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Blank Space: A Cultural History of the Twenty-First Century
A revealing exploration of a quarter century of cultural stagnation, examining the commercial and technological forces that have come to dominate contemporary culture—from music and fashion to art, film, TV, and beyond
Over the past twenty-five years, pop culture has suffered from a perplexing lack of reinvention. We’ve entered a cultural “blank space”—an era when reboots, rehashes, and fads flourish, while bold artistic experimentation struggles to gain recognition. Why is risk no longer rewarded, and how did playing it safe become the formula for success? Acclaimed cultural historian W. David Marx sets out to uncover the answers.
In this ambitious cultural history, Marx guides us through the blur of the twenty-first century so far, from the Obama era to the rise of K-pop, from Paris Hilton to the Marvel cinematic universe, from Beyoncé and Taylor Swift to . . . Beyoncé and Taylor Swift, whose enduring influence highlights both their adaptability and the broader shifts in pop culture. Combining sociological, economic, and political insights with a deep dive into art, street culture, fashion, and technology, Blank Space dissects the rise of profit-driven, formulaic trends and the shifting cultural norms that often prioritize going viral over innovation. He reveals how backlash against indie snobbery and nineties counterculture gave rise to a “counter-counterculture”—one marked by antiliberal sentiment, the celebration of business heroes, and the increasing influence of industry plants and the elite class. In a world of crypto bros, nepo babies, and AI-driven art, Marx offers readers a much-needed dose of clarity and context.
Vibrantly narrated and sharply argued, Blank Space is an essential guide for anyone looking to understand the chaos of the twenty-first century, the trends, tastemakers, and icons who shaped it, and how we might push our culture forward over the next quarter century—through renewed emphasis on creativity, community, and the values that transcend mere profit.
Over the past twenty-five years, pop culture has suffered from a perplexing lack of reinvention. We’ve entered a cultural “blank space”—an era when reboots, rehashes, and fads flourish, while bold artistic experimentation struggles to gain recognition. Why is risk no longer rewarded, and how did playing it safe become the formula for success? Acclaimed cultural historian W. David Marx sets out to uncover the answers.
In this ambitious cultural history, Marx guides us through the blur of the twenty-first century so far, from the Obama era to the rise of K-pop, from Paris Hilton to the Marvel cinematic universe, from Beyoncé and Taylor Swift to . . . Beyoncé and Taylor Swift, whose enduring influence highlights both their adaptability and the broader shifts in pop culture. Combining sociological, economic, and political insights with a deep dive into art, street culture, fashion, and technology, Blank Space dissects the rise of profit-driven, formulaic trends and the shifting cultural norms that often prioritize going viral over innovation. He reveals how backlash against indie snobbery and nineties counterculture gave rise to a “counter-counterculture”—one marked by antiliberal sentiment, the celebration of business heroes, and the increasing influence of industry plants and the elite class. In a world of crypto bros, nepo babies, and AI-driven art, Marx offers readers a much-needed dose of clarity and context.
Vibrantly narrated and sharply argued, Blank Space is an essential guide for anyone looking to understand the chaos of the twenty-first century, the trends, tastemakers, and icons who shaped it, and how we might push our culture forward over the next quarter century—through renewed emphasis on creativity, community, and the values that transcend mere profit.
384 pages, Hardcover
First published November 18, 2025
198 people are currently reading
5704 people want to read
About the author
W. David Marx
5 books148 followersW. David Marx is a long-time writer on culture based in Tokyo. He is the author of "Ametora: How Japan Saved American Style" (2015) and "Status and Culture" (2022). Marx's newsletter can be found at culture.ghost.io.
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Displaying 1 - 30 of 103 reviews
November 18, 2025
Blank Space is THE pop culture history I've been waiting for.
In a sea of pop culture history books that tend to just rehash everything we lived through without really adding anything new, Blank Space offers a criticism and analysis of pop music, style, culture, and counterculture with actual theory and insight to sink your teeth into. You won't just feel like you're going down memory lane, you'll actually be learning and getting smarter. He discusses topics like indie sleaze, poptimism, generative AI, and the manosphere and explains their relationship to commerce and politics, how they came to be, the inner workings and dynamics of how they succeeded and/or failed, and the lasting impact they had on changing culture. The book is also funny and often even biting because it needs to be, but it's so well-researched and you can tell the author is obviously passionate and an expert about the subjects. (Marx's previous book, Status and Culture: How Our Desire for Social Rank Creates Taste, Identity, Art, Fashion, and Constant Change is just as delicious and vital btw!!!)
Blank Space is a MUST if you like pop culture, history, or want to better understand the connection between pop culture and politics.
Thank you to Viking and Netgalley for the ARC.
In a sea of pop culture history books that tend to just rehash everything we lived through without really adding anything new, Blank Space offers a criticism and analysis of pop music, style, culture, and counterculture with actual theory and insight to sink your teeth into. You won't just feel like you're going down memory lane, you'll actually be learning and getting smarter. He discusses topics like indie sleaze, poptimism, generative AI, and the manosphere and explains their relationship to commerce and politics, how they came to be, the inner workings and dynamics of how they succeeded and/or failed, and the lasting impact they had on changing culture. The book is also funny and often even biting because it needs to be, but it's so well-researched and you can tell the author is obviously passionate and an expert about the subjects. (Marx's previous book, Status and Culture: How Our Desire for Social Rank Creates Taste, Identity, Art, Fashion, and Constant Change is just as delicious and vital btw!!!)
Blank Space is a MUST if you like pop culture, history, or want to better understand the connection between pop culture and politics.
Thank you to Viking and Netgalley for the ARC.
November 18, 2025
Enjoyed the author’s previous book “Status and Culture” 3 years ago, so got my hands on this one early thanks to a good friend who got first dibs.
Here is my honest take on it :
Blank Space is, in many ways, a testament to W. David Marx’s extraordinary ability to marshal vast bibliographies, track intellectual lineages across cultures, and stitch together patterns with impressive fluency. A decade ago, this method—an almost virtuosic accumulation of references, quotes, and cross-disciplinary comparisons—would have felt extraordinary. Pre-ChatGPT, the book’s sheer density of citations might have passed as a kind of cultural x-ray: here is someone who has read everything so you don’t have to!
But in 2025, the effect is strikingly different.
The very technique that once defined Marx’s authority now reads less like original insight and more like a beautifully organized database. The synthesis is thorough, yes—but depth of reading is no longer rare. Summaries, cross-cultural parallels, etymologies, even “patterns” across time can now be generated in seconds by any reasonably advanced model. This shifts the criteria for what counts as meaningful intellectual contribution. Simply having read a lot—simply connecting a lot—is no longer enough.
And that is where Blank Space falters. Beneath the avalanche of references lies surprisingly little that feels new. The central argument—that culture is stagnating—has merit, but Marx states it mostly in the register of lament (against suspiciously shallow framings of poptimism/omnivore culture/“inclusiveness”) rather than revelation. It’s a diagnosis without a prognosis, an extended moan about diminishing novelty rather than an attempt to offer alternatives, frameworks, or even provocations that push the conversation forward.
The book’s encyclopedic quality, once a strength, becomes a kind of camouflage: the breadth of sources creates the appearance of profundity, but the conclusions rarely rise above what culturally literate readers already suspect. In a world awash with AI-enabled synthesis, the question is no longer what one can compile from the global archive, but what one can argue, risk, or imagine. On that front, Blank Space feels curiously hollow—fitting, perhaps, given its title.
There is also an undercurrent in the book—subtle but noticeable—of resentment toward popular creators and commercially successful cultural producers. The critique of stagnation sometimes reads less like a structural analysis and more like an autobiographical grievance: a scholar frustrated that others profit from creating widely embraced work while he has devoted his career to niche areas that command reverence but not mass appeal (quick search reveals that Marx’s first book was “Ametora” , a book that appeals to a relatively small niche of Japanophiles) The book’s grand thesis occasionally feels like a gloss over a more personal tension: the suspicion that cultural stagnation is partly a story about his own position within the cultural economy.
This subtext doesn’t ruin the book, but it does color it. Rather than rising above the dynamics he critiques, Marx sometimes seems ensnared by them—using intellectual density as a shield, and cultural pessimism as a way of elevating his own choices.
Had Blank Space been published ten years ago, the mastery of material alone would have made it indispensable. Today, in an age or AI-enables synthesis, it reads more like a well-curated scrapbook of cultural melancholy: impressive in scope and structure, but lacking the spark of genuine intellectual novelty. I did, however enjoy the witty sarcasm in parts of the book.
Here is my honest take on it :
Blank Space is, in many ways, a testament to W. David Marx’s extraordinary ability to marshal vast bibliographies, track intellectual lineages across cultures, and stitch together patterns with impressive fluency. A decade ago, this method—an almost virtuosic accumulation of references, quotes, and cross-disciplinary comparisons—would have felt extraordinary. Pre-ChatGPT, the book’s sheer density of citations might have passed as a kind of cultural x-ray: here is someone who has read everything so you don’t have to!
But in 2025, the effect is strikingly different.
The very technique that once defined Marx’s authority now reads less like original insight and more like a beautifully organized database. The synthesis is thorough, yes—but depth of reading is no longer rare. Summaries, cross-cultural parallels, etymologies, even “patterns” across time can now be generated in seconds by any reasonably advanced model. This shifts the criteria for what counts as meaningful intellectual contribution. Simply having read a lot—simply connecting a lot—is no longer enough.
And that is where Blank Space falters. Beneath the avalanche of references lies surprisingly little that feels new. The central argument—that culture is stagnating—has merit, but Marx states it mostly in the register of lament (against suspiciously shallow framings of poptimism/omnivore culture/“inclusiveness”) rather than revelation. It’s a diagnosis without a prognosis, an extended moan about diminishing novelty rather than an attempt to offer alternatives, frameworks, or even provocations that push the conversation forward.
The book’s encyclopedic quality, once a strength, becomes a kind of camouflage: the breadth of sources creates the appearance of profundity, but the conclusions rarely rise above what culturally literate readers already suspect. In a world awash with AI-enabled synthesis, the question is no longer what one can compile from the global archive, but what one can argue, risk, or imagine. On that front, Blank Space feels curiously hollow—fitting, perhaps, given its title.
There is also an undercurrent in the book—subtle but noticeable—of resentment toward popular creators and commercially successful cultural producers. The critique of stagnation sometimes reads less like a structural analysis and more like an autobiographical grievance: a scholar frustrated that others profit from creating widely embraced work while he has devoted his career to niche areas that command reverence but not mass appeal (quick search reveals that Marx’s first book was “Ametora” , a book that appeals to a relatively small niche of Japanophiles) The book’s grand thesis occasionally feels like a gloss over a more personal tension: the suspicion that cultural stagnation is partly a story about his own position within the cultural economy.
This subtext doesn’t ruin the book, but it does color it. Rather than rising above the dynamics he critiques, Marx sometimes seems ensnared by them—using intellectual density as a shield, and cultural pessimism as a way of elevating his own choices.
Had Blank Space been published ten years ago, the mastery of material alone would have made it indispensable. Today, in an age or AI-enables synthesis, it reads more like a well-curated scrapbook of cultural melancholy: impressive in scope and structure, but lacking the spark of genuine intellectual novelty. I did, however enjoy the witty sarcasm in parts of the book.
January 16, 2026
i found this quite interesting for the first third or so, when it was shuttling through the post 9/11 culture-industry changes, because i was mostly oblivious to them at the time. once we arrived at the later obama years, it felt instead like a rapid-fire accounting of recent history i did not wish to be fired at me-- do you remember The Dress? yes, unfortunately i do!-- with little significant additional material in the form of assessment or connection.
the end analysis (which was also in the introduction) i also had some trouble with; his ultimate argument is that this century thus far has been a stagnant void of new culture, as indicated by the fact that any layperson could go "oh this is what the 60s looked like, and the 70s, and the 80s, and the 90s" but that the post-millennium all blurs together, with no great counter-cultural leaps of movement that then "seize control of the establishments" to push culture in a new direction.
his reasoning for this is that 1) music etc are no longer authentic/new but controlled by power's anticipation of audience demands e.g. everything is industry plants 2) music etc are no longer challenging/counter-cultural but written to be appealing/mainstream, which does not change culture 3) we now applaud selling-out, particularly as the valuation of diversity over innovation contributes to the celebration of marginalized entrepreneurship over art itself 4) society has become an omniculture which absorbs everything into one funnel without room for pushback, thus increasingly everything looks and sounds the same 5) the locus of power has not shifted 6) almost directly, "kurt cobain would have wept"
i found parts of this apt and parts inane and still more parts simply bizarrely out of touch and then furthermore unthinking about why/how things have happened. essentially, for those who hate the art of blogging, while i agree that art is broadly in a dismal place, particularly art that needs funding and access, art is not the same as culture. nevertheless, both of them have changed and will continue to change-- and moreover the forms and sites of them are changing, which makes them stranger to grasp. i'm going to go out of order.
