Is Western civilization exhausted?

You are right

this
youtube.com/watch?v=Da9FeNoFIm0

In 50-60 years people will see this as a golden age of communication where the internet came into its own.

Everyone takes the last two decades for granted in regards to the fact that you can now carry a fucking device in your pocket virtually anywhere with a signal and access a global network of information and communication. You can download a majority of any worthwhile literature that has existed (usually for free), you can have something delivered to you from across the world with the click of a button. You can draw something and post it online for someone in fucking Japan or India to instantly see, you can write a post on any number of subjects just to have somebody in France tell you why you're a faggot. You can access content that's being produced in such INSANE quantities that every hour, more of it than you could ever consume in a hundred lifetimes becomes available.

There's a lot more garbage to sift through, sure, but that comes with the territory. People really need to stop and actually reflect on the things they wouldn't have if they were born a few decades earlier, rather than dwelling on the things they're missing.

Name me one innovative album ever mister music critic
SILY is the least innovative of the list, id more or less included it because I love the album. DJ Shadow was actually earlier with the sample sound in 1996.

I'd say Flockaveli might be the most innovative on the list as it set off Trap music as we know it. All other albums on this list except SILY and maybe RC and RV1 are completely new ideas, except for RTJ I chose RTJ2 as it was the better album, but EL-P orginated the sound on fantastic damage, which was early 2002

a lot of these are mediocre hip hop artists.

They might be, they might even be horrid, but the albums introduced new styles

Can any of you two inform me why Islam has reproaches/prohibitions on instruments in its music?

nope the future is asian

the last white person to set foot on a planet will be the mars mission, after that all planetary explorers will be asians

OP, you have to realize that things are returning to normalcy. Before WW1, this is what life was like: slow incremental progress while modern "art" was largely garbage only 1% of society concerned itself with. From 1910-2010 the world was rapidly expanding and dealing with newfound industrial capacity. Mass production, a new concept, led to everything becoming cheaper. Art changed as records (print paper, magnetic tape film, vinyl discs) drove down the cost of publishing while the telephone (and later the internet) drove down the cost of communication.

It's not so much exhaustion as it is society returning to what it was. There are no massive wars (WW1, WW2, the Cold War) demanding new technology every five years, so administrators are solely driven to maximize consumption. Consumption has been maximized (reflected in debt loads), but now making anti-consumption decisions like choosing to rent an apartment over owning a home, or choosing not to attend college. As a result, society begins to more and more reflect what it was a century ago: lots of poor renters inside urban cities doing temp jobs with everything run by a small clique of landlords with real jobs.

It's not a self-perpetuating cycle. Colonization was the safety valve administrators put into place to deal with surplus urban populations, but that had stopped working by 1910 which is how WW1 came about. The same will happen with our generation or the next, cities overfilled with underpaid workers will demand change and something will happen. Throw the question of Islam (not unlike the Jewish question a century ago) into the mix and you have a potent brew for cultural change.

and what makes you think that

maybe they're innovative. but innovation for innovation's sake is stupid imo (even if OP isn't explicitly arguing that

Western civilization is exhausted and the greatest proof is that Western people don't have children anymore.

I, for one, welcome our new African overlords.

Another good point to make: the Internet won't last forever. Data caps are already common in the US, where Net Neutrality is totally dead. If AT&T can reobtain their monopoly, this could have major implications on what the actual clearnet Internet itself looks like (for example, AT&T could charge Google or Facebook higher data rates, but offer their own services for free).

Meanwhile the EU is looking at censoring most of the Internet, and will likely adopt practices already used by Russia, China and South Korea (blocking domains, throttling int'l traffic, requiring a login just to access the Internet, no anonymity) which will work to fragment the Internet away from the www standard.

It's likely that in 50-60 years, the Internet will be unrecognizable. American Internet would look like Netzero (built-in ads!) while European Internet would resemble Minitel.

