Cultural conservatism tracks the cost of rent and social withdrawal.

Evidence

The other explanation for the link between late capitalism and retrospection centres on production. Despite all its rhetoric of novelty and innovation, neoliberal capitalism has gradually but systematically deprived artists of the resources necessary to produce the new. In the UK, the postwar welfare state and higher education maintenance grants constituted an indirect source of funding for most of the experiments in popular culture between the 1960s and the 80s. The subsequent ideological and practical attack on public services meant that one of the spaces where artists could be sheltered from the pressure to produce something that was immediately successful was severely circumscribed. As public service broadcasting became ‘marketised’, there was an increased tendency to turn out cultural productions that resembled what was already successful. The result of all of this is that the social time available for withdrawing from work and immersing oneself in cultural production drastically declined. If there’s one factor above all else which contributes to cultural conservatism, it is the vast inflation in the cost of rent and mortgages. It’s no accident that the efflorescence of cultural invention in London and New York in the late 1970s and early 80s (in the punk and postpunk scenes) coincided with the availability of squatted and cheap property in those cities. … Naturally, the besieging of attention described by Berardi applies to producers as much as consumers. Producing the new depends upon certain kinds of withdrawal – from, for instance, sociality as much as from pre-existing cultural forms – but the currently dominant form of socially networked cyberspace, with its endless opportunities for micro-contact and its deluge of YouTube links, has made withdrawal more difficult than ever before. Or, as Simon Reynolds so pithily put it, in recent years, everyday life has sped up, but culture has slowed down. — Mark Fisher, Ghosts of My Life, 49

Categorization

• SEED: The materialist claim that cheap housing funded late-70s cultural invention could support an essay on urban creative economies and the disappearance of slack.
• XREF: Reynolds’s ‘everyday life sped up, culture slowed down’ dovetails with the reader’s silence/noise and attention material. — connects to: Enclosure of cheap urban space drove cultural conservatism by eliminating room for experimentation — Mark Fisher, Ghosts of My Life: Writings on…, 471; A generation feels lost for having missed every militant moment by a phase — Mark Fisher, Ghosts of My Life: Writings on…, 476; Rising property prices caused the cultural conservatism of recent decades. — Mark Fisher (edited by Darren Ambrose), K-Punk: The Collected and Unpublished…, 1637 (+3 more)

Broader Connections

• Rising property prices caused the cultural conservatism of recent decades. #qualifies (0.80) — Mark Fisher (edited by Darren Ambrose), K-Punk, 1637
• Cultural and ideological factors shape social problems rather than merely reflecting economics #complicates (0.75)
• Cultural shift and economic transition align but causal direction stays unclear #qualifies (0.72) — David Harvey, The Condition of Postmodernity, 1047