6) he's dead and i don't care
2) i will address john lennon directly here: i will never understand why some people, mostly older guys who aren't fun to sit next to, think that things must be unpleasant to be counter-cultural, or that said unpleasantness provides automatic meaning. i don't believe anyone has ever listened to revolution no. 9 for any reason other than to piss off their parents or bewilder a girl, but do you know who did invent new and bizarre shifts in music technology and use them to make something compelling? george.
for this author, verbatim, the introduction of kpop and latin music into u.s. powerhouses do not represent revolutionary shifts because they are listenable or industry-backed or both-- literally, what are you talking about? how are these functional dichotomies, when what you are talking about is not only money but also culture?
1) sometimes this is true and it sucks; this has been to some extent true since people discovered you could make money off things (e.g. THE WALL OF SOUND etc). i don't know how much power in industries has shifted since their invention; i do agree that particularly in film people used to fund auteurs because they trusted their sensibility and skill, and now they only fund safe hits, and i'm not a fan of this. there have nevertheless been many interesting counter-cultural or novel artworks across music/film/etc since then-- and the entire form of tv has transformed not only through reality programming but through the sopranos and streaming and television as intimacy-- but
4) i agree that none of them has made as resounding a behavioral-cultural splash as like, sorry, sergeant pepper, and do you know when this dates back to? the emergence of the smartphone and the swift faucet of cultural progressions and fixations that become exhausted by the afternoon of their discovery. everyone is desperate for something to talk about at The Water Cooler and then when it's over it's forgotten. this is not the same thing as a blank space of culture; this is the process and locus of culture fundamentally shifting. i'll come back to this.
3) the book opens with a story about, i am genuinely trying to remember and i can't, let's say phish, and how when they accidentally got too popular and criticized for being mainstream they tried to write less appealing music and refused festival circuits and their album still sold better than they wanted it to. this is the stupidest story i've ever heard, and also i just went back and looked it up, and it was pearl jam. this is presented in diptych with the story of a finance ceo recently djing at the same festival, which i agree sucks, but that doesn't give gen x's valorization of attempting to appear niche for the illusion of counter-cultural cred when in fact you've become a trend any more legitimate. in fact, this is responsible for most of gen x's personality problems.
and yes, the parasocial identification with celebrities and wanting to support them by making them richer is ass, and championing success as its own metric of value is ass. but the real problem with the profitable industrialization of diversity is that
5) yes, the people selecting the diversity to market are the same people as always, and they have no taste when it comes to tastes and lives outside their own, but are hoping to continue doing profitable things more profitably than ever, and the people who enter into partnership with them are rarely people who are making interesting and challenging art. this is exploitation of shifting values and reflects the same focused position of power/money as everything else. nevertheless, the emergence of so much new art and artists even alongside bad or hollow or overly soothing art is not a void; it is just not what you expected.
also, no, modern culture is not "seizing the establishment" so much as making them irrelevant, which is arguably a greater cultural change than before, even if it's not one you like. rolling stone is now like, begging me to venmo them whenever i go to their website, and so is the new york times, and so is vogue.
4) to be honest, i'm sorry, saying "everything since 2000 has looked and sounded the same" is emo erasure. if culture starts with teens and specifically with laughing at teens for looking/acting goofy while listening to music that startles the ears, HELLO???? i have gerard way on the phone and he'd like a word!!!!!!!!!! literally speaking of post 9/11 cultural shifts, hello? sorry? what?
honestly to me this is in general a very straight man opinion, and i hate to bring #diversity into it like this, but the people who have looked the same since 2005 (advent of the normie social internet, decline of the bleached/gelled surfer hair) are straight guys, and that is because they are in their own vortex of defensive suffering that has only tightened with time. personally, if you show my wife any image of a woman from the last 20 years, i bet she locates her within two. we've had the anorexia years, the curvy-but-only-in-government-approved-places years, the return of the anorexia years, low-cut jeans, dark wash, plaid, mom-cut, high-waist, boot, skinny, wide, and that's just pants. these do not look the same and they don't feel the same. the crashing advent of normalized plastic surgery, high-maintenance skincare, specific faces in vogue specific years, water bottles, fjallraven backpacks, charms to put on your backpack, charms to put on your phone, going-out tops, chokers, layered necklaces, monochrome, bralettes, three-quarter sleeves, short-sleeves over long-sleeves, your grandmother saying get your hair out of your face, your grandmother saying why is your hair green, lana del rey girls.
what it is is that, as i said, the places that culture happens have changed since culture became something we could meticulously document ourselves, when we began appearing in others' phones as much as in their realities: impactful art and styles shuffle as quickly as they are, the culture becomes something different and dialectic: commentary, positionality, individual piecemeal alliances rather than big splash and aligned, reflective ripple. music has become quite literally background, music as confessional that reflects an individual rather than speaking for a generation. the image of the body has become foreground, an image which has to last on the grid more than six months without immediately turning embarrassing; words have become foreground.
and all of this of course becomes at least partially online, and this guy is not online at all, at least not past twitter. there's barely any investigation of culture-making on tumblr or reddit, which is frankly psycho. he mentions regarding tiktok and i think instagram only the influencer phenoms and that their algorithms serve "the most broadly appealing content reinforcing the shared parts of taste." there is absolutely more to the micro-level divisions, connections, and flag-plantings than this, particularly when it is so fervent and so many are doing it happily for free, without ambition of virality or celebrity, but because they are invested in performing their identity in society, or affecting society, which is to say making culture. (and these are also changing, rapidly, as culture-- changing and staying changed-- recently i rewatched an obama-era proposal flashmob and i felt like i was having a stroke.) i wish he was curious about any of this, particularly on the level of form rather than, dare i say, content!
there's only sporadic assessment of gender as a factor or divide in culture at all; there's nothing on gaming, to which he cites his own ignorance, but which produces an ultimate image of him looking out the window and going hey the kids aren't doing what they're supposed to be doing, because what they're actually doing are things he can't quite see, and also, it sucks out there, which again, i don't disagree with. but that's not the same thing.
the markers of culture he's talking about are all very recent. we've had basically affordable recorded music for what, 70 years? music we can transport for 40 years, the internet for 30, the internet transportable for 20. the sites of power and culture are changing and the forms of art that have become central to culture are changing. i'm not saying any of this is good. personally i would love it if the mega-rich boomers and gen-xers holding the reins of industry tight were to let go and let god, if spotify were to pay artists wages comparable to history even if it inconvenienced or charged me, if we all started wearing funky hats. i think these things would be good and fun. but what we have now is also something, and it is hardly stagnant. it is just new.
the end analysis (which was also in the introduction) i also had some trouble with; his ultimate argument is that this century thus far has been a stagnant void of new culture, as indicated by the fact that any layperson could go "oh this is what the 60s looked like, and the 70s, and the 80s, and the 90s" but that the post-millennium all blurs together, with no great counter-cultural leaps of movement that then "seize control of the establishments" to push culture in a new direction.
his reasoning for this is that 1) music etc are no longer authentic/new but controlled by power's anticipation of audience demands e.g. everything is industry plants 2) music etc are no longer challenging/counter-cultural but written to be appealing/mainstream, which does not change culture 3) we now applaud selling-out, particularly as the valuation of diversity over innovation contributes to the celebration of marginalized entrepreneurship over art itself 4) society has become an omniculture which absorbs everything into one funnel without room for pushback, thus increasingly everything looks and sounds the same 5) the locus of power has not shifted 6) almost directly, "kurt cobain would have wept"
i found parts of this apt and parts inane and still more parts simply bizarrely out of touch and then furthermore unthinking about why/how things have happened. essentially, for those who hate the art of blogging, while i agree that art is broadly in a dismal place, particularly art that needs funding and access, art is not the same as culture. nevertheless, both of them have changed and will continue to change-- and moreover the forms and sites of them are changing, which makes them stranger to grasp. i'm going to go out of order.
6) he's dead and i don't care
2) i will address john lennon directly here: i will never understand why some people, mostly older guys who aren't fun to sit next to, think that things must be unpleasant to be counter-cultural, or that said unpleasantness provides automatic meaning. i don't believe anyone has ever listened to revolution no. 9 for any reason other than to piss off their parents or bewilder a girl, but do you know who did invent new and bizarre shifts in music technology and use them to make something compelling? george.
for this author, verbatim, the introduction of kpop and latin music into u.s. powerhouses do not represent revolutionary shifts because they are listenable or industry-backed or both-- literally, what are you talking about? how are these functional dichotomies, when what you are talking about is not only money but also culture?
1) sometimes this is true and it sucks; this has been to some extent true since people discovered you could make money off things (e.g. THE WALL OF SOUND etc). i don't know how much power in industries has shifted since their invention; i do agree that particularly in film people used to fund auteurs because they trusted their sensibility and skill, and now they only fund safe hits, and i'm not a fan of this. there have nevertheless been many interesting counter-cultural or novel artworks across music/film/etc since then-- and the entire form of tv has transformed not only through reality programming but through the sopranos and streaming and television as intimacy-- but
4) i agree that none of them has made as resounding a behavioral-cultural splash as like, sorry, sergeant pepper, and do you know when this dates back to? the emergence of the smartphone and the swift faucet of cultural progressions and fixations that become exhausted by the afternoon of their discovery. everyone is desperate for something to talk about at The Water Cooler and then when it's over it's forgotten. this is not the same thing as a blank space of culture; this is the process and locus of culture fundamentally shifting. i'll come back to this.
3) the book opens with a story about, i am genuinely trying to remember and i can't, let's say phish, and how when they accidentally got too popular and criticized for being mainstream they tried to write less appealing music and refused festival circuits and their album still sold better than they wanted it to. this is the stupidest story i've ever heard, and also i just went back and looked it up, and it was pearl jam. this is presented in diptych with the story of a finance ceo recently djing at the same festival, which i agree sucks, but that doesn't give gen x's valorization of attempting to appear niche for the illusion of counter-cultural cred when in fact you've become a trend any more legitimate. in fact, this is responsible for most of gen x's personality problems.
and yes, the parasocial identification with celebrities and wanting to support them by making them richer is ass, and championing success as its own metric of value is ass. but the real problem with the profitable industrialization of diversity is that
5) yes, the people selecting the diversity to market are the same people as always, and they have no taste when it comes to tastes and lives outside their own, but are hoping to continue doing profitable things more profitably than ever, and the people who enter into partnership with them are rarely people who are making interesting and challenging art. this is exploitation of shifting values and reflects the same focused position of power/money as everything else. nevertheless, the emergence of so much new art and artists even alongside bad or hollow or overly soothing art is not a void; it is just not what you expected.
also, no, modern culture is not "seizing the establishment" so much as making them irrelevant, which is arguably a greater cultural change than before, even if it's not one you like. rolling stone is now like, begging me to venmo them whenever i go to their website, and so is the new york times, and so is vogue.
