I do too! At least the idea of them, even if not every specific one. Re ChatGPT psychosis, the problem is the many, many people who are *not* well-functioning and *have* mental illness. I speak from experience. Also I somehow skipped over the fact that the linked author's name was Marx, and was reading the first comment here as if *Karl* Marx had something to say about Labubus
This has nothing to do with anything, but I used to be obsessed with Matcha and drink it all the time every day. And then I found out it’s full of lead. But I still had to drink it until I what I had ran out. I did the same thing with Theo’s 85 % chocolate. I’m just telling you this because I love you.
Yeah, but we gotta be batshit now about cadmium & arsenic
Levels in chocolate…. Or just pretend not to give a fuck like I also do and eat this shit anyway. Argh ! Luv u. I have to send you a DM. I always feel like I’m doing some kind of scat message when I say that- Because it’s too easy to write the wrong thing….
100% agree that these microtrends are not meaningless! If you're interested reading a thinkpiece about the genealogy I sorta have one for you already lol (link below). Also agreed on meta-adoption / fads as monoculture, and it’s all connected! A few years ago I wrote in a trend report: “Gen Z is exploring & experimenting with everything, everywhere, all at once.” This has turned into what I now call “chaos culture,” and it’s been the dominant macrotrend over the few years (someone else noted the 'irony era'). Chaos (and irony) is a coping mechanism to avoid a stressful reality.
BUT I do think that Marx is also correct in the sense that fad-as-monoculture has the negative corollary effect of cultural stagnation, because the ironically-cool-to-cringey-uncool loop is moving so quickly that it doesn’t allow time/space for any deeper meaning/ideology to be assigned. It ends up becoming irony for the sake of irony. And when the irony is purely superficial, it leads to things like the contrarian Dimes Square artsy alt-right contingent. And then it all falls flat. Which is kinda where we’re at now. I think we’re at peak chaos culture this year, I’ve called it chaos overload.
there's a whitney phillips book - i think it's the ambivalent internet - that makes an adjacent point about it being a coping mechanism. check it out.
i disagree that the ironically cool to cringey uncool loop is all that fast. i will say, i do not know much about gen alpha or people who are under, say, 20. and that seems like it might be a fruitful culture to learn about though for obvious reasons difficult as an adult.
I think it's just faster than it has ever been before. It used to take ~10 years for something "cool" to be commodified. Amy's piece talks about that - https://substack.com/home/post/p-170921911
to go back to dimes square, if you divorce that lineage from older fringe right-wing components, it took about ten years for the fringe/dissident/online right to have a moment of coolness and it was a flash in the pan for a variety of reasons. same with sedevacantism/tradcaths. that broke "containment" in the 90s among weirdos, was a big thing online in the early 2010s, by the late 2010s we get people adopting the aesthetics until it becomes Cool in the 2020s.
hm idk if the dime square kids were actually part of that lineage though. these were artsy scenesters who temporarily played with the superficial aesthetics of the fringe/dissident/online right, thus giving it a moment of coolness. but the artsy kids were never actually ideologically aligned with that lineage. more to add to your reading list for this evening lol if you haven't seen them yet: https://antiart.substack.com/p/dimes-square-is-dead / but also curious to hear your thoughts later!
no... they definitely were part of that lineage lol. moldbug is a huge part of dimes square. there were hanger-ons and orbiters in the alt-right, too. look at some of the articles i've posted about the history of the alt and dissident right, and dimes square. it's not so neat.
I like it too. At first, I thought they were putting out the halloween stuff too early but then the retail associate at Bath and Bodyworks explained it to me
It comes from a Gravity Falls episode about kids being bored on a summer afternoon. The Disney Adults got ahold of it and now it's a whole thing. I'm more of an observer than a participant, but I worked it into a recent article. I like my spooky times after summer loses its grip and everything starts dying. Regarding your polls, I love the internet culture takes, obvs. But I'd love more techno-mystical, computer cults, internet cryptids, haunted tumblr pages - Grok as Ouija board could actually be fun. You know I love when you lean into the Art Bell stuff. One of these days I'm going to give y'all a call.
What you say about "a culture that’s rarely articulated explicitly precisely because it doesn’t need to be" really (ironically) explicitly articulates a feeling that I have, perhaps, always had within myself, as a poster anyway. When you're part of a wider complex of (digital) people marinating in the same ideas, conceits, images, and of course aesthetics, it really is a fluency in identifying all possible types, an ability to engage in "meta-adoption," as you put it, that becomes adopted into one's identity. I would say this is a level of complexity higher than Marx's notion of people "[adopting] novelties into their core identities." And as long as we all have a shared faith that our other participants understand what's going on, even if it seems inscrutable to outsiders, we're fine with it. (And hasn't that really always been how fads have worked?)
