Constant churn without ordered sequential change constitutes cultural stasis

Evidence

Some critics argue that trends now move too quickly to cohere into lasting movements, what music critic Simon Reynolds described as a “paradoxical combination of speed and standstill.” This was already evident at the end of modernism. In 1967, music scholar Leonard B. Meyer predicted that cultural stasis would not be “an absence of novelty and change—a total quiescence—but rather the absence of ordered sequential change.” He likened it to molecules in Brownian motion: constant activity but no forward progress. Today our experience of “everything everywhere all at once” reduces even the most rapid shifts to static noise. — W. David Marx, Blank Space, 18

Categorization

• DEFINE: Meyer’s Brownian-motion definition of cultural stasis is the precise mechanism the reader needs — says blankness means activity without progression, not absence of activity.
• XREF: The Brownian-motion notion of churn-without-progress needs testing against counter-examples later — an intellectual seed for the reader’s rebuttal. — connects to: Fast-moving cultures depend on stable cultural anchors to absorb innovation — Hartmut Rosa, Social Acceleration: A New Theory of…, 288