4) to be honest, i'm sorry, saying "everything since 2000 has looked and sounded the same" is emo erasure. if culture starts with teens and specifically with laughing at teens for looking/acting goofy while listening to music that startles the ears, HELLO???? i have gerard way on the phone and he'd like a word!!!!!!!!!! literally speaking of post 9/11 cultural shifts, hello? sorry? what?
honestly to me this is in general a very straight man opinion, and i hate to bring #diversity into it like this, but the people who have looked the same since 2005 (advent of the normie social internet, decline of the bleached/gelled surfer hair) are straight guys, and that is because they are in their own vortex of defensive suffering that has only tightened with time. personally, if you show my wife any image of a woman from the last 20 years, i bet she locates her within two. we've had the anorexia years, the curvy-but-only-in-government-approved-places years, the return of the anorexia years, low-cut jeans, dark wash, plaid, mom-cut, high-waist, boot, skinny, wide, and that's just pants. these do not look the same and they don't feel the same. the crashing advent of normalized plastic surgery, high-maintenance skincare, specific faces in vogue specific years, water bottles, fjallraven backpacks, charms to put on your backpack, charms to put on your phone, going-out tops, chokers, layered necklaces, monochrome, bralettes, three-quarter sleeves, short-sleeves over long-sleeves, your grandmother saying get your hair out of your face, your grandmother saying why is your hair green, lana del rey girls.
what it is is that, as i said, the places that culture happens have changed since culture became something we could meticulously document ourselves, when we began appearing in others' phones as much as in their realities: impactful art and styles shuffle as quickly as they are, the culture becomes something different and dialectic: commentary, positionality, individual piecemeal alliances rather than big splash and aligned, reflective ripple. music has become quite literally background, music as confessional that reflects an individual rather than speaking for a generation. the image of the body has become foreground, an image which has to last on the grid more than six months without immediately turning embarrassing; words have become foreground.
and all of this of course becomes at least partially online, and this guy is not online at all, at least not past twitter. there's barely any investigation of culture-making on tumblr or reddit, which is frankly psycho. he mentions regarding tiktok and i think instagram only the influencer phenoms and that their algorithms serve "the most broadly appealing content reinforcing the shared parts of taste." there is absolutely more to the micro-level divisions, connections, and flag-plantings than this, particularly when it is so fervent and so many are doing it happily for free, without ambition of virality or celebrity, but because they are invested in performing their identity in society, or affecting society, which is to say making culture. (and these are also changing, rapidly, as culture-- changing and staying changed-- recently i rewatched an obama-era proposal flashmob and i felt like i was having a stroke.) i wish he was curious about any of this, particularly on the level of form rather than, dare i say, content!
there's only sporadic assessment of gender as a factor or divide in culture at all; there's nothing on gaming, to which he cites his own ignorance, but which produces an ultimate image of him looking out the window and going hey the kids aren't doing what they're supposed to be doing, because what they're actually doing are things he can't quite see, and also, it sucks out there, which again, i don't disagree with. but that's not the same thing.
the markers of culture he's talking about are all very recent. we've had basically affordable recorded music for what, 70 years? music we can transport for 40 years, the internet for 30, the internet transportable for 20. the sites of power and culture are changing and the forms of art that have become central to culture are changing. i'm not saying any of this is good. personally i would love it if the mega-rich boomers and gen-xers holding the reins of industry tight were to let go and let god, if spotify were to pay artists wages comparable to history even if it inconvenienced or charged me, if we all started wearing funky hats. i think these things would be good and fun. but what we have now is also something, and it is hardly stagnant. it is just new.
January 1, 2026
A thorough overview of the last 25 years. They said the internet would make people more creative. It did not.
November 17, 2025
Thanks to NetGalley and Viking for the ARC of this title.
This is probably closer to a 3.5 than a 3 - I like this author working on THIS topic, but I was left a little underwhelmed by the abruptness of the way this ended. On the other hand, given that this is an extremely recent history, was there any other way this _could_ end?
This book asks a really good question - why does it feel like there's not any defining culture for the 2010s and 2020s in the same way we can easily classify "the 80s", "the 90s", y2k, etc.? It also goes an impressive way towards covering all of the trends and changes on the business side of things that's gotten us to where we are today. The way very recent history (and I do mean VERY recent: this applies the same talking-about-the-past language we associate with histories written about events 30 years ago to events that happened in 2024. It is late 2025 as I write this.) gets covered feels like it's all getting to a "here's how we got here" point that will be followed by some solid "and here's what we can do" chapters.
And yet: we only get one "conclusions" chapter. Which? fair. We're still in 2025 and it may be too early to really say what will get us out of our stagnated state of culture. And yet, I found myself not really buying Marx's sudden decision that what's really the bad guy here is "poptimism". After a ton of very solidly written chapters covering a ton of cultural spheres, this last-second "here's what the real problem is" felt incredibly underbaked and felt more like a personal bugbear for Marx than a solid argument for a source of the problem. The rest of his suggestions on what makes for more dynamic culture are great! The final arguments needed a better reasoning, and left me frustrated after what had been a fairly compelling history of recent culture.
This is probably closer to a 3.5 than a 3 - I like this author working on THIS topic, but I was left a little underwhelmed by the abruptness of the way this ended. On the other hand, given that this is an extremely recent history, was there any other way this _could_ end?
This book asks a really good question - why does it feel like there's not any defining culture for the 2010s and 2020s in the same way we can easily classify "the 80s", "the 90s", y2k, etc.? It also goes an impressive way towards covering all of the trends and changes on the business side of things that's gotten us to where we are today. The way very recent history (and I do mean VERY recent: this applies the same talking-about-the-past language we associate with histories written about events 30 years ago to events that happened in 2024. It is late 2025 as I write this.) gets covered feels like it's all getting to a "here's how we got here" point that will be followed by some solid "and here's what we can do" chapters.
And yet: we only get one "conclusions" chapter. Which? fair. We're still in 2025 and it may be too early to really say what will get us out of our stagnated state of culture. And yet, I found myself not really buying Marx's sudden decision that what's really the bad guy here is "poptimism". After a ton of very solidly written chapters covering a ton of cultural spheres, this last-second "here's what the real problem is" felt incredibly underbaked and felt more like a personal bugbear for Marx than a solid argument for a source of the problem. The rest of his suggestions on what makes for more dynamic culture are great! The final arguments needed a better reasoning, and left me frustrated after what had been a fairly compelling history of recent culture.
December 1, 2025
I read Blank Space as soon as it came out and recently read Marx’s Atlantic article, “Make Culture Weird Again.” — a piece that pushed me to finally write this review. The article implied that more esteem should be given to “weird” things without acknowledging that “weird” is subjective, elastic, culturally dependent — and, frankly, often just code for “things Marx personally thinks are brilliant.” The idea of “weirdness” he champions isn’t weird at all; it’s simply niche taste masquerading as a universal cultural metric. That blind spot played out across this entire book.
After reading Blank Space, it’s hard to shake the sense that Marx is less interested in understanding culture than in positioning himself close to it. The constant name-dropping — celebrities, indie musicians, designers, tech figures, creators — feels less like evidence and more like an attempt to borrow clout from people who actually shaped the culture he’s critiquing. The references pile up, but the insight never does.
The book starts with a promising premise about digital flattening and the disappearance of strong curatorial voices, but the argument stalls almost immediately. Each chapter follows the same rhythm: a broad observation, a cascade of citations, a detour into some 2000s microtrend, and then a resigned lament about how things used to be. Nothing builds. Nothing resolves. The middle chapters in particular feel like endlessly rearranged versions of the same idea (it is, however, impressive how much time Marx must have spent reading).
What becomes increasingly clear — and increasingly uncomfortable — is the tone of frustration that runs under the surface. Marx seems almost resentful of creators who turned visibility into success. Rather than interrogating the economic and technological structures that shape cultural production, he circles back to a familiar implication: if culture is “stagnant,” it’s partly because successful people don’t deserve the influence they have. It’s a critique bordering on bitterness. While it could be true, it is unclear what kind of “art” exactly Marx believes deserves higher esteem.
The irony is that Blank Space ends up exemplifying the very stagnation it claims to diagnose. It’s a remix of other people’s theories, filtered through nostalgia for a past cultural gatekeeping ecosystem that never really existed in the clean form he idealizes. There are brief moments where he almost breaks new ground on algorithms or attention economies, but they dissolve quickly under the weight of more references.
In the end, Blank Space is full of names but empty of synthesis — a cultural critique so obsessed with orbiting influence that it never develops gravity of its own.
After reading Blank Space, it’s hard to shake the sense that Marx is less interested in understanding culture than in positioning himself close to it. The constant name-dropping — celebrities, indie musicians, designers, tech figures, creators — feels less like evidence and more like an attempt to borrow clout from people who actually shaped the culture he’s critiquing. The references pile up, but the insight never does.
The book starts with a promising premise about digital flattening and the disappearance of strong curatorial voices, but the argument stalls almost immediately. Each chapter follows the same rhythm: a broad observation, a cascade of citations, a detour into some 2000s microtrend, and then a resigned lament about how things used to be. Nothing builds. Nothing resolves. The middle chapters in particular feel like endlessly rearranged versions of the same idea (it is, however, impressive how much time Marx must have spent reading).
What becomes increasingly clear — and increasingly uncomfortable — is the tone of frustration that runs under the surface. Marx seems almost resentful of creators who turned visibility into success. Rather than interrogating the economic and technological structures that shape cultural production, he circles back to a familiar implication: if culture is “stagnant,” it’s partly because successful people don’t deserve the influence they have. It’s a critique bordering on bitterness. While it could be true, it is unclear what kind of “art” exactly Marx believes deserves higher esteem.
The irony is that Blank Space ends up exemplifying the very stagnation it claims to diagnose. It’s a remix of other people’s theories, filtered through nostalgia for a past cultural gatekeeping ecosystem that never really existed in the clean form he idealizes. There are brief moments where he almost breaks new ground on algorithms or attention economies, but they dissolve quickly under the weight of more references.
In the end, Blank Space is full of names but empty of synthesis — a cultural critique so obsessed with orbiting influence that it never develops gravity of its own.
October 20, 2025
A fascinating look at a culture that hasn’t so much stagnated as frozen and become so ubiquitous, bland, and palatable as to be completely non-existent, as W. David Marx says, a “blank”.
I’ve long felt that pop culture has stagnated since the 90’s. I mean that was the last decade with a definable aesthetic and vibe to it, you know? The 70’s was disco and bell bottoms, the 80’s was hairspray and Reaganomics, the 90’s was grunge and irony laden detachment. Each of those decades recalls an evocative style, an ethos, almost a smell; they’re that distinct.
But the 2000’s and 2010’s? How were those decades culturally different from one another? Despite a few small things, what is really so different about 2010’s culture and 2020’s culture? What are the 2010 equivalent of bell bottom jeans? For years I was assured this suspicion was simply because I’m getting old, which, to be fair, is correct. However, there IS something afoot that can’t simply be chalked up to my new random joint pain and now having definite opinions about grocery store layouts.
The author does a better job laying it all out than I could. I learned a lot and also had some personal observations and feelings vindicated.
There’s a host of reasons for this bizarre null feeling around current popular culture. Hyper nostalgia that obsessively regurgitates the same handful of iconic media, the complete takeover of all artistic pursuits by entrepreneurial capitalism, the flattening effect of an internet largely made up of only a few monolithic social media sites.
Here are a couple key takeaways I found fascinating.
High finance has become ever more entwined with the production of film and television resulting in the rash of remakes, sequels and reboots, the absolute terror of anything original as a simple risk averse investment strategy. The lack of creativity is in some ways the point as art isn’t the desired goal anymore, a higher return on investment is. This is the main reason why there are almost no original movies coming out, everything has to be tied to an already existing property, something with a built in audience.
“Omnivore monoculture”, is a useful phrase the author coined encapsulating the ubiquitous sameness of all aspects of music, tv, film, etc. Genres are no longer distinct as much as they are different codes for saying the same thing. Nothing is niche anymore, everything is everywhere and you almost can’t help hearing about it. Styles and trends overlap and fuse together in a way that could theoretically be exciting, but ultimately ends up producing high quality, mediocre content.
This was an entertaining and informative read. I think it would be particularly impactful for readers, like me, who lived through the time covered here. But I could see it having something for almost any reader.
I’ve long felt that pop culture has stagnated since the 90’s. I mean that was the last decade with a definable aesthetic and vibe to it, you know? The 70’s was disco and bell bottoms, the 80’s was hairspray and Reaganomics, the 90’s was grunge and irony laden detachment. Each of those decades recalls an evocative style, an ethos, almost a smell; they’re that distinct.
But the 2000’s and 2010’s? How were those decades culturally different from one another? Despite a few small things, what is really so different about 2010’s culture and 2020’s culture? What are the 2010 equivalent of bell bottom jeans? For years I was assured this suspicion was simply because I’m getting old, which, to be fair, is correct. However, there IS something afoot that can’t simply be chalked up to my new random joint pain and now having definite opinions about grocery store layouts.
