This is fairly entertaining, and I predict it will get a lot of votes because of who it attacks, but I don't think it's actually correct. I haven't noticed any change in the rate at which posers mention Derrida.
The old hierarchy of the arts was dismissed as hopelessly reactionary. Instead, any cultural artifact produced by a member of a colonially oppressed out-group was deemed artistically and intellectually superior.
It seems like the basic argument is that we now assign social status based on the third places a person inhabits on the Internet, whereas in the past we assigned social status based on the cultural objects a person was familiar with. Ignoring the fact that the two are essentially equivalent, how is this different than the concept of discourse groups from the past? Perhaps one could argue that one's discourse group has been merged one's social circle in a way that is qualitatively different and meaningful, but if so I'm not really seeing it.
I think that the reason that people have stopped quoting Kafka, is because he's really painful to read. Derrida, Greek philosophers: meh. Fun for a while, but fails to capture the imagination.
Part of the problem with "great" literature or philosophy is that so much of it is written by tortured, depressed people for the tortured and depressed audience. It was cool to read Nietzsche when I was tortured and depressed in my early 20's, sitting at the Kopi Cafe in Chicago, while chain smoking and pounding triple espresso's. Right now, I don't really have the time to think about soul-crushing absurdity of life. I'm too busy trying to found my startup. Not too many nihilists in Silicon Valley these days. You'd probably find more of them in the rust belt.
Brilliant, absolutely brilliant. Mostly because it attacks me personally though ;)
I must admit that I just can't help but enjoy the sensation that rushes through my body when one of my co-workers enthusiastically extols the virtues of a new concept he's discovered and whose beauty I have not only already understood but whose weaknesses I have analysed to the point where it is yet another feeble attempt at realising the elusive beauty only my mind can grasp.
Now if only I didn't need to do this in order to compensate for the fact that as the breadth and depth of my aesthetic judgements expanded I seem to have lost my ability to synthesize the beauty I perceive so vividly ... ;)
It gets pretty ridiculous in programming languages, too:
"So, you've just discovered Scala? (scoff) Briefly interesting, till I realized it just apes Haskell's type system and adds cruft from Java. Oh, you're getting into Haskell now? (rolls eyes) Too bad the type system's not even Turing complete. I've been playing with Qi lately, has its pros and cons, you know."
