Kurt Anderson chronicles the lack of new popular styles:
Since 1992, as the technological miracles and wonders have propagated and the political economy has transformed, the world has become radically and profoundly new. … Here is what’s odd: during these same 20 years, the appearance of the world (computers, TVs, telephones, and music players aside) has changed hardly at all, less than it did during any 20-year period for at least a century. The past is a foreign country, but the recent past—the 00s, the 90s, even a lot of the 80s—looks almost identical to the present.
He believes gay culture helped democratize style so that it is now affordable to most. Alan Jacobs spotlights a big oversight of the piece:
[I]t’s noteworthy that Andersen keeps saying, "Well, except for technology." As though technological change — change in our gadgets, our electronic encounters, our newly-digital lives — don’t really count somehow and aren’t matters of style. Maybe the real story is that a lot of the energy that once was directed towards altering styles of art and fashion has gone for the past twenty years into figuring out how we engage with the digital world.
Tyler Cowen concurs:
Today the areas of major breakthrough innovation are writing, computer games, television, photography (less restricted to the last decade exclusively) and the personal stream. … Although that is a relatively optimistic take on the aesthetics of the last decade, it nonetheless supports the view that aesthetic innovation relies on technological innovation. Most (not all) of the major areas of progress have relied on digitalization, and indeed that is the one field where the contemporary world has brought a lot of technological progress as well.
The Dish 