Are we doomscrolling our way into a democratic crisis? That’s what the playwright James Graham fears may be happening, as he suggests that our algorithms have led us into ‘a massive crisis of the new’ and are preventing us from imagining a different future
Aditya suggested reading (and watching) list for James Graham
James Graham has written a shaming amount. I’ve listed below three
1. Dear England: about England’s football team
https://www.bbc.co.uk/iplayer/episodes/m002qktz/dear-england
2. Sherwood: mentioned in the conversation, set in the village where James Graham grew up in the shadow of the miners’ strike
https://www.bbc.co.uk/iplayer/episodes/p0c724lz/sherwood
3. Quiz: set on the British quiz show, Who wants to be a millionaire, where a contestant wins a million quid
https://www.itv.com/watch/quiz/2a7854
On cultural stagnation:
A lot of people say culture is stuck, although few sketch out the political consequences of that stagnation as well as James Graham does in our chat.
Many also disagree on why:
For ‘it was the algorithm that did it’, read Filterworld: How algorithms flattened culture by Kyle Chayka
For a wider ranging explantaion look at Blank Space: A Cultural History of the Twenty-First Century by W. David Marx
Those two are fairly recent. Much earlier and truly magnificent is the much-missed Mark Fisher on what he called the slow cancellation of the future
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=aCgkLICTskQ
On the same theme this essay by Adam Mastroianni is great
https://www.experimental-history.com/p/the-decline-of-deviance
