>> You can wonder all you like, and call me a cynic, but the US runs on money not culture. The American identity is built on money and wealth and excess, not on anything you might describe as "culture".
> The USA's biggest export is our culture...like it or not. Think of movies, music, etc. Some of it is intangible.
Yeah, but that's not high culture. It's mass-market culture that makes a lot of money.
I think what the GP is referring to as "culture" is high culture--the kind of stuff that is not popular and requires subsidies and special effort to sustain.
I don't think so at all: the IA has little to do with what is normally termed "high culture", and much more to do with "low culture" (lots and lots of internet trivia that would mostly be of interest to archeologists).
The IA is the only way to see a lot of what was written and widely read starting in the 1990s onwards.
Libraries used to keep archives of old newspapers and publications on microfilm, and anyone who needed to research something could go and look through those archives. The IA holds a similar function today - but it's the only one with its breadth and age. If we lose the IA, we lose a lot of important historical information.
> Libraries used to keep archives of old newspapers and publications on microfilm, and anyone who needed to research something could go and look through those archives. The IA holds a similar function today - but it's the only one with its breadth and age.
Newspapers very frequently maintain and provide public access to their own online archives now. That's also not a function the IA is even especially good at--its coverage is spotty, and unless you have an old URL, it's very hard to find stuff in the IA.
The one unique thing the IA does is have is a broad and deep collection of internet ephemera.
> The one unique thing the IA does is have is a broad and deep collection of internet ephemera.
That's what I was referring to. Blogs especially are an important source of historical information from this period that will not exist in newspaper archives -- and many of those have appeared and disappeared in the last 20 years. IA is the only record we have of much of that.
High culture, like theatre, classical music, architecture - sure,thats one line of thought here. There are isolated examples that exist, supported by patronage, but that's not entirely what I meant.
If we look to the mainstream,the movies,music etc are all commercial. There's a reason a studio would rather make another Marvel movie than something more meaningful. That's not to say that -only- Marvel movies are made, and they are very entertaining, but the -reason- they are made at all us economic.
For software we celebrate money-raised, MRR, user numbers and engagement. We dont celebrate programs for their life-impact. We don't celebrate the software used yo design the James Webb telescope. Or the software in an MRI machine. We don't throw VC levels of funding at prosthetics, things that have value beyond just ygr monetary, even more so when the monetary value is near-nil, just like the IA.
I say all this not to change it, at a fundamental level it can't be changed, bug rather to understand it.
It's also one of those phrases where people insist that's not what it means. You can see this bizzare battle playing out on its wikipedia page:
> In popular usage, the term high culture identifies the culture either of the upper class (an aristocracy) or of a status class (the intelligentsia); high culture also identifies a society’s common repository of broad-range knowledge and tradition (folk culture) that transcends the social-class system of the society.
you don't export culture, you export stuff. it sounds like you're disgreeing with "america runs on money, not culture", but the fact you conflate culture with, like, movies sold internationally proves the point: american culture is in the form of market transactions. given that, how do you end up with "culturally too big to fail?"
and i'd dispute that entertainment is our #1 export. not all exports are on the books; i'd bet arms is our real #1 export.
You can look this information up pretty easily.[1] If you only count physical goods, the US's biggest exports are cars, aircraft, petroleum, food, drugs, industrial machinery, and semiconductors. Even if we count the value of all the military equipment sold to allies such as the Netherlands, France, Japan, Korea, the UK, etc, and we count all the Ukraine aid, the total value last year was $205.6 billion. That's less than petroleum exports ($258.3B) or food ($208.2B).
The fiat currency is just as valuable as the lithium deposits because the fiat currency is backed by the most powerful force of military might the world has ever seen. When you trade for a dollar you're trading for that. Better than them just taking the lithium, as was the old way.
Empires that over-expand and seize too much sow the seeds of their own military destruction. Economic empires backed by ever-increasing military become overwhelming and then define any pushback as terrorism. What you end up with is a planetary-scale protection racket. Please do not construe this as an endorsement of other would-be hegemonies.
> The USA's biggest export is our culture...like it or not. Think of movies, music, etc. Some of it is intangible.
Yeah, but that's not high culture. It's mass-market culture that makes a lot of money.
I think what the GP is referring to as "culture" is high culture--the kind of stuff that is not popular and requires subsidies and special effort to sustain.