Not sure if this part was meant to make the reader cry, but it did. All the self books in the world couldn't have illuminated the state-of-me as well as this.. the wellspring of my misery.
"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."
Fascinating, thank you. One thing I think that relates, but am too snoozy to articulate is how young people seem disconnected to albums - there’s little inquisitiveness about the other songs that were created around and with the one they love. Also, music is more something that’s a soundtrack or backing to something else rather than to be listened to for itself. I don’t mean any judgement implied, just observations
I understand the sentiment here, but I feel like it's still such a narrow lens to see culture. Yes, Spotify allows people to listen to any music from any era they'd like, but I also feel like it allows people to listen to music that would have been impossible to listen to if you only have FM radio. We now are able to listen to Medieval, Renaissance, and Classical musicians on command compared to hoping that a NPR DJ would put one of those eras on compared to the almost endless repeat of Romantic, Modern, and Postmodern music (sans Mozart, of course). The massive amount of instrumental soundtracks that come from Final Fantasy, Suikoden, Mana, and the Tales series, etc. In addition to the massive amount of commissionable art, writing, and gaming that exists due to places like substack, Amazon self-publishing, and more.
I could go on with this, but my point is that it feels like so many cultural commentators are looking for rebellion and only framing rebellion through the lens of punk rock or grunge or what have you. Whereas now there is a plethora of potential critiques that can be found or artists who are talking with writers several generations back. There is still a great deal of Sword and Sorcery literature being written in zines and such and those writers are arguing with Lovecraft and Howard just as much as say the romantasy writers of today are still grappling with Tolkien.
Another thing that I think needs to be considered is that we also now have more access to world music, art, and literature and so rebellion and cultural transformation can be looked through all kinds of various perspectives that are not just Anglo-American. After all, if I want to listen to Polish folk music, Spotify is my only option
The UK documentary maker Adam Curtis has talked about this in the past five years - from both a cultural and political point of view.
Lazy AI summary below but do seek out his films and interviews:
Permanent past: Digital media means old music, images, and ideas never disappear, so culture constantly replays fragments of earlier eras.
Algorithmic loops: Online platforms recommend content based on past behaviour, reinforcing repetition instead of encouraging new ideas.
Loss of future visions: After the decline of big political ideologies in the late 20th century, politics stopped offering bold narratives about the future.
Nostalgia culture: With no clear direction forward, culture relies heavily on remakes, retro styles, and historical references.
Stuck in an “eternal present”: Society struggles to imagine new eras because it keeps remixing the past rather than creating new stories about the future.
Certified Zoomer here. This seems pretty accurate to me. AI being trained on the dataset of peak nostalgia will make the problem worse, imo. I feel like this generation is so fragmented into subcultures that it prevents the creation of a critical mass of people that can influence broader culture.
Nobody hates the idea of “stuck culture” more than Kat, but this is the best argument for it I’ve heard in awhile. But it’s not that Gen Z exists in the entirety of culture but that they exist in the culture of the 90s/00s. Nobody is listening to Glenn Miller or Cab Calloway, not even Buddy Holly or the Dave Clark Five they’re listening to the 70s, 80s, and 90s. They’re listening to the same shit that I did in high school and if we’re paying attention to the box office this weekend with Scream 7 (with the return of Party of Five’s Never Campbell), the same movies as well.
They exist in my culture (as a class of 95) because we were the end of the monoculture and that’s the culture that birthed the Internet where we’re all still living. That’s why in 2026 you hear “I Kissed A Girl” and “Poker Face” or “Umbrella” on Top 40 stations right after “The Fate of Ophelia” even though those songs came out 15 years beforehand. Would a Top 40 station in 1992 play fucking “Night Fever” or “Three Times a Lady”?
The medium is the message and while the fringes had their minds warped on Tumblr and YouTube created a new genre, the mainstream is still very much living in the past. Notice when Mr. Beast wanted to make a big splash for the masses he did it with a reality game show? We’re still paying attention to Saturday Night Live like it’s Dan Ackroyd and Eddie Murphy, but when was the last big star minted from it? Pete Davidson (talk about failure to launch!)
