AI Did Not Kill Culture. Money Did.
The Death of Culture Started Long Before AI
Hi, I’m an existential imbecile named Max Murphy. Here on The Murphy Memos we explore the absurdity of existence with crappy cartoons.
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There’s a certain kind of post that keeps me up at night:
"AI is going to destroy human creativity."
But here’s the thing: AI isn’t the root of cultural decay—it’s gasoline feeding a dumpster fire that’s been burning for decades.
The real culprit is older, subtler, and far more parasitic than ChatGPT could ever be.
It’s commercialization.
Not capitalism in the abstract, not the rich in some cartoonish villain sense.
I mean commerce itself—the logic that converts everything sacred into a product.
Commerce is not a person.
It is not even evil.
It’s much worse:
it’s efficient.
Simply put,
It is.
Culture Used to Be a Verb
Let’s start with a forgotten truth: culture is not content. Culture is what humans do. It’s how we make sense of death, birth, grief, wonder, Saturday nights, and Monday mornings.
Culture is alive. It breathes, inhaling the world around us, and exhaling who we are becoming. It’s the songs we sing, the pictures we draw, and the stories we tell.
Hunter gatherers singing to worship their ancestors.
Indigenous Europeans painting the walls at Chauvet Caves.
Ancient Greeks telling stories about Poseidon causing a tsunami because he got cucked yet again.1
That is culture—the active choice to bring something into existence.
So, if culture is what we do… what the hell is content?
Content is a product, a time capsule of past cultural forms.
Picture this: your alcoholic father is renting the old school Scooby Doo cartoons from Amazon to bask in a nostalgic stupor before passing out on the couch again.
The Scooby Doo cartoon is not being actively created, but resurrected. The people who originally made it are probably dead. And even if they were alive, the last thing they would want to do is re-create cartoons from the 1970s. The cartoon is content, an end product, a mere derelict of a bygone time.
Not a fresh breath of new life but stale air that stinks like garbage because it’s been floating around unchanged for decades.
So is the fate of most culture in modernity.
The slow, painful death of culture
Culture has descended from the birth of the new to nothing more than a sick séance.
We do no longer, only resurrect.
The transformation began with the age of mechanical reproduction, but has been solidified in our age effortless digital reproduction.
Commercialization loves it:
A built‑in audience: old culture sells better than new culture since it has bRaNd rEcOgNiTioN
No creation required: why make new art when you can copy/paste the old (or make it even worse like Disney does… seriously live action remakes are dog shit—yes, all of them)
No messy permissions: the original artists are probably dead—physically or spiritually
Past culture haunts the present.
The content over culture mindset infects everyone—especially aspiring artists. Talk to any hopeful creator and you’ll hear it: they want a blockbuster movie. A best selling novel. A viral video.
You’ll hear nothing about the actual doing of culture.
Just the idea of an end product.
We all know that one motherfucker always talking about writing a book that’s gonna change the world, but hasn’t written a single word in a decade.
Culture is no longer something that we do, it is a product—even at the level of imagination.
That’s when art lost its soul.
Not when AI showed up.
Artists Are Miners, Not Machines
Artists are archeologists of the subconscious. They tunnel through personal trauma, cultural memory, collective mythology. They surface truths that even they didn’t know they were looking for.
I’ve had moments writing late at night, alone and insane, when a sentence emerges triumphantly from the void and I realize: Oh wow. That’s what I’ve been trying to say. That’s what I believe.
AI will never do that. Not now. Not ever.
It doesn’t feel. Doesn’t grieve. Doesn’t wrestle with the horror of mortality or the intrusive thoughts of your favorite writer sitting on your face.
Human oh so human, no robot can take these big feelings from you.
AI is culture without the doing but also without having to resurrect past cultural forms. AI is the liminal space between old and new, past and future, dead and living, the zombification of all that makes us human.
One is horrifyingly reminded of that based Max Weber quote: “specialists without spirit, sensualists without heart; this nullity imagines that it has attained a level of civilization never before achieved.”2
Does this not perfectly capture our era?
Artists have been reduced to machines. And the only thing better than a person who acts like a machine is actually just a machine.
AI is just the next logical step—the just in time production of culture content.
The Real Question
So, no—AI is not the death of creativity many claim it to be. AI did not start this dumpster fire. It’s the next logical step in a system that’s been gutting culture for decades.
The real question isn’t should we use AI?
It’s what do we want culture to be?
If we continue treating culture like a product then we’ll simply forget how to do it or why it mattered in the first place. Culture will be dead. Artists will fade out, phased into obsolescence by metrics and market logic. What remains will be a dead shopping mall of cultural time capsules: shiny, static, and slightly remixed by LLMs.
Our descendants will wonder around what Jameson called the imaginary museum—marveling at the past through glass—convinced, perhaps, that no human ever made it. Maybe ancient alien LLMs did.
But it’s not all doom and fumes, my friend.
This little frog may be stuck in an actual dumpster fire, but AI has done us one favor: it turned up the heat enough for us to notice.
The sewage is boiling.
The flames are real.
And they hurt.
Bad.
Which means this little froggie can hop tf out before its too late!
That is our task.
This is why I started The Murphy Memos—to think, write, and create out in the open.
To make culture, not content.
If you’re still reading this, you care at least a little bit about that kinda thing.
Why not subscribe?
ps: a giant thank you to Marble for reviewing this essay!
Upon further research, it has come to my attention that this joke is inaccurate to Poseidon mythology. However, I decided to include it because I’m bringing Greek mythology back to life with a new, imaginative interpretation. Also because I was too lazy to write another joke.
If you're reading this, you better comment, motherfucker
Michaelangelo and Shakespeare got paid for their work... But at least they worked.