I'm gonna put on my curmudgeon hat now. The argument is that microtrends are good actually, or at least not bad and have not supplanted personality. The evidence is that the Japanese had microtrends 15 years ago, a quick strawmanning of the opposite view, pointing out that newer subcultures are basically fandoms or cults of personality (still bad IMO), oh also the algorithm is not all powerful so there is still some capacity for user agency (agree on that point). But overall I don't find it persuasive.
Internet has dissolved the macro culture and gives smaller and smaller subcultures opportunity to exist without media/market. The move away from growth driven algorithms to siloing niche algorithms only furthered this. Chattification. Bill Clinton may have been the first black President, but trump is the first poaster. God forbid we get a real one
Good piece. I remember all the critics freaking out over Vaporwave. What it misses though is a response to one of the points it makes at the start: "To have a culture-wide obsession with “aesthetics” indicates a culture that’s fixated on collecting, curating, and buying. Young people aren’t engaging with culture on a level that’s any more challenging than buying items that meet particular criteria or, worse, saving images that meet specific criteria, posting them online, and affixing a label to them. This description of youth culture is hardly distinguishable from the machine-like process of semantic tagging".
I think in this sense “aesthetic” is pretty much the same thing as “personal branding”. My issue is that success in a given field hinges largely on nailing the aesthetics, not achieving actual excellence in the field. And even if you are a person who cares deeply about something, and wants to pursue excellence in it on those terms, there is no path to success that doesn’t involve playing this game on some level.
The internet is not a place. We live an embodied existence. Arguments that "places" on the internet can be just as meaningful as reality are simply just cope, as the kids say.
One thing I notice is that online aesthetics tend to be pretty separate from experience. If someone goes full cottagecore and actually lives on a farm, then it doesn't seem like most people are bothered by that. On the other hand, I remember those tumblr soft grunge pictures where there were photographs of parties with black balloons floated to the ceiling and people lighting roses on fire. But, what even were these parties? How many soft grunge parties actually happened?
Aesthetics come from a snapshot of sensory reality. Or they come from an abstract representative of reality that can express lived experience better than a literal representation. In that sense, some Internet subcultures are just trying to express the strange, cerebral nature of Internet experience, which can be pretty interesting. But trying to express an embodied culture, like living on the prairie, without engaging with it, will probably always feel kind of aesthetically hollow.
I'm gonna put on my curmudgeon hat now. The argument is that microtrends are good actually, or at least not bad and have not supplanted personality. The evidence is that the Japanese had microtrends 15 years ago, a quick strawmanning of the opposite view, pointing out that newer subcultures are basically fandoms or cults of personality (still bad IMO), oh also the algorithm is not all powerful so there is still some capacity for user agency (agree on that point). But overall I don't find it persuasive.
Rachel Haywire gets this. She’s using aesthetic styles to spread metapolitics.
https://culturalfuturist.substack.com
I’m also somebody who’s into aesthetics. Anglofuturism is an aesthetic movement at its core.
Internet has dissolved the macro culture and gives smaller and smaller subcultures opportunity to exist without media/market. The move away from growth driven algorithms to siloing niche algorithms only furthered this. Chattification. Bill Clinton may have been the first black President, but trump is the first poaster. God forbid we get a real one
Good piece. I remember all the critics freaking out over Vaporwave. What it misses though is a response to one of the points it makes at the start: "To have a culture-wide obsession with “aesthetics” indicates a culture that’s fixated on collecting, curating, and buying. Young people aren’t engaging with culture on a level that’s any more challenging than buying items that meet particular criteria or, worse, saving images that meet specific criteria, posting them online, and affixing a label to them. This description of youth culture is hardly distinguishable from the machine-like process of semantic tagging".
I was talking to my girlfriend about this post and she said that "there are no more subcultures, only brands."
I think in this sense “aesthetic” is pretty much the same thing as “personal branding”. My issue is that success in a given field hinges largely on nailing the aesthetics, not achieving actual excellence in the field. And even if you are a person who cares deeply about something, and wants to pursue excellence in it on those terms, there is no path to success that doesn’t involve playing this game on some level.
The internet is not a place. We live an embodied existence. Arguments that "places" on the internet can be just as meaningful as reality are simply just cope, as the kids say.
One thing I notice is that online aesthetics tend to be pretty separate from experience. If someone goes full cottagecore and actually lives on a farm, then it doesn't seem like most people are bothered by that. On the other hand, I remember those tumblr soft grunge pictures where there were photographs of parties with black balloons floated to the ceiling and people lighting roses on fire. But, what even were these parties? How many soft grunge parties actually happened?
Aesthetics come from a snapshot of sensory reality. Or they come from an abstract representative of reality that can express lived experience better than a literal representation. In that sense, some Internet subcultures are just trying to express the strange, cerebral nature of Internet experience, which can be pretty interesting. But trying to express an embodied culture, like living on the prairie, without engaging with it, will probably always feel kind of aesthetically hollow.
Meanwhile what you have described in this essay is just a more extreme fragmented extension of the zombified phenomenon described in this essay:
http://www.awakeninthedream.com articles/invasion-of-the-body-snatchers-comes-to-life
Humankind is now in a state of extreme fragmentation.