Rising property prices caused the cultural conservatism of recent decades.

Evidence

Only prisoners have time to read, and if you want to engage in a twenty-year-long research project funded by the state, you will have to kill someone. … To understand the time-crisis, we only have to compare the current situation with the height of punk and post-punk in the UK and the US. It’s no accident that the efflorescence of punk and post-punk culture happened at a time when cheap and squatted property was available in London and New York. Now, simply to afford to pay rent in either city entails giving up most of your time and energy to work. The delirious rise in property prices over the last twenty years is probably the single most important cause of cultural conservatism in the UK and the US. In the UK, much of the infrastructure which indirectly supported cultural production has been systematically dismantled by successive neoliberal governments. Most of the innovations in British popular music which happened between the Sixties and the Nineties would have been unthinkable without the indirect funding provided by social housing, unemployment benefit and student grants. — Mark Fisher (edited by Darren Ambrose), K-Punk, 1637

Now, simply to afford to pay rent in either city entails giving up most of your time and energy to work. The delirious rise in property prices over the last twenty years is probably the single most important cause of cultural conservatism in the UK and the US. In the UK, much of the infrastructure which indirectly supported cultural production has been systematically dismantled by successive neoliberal governments. Most of the innovations in British popular music which happened between the Sixties and the Nineties would have been unthinkable without the indirect funding provided by social housing, unemployment benefit and student grants. — Mark Fisher (edited by Darren Ambrose), K-Punk, 1637

Categorization

• XREF: Pays off ch96’s account of the bohemia-working-class alliance — here its material infrastructure (cheap housing, benefits) is named as the subsidy that made that alliance’s culture possible. — connects to: Cultural conservatism tracks the cost of rent and social withdrawal. — Mark Fisher, Ghosts of My Life: Writings on…, 49; Enclosure of cheap urban space drove cultural conservatism by eliminating room for experimentation — Mark Fisher, Ghosts of My Life: Writings on…, 471; The economics of late capitalism preceded its cultural forms by roughly a decade. — Fredric Jameson, Postmodernism, or, The Cultural Logic…, 28 (+1 more)
• ADDENDUM: Supports the trees/grafting essay’s theme of slow unfurl time only by contrast — but more directly connects to the book’s broader concern with cultural production’s material substrate. Actually strongest link: the claim that cheap housing + welfare = cultural efflorescence offers a hard materialist counterpoint to any purely cultural theory of creativity.
• SEED: Angle: ‘Housing policy is cultural policy’ — an essay tracing how rent affordability directly predicts musical/artistic innovation waves in London and New York across decades.
• corroborated: 2 independent passages support this claim — Mark Fisher (edited by Darren Ambrose), K-Punk: The Collected and Unpublished…, 1637

Broader Connections

• The economics of late capitalism preceded its cultural forms by roughly a decade. #corroborates (0.75) — Fredric Jameson, Postmodernism, or, The Cultural Logic…, 28
• Secular economic stagnation beginning in the 1970s drives immediacy as a novel cultural style #corroborates (0.75) — Anna Kornbluh, Immediacy, or The Style of Too Late…, 52