The author does a better job laying it all out than I could. I learned a lot and also had some personal observations and feelings vindicated.
There’s a host of reasons for this bizarre null feeling around current popular culture. Hyper nostalgia that obsessively regurgitates the same handful of iconic media, the complete takeover of all artistic pursuits by entrepreneurial capitalism, the flattening effect of an internet largely made up of only a few monolithic social media sites.
Here are a couple key takeaways I found fascinating.
High finance has become ever more entwined with the production of film and television resulting in the rash of remakes, sequels and reboots, the absolute terror of anything original as a simple risk averse investment strategy. The lack of creativity is in some ways the point as art isn’t the desired goal anymore, a higher return on investment is. This is the main reason why there are almost no original movies coming out, everything has to be tied to an already existing property, something with a built in audience.
“Omnivore monoculture”, is a useful phrase the author coined encapsulating the ubiquitous sameness of all aspects of music, tv, film, etc. Genres are no longer distinct as much as they are different codes for saying the same thing. Nothing is niche anymore, everything is everywhere and you almost can’t help hearing about it. Styles and trends overlap and fuse together in a way that could theoretically be exciting, but ultimately ends up producing high quality, mediocre content.
This was an entertaining and informative read. I think it would be particularly impactful for readers, like me, who lived through the time covered here. But I could see it having something for almost any reader.
November 29, 2025
"The history of all hitherto existing society is the history of class struggles." - Karl Marx
W. David Marx somehow wrote an entire book without any materialist grounding. a real Chuck Klosterman for our times. /derogatory
W. David Marx somehow wrote an entire book without any materialist grounding. a real Chuck Klosterman for our times. /derogatory
January 11, 2026
W. David Marx is an American-born culture writer who's lived and worked in Japan for the past few decades. His 2025 book Blank Space is his argument on why the 21st century has, thus far, been lacking in forging own culture and innovation, and instead has been largely derivative of the 20th century. The main examples cited are from mainstream US music, though to a lesser extent, arenas like fashion are also discussed.
Unfortunately this book was a miss for me, as I generally disagree with Marx's argument (I don't think that the the 21st century has been culturally stagnant, and I think 26 years in is too soon to jump to that conclusion) and though Marx cites voluminous amounts of information (~75% of which I distinctly remember as I lived through these decades as well), it still doesn't prove his theory.
I think a stronger argument would have been of Marx were able to convincingly explain how and why music of, for example, the 1970s and 1980s was NOT, even in the slightest, derivative of music of the 1950s and 1960s, and show that rule applied right until the turn of the century when music became derivative and entirely unoriginal. He doesn't do this. He cites some defining trends and examples of late 20th century music but claims they're all original, then as soon as the year 2000 hits, innovation comes to a grinding halt. The 2000s were my formative music decade, and I conceptualized the decade as clustered in several distinct sonic landscapes (for instance, the teen/bubblegum pop of the early 2000s, the pop/rock of the early/mid 2000s, the pop/R&B of the mid 2000s, the dance/electronic-inspired pop and in parallel the pop punk of the late 2000s), and while none of those landscapes was made in a vacuum, each was innovative and took advantage of music recording and producing technology that would have been much harder or impossible to achieve in earlier eras -- aka, innovation. One of my favorite examples is the English Xenomania production team of Miranda Cooper and Brian Higgins whose primary creative muses/vehicles were English pop group Girls Aloud -- albums like What Will the Neighbours Say? (2004), Chemistry (2005), and Tangled Up (2007) were composed of the five group members singing random vocal tracks separately that were then spliced together with a pop/electronica beat that sounded very experimental and avant garde at the time and (in my opinion) have aged well. While Girls Aloud achieved a lot of commercial success in the UK in the 2000s (20 consecutive top 10 singles), they failed to break into other markets, and ironically, most members of the group didn't seem to have much appreciation or creative alignment with the music they released -- though as Marx himself cites when talking about the likes of Ashlee Simpson or Paris Hilton, not every musical artist is an auteur.
I digress. The point is, with areas like music, I think we're naturally primed to prefer what we listened to in our formative years (whether that was contemporary or not) and use that as a model for what defines 'good', 'original', 'innovative', etc. music for the rest of our lives. Having been primed on the music of the '00s, I don't really care for music of the '20s, but that doesn't mean it lacks originality and taste. With how differently we discover and listen to music these days (another innovation Marx skips over entirely), and how drastically that's shifted the music industry's profit model, change is really the only constant.
Further reading: 2000s pop culture
Hit Girls: Britney, Taylor, Beyoncé, and the Women Who Built Pop's Shiniest Decade by Nora Princiotti
Girl on Girl: How Pop Culture Turned a Generation of Women Against Themselves by Sophie Gilbert
Toxic: Women, Fame, and the Tabloid 2000s by Sarah Ditum
Further reading: music
The Song Machine: Inside the Hit Factory by John Seabrook
Pretend We're Dead: The Rise, Fall, and Resurrection of Women in Rock in the ’90s by Tanya Pearson
Mood Machine: The Rise of Spotify and the Costs of the Perfect Playlist by Liz Pelly
This Is What It Sounds Like: What the Music You Love Says About You by Susan Rogers and Ogi Ogas
How Music Works by David Byrne
My statistics:
Book 11 for 2026
Book 2317 cumulatively
Unfortunately this book was a miss for me, as I generally disagree with Marx's argument (I don't think that the the 21st century has been culturally stagnant, and I think 26 years in is too soon to jump to that conclusion) and though Marx cites voluminous amounts of information (~75% of which I distinctly remember as I lived through these decades as well), it still doesn't prove his theory.
I think a stronger argument would have been of Marx were able to convincingly explain how and why music of, for example, the 1970s and 1980s was NOT, even in the slightest, derivative of music of the 1950s and 1960s, and show that rule applied right until the turn of the century when music became derivative and entirely unoriginal. He doesn't do this. He cites some defining trends and examples of late 20th century music but claims they're all original, then as soon as the year 2000 hits, innovation comes to a grinding halt. The 2000s were my formative music decade, and I conceptualized the decade as clustered in several distinct sonic landscapes (for instance, the teen/bubblegum pop of the early 2000s, the pop/rock of the early/mid 2000s, the pop/R&B of the mid 2000s, the dance/electronic-inspired pop and in parallel the pop punk of the late 2000s), and while none of those landscapes was made in a vacuum, each was innovative and took advantage of music recording and producing technology that would have been much harder or impossible to achieve in earlier eras -- aka, innovation. One of my favorite examples is the English Xenomania production team of Miranda Cooper and Brian Higgins whose primary creative muses/vehicles were English pop group Girls Aloud -- albums like What Will the Neighbours Say? (2004), Chemistry (2005), and Tangled Up (2007) were composed of the five group members singing random vocal tracks separately that were then spliced together with a pop/electronica beat that sounded very experimental and avant garde at the time and (in my opinion) have aged well. While Girls Aloud achieved a lot of commercial success in the UK in the 2000s (20 consecutive top 10 singles), they failed to break into other markets, and ironically, most members of the group didn't seem to have much appreciation or creative alignment with the music they released -- though as Marx himself cites when talking about the likes of Ashlee Simpson or Paris Hilton, not every musical artist is an auteur.
I digress. The point is, with areas like music, I think we're naturally primed to prefer what we listened to in our formative years (whether that was contemporary or not) and use that as a model for what defines 'good', 'original', 'innovative', etc. music for the rest of our lives. Having been primed on the music of the '00s, I don't really care for music of the '20s, but that doesn't mean it lacks originality and taste. With how differently we discover and listen to music these days (another innovation Marx skips over entirely), and how drastically that's shifted the music industry's profit model, change is really the only constant.
Further reading: 2000s pop culture
Hit Girls: Britney, Taylor, Beyoncé, and the Women Who Built Pop's Shiniest Decade by Nora Princiotti
Girl on Girl: How Pop Culture Turned a Generation of Women Against Themselves by Sophie Gilbert
Toxic: Women, Fame, and the Tabloid 2000s by Sarah Ditum
Further reading: music
The Song Machine: Inside the Hit Factory by John Seabrook
Pretend We're Dead: The Rise, Fall, and Resurrection of Women in Rock in the ’90s by Tanya Pearson
Mood Machine: The Rise of Spotify and the Costs of the Perfect Playlist by Liz Pelly
This Is What It Sounds Like: What the Music You Love Says About You by Susan Rogers and Ogi Ogas
How Music Works by David Byrne
My statistics:
Book 11 for 2026
Book 2317 cumulatively
January 7, 2026
This was a highly entertaining and thought-provoking American cultural history of the first quarter of the 21st century. I thoroughly enjoyed Marx’s tracing of pop culture (particularly music) from indie sleaze to the corporate pop tyranny of Taylor Swift. If you love cultural history and reliving forgotten pop and tv memories, you will have a good time reading this.
Marx argues that we have a developed a static cultural monoculture through a mix of neoliberalism and the rise of the internet. This culture hampers artistic innovation, and the few recent cases of important artistic breakthroughs have occurred through micro-cultural remnants of what we once had. This leaves a “blank space” in our culture where this innovative spirit once rested.
I’m inclined to generally agree with Marx’s assessment, although rather than a “monoculture” it seems that we have instead no distinct culture at all. Rather than norms and values, we simply have the dollar. Marx seems to conceptualise our culture as hollowed out; in existence but devoid of meaningful content. To me any semblance unified American culture has broken down entirely. I wish he dedicated more than 9 pages of conclusion to discussing his model of what we are left with and should do about it. I would have happily read 100 more pages of his diagnoses and solutions to this current moment.
In any case, I definitely recommend.
Marx argues that we have a developed a static cultural monoculture through a mix of neoliberalism and the rise of the internet. This culture hampers artistic innovation, and the few recent cases of important artistic breakthroughs have occurred through micro-cultural remnants of what we once had. This leaves a “blank space” in our culture where this innovative spirit once rested.
I’m inclined to generally agree with Marx’s assessment, although rather than a “monoculture” it seems that we have instead no distinct culture at all. Rather than norms and values, we simply have the dollar. Marx seems to conceptualise our culture as hollowed out; in existence but devoid of meaningful content. To me any semblance unified American culture has broken down entirely. I wish he dedicated more than 9 pages of conclusion to discussing his model of what we are left with and should do about it. I would have happily read 100 more pages of his diagnoses and solutions to this current moment.
In any case, I definitely recommend.
November 27, 2025
A great cultural analysis about the social, political and technological changes that took place from 2000 to 2025 and how they resulted in a cultural blank space, and overall, Marx is very accurate. One of the overarching themes in the book is that art, music, and culture became eclipsed by commercialization. He makes the case that when making money becomes the primary incentive, the quality of art and culture becomes watered-down and is less likely to challenge the status quo.
Other global events like the 2008 recession played a role too as executives became more risk averse and relied on established artists and franchises instead of investing in something new. This is evident in the growth of remakes, reboots and sequels in entertainment.
While the author is very knowledgeable about art and culture, he's not as knowledgeable in other areas. In chapter 13, he implied that all vitamins and supplements are placebos and scams. While there are bad actors, there are plenty of supplement companies that make products based on science and data and don't have a celebrity spokesperson. The examples he used were from celebrity endorsed products, which shows an availability bias.
His solution for addressing the cultural blank space is unclear and probably unrealistic. It also doesn't factor in the role that A.I. generated art and music will play. You can't put the toothpaste back in the tube. There would need to be a mass rejection of the status quo for that to happen, and as long as money is the primary incentive, I don't see people abandoning their source of income any time soon nor the convenience of quick access. There certainly does need to be a balance between making quality art and being able to make a living, but ultimately art scene cred doesn't pay bills.
Other global events like the 2008 recession played a role too as executives became more risk averse and relied on established artists and franchises instead of investing in something new. This is evident in the growth of remakes, reboots and sequels in entertainment.
While the author is very knowledgeable about art and culture, he's not as knowledgeable in other areas. In chapter 13, he implied that all vitamins and supplements are placebos and scams. While there are bad actors, there are plenty of supplement companies that make products based on science and data and don't have a celebrity spokesperson. The examples he used were from celebrity endorsed products, which shows an availability bias.
