Imlisanen Jamir
When the writer W. David Marx published ‘Blank Space’ this past autumn, he gave a name to something many people had already sensed without being able to argue it properly, that the twenty-first century, for all its technological churn, has produced remarkably little that counts as genuinely new. Film franchises are entering their third and fourth decades of the same characters. Fashion houses reissue silhouettes from three decades ago under new marketing copy. Music charts the world over are dominated by artists who sound like earlier artists, and streaming platforms recommend content by measuring its resemblance to content already proven to work. Marx traces how democratization, commercialization, and digitalization, three forces that were each supposed to widen the field of cultural possibility, converged instead to narrow it, rewarding safety over risk at every stage from creation to distribution.
The pattern is worth taking seriously beyond the cultural industries Marx writes about, because the mechanism he describes, a system that optimizes for what has already succeeded rather than for what might succeed differently, belongs to the operating logic of most large institutions now, and Nagaland's own cultural and civic life is not exempt from it. Local media, where it exists, mimics formats developed elsewhere. Political messaging borrows its vocabulary from national parties rather than developing an idiom suited to the specific grievances and hopes of the region. Protest itself increasingly follows scripts perfected by earlier movements, repeated because repetition is safer than invention and because algorithms reward whatever already carries a proven emotional shape.
Part of the blame, Marx argues, lies with the democratization of cultural production itself. When anyone can publish, record, or broadcast, the sheer volume of output should in theory produce more variety. But volume without gatekeeping produces its own conformity, because in an oversaturated field, audiences and algorithms gravitate toward whatever is easiest to categorize. A song that sounds like nothing else is harder to market than a song that sounds like something people already love, and the platforms deciding what gets seen are built to reward the latter.
The commercial half of the argument is more familiar, though worth restating. Culture that must justify itself immediately in financial terms has little patience for the years of failure that genuine innovation usually requires. The counterculture of earlier decades, whatever its flaws, was subsidized by inefficiency: cheap rents, tolerant institutions, an economy that let young people experiment without immediate commercial accountability. Much of that inefficiency has since been engineered away in the name of optimization, taking with it the slack that new ideas need in order to fail long enough to eventually succeed. Institutions here that might once have tolerated an unproven idea, a magazine, a music scene, an independent film, now face pressure to show immediate returns, and the effect mirrors the narrowing Marx documents elsewhere.
This is an argument about incentives, and incentives can change. Marx treats his own diagnosis as reversible: the same three forces that produced this blankness could, reconfigured, produce something else. That would require institutions, cultural and political alike, willing to fund work before it proves itself, and audiences willing to sit with unfamiliarity long enough to judge it on its own terms. Naming the mechanism, as Marx has done, is the first step toward changing it.
Comments can be sent to imlisanenjamir@gmail.com
