In Too Much, Lena Dunham’s Netflix romcom, protagonist Jess has a toxic ex called Zev. Via flashback, we witness Zev dismiss her emotional needs, demand she get rid of her dog and – worst of all – pour scorn on her cultural preferences: Vanderpump Rules, the “Real Housewomen of North Carolina”, Miley Cyrus songs. When Jess enthusiastically sings along to the ballad Angels Like You, Zev admonishes her: “It’s not real music, it’s manufactured bullshit – come on, you’re too smart to fall for that.” Jess briefly defends Cyrus, before retreating. “Don’t make me feel stupid for loving things!” she implores tearily.
Zev is a bad guy and a cultural snob. He’s a bad guy partly because he’s a cultural snob. He’s also a relic. We live in a world where contempt for culture based on its level of sophistication or intellectual value is considered deeply passé, if not borderline evil. The derogatory labels – guilty pleasure, idiotbox, dumbed-down entertainment, disposable pop, trash TV – are no longer in circulation. Culture of every stripe is worthwhile: superhero movies prompt near academic levels of discourse; Taylor Swift is the subject of multiple university classes; and reality shows double as state of the nation treatises (The Traitors echoes British democracy’s dysfunctions, wrote Ian Dunt in the i; the brutal competition of Love Island USA is an allegory for the mercilessness of American life, according to the New Yorker). Throwing insults – vapid, stupid, pointless, brain cell-depleting – is now like spitting into a mirror: it says more about you than the song/show/movie you are criticising.
But what if cultural snobbery, so effectively cast off over the past decade, wasn’t a waste of time? What if it did actually uphold certain standards? What if – faced with a future dominated by social media advertainment and AI-generated content – it’s our only hope?
You could argue that culture has been on an intellectual downward spiral since the Victorian era, when mass-market literature lowered the collective brow. Ever since, we’ve adapted to art in increasingly populist, democratic and easily digestible forms – cinema, pop music, television, the internet – much of it reflective of new technologies. Over time, suspicion about specific mediums became synonymous with elitism and a fear of change – yet there were always hierarchies within these modern forms, often directed along lines of race, gender and sexuality with the output (and tastes) of the straight, white male generally receiving the least derision.
In a 2004 New York Times article, Kelefa Sanneh summarised rockism – the musical facet of that mindset – as favouring punk over disco, live shows over music videos and idolising “the authentic old legend (or underground hero) while mocking the latest pop star”. By the mid-00s, rockism seemed suffocating. To move beyond it, Sanneh suggested we envisage a world where “it’s impossible to separate classics from guilty pleasures” and try “to acknowledge that music videos and reality shows and glamorous layouts can be as interesting – and as influential – as an old-fashioned album”.
We certainly rose to that challenge. Soon poptimism – an ideology that maintained that authenticity was a pose and conventionally unserious music (and, later, film, TV and books) had inherent value – became the status quo. It was bolstered by the belief that snobbery towards certain genres was inseparable from bigotry (the shudder-inducing memory of 1979’s Disco Demolition night; Noel Gallagher responding to Jay-Z’s 2008 Glasto headline slot by saying: “I’m not having hip-hop at Glastonbury, it’s wrong”). People wanted to purge themselves of the prejudices that prevented them embracing lowbrow culture, resulting in headlines such as “My anti-romance book snobbery was rooted in internalised misogyny”. In Zev and Jess’s case, it is no coincidence that her favoured music and TV are stereotypically feminine. Needless to say, appraising art through a misogynistic, homophobic, white-supremacist lens is not a good thing. Yet poptimism’s reach went far beyond oppressive power structures – in the end, open-mindedness curdled into indiscriminate celebration.
Too Much demonstrates how. Jess’s ultimate defence of her devotion to Cyrus is to equate Zev’s disdain with a kind of emotional robbery; to judge is to shame is to destroy joy that is in short supply in a world plagued by catastrophe and disconnection. This applies not only to reality TV and chart fodder, but also manchild-friendly comic franchises and fantasy epics. In 2016, a webcomic by Adam Ellis depicting a sports fan telling his snide friend to “let people enjoy things” captured this perspective so well it became a popular meme.
These days, “let people enjoy things” is the prevailing attitude towards all cultural consumption. The mainstreaming of obsessive fandom helped conflate criticism with trauma-inducing attacks (see: Swifties who take the musician’s output – and discussion of it – incredibly personally), as did superstars clapping back at commentators (Lana Del Rey taking the time to tweet multiple haughty rebuttals to an NPR review; Halsey expressing her hopes that the “basement they run [Pitchfork] out of” – situated in the World Trade Center no less – collapses). With any negativity now considered psychic violence (sometimes countered by threats of actual violence from fans), enthusiasm took over as the default mode. Ironically, considering the Gallaghers’ track record of insulting their peers, it’s a mindset that has benefited the Oasis reunion no end: don’t call them derivative, dull or lyrically inane like people did in the 1990s; just focus on the rare and precious sight of British people having fun.
This may all sound very nice, but a new age is upon us. Accounts pumping out AI-generated music are reaching massive audiences; in June, a fake rock band called the Velvet Sundown amassed more than 1m Spotify plays in weeks. In light of advances in AI video technology, YouTube recently issued a warning about content that is “inauthentic”, “mass-produced” and “repetitious” (which does admittedly sound like a 1990s dad describing happy hardcore). There is now an established term for this sort of thing: slop – a word that reflects its junky, empty, imitative nature. Should we just let people enjoy that, too?
