I have a spin to put on this take. As another poster commented, this is "capitalist decay", but there's a bright side to it. There's a growing number of people getting sick of interacting with the internet as a finished product for "consumption". It's becoming less fun and useful, so people will be looking elsewhere.

And like all proper capitalist systems, it undermines itself. What I mean by this is that we can use the internet for what it's still really good at - finding a product, event, or thing to engage with in person. It's never going to stop being an engine for commerce. So as people are longing for something real, the internet still deliverers the information of what is available.

Basically, "market" demands for unplugged things to do is growing.

I think that enshittification is not even the primary driver.

What really happened is that it all became so centralized.

Walled gardens like the iPhone App Store are what drove this.

It would be so fucking easy to clone twitter or pintrest or MySpace or any of the thousands of other websites that used to bring joy, but the problem is that access is mediated by these walled gardens.

The only way to get users is to pay for user acquisition. Designers don’t design experiences anymore, they design “funnels” that identify “user lifetime value” and use this as the metric for determining ad spend within the walled gardens.

Enshittification is a by-product of this, not a driver. Websites and apps are able to enshittify because what are you going to do? Use lemmy instead of Reddit? What are you some fucking trans communist Linux nerd?

The web used to be an open world game and now it’s on rails.

Also I had hope that g*mers noticing big-budget releases getting worse would lead to something good, which

they mostly just opine about how Minecraft Alpha or Assassins Creed III or whatever were peak. Sad!

A lot of the "dead" complaints in my experience come from people that mostly engage with things in the mainstream which tends to be them feeling the decaying of capitalism as these companies chase more profit. These same people tend to be blind or unwilling to engage with much outside of the mainstream.

I haven't really engaged with much mainstream culture for a long time myself, but can say most things are still going strong away from the mainstream. I have a large backlog of books, games and music.

I haven't really seen much AI stuff with my online use but I use various filterlists in my adblocker, and don't use social media other than here. I think what you're seeing now in a lot of people limiting their online use, or moving into smaller spaces like here to engage with people rather than the larger platforms, decentralising which imo is a good thing. I've seen people going back to creating forums recently too.

i think that a lot of people are now afraid to share their genuine content due to how commonplace shame is nowadays. seriously theres this silly artist on instagram who makes dancing animation and everybody acts like they committed some sort of mortal sin and shares their videos and makes fun of them. we cant do anything because stupid commentary youtubers HAVE to do their videos to make a profit on their newest selected lolcow and people HAVE to be miserable about everything and harass every minority who dares be out in public etc.

no, its NOT an internet thing, its a lack of moderation issue. capitalism allows such content to continue because it makes a lot of money but a system that places human dignity on top would never do this. theres this singaporean guy who made a lot of hateslop videos. when people pointed out that what he does can land him in jail under singapore law he stopped.

Is there any sort of cuture outside of a few indie works that people get genuinely excited for now?

I dunno, I think this is breddy gud. There isn't as strong of a centralised 'did you see [new episode] on tv last night' thing now, and instead people post about like, The Amazing Digital Circus or Gameoverse now. Lotta great indie games out there too. I prefer this to being in 2009 and unable to escape that new fucking James Cameron film.

Books in particular, you still have booktok or otherwise popular novels, but damb so much good stuff is still coming out. You have no right to declare literature dead if you haven't read Songs of No Provenance.

"Culture" is ailing and I'm happy about it! MORE 👏 INDIE 👏 WORKS 👏 GETTING 👏 BIG 👏 EXPOSURE 👏

Don’t forget about nut busting content. Half the insta thots in my feed are AI bots

I'm looking to move and got Pinterest for the first time.

Holy shit it's nothing but ads and occasionally AI slop. How do people use this shit

Just stop spending time on the internet lmao. This post is like "I've been hanging out down at the sewage treatment plant and I can't stop thinking about how the whole world smells like poop now."

Yeah, the internet is absolute ass and not worth engaging with. Everything else you you're lamenting about can be overcome in person, but first you gotta clear your mind of the negativity vortex that the internet enforces on everyone who uses it.

Underground music is strong as it's ever been. Just have to get out in the world and engage with it.

NWSL, MLS, and MLB games are all cheap as hell and a great time.

Books... dead? What? Almost everyone I know has entirely replaced social media time with reading, and now carry an e-reader around everywhere they go.

Like yeah, everything based around the internet is going to keep getting worse, but one effect of this is that all the cool people are ditching social media and getting back to the real world which is making underground and community spaces thrive again.

People really seem to have cut back on social media use recently, the bloomer would say this is because of all the news articles about how bad it is for you and how terrible the algorithms and people behind it are. As a person who's not really on social media, I don't really care and actually, it makes me kind of happy.

Pretty hard to get excited about streaming when there's a million services out there that keep hiking up their prices. Same goes for tech even before the RAMocalypse, you just get new smartphones that are slightly better than the ones that came out last year.

There aren't as many universally beloved musical artists because Napster started the slow deterioration of the dominant large record labels and radio stations that really came to a head with Spotify and other streaming services. 25 years ago, and this is admittedly oversimplified, you could just segment the market so you had Britney Spears for girls, Limp Bizkit for boys and then Nickelback or 3 Doors Down or whoever for adults. People's tastes just atomized because it became easier to find music you like, even if it was ”old” or not mainstream, and honestly that's good.

Dunno, I think there's still excitement for sports, it's the only thing that people really watch live anymore.

