persistence of the past
An idea popularized by many cultural critics, including Mark Fisher, that popular culture has locked into repetition. It creates an ambient signal that nothing is changing and thus nothing ever can changed.
Fisher explained a possible reason for this increasingly common phenomenon:
Innovation in popular culture has overwhelmingly come from the working class. Neoliberalism has been a systematic and sustained attack on working class life – the results are now all around us.
Furthermore, he observes that our obsession with social media and smartphones have contributed to this grinding halt: we live inside the machines, and all three-dimensional socialization has been replaced by shallow, virtual socialization. The forces of capital have a majority stake in the tools most of us use to communicate and participate in society and culture. Our two most crucial resources, time and energy, are used up keeping up with what already is (and making us miserable and angry at the same time) rather than creating the new and changing the world.