Michelle Goldberg wonders why American culture seems so stagnant these days. The answer is simple: algorithms. The secret to popularity and financial success for artists lies in understanding and exploiting them, and they lead the public back to what is already familiar, so how likely is it that we are going to see anything radically different and appealing?
The artists we revere had the insight and the courage to take the artifacts of existing culture and package them into something that was generally recognized as completely new. You would have to be very brave or very stupid to try something like that in today’s world.