His solution for addressing the cultural blank space is unclear and probably unrealistic. It also doesn't factor in the role that A.I. generated art and music will play. You can't put the toothpaste back in the tube. There would need to be a mass rejection of the status quo for that to happen, and as long as money is the primary incentive, I don't see people abandoning their source of income any time soon nor the convenience of quick access. There certainly does need to be a balance between making quality art and being able to make a living, but ultimately art scene cred doesn't pay bills.
December 23, 2025
It was fine but I didn’t feel like I learned anything. It was like a much less focused Filterworld with even less materialist analysis. Disappointing.
January 16, 2026
felt like this book was written for me
Read
December 27, 2025Imo, this book provokes a much-needed reckoning with our cultural cul-de-sac, pondering questions like: Why are there no heads anymore? (In the sixties, kids dismissed the previous paradigm, jazz, as hopelessly antiquated; today’s young adults enjoy Katri Helena.) How did conservatism become the hip counterculture and social progressives the squares? When did Silicon Valley regress from genuine innovation into little more than a hunt for new ethical lines to cross? And so on. Very interesting. Also not as negative as I thought, as Marx is quite funny with his words. Klosterman is the obvious comparison, but Marx is more systematic (historian), while Klosterman writes from an affective point of view (critic), I reckon… Anyhow, the hardest recommend.
January 8, 2026
Undoubtedly a well-researched book but the grandiosity and victim mentality in this book? Red flags everywhere.
The entire book rests on a false premise that “not mainstream” = “not mattering”. moral sorting is disguised as “theory”.
First, the book 100% misreads contested public arenas and settled consensus by massively overgeneralising localised discourse into totalising cultural norm. Elite critical institutions—academic criticism, highbrow journalism, museums, and experimental art worlds—continue to draw sharp distinctions between market success and aesthetic value. The claim that “you can’t say anything negative” is simply untrue. The author refuses to distinguish between “being disagreed with” vs “being silenced”.
Second, the stance performs projection by attributing the critic’s own experience of friction to a structural silencing. What has changed is not the permissibility of critique, but the CONDITIONS of reception: critics now encounter immediate, visible, and often hostile disagreement thanks to the internet. The loss of asymmetrical authority is reframed as cultural repression, when it is more accurately described as the democratization of response. By framing mass audiences as “minions” and criticism as dangerous, the argument displaces anxiety about declining cultural authority onto fans themselves. What is actually threatened is not the ability to critique, but the privileged insulation critics once enjoyed from public response. Losing unilateral authority is recast as victimhood!
Third, this stance romanticizes an earlier critical order that never truly existed. Cultural criticism has always operated in tension with commerce and popularity. To claim that “if it makes money, it’s considered good” erases a long history of commercially successful art being dismissed by critics—and still is. The novelty is not pop’s dominance, but the democratization of reply.
Marx’s core mistake is not that money influences culture — it always has — but that he mistakes the visibility of mass taste for the dominance of mass taste.
Before social media:
• Most people liked basic, commercial things too.
• You just didn’t see them.
• Culture was filtered through critics, editors, curators, and tastemakers.
After social media:
• The same mass tastes exist…
• …but now they’re loud and measurable.
Taylor Swift didn’t become “the standard of good.”
What changed is that millions of people can now say “I like Taylor Swift” in public , all at once!
That feels like cultural flattening if and ONLY if you were accustomed to a world where:
• ordinary taste was invisible
• elite taste was overrepresented
Marx treats this as a new ideological regime (“poptimism,” “omnivorism,” etc.), but it’s really just the end of cultural gatekeeping by scarcity of platforms.
Culture didn’t get blander.
The hierarchy of who gets to speak collapsed.
And that feels, to people like Marx, who built their identity on being arbiters of taste, like an existential threat.
The issue Marx is concerned about is availability of platforms (unfortunately irreversible at this point) , NOT values. The people with taste will always have taste. His projections are irritatingly delusional, hence the 1 star despite the clear prose.
The entire book rests on a false premise that “not mainstream” = “not mattering”. moral sorting is disguised as “theory”.
First, the book 100% misreads contested public arenas and settled consensus by massively overgeneralising localised discourse into totalising cultural norm. Elite critical institutions—academic criticism, highbrow journalism, museums, and experimental art worlds—continue to draw sharp distinctions between market success and aesthetic value. The claim that “you can’t say anything negative” is simply untrue. The author refuses to distinguish between “being disagreed with” vs “being silenced”.
Second, the stance performs projection by attributing the critic’s own experience of friction to a structural silencing. What has changed is not the permissibility of critique, but the CONDITIONS of reception: critics now encounter immediate, visible, and often hostile disagreement thanks to the internet. The loss of asymmetrical authority is reframed as cultural repression, when it is more accurately described as the democratization of response. By framing mass audiences as “minions” and criticism as dangerous, the argument displaces anxiety about declining cultural authority onto fans themselves. What is actually threatened is not the ability to critique, but the privileged insulation critics once enjoyed from public response. Losing unilateral authority is recast as victimhood!
Third, this stance romanticizes an earlier critical order that never truly existed. Cultural criticism has always operated in tension with commerce and popularity. To claim that “if it makes money, it’s considered good” erases a long history of commercially successful art being dismissed by critics—and still is. The novelty is not pop’s dominance, but the democratization of reply.
Marx’s core mistake is not that money influences culture — it always has — but that he mistakes the visibility of mass taste for the dominance of mass taste.
Before social media:
• Most people liked basic, commercial things too.
• You just didn’t see them.
• Culture was filtered through critics, editors, curators, and tastemakers.
After social media:
• The same mass tastes exist…
• …but now they’re loud and measurable.
Taylor Swift didn’t become “the standard of good.”
What changed is that millions of people can now say “I like Taylor Swift” in public , all at once!
That feels like cultural flattening if and ONLY if you were accustomed to a world where:
• ordinary taste was invisible
• elite taste was overrepresented
Marx treats this as a new ideological regime (“poptimism,” “omnivorism,” etc.), but it’s really just the end of cultural gatekeeping by scarcity of platforms.
Culture didn’t get blander.
The hierarchy of who gets to speak collapsed.
And that feels, to people like Marx, who built their identity on being arbiters of taste, like an existential threat.
The issue Marx is concerned about is availability of platforms (unfortunately irreversible at this point) , NOT values. The people with taste will always have taste. His projections are irritatingly delusional, hence the 1 star despite the clear prose.
July 6, 2025
4.5 ⭐️ “Over the past twenty-five years, culture has prospered as a vehicle for entertainment, politics, and profiteering—but at the expense of pure artistic innovation.”
“…we can feel what’s missing—there is a conspicuous blank space where art and creativity used to be.”
This was an incredibly insightful read that I finished in one day! The author takes a look at the “blank space” culturally speaking that we’ve seen in the past 25 years. If you’ve ever wondered how the 2000s and beyond will be remembered, it’s all referenced in this book and I gotta tell you. I’m embarrassed. It’s forgettable and a bit sad compared to previous generations.
Common themes include: Kanye, Kardashians and Trump. Not much to be proud of here. The author does an excellent job citing pop culture, music, movie and political references and gives five steps for rebuilding our cultural innovation at the ends. This is a worth the read!
“…we can feel what’s missing—there is a conspicuous blank space where art and creativity used to be.”
This was an incredibly insightful read that I finished in one day! The author takes a look at the “blank space” culturally speaking that we’ve seen in the past 25 years. If you’ve ever wondered how the 2000s and beyond will be remembered, it’s all referenced in this book and I gotta tell you. I’m embarrassed. It’s forgettable and a bit sad compared to previous generations.
Common themes include: Kanye, Kardashians and Trump. Not much to be proud of here. The author does an excellent job citing pop culture, music, movie and political references and gives five steps for rebuilding our cultural innovation at the ends. This is a worth the read!
November 28, 2025
First, I think it’s important to note that this book is not, as the subtitle suggests, discussing the culture of the 21st century. It is discussing the pop culture of the 21st century. There are no mentions here of fine art, literature, classical music, opera, and such.
I think it’s also important to note that we are about one quarter of the way into the 21st century at the moment, so this is, of course, a history of only the first 25 years of the century.
All of that is to preface the fact that Marx wants to tell you that the 21st century thus far essentially has no culture. Or pop culture. He’s conflating the two.
While I think there’s plenty to criticize about a lot of this century’s cultural tastes and patterns, I also don’t trust criticism that essentially wants to tell you nothing but that everything is awful. Marx does a better job than some of keeping a lot of his personal opinions out of the narrative except when they are necessary, but he’s pretty clear that his overall view of this century so far is basically that it sucks here.
Marx is about my age so the comparison trap here is tough to get on board with. We were in our late teens when the calendar turned over at Y2K, so this is the first set of decades in which we were actually old enough to have both the cultural sentience and personal taste required to even have informed opinions on culture. So it’s a tough sell to imply even slightly the idea of wanting to go back to a better, more cultured (again, he means pop cultured) time, aside froM some pangs of childhood nostalgia.
Marx makes some solid observations on some of the things that negatively shaped pop culture in the aughts (post 9/11 forced patriotism and American exceptionalism, etc), but later misses on things like OWS, which has perhaps lasting historical and political significance, but little to no (pop) cultural significance.
There’s also a lot of low hanging fruit taking up space here, leaning on things that trigger the “problematic!” sirens from the early 2000s. Are people really still blaming Paris Hilton for this much personal nonsense? Sigh.
If you’re just looking for a summary of pop cultural moments and events that have contributed to the American collective taste this century, I suppose this is an okay place to do that (though I would still caution that a lot of what was good or positively impactful was conveniently left out of the narrative or devalued here). If you want actual fair and balanced criticism of 21st century pop culture, look elsewhere.
*I received an ARC of this book in exchange for an honest review.*
I think it’s also important to note that we are about one quarter of the way into the 21st century at the moment, so this is, of course, a history of only the first 25 years of the century.
All of that is to preface the fact that Marx wants to tell you that the 21st century thus far essentially has no culture. Or pop culture. He’s conflating the two.
While I think there’s plenty to criticize about a lot of this century’s cultural tastes and patterns, I also don’t trust criticism that essentially wants to tell you nothing but that everything is awful. Marx does a better job than some of keeping a lot of his personal opinions out of the narrative except when they are necessary, but he’s pretty clear that his overall view of this century so far is basically that it sucks here.
Marx is about my age so the comparison trap here is tough to get on board with. We were in our late teens when the calendar turned over at Y2K, so this is the first set of decades in which we were actually old enough to have both the cultural sentience and personal taste required to even have informed opinions on culture. So it’s a tough sell to imply even slightly the idea of wanting to go back to a better, more cultured (again, he means pop cultured) time, aside froM some pangs of childhood nostalgia.
Marx makes some solid observations on some of the things that negatively shaped pop culture in the aughts (post 9/11 forced patriotism and American exceptionalism, etc), but later misses on things like OWS, which has perhaps lasting historical and political significance, but little to no (pop) cultural significance.
There’s also a lot of low hanging fruit taking up space here, leaning on things that trigger the “problematic!” sirens from the early 2000s. Are people really still blaming Paris Hilton for this much personal nonsense? Sigh.
If you’re just looking for a summary of pop cultural moments and events that have contributed to the American collective taste this century, I suppose this is an okay place to do that (though I would still caution that a lot of what was good or positively impactful was conveniently left out of the narrative or devalued here). If you want actual fair and balanced criticism of 21st century pop culture, look elsewhere.
*I received an ARC of this book in exchange for an honest review.*
January 12, 2026
W. David Marx speaks my language. This was, therefore, a really straightforward, enjoyable read.
However, I was desperate for this history to segue into analysis and, unfortunately, this never came. As another reviewer has noted, maybe this kind of synthesis feels less novel in the post-ChatGPT world.
The effect of Marx’s writing is still powerful; one feels as though one’s choices, interests (as well as everyone else’s) are predetermined by mysterious waves of collective activity. His conclusion here, though, flies in the face of this. How are we, the inheritors of the “blank space,” supposed to trust our own tastes in, or ability to identify, the alternative?
However, I was desperate for this history to segue into analysis and, unfortunately, this never came. As another reviewer has noted, maybe this kind of synthesis feels less novel in the post-ChatGPT world.
The effect of Marx’s writing is still powerful; one feels as though one’s choices, interests (as well as everyone else’s) are predetermined by mysterious waves of collective activity. His conclusion here, though, flies in the face of this. How are we, the inheritors of the “blank space,” supposed to trust our own tastes in, or ability to identify, the alternative?
