Creative Maximalism: A trend story

Last week, we asked the following question: How deep can Creative Maximalism, which is claimed to be a new participatory, collective, and rapidly produced cultural movement, actually go? Is it truly the story itself that is changing, or merely the mode of expression and presentation? If we reformulate the question within a clearer theoretical framework, are we facing a cultural transformation, or is it simply a new adaptation of culture in the circulation of platform capitalism?

Let us first make a conceptual distinction. Culture is a social phenomenon historically defined by production and accumulation. Works, forms, narratives, and aesthetic codes overlap, sediment, and produce a field of memory. In the words of Raymond Williams, culture is formed through a process of accumulation and transmission. What we are witnessing today is circulation rather than accumulation. Indeed, younger generations are active actors on digital platforms who produce memes with artificial intelligence (AI), create videos, contribute to gaming and platform universes, and put aesthetic forms into circulation. But to what extent does this intense participation signify cultural autonomy or accumulation?

In digital media dominated by platforms, cultural objects gain value not as carriers of meaning, but as units of circulation. The value of content is measured by how quickly it spreads, how much interaction it generates, and how long it remains in the algorithmic flow. In this context, concepts such as “participatory culture, collective production, or Public-Generated Entertainment” point to the socialization of production costs in the infrastructure and the distribution of risk to the user. When Dallas Smythe’s concept of the “audience commodity” is updated today, it transforms into the producer-user who creates content, generates data, and accelerates circulation. Walter Benjamin, while stating that technical reproduction strips culture of its “aura,” was emphasizing not just multiplication, but the transformation of experience. In this sense, what we see on digital platforms today is the dissolution of the cultural object through multiplication within an endless circulation.

Adorno’s critique of the culture industry also resurfaces at this point, updated. Once again, culture gains value not by its own internal criteria, but according to the speed of circulation and consumption. The difference is that standardization has turned into the illusion of infinite variation. But the common point of both is the subjection of culture to time.

While Jonathan Crary notes that how we perceive what is produced and how long we can perceive it is managed, Hartmut Rosa explains with the concept of “social acceleration” that as the circulation speed of culture increases, its capacity to settle and produce memory weakens. When perception and speed are paramount, the overloaded, layered, chaotic, and exaggerated aesthetics of Creative Maximalism appear to be an inevitable result of the attention economy. In other words, to remain visible, one must constantly be more intense, faster, and louder.

So, is this movement structurally conducive to producing cultural accumulation? The answer is increasingly leaning toward a clear “No.” Because the fundamental temporal logic of this system is built on social acceleration, and for this reason, that which does not age becomes a problem for the system. Yet, culture is a social production that can fight against time. While the majority of content circulating on TikTok, YouTube, or similar platforms disappears before it can even settle, the flow itself organizes forgetting rather than remembering. As Bernard Stiegler put it, it is a destruction of memory on an industrial scale. The logic of “constant tinkering, constant adding” from gaming culture also fits this system very well. The constant updating and re-circulation of something is an advantage for platforms. Because this means constant interaction.

In the context of Turkey, where cultural institutionalization is already weak and the public sphere of debate is already fragile, this trend of speed causes further fragmentation. Agendas, figures, debates, and aesthetic forms flow side by side. In a country like Turkey, where economic uncertainty and precariousness are widespread, these platforms are often seen as a “door of opportunity.” The hope that if it catches on, maybe there will be a way out. Yet, the “hope of the subsistence entrepreneur” in user-producers is itself one of the elements that feeds the continuity of the platform system in digital media.

Therefore, it is possible to give a clearer answer to last week’s question today: Yes, the screen has changed. Yes, the form has changed. But more importantly, the ontological status of culture has changed. It is not the work, but the flow; not accumulation, but circulation; not memory, but topicality that has become the determinant. This is not so much a new era of culture as it is a new form of circulation for culture, adapted to platform capitalism. Because there is one thing that has not changed: the economic order upon which the flow takes place. Today, culture circulates on infrastructures owned by a few large platforms, under the rules they set, and with the visibility criteria they determine. In other words, even if the form on the stage has changed, the basic rules of the game remain in place. The system can simply have production done more cheaply, faster, more colorfully, more AI-focused, and in greater volume on digital media. Concepts like “participation, creativity, and community” turn into attractive headings used to make the mechanism work more efficiently.

Consequently, what we see today is a directed trend. It is more about the creative energy of youth being utilized in the speed and attention algorithms of the platform economy. In their hands, culture is more mobile than ever, but also more ephemeral than ever. It seems structurally very difficult for a culturally deep accumulation in the historical sense to emerge from within this movement.