Art & Creativity Quote by Anthony Holden

There is a quiet provocation in Holden's "Not merely can people like me write things that would never have been printed before..". He is talking about permission, not talent: the loosening of editorial gatekeeping and the collapse of old taboos that once kept certain subjects, tones, and critiques out of print. The phrase "people like me" is doing double duty. It signals a cohort (journalists, cultural commentators, maybe insiders) and also smuggles in a self-conscious awareness of class, platform, and the fact that newfound frankness is not evenly distributed. Some people have always been "printable"; the change is who gets to be publicly indecorous without career-ending consequences.

The real bite arrives in the second clause: "an enormously dramatic change has taken place in public opinion, possibly for the wrong reasons". Holden isn't celebrating liberalization as moral progress; he is warning that a culture can become more permissive for cynical, even exploitative motives. Public opinion may be shifting because outrage sells, confession converts to content, scandal drives circulation, or because institutions learned that transgression is profitable when packaged correctly. That ambiguity - progress or market logic? - is the subtext.

As a journalist, he also implicates the profession: the media doesn't just reflect public opinion; it manufactures the conditions under which certain opinions become fashionable. Holden's intent feels like a mixed admission and cautionary note: yes, the walls came down, but some of that demolition was done with a wrecking ball paid for by attention economics.