Gen Z Lives in the Archive

Is cultural time actually continuous?

I’ve argued before that culture isn’t stagnating so much as migrating into forms we don’t have the language to recognize yet — internet personalities as continuous works of art, TikTok as digital vaudeville, and aesthetic curation as a kind of immersive storytelling.

My friend Sam Buntz makes the opposite case: his claim is that streaming platforms and TikTok have flattened cultural time so completely that Gen Z can’t form the generational chain of influence that has driven every major artistic movement for centuries.

Gen Z reacts to everything and nothing, lost in what Sam calls “the Archive” — a Borgesian labyrinth where all of recorded culture is equally available and equally weightless. I’m still torn and much more optimistic, but I loved his articulation of this argument. — Katherine

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Last summer, I was at a bar with a few friends. Rapidly discovering more and more veritas in vino, I found myself giving an impromptu oration on the musical tastes of the generation junior to my own. I argued that Zoomers don’t really have their own music: they’re willing to listen to everything because Spotify, Apple Music, and the various songs that all pop up on Tik Tok are presented devoid of history and context. You like what you like and are free to choose from the phenomena bubbling up around you. Kate Bush, Billy Joel, Laurie Anderson, Paul McCartney—songs by these artists were always popping up on my Zoomer ex-girlfriend’s Tik Tok feed. She accepted all of it. None of it seemed corny or out-of-date. (This article from Activaire calls TikTok, “the most powerful music revival machine we have ever seen.)

One of my friends, a keen observer of the contemporary scene, well-versed in generational difference, said that my claim was somewhat false and that Zoomers do in fact have their own trailblazing avant garde music. She held up 100Gecs and nettspend as examples. I was like, “I bet you that only 0.2% of them know who those artists are.”

Serendipitously, a pair of Zoomer whippersnappers had just entered the bar. “I’m going to ask them,” I said. I got up and shuffled over, not overly conscious of the roughly fifteen-year age gap between us. (I’m a silverback millennial).

I asked what kind of music they listened to and if they were familiar with nettspend (a name new to me as well). I thought I was going to weird them out—a hulking man in his mid-30s, looming over them and posing this culturally sensitive question out of nowhere. Zoomers are notoriously skittish and need to be approached with caution in the wild, ideally with a handful of nutritional pellets and soothing rabbit noises.

But they were very polite and eager to share their listening habits. They had no idea who nettspend was; they listened to Nirvana and 90s music. As if illustrating the point visually, they seemed to be affecting a mid-90s skateboarder style in terms of their garb. My friends were impressed by my willingness to be weird and win debates through moments of Gonzo journalism. If you can manufacture anecdotal knowledge on the spot, it goes a long way.

But the data isn’t just anecdotal. According to a 2019 article from Billboard, Shannon Cook, a trends expert at Spotify, said that Gen Z’s listening habits on Spotify were unusually broad and tended to delve deeply into the past. Tracks by Miles Davis (“Blue in Green”), The Grateful Dead (“Friend of the Devil”), and Joan Jett (“I Love Rock n’ Roll”) were all among Gen Z’s most listened to tracks at the time.

Albeit, this article was from 2019—but the forces driving the trend, Tik Tok nostalgia and the buffet-like nature of streaming platforms, have only continued or accelerated their effects. The aforementioned 2025 article from Activaire argued that Spotify data showed Gen Z was connecting more with Gen X music on Spotify, beguiled by its apparent authenticity.

Zoomers, you see, live inside the Archive.

Perhaps it would be more accurate to say that they are imprisoned inside the Archive—a Borgesian labyrinth. Everything that has ever happened exists at their fingertips, assigned equal weight (or assigned whatever weight the fickle algorithm happens to be assigning on that particular day). This is also why they are a uniquely anxious generation, paralyzed by an inability to choose. They are confronted with too many options, unstuck in time.

We think of time as being continuous, as involving one event following naturally, causally after a preceding event. But living within the digital archive disintegrates our basic, linear perception of time. Since every era is equally available, and all events are potentially happening at the same time, the chain of causality and influence breaks down completely. We think of musicians, artists, writers, and filmmakers as responding to those who came before them, generationally. For instance, Bob Dylan admired and initially imitated Woody Guthrie—but he also rebelled and created his own style, departing from Guthrie’s folksy populism and adding intensely personal and surrealistic touches. Changes in the arts always work this way. One generation responds to the previous generation. (Hemingway and Fitzgerald were reacting to Joseph Conrad, Edith Wharton, and Henry James, while Henry James was reacting to Hawthorne and Emerson, and so on and so forth.)

