Anti-snobbery media norms produced an infantilized rather than diverse culture

Evidence

By denying this central principle of cultural dynamics, we’ve created a cultural landscape that feels increasingly stagnant. Poptimists thought they were liberating the world from taste, but celebrating Ashlee Simpson’s lip-synching opened the door for Kim Kardashian and Jake Paul. As Mark Fisher observed, “The media class’s refusal to be paternalistic has not produced a bottom-up culture of breathtaking diversity, but one that is increasingly infantilized.” — W. David Marx, Blank Space, 861

Categorization

Category: Contrarian or Surprising Claims

• QUESTION: The causal chain from Ashlee Simpson’s lip-synching to Kim Kardashian is asserted, not demonstrated — worth pressing on whether this is a real causal path or post-hoc narrative.
• SEED: The Fisher quote is the crux counter-argument against the reader’s own case; the reader needs this to argue their counter-thesis that blankness has a signature.

Related

• Poptimist anti-elitism produced infantile rather than diverse culture (similarity 0.90)