Twenty-first-century digital culture conceals a deep, quiet hopelessness

Evidence

On Nothing Was the Same, Drake often sounds like Tony Montana in Scarface: fucking, eating, snorting, is that all there is? But the tone here couldn’t be more different from Pacino’s Eighties cocaine histrionics. A glacial fatalism runs beneath everything here, and Drake matters because he makes contact — maybe better than anyone else — with the sense of hopelessness that quietly subsists beneath all the twerking and tweeting, all the twitter and the chatter of twenty-first-century culture. — Mark Fisher (edited by Darren Ambrose), K-Punk, 1326

Categorization

• XREF: Connects to Fisher’s ongoing argument across the collection about the culture industry’s enervating chatter and the buried sense of terminal malaise, echoing his diagnosis of capitalist realism. — connects to: Technological utopias mask a fear of our embodied vulnerability; The awe of technology substitutes for transcendence in mass culture. — Theodor W. Adorno, The Culture Industry: Selected Essays…, 110; The twenty-first century has failed to produce a culture of its own — Mark Fisher (edited by Darren Ambrose), K-Punk: The Collected and Unpublished…, 2285

Broader Connections

• Technological utopias mask a fear of our embodied vulnerability #corroborates (0.80)
• The awe of technology substitutes for transcendence in mass culture. #corroborates (0.78) — Theodor W. Adorno, The Culture Industry, 110