Before he was merely Macklemore, Ben Haggerty called himself Professor Macklemore, which is just so perfect. Of course the reigning enfant tryhard of serious, Reddit-approved rap music once went by Professor Macklemore. Even though he seems to have lost his doctorate on his way up the Billboard charts, the dull haranguing remains.

I don’t mean to disparage those who pursue a career in academia, and I apologize for doing so. But what I’m trying to say is that if I wanted to have a fun time ruined this Saturday, I’d get drunk with some GTFs and listen to them debate the heteronormative anxieties present in that new Michael Bay movie about bodybuilders and wouldn’t go hear a Macklemore lecture at the Matthew Knight Arena about basketball shoes equaling murder.

The worst thing about Macklemore isn’t that he’s even the worst thing. Indeed, he’s actually pretty OK! “Thrift Shop” is a fun enough song, until the end of the second verse, in which Professor Macklemore offers a consumer culture 101 lesson about business trickery and the political economy of $50 T-shirts. I suppose this all might sound edgy and exciting if your parents didn’t let you listen to, like, Common or Lupe Fiasco in grade school, but whatever.

In the land of the blind, the one-eyed man is king, as Erasmus put it, and in our democratized culture — blinded and stultified by retromania and a lack of curiosity – one-eyed artists like Macklemore and Odd Future and Aaron Sorkin and Lena Dunham, for example, are exalted. We cannot wholly blame the Internet for this (Reagan-era deregulations did a lot of it, “trickling down” from politics and the economy to the culture) but it served as an accelerate, transforming ours into an “upvote/downvote” culture, where artistic value is simply a matter of mouse clicks and page views.

This has utterly reshaped our relationship to the arts. Art was once a solitary, singular activity, pursued by men and women accompanied by nothing and no one but their genius. Yes, there were patrons (there would be no Michelangelo without the Medicis’ wealth) but the final artwork was the work of the artist’s alone. Now that work is crowd-sourced.

Because we all can be artists, it is said that we all are artists. Digital tools have helped to give more people more access to the means of producing art, a development we accept as self-evidently good. Perhaps we have lost something in the process of making art easier and easier, though.

Digitally-driven democratization has deformed the culture in other ways. It has led to us confusing information with knowledge, and trading the luminous and transcendent in favor of things that are “epic” or “awesome” or “restore our faith in humanity,” especially if those are relayed to us in .gif form. The .gif perfectly embodies what is wrong with our culture: Instead of letting moments live in conversation and memory, we force technology to help us relive those moments in a choppy, endless loop. We have Tumblr blogs that serve as galleries of .gifs, speaking to us about our modern condition. That is what art used to do. This is our new art?

Into this howling cultural wasteland steps a Macklemore figure, someone who has put in just enough effort, clocked in the requisite number of hours. In a declining culture, everything and everyone is graded on a curve. It’s not Macklemore’s fault that we mistake the best he’s got for the best there is.