December 1, 2025
Um margt óvitlaus bók en setur allan fókus á tískustrauma til þess eins að hafna þeim - hunsar sjálf þá menningu sem hún þykist tigna (en þekkir bara í forml grunge-stjarna). Sem sagt sek um allt sem hún fordæmir. Kenningin, að popptivismi og alætur og sjálfhverfa og vinsældaþrá sé að gera út af við menninguna, er ekki röng - en það vantar allt mótvægi í hana, allan áhuga á því sem er raunverulega krefjandi, utangarðs, sjálfstætr og/eða frumlegt.
January 16, 2026
This book makes me feel seen.
Apparently I'm not just a singular angry old millenial who can't adapt - my opinions on today's "culture" have been validated. Poptimism has destroyed everything that we held sacred before the 2010s.
Everything has indeed lost meaning, merit and quality.
"Culture" and art today is a joke and it's sad. But at least I still have vivid memories of the before times and no obligation to participate in whatever trash we're being served today.
Apparently I'm not just a singular angry old millenial who can't adapt - my opinions on today's "culture" have been validated. Poptimism has destroyed everything that we held sacred before the 2010s.
Everything has indeed lost meaning, merit and quality.
"Culture" and art today is a joke and it's sad. But at least I still have vivid memories of the before times and no obligation to participate in whatever trash we're being served today.
January 1, 2026
I’ve liked David Marx’ previous books but this one really didn’t do it for me. While the overall thesis is interesting, most of the book is a play by play of recent and distant Internet happenings that you likely remember well enough to make the rehashing here read as pretty boring. It’s also a pretty limited look at 21st century culture, largely focused on the top tier events (elections, Super Bowls, etc) and and most overexposed personalities (Mr Beast, Obama, Joe Rogan). Ultimately if you come to this book largely agreeing with its negative view of contemporary pop culture, it’s not going to tell you anything you don’t already know. For a true poptimist or techno utopian, it’s not really making a very persuasive argument as the book is just packed full of unsupported assertions about the relatively importance or impact of various bits of internet trivia.
Midwit takes on midwit culture.
Midwit takes on midwit culture.
December 23, 2025
- took me too long to read for no reason… i’m reading 70 books next year or so help me God…
- mr marx otter stick to termite topics…. a cultural history of the 21st century is a mighty task perhaps nobody is up to take…
- lots of fun factoids in this one, though! survivor dp went to the office !
- mr marx otter stick to termite topics…. a cultural history of the 21st century is a mighty task perhaps nobody is up to take…
- lots of fun factoids in this one, though! survivor dp went to the office !
January 11, 2026
“Blank Space” is David Max’s “Cultural History of the Twenty First Century" focused mainly on the United States. As background, David is a fashion and culture writer based in Tokyo and has written other books on these subjects.
The central theme of this book is that in this new century there are fewer cultural inventors and the more/most forms of cultural invention has become scarce. According to the author, there is a “Blank Space” where art and creativity used to reside. Is this true?
Although the Twenty-First Century has (so far) brought a large Quantity of words, ideas, songs, and videos – because they are easier to produce and distribute with new technology. That said, there are apparently very few, if any, Quality ideas that have a big cultural impact?
The book starts you wondering “Where are today’s rebels?” i.e., those who need to break free from the prevailing culture to create a different future.
In the Twentieth Century, breaking norms was important for cultural innovation. Now the goal has change from breaking norms to making money. And with that goal is the strategy of playing it safe, so you don’t jeopardise a big financial pay-out.
Coming from the advertising industry, I’ve come to similar conclusions. In my day, ads such as Apple’s “Here’s to the Crazy Ones” in 1997, became cultural “touchstones”. The ad was aired in the Super Bowl – only once – and achieved fame. As digital ads rose with the growth of the internet, no online ad has attained this kid of status.
At the same time in movies, actors would never “Sell out” to promote products and services in their home markets in the 1990s. This was seen to somehow diminish their artistry.
They would sign up to promote products in Japan, where the pay was high and very few Western fans would see this. This all shifted in the Twenty First Century when actors also wanted to be founders, entrepreneurs, and “Icons” (i.e., many high status roles) as they have been in Japan so many decades.
Why did this change? And does this represent smaller shifts to culture?
The author puts forth five main reasons for the changes. (These are how he describes them with my editorial to help define the terms.):
1. Omnivorism – this phenomenon is a general rejection of cultural hierarchies where all styles should be treated equally. It’s part of a Liberal tradition of tearing down structure and is arguably “Inclusivity gone mad” (My quote.) It’s both a way of thinking and action.
Technology such as Napster and the iPod shuffle helped make the sampling of multiple genres easy, giving rise to this way of Omnivore thinking. With it, music became an anytime, anywhere part of modern living.
But standing out and creating something different became less important than being financially successful. This involved “de-risking” the work.
2. Poptimism - this term, taken from modern music journalism, posits that pop music deserves the same respect, analysis, and cultural consideration that “rock music” deserves – no matter different tastes. This thinking challenges the traditional hierarchy that favour Rock as authentic art.
For those who advocate this idea, popularity (a proxy for financial success) is the only thing that matters. For example, people can be famous for being famous. They don’t necessarily have to be good at what they do e.g., Paris Hilton or The Kardashians.
Poptimism is also a key reason why there are more movies today that are sequels or prequels to existing hits or why successful comic book series such as those in the Marvel franchise are produced. The movie business rewards those who don’t take risks.
The “Mass Market success became an important signifier of ambition and innovation rather than a betrayal of artistic principles.” Page 39
An interesting point to be made here is the author's belief that music as a driver of culture also started to decline in this period. This started when MTV moved away from music videos and toward videos that discussed music. Shows like America’s Got Talent” and Reality TV then made people more important than music.
3. Entrepreneurial heroism – in this new century there has been a general glorification in the United States of business savvy vs artistic genius. Taylor Swift is an example of this for she fought “Big Music” (Scooter Braun) by re-recording her master records making the original masters obsolete.
Moreover the heroes of the twenty first century were more often technology leaders including Bill Gate, Steve Jobs (who with Apple changed the world with the iPhone in 2007), and Mark Zuckerberg.
Other examples of this include actors who develop brands including Ryan Reynolds and his “Aviator Gin”. Cultural fame is no longer enough. Leaders in the arts need also to be successful business-people.
In many instances this societal need for success drives fraud. This takes the idea of “Fake it till you make it” to an extreme. A good idea of this is Bernie Madoff and his pyramid scheme, or Elizabeth Holmes, who falsified the results at Theranos and was sent to jail for fraud.
4. “The Counterculture against counterculture” – the Twenty-First Century saw a backlash against “Liberal ideals” from previous decades.
Conservative values reappeared after the attacks on 9-11, and patriotism grew more fashionable. The Right wing reframed the Left as “Oppressors” and the rural right being “Oppressed” and this has led to events such as the elections of Donald Trump as likely the biggest example.
5. Digital Norm Evasion – there is a general championing of technology which can be more important than artistry. This is especially true for concepts such a Non Fungible Tokens (NFTs) which were not really about art or culture, but were mainly speculative tools focused on the main goal of the day – making money.
The underlying belief in the book is that we need cultural innovation to change the world for the better, creating a brighter future. According to the author, David Marx, it was the counterculture rebels who wanted to change the world, that were heroes.
The author goes on to provide a detailed list of cultural events – mainly related to music, media, and business – based on four eras of the Twenty First Century – 2001 to 2008 (i.e., “9-11” to the Great Recession) 2009 to 2015 (The Recession to the end of Obama as President), 2016-2019 (Donald Trump and the Rise of the Right) 2020 – 2024 (The Pandemic till now.) He also wove into this story technology growth including the Internet, Smartphones, Web 2.0 and AI to create a story about culture and how our culture compares and/or contrast to culture in the past.
There is a lot of material to summarise, and this is not the place to do it. You should read the book to do that. In the meantime, this is my review of “Blank Space”.
The thing I liked most about the book was that David Marx brought a perspective to American culture that I could feel, but not clearly articulate. I could see how pop music appeared to be shallower than when I was growing up in the late twentieth century with Rock and Roll. I could also see how popularity drove things as people like Paris Hilton seemed to be just famous for being famous.
And I have seen the cultural wars where in some cases being conservative is the new counter-culture. The author was able to take me on a tour of the big events and cultural shifts when I could not put words to it.
It took me a fair bit of time to go through the book as there were insights on every page. Sometimes these were sound-bytes, but other times required me to think about what was written, implied and how that underpins what we are experiencing today.
In terms of negatives, the largest negative in the book concerned structure. While the author outlined five key reasons why there was little cultural innovation in the Introduction, he did not follow through and support these through the book. I feel the book was released before completion in that it was not as well integrated together as it should have been.
Like all books on culture, and especially a book that covers as much ground as this attempts to do, there are missing topics were also related to what he covered in culture – music, fashion, and business – but not other cultural drivers such as sports and religion, with the decline in religion being very important.
People need organising principles that religion used to provide. Now they look to new "gods" - celebrities, wealthy people - to help them rally around. This can help explain the move from chasing artistry to chasing money. But the author doesn't see this. Rather he looks at "Pop culture" vs. culture in general to understand the world. This is a mistake.
I also don’t think the author is comfortable talking about how Conservatives i.e., the counter-counter-culture, can add to American culture moving forward. He understands the old days when Liberal culture broke down norms. To the author, these Liberals were able to create culture.
But the author does not seem to understand how culture moves ahead in a more Conservative world. He does not see how Conservative values of structure and traditions and symbols can build the culture. Perhaps these values are needed to reduce divorce rates, to build communities, to not bowl alone, and to respect the values that have made America great in the past.
In general, I don’t think Liberals (Democrats) understand Conservatives (Republicans) as much as Conservatives understand Liberals. And the author falls into this trap.
Further the author is not comfortable with the readjustment in society to discuss men in a more positive light – as opposed to the last forty years in the Twentieth Century which focused more on women’s rights and minority rights. An example of this concerned the rise of Jordan Peterson and Joe Rogan, which he doesn’t seem to be positive thing for society.
These observations make me question how flexible the author is in his thinking.
In addition, I didn’t really like the titles of the themes he chose for I would select different titles than Omnivision and Poptivism. Omnivision could be “Inclusivity gone mad” and “Poptivism” was too narrow. I would have said “Famous for being famous” as it paints a clearer picture.
I felt that the book could have used some images (a common complaint of mine for books that neglect this) and for a timeline or chart of key milestones in the twenty first century to summarise his thinking and conclusions.
To summarise, this is a good book and a sign of an interesting man. I’m sure to read more of his writing in the year(s) ahead.
That said, Blank Space could have been a great book if it had a little more structure and dug deeper into the drivers for the change in American culture.
The central theme of this book is that in this new century there are fewer cultural inventors and the more/most forms of cultural invention has become scarce. According to the author, there is a “Blank Space” where art and creativity used to reside. Is this true?
Although the Twenty-First Century has (so far) brought a large Quantity of words, ideas, songs, and videos – because they are easier to produce and distribute with new technology. That said, there are apparently very few, if any, Quality ideas that have a big cultural impact?
The book starts you wondering “Where are today’s rebels?” i.e., those who need to break free from the prevailing culture to create a different future.
In the Twentieth Century, breaking norms was important for cultural innovation. Now the goal has change from breaking norms to making money. And with that goal is the strategy of playing it safe, so you don’t jeopardise a big financial pay-out.
Coming from the advertising industry, I’ve come to similar conclusions. In my day, ads such as Apple’s “Here’s to the Crazy Ones” in 1997, became cultural “touchstones”. The ad was aired in the Super Bowl – only once – and achieved fame. As digital ads rose with the growth of the internet, no online ad has attained this kid of status.
At the same time in movies, actors would never “Sell out” to promote products and services in their home markets in the 1990s. This was seen to somehow diminish their artistry.
They would sign up to promote products in Japan, where the pay was high and very few Western fans would see this. This all shifted in the Twenty First Century when actors also wanted to be founders, entrepreneurs, and “Icons” (i.e., many high status roles) as they have been in Japan so many decades.
Why did this change? And does this represent smaller shifts to culture?
The author puts forth five main reasons for the changes. (These are how he describes them with my editorial to help define the terms.):
1. Omnivorism – this phenomenon is a general rejection of cultural hierarchies where all styles should be treated equally. It’s part of a Liberal tradition of tearing down structure and is arguably “Inclusivity gone mad” (My quote.) It’s both a way of thinking and action.
