revivals. And I think part of that is because we don’t really know how to create new culture anymore. We don’t have the cultural infrastructure to support new movements or new ideas.

And so we just keep recycling old stuff because that’s easier and it’s safer and it’s more profitable.

Craig Mod: Right. And I think one of the examples you use in the book is superhero movies, right? Like we’re just making the same superhero movies over and over again.

W. David Marx: Yeah, I mean, I think superhero movies are the perfect example of 21st century culture. They’re incredibly expensive, they’re incredibly profitable, they’re based on existing intellectual property, and they’re basically the same movie over and over again with slightly different characters.

And I think that’s emblematic of a culture that’s not really interested in creating new things, it’s interested in exploiting existing things for profit.

Craig Mod: Right. And I think one of the things that you talk about in the book is that this is not just about movies or music or TV. This is about everything. Like we’re seeing this same pattern in journalism, in politics, in education.

W. David Marx: Yeah, I mean, I think the key thing is that once you see the pattern, you can see it everywhere. Like journalism is increasingly just aggregating other people’s content rather than doing original reporting. Politics is increasingly just performing for the cameras rather than doing actual governance. Education is increasingly just credentialing rather than actual learning.

And I think all of these things are driven by the same underlying forces, which is the commercialization and digitalization of everything.

Craig Mod: Right. And I think one of the things that really struck me about the book is how much of this connects to this idea of authenticity. Like we’re all constantly performing authenticity, but nothing is actually authentic anymore.

W. David Marx: Yeah, I mean, I think authenticity has become this kind of commodity that we’re all trying to produce. And the more we try to produce it, the less authentic it becomes. Like in the 20th century, authenticity was something that you just were. You didn’t have to perform it.

But in the 21st century, authenticity is something that you have to constantly demonstrate and perform. And I think that’s really exhausting and also kind of impossible because the act of performing authenticity makes you inauthentic.

Craig Mod: Right. And I think one of the examples you use in the book is Instagram, right? Like everyone’s Instagram feed is this carefully curated version of their life that’s supposed to look authentic but is actually completely staged.

W. David Marx: Yeah, I mean, I think Instagram is the perfect example of performed authenticity. Like everyone’s Instagram is supposed to look like their real life, but it’s actually this incredibly carefully curated and edited version of their life. And everyone knows that, but we all pretend that it’s real.

And I think that’s one of the weird contradictions of the 21st century is that we all know that everything is fake, but we all pretend that it’s real.

Craig Mod: Right. And I think one of the things that you talk about in the book is how this affects our relationships and our sense of connection with other people.

W. David Marx: Yeah, I mean, I think the big problem is that we’ve replaced real connection with simulated connection. Like we have more “friends” on Facebook than ever before, but we have fewer real friendships. We have more “followers” on Instagram, but we have less real community.

And I think that’s one of the big losses of the 21st century is that we’ve traded real human connection for these kind of shallow, mediated connections that don’t really satisfy us.

Craig Mod: Right. And I think one of the things that you point out is that this is making people really unhappy. Like there’s all this research showing that people are more depressed and more anxious than ever before.

W. David Marx: Yeah, I mean, I think there’s pretty clear evidence that the rise of social media has coincided with a rise in depression and anxiety, especially among young people. And I don’t think that’s a coincidence. I think that when you’re constantly comparing yourself to other people and constantly performing for an audience and constantly trying to optimize yourself, that’s really bad for your mental health.

Craig Mod: Right. And I think one of the things that you talk about in the book is this idea of “the burden of choice.” Like we’re told that having more choices is always better, but actually having too many choices can be paralyzing and can make us less happy.

W. David Marx: Yeah, I mean, I think the paradox of choice is one of the big problems of the 21st century. Like we’re told that freedom is always good and that having more options is always better. But actually, research shows that when you have too many options, you become paralyzed and you can’t make decisions and you’re less satisfied with whatever decision you do make.

And I think that’s true for culture too. Like we have access to more culture than ever before, but we’re less satisfied with the culture we consume because we’re always wondering if there’s something better out there that we’re missing.

Craig Mod: Right. And I think one of the things that you talk about in the book is how this connects to this idea of FOMO, fear of missing out, right? Like we’re all constantly worried that we’re missing something.

W. David Marx: Yeah, I mean, I think FOMO is one of the defining emotions of the 21st century. And it’s driven by social media and by the perpetual present and by this sense that there’s always something happening somewhere that’s better than whatever you’re doing right now.

And I think that makes it really hard to be present and to enjoy whatever you’re actually doing because you’re always worried that you’re missing something better.

Craig Mod: Right. And I think one of the things that really struck me about the book is that you’re not offering easy solutions. Like you’re not saying, “here’s how we fix everything.” You’re more just diagnosing the problem.

