Welcome to human-centipede culture

For it feels as though “culture” has hit the wall. The novelist Ewan Morrison lamented with this sense of stasis recently, arguing with the late cultural critic Mark Fisher that “the future has disappeared”. This has left us, he suggests, an oppressive sense of eternal present where, instead of new narratives, “the arts have been dominated by remakes, reboots, sequels, spin-offs and imitations, leaving an ever-shrinking space for genuine creativity and new ideas”.

Of the 40 “most anticipated films” in 2023, for example, only three were original screenplays. Goldeneye, a classic video game, has just been relaunched for Switch. Morrison deplores that “The techno-capitalist future will be a kind of Groundhog Day”, in which “we’re consuming the same reprocessed products again and again and again”.

And this threatens to strand us in what I’ve come to think of as “Human Centipede culture”, after that cult horror movie in which victims are stitched together mouth-to-anus, forcing each to consume the excreta of the one in front. For an onrush of generative AI technologies is already accelerating this proliferation of reboots. Buzzfeed has augmented its human writers with quiz-writing AI, while futurists predict a deluge of automated content in every field from art to pornography that will swamp our ability to tell who is human — or to care.

[Some of this is just due to technological advances allowing us to reimagine previous works. Some of it is just plain laziness and commodification of recent history. But one has to wonder whether this is a new normal created by the woke, cancel-culture elements that have seized the leadership of the art and entertainment industries. The point about Lola Bunny needing to be “re-imagined” because her breasts were too large in the original Space Jam is completely absurd, especially when the original explicitly had her character fight against that — and looked athletic in the first place, hardly “bouncy.” Here’s her entrance clip in the original, which makes that clear. It’s an example of needless nihilism and empty virtue preening by people who should know better. — Ed]