Alternately; immortality might cause the death of popculture. I think that cultural evolution is driven by new and youthful ideas that are a response to the change in living conditions and social situations brought on by advancing tech and science. In EP the tech curve should be advancing at the rate of the post singularity phase of human evolution. It will probably be too fast for broad memes and social movements to keep up with. Also, in the west, we're used to the anomaly Post Babyboom population explosions creating a large number of young people. There will never be more young people than old people in EP. The older generation won't be marginalized the younger generations will have to struggle to catch up. Culture or art will be even more influenced by the past as previous generations do not fade but grow ever stronger and influential. I think this could mean that popular art and broadly accepted culture will be... Better. I don't really have the words for it, but I think the things that are universally loved and accepted will be so because they have "broad human appeal" they will be things that "Ring True" across generations and remain relevant regardless of time or setting. New art/ideas will have to call back to that pool of culture that has been found to be "True" in earlier times. This has already happened. Everyone knows who Homer, Shakespear, Bach and Michelangelo are. They will be relevant as long as there are humans. Possibly those aren't good examples because their art is so basic or intrinsically human that contemporary art can't help but be informed by them. Maybe it would be better to compare Picaso/Jackson Pollock/Andy Warhol, or Gershwin/Beatles/Trent Reznor.

I see a very curious mixed blessing, the idea of which can be summed up in this picture: [img]http://img200.imageshack.us/img200/487/ifoughtnazis4743672.jpg[/img] With being forced to think for the long term, extensive amounts of free time, and an unparalleled access to news/events information, it strikes me that this will be a time that'll be great for politics and harmful for it at the same time. The human propensity for self-delusion in the form of nostalgia is frankly astonishing, which is a problem; humans frequently tend to think of some time as better than the one they lived in, and it's usually the one they grew up in or some time shortly before that. However, with such long lives and immense amounts of data available, and having lived through tumultuous times, transhumans have the advantage of experience too. They've seen the politics of the past and can be extremely aware of the politics of the present with a mental reflex. For the wealthy, they can download an Economics and Political History Understanding package to their Skillware and very quickly find themselves informed enough to make rational, reasonable decisions on many policies. So transhuman politics in the era of AF 10, or even further, are likely very hard to recognize today; the voting base is usually smaller, wealthier, healthier, and far more well informed. They're also far more forward thinking. This sounds great. They're also likely given to xenophobia, resistant to change, and highly cynical/skeptical. The younger generations will lack their parent's experience with the world that came before (many Fall survivors remember the world of dying nation-states) and the resulting ultra-cynicism, and will grow up in a world without any of the problems we know today. I wouldn't imagine this will be a big problem; not because it won't be, it'll be a really cool and interesting one to toy with, but because transhumanity, at this sort of pace, will evolve into posthumanity long before it becomes an immense problem.