Serious question: do you think the 21st century will be seen as a sort of dark age? From where I’m looking, market of art and ideas is too oversaturated for anything interesting to stick out. The notion of rebelling against the dominant culture no longer has any weight, because due to decades of waning attention spans and centuries of similar rebellion, we simply don’t have a culture coherent enough to rebel against. The avenues left open to contemporary writers seem to be1) - mindless bestseller slop that we all know about (romance, YA novels, poetry books by bitter women and ethnic diaspora groups)2) - /lit/-bro rehashing of the classics, attempting to live in a past which no longer exists and perhaps never existed3) - hyper-obscure avant-garde literature, written by fairly intelligent academics but destined to be read by only three people.The transformation is probably irreversible. There will never be a return to the older world of literature, and whatever comes after us will have to be completely original. I’m welcoming recommendations of anything written in the 21st century that you think is quite good.
>>24850037It will be another generation or two. All physical media has to be phased out firat, then there will be a period of hyper accelerated retardation before the plug is pulled one way or another, erasing 99% of everthing
>market of art and ideas is too oversaturated for anything interesting to stick out.sounds to me like one of those old timer jokes>nobody goes down that road anymore, it's too busyhave some faith in man's ability to get bored with the current scheme. maybe this will last a hundred years, maybe a thousand, maybe a decade, but eventually some novel way of thinking will emerge, some modality of artistic endeavor shall roar, and all will take heed.
>>24850037>...and perhaps never existedWhat a cliche.The period from the printing press to the internet was pretty unique, and this digitization and then by copyright utter destruction of everything that came before will wipe out nearly everything. Absolutely a dark age, but mostly due of a culture of anti-intellectualism and corporatism. Almost nothing will survive the evolution of digital media and copyright. Give it a few hundred years.
>>24850037>The transformation is probably irreversible. There will never be a return to the older world of literature, and whatever comes after us will have to be completely originalI strongly disagree. It's the other way around: the problem is we have no great unifying literature or art. Where's our Grapes of Wrath? A Tale of Two Cities? Frankenstein? Moby Dick? Three Musketeers? Dante's Inferno? Etc etc. At most you have genres. Markets. Hobbyists interesting in a specific genre, those are still around. But a literary work that will be read and examined by the general public in 20-40 years are dying off.
>>24850037>Serious question: do you think the 21st century will be seen as a sort of dark age?No.
