SAGE ADVICE: The Cultural Plateau

On creative flattening, attention colonization, and what it means to make something real when everything around us—governments, financial systems, society at large—are phoning it in and cashing out

I don’t know about you… but something feels off.

I sat in bed this past weekend sipping coffee and chatting with my husband about some of the premier design and art shows popping off around the world right now. Specifically, we were discussing The New York Times critique of Alma Allen’s exhibition for the American pavilion at the Venice Biennale—which, like so much else in our society, has had a myriad of paralyzing protocols imposed upon it by our current government.

“Visitors may experience a numbness—am I feeling anything? Do I even care?”

As I spoke, clearly attempting to articulate this feeling I was experiencing beyond these large-scale exhibitions and more generally speaking. I struggled to find the words. Nothing is overtly broken, exactly. Not in crisis in any legible way anyways.., at least not yet. Just—flat. Boring, even. Like the cultural atmosphere has lost pressure. You can move through it but you can’t feel the wind. Not feeling/unfeeling is… not great.

Ideas that should be generating heat aren’t. Conversations that used to spark something are circling the same drain. Art that could be challenging isn’t. Fashion perpetually circles the same references. Music that SHOULD be weird plays it safe. Film and TV are inundated with reboots so bland you can’t get me to the box office anymore. And the political discourse that dominates our feeds isn’t discourse at all—it’s performance. Underneath all of it, this strange, anesthetized hum.

I’ve been trying to name this feeling for a while. I’m calling it the Cultural Plateau.

And I want to be clear: the plateau is not a passive condition. It’s the logical endpoint of every system around us choosing extraction over creation, profitability over everything else. Capitalism be capitalizing to the point of no return.

Attention Colonization

Here’s what I think happened. Somewhere within the last two decades, our attention stopped being ours.

Cal Newport, writing in The New York Times this spring, put numbers to something most of us have felt: our attention spans are now roughly one-third of what they were in 2004. The sharpest drop happened around 2012—exactly when smartphones became ubiquitous and the attention economy went into hyperdrive. Coincidence? The research says no. AI-induced cultural stagnation, as a WMNF report bluntly declared this year, is no longer speculation. It’s already happening.

But here’s what’s worse than distraction. We’ve been de-skilled. Not by AI taking our jobs, but by us voluntarily outsourcing the act of thinking, of doing, before AI even had a chance to do it for us. Derek Thompson—who drives me crazy when I don’t like the points he’s making, but game recognizes game—called this out clearly: the crisis isn’t the rise of thinking machines. It’s the decline of thinking people.

“Writing is not a second thing that happens after thinking. The act of writing is the act of thinking. And we’ve stopped doing both.”

Strangely, I’ve started writing more. Maybe I’m unintimidated, maybe I don’t care so much, or too much. I think it’s worth the risk of putting out another think piece a select few will read if I’m lucky. Regardless… Here I am speaking into the void. Glad you’re here😘

Reading for leisure is down nearly 50% since the 2000s. Average reading scores just hit a 32-year low—the furthest back the data even goes!? Newport describes deep reading as the serum we have to keep taking to maintain the cognitive superpower of complex thought. I’d argue its not deep reading… but reading at ALL!? Or more subjectively, teaching people how to read, encouraging it. Society stops when curiosity stops and reading/writing are wildly attached to fostering critical thinking. THAT thread has been seemingly lost. We’ve stopped reading and writing. Voluntarily. YIKES. Because what? Scrolling is easier. Because a chatbot will draft the email. Because concentration has become uncomfortable and we’ve trained ourselves to flee discomfort at the first twitch. (by the way, my hubby as a hypothesis on why we have lost of our ability to be uncomfortable anymore that is a scathing cultural review waiting to be written.)

And the creative class isn’t immune. Artist and educator Liz Kohler Brown put it plainly: when the algorithm becomes our primary source of creative input, the result is homogenized work and creative fatigue.Performance metrics warp the creative compass. We end up making art that gets likes—not art that matters, not art that lasts. Art that’s just more stuff. That’s attention colonization applied to the creative act itself.

Our mental real estate—the space where original ideas form, where connections get made, where the weird and unexpected can surface—has been completely and utterly occupied so fully that nothing can rise to the surface at all. I feel we are suffocating. In every goddam direction and way imaginable. Nothing can breathe, including our spirit (individually and collectively) and it’s created a density of non-emotive, un-evocative and underseasoned expression.

Furthermore, overstimulation has become its own form of anesthesia. We are drowning in content and stuff for stuff’s sake, yet we are absolutely starving for meaning.

When we’re anesthetized, we don’t generate new ideas. We become hyperreactive. We replicate without an awareness of it. We perform like jesters without audiences that care or respect us and then it seems the value we intend to create for the world around us becomes valueless.

