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Culture Creep: Notes on the Pop Apocalypse
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About This Book
From the critically acclaimed author of Dead Girls ("stylish and inspired"—New York Times Book Review), a sharp, engrossing collection of essays that explore the strange career of popular feminism and steady creep of cults and cult-think into our daily lives. In seven stunning original essays, Alice Bolin turns her gaze to the myriad ways femininity is remixed and reconstructed by the pop culture of the computer age. The unlikely, often insidious forces that drive our popular obsessions are brilliantly cataloged, contextualized, and questioned in a kaleidoscopic style imitating the internet itself. In "The Enumerated Woman," Bolin investigates how digital diet tracking apps have increasingly transformed our relationships to our bodies. Animal Crossing's soothing retail therapy is analyzed in "Real Time"—a surprisingly powerful portrait of late capitalism. And in the showstopping "Foundering," Bolin dissects our buy-in and complicity with mythmaking around iconic founders, from the hubristic fall of Silicon Valley titans, to Enron, Hamilton, and the USA. For readers of Trick Mirror and How to Do Nothing, Culture Creep is a swirl of nostalgia and visions of the future, questioning why, in the face of seismic cultural, political, and technological shifts as disruptive as the internet, we cling to the icons and ideals of the past. Written with her signature blend of the personal and sharply analytical, each of these keen-eyed essays ask us to reckon with our own participation in all manner of popular cults of being, and cults of believing.
Reviews
"Where these essays deal in more global subjects, holding the reader at arm's length, the essay Real Time invites us in as she indulges in some of the more frivolous joys of the computer age—and it's more compelling, and persuasive, as a result."
"(Essays on the NXIVM cult and on the teen magazine industry of the late 1990s and early 2000s are particularly, disturbingly excellent.) If power comes from clear-eyed, uncompromising knowledge, Bolin's text is a tool for the takedown of more current trends of consumerism, oppression, and the new technology that fuels them."
"But it's hard to shake the sense that Bolin included some of these secondary sources to compensate for a concern that Y2K artifacts and early-2000s media are not topics serious enough to constitute an essay collection."
"Culture Creep succeeds in questioning the direction of popular culture in a time of upheaval and in prompting readers to ask what cults they have willingly joined."
"This solidifies Bolin's status as a vital chronicler of millennial ennui."
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