In 2022, economic historian Adam Tooze popularized the term “polycrisis” to describe our current historical moment – one in which multiple global crises interact in complex ways, amplifying and exacerbating each other. Climate change intensifies geopolitical tensions, which in turn affect supply chains and economic stability, creating a web of interlinked challenges that defy simple solutions. However, while much attention has been paid to the economic, environmental, and political dimensions of this polycrisis, less consideration has been given to its cultural manifestations.
This oversight is significant because culture – our shared systems of meaning, representation, and value – is both a vector through which other crises express themselves and a crisis domain in its own right. We are experiencing not just a polycrisis with cultural effects, but a cultural polycrisis: multiple, interconnected crises in how we produce, consume, preserve, and make sense of culture itself.
The symptoms of this cultural polycrisis are everywhere. We see it in the collapse of traditional media institutions and the rise of algorithmic content recommendation systems. We see it in the ways artificial intelligence is simultaneously threatening creative industries while being enlisted to intensify cultural production. We see it in how identity and representation have become both commodified and weaponized, and in how our very ability to maintain shared truths and collective memory is being eroded by technological and social forces.
What makes these cultural crises particularly insidious is how they interact and reinforce each other. The crisis of cultural production feeds the crisis of truth, which intensifies the crisis of identity, which in turn affects how culture is produced – creating feedback loops that amplify instability and uncertainty. Understanding these dynamics is crucial not just for cultural theorists, but for anyone seeking to comprehend our current moment and imagine possible futures.
I want to examine four key vectors of our current cultural polycrisis: the crisis of cultural production, the crisis of truth and reality, the crisis of identity and representation, and the crisis of cultural memory. By analysing how these crises intersect and amplify each other, we can better understand both the challenges we face and potential paths forward.
The Crisis of Cultural Production
The first and perhaps most visible vector of our cultural polycrisis is a fundamental transformation in how culture is produced, distributed, and monetized. At the heart of this crisis lies what Mark Fisher called “the slow cancellation of the future” – not just an inability to imagine alternatives to capitalism, but a profound mutation in cultural production itself.
Platform capitalism has reshaped the cultural landscape into the attention economy, where engagement is the primary currency. Cultural producers – whether they are writers, musicians, visual artists, or filmmakers – increasingly find themselves caught in a system that demands constant content production while simultaneously devaluing that very content. The rise of streaming services, social media platforms, and content aggregators has created what some theorists call an “economy of abundance,” where cultural products are endlessly available but increasingly difficult to monetize.
The recent emergence of Generative AI systems has intensified this crisis. These technologies, exemplified by platforms like GPT-4 and DALL-E, represent what Kate Crawford calls “neither artificial nor intelligent” systems that nevertheless threaten to reshape creative industries, which are themselves subordinate to the violently destructive form of capitalism that attempts to embed the technology into our lives. The result is not just technological displacement but a fundamental restructuring of creative labour.
This restructuring is characterized by increasing casualization. Cultural workers face what Guy Standing terms “the precariat” condition – defined by flexible, casual, temporary labour contracts and a reliance on multiple income streams. Writers must become content creators, artists must become social media managers, musicians must become YouTubers. The traditional boundaries between cultural forms blur not through artistic experimentation but through economic necessity.
Meanwhile, traditional cultural institutions – publishers, galleries, record labels, museums – find themselves caught between their historical role as curators and gatekeepers and the platform-driven demand for constant content. Many respond by adopting platform logic themselves, prioritizing metrics over meaning, quantifiable engagement over cultural value.
These developments create a feedback loop: the pressure to produce constant content leads to the adoption of AI tools and automated systems, which increases the supply of cultural products, which further devalues creative labour, which intensifies the pressure to produce more content more quickly.
This crisis in cultural production cannot be understood in isolation. It feeds directly into our crisis of truth and reality, as the flood of content makes it increasingly difficult to distinguish signal from noise, authentic from artificial, meaningful from mere content. It amplifies our crisis of identity and representation, as cultural producers struggle to maintain authentic voices while navigating platform demands and algorithmic incentives. And it threatens our cultural memory, as the emphasis on novelty and constant production undermines our ability to preserve and reflect on cultural artefacts.
The Crisis of Truth and Reality
If the crisis of cultural production concerns how culture is made, the crisis of truth and reality concerns how we collectively make sense of the world. This crisis manifests not just as a struggle over particular truths, but as what philosopher Bruno Latour calls a “crisis of the very notion of shared reality” – a fundamental breakdown in our ability to agree on what constitutes truth itself.
At the heart of this crisis lies the “faux-scriptible” quality of contemporary media. Drawing from Alec Charles's adaptation of Barthes, we see how modern platforms give users the illusion of meaning, power and active participation, and which, in appearing to satisfy its audience's desire for agency, in fact sublimates and dilutes that desire. Social media platforms present themselves as neutral spaces for sharing information and experience, but their algorithmic architectures actively shape what we see and how we interpret it.