>Before WW1, this is what life was like
stopped reading here
telegraph, steam engines, railroad, mass production, mass markets, industrialization, mechanization, electrification, chemical industries, petroleum industries, indoor plumbing were all made before WWI. These brought changes many times more dramatic than digitalization has provided yet, despite what people here say.

Yes but they weren't nearly as widespread. I'll give you railroads, though.

Nah it'll be black-brown-Mulatto underclass with Jewish overlord at the top, just like they've always planned
Now the only thing left is to take down Asians

weeaboo pls

>op doesn't lichen to the organismic glory that is synthwave

absolutely disgusting

It's being bled.

>cities overfilled with underpaid workers will demand change and something will happen. Throw the question of Islam (not unlike the Jewish question a century ago) into the mix and you have a potent brew for cultural change.
I don't think so, the way to deal with the Islamic question has already been settled, the elites have decided to surrender. And I don't see mas protests in the streets leading to serious changes happening in our lifetimes

This is wonderful and very haunting, thank you! I wish the Near East was still culturally exotic.

>golden age of communication
Debatable. The Internet makes censorship and surveillance easier because every communication is traceable. The perception of anonymity and freedom only exists because most of the Internet's infrastructure is hosted in free-speech jurisdictions like California, but it's just an illusion. States around the world already suppress free speech in ways that Soviet administrators could never dream of, and it's thanks to the nature of the Internet.

>You can download a majority of any worthwhile literature that has existed
You have to admit the vast majority of people don't do that though. Internet pop culture is dominated by the lowest common denominator, just like offline pop culture.

>There's a lot more garbage to sift through, sure
And in many ways, a lot less too. The Internet erodes local cultures and sucks users into a kind of digital cosmopolitanism, where everyone everywhere is more or less the same.

Don't forget the fact that companies increasingly want "walled gardens", where data interchange happens according to proprietary formats and applications, rather than open standards. This, plus all the forces you mention trying to undermine the openness of the Internet, are taking it in a bad direction. However, you need to recognize that from the beginning, it was never the ideal humanist invention you portray it as. The Internet got off to an okay start - some flaws, but nothing irreparable. But now instead of becoming freer and more resilient as it should have, it's going the opposite way.

This. Demographics will be the coup de grace to the West, at least in Europe, Australia and Canada. America will endure for longer

>Yes but they weren't nearly as widespread.
You have a point, but there was no doubt things changed dramatically in the cities. Railway and telegraph were almost always next to each other, especially in the US, so all major cities in the West would have had telegraph and would have been linked by rail in the late 19th century. Before that canal building had a tremendous could also tremendously lower costs and uproot markets, like the Eerie Canal did. Even if the majority of the West (and the 3rd world obviously) were not urbanized, the rate of urbanization was tremendous at the end of the nineteenth century. And if people in the countryside didn't yet become affected by technology, market forces produced social and economic changes. We see millions of peasants moving from the old world to the new. There was also settler colonialism of the British Commonwealth and whats more the dislocations brought by european colonial administration and imperial competition. Steam ship travel, the opening of African, South American and Western USA markets...I could go on... but to say that 19th century was a century of incremental progress is just false. It'd be more appropriate to say that this characterized the period before ~1750

I should also say that the whole premise of OP; the idea of stagnation, decline and decadence, was a HUGE intellectual and popular theme of the 1890s to 1945.

