Everything is Everything is Everything is Everything is Everything is Everything is

Culture, in the mass-mediated digital age, has been flattened.

I just saw an advert for Overdrive, a new event-type-thing for the rabidly popular online shooter game Fortnite. Among neon colours and loud noises, the jangling keys of modern entertainment, miscellaneous characters from anime are featured in a 3D recreation of Sonic's Green Hill Zone from the original Sega Genesis sidescroller. Finn from Adventure Time is also running around for some reason.

A diaspora of recognisable characters from a range of media, squashed together in a re-enactment of a level from a game released decades before most of Fortnite's playerbase was born. This is flattened culture.

Deprived of provenance, of their own space, characters are just designs - symbols and semiotics. Brands. Thrown together, hung in the solid air of free-market capitalism, which exhumes and extracts them for any meagre cultural (see: commercial) value that they may ephemerally hold.

In other words, these are things. Playthings. Digital skins in digital playgrounds. Not even artefacts or relics. Husks. Everything is everything, and therefore nothing. Adventure Time, The Simpsons, John Wick, anime, Star Wars -- all are equally nothing in the great everything sandbox. Media, and by extension -- culture, have become digital toys.

The distance between our pop-cultural experience of media, and the production of said media, has never been shorter. For instance, I don't watch the Marvel movies -- in fact, I haven't watched anything superhero related since the mind-numbing mediocrity of Ant-Man -- but I did used to watch the Tobey Maguire Spidermans when I was a kid. Apparently, according to the feeds, there's been this multiverse thing going on in the MCU. It's allowed the filmmakers to bring back Andrew Garfield and Tobey Maguire to play in the sand with Zendaya's husband. Online, fans (see: basement dwellers) have complained bitterly for years that Maguire and Garfield deserved another shake in the spidey suit. Now, thanks to the flattening of media, they've got their demand. Even though it is performative, it is commercially-driven, it breaks diegetic verisimilitude and makes no thematic or narrative sense, it is what the fans wanted. So they got it.

For me, the multiverse is a weak, cheap, lazy way of kow-towing to the free market -- rather than a genuine, creative vision. If multiple universes exist, where the guy from The Office can be the stretchy man from Fantastic Four, or Henry Cavill can play an alternate version of Wolverine or whatever, or DC has a CGI Nicholas Cage playing Superman in reference to a fucking MEME, then nothing is everything and everything is everything and nothing at all. None of it matters. We aren't even pretending that fiction should feel real. There is open acknowledgment that it's bread and circuses. Feeding off itself, its own relevance, its own consumers.

This flattened media can be seen in the feeds. Scroll on X, or Instagram, or whatever, and you will vascillate from cartel beheading videos, kitten pictures, news, your mate's honeymoon photos and inane rumours about celebrities who are famous for being famous. The line, the distinctions between things, the delineation between official, unofficial, fan-made, artist-driven, commercial, "original", memetic, narrative -- it's gone. It's all gone.

Everything is everything. A big, nebulous blob of everything -- sliding around, fumbling for clicks and views and likes. A beige blob. One that doesn't ask anything of you, doesn't challenge you, one that can only point at itself and say "hey, remember me?". The leftover sludge from the hollowed-out barrel of culture.

That sounds a bit gloomy. And maybe it is. An advert for Fortnite shouldn't instil such cosmic horror on a Saturday morning. Maybe I am being dramatic. It certainly helps when writing these blogposts.

I do, though, have an answer -- a bulwark -- to the deluge of slop. Infantile in its simplicity, though liberating in the long run.

Print media. Magazines and books are without notifications, without the ability to scroll on. It's you and the written word, alone together. Ironically, despite the advent of digital technology, and the new artistic horizons promised by the internet, it is literature that has persevered as the only artform able to capture the strange, atomised experience of modern life and culture. It is also one of the few artforms that can provide, at least temporarily, relief from it.

Maybe I should get into Fortnite. I hear you'll be able to play as Charlie Kirk next month.