I think “zombified” is more appropriate than dead. A truly dead medium would be the telegraph. What you’re talking about is analogous to a zombie, that which takes the form of a living person and is animated as such, but without a soul, desires no meaningful interaction and no one wants meaningful interaction with it. All consuming; “braaaaains,” “prooooooofits.” Much as those in zombie media typically only interact with zombies out of necessity, people increasingly interact with these zombie media out of a sense of “having to”; Facebook is the only way my kid’s school’s PTA posts updates, it’s the only way aunt Mildred lets us know what’s going on with her family.

The one exception that proves the rule I can think of with media that people get excited for is Taylor Swift. Swifties get genuinely excited for her new releases. However, her long term success speaks less to her talent or personality and more to the risk adverse nature of the music industry. Take fewer chances on up and coming artists, milk the established artists and their fanbases for all they’re worth. The way they do it also shows how the pop music industry isn’t trying to appeal to a broad, popular base. Swift sells a ton of albums, but a lot of that is due to there being 4-5 different versions of her albums (the “regular” version, the Target-exclusive version, the Amazon-exclusive version, etc) and the hardcore Swifties will buy every version. It doesn’t need to sell well with the broad market, just maximize profits off the diehards.

You see this with zombified media all the time. Microtransaction slop games just need a handful of whales to turn a good profit, reality TV gets poor ratings but the production costs are so low that the few viewers that tune in are enough, the film industry gets by on capeshit primarily consumed by ge 14-30 year old male demo. So we get this dynamic where a small handful of people enjoy the media content while most people just taste the enshittification.

Talking to people in real life is still pretty good if you can find a good context for it and people you like (both easier said than done).

That's about it. Is that media?

go to local shows it's not dead.

The internet is shit, thus anything associated with it is. All those things mentioned in your post are still great when the internet is not involved

I'm not in the US so YMMV but second hand goods and physical media are big in Spain so I can speak to that.

As people get poorer more will turn to offline alternatives. I cut off most of my subscriptions. I play retro or indie games (I think the last AAA title I played was Elden Ring??) I've been going through a back log of old comics and anime. I've also been reading stuff from local authors. There is so, so much media out there.

People are going to keep creating no matter what, the hard part is cutting through the blood sucking middle men so it's easier for the general public to access.

Western media is dead because Western society is a decaying society. From my limited exposure of Chinese social media, it's worlds apart. Overall, Chinese videos/clips are more informative, more creative, more well produced, and funnier. It's rare to see something that's just straight up better in almost every single metric. That's what I feel whenever I watch Chinese videos and compare them with Western genre equivalents. They are also weirdly life-affirming without being cheesy about it. Even shitpost videos/clips would occasionally have this and they are not cynical about it at all. You would watch some video which would leave an impression like "you can do great things with teamwork" or "you can accomplish your dreams with perseverance and help from mentors."

I've been getting into this channel of some Chinese DIY studio that has recently started to republish their Chinese videos in English. Here's one of their videos: https://youtu.be/XhUuhl9iWpQ. It's also a good video to understand why everything is made in China.

Probably haram or whatever but anime and manga have been continuing to be quite good relative to what is produced in the US wrt animation. Particularly, shonen has continued to have amazing production value (still misogynistic and mostly for kids) and yuri as a genre has had a lot of breakouts since the commercial success of Bloom into You.

It's never been great, that is just rose tinted glasses. It is getting worse I suppose for 'mainstream' stuff like news, sports, social media etc but if you know where to look it has never been better as well. Communities like these are an example of it. Amateur sport groups are thriving worldwide too, and independent journalism is more accessible than ever before in history.

outside of a few indie works

Well there's your problem. It's not a few, there's plenty (for some of those things).

Gaming is the obvious answer where indies are thriving - the main issue is finding the right games for you.

Books in general is the most unaffected of those categories (the books themselves, the publishing is what's affected). Finding good books is even harder because most small authors are completely tied to Amazon these days. And AI has caused an avalanche of book-formatted garbage to take even more space from the real ones, but good books are still being written.

Computers? I hate to be that guy but Linux actually is that great now (to give some credibility: I've been using Linux for two decades but only started recommending it in this regard last year). But even here the issue of "finding the right one" is present. Linux is a broad name that can mean vastly different experiences and some of the most common recommendations for beginners like Mint are not distros that I keep in that high-regard. Phones and tablets sadly I have to agree - I don't think there's any hope left for those.

Social Media? Yeah mostly dead, but also we are in one right now and it's not that bad here.

So yeah, everything main stream is dead, but there's still life out there.

a few indie works

My they/them in Allah there are more good indie works being released now than at any time in human history. It does act as a difficulty filter though - if you aren't into a specific scene then you're probably stuck with the slop, the answer imo is to decide what you want, cut out what you don't, and use the extra effort to dive deeper into what you do.

edit: then again I guess I can see what you're saying about people's perception. Cynicism has always been a thing but it seems like there's more of it now. I think people have been "salami sliced" into this by and large, which is why so many of them still can't connect it to capitalism in decay.

what

Also how we are told AI can do all that better than us. Why use a smartphone, just prompt. Why draw just prompt. Why film, just prompt. Why do anything, just prompt. It's quite weird how it has infected whole culture across most mainstream and most niche, even communists have been infected with it just like wojak memes and edgelord culture infected communists.

I keep hearing that gaming is dead. I see no evidence of that, and in fact, I'd say gaming is in the best shape it's ever been.

There are more DRM-free indies available for free and/or low prices than ever before.

I stopped watching American TV and movies a while ago and now I kind of just watch asian dramas with my wife. They are still going strong.

Currently watching Si Jin.

Wormer! Marmalard! Neidermeyer!