Anyway, great article. Sam’s the guy that has a Gurdijeff avatar right? I was just thinking about him the other day as I was reading Frank Lloyd Wright’s Gurdijeff obituary from the Chicago Tribune (some think that old Gurdijeff was Frank’s last wife’s real baby daddy…)
Fascinating to think about how "the influence of the original impetus wanes until, presumably, we culturally reset and reconnect to the magnetic source directly." Many people, myself included, are of the mindset of an upcoming Renaissance. Common Renaissance phrase? "Ad fontes" (to the sources), which referred specifically to returning to Greek and Latin texts, such as Plato's Ion, but I could imagine our "sources" to be reality and the material natural world itself.
Moving deeper, I don't think "cultural time" has ever been continuous, intertextuality has always been a wormhole through eras of humanity. Even encountering a cave painting has linerarity-breaking effects on human cultural experience, in my opinion. Cultural time (culture's relation to each other) is, as I see it, mycelial. Natural time is cyclical. Historical time (human relation to living time) is what is continuous.
Kinda reads like not-so-subtle bragging about the joys of dating women much younger than yourself. I guess it’s more eloquent than “she hit the wall lol” 🤷🏻♂️
I've been saying this for like 10 years, ever since I saw some of my friends' daughters wearing Nirvana shirts. Granted, in my teens in the 90s, we definitely had kids wearing Led Zepplin shirts, but I felt like most of the Gen X and older bands we became fans of, it was because of some musical prowess or musical style influence on future bands, etc. But personal opinion, Nirvana wasn't great, and other than getting Dave Grohl a platform to spring Foo Fighters from (a much better band IMO) but they were a cultural touchstone, Nirvana nailed that 90s ennui of the dying punk scene that was being replaced by grunge. That moment in history is totally foreign and largely irrelevant to the raised-on-iPad generation, so seeing those 10 year olds in those shirts was really jarring. (For that matter, I find it weird when I see middle-aged black women wearing Nirvana shirts too. Not that they can't like Nirvana, but... I was there, and they...didn't? Nirvana was one of the whitest bands ever, I don't get it.) But that was what got me thinking of this "the internet never forgets" thing, where my kids are listening to 70s songs in my car, which are even before my time, but at least I can relate a bit to them. But 60s oldies I'm like "blah, boomer slop!" But my kids have no sense of time, of cause and effect, and they can't place a song in history, even in a guess just based on the style or recording quality. And yeah, that was my conclusion, there's just going to be one big cultural dead-end where everything is permanent and the past is still happening.
On this note, since even old memes make their way back around occasionally, it makes me wonder if there will be less and less generational divide in general online activity. We have more and more adults who grew up playing video games still playing games on their phone, that sometimes their kids are playing too, like Pokemon Go. Or like my teen and I, we are both on X, but we haven't disclosed our screen names to each other, so that we can maintain our privacy on both sides, lol. But we show each other tweets and talk about current events, with the same enthusiasm and relevance, it's really weird. It's not like when I was on Something Awful and my parents had no idea what that was, nor did I want them to. I think the Eternal Summer effect is coming to IRL in the next decade or so.
The other aspect that I see is that we already have Gen Alpha Brainrot slang, and from what I can tell, it's as common among right wing dissidents as it is the general elementary school population. This probably stems from the parents learning it from their kids, every time I see a new turn of phase, I hear it from my kids first, then I see it among those guys online. It's odd that the kids don't get immediately off put by their parents using the same slang to me though, like my kids seem to think it's cool that I understand them, whereas I def made fun of my mom if she pulled a "NOT!" on me as a teen. I feel like this is part of that "end of history" vibe too.
Having lived in Oakland during the '90s, I can attest that some Black women listened to Nirvana. I went to a house party thrown by one, and looked through her CD collection. It was mostly hip hop and R&B— which I would've guessed, from what I knew of her— but there was some alternative rock in there, including Nevermind.
This is really well articulated. I see the same trend in young activists that seize upon old movements and ancient sins as if they occurred yesterday. Big idea here!
I work with art students. I've thought a lot about this issue. My answer is to lecture on modernism. Why? Because that's what all of this is running on. If you understand modernism you understand Western culture. This may not make it easier to navigate the internet ocean, but it at least provides an anchor of understanding of how this situation came about and why modernity is the way it is.
I think you are more correct in saying that the "present is dying" moreso than the past, because the past should be dead, but we refuse to kill it, we let it dominate the future. I believe that the "future is not yet born" more than resigning to the idea that its already "aint what was promised." The present ain't what was promised. The future is what we create. We need to kill the past in order to birth the future.
Not sure if this part was meant to make the reader cry, but it did. All the self books in the world couldn't have illuminated the state-of-me as well as this.. the wellspring of my misery.
"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."
