I’ve thought about this a lot. I think its more the sheer oversaturation of “culture” than it is a true lack of imagination. People alive today consume exponentially greater amounts of “culture” (for the broadest term possible) than anyone ever before, and it’s not even close.
When tech enables you to experience a movie or a video game or a performer 30 years after the death of everyone involved, in essentially the same fidelity as the day it debuted, “old culture” has a much harder time making way for “new culture.” If Star Wars exists, why care about Rebel Moon or whatever that movie was called?
I think the public consciousness can only maintain cognizance and interest in so much, but at the same time creatives are constantly adding to the Culture Pile. But the more tech enables us to hold on to our past, it becomes more and more difficult to move on, and the majority of new stuff goes unwanted and unappreciated. And so the mass market dives into keeping the old alive with reboots, remakes, remasters, and now AI recreations, because that’s what people respond to.
Even back then, once the public support died down a bit they just had the NYPD bulldoze the whole thing. Since then the police have only gotten more brazenly violent against protests that are not in the establishment’s interests.
Shit will get “wild” when instead of picket signs and bullhorns, people start bringing rifles and pipe bombs. Otherwise the outcome of any meaningful protest will be the same no matter how many people show up: an unforgiving police crackdown.
AI’s most successful accomplishment is going to be its ability to parse the astronomical amounts of personal data corporations and governments have been collecting for the last 20 years. Enshittification and the identification, surveillance, and targeting of dissidents.
Last I knew they called the Russia-Ukraine war the “NATO War in Ukraine” and claimed Russia killed over 10,000 “NATO mercenaries” mostly from Germany.
I thought that the solution there has always been to bury it in desert bunkers for 10,000 years.
If we’re still around by the time that becomes too cumbersome we are hopefully space-faring and then yeeting it into Jupiter becomes an option.