W. David Marx: Yeah, I mean, I think the book is fundamentally diagnostic rather than prescriptive. I’m trying to explain what happened and why it happened, but I’m not necessarily saying exactly how to fix it. Because I think the problems are really deep and really structural and they’re not going to be fixed by individual actions.

Like you can delete your social media accounts, but that’s not going to change the fundamental structure of the attention economy. You can buy physical books instead of reading on your phone, but that’s not going to change the business model of publishing.

Craig Mod: Right. But at the end of the book, you do offer some hope, right? Like you do suggest that things could change.

W. David Marx: Yeah, I mean, I think my fundamental belief is that human beings created these systems and human beings can change these systems. And I think the first step to changing them is understanding them. And that’s what I’m trying to do with the book is to help people understand how these systems work and why they produce the outcomes that they produce.

And then once you understand that, you can start thinking about what interventions might be possible. But I think it has to be collective interventions, not just individual interventions. Like we need to think about regulation, we need to think about different business models, we need to think about different cultural institutions.

Craig Mod: Right. And I think one of the things that you talk about at the end of the book is this idea that we need to rebuild some of the institutions that we’ve destroyed. Like we need critics again, we need editors again, we need cultural intermediaries again.

W. David Marx: Yeah, I mean, I think that’s one of the key things is that we need to rebuild the cultural infrastructure that we’ve torn down. And that doesn’t mean going back to exactly how things were in the 20th century, because there were real problems with the 20th century system.

But it does mean recognizing that we need some kind of curation, we need some kind of filtering, we need some kind of guidance. And we need people whose job it is to help us navigate the overwhelming amount of culture that exists in the world.

Craig Mod: Right. And I think one of the things that you talk about is that we need to think differently about value, right? Like we need to value quality over quantity.

W. David Marx: Yeah, I mean, I think that’s one of the fundamental shifts that needs to happen is that we need to move away from this ideology of more is always better. And we need to start thinking about what actually makes culture valuable and what actually makes culture meaningful.

And I think that means valuing quality over quantity, valuing depth over breadth, valuing expertise over amateurism. And that’s a big cultural shift that needs to happen.

Craig Mod: Right. And I think one of the things that you point out is that this is not going to happen automatically. Like we’re not just going to drift back to a better system. We’re going to have to actively work to create a better system.

W. David Marx: Yeah, I mean, I think that’s the key point is that this is all going to require human intervention. Like the market is not going to fix this on its own. The algorithms are not going to fix this on their own. We’re going to have to make conscious decisions about what kind of culture we want and what kind of systems we want to support that culture.

Craig Mod: Right. And I think one of the things that you talk about at the very end of the book is that there are some signs of hope. Like there are some people who are trying to build different systems and trying to create different kinds of culture.

W. David Marx: Yeah, I mean, I think there are definitely people who are experimenting with different models. Like there are publications that are going back to subscription models instead of advertising models. There are musicians who are going back to selling albums instead of just streaming. There are communities that are forming around shared interests rather than just algorithmic recommendations.

And I think those experiments are really important and really valuable. And I think they show that it is possible to create different systems if we want to.

Craig Mod: Right. And I think, you know, as someone who’s been trying to do something similar with my own work, like I’ve been building a membership community, I’ve been selling books directly to readers, I’ve been trying to create things that are outside of the attention economy.

And what reading your book made me feel is that what I’m doing is not crazy. Like it’s actually a reasonable response to the systems that you’re describing. And it’s important work to be doing even if it’s small scale.

W. David Marx: Yeah, I mean, I think that’s exactly right. And I think what you’re doing is really important because you’re showing that there are alternative models that can work. And I think we need more people doing that kind of work and experimenting with different ways of creating culture and connecting with audiences.

Because I think the only way we’re going to get out of this mess is if we have a lot of people experimenting with different models and different approaches. And then hopefully some of those experiments will succeed and will start to create a better cultural ecosystem.

Craig Mod: Right. And I think one of the things that gives me hope is that I think people are starting to get tired of the current system. Like I think people are starting to recognize that the attention economy is making them unhappy and that the perpetual present is exhausting and that they want something different.

W. David Marx: Yeah, I mean, I think that’s one of the things that I’m most optimistic about is that I do think people are starting to wake up to the problems of the current system. And I think the COVID pandemic actually accelerated that in a lot of ways because it forced people to step back and think about what they actually value and what actually makes them happy.

And I think a lot of people realized that what they value is real human connection and being present and having meaningful experiences rather than just constantly consuming content and constantly being online.

Craig Mod: Right. And I think one of the things that you talk about in the book is that the pandemic was actually a useful reset in some ways. Like it gave us a chance to step back and reevaluate things.

