Blank Space: A Cultural History of the Twenty-First Century by W. David Marx. Viking, 384 pages. 2025.
In April 2025, a home security technology company, Wyze Labs Inc., released what looked like a totally unremarkable ninety-second advertisement. The ad’s spokesman seems exactly as anonymous as any other YouTuber trying to sell some inscrutable pharmaceutical—you get the obvious glare of his ring light, the flavorless Airbnb neutrality of his bedroom, the skip ad button in the corner, deliciously clickable in three . . . two . . . one . . . but then we hear his sunny—and maybe even familiar—voice. “I’m Antoine Dodson,” he says. “Ever wonder what happened to me?”
Fifteen years ago, Dodson, then a resident of the Lincoln Park housing project in Huntsville, Alabama, called local NBC affiliate WAFF-48 News to report the attempted rape of his sister. What followed that call was a sequence of events that catapulted young Antoine into twenty-first-century immortality: the news crew arrived in front of his family’s apartment complex. The host pushed a microphone toward Dodson’s face. Cameras started rolling. “Obviously, we have a rapist in Lincoln Park,” he says in the footage, wagging around a rolled-up newspaper. “He’s climbing in your windows, he’s snatching your people up, trying to rape them, so y’all need to hide your kids, hide your wife—and hide your husband, because they’re raping everybody out here.”
The two-minute video was one of those accidentally nuclear-strength blockbusters of small-town American theater. Within hours of airing, the WAFF-48 report was uploaded to YouTube by user CrazyLaughAction. It blazed through the algorithm with the help of an attendant parody video titled “BED INTRUDER SONG!!!” by the Gregory Brothers—a four-piece pop group known primarily for musical work that, per their channel’s series title, auto-tuned the news—making Dobson the bewildered star of the year’s most-watched video. The track became available on iTunes, swan-dove into the Billboard Hot 100, and received an award from Comedy Central.
This bears repeating: it was 2010, a time when the phrase “Tik Tok” was in regular parlance only because it was the title of Ke$ha’s number-one song of the year. How was Dodson supposed to know that his own celebrity would sit near the top of the year’s time capsule of affectations?
Back in the present, and back in the ad, Dodson waxes briefly about his life after the stardust settled. It sounds like it’s been nice. He now has a ten-year-old son and a career in waste management—but he’s here to discuss his Wyze camera. As Dodson testifies to the miracle of a device that allows him to monitor his family’s whereabouts on the go, Wyze’s video playback—which scopes neon-green boxes on any moving object—settles on footage of Dodson’s grandmother in her kitchen. “So, when my grandmother tells me if she takes her medication, I can go back and watch that video to see if she’s lying.” He smiles. “Wyze makes it so you never wonder,” he says. “You don’t have to hide.”
Eat Shit and Live
In the twenty-first century, conspicuousness has become a troubled science. In the last rasp of the noughties, Dodson is a less-than-minor character in its splurge of lore, but the logic of his reappearance moves in the sensibly hallucinatory fashion of most names delivered to public consciousness across the past twenty-five years, and “BED INTRUDER SONG!!!” could reasonably be called one of the more exemplary pieces of 2010s pop art. Not just because the song uses auto-tune as an instrument, nor because it has a gallery of white producers profiting hugely from drama happening in and around low-income public housing, nor even because it takes a very fresh-off-the-Bush-era approach to the whole idea of getting raped, but in its slice-and-dice Frankensteining of the videorama that now makes up the stock of the attention economy. From news event, to take, to virality, to memory-holed graveyard, and, with some brute force, revived to the news cycle or straight back to meme again: the past few years of culture’s spin feels like a herky-jerky death loop of information. Origin stories slurry; terabytes of recorded content compound, sequel, and franchise; and, like the unabating scroll of your short-form video platform of choice, it feels like it’s becoming close to impossible to do anything but watch data get dis- and reassembled on repeat. The stuff just keeps coming.
