Poptimist anti-elitism produced infantile 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

• XREF: Fisher’s infantilization line directly supports the blankness/omnivore monoculture counter-thesis core of the reader’s goal.
• SEED: A usable epigraph for an essay on how well-intentioned democratic taste reforms backfired into flattened mass culture.