This dynamic is also dramatically intensified by the emergence of GenAI. These systems are little more than statistical prediction engines, yet they are increasingly positioned as arbiters of truth and knowledge. The tendency to anthropomorphize these systems – to treat them as intelligent rather than probabilistic – again reshapes our relationship with truth.
The result is what we might call an epistemological hall of mirrors. Consider how GenAI, trained on internet data that already includes misinformation and bias, generate new content that is then posted online, potentially becoming training data for future models. These systems have no mechanism for distinguishing between high-probability and factual outputs, leading to a situation where “hallucinations” – plausible but false information – become increasingly difficult to distinguish from truth.
This technological dimension interacts with broader social and political forces. The crisis of expertise that sociologists have documented for decades has accelerated, as traditional authorities struggle to maintain credibility in an environment where, as Mark Fisher notes, capitalism “dismantles such codes only to reinstall them on an ad hoc basis.” The result is a situation where it becomes increasingly difficult to distinguish between reality and its simulation.
The implications extend far beyond simple questions of fact-checking. The “reality effect” described by Barthes takes on new significance when applied to AI-generated content and immersive media. The very notion of “authentic” experience becomes problematic when our experiences are increasingly mediated through systems designed to maximize engagement rather than convey truth.
This crisis of truth and reality feeds back into our other crisis vectors. It makes cultural production more challenging, as creators struggle to establish authenticity in an environment of synthetic media. It complicates questions of identity and representation, as the very notion of “authentic” representation becomes increasingly contested. And it threatens cultural memory by making it harder to establish reliable historical records in an environment of constant information manipulation.
Perhaps most troublingly, this crisis creates what media scholar Yochai Benkler calls “epistemic paralysis” – a situation where the inability to agree on basic facts makes it impossible to address other crises effectively. When we cannot agree on what is real, how can we possibly address complex challenges like climate change or social inequality?
The Crisis of Identity and Representation
The crisis of identity and representation emerges at the intersection of progressive politics, corporate power, and cultural authenticity. What makes this crisis particularly complex is how legitimate demands for recognition and representation have been co-opted and transformed by what Deleuze would call the infinite plasticity of contemporary capitalism — its ability to absorb and neutralize resistance while maintaining underlying power structures.
Drawing from Jasbir Puar's concept of "homonationalism" and related theoretical frameworks, we can see how representation has become both a tool of liberation and a mechanism of control. My work on the inclusion of non-binary characters in the Call of Duty games provides a telling example: it appears progressive on the surface, but ultimately serves to legitimize military violence and imperial power. Rather than mindlessly celebrating these representations as a dynamic shift towards liberalism... we should instead see it for what it is; a cynical attempt to legitimise and sanitise empire.
This dynamic extends far beyond gaming. This manifests in corporate diversity initiatives that emphasize representation while leaving structural inequalities untouched. Companies champion identity-based representation while actively opposing labour organizing or meaningful redistribution of power. The result is a fusion of truncated ideals of emancipation with lethal forms of financialization.
This commodification creates what we might call a representation trap. Marginalized groups face an impossible choice: reject mainstream representation and remain invisible, or accept representation on corporate terms that may ultimately reinforce their marginalization.
Technological change further complicates the crisis. AI systems trained on existing cultural data tend to reproduce and amplify existing biases while presenting them as neutral or objective. As our sources note, these systems have no inherent understanding of the meaning or context of the representations they generate. Yet they increasingly shape how identity is represented and understood in digital spaces.
This creates what we might call a representation paradox: as representations of diversity become more prevalent in media and culture, their ability to challenge power structures seems to diminish. The more identity is represented, the more it becomes detached from material struggles for justice and equality. As Fisher notes, capitalism "can metabolize anything, even - especially - those things which emerged in opposition to it."
The implications extend beyond questions of media representation. This crisis affects how we understand ourselves and our relationships to others. It shapes political possibilities by determining which forms of identity-based politics are considered legitimate. And it influences how we imagine possible futures, as representation becomes increasingly divorced from material change.
This crisis intersects with our other vectors in complex ways. The crisis of cultural production shapes which representations are possible and profitable. The crisis of truth and reality makes it harder to distinguish authentic representation from corporate performance. And the crisis of cultural memory affects how we understand the historical context of identity and representation struggles.
The Crisis of Cultural Memory
The crisis of cultural memory represents perhaps the most profound yet least understood vector of our cultural polycrisis. This crisis manifests not just as a problem of preservation or recall, but as a fundamental transformation in how societies maintain and transmit cultural knowledge across time. Drawing from our source materials, we can see how this crisis operates at multiple levels, from the technological to the social to the epistemological.
At the technological level, we face what media theorists call "digital ephemera" - the paradox of having more recorded information than ever before, yet increasing uncertainty about its long-term preservation. Our digital archives are simultaneously vast and fragile. Platform changes, link rot, and obsolescence threaten to create what some scholars call "digital dark ages." The irony, as our source material suggests, is that in an age of supposedly perfect digital memory, we risk losing vast swathes of cultural history to technological change.