With reinforced gloves and hazmat suit, W. David Marx has waded, maybe inadvisably, into the endless present’s cranking, bucking flow. His Blank Space: A Cultural History of the Twenty-First Century contends to be the “first sweeping history of how money, technology, and ideology rewrote the rules of culture in the twenty-first century.” Training his lens on the irony-deficient Obama years, the forgettable and confusing Biden blip, and the gothic anxiety of the Trump eon, Marx redramatizes the anni horribiles of the last American quarter century as one big “lowest-common-denominator battle for attention.” In Marx’s coliseum, the gore flies. Blank Space is like taking uncomfortable splash-zone seats to a theater of hypermodern twenty-first century mayhem. It is a mundane pandemonium, a gladiatorial conference of the frustrations, waste, exploitation, and commerce that govern the ecosystems working the churn of our feeds, and constantly witnessing his broad summations of the contemporary American cultural order makes reading the book feel a lot like being pelted by shit. But his mimicry of the mise en abyme is as much by obligation as by design. In Marx’s twenty-first century, it’s the maelstrom of everyday crap a ravenous era recycles that defines us. And all of it, raining down indiscriminately, has us in its crosshairs. There’s nowhere to hide.
Marx’s inquiry into the unthinkable 2000s begins long after the missiles never fire. His prologue is the 1990s—last outpost of the real. In the salad days of flannel and frosted tips, the reigning ideology (in Marx’s boilerplate portraiture) was selling out, an altogether different species of terror. Described by SPIN magazine veteran Chuck Klosterman as the “adversarial relationship with the unseemliness of trying too hard,” selling out functioned less as a snipe than as a slur, not so much a convenient ideological objection as a pan-cultural orthodoxy. Not selling out meant never compromising your creative vision in exchange for a check—a commitment to noncommitment. “Selling out meant you needed to be popular,” goes Klosterman, “and any explicit desire for approval was enough to prove you were terrible.”
The foreignness of that statement should strike you as charming. It’s key to Marx’s diagnosis: we betrayed Gen X’s anti-corporate idealism in service of new poptimistic standards, and in saying yes to everything (the check, genre distinction, critical laxity) fundamentally altered the scope of adulthood as we knew it. Marx cites a seismic shift in the form of a New York Times op-ed from 2004, where critic Kelefa Sanneh—defending Ashlee Simpson’s lipsynched performance on Saturday Night Live—declares that music journalism was too rockist, too male and snooty in their dismissal of Simpson and her ilk. Culture, Sanneh writes, was trapped “idolizing the authentic old legend (or underground hero), while mocking the latest pop star; lionizing punk while barely tolerating disco; loving the live show and hating the music video; extolling the growling performer while hating the lip-syncher.” Hip-hop was taking regency over rock as music’s most disruptive genre while major music journalists still distanced themselves from it with phrases like “gold-plated phooey,” per Rolling Stone a few months before Sanneh’s piece. It was high time to refresh and expand the parameters of the mainstream and “to acknowledge that music videos and reality shows and glamorous layouts can be as interesting—and as influential—as an old-fashioned album.” But this inclusive, good-faith omnivorousness had downstream effects.
This Is Pop
In Marx’s survey, it’s a long way down. His five-point value system governing the rules of the twenty-first century mutate from simple, established concepts—poptimism and omnivorism—into a new, elaborate schemas of social thought. There’s “Entrepreneurial Heroism,” the idea that Zuckerberg and his legion became valorized by an ethos that puts business savvy on par with artistic genius. There’s the “Counter-Counterculture,” the subversive backlash against poptimism as a liberal ideal, followed closely by the clunky “Digital Norm Evasion,” or how, in an increasingly omnivorous, everything-goes landscape, systems of power and profit have increasingly shielded the wealthy by way of staggering advancements in tech.
In Marx’s twenty-first century, it’s the maelstrom of everyday crap a ravenous era recycles that defines us.
Crucially, our pluralistic monoculture isn’t just an act of “market domination—it’s human capitulation.” That is, with capitalist logic long accepted as a foregone conclusion, we are who we are because we’ve unconsciously accepted these five values, and most figures, movements, and art of the past quarter century are explainable via some combinatory combination of the points in Marx’s pentagram. For instance, what’s up with millennial narcissism? That’s a side effect of poptimism as mediated through the 2008 financial crash, giving us a “high-pressure, winner-takes-all economy” that allowed posthipster youth to abandon irony and “Gen X detachment” for “radical vulnerability.” The domination of Taylor Swift from 2006 to 2025? From her ultrapoptimist fandom, willing to very literally hunt/maim her elitist critics, to her entrepreneurially heroic battle for music rights and masters—she’s the purest distillation of pop as we know it.