W. David Marx: Yeah, I mean, I think the pandemic was this kind of forced pause where everyone had to stop and think about what they were doing and why they were doing it. And I think for a lot of people, that was actually really valuable because it made them realize that a lot of the things that they thought were important actually weren’t that important.

And a lot of the things that they had been neglecting actually were really important. And I think that’s one of the reasons why I end the book at COVID, because I think COVID was this moment where the ideology of the first 20 years of the 21st century really started to break down.

Craig Mod: Right. And I think one of the things that you point out is that we’re now in this kind of interregnum period where the old system is breaking down but the new system hasn’t emerged yet.

W. David Marx: Yeah, exactly. I mean, I think we’re in this transitional moment where the 21st century system that I describe in the book is starting to fall apart, but we don’t know what’s going to replace it yet. And I think that’s both scary and hopeful because it means that things are going to change, but we don’t know yet what they’re going to change into.

Craig Mod: Right. And I think that’s where the work that people like you and me are doing becomes really important, right? Because we’re trying to create alternatives and trying to show that different systems are possible.

W. David Marx: Yeah, exactly. I mean, I think the work that we’re doing is about trying to create models that can serve as alternatives to the dominant system. And I think the more people who do that work, the more likely it is that we’ll be able to create a better cultural ecosystem going forward.

Craig Mod: Right. Well, I want to talk a little bit more specifically about some of the things in the book. So one of the things that I thought was really interesting is your discussion of Korean pop culture and how that’s been such a success story. Can you talk a little bit about that?

W. David Marx: Yeah, I mean, I think K-pop and Korean culture more broadly is one of the really interesting success stories of the 21st century. And I think it’s interesting because it shows that you can have global cultural success without following the 21st century model that I describe in the book.

Like K-pop is very much a product of the old system. It’s very curated, it’s very controlled, there’s a lot of gatekeeping, there’s a lot of training and practice. Like K-pop idols train for years before they debut. And that’s completely antithetical to the post-practice ideology that I describe in the book.

But it’s been incredibly successful globally. And I think that shows that there’s still an appetite for high-quality, well-produced culture. And that the democratization model isn’t the only model that can work.

Craig Mod: Right. And I think one of the things that you point out is that the Korean government actually played a big role in supporting K-pop and Korean culture more broadly.

W. David Marx: Yeah, I mean, the Korean government definitely invested a lot in cultural production. They saw culture as a strategic asset and they invested in training programs and production facilities and export promotion. And I think that’s been really important to the success of Korean culture.

Now it’s massively in the conversation in a very short amount of time. Which was also government catalyzed.

Craig Mod: Right.

W. David Marx: Government certainly helped, but I would say, I mean, it was a bunch of companies that were just incredibly eager. I think Japan has put equal resources probably into supporting Japanese culture with mixed effect.

I think Japanese pop culture is successful despite the government rather than because of the government. But the point is, I would say that this 25 years has been a flourishing of the possibilities. Right. And that it is now incumbent on us to look at, okay, we didn’t get the outcomes we wanted.

From this democratization. What are the small tweaks that need to be made? I do think that my one goal in all of this is, and especially with my previous book Status and Culture, to say, where does cultural value come from? How to understand that. How to understand all the workings of the ecosystem to maximize the best output in that ecosystem.

And so this book points out here are the problems that if we have these value systems, we’re only going to be pushing towards more money. We’re not going to be pushing towards more art. If we have this kind of media that’s powered by display ads, we’re only going to be pushing towards this kind of content, not this kind of content.

Et cetera, et cetera. So the best case scenario is to say—‘cause I ultimately, I am not a fatalist and what’s written in this book—is just to say I’m very cynical and skeptical about what happened in the last 25 years. For obvious reasons. I think that the average case of what happened in the last 25 years is not good.

Right. But the chance we have now, which is what I end the book with, is to say, okay, that was a cautionary tale.

Craig Mod: Yep.

W. David Marx: What human intervention do we have to make in order to fix it? And that’s the number one most important point, which is that this is all on autopilot. These value changes happened without intention.

And no one voted these in. I mean, you have Zuckerberg—I was going to say it’s essentially six people. Zuckerberg and Musk. And these people are taking specific actions to get their specific goals. But we’re all being swept along with it.

But we didn’t come together as a community to be like, this is, these are the value shifts we want and these are the outcomes we want. And so it’s just to say, human beings still have the possibility to fix our own problems. And we have to do it. And so that’s the optimistic case.

It’s just we’ve, we have some of these bad biases and problems of the 20th century we have fixed and opened the door for and now can we take that and do something with it? But if we just let it go without making any intervention, we will have, it will only get worse.