>new hip hop style
>the "artist" mumbles incoherently rather than growling and barking like a dog

because most people on the earth are asians, lol

The whole premise of social darwinism, far right radicalism of the Nazis and such, the huge enthusiasm that was met by many intellectual quarters at the outbreak of World War, all were predicated on the idea that one's country, society and economy was under serious assault and the moral and spiritual character of its people declining. It's also why you see the first mass hysterias about the decline of the white race. Kaiser Wilhelm who coined and had autistic fantasies about Yellow Peril overwhelming the West. Declining birthrates in France brought left and right together screaming for pro-natalist measures, such as bans on abortion, to insure that the French had a large enough body of young men to defend the French race (from Germany especially). In Britain there was an equal alarm at being surpassed by German industrial prowess and the sentiment that their best days were behind them. That's what led to the popularity of Joseph Chamberlain's calls for protectionism, a total break from the free trade orthodoxy of the prior half-century. And its also why intellectuals all over the West started calling for governments to step in to prevent dysgenics, promote eugenics and secure the quality of the national stock; a theme that came to full fruition everywhere during the Great Depression, and in Nazi Germany most dramatically.

Some flaws in your argument.

>Consumption has been maximized (reflected in debt loads),
Markets can grow infinitely, and debts redeemable in fiat currencies are subject to the real value of those currencies being inflated away by monetary authorities, in part to encourage growth. There's no limit to the amount of utility that can be traded. In fact, high growth is in the interests of the elites because people with comfortable lives are more likely to be passive and accepting of their lot.

>choosing to rent an apartment over owning a home
This approaches the real issue, which is that we're running out of natural resources with which to produce specific kinds of utility that everybody wants, namely land and houses. The elites cannot create more land. If they could, they would in an instant, as it would reduce social pressures and thereby benefit themselves.

>but that had stopped working by 1910 which is how WW1 happened
That's not how WWI happened, and we have more than enough land on the earth for everyone to have a home. I don't think there will be a social explosion caused by surplus urban populations, because when things get bad enough, the elites will sacrifice wilderness and green belts for the sake of housing. We're centuries away from true overpopulation.

Elites won't be surrendering when Islamist parties start growing and begin persecuting women, gays, and most importantly Jews. They'll target non-Islamic banks and that is where the fight begins. It's at this point where European civilization has a gut check to side with the Jew again or not.

yes but Japan is a borderline bankrupt client state of America, South Korea doesn't have the resources for a serious space program and China won't be able to afford anything when their bubble pops

It's a golden age of noise and miscommunication enabled by the IT revolution.

Culture is a reflection of life. When people lives revolve around facebook and the mobile phone, that's the kind of culture you get. I don't think Cobain and the guys would have happened growing up as kids in this kind of society.

The fall of the Berlin Wall also meant the end of the struggle of ideologies, values, ways of life. The West won it, had the opportunity to choose the future and it chose the one in which you are your net worth and there's little room for alternative values. The Max Weber version of what the West is has won.

There's probably some degree of civilizational fatigue as well, a bit like when Rome won it all. What do next? Another Augustus? Build another Arc of Triumph? Someone please plagiarize Seneca's works? What do you do when you have just reached the top of the Everest?

What is there to fight for, to dream of, to rebel against, to surprise yourself with, to discover, to come up with anymore?

Not that it matters at all in a globalist world culture 100% driven by economics.

>Markets can grow infinitely, and debts redeemable in fiat currencies are subject to the real value of those currencies being inflated away by monetary authorities, in part to encourage growth.

Markets are finite, they are based upon the amount of people capable and willing to participate in them. Societies with neutral or negative childbirth rates and societies with a lot of anti-western people can't grow easily. No amount of financial magic can change the fact that any single person only desires one hours, maybe two cars, and maybe 500gb of data per month. This assumes they can even afford it, though.

>which is that we're running out of natural resources with which to produce specific kinds of utility that everybody wants, namely land and houses.

It's not a resource problem, it's a much deeper cultural problem. Millennials don't want to live suburban lives with a big house and a big car. As insane as it is, they want to throw away a third of their income on rent because they enjoy that lifestyle. This is especially true in cities that offer free wifi (a thing which will become more common as time goes on) vs a monthly data plan.

All they need is their phone, which has replaced most other devices (alarm clocks, watches, TVs, PDAs, calendars, notebooks, landline phones, desktops, and much more) for most people. You don't need a 20x20' living room with a $1000 couch, $5000 TV, a $200/mo cable package and a $50 PPV to enjoy things now, just a phone that can use wifi offered for free by individual cities.

