The Artificial Culture: On The Funding Grift And Cultural Creation
I’ll start with a simple premise. If we now have direct evidence that the federal government was funneling millions of dollars into supposedly free market press organs (such as Politico, which has received federal subscription payments from agencies including the Department of Health and Human Services), into universities and para-educational organizations (such as the Department of Education’s discretionary grants to universities, which totaled billions in 2023), into influential political activism in think tanks and third-party media (such as USAID grants that have included funding for policy programs), into startups (such as Small Business Administration grants awarded to tech incubators), into lucrative speechwriting gigs (such as high-paying corporate events featuring former Obama speechwriters), and then into lucrative speaking engagements for dutiful progressives, then we must reckon with the implications of this influence.
Would it not be right rather to say that we have plain evidence that we’ve been living in a propaganda regime, albeit a restrained one (operating through soft censorship, algorithmic suppression, and selective amplification rather than overt bans), that our moral and aesthetic sensibilities have been warped by this (as seen in the ideological homogenization of major cultural institutions and the narrowing of acceptable discourse), that our moral and creative authorities, at least in part, are corrupt or corrupted (by financial incentives, gatekeeping, and revolving-door career paths between media, government, and academia), and that we have to, ought to, rethink why certain people and things are great and famous, at least in part–considering the extent to which institutional backing and controlled distribution shape public perception?
It is and has been a popular trope of the discourse (especially in dissident media circles and online subcultures) that culture has gotten steadily worse since 2010; I’ve argued so myself, in print, on numerous occasions. And while it is inarguable that this decline has been precipitated by smartphones and accelerated by apps, I’m starting to feel that there hasn’t been sufficient attention paid to the way that emerging platforms have been co-opted and molded, by political forces, to produce certain narratives and cultural victories and defeats–in other words, how they’ve been easily propagandized and influenced. I’m not making any grand claims or assertions; even on the basis of the contracts already uncovered since January by the Trump Administration, we know that at least some things were essentially fake; and at the point where you have meaningful sums of money shaping who teaches or lectures, who conducts investigative journalism, who gets artificially inflated numbers on social media–you can be certain there will be ripple effects across the culture at large. When you accept that aspects of our discourse have been artificially seeded, then you accept that all of our cultural production has been affected, indirectly.
It is natural and easy to extrapolate from here as a cultural critic; when academics, artists, and journalists are armed with strings-attached capital to shape perceptions, fix opinions, and place social facts and epistemological realities, there’s a net ecological effect; certain ‘truths’ get welded into place–and are very hard to pry out (even by countervailing, evidentiary counter-proposals and potential ‘truths’). Covid is the most obvious of myriad examples of this kind of passive social engineering.
When trends, ideas, beliefs are created by fiat (and I mean fiat in several senses of the word), you don’t only change how people vote or try to, but also who gets to write books, buy books, who gets to paint, who buys those paintings, who gets into galleries, which foundations grant residencies, which so-called little magazines take off, and which pieces go viral. Everything–even the most well-meaning, independent art–ends up downstream of well-engineered social memes.
It might be useful to compare post-Obama, smartphone mediated politics and culture-adjacent federal appropriations with the Farm Bill, which, at least since the early ’70s, has fundamentally changed how we eat, what we grow, and, more importantly, made it impossible to grow and eat otherwise—locking farmers into destructive land usage, poisonous pests, dependence on pesticides, and consumers into chronic illness. The scale at which the government or allied corporate actors can act is always going to overwhelm the local, the natural.
Why did music, film, books, and language change? The answer is the same reason that food changed (around 1971). Due to policy changes implemented during the Nixon administration to combat inflation, the U.S. agricultural system shifted toward increased corn production, leading to a rise in the use of high-fructose corn syrup as a cheaper alternative to cane sugar (among other overnight changes).
Nixon didn’t make food healthier; Obama and Biden–using government incentives–didn’t make culture more interesting, let alone more moral; literary critics, psychologists, and philosophers didn’t get more truthful; films and music didn’t become more entertaining (Oscar-bait political dramas replaced daring storytelling; algorithm-driven pop music eclipsed raw artistic experimentation); there were no Whitmans or Morrisons (only sensitivity-proofed voices elevated to bestseller lists). We produced artistic corn syrup; massive dark flows of capital from government agencies, filtered through NGOs, gradually but definitively tempered the way we created and interacted with art.
If you want to ask why certain so-called socialist, left-leaning magazines failed to ever substantially criticize the DNC and Democratic politics in more than a superficial way (despite positioning themselves as independent or even adversarial), it’s because they were functionally part of the DNC (as evidenced by their reliance on grants from foundations tied to Democratic donors, their hiring patterns favoring staff with direct party affiliations, and their editorial alignment with DNC priorities during election cycles), part of DNC patronage networks (with documented financial ties to progressive nonprofits, think tanks, and media funds that coordinate messaging with the party).
Intellectuals didn’t become more progressive in the last 15 years (as seen in the lack of any substantive challenges to corporate power or militarism from these quarters); they just got greedier (with lucrative fellowships, speaking engagements, and media contracts available to those who stayed within the ideological boundaries set by elite funders) and enthusiastically supported whatever hobgoblins could get funding (from Russiagate hysteria to DEI industry grifts to the constant manufacture of new existential political crises that justify continued patronage).
Why did newspapers, universities, publishing houses, record labels, and movie studios uniformly fall in line behind Trump Derangement Syndrome, Russiagate, cancel culture, COVID safetyism, dogmatic gender ideology, and other authoritarian ideological certainties? Because key figures in public and private institutions across the globe—literally—were being paid to propagate these narratives; this much we now know.
Conclusions can and should be drawn. The last decade or two of cultural rock stars? They’re fake and likely don’t even believe what they write or promote. It tells you that book deals and TV deals are, for the most part, fake: predicated on an astroturfed epistemological and semiotic system. Prestige has been misassigned; it’s a good time to start over, from first principles (in this case: pre-2000s aesthetics and pre-2000s common sense).
And if this system has been operational in its current form for at least 15 years (as evidenced by government grants to media organizations, disclosures of intelligence agency influence in newsrooms, and well-documented funding of activist journalism through NGOs and think tanks), why do we have any reason to believe that our bestsellers (Colson Whitehead’s The Underground Railroad, Ocean Vuong’s On Earth We’re Briefly Gorgeous, Ibram X. Kendi’s How to Be an Antiracist, Claudia Rankine’s Citizen, Robin DiAngelo’s White Fragility), often promoted through corporate media partnerships and publishing house incentives, our hit records (driven by algorithmic curation and major label payola arrangements), our most important journalists and voices (many of whom have been directly connected to government agencies, nonprofits, and ideological foundations), our influential literary magazines (sustained through foundation grants, preferential ad partnerships, and direct subsidies), are purely organic?
Matthew Gasda is a writer and director.
This article was originally published by RealClearBooks and made available via RealClearWire.