Craig Mod: It’ll only get worse. Well, I mean, that’s why I said I was kind of radicalized. I was already radicalized before I read this, but what reading this book made me feel is like what I’m doing at my own weird little scale, which is arguably, you know, I’d be the first to admit, it’s very small, feels really good, and it feels like the right thing to be doing. And it feels like a healthy way to be engaging. And I’m proud of the work I’m able to do, and I’m proud of the community I’ve built around the work that I’m doing. And part of why I put that out there and sort of like do my board meetings and stuff like that is I want other people to emulate it because it is there to just be done.

It takes a lot of work. You have to believe in it. You have to have some kind of like underlying theology or philosophy that’s kind of motivating you to do it. But it’s there. It is possible. And I’m very glad that you’ve been doing the work that you’ve been doing. I mean, like, you had to go deep offline.

I mean, I know you had to go online to read all this crap, but to actually produce the book, you have to not be in that space. And you’ve done that now several times over the last 10 years. And hopefully you’ll continue to do that. And I think that, you know, those kinds of acts are really more and more important, and it’s good that you’re out there doing it.

W. David Marx: Yeah. But I mean, I always think is it worth it in a sense? But I enjoy it. I mean, I think my problem now is, and the other reason I’m really optimistic about things is the value in my life of non-online experiences has never felt higher. Like in Tokyo, you’re blessed with this ‘cause it’s still a very analog city.

But like I was in some kind of bar and I’m just watching someone cut lemons. I was like, yes, yes. These lemons are getting cut. This is incredible. You know, so the joy that I feel of being in real life talking to people.

Craig Mod: Yeah.

W. David Marx: Being places. We both love walking and I love it just ‘cause like there’s no better stimulus to me than walking through Tokyo.

Right. Those things feel real and great and that’s where value is shifting for me. And if it’s shifting for me, I think it’ll shift for other people too. That what is going to destroy online culture is not a government intervention. And it’s not a like scolding, “no, stop playing Candy Crush.” It’s just that people will get sick of playing Candy Crush and people get sick of this stuff. And everyone said, “well, it’s like heroin. You can’t get off of it.” But it is already happening. People don’t want their social lives being online. There are already tons of offline social clubs for this reason. And I personally want to move in that direction. Every time I make a move in that direction, I feel good about it. And it’s more enjoyable.

And it’s like, I think everyone has this experience where they leave their phone somewhere and they can’t find it. That was the best four hours of my life. What happened? I know. And so if that is how things are moving, it could move that way for everybody.

And one final thing, I ran into a friend and we were both—he said this, but I was thinking—I can’t wait till I’m rich enough not to have a smartphone.

And to me, that says everything, which is the real luxury that people are going towards is not feeling chained to their phone. And if that is how people think about it in their heads, you do get a move away from it. The same way that people were addicted to cigarettes for a long time and they said, there’s no way we’re going to get people off of cigarettes. And there was just a collective understanding of this is not good for us, and people moved away.

Craig Mod: I do think the big difference is cigarettes were a single industry, whereas the smartphone addiction is literally everything in the world. It’s your life. It’s everything in the world. That’s the big difference.

And so it’s a bigger ask. I admire the optimism. Let’s end on that. Let’s end on that point. Because I think we could talk forever about what will or will not happen. But thank you for making time. And thank you for writing this book.

Thank you for reading it. It was a pleasure. And it, you know, I think of the last maybe five or six years, this book having me highlighting and writing notes and thinking more about what I’m doing and feeling better about what I’m doing than anything else I’ve read. So that felt good.

Thank you.

W. David Marx: I mean, and hopefully, I call it a tragedy. I mean, it’s a pessimistic book. But it’s hopefully a fun, funny, pessimistic book. And it reads pretty quick, so.

Craig Mod: Yeah, it does. No, I mean, very quick. ‘Cause you’re going through this going like, oh my God, that’s right. That happened. Holy shit. That’s right. That happened too. It’s like, I can’t believe all this stuff happened.

W. David Marx: Yeah.

Craig Mod: Anyway, thank you, David.

W. David Marx: Thank you.

Craig Mod: And thank you listeners for listening to this episode, which I have to say was brought to us by our sponsor today, Mount Fuji. Mount Fuji. It’s just out there and I’m looking at it and it’s pretty darn pretty. I have to admit, just gazing upon Mount Fuji fills me with a kind of awe of nature and gratitude for being alive.

And it helps me push through the struggles of recording a podcast, and more importantly, editing a podcast and packaging a podcast. So thank you Mount Fuji for existing for a very long time. And it’s kind of cool to think that Hokusai looked at the same thing that I’m looking at right now. So thanks Mount Fuji for helping us be better humans and bringing joy to everyone who gazes upon your impressiveness.