Books Review: “Culture Creep”, by Alice Bolin

Flumbing culture: Notes on the Pop ApocalypseBy Alice Bolin

The modern era is overwhelming. There are so many things to look at, so many applications to follow our calorie contribution, our rules, what our friends and our celebrities of emotional support do. There is so much suffering, so many trauma and so many men whitening myths of magnitude in order to control our daily life. How does an individual give meaning to all of this? According to Alice Bolin’s new test book, “Culture creep: notes on the pop apocalypse”, the answer is cult thought.

“All decisions are exhausting,” writes Bolin. “Part of us aspires to give in control and ask someone else to tell us what to do.” And so we have, on the whole, gave in lives “shaped by group thought and indoctrination”. In the process, we – each of us, according to Bolin – have played directly in the hands of a capitalist system which seeks to keep us accomplices and to wipe our bank accounts.

Bolin’s first test book, “Dead girls“Explored the American obsession for women victims. Now Bolin turns his eye to the average social manipulation of Americans by the industries that created everything, “surprising regression” among women in the 1950s within the limits of the house, Gamergate and the climb of Donald Trump. In a world where each data point is collected by the machine.

Bolin describes the three main subjects of the book as “cults, control of the thought of companies and end of the world as we know it”, and it covers them in seven itinerant trials all linked to Catch-22 to try to exist as an individual at a hyperconnected era. Often, these wanderings make it difficult for the reader to identify a central gathering point for Bolin’s reflections, although it manages to strike sharp truths. The “founder” excuses the “American mania for founding myths”, including Elizabeth Holmes, Sam Bankman Fried and Elon Musk are only the most modern iterations. “The narrative impulse comes from our own story of epic origin,” she writes about the founding fathers, “whose inspiring opening Salvo, a poetic ode to all men created, was perhaps more marketing than the real game plan.”