Technology such as Napster and the iPod shuffle helped make the sampling of multiple genres easy, giving rise to this way of Omnivore thinking. With it, music became an anytime, anywhere part of modern living.
But standing out and creating something different became less important than being financially successful. This involved “de-risking” the work.
2. Poptimism - this term, taken from modern music journalism, posits that pop music deserves the same respect, analysis, and cultural consideration that “rock music” deserves – no matter different tastes. This thinking challenges the traditional hierarchy that favour Rock as authentic art.
For those who advocate this idea, popularity (a proxy for financial success) is the only thing that matters. For example, people can be famous for being famous. They don’t necessarily have to be good at what they do e.g., Paris Hilton or The Kardashians.
Poptimism is also a key reason why there are more movies today that are sequels or prequels to existing hits or why successful comic book series such as those in the Marvel franchise are produced. The movie business rewards those who don’t take risks.
The “Mass Market success became an important signifier of ambition and innovation rather than a betrayal of artistic principles.” Page 39
An interesting point to be made here is the author's belief that music as a driver of culture also started to decline in this period. This started when MTV moved away from music videos and toward videos that discussed music. Shows like America’s Got Talent” and Reality TV then made people more important than music.
3. Entrepreneurial heroism – in this new century there has been a general glorification in the United States of business savvy vs artistic genius. Taylor Swift is an example of this for she fought “Big Music” (Scooter Braun) by re-recording her master records making the original masters obsolete.
Moreover the heroes of the twenty first century were more often technology leaders including Bill Gate, Steve Jobs (who with Apple changed the world with the iPhone in 2007), and Mark Zuckerberg.
Other examples of this include actors who develop brands including Ryan Reynolds and his “Aviator Gin”. Cultural fame is no longer enough. Leaders in the arts need also to be successful business-people.
In many instances this societal need for success drives fraud. This takes the idea of “Fake it till you make it” to an extreme. A good idea of this is Bernie Madoff and his pyramid scheme, or Elizabeth Holmes, who falsified the results at Theranos and was sent to jail for fraud.
4. “The Counterculture against counterculture” – the Twenty-First Century saw a backlash against “Liberal ideals” from previous decades.
Conservative values reappeared after the attacks on 9-11, and patriotism grew more fashionable. The Right wing reframed the Left as “Oppressors” and the rural right being “Oppressed” and this has led to events such as the elections of Donald Trump as likely the biggest example.
5. Digital Norm Evasion – there is a general championing of technology which can be more important than artistry. This is especially true for concepts such a Non Fungible Tokens (NFTs) which were not really about art or culture, but were mainly speculative tools focused on the main goal of the day – making money.
The underlying belief in the book is that we need cultural innovation to change the world for the better, creating a brighter future. According to the author, David Marx, it was the counterculture rebels who wanted to change the world, that were heroes.
The author goes on to provide a detailed list of cultural events – mainly related to music, media, and business – based on four eras of the Twenty First Century – 2001 to 2008 (i.e., “9-11” to the Great Recession) 2009 to 2015 (The Recession to the end of Obama as President), 2016-2019 (Donald Trump and the Rise of the Right) 2020 – 2024 (The Pandemic till now.) He also wove into this story technology growth including the Internet, Smartphones, Web 2.0 and AI to create a story about culture and how our culture compares and/or contrast to culture in the past.
There is a lot of material to summarise, and this is not the place to do it. You should read the book to do that. In the meantime, this is my review of “Blank Space”.
The thing I liked most about the book was that David Marx brought a perspective to American culture that I could feel, but not clearly articulate. I could see how pop music appeared to be shallower than when I was growing up in the late twentieth century with Rock and Roll. I could also see how popularity drove things as people like Paris Hilton seemed to be just famous for being famous.
And I have seen the cultural wars where in some cases being conservative is the new counter-culture. The author was able to take me on a tour of the big events and cultural shifts when I could not put words to it.
It took me a fair bit of time to go through the book as there were insights on every page. Sometimes these were sound-bytes, but other times required me to think about what was written, implied and how that underpins what we are experiencing today.
In terms of negatives, the largest negative in the book concerned structure. While the author outlined five key reasons why there was little cultural innovation in the Introduction, he did not follow through and support these through the book. I feel the book was released before completion in that it was not as well integrated together as it should have been.
Like all books on culture, and especially a book that covers as much ground as this attempts to do, there are missing topics were also related to what he covered in culture – music, fashion, and business – but not other cultural drivers such as sports and religion, with the decline in religion being very important.
People need organising principles that religion used to provide. Now they look to new "gods" - celebrities, wealthy people - to help them rally around. This can help explain the move from chasing artistry to chasing money. But the author doesn't see this. Rather he looks at "Pop culture" vs. culture in general to understand the world. This is a mistake.
I also don’t think the author is comfortable talking about how Conservatives i.e., the counter-counter-culture, can add to American culture moving forward. He understands the old days when Liberal culture broke down norms. To the author, these Liberals were able to create culture.
But the author does not seem to understand how culture moves ahead in a more Conservative world. He does not see how Conservative values of structure and traditions and symbols can build the culture. Perhaps these values are needed to reduce divorce rates, to build communities, to not bowl alone, and to respect the values that have made America great in the past.
In general, I don’t think Liberals (Democrats) understand Conservatives (Republicans) as much as Conservatives understand Liberals. And the author falls into this trap.
Further the author is not comfortable with the readjustment in society to discuss men in a more positive light – as opposed to the last forty years in the Twentieth Century which focused more on women’s rights and minority rights. An example of this concerned the rise of Jordan Peterson and Joe Rogan, which he doesn’t seem to be positive thing for society.
These observations make me question how flexible the author is in his thinking.
In addition, I didn’t really like the titles of the themes he chose for I would select different titles than Omnivision and Poptivism. Omnivision could be “Inclusivity gone mad” and “Poptivism” was too narrow. I would have said “Famous for being famous” as it paints a clearer picture.
I felt that the book could have used some images (a common complaint of mine for books that neglect this) and for a timeline or chart of key milestones in the twenty first century to summarise his thinking and conclusions.
To summarise, this is a good book and a sign of an interesting man. I’m sure to read more of his writing in the year(s) ahead.
That said, Blank Space could have been a great book if it had a little more structure and dug deeper into the drivers for the change in American culture.
January 7, 2026
Interesting look at how culture is largely driven by financial forces towards "omnivore monoculture" - a world where the majority of music and art is palatable, unremarkable, and nearly indistinguishable. It's unfair to say art is poor quality now, but Marx argues boundaries are not pushed as often, and genres have seemingly gone away in favor of the lowest common denominator. I'm inclined to agree.
Cool book if you're generally aligned with Marx's tastes/ideologies.
Cool book if you're generally aligned with Marx's tastes/ideologies.
November 24, 2025
Fascinating deep dive into 21st century culture, well-researched and sharply written. Even with a narrower focus than Marx's last book, the amazing Status and Culture, it sometimes feels like it covers too much to go especially deep into any one thing, reading at times like a zippy overview of the last 25 years without much analysis (and it's clearly focused on the aspects of culture that most interest Marx - music, fashion and tech, primarily). The analysis that is there is excellent, though, as Marx does a great job at pulling out the threads and the people that link these disparate elements of contemporary culture. In the process, he paints a pretty bleak, but overall quite accurate, portrait of where we're at as a culture.
October 22, 2025
(Thanks to Netgalley for the advance copy.)
As someone who feels troubled and alienated by our current cultural landscape and how art is presently engaged with, I’m hungry for anything that can make sense of these times. That being said, this was easily my most anticipated book of the year.
I liked this book a lot but felt slightly let down by its briefness and pacing. It’s predominantly a cultural history of our current century with some of the authors criticism, suggestions, and point-of-view mixed in at the beginning and end. The history portion was well done and thorough enough but I was left wishing the author spent a bit more time fleshing out the connection between each point of history to the corresponding qualities of current culture that is (brilliantly) laid out in the opening section of the book. The connections were there but I was longing for deeper description, sometimes the history began to feel simply listed rather than discussed. In the conclusion section, i greatly connected with and agreed with all of the points and expressed but once again was left wanting more. The authors point-of-view and opinion on a solution to the “blank space” feels well argued, sensible, and exciting; I would be happy to read a book length expansion of just the conclusion of this book.
Overall, I loved all of the content in this book but just wish it was longer, paced a bit differently, and contained a lot more criticism/discussion than is provided. But what is provided is exciting, thought-provoking, and vital, and I will be sharply tuned in to whatever Marx does next.
As someone who feels troubled and alienated by our current cultural landscape and how art is presently engaged with, I’m hungry for anything that can make sense of these times. That being said, this was easily my most anticipated book of the year.
I liked this book a lot but felt slightly let down by its briefness and pacing. It’s predominantly a cultural history of our current century with some of the authors criticism, suggestions, and point-of-view mixed in at the beginning and end. The history portion was well done and thorough enough but I was left wishing the author spent a bit more time fleshing out the connection between each point of history to the corresponding qualities of current culture that is (brilliantly) laid out in the opening section of the book. The connections were there but I was longing for deeper description, sometimes the history began to feel simply listed rather than discussed. In the conclusion section, i greatly connected with and agreed with all of the points and expressed but once again was left wanting more. The authors point-of-view and opinion on a solution to the “blank space” feels well argued, sensible, and exciting; I would be happy to read a book length expansion of just the conclusion of this book.
Overall, I loved all of the content in this book but just wish it was longer, paced a bit differently, and contained a lot more criticism/discussion than is provided. But what is provided is exciting, thought-provoking, and vital, and I will be sharply tuned in to whatever Marx does next.
This entire review has been hidden because of spoilers.
October 20, 2025
My thanks to NetGalley and Viking Penguin for an advance copy of this book that looks at the cultural and artistic history of the 21st century when borrowed nostalgia and the influx of money has turned what used to creative fires into ways of making people famous for famous sake, leaving us with few things to remember or even to care about.
I remember being young and wanting to know everything about everyone in the entertainment I liked. I read magazines, books, watched cable documentaries, tracked down zines, everything I could in the pre-Internet days to to get more information on bands, movies, books, comics, even zines. Working in bookstores and music stores helped, but there was so much to enjoy I knew I could never keep up. Nor could my wallet. By the start of the 2000's this interest was slowly decreasing. My father had passed, my job wasn't that fun, and the cultural landscape was changing. This happens as one ages out of something, but and maybe I am no better than those that say music was only good when I was seventeen, and SNL was only funny when I was in college, things I don't agree with in the slightest. There was some stuff, some music, some movies, but everything started seeming, well bland. One started to notice celebrities pushing things, advertising things, something few ever did. Reality shows appeared everywhere. Gossip was news, big news, and people were being famous for being famous. And one could almost follow the money and see where things were going. Things that W. David Marx discuses in this really impressive, throughly sourced book. Blank Space: A Cultural History of the Twenty-First Century is a look at the last 25 years, where we are going and why things seem so safe, so kid tested and mother approved, and what this might mean for our culture.
The book begins with discussions about the biggest moment of the earliest part of our century, 9/11 and how in the interest in being safe, suddenly if became hip to be square. People went from begin mad at a stolen election, so suddenly wanting to kill foreigners for the lost feeling f American dominance we had grown accustomed to. This sense of conservatism, see the rise of Vice Media, and the founder of the company, began to affect the creation of art in this country. Suddenly selling out wasn't a bad thing. It was the only thing. Greed was officially good, and while the collapse of the economy made people pretend to be less interested in the better things in life, this did on last long. Music was becoming more beats orientated, songs written by committee, sometimes never even being in the same room. Outrage seemed almost nostalgia, a Lady Gaga compared to say Madonna. Movies were the same, remakes, repeats, soft reboots, hard reboots, as companies tried to deal with both waning interest, and video games. Adding to all of this was money. Money on top of money. Tech was the new religion, and they began to spread their money, and power, pivoting from print media to video, destroying whole swathes of media with dreams of control that we are still dealing with today.
