Mostmodernism
| Mostmodernism | |
|---|---|
| Coined by | Miya |
| Related concepts | Post-authorship, Mark Fisher, Jean Baudrillard |
| Field | Cultural theory; accelerationism |
Mostmodernism is a concept coined by the Miya net-art persona to describe the condition of culture after postmodernism: not a movement beyond modernity but its terminal, maximal stage — "most" modernism — in which the internet completes modernity's tendencies rather than transcending them. It is the subject of the opening essay of The Exegesis of Miya Black Hearted Cyber Angel Baby, where it functions as the manifesto framing the rest of the corpus.[1]
In Miya's account, the years around the millennium marked a cultural closure — "art stopped Y2K, and history ended 9/11" — after which culture entered a post-historical "eternal trend-state," recombining existing forms without producing genuine novelty until an eventual collapse restarts history.[1]
Database culture and cultural stasis
Mostmodernism begins from what Miya calls database culture: in the digital era culture becomes "flat," produced and consumed as composable elements — reconfigured tropes and archetypes arranged to taste and demand — rather than as original works. Narrative is distilled to genre tropes and characters to deep archetypes, with a curator's agency surviving only in the tuning of one's consumption. The framing draws on the theory of otaku "database consumption" associated with the critic Hiroki Azuma, extending it into a general account of post-millennial culture.
From this premise Miya derives a condition of cultural stasis. With near-total information accessibility, art is consumed by "necrophilic nostalgia"; fashion and the underground have ended, surviving only as endless revivalism — "there is no new today, only an eternal trend-state." This diagnosis parallels Mark Fisher's hauntology and his account of the "slow cancellation of the future," though Miya frames the stasis as the completion of modernity rather than a failure to be mourned.
Miya's treatment of mediation is expressly Baudrillardian: media is never consumed directly but filtered through memetic preconception, so that "the trailer is the movie," and the contemporary art world is described as a "simulacrum that never existed." An extended aside insists that a given blockbuster film literally "does not exist" — that audiences stare at a blank screen and honor a social contract to pretend otherwise — a deliberately scandalous illustration of the hyperreal in the manner of Jean Baudrillard.
Distributed authorship
The second major claim of mostmodernism is that "distributed authorship is the future of culture." Miya argues that decentralized content-distribution networks, algorithmically accelerated and AI-assisted remix production, and the hyperfinancialization that blurs leisure and labor together erode the pre-digital "one-to-many" media paradigm, which survives only through the "ethically incoherent" apparatus of IP and copyright law and an "anti-AI youth political movement" Miya dismisses as pseudo-Marxist.
Against the figure of the auteur, mostmodernism advances "studio authorship": art is never produced in a vacuum, and its material infrastructure — publishers, galleries, record labels, film studios — informs and transforms what artists make, melding them "in their owner's image." The conclusion, "there is no auteur," recasts the industrial or institutional machine as more profound than individual genius, and connects directly to the practice of post-authorship developed across the Miya corpus and later within Remilia Corporation. A related motif holds that the terminus of aestheticism is its own transcendence: the ideal is to hold the finest taste and decline to consume, since "at the end of the long road of aestheticism you find yourself before even the beginning."
Relation to Remilia
As the opening essay of the Exegesis, mostmodernism supplies the theoretical frame for much of the Miya corpus and, through it, for Remilia Corporation's later practice. Its account of database culture underlies the trope- and archetype-driven design logic of trait-based collections such as Milady Maker; its thesis of distributed and studio authorship anticipates Remilia's post-authorship and corporation-as-artwork model; and its embrace of revivalism and recombination as the only available cultural mode is legible across the project's aesthetics. The concept sits alongside Miya's other coinages — including Retrocausal anachronism and the treatment of collective online belief theorized as the egregore — within the accelerationist framework the Exegesis systematizes.
See also
- The Exegesis of Miya Black Hearted Cyber Angel Baby
- Miya Black Hearted Cyber Angel Baby
- Post-authorship
- Mark Fisher
- Jean Baudrillard