Hypercapitalism, the assassin of culture

 

I saw The Studio episode last night entitled Golden Globes, in which one of the running jokes is that nobody goes to movies anymore. Buying a ticket and going to see a movie in a theatre, the joke implied, is becoming a rarer and rarer experience.

Then, this morning, I read the totally Fruit loops article about the AI epidemic at colleges in New York magazine.

And then I thought about the American territory I grew up in, metro Atlanta, and about where I live now, in Paris.

Where I live now, I can walk to at least twelve to fifteen book stores within fifteen minutes. I can walk to a similar number of movie theaters. And I can do this partly because the French government, through its taxation system, among other things, supports the cultural infrastructure.

In Gwinnett county in Georgia, by contrast, I can drive from my brother’s house to about three bookstores that I can remember – all of them used book stores. Looking it up on Google, I notice with satisfaction that there is still a barnes and noble in Snellville. And of course there are about four Christian bookstores.  As for movie theatres – there are approximately three, all megaplexes. The idea of the art movie theatre – one is just around the corner from me here – has almost died away in the U.S. When we lived in Santa Monica in 2012-2016, I was astonished that the art house cinema was on the verge of extinction in the very epicenter of the movie industry.

The point here is that movies and reading and writing are not separate little reservations in a culture – they all come together, and when they start to die out on the street, they are sooner or latter going to die out in the classroom.

The article on AI in the New York magazine did not at all emphasize, I think, the main thing, at least for me. When I was a teaching assistant at U.T., the emphasis even then was on grading and making good grades “hard”. This never made any sense to me, from the perspective of education – but from the perspective of college being an adjunct to corporate HR, it made total sense. The old hippie 70s notion that grading should be abolished – the Reed College model – was still at least a phantom in the cultural memory back then, but now it seems to have entirely vanished. The logic here makes perfect Hegelian sense – the classroom experience is grade driven to give us an indexical sense of the students, some of whom go on to make AI, which then empties the grade of any meaning – and the classroom experience too.

Bring back Reed.