There is a lot going on in the book. First Marx did a tremendous job researching and bringing divergent ideas together, linking things that I had never thought of but now can't get them out of my head. Marx looks at the nostalgia trend that demands that things not be too new, but familiar. How innovation, recklessness and failure are steered away from, in pursuit of the familiar, the stuff that plays on American Idol. People are not having careers in the arts any more they are having moments, and there are others who want the fame waiting in the wings. Every page has something to think about, something to mull on and of course things that one disagrees with. Just like entertainment used to be.
A book worthy of reading and discussing, with no real answers, and a darkness on the horizon when it comes to new things. A book that made me think far more than I expected, and made me remember when I used to care about the things I liked. My first experience with W. David Marx, but hopefully not my last.
I remember being young and wanting to know everything about everyone in the entertainment I liked. I read magazines, books, watched cable documentaries, tracked down zines, everything I could in the pre-Internet days to to get more information on bands, movies, books, comics, even zines. Working in bookstores and music stores helped, but there was so much to enjoy I knew I could never keep up. Nor could my wallet. By the start of the 2000's this interest was slowly decreasing. My father had passed, my job wasn't that fun, and the cultural landscape was changing. This happens as one ages out of something, but and maybe I am no better than those that say music was only good when I was seventeen, and SNL was only funny when I was in college, things I don't agree with in the slightest. There was some stuff, some music, some movies, but everything started seeming, well bland. One started to notice celebrities pushing things, advertising things, something few ever did. Reality shows appeared everywhere. Gossip was news, big news, and people were being famous for being famous. And one could almost follow the money and see where things were going. Things that W. David Marx discuses in this really impressive, throughly sourced book. Blank Space: A Cultural History of the Twenty-First Century is a look at the last 25 years, where we are going and why things seem so safe, so kid tested and mother approved, and what this might mean for our culture.
The book begins with discussions about the biggest moment of the earliest part of our century, 9/11 and how in the interest in being safe, suddenly if became hip to be square. People went from begin mad at a stolen election, so suddenly wanting to kill foreigners for the lost feeling f American dominance we had grown accustomed to. This sense of conservatism, see the rise of Vice Media, and the founder of the company, began to affect the creation of art in this country. Suddenly selling out wasn't a bad thing. It was the only thing. Greed was officially good, and while the collapse of the economy made people pretend to be less interested in the better things in life, this did on last long. Music was becoming more beats orientated, songs written by committee, sometimes never even being in the same room. Outrage seemed almost nostalgia, a Lady Gaga compared to say Madonna. Movies were the same, remakes, repeats, soft reboots, hard reboots, as companies tried to deal with both waning interest, and video games. Adding to all of this was money. Money on top of money. Tech was the new religion, and they began to spread their money, and power, pivoting from print media to video, destroying whole swathes of media with dreams of control that we are still dealing with today.
There is a lot going on in the book. First Marx did a tremendous job researching and bringing divergent ideas together, linking things that I had never thought of but now can't get them out of my head. Marx looks at the nostalgia trend that demands that things not be too new, but familiar. How innovation, recklessness and failure are steered away from, in pursuit of the familiar, the stuff that plays on American Idol. People are not having careers in the arts any more they are having moments, and there are others who want the fame waiting in the wings. Every page has something to think about, something to mull on and of course things that one disagrees with. Just like entertainment used to be.
A book worthy of reading and discussing, with no real answers, and a darkness on the horizon when it comes to new things. A book that made me think far more than I expected, and made me remember when I used to care about the things I liked. My first experience with W. David Marx, but hopefully not my last.
January 16, 2026
Pros
- A compelling retelling of pop culture over the past 25 years that highlights key milestones, clarifies their significance, and contrasts them effectively with the preceding era.
- Presents an interesting argument for cultural stagnation in the U.S., centering on neoliberalism’s drive to commodify rebellion, authenticity, and creativity.
- Particularly strong analysis of the right’s counter–counterculture over the past decade, clearly explaining how reactionary identity, grievance, and nostalgia have been repackaged as cultural rebellion.
- Extremely accessible and easy to follow, clearly connecting events, figures, ideas, and critiques without becoming dense.
Cons
- Implies that culture in 2025 is largely indistinguishable from that of 2000, which understates meaningful developments in music, fashion, and media over the past two decades. While much feels hollow, framing the era as a cultural blank spot is overly dismissive.
- Focuses exclusively on pop culture and media, without analyzing other important aspects of U.S. culture, such as family gatherings, holidays, at-home rituals, or key life milestones. This omission makes the argument feel one-dimensional, as culture exists beyond media.
- Mentions video games but fails to treat them seriously as cultural or artistic artifacts, despite their creativity, risk-taking, and cultural significance over the past 25 years.
- Critiques modern culture as hollow without clearly defining what constitutes culturally rich artifacts from earlier eras. The book suggests pre-2000 culture was uniquely meaningful, a claim that is difficult to extend beyond certain periods and oversimplifies earlier decades.
Summary
This book offers an engaging and highly readable overview of pop culture from the past 25 years, advancing a provocative critique of cultural stagnation driven by neoliberal commodification. Its analysis of the right’s counter–counterculture in the past decade is particularly compelling, illuminating how reactionary politics have been reframed as cultural rebellion. However, the book overreaches by minimizing genuine cultural evolution, narrowly focusing on media while ignoring culture outside of pop culture, and overlooking major creative domains such as video games. The lack of clear definitions or historical benchmarks for “meaningful” culture ultimately weakens its argument, leaving the critique sharp but one-dimensional.
- A compelling retelling of pop culture over the past 25 years that highlights key milestones, clarifies their significance, and contrasts them effectively with the preceding era.
- Presents an interesting argument for cultural stagnation in the U.S., centering on neoliberalism’s drive to commodify rebellion, authenticity, and creativity.
- Particularly strong analysis of the right’s counter–counterculture over the past decade, clearly explaining how reactionary identity, grievance, and nostalgia have been repackaged as cultural rebellion.
- Extremely accessible and easy to follow, clearly connecting events, figures, ideas, and critiques without becoming dense.
Cons
- Implies that culture in 2025 is largely indistinguishable from that of 2000, which understates meaningful developments in music, fashion, and media over the past two decades. While much feels hollow, framing the era as a cultural blank spot is overly dismissive.
- Focuses exclusively on pop culture and media, without analyzing other important aspects of U.S. culture, such as family gatherings, holidays, at-home rituals, or key life milestones. This omission makes the argument feel one-dimensional, as culture exists beyond media.
- Mentions video games but fails to treat them seriously as cultural or artistic artifacts, despite their creativity, risk-taking, and cultural significance over the past 25 years.
- Critiques modern culture as hollow without clearly defining what constitutes culturally rich artifacts from earlier eras. The book suggests pre-2000 culture was uniquely meaningful, a claim that is difficult to extend beyond certain periods and oversimplifies earlier decades.
Summary
This book offers an engaging and highly readable overview of pop culture from the past 25 years, advancing a provocative critique of cultural stagnation driven by neoliberal commodification. Its analysis of the right’s counter–counterculture in the past decade is particularly compelling, illuminating how reactionary politics have been reframed as cultural rebellion. However, the book overreaches by minimizing genuine cultural evolution, narrowly focusing on media while ignoring culture outside of pop culture, and overlooking major creative domains such as video games. The lack of clear definitions or historical benchmarks for “meaningful” culture ultimately weakens its argument, leaving the critique sharp but one-dimensional.
Read
December 3, 2025This was the state of pop culture in the twenty-first century: artists and fans joining forces united in one corner of a corporate rivalry between multi-millionaires, battling over rights management as a means of securing long-term passive income streams.
The "Taylor's Version" solution fit neatly within the entrepreneurial ethos championed by figures like Jay-Z, in which capital accumulation was framed as an act of heroism. In this ultrapoptimist worldview, wealth creation wasn't just a goal but a measure of democratic and cultural success. Fans eagerly joined their idols in the quest for financial domination, viewing their loyalty and spending as a form of empowerment. As money became synonymous with popularity, industry executives achieved parity with the artists they represented.
The 2017 documentary The Defiant Ones reflected this shift. Directed by Menace II Society cocreator Allen Hughes, the film follows Jimmy Iovine and Dr. Dre as coequal protagonists, culminating in Apple's acquisition of their company, Beats. In the old logic of cool, defiance was a noble act—an artistic stand again authority. But The Defiant Ones redefined it, equating N.W.A.'s culture-bending releases (e.g., "Fuck Tha Police") with Iovine's "greatest hits": coercing Bruce Springsteen and Tom Petty into making radio-friendly singles, peddling the monstrous Marilyn Manson's banal provocations to suburban teens, and turning his entire Interscope artist roster into a marketing team for Beats headphones. The Defiant Ones framed industry profiteering as equally valuable as the art it commercialized. And as Taylor Swift continued to show, fans were right there with their idols—cheering on their quest to escape the embarrassment of being mere multimillionaires.
The "Taylor's Version" solution fit neatly within the entrepreneurial ethos championed by figures like Jay-Z, in which capital accumulation was framed as an act of heroism. In this ultrapoptimist worldview, wealth creation wasn't just a goal but a measure of democratic and cultural success. Fans eagerly joined their idols in the quest for financial domination, viewing their loyalty and spending as a form of empowerment. As money became synonymous with popularity, industry executives achieved parity with the artists they represented.
The 2017 documentary The Defiant Ones reflected this shift. Directed by Menace II Society cocreator Allen Hughes, the film follows Jimmy Iovine and Dr. Dre as coequal protagonists, culminating in Apple's acquisition of their company, Beats. In the old logic of cool, defiance was a noble act—an artistic stand again authority. But The Defiant Ones redefined it, equating N.W.A.'s culture-bending releases (e.g., "Fuck Tha Police") with Iovine's "greatest hits": coercing Bruce Springsteen and Tom Petty into making radio-friendly singles, peddling the monstrous Marilyn Manson's banal provocations to suburban teens, and turning his entire Interscope artist roster into a marketing team for Beats headphones. The Defiant Ones framed industry profiteering as equally valuable as the art it commercialized. And as Taylor Swift continued to show, fans were right there with their idols—cheering on their quest to escape the embarrassment of being mere multimillionaires.
December 12, 2025
Ack, I wasted an audible credit on this hoax of a book! My first impression is that the book is extremely BORING. Now boring can mean “eat your vegetables” or it can be a signal to the reader that there is something wrong with the book. Not to my credit, it took me until chapter five to realize it was the latter.
At this point, Simon Reynolds was quoted. The quote had some words that sounded good, so I decided to copy it down. As I copied it down, I realized the quote had no meaning in the English language. So the question is, did the author of this book have AI gather him a collection of newspaper articles and quotes that he re-wrote into mostly natural language, or was he himself so incompetent that he wrote down these words not catching that they were MEANINGLESS.
As it goes on here are some other words the author misdefines & mis-historicizes: globalist, wokeness, thin blue line.
So what can you learn from this book? At the point where I extricated myself in chapter 10, the main take home is that whether the re-written string of newspaper clippings that makes up this book was created by AI or by an actual human collection, it is an emblem of the hollowing out of news reporting in the era the book means to cover. If a person living through this era didn’t make any effort, they too may well have come out of it not knowing what any of these words mean.
That the book has reached such acclaim suggests an era of readers trained on that shallow reporting and more recently on AI junk who are unable to identify a lack of meaning in a sentence or lack of context or originality in a book. This book will stand as a warning to future of what our population, even the population of readers, has become in 2025.
At this point, Simon Reynolds was quoted. The quote had some words that sounded good, so I decided to copy it down. As I copied it down, I realized the quote had no meaning in the English language. So the question is, did the author of this book have AI gather him a collection of newspaper articles and quotes that he re-wrote into mostly natural language, or was he himself so incompetent that he wrote down these words not catching that they were MEANINGLESS.
As it goes on here are some other words the author misdefines & mis-historicizes: globalist, wokeness, thin blue line.
So what can you learn from this book? At the point where I extricated myself in chapter 10, the main take home is that whether the re-written string of newspaper clippings that makes up this book was created by AI or by an actual human collection, it is an emblem of the hollowing out of news reporting in the era the book means to cover. If a person living through this era didn’t make any effort, they too may well have come out of it not knowing what any of these words mean.
That the book has reached such acclaim suggests an era of readers trained on that shallow reporting and more recently on AI junk who are unable to identify a lack of meaning in a sentence or lack of context or originality in a book. This book will stand as a warning to future of what our population, even the population of readers, has become in 2025.
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