Here: let’s watch Marx’s pinball track the American-made trajectory of Gavin McInnes as a case study of Blank Space’s methods and convictions. For Marx, McInnes—a Canadian-born liberal-arts student who became the cofounder of Vice, creator of the Proud Boys in 2016, and regent of the throne of right-wing podcast hosts after 2017—serves as a metonym for the slow strain of perversion that moved fringe members of the counterculture to the Counter-Counterculture. Beginning with McInnes’s work at Vice in the early 2000s—concomitant with liberalism’s triumph at the end of the twentieth century—the countercultural alternative resisted standard progressive values. Vice, a magazine famous for its adulation of “white trash aesthetics” (Pabst Blue Ribbon, trucker hats, Eminem, softcore) sought transgression by seeking to “shock wholesome liberals.” The publication’s early 2000s spirit, per a former staffer, was “largely an extension of McInnes’ psyche,” thriving on provocation with its guides to anal; high-resolution photos by the pervy, porny, later-disgraced Terry Richardson; and “maximum nihilistic indulgence in drugs, sex, and rock and roll.” McInnes bragged that the magazine was “shifting young people away from liberalism.” By 2008 McInnes was ousted from the magazine, allegedly for attending a white-nationalist conference and meeting former KKK Grand Wizard David Duke.
In the wake of the recession, any self-avowed countercultural figure seeking to deepen their personal brands could fall into one of two paths: the radical vulnerable or the radical invulnerable. For those who lived in the shadow of McInnes, the gnawing distrust in Obama-era (P)optimism rendered “progressive institutions as oppressive forces,” and the onetime fringe weirdos could now claim a new sense of provocation by rejecting the liberal monopoly outright. Being anti-poptimist made you feel edgy; being outright racist made you feel bulletproof. Around Trump’s first win, McInnes founded the far-right paramilitary group the Proud Boys as a “fusion of right-wing ideology and youth culture.” It was, Marx suggests, an exponentially more evil version—but still a version—of Vice. Marx goes on to propose McInnes was ahead of his time, a paradigmatic prophet whose path to radicalization would later be replicated in the online petri dish of 4chan, the late-period antics of Ye, even the vaguely fashy aroma of downtown New York circa 2020.
There’s some admirable ambition in the scope of this synthesis—even if it murders to dissect. Marx adores chasing the culture industry’s loudest figures across timelines, chaining them in smooth cause-effect sequences, then standing back to show us how tangled the web gets. Personally, I prefer his concatenated story of Joe Francis, founder of the Girls Gone Wild franchise: not unmeaningfully responsible for the mainstreaming of 2000’s-era prurience, reality television, and, in a dialectical purple nurple, our present president. As the premium-cable netherworld of Gone Wild waned, Francis became responsible for brokering the sale of an artisanal sex tape directed by and starring the young, fame-famished Kimberly Kardashian and her then-boyfriend, rapper Ray J, to adult-video company Vivid. This dropkicked her into the limelight and authored an inflection point that would mark the emergence of the personal brand, celebrity-as-influencer, then influencer-as-celebrity. Next, we’re moving backward from Ms. Kardashian, and we get her former boss, Paris Hilton, a first-wave practitioner of the art of the shill, maverick of the reality-television ion field—and who happened to be Francis’s ex-girlfriend. With her own entrepreneurial cocktail of celebrity-crisis savvy, amateur pornography, and kingdom of small goods, Hilton “had two particular business heroes,” Marx writes. “Sean ‘Puff’ Daddy Combs and her old family friend, Donald Trump.” Celebrity-as-political-party was the natural next gradient, and here is where Marx gets touchingly serious:
Where there is no value other than money, honor is meaningless; and where there is no honor, there cannot be shame. And without shame, infamy and esteem become indistinguishable. This state of affairs rewarded sociopaths who were willing to weaponize their own disinhibition and amorality to dominate the public discourse.
In Marx’s telling, the twenty-first century is a high-speed Rube Goldberg machine, motored by the point men and point women who move our history as its modular linchpins. This makes history, kinetically at least, not exactly linear but hyperlinked, where page opens after page and tab sizes shrink inversely to the information’s overload. If your browser freezes, Marx seems to suggest, that’s a feature, not a bug.