But Gen Z doesn’t experience cultural time this way. They’re reacting to everything that has ever happened. Which is impossible to actually do. On the one hand, it might make you more cosmopolitan (though this is hard to do without a guide to help develop your critical intelligence). But, on the other, it ruins your ability to assimilate anything and reduces you to a quivering lump of uncertainties. It also reduces your own ability to create because your response to life becomes so indeterminate. You can’t figure out what to respond to.

In Plato’s dialogue, “Ion,” he describes how inspiration works: the first poet was inspired directly by the muse, like an iron filling attached to a lodestone. The subsequent generations of poets are like iron fillings attached to that first filling. The force of inspiration is still present, but it is exerted indirectly and weakens with every generation. Thus, the influence of the original impetus wanes until, presumably, we culturally reset and reconnect to the magnetic source directly. Gen Z finds itself in a state in which the fillings have all been scattered on the ground, perhaps experiencing some ambient attraction from the lodestone, but unable to really connect with it.

Can this state of affairs create vital popular music? It appears not. The results seem to be avant garde Adderall brain slurry—100 Gecs and nettspend and hyperpop—for a tiny, cultured minority. The masses just keep listening to Taylor Swift on repeat. And for those of you who want to object by saying, “No, no, you have to hear my cousin’s noise rock project. It’s really going somewhere, doing something new,” I say, “That’s exactly what I’m talking about.”

Gen Z wants to rebel, but its rebellion is entirely a matter of online aesthetics. They reject “millennial cringe” and “stomp clap music,” propounding their own allegedly edgier aesthetic. Some have compared this to Gen X reacting against the Baby Boomers, to punk rock reacting against the hippies. But, given their agoraphobia and preference for marijuana over alcohol, Zoomers tend not to go out and socialize, which stops anything with the Dionysian energy of original punk rock (or 50s rock n’ roll or 60s garage rock or 90s grunge) from ever taking shape. They’re left to LARP and cosplay online, adopting the costumes of prior generations and prior subcultures without finding an authentic cultural relation of their own. They are, as Shelley described the moon, “ever changing like a joyless eye / That finds no object worth its constancy.”

Sometimes, I wonder if this will ultimately result in a state of cultural affairs in which fresh artistic creation stops entirely. Unable to have a satisfactory relationship to the past from which we can create our own art, we’ll end up settling for reviewing the archive of all prior creative events. This would resemble the world of Castalia in Hermann Hesse’s The Glass Bead Game, in which a future society contents itself with playing a game that synthesizes cultural knowledge, but without creating any new art of its own. This would be, culturally speaking, the “end of history.” But to those who think that the end of history would be ultimately pleasant, our current experiences suggest that it would be more like being trapped in a senile brain. (The discontinuous quality of life online has a close relationship to the drifting and discontinuous nature of senile thoughts).

Cormac McCarthy once said something disconcerting and prophetic in an interview:

“I don’t know what of our culture is going to survive, or if we survive. If you look at the Greek plays, they’re really good. And there’s just a handful of them. Well, how good would they be if there were 2,500 of them? But that’s the future looking back at us. Anything you can think of, there’s going to be millions of them. Just the sheer number of things will devalue them. I don’t care whether it’s art, literature, poetry or drama, whatever. The sheer volume of it will wash it out. I mean, if you had thousands of Greek plays to read, would they be that good? I don’t think so.”

McCarthy makes a strong point. The internet functions to preserve everything, and it’s easy to get lost in that great, gray sea. The problem of selection, of where to put your attention, is increasingly grave and increasingly intractable. The mind cannot find a definite port-of-call in this endlessly heaving, endlessly shifting reality. Curating vibes isn’t enough.

Poets have sometimes fantasized about total cultural destruction—something like the burning of the Library of Alexandria—to escape the sense that everything has already been done, has already been written. I wouldn’t go that far, since everything I love is part of the past. Maybe some brave artist can find a route back to the Original Magnet—a route that would presumably lie through the great works of the past, since the past is where we all start to feel magnetism acting on us. In any case, something needs to give. The links of the chain need to re-connect.