Amanda wants me not to be so sad about the state of indie-rock culture. We've always had one-hit wonders, after all; and besides, we can't guess history's judgment, so why get stressed about my sense that nothing lasts?

It's true that pop music has always had its overnight sensations. But they've almost always been manufactured by radio, or by big record labels, or by the interplay between the two. What got me thinking about indie rock, as I began to report my book, was the observation that this now Web-centric music scene, left in the hands of the fans themselves (together with some very low-budget semi-pro outfits, like indie labels and Pitchfork), was actually creating overnight sensations more quickly than the corporate music machine does. As I pointed out in my post on the "media mind," when you give amateurs the tools to compete with big media, they act, in many respects, like big media!

Beyond that, though, having formed my musical tastes (and political consciousness) during the 1990s, I find there to be something depressing about the ecstatic surf from new band to new band, from track to track, from style to style, that serves as the predominant mode of indie-rock fandom today.

Like a lot of people, I developed essentially a Baffler vision of pop music, where non-corporate music and anti-corporate politics went hand in hand. Indie culture was supposed to be oppositional culture. I don't think that's true anymore. Just like a flash mob isn't a protest, an on-the-go playlist doesn't make a statement. What can you pretend to say, if every ten minutes you're running away?

I concede that this sounds like a quaint lament, as it pertains to indie rock in particular. But it's a more general problem in what used to be indie culture. There's a sense today that so long as you're consuming a constantly changing diet of nifty new snacks, it doesn't matter what's in them. Grand Theft Auto? It's edgy! Lost? It's exciting! Gossip Girl? Don't even bother being ironic about it! Oppositional culture has been replaced by a culture of omnivorous flux.

We're more sanguine about corporate culture, I suppose, because we see it as being on the ropes. And maybe that's true -- in certain areas of culture (journalism, and maybe music) it's undeniably true. But in, say, film, the landscape is arguably bleaker than ever: more dominated by blockbusters that are increasingly risible in quality, with fewer screens on which smart independents can find audiences. Will the Internet eventually provide those screens at home, as bandwidth increases? I'm skeptical, in part because of the attentional issues that Nicholas Carr points out: the Internet generally resists the long form, privileging the short and speedy.

I once heard a colleague of mine, in explaining what good writing was, put it like this: when the alien spacecraft are hovering just above the Earth's surface, and their emissary beams down to ask us, politely, for one good reason why they should refrain from activating the general death ray, art is the thing that you can hold up to the blinding lights and say, Because a person made this. The reason to hate corporate culture has always been that it fails utterly at creating those kinds of objects, and indeed actively hinders their creation. The Internet, I fear, discourages them, too.