Systems of Romance
We should be aware that Marx is an addict of big truths told hugely. Last we saw him in 2022, his Status and Culture: How Our Desire for Social Rank Creates Taste, Identity, Art, Fashion, and Constant Change was written out of frustration for “a single book that explains the Grand Mystery of Culture.” The title caps should be a clue: Marx actually does live in the dream of the total artwork, where every person is a symbol, where every symbol is a part of an unconscious gesture, where every gesture is in service of a greater ecology. Characters repeat relentlessly throughout the work until the book fades to black at the dawn of Trump’s second term. By the exhausting finale, one has to ask: To what end? If the book is a textbook masquerading as a sort of systems novel—with its stylistic steals, multiple villains, and glossed-up narrative reveals—do all plots, as Don DeLillo once said, really lead deathward?
All eras seem to offer less than meets the mind, and as Marx relishes in suggesting, the minds we meet in our meatspace are particularly cooked. But if we accept his map as the territory and broadly agree on the totalizing structural forces that render the past twenty-five years this blank, “Restoring Cultural Invention,” the relatively tiny, seven-page capstone at the tail end of the book, feels like a desperate genre switch into fantasy. It’s his call to fill our blank space with “the imagination to reject kitsch and pursue artworks that expand the possibilities of human perception.” Casting aside the probability that an editor begged him to shoehorn this section in after a reading experience that makes a reader feel like a caged animal being bombarded by batteries, his solutions are right, if relentlessly facile. We’ve got to return, he says, to a state of stronger, better enforced, more serious criticism. We’ve got to reinstate the necessity of subcultures, resist inclusivity for inclusivity’s sake, really get familiar with the canon, then reinvent it. We’ve got to deny mass art what it wants in service of a stranger, more serious avant-garde. If the poptimist gave equal respect to art and kitsch, our mishandling of the ideal gave “equal respect to the artist and the businessperson.” We should fix that.
This is all densely packed, hilariously general, and correct. All cultural criticism is trapped in the doomed-by-definition project of escaping contemporaneity. Every book that limns our mass cultural dilemma will skim—if not totally elide—the existence of already living subcultures, groundswells of revolution, collective action, genuinely noncorny art. And for a doorstopper that seems enormously outweighed by the sheer volume of its pessimism, his flight path toward a wishful future is an act of charity. But I find it hard to treat Blank Space’s revanchist epilogue as anything but analogous to being handed a couple of Tylenols after a car crash. Marx has made the real world sharper, more hysterical—and at the same time, grotesquely tedious. The tedium of his realism is unfortunate for the sheer fact that it isn’t going anywhere.
After Blank Space, I don’t know—it’s hard not to slide into something like contempt. If we’re all consumers by design, doomed to never be able to touch the grand levers of power, perhaps all we can do is read this book, set it down, and accept that all that is solid really is melting into air. I suppose that tracing the snarling lines of the idiot hegemony undergirding mass culture is edifying in a way that deepens the urgency of living in real reality, not the hyperreal one that hyperlinks indefinitely. The culture war, after all, isn’t the only war. Notions of celebrity scaffolding across the scope of our lives do not have to deepen, lace, or authenticate your experience. And, despite the fact that art and society en masse seem to be facing a crisis of enslopification—and that AI will kill us, no question—I’m mostly glad to be alive now.
Blank Space fascinates because it makes radical the idea that the human will still be—despite frameworks of ideology that insist on symbolic or metaphorical superstructures—totalizing. Our imaginations remain intact. Everything that makes you fulfilled, sad, afraid, angry, horny, nostalgic, can be brought earthbound if you refuse to feed the cycle of frenzy with compulsory plotlines and shell games that perpetually insist on its own narratives. The plot’s always been lost and always will be. Actually, Antoine Dodson, who at present has become a sort of pop-cultural cleric on TikTok, has a nice sermon about this. “This shit is going to continue. It’s gonna keep going on and on and on,” he preaches in a recent video delivered from what looks like the front seat of a garbage truck. “They’re just going to find more stupid dummies to do this shit. I’m sorry.”