Taylor Swift and the New Dark Ages
Taylor Swift's wedding broke the internet. And something about the way it broke the internet felt less like 2026 and more like a medieval omen. So I went looking: what actually made the Dark Ages dark, and how many of those boxes are we quietly checking right now?
We cover what really happened when a civilization stopped being able to read its own books, why losing skills matters more than losing information, Bernard Stiegler on outsourcing our memory to our tools, the algorithm problem (Max Fisher's The Chaos Machine), Roman emperors and spectacle, Odysseus and the sirens, and Jean Baudrillard's Simulacra and Simulation, plus four things I actually do to stay tethered to reality:
1. Take time off the internet
2. Seek real, validated sources
3. Believe. Let ideas percolate.
4. Stay true to your reality
(One correction: at one point I say Bourdieu. I mean Jean Baudrillard, Simulacra and Simulation, 1981. The card on screen has it right.)
Read the companion essay, The Met Gala is a Sign We're in the Dark Ages: https://artlust.substack.com/p/the-me...
If you like thinking about art and culture this way, my essays live here: https://artlust.substack.com
Taylor Swift photo by iHeartRadioCA, CC BY 3.0; Travis Kelce photo by Erik Drost, CC BY 2.0; Maison Carrée photo by Krzysztof Golik, CC BY-SA 4.0 — all via Wikimedia Commons. All other artworks shown are in the public domain.