But the crisis goes deeper than mere technological preservation. The way digital platforms organize and present information creates a compression of historical time that makes it increasingly difficult to imagine alternatives to the present. Algorithmic recommendation systems prioritize recency over historical significance, creating what media scholar Andreas Huyssen calls "present shock" - a constant now that makes historical consciousness increasingly difficult to maintain.
This temporal compression is exacerbated by what our capitalist realism; capitalism is the human condition that is left after culture, ritual, and symbolic elaboration are dead, subsumed by a new 'culture' of consumption and spectacle. Traditional forms of cultural memory - rituals, traditions, shared narratives - are increasingly displaced by what Fisher calls "market-driven amnesia."
Yet again, AI adds another layer to this crisis. As these systems become more prevalent in cultural production, we risk creating what one might call "synthetic memory" - cultural artifacts that reference historical forms while being disconnected from their original contexts and meanings.
This leads to what we might term a "memory paradox": despite having unprecedented access to historical information, we seem increasingly unable to maintain meaningful connections with the past or imagine different futures. This can lead to a kind of historical flatness where, for example, a game can feature both Ronald Reagan and non-binary characters without any sense of historical contradiction or context.
The crisis of cultural memory intersects with our other crisis vectors in important ways. The crisis of cultural production creates an overwhelming flood of content that makes meaningful cultural memory more difficult. The crisis of truth and reality makes it harder to establish reliable historical narratives. And the crisis of identity and representation affects which histories are preserved and how they are interpreted.
Perhaps most troublingly, this crisis of cultural memory threatens our ability to learn from past struggles and imagine alternative futures. As Fisher noted, "the disappearance of the past" is not just about forgetting history, but about losing the ability to imagine different possibilities for the future. When cultural memory becomes merely another form of content to be consumed rather than a living connection to past struggles and possibilities, our capacity for meaningful social change is diminished.
Conclusion
The various vectors of our cultural polycrisis - production, truth, identity, and memory - do not operate in isolation but form what complexity theorists would call an emergent system. Each crisis amplifies and complicates the others, creating feedback loops that make individual solutions increasingly difficult to imagine or implement. This interconnected nature of our cultural polycrisis suggests that any meaningful response must be equally systemic in nature.
We can see how these crises converge around what Mark Fisher identified as capitalism's unique ability to absorb and neutralize resistance. Whether it's the co-optation of identity politics by corporations, the transformation of cultural production into content creation, the erosion of shared truth by platform capitalism, or the flattening of historical memory by algorithmic systems, we see a consistent pattern of what Fisher called "capitalist realism" - the seeming impossibility of imagining alternatives to current systems.
Yet paradoxically, the very intensity of our cultural polycrisis might contain the seeds of potential resistance. Even heavily controlled cultural spaces can become sites of unexpected contradiction and possibility. The same technological systems that threaten to automate cultural production also create new possibilities for cultural preservation and transmission. The crisis of truth and reality might lead to new forms of collective sense-making. The crisis of identity and representation might spark new forms of solidarity and resistance.
The challenge, then, is not just to address individual crisis vectors but to imagine new forms of cultural resilience that can operate within and against the system that produces these crises. This might involve what some theorists call "counter-platforms" - alternative systems for cultural production and distribution that prioritize community and meaning over engagement metrics. It might involve new forms of cultural memory that are both technologically robust and socially meaningful. It might involve what Nancy Fraser calls "transformative recognition" - forms of identity politics that connect cultural representation to material struggle.
The role of cultural studies in this context becomes increasingly crucial. Rather than simply documenting or analyzing these crises, cultural studies must help imagine and articulate alternatives. This means moving beyond critique to what Raymond Williams called "resources of hope" - practical and theoretical tools for building cultural resilience in the face of systemic crisis.
Looking forward, several key questions emerge:
How can we develop forms of cultural production that resist the logic of platform capitalism while remaining accessible and sustainable?
What new forms of collective truth-making might emerge from the crisis of reality?
How can we transform representation from a market commodity into a tool for genuine liberation?
What technologies and practices might support meaningful cultural memory in an age of digital ephemera?
The answers to these questions will not come from individual theorists or movements, but must emerge from collective struggle and experimentation. As our cultural polycrisis deepens, the task is not just to understand these intersecting crises but to actively imagine and create alternatives to the systems that produce them.
In the end, the cultural polycrisis might be best understood not just as a threat but as an opportunity - a moment when the contradictions of our current system become so apparent that new possibilities for resistance and transformation emerge. The challenge is to seize these possibilities while we still can, to build forms of cultural resilience that can weather current crises while pointing toward different futures.
The task ahead is both theoretical and practical, requiring new ways of thinking about culture and new ways of practising cultural production, preservation, and transmission. In this sense, our cultural polycrisis might be not just an endpoint but a beginning - a moment when the very intensity of our current contradictions creates openings for meaningful change.
