This is from where progress in the West now starts

The substantial point beneath a frivolous comparison of worthless TV in 2025 to worthless 19th century military painting is that the content of every cultural edifice has been ground to dust. Salon painting at least had its pretensions and standards, no matter how conservative and tasteless its judges might be. Manet still wanted the Salon’s approval in spite of everything, and that desire for social achievement is a valuable motivator, which is not to suggest we can or should return to that model. The implications are much broader than academic painting; the library or the museum would never be invented today because those institutions are founded on ideas of cultural edification that are now entirely foreign to society at large. The assumptions of the End of History from the 1990s until roughly 2016 led the cultural sphere to assume it would proceed by its own momentum, reinventing itself boundlessly with no need for maintenance. That may have worked for a time, but the internet, social media, the rising cost of living, and so on, has since stripped culture for parts. Social media kills the social, dispersing in-person groups that used to be called countercultures and subcultures, and monetization optimizes the attention economy into a self-regulating system of everyone selling out to the algorithm. As usual, what at first seems liberatory is a crack in culture that more capitalism seeps into. The humanities and education in general, let alone the art world or popular media, are no longer able to maintain standards of development or basic competence, and it seems impossible to recover them from their current state.

But this is pessimism, not fatalistic cynicism. As Adorno has it: “All specifically modern art can be regarded as an attempt to keep the dynamic of history alive through magic, or to increase the horror at the stasis to shock, or to portray the catastrophe in which the ahistorical suddenly begins to look archaic.” (“Spengler After the Decline,” Prisms, p. 58.) We don’t need cultural institutions to keep the dynamic of history alive or portray our catastrophe, and in all likelihood those edifices have been more of a hindrance than an aid for some time. This can be framed as a freeing from institutional indoctrination, but this is a high price to pay and a challenging imposition on the individual. The internet certainly indoctrinates the general public far more crudely and insidiously than institutions, and this is far from optimistic; rather than an excitement at new tools, the collapse of institutionality forces us to find alternatives on our back foot. The internet may have killed culture, but its barrage of information revived the possibility of history by giving us immediate access to vast amounts of media of the past, and this access can, possibly, act as a trapdoor to outmaneuver the end of the world for the few that care to put in the effort.

By the internet I don’t mean its very contemporary experience, of course, that flood of frivolous content optimized to command and envelop our attention. I mean the Internet Archive, Newspapers.com, JSTOR, Libgen, torrents, online catalogue raisonnés, untapped research archives in raw HTML, even Wikipedia rabbit holes, means of accessing vast stores of information far larger than any physical archive that are sitting and waiting to be utilized. Most of these are relics from the ‘90s when people could still see the internet as an unprecedented practical resource, an idea that’s so hard to remember now.

Sean Tatol (2025) “After the End of the World” (accessed online at https://tripleampersand.org/after-the-end-of-the-world/; my bolding)