Fascinating, thank you. One thing I think that relates, but am too snoozy to articulate is how young people seem disconnected to albums - there’s little inquisitiveness about the other songs that were created around and with the one they love. Also, music is more something that’s a soundtrack or backing to something else rather than to be listened to for itself. I don’t mean any judgement implied, just observations
Incredibly stupid article.
I understand the sentiment here, but I feel like it's still such a narrow lens to see culture. Yes, Spotify allows people to listen to any music from any era they'd like, but I also feel like it allows people to listen to music that would have been impossible to listen to if you only have FM radio. We now are able to listen to Medieval, Renaissance, and Classical musicians on command compared to hoping that a NPR DJ would put one of those eras on compared to the almost endless repeat of Romantic, Modern, and Postmodern music (sans Mozart, of course). The massive amount of instrumental soundtracks that come from Final Fantasy, Suikoden, Mana, and the Tales series, etc. In addition to the massive amount of commissionable art, writing, and gaming that exists due to places like substack, Amazon self-publishing, and more.
I could go on with this, but my point is that it feels like so many cultural commentators are looking for rebellion and only framing rebellion through the lens of punk rock or grunge or what have you. Whereas now there is a plethora of potential critiques that can be found or artists who are talking with writers several generations back. There is still a great deal of Sword and Sorcery literature being written in zines and such and those writers are arguing with Lovecraft and Howard just as much as say the romantasy writers of today are still grappling with Tolkien.
Another thing that I think needs to be considered is that we also now have more access to world music, art, and literature and so rebellion and cultural transformation can be looked through all kinds of various perspectives that are not just Anglo-American. After all, if I want to listen to Polish folk music, Spotify is my only option
The UK documentary maker Adam Curtis has talked about this in the past five years - from both a cultural and political point of view.
Lazy AI summary below but do seek out his films and interviews:
Permanent past: Digital media means old music, images, and ideas never disappear, so culture constantly replays fragments of earlier eras.
Algorithmic loops: Online platforms recommend content based on past behaviour, reinforcing repetition instead of encouraging new ideas.
Loss of future visions: After the decline of big political ideologies in the late 20th century, politics stopped offering bold narratives about the future.
Nostalgia culture: With no clear direction forward, culture relies heavily on remakes, retro styles, and historical references.
Stuck in an “eternal present”: Society struggles to imagine new eras because it keeps remixing the past rather than creating new stories about the future.
Certified Zoomer here. This seems pretty accurate to me. AI being trained on the dataset of peak nostalgia will make the problem worse, imo. I feel like this generation is so fragmented into subcultures that it prevents the creation of a critical mass of people that can influence broader culture.
Nobody hates the idea of “stuck culture” more than Kat, but this is the best argument for it I’ve heard in awhile. But it’s not that Gen Z exists in the entirety of culture but that they exist in the culture of the 90s/00s. Nobody is listening to Glenn Miller or Cab Calloway, not even Buddy Holly or the Dave Clark Five they’re listening to the 70s, 80s, and 90s. They’re listening to the same shit that I did in high school and if we’re paying attention to the box office this weekend with Scream 7 (with the return of Party of Five’s Never Campbell), the same movies as well.
They exist in my culture (as a class of 95) because we were the end of the monoculture and that’s the culture that birthed the Internet where we’re all still living. That’s why in 2026 you hear “I Kissed A Girl” and “Poker Face” or “Umbrella” on Top 40 stations right after “The Fate of Ophelia” even though those songs came out 15 years beforehand. Would a Top 40 station in 1992 play fucking “Night Fever” or “Three Times a Lady”?
The medium is the message and while the fringes had their minds warped on Tumblr and YouTube created a new genre, the mainstream is still very much living in the past. Notice when Mr. Beast wanted to make a big splash for the masses he did it with a reality game show? We’re still paying attention to Saturday Night Live like it’s Dan Ackroyd and Eddie Murphy, but when was the last big star minted from it? Pete Davidson (talk about failure to launch!)
Anyway, great article. Sam’s the guy that has a Gurdijeff avatar right? I was just thinking about him the other day as I was reading Frank Lloyd Wright’s Gurdijeff obituary from the Chicago Tribune (some think that old Gurdijeff was Frank’s last wife’s real baby daddy…)
Fascinating to think about how "the influence of the original impetus wanes until, presumably, we culturally reset and reconnect to the magnetic source directly." Many people, myself included, are of the mindset of an upcoming Renaissance. Common Renaissance phrase? "Ad fontes" (to the sources), which referred specifically to returning to Greek and Latin texts, such as Plato's Ion, but I could imagine our "sources" to be reality and the material natural world itself.