>The Max Weber version of what the West is has won.
i'm guessing you mean the grim conclusions he came to about modernity being an "iron cage", right?

also Weber didn't really believe in the end of ideology. he imagined modernity would become characterized by a battle of various cultural lifestyles (warring cultural gods, i think he referred to it as) with incompatible sets of values, which is the farthest thing from the end of ideologies, values or ways of life, as you put it. And I think this describes life today, a battle among innumerable sub-cultures though, as I think you hinted, the basis of all these sub-cultures is consumerism and using consumer items to distinguish one's set of values from another's.

>We're centuries away from true overpopulation.

Just because the United States has plenty of open land doesn't mean that the land is functional enough to support a large population just for the sake of it.

This is pretty cool, thanks user

>Millennials don't want to live suburban lives with a big house and a big car.
This was always a huge fucking spook. The rates of depression, family conflict unhappiness and unecessary work hours to achieve this vapid materialist goal was always out of reach for most people (in its most maximalist form) and more importantly was never a sustainable one. To think that a culture that revolves around excess space, excess gadgets and cheap baubles from China or India is the "good life" is ridiculous. Besides that, the amount of expenses, responsibility and management that go into owning a house almost makes the venture an unnecessary fuss. At least a true capitalist (not saying these are millennials) would spend more time living a frugal life accumulating capital than the utterly wasteful ridiculously inefficient and unsustainable middle class lifestyle, which now requires TWO working parents to maintain and two parents working excessive hours and even multiple jobs.

so tl;dr-ish you can't propagate continuous generations of children as the cost of living increases, wages stagnate and educated parents who attain this lifestyle have less kids. While I think working women is very nice economic-liberty wise its clear that this will never fail to make sure that women have less or no kids at all.

>waaah everything sucks now
Why did you even bother typing this drivel?

"everything I don't like is bad!"
grow up

It's not innovation for innovations sake, people don't tend to listen to music just because it's innovative, unless it's uber hipsters, thee are people with actual fans, casual ones aswell

Things only seem slow because you're experiencing it first-hand, whereas history you absorb a relatively quick format. If you were looking at day-to-day happenings in the 50s, you'd be asking when the interesting stuff started.

was the birth of a genre and came out in 2010 youtube.com/watch?v=unN7QvSWSTo

Fukuyama, pls go.

Your problem is perspective, or total lack of it. There are two main problems with western civ at the moment.

One is its "identitarian" approach towards society, rather than economic. Fuck poor people, as long as they can fly their rainbow flags and wear pink tututs in the men's room. This is most exemplified in the subversive neo-marxist left (SJWs, et al), who fly under the flag of 'progressive' seemingly mainstream politics, but are in fact radically illiberal. It's not like 'the right' is off the hook either, though. Any cookie-cutter Christfag will prove that.

The other problem is our runaway-train deregulated brand of widespread industrialized capitalism (i.e., capitalism itself is an industry). There's the outward promise of all the rewards of a market economy, but as the rise of populism shows you, large segments of the population feel disenfranchised because they ARE disenfranchised. In the US, Congress is an eternal target, but seriously just look at how many members are puppets to lobbyists, big banks and hedge funds and shit. Money has absolutely corrupted politics.

I don't know how often this needs to be said but you're looking at a past time after the boring shit has been filtered out. This isn't Mad Men.

Demographics alone confirm that Western civilisation is dying. You can argue about music quality all day and get nowhere, but the birthrate is still below 2.1 and the long-term European population is still tending to zero.

you're wasting your time posting views of that quality on Veeky Forums or anywhere else online

go back to reading books and studying properly you have better things to do

This is just a consequence of the tyranny of economics. The human spirit has no refuge and as such cannot blossom, when your opportunity is shackled by concepts of market potential and workplace efficiency how are revolutionary ideas and breakthroughs supposed to happen?