The Enshittification of Everything

There’s a framework for what’s happening at the systems level, and it’s called enshittification–well, hello again. (I’ve brought up this concept before.) Coined by writer Cory Doctorow and recently applied to the full sweep of American civic life by Jonathan Last at The Bulwark, it describes a three-stage decay cycle: first a platform is good for users, then it’s good for businesses at users’ expense, then it’s only good for the platform itself—extracting maximum value while delivering minimum experience. And then we all die a slow death together, but separately.

Think F*cebook (recent articles prophesied a looming death spiral for this abhorrent corporation.) Think Am*zon. (Who can afford prime if no one can afford more crap made by slaves on the other side of the planet?) Think Spirit Airlines, whose entire business model was: how much discomfort will customers tolerate before they pay us to stop? (RIP dying business model not even the Trump Administration will save.) The elite seem to have forgotten who supplies their yacht money.

The enshittified system doesn’t ask ‘how do we create value?’ It asks ‘what’s the worst we can get away with?’

Now apply that to culture. The way most people drive, now? It’s as tho noone esle is on the road and basic rules of engagement (and safety) don’t exist anymore!? Enshittified cars and media and civil society. Effort of any kind has been lost onus collectively speaking.

And then there’s our political ecosystem… which isn’t just enshittified—it’s dysfunctional, if not completely defunct. Politicians have become influencers, optimizing for engagement and manipulating society into a lumpenFrankenstein that lacks humanity. Cancel culture and combative debate styles aren’t the result of people caring more—they’re the result of a system that rewards the loudest signal instead of the most urgent or considered one. Partisan news cycles don’t exist to inform; they exist to retain attention through outrage. This means we hardly engage at all door-to-door, face-to-face with our neighbors anymore. Our humanity is losing to black screens.

I believe we are seeing this sorry sack of a model being replicated across creative cultures and industries at large. May the biggest monster win! And at the cost of anything and everything.

Apathy, isolation, and dissociation don’t make for rich and robust culture(s). Why say anything, or do anything, if it’s merely going to be politicized and assaulted through lenses of reactivity and repulsion? Including highly conceptual creative expressions!? And social, environmental and economic missions? All enshittified. This one is big for me. This is not good for creativity. This is not good for collectivity. Full stop.

Our government[s] have flattened society into ideological warfare that serves no one, or at least no one we’ve ever met. The sharing economy has utterly flattened creative risk by rewarding what already has an audience. Algorithms surface familiarity, not novelty for clicks.

Art director and cultural critic Zoë Yasemin crystallized this perfectly recently: what passes for taste in 2026 is mostly recognition (cough, I’d call this traditional advertising no?) The ability to point at the “right” things, repeat what’s already been validated, follow people whose taste was validated by someone else—now it’s just online instead of in print.

“Taste has become almost entirely performative. The references are passwords, not actual arguments.”

Knowing about your niche artist (music, fine art, design, etc) used to mean being so into something you were a nerd about the subject matter and you found community and solace in speaking (sometimes only) to that crowd. Now to speak so exclusively to a clique is seen as an economic failing rather than a rapturous devotion to specificity that led to belonging. The arms race of references has become so refined that the actual point—what does this do, what does it argue for, what does it make possible in your own work—gets lost underneath the performance of having recognized it. As Yasemin writes: you cannot scrape a position off a Pinterest board.

Beauty and culture journalist Anita Bhagwandas goes further, arguing we should kill the word “aesthetic” entirely. “Aesthetic” culture is shallow by design: it prioritizes looking like something over actually being something. Part of something! It’s costume over community, optics over identity. When trends used to emerge, they came from something alive—a movement, a music genre, a political manifesto, an underground scene. Now it’s been reduced to matching outfits and a TikTok Shop link. Cultural cosplay. A parody of the subcultures it steals from.

Benicio del Toro’s character ‘Benny’ in Basquiat said it perfectly:

“You gotta dress right. You gotta hang out with the right people. You gotta go to the right places. And you gotta make the same thing over and over again so that they can recognize it. And after you get famous, you still gotta keep on doing the same thing. If you change... they’re not gonna know. And they’re gonna say, ‘Well, we don’t like it.’ You know.”

If you can’t demonstrate an existing fanbase, you can’t get funding. If you can’t show proven demand, you can’t get a platform, a deal or the like. Creative risk has been structurally priced out.

Meanwhile, AI is training on the flattened language we’ve already produced—the polished, directive, emotionally-neutral text that dominates the internet, because the internet, built by some of the most humanity-deficient people ever, has trained us into antihumanism! Misanthropy amplified by a billion “chats” a day. The result is a feedback loop: language itself becomes more homogeneous, more terse, less emotionally textured. The medium we use to “think in” is being standardized into blandness. And the ideas that emerge from flattened language tend to be fuckin’ flat.

TLDR’s are even too long to read now, really? Yikes.

