Time now gets marked by technical upgrades rather than cultural forms

Evidence

The point is that the question “Where were you in 92?” makes sense, whereas the question “Where were you in 02?” (or indeed 08) doesn’t. One of the things that has happened over the last decade or so is the disappearance of very distinctive “feels” for years or eras — not only in music but in culture in general. I’ve got more sense of what 1973 was like than what 2003 was like. This isn’t because I’ve stopped paying attention — on the contrary, I’ve probably paid more close attention to music this decade than at any other time. But there’s very little “flavour” to cultural time in the way there once was, very little to mark out one year from the next. That’s partly a consequence of the decline of the modernist trajectory that Simon describes. … If time is marked now, it’s by technical upgrades rather than new cultural forms or signatures. But the technical upgrades increasingly seem to be manifested in terms of the distribution and consumption of culture rather than in terms of production. You can’t hear or see dramatic formal innovations — but you get a higher definition picture, or a greater storage capacity on your mp3 player. — Mark Fisher (edited by Darren Ambrose), K-Punk, 1254

Categorization

• XREF: Connects to the reader’s standing theme about cultural time, acceleration/deceleration, and modernist temporality vs pastiche-time — echoes Baudrillard and Jameson material. — connects to: Modernization fundamentally transforms time structures and horizons themselves, not just events within time. — Hartmut Rosa, Social Acceleration: A New Theory of…, 80; Capitalist realism reduces historical time to technological upgrades — Mark Fisher (edited by Darren Ambrose), K-Punk: The Collected and Unpublished…, 1906