Damek.

I always used to find the name of the band “Pop Will Eat Itself” slightly amusing (though not caring for the band). Amusing because it always seemed sort of obvious to me. Then, in recent years, I thought about electronic music and sampling, and covers of songs, and the way artists are influenced, and use and reuse and synthesize and…

Of course pop eats itself. Culture eats itself. It always has and always will. Shakespeare re-wrote italian plays. Culture is the snake that creates itself by consuming its own tail. Ever-changing, always the same.

As some liberals become disillusioned with the Obama administration after less than a year – myself included, what with stories like these, and his general inability to live up to lefty-blogger hope that he’d be as media savvy as they imagine themselves to be – I’ve come across people starting to question the narrative that “third parties are always bad, due to the mathematical nature of our voting system.”

I recently read a commenter at one site (link forgotten, sorry) point out that our government used to contain more than one “third party,” with the same voting system in place, for the first half of its existence or so. Now, pulling this out of my nether-regions, it occurs to me that the vitality of third parties in the USA dwindled roughly around the same time as the rise of mass media.

Separately, it occurs to me that mass media (coupled with population growth) is a tool not just for homogenizing culture, but for accelerating it. Consider the difference between software running on a card-reading vacuum tube system, vs. a RAM-reading silicon chip system. You get exponential growth and change, and also consolidation of variation in terms of system design and coding standards.

The connections are nebulous but I have two “hey it’s late and we’re just talking” questions.

When people talk about a technological singularity, is it possible that the true singularity already happened at the dawn of mass media, and the true emergent entity is already in existence, riding the wave of, or consisting directly of, the continually growing and homogenizing global shared culture?

Has pop et itself into a mind?

The other question is contrary to that – much as the political is personal, is culture more personal than social? Basically, are those in power tools of a culture into which they were born and have little control over, or is culture enough under the control of personal decisions that each new generation really does choose its own culture, and those with the most power actually have as much control as they believe?

Two answers:

First, my brain hurts. Second, probably as with nature vs. nurture, people are as much the creators of their culture as they are at the whim of it. Much as we are both historical actors, and children of history.

But mostly, my brain hurts.