Nobody Knows What They Can Say

There’s one more ingredient in this particular stew, and it’s the one nobody wants to admit: we’re paralyzed. Everyone seems stuck. Creatively and emotionally, let alone economically. Paralysis ain’t conducive to new ideas, flagrant expressions, or exciting and enticing experiences.

BUT it’s not paralysis by censorship, or not only/exactly. But by ambient uncertainty. In the current cultural and political climate, creative risk doesn’t just carry aesthetic consequences—it carries social ones. And I’m so brutally aware of our collective apprehension to have an opinion and put ourselves out there as creative entrepreneurial folk. The discourse has become so combative, so zero-sum, so algorithmically amplified, that putting something genuinely new into the world feels like threading a needle in a windstorm. Where is the eye? Of the needle OR the storm? Will this be enough? What might happen after this blows over? What happens if it NEVER DOES?

Just some questions I am pondering… or fearing. Both.

Nobody knows what they can say, or do. Nobody knows where we’re going economically–certainly not the people running this shitshow. Nobody knows what the rules are going to be next quarter, let alone next year. War. AI disruption. Political volatility. Every axis of stability wobbling simultaneously makes it challenging to navigate. Polycrisis, some smart people have been calling it. Let’s don’t even get started on the weather.

SOoooOooOoOOoooo… we retreat to the known. We replicate what worked before. We perform safety.

I want to name this clearly: the Cultural Plateau is not about a lack of talent. There is no shortage of creative people. What there is a shortage of is conditions that make creative risk feel survivable—let alone embraced and revered. And when risk disappears from creative work, what you get is competence without courage. Craft without conviction. A lot of very polished nothing.

I yearn for roughedged, raw and radical expressions that challenge norms we’ve been lulled to sleep by. I want to see genuine ideas that revolt the elite and push us all to the brink of — newness.

Why This Is Your Moment

If you’ve made it this far in my monologue, thank you and Im sorry for possibly making you feel completely and utterly hopeless. Lol. Here’s the contrarian argument I want to make.

The plateau is not the problem. It’s the proof.

When every system is optimized for extraction and replication—when algorithms surface familiarity for profit, when institutions are enshittified out of fear of losses, when the cognitive fitness of the general population is in measurable decline, only benefiting those already in power—originality becomes the scarcest resource on earth. The scariest too, maybe.

And here’s what I keep coming back to: the counter-movement is already being built. Not loudly. Not virally. But it’s here in the every day. I’m reading it, listening to it, like when we were kids under the covers straining to listen to weird distant radio stations our AM/FM alarm clocks could just barely pull in. (yes I did in fact grow up that rurually and in the 1900’s). WE are out there, but it can feel like only just barely, depending on the day.

Designer Katie McIntyre is buildingMatriarch—a creative and design movement that asks not what can you do with technology but how does this technology nurture humanity? Her work treats women’s bodies, experiences, and aesthetics as primary data—not edge cases. In a cultural moment dominated by the preferences of a very narrow slice of humanity, that’s a radical act. Another great example is musical multi-hyphenate Kelli Scarr’s Greater Mysteries. This burgeoning multi-disciplinary art and community project is designed as a modern reimagining of ancient initiatory rites to help participants navigate personal and collective transformation. Times of collective plateauing are absolutely calling for opportunities for transformation. That’s what it looks like to build with a position instead of a pose.

That same posture—decisive, rooted, willing to defend—is what Yasemin is pointing to when she distinguishes taste from position. Taste is what you recognize.Position is what you defend. Decisiveness is what makes either posture useful. The creatives who will matter on the other side of this plateau aren’t the ones with the best reference library. They’re the ones who know what they actually believe and are willing to hold it out in public, even when it’s not currently en vogue.

Newport’s argument is that we transformed our understanding of physical health within a single generation, from a sedentary, car-dependent culture to one with 34 million joggers and 55,000 gyms. He believes the same revolution is possible for cognitive health. I think he’s right. But I’d go further, as I think his linear (hyper masculine) perspective is limited in its expression of how and where we should define thriving. #justsayin

We need revolution and we already know it’s what we need to buck up to.

The plateau will break. It always does. The question is who will have kept working when it does. I’ve said it before and I’ll say it again: I think that could be us—the creative class who are fearless enough to say ENOUGH. And to demand a specific kind of more (New! Radical!? Refreshing!?) not just for ourselves, but the collective whole we’re part of.

Great creative disruptions have always come from the edges—from people who kept making things during the flat, anesthetized periods when it seemed like no one was paying attention and no other options were available. That might be a fringe expression, a fringe life, but it’s important and necessary… especially during times like these (which are in fact precedented.)

The plateau is not a signal to stop. It’s a signal that the work we’re all doing is more necessary than ever, even if the culture hasn’t caught up to that fact yet.

The blankness setting in all around us? That’s not the end of something.

That’s the setup.

#getwithit
— gJ