Probably not. In December, brain rot – a term popular with gens Z and A – was crowned the Oxford word of the year. Defined as “the supposed deterioration of a person’s mental or intellectual state” due to “overconsumption of material (now particularly online content) considered to be trivial or unchallenging”, it is proof we don’t need to wait for the robots to take over: consuming human-created social media dross clearly feels unhealthy on a biological level.
The funny thing is, the defining traits of AI and social media slop are the very qualities cultural snobbery used to rail against. One of these was naked commercialism: AI content takes barely any time or effort to create and economies of scale mean profit is the point, while the success of social media content is judged almost entirely on its viewership. Another was soulless imitation: AI draws crudely on existing culture; social media slop, meanwhile, often involves re-enacting trends or crazes.
Some of these old standards will feel alien to zoomers and alphas. In his 2022 book The Nineties, the critic Chuck Klosterman explores the decade’s hostility towards “selling out,” which he calls “the single most nineties aspect of the nineties”. Selling out involved a respected artist deciding to make work that was more “palatable” and therefore more commercially viable. By 2010, says Klosterman, “it was hard to illustrate to a young person why this act was once seen as problematic; by 2020 it was difficult to explain what the term literally expressed”.
Social media decimated the binary between advertising and entertainment long ago. So what if art and commerce become synonymous? Well, how about this remarkably on-the-nose warning from the recent past. When NFTs – digital artworks that only exist online – exploded in popularity during the pandemic, there was little sign of luddite elitism: Christie’s sold an NFT by Beeple for a record-setting $69.3m. To detractors, Rosanna McLaughlin wrote in the Guardian, the makers of NFTs were “morally bankrupt, environmentally vandalistic money-grabbers whose creations barely qualify as art”, a view shared by Beeple himself who described the work as “a big pile of ass-shit”. NFTs helped “the distinction between art and asset” disappear, observed McLaughlin. “Prices, not ideas, dominate.” This meant that when the bubble burst – it was reported in 2023 that 95% of NFTs were worthless – nothing at all remained.
If we can use the long-lost tenets of cultural snobbery as an effective, rational critique of AI and social media slop, then why not reinstate standards across the board? Deliberate imitation and an obsession with numbers increasingly rule conventional popular culture, too. The tech companies who now create and distribute so much television are interested almost exclusively in viewership (as their policy of cancelling acclaimed shows has repeatedly proved) and they have always been committed to exploiting existing tastes: House of Cards, Netflix’s first original series, came about after the platform noticed that Kevin Spacey, director David Fincher and the original BBC version were all popular.
Following the prestige television era, this mindset has, unsurprisingly, produced diminishing returns. Last year, the New York Times critic James Poniewozik coined the term “mid TV”, defined as a “profusion of well-cast, sleekly produced competence” that represented modern television’s “willingness to retreat, to settle, to trade the ambitious for the dependable”. In other words, to make safe bets on emulative and unchallenging shows (Poniewozik cites Mr and Mrs Smith and House of the Dragon as examples).
The quest to appeal to proven preferences has reshaped pop music too, as songwriters craft bland, vapid tracks in the hope of pleasing Spotify algorithms. It’s also why we’re trapped in a nightmare of endless reboots, adaptations and spin-offs (there have been 11 Star Wars shows since 2021 alone). AI may be entirely derivative, but so is much TV. And Hollywood is so obviously beholden to branding – whether that be existing IP or actual consumer products – that Apple TV+’s affectionate satire The Studio used this obsession as the cornerstone of its movie business pastiche. Initially, The Studio’s protagonist Matt Remick (Seth Rogen) pays lip service to cultural snobbery: he is infuriated by his CEO’s insistence they make a Kool-Aid film. But the show teaches him to compromise in a post-Barbie reality. (You really can’t hold it against Remick: he exists within the TV arm of a phone company trying to foster cultural cachet; he was always going to be a capitalist stooge.)
Obviously, the value of art is subjective up to a point, but there are still some broad criteria we can claw back, regardless of the medium. Shifty, Adam Curtis’s recent docuseries about 1980s Britain, includes a clip of Martin Amis informing an interviewer that “there is a great convulsion of stupidity happening in the world, mostly to do with television […] It’s almost like consumerism of culture.” Amis seems almost comically fusty in the footage. It doesn’t mean he doesn’t have a point. A great convulsion of stupidity endures – see: brain rot – but the idea that art can spread idiocy has disappeared. Implicit in the “let people enjoy things” mindset is the argument that people need mindless pleasure and distraction during terrible times. To deny them that is mean-spirited. But what if those terrible times were partly a product of our dumbed-down, money-fixated culture in the first place?
In a 1993 interview, David Foster Wallace defined “low” culture – such as “TV and popular film” – as art that is lucrative because it knows “audiences prefer 100% pleasure”. Serious art is “more apt to make you uncomfortable, or to force you to work hard to access its pleasures, the same way that in real life true pleasure is usually a by-product of hard work and discomfort”. We may live in an era when watching an entire TV programme without looking at your phone feels like monastic contemplation, but Foster Wallace’s ethos remains true and applicable. The easier art is to consume and produce, and the more focused it is on remuneration, the less it gives us: no food for thought, just reaffirmation at a time when echo chambers are the default.
Cultural snobbery might end up being no match for tech giants and AI and social media’s infinite scroll. But as a bulwark against vacant, commercial, intellectually bereft art made by robots or humans or a combination of the two, it’s worth reconsidering. Throughout this article, I’ve been tempted, in characteristically millennial style, to give assurance of my own lack of cultural snobbery – I have enthusiastically consumed years’ worth of dross – but by the end I felt less perverse pride than straightforward shame. At the very least, we should stop villainising the proponents of some kind of standards: the Zevs of this world may have their flaws, but when it comes to brain-rotting culture, they could also be our saviours.