OP I think you might enjoy reading Christopher Lasch's "The Culture of Narcissism: American Life in an Age of Diminishing Expectations". Essentially it's a historian's cultural commentary from 1979 where he discusses that feeling of decline and whence it came.

He has another book that you might enjoy too called "The Revolt of the Elites and the Betrayal of Democracy" from 1994 where he proposes that the American democratic system is in serious danger from the default of the elites.

>In an increasingly global and information-based economy, the gap—economic, cognitive, and moral—between the lives of those in the elite and the rest of America seems to grow inexorably, as the manufacturing sector continues to decline, and as the middle and working classes experience relentless downward pressures and social disintegration. Indeed, there is “a question,” Lasch writes, whether the members of our new elites “think of themselves as Americans at all.”

> Why can't my unrealistic ideas work in reality?

>X, Y and Z doesn't work because of reality!
>"What if you try and change reality?"
>You can't because it's reality!
You'd think that a history board would understand that things are only the way they are now because events that happened in the past, and that people living today make the reality of the future.

its becoming too lazy and too fucking much focused on "wealth"

>Indeed, there is “a question,” Lasch writes, whether the members of our new elites “think of themselves as Americans at all.”
Rootless cosmopolitans at it again.

>The Internet erodes local cultures and sucks users into a kind of digital cosmopolitanism, where everyone everywhere is more or less the same.
Is this bad? It seems like the natural progression that we're going to be taking as a species as things move on.

Western civilization went insane after WWI, and still hasn't recovered.

It makes everything the same grade of grey. Everything becomes Anericanized.

>and China won't be able to afford anything when their bubble pops
China's been steadily improving for the past two decades or more. Why would their bubble be popping anytime soon?

Why does the wife have to be white?

Is that not the impossible-to-avoid final stage of people being aware of all other cultures?

T. George Soros

Surprised this post hasn't received more flak lol
>fucking Grimes

this. China is too big to fail now. Their bubble is not going to burst because the rest of the world will fall over trying to keep it patched up.

Yes, it's aimless, goalless, and under attack from postmodernism.

if you're talking about genre, then vaporwave, witch house, and subgenres like H A R D V A P O R, ocean grunge, and future funk.

>in B4 but they're all just phlunderphonics

I don't think AT&Te&Ti are going to get their monopoly back

(and in all honesty their service isn't that good, MetroPCS is better.)

>those kids and their damn facebook
eyeroll

I'm all ears for listening to people talk about how information flow has changed, but it isn't high brow to condemn "those damn kids and their rock n' roll!".

>"High culture" is dead, and being perceived as too polite or posh is considered a bad thing.
This though. We live in a world that just wants more (You)'s. And I think thats the trick, really. Compare the amount of time it takes to make a decleration to the time it takes to determine its truth value. US minimum wage is 7.50, and a meaningful scientific article can cost 30. If we assume our example person makes twice the minimum, that's two hours of labor for access, then maybe another two to go over it. Even if we stick to low level highschool essay standards, they'll probably need what, at least three articles? Twelve hours. Meanwhile a shitpost takes seconds. The new trick is to just lie faster than anyone could check. Everyone who doesn't get on board the irony train is labeled as bluepilled just for attempting to be high browed.

It only seems that way.

Humans have always sought to 'fit in' with their tribe. Used to be your tribe was your village, or your extended family's valley or your Lord's domain of which you were a part. Then it became religion, then nations, and now sub-cultures, etc. All layered on each other, some still relevant, some not, depending on which hats you choose to wear.

The internet is a coagulating force to extent, but I think it just make it easier to belong to your chosen sub-culture 'tribe', whether it's being a SJW, a Conspiracy-theory Rightist, a goth, a furry, a NEET, a kissless virgin, a /k/ommando, whatever. You don't have to actually physically live next to your 'kind' to belong. In fact, you may not 'belong' at all to the people you live next to, go to school with, work with.