Moving deeper, I don't think "cultural time" has ever been continuous, intertextuality has always been a wormhole through eras of humanity. Even encountering a cave painting has linerarity-breaking effects on human cultural experience, in my opinion. Cultural time (culture's relation to each other) is, as I see it, mycelial. Natural time is cyclical. Historical time (human relation to living time) is what is continuous.
Kinda reads like not-so-subtle bragging about the joys of dating women much younger than yourself. I guess it’s more eloquent than “she hit the wall lol” 🤷🏻♂️
zoomers don't annoy their parents with music, that's impossible now, they do it with gender.
What a banger article
I've been saying this for like 10 years, ever since I saw some of my friends' daughters wearing Nirvana shirts. Granted, in my teens in the 90s, we definitely had kids wearing Led Zepplin shirts, but I felt like most of the Gen X and older bands we became fans of, it was because of some musical prowess or musical style influence on future bands, etc. But personal opinion, Nirvana wasn't great, and other than getting Dave Grohl a platform to spring Foo Fighters from (a much better band IMO) but they were a cultural touchstone, Nirvana nailed that 90s ennui of the dying punk scene that was being replaced by grunge. That moment in history is totally foreign and largely irrelevant to the raised-on-iPad generation, so seeing those 10 year olds in those shirts was really jarring. (For that matter, I find it weird when I see middle-aged black women wearing Nirvana shirts too. Not that they can't like Nirvana, but... I was there, and they...didn't? Nirvana was one of the whitest bands ever, I don't get it.) But that was what got me thinking of this "the internet never forgets" thing, where my kids are listening to 70s songs in my car, which are even before my time, but at least I can relate a bit to them. But 60s oldies I'm like "blah, boomer slop!" But my kids have no sense of time, of cause and effect, and they can't place a song in history, even in a guess just based on the style or recording quality. And yeah, that was my conclusion, there's just going to be one big cultural dead-end where everything is permanent and the past is still happening.
On this note, since even old memes make their way back around occasionally, it makes me wonder if there will be less and less generational divide in general online activity. We have more and more adults who grew up playing video games still playing games on their phone, that sometimes their kids are playing too, like Pokemon Go. Or like my teen and I, we are both on X, but we haven't disclosed our screen names to each other, so that we can maintain our privacy on both sides, lol. But we show each other tweets and talk about current events, with the same enthusiasm and relevance, it's really weird. It's not like when I was on Something Awful and my parents had no idea what that was, nor did I want them to. I think the Eternal Summer effect is coming to IRL in the next decade or so.
The other aspect that I see is that we already have Gen Alpha Brainrot slang, and from what I can tell, it's as common among right wing dissidents as it is the general elementary school population. This probably stems from the parents learning it from their kids, every time I see a new turn of phase, I hear it from my kids first, then I see it among those guys online. It's odd that the kids don't get immediately off put by their parents using the same slang to me though, like my kids seem to think it's cool that I understand them, whereas I def made fun of my mom if she pulled a "NOT!" on me as a teen. I feel like this is part of that "end of history" vibe too.
Having lived in Oakland during the '90s, I can attest that some Black women listened to Nirvana. I went to a house party thrown by one, and looked through her CD collection. It was mostly hip hop and R&B— which I would've guessed, from what I knew of her— but there was some alternative rock in there, including Nevermind.
This is really well articulated. I see the same trend in young activists that seize upon old movements and ancient sins as if they occurred yesterday. Big idea here!
I work with art students. I've thought a lot about this issue. My answer is to lecture on modernism. Why? Because that's what all of this is running on. If you understand modernism you understand Western culture. This may not make it easier to navigate the internet ocean, but it at least provides an anchor of understanding of how this situation came about and why modernity is the way it is.
Curious if this matches the “Flashback” that Dan Simmons mentioned in his 15-year old novel … living in the past
We live in a point where the past is dying and the future is not yet born..Its an amazing times, but very disorienting to many
The present is dying and the future ain't what was promised!
I think you are more correct in saying that the "present is dying" moreso than the past, because the past should be dead, but we refuse to kill it, we let it dominate the future. I believe that the "future is not yet born" more than resigning to the idea that its already "aint what was promised." The present ain't what was promised. The future is what we create. We need to kill the past in order to birth the future.