This is pretty alienating really, as despite all the connectivity of the internet, it doesn't really encourage physical community-building. I've been a Veeky Forums user for 8 years, but I never talk about in real life. I'm pretty normie by outward appearances, but I don't know anyone IRL who would want to spend even 5 minutes discussing the sort of shit I can on Veeky Forums every evening.

Because factory drones usually don't want their children to be factory drones. Believe it or not, China does not have an endless source of uneducated rural labour to draw from. It works for one generation for most, not more.

Living standards rise, costs rise, people (even Chinadrones) want certain aspects of autonomy and self-determination. I don't think western-style liberal democracy will sweep over China, but at some point, people tire of the corrupt authoritarianism stepping on their necks. You can see China is now trying to deflect this with increased nationalism and imperialism (OUR SANDBARS NOW island monkeys!). It works for some, but it won't work forever.

>too big to fail now.
famous last words...

>How to get laughed out of /mu/: the post

Stop trying to end the decline

Carpenter Brut's Trilogy is the best album of all time and it came out 2 years ago. Shame on me for responding to a "le rung genereyshun" shit thread.

>name one truly irrefutably innovative album released after
I think the reason why this can't be done isn't because the quality of work has declined, but because there's so much more. Making a significant impact on an anthill is much easier than making a significant impact on a beach.

Milk-Eyed Mender
Ys
Have One On Me
Divers

Synthwave isn't truly innovative buddy.
The whole point it to call back to 80's movie soundtracks.

>millenials don't want homes
this doesn't really sound true desu. nobody wants to live in an apartment when they're 65. the reasons why millenials don't own homes are probably mostly economic. At least where I live(LA), homes cost a shit ton of money, and the city's kind of overpopulated. ain't no millenial paying $1 million dollars for some half-acre shitbox in Long Beach.

I didn't say innovative I said best, friendo

yup, and IMO because of that there is quite an absence of a true spiritual, culture. There is entertainment, but i don't think you could call it anything other than that. What else is to be expected when you mishmash a bunch of disparate peoples together, who have nothing in common other than an economy and some abstract belief in 'freedom'?

Well that wasn't what was asking.

>but as the rise of populism shows you, large segments of the population feel disenfranchised because they ARE disenfranchised
THIS.
This is why Trump won, this is why Bush won, this is why Obama won, this is why Clinton won.
This is why there's a left-right-left march of Republicans winning, then Democrats, then Republicans again, then Democrats again.
EVERYONE is disenfranchised at the moment ( except the very wealthy ), but because of ideological spooks no one wants to blame the elephant in the room ( the very wealth ), so they resort to blaming the symptoms instead ( sjws, alt-right, etc ).
Occupy Wallstreet and the Teaparty might have been a step forward, but the very wealthy are not stupid and swiftly put a stop to that.
Not saying the solution is communism or socialism, but more deregulated capitalism is certainly not the solution.

That's the thing. They are NOT unrealistic ideas.
They are merely inefficient. And in a capitalism system, inefficiency might as well be unrealistic in a capitalism focused socioeconomic system.

> Listening to /mu/ instead of forming your own opinions because you're a sheepish fuck

Good bait

Listen you idiots. Rome fell because of massive economic problems from the Crisis of the Third Century, diseases, military defeats and being a logistical nightmare to effectively run. It did not fall because they "Grew Soft" they were fighting just as hard at their end as they were at their beginning. It did not fall because they had "cultural exhaustion" or "moral decline" unless you want to count a growing disparity of wealth as such. The Romans partied harder during their rise than they ever did during their decline.

Fascism is the answer, brother.

Hey thats a decent portrait, even if made with period blood. Maybe I should try do a painting with mine.

Death Grips - Exmilitary
Death Grips - The Money Store
Death Grips - No Love Deep Web

I actually wish it were withoit the blood, because the pic of trump in itself