I also find particular salience in what you note as the "jokey, self-aware nature of how people discuss these trends... a meta-awareness of how goofy it sounds to outsiders." This also is very much close to my experience on the Internet, and it actually reminds me of something that, of all people, Curtis Yarvin wrote on Substack almost five years ago (five years, Jesus...), after the Gamestop/Wall Street Bets Imbroglio:
"The ironic approach to democracy uses the same mechanisms, but plays by completely different rules. The normal state of the ironic voter is a state of nihilism; he believes in nothing; he is happy to do anything, “for the lulz.” The idea of sincere and instinctive collective spirit, Ibn Khaldun’s asabiya, is one he finds hilarious and/or horrifying.
Yet he is a human being and a human being is a social animal. He will cohere—he will act in concert with his fellow human beings—and he will enjoy it. But as a modern and cosmopolitan human, he can do so only ironically—as a game.
...
Normally, cohesion and commitment go together. But we expect cohesion to be the effect of commitment—you obey your officers loyally because of your passionate loyalty to your country. Here, commitment is the effect of cohesion—anyone who hodls side by side with you is your brother, regardless of the stonk.
The capacity for significant collective ironic action is very rare in human history—so rare that I am at a loss to think of another example. It must have happened. Irony is not a new invention—but its distribution across a whole population is unprecedented."
Yarvin's bailiwick is politics, and good luck to him, I suppose. But when this quote comes back to mind, as it does rather often, I find myself more focused on its applicability to culture, and it is precisely here where I think the spirit of his remarks are most interestingly felt. Is something not collective action because it is engaged in with puckish irony and cultivated self-awareness? I think surely it still is, and it still matters to people, and creates collective energy, even if all that is true. (And you also note that labubus and dubai chocolate are not entirely free-floating, contentless referents, either, but for the sake of argument let's accede that they are rather so compared to, I don't know, the fucking hula hoop.)
Thank you for bringing up this quote from Yarvin! It's very aligned to what I've been mulling over for the past month. I think we've been in a state of 'collective ironic action' for the past five years, and I think it may have culturally peaked this year. If you're interested in that -
I definitely think it existed earlier! I mean, it’s always existed, but meme culture really made it a thing. But the 2008-2020 timeframe was much more earnest overall, think millennial woke culture. It really feels like Gen Z owns irony as a mainstream cultural trend.
I do too! At least the idea of them, even if not every specific one. Re ChatGPT psychosis, the problem is the many, many people who are *not* well-functioning and *have* mental illness. I speak from experience. Also I somehow skipped over the fact that the linked author's name was Marx, and was reading the first comment here as if *Karl* Marx had something to say about Labubus
This has nothing to do with anything, but I used to be obsessed with Matcha and drink it all the time every day. And then I found out it’s full of lead. But I still had to drink it until I what I had ran out. I did the same thing with Theo’s 85 % chocolate. I’m just telling you this because I love you.
Oh no! I am a casual on matcha but I do drink ceremonial cacao A LOT
Yeah, but we gotta be batshit now about cadmium & arsenic
Levels in chocolate…. Or just pretend not to give a fuck like I also do and eat this shit anyway. Argh ! Luv u. I have to send you a DM. I always feel like I’m doing some kind of scat message when I say that- Because it’s too easy to write the wrong thing….
I’m visiting sf soon! I’ll buy u dinner
We’ll have Matcha and dark chocolate! ❤️♥️
Google on steroids- tru dat
100% agree that these microtrends are not meaningless! If you're interested reading a thinkpiece about the genealogy I sorta have one for you already lol (link below). Also agreed on meta-adoption / fads as monoculture, and it’s all connected! A few years ago I wrote in a trend report: “Gen Z is exploring & experimenting with everything, everywhere, all at once.” This has turned into what I now call “chaos culture,” and it’s been the dominant macrotrend over the few years (someone else noted the 'irony era'). Chaos (and irony) is a coping mechanism to avoid a stressful reality.
BUT I do think that Marx is also correct in the sense that fad-as-monoculture has the negative corollary effect of cultural stagnation, because the ironically-cool-to-cringey-uncool loop is moving so quickly that it doesn’t allow time/space for any deeper meaning/ideology to be assigned. It ends up becoming irony for the sake of irony. And when the irony is purely superficial, it leads to things like the contrarian Dimes Square artsy alt-right contingent. And then it all falls flat. Which is kinda where we’re at now. I think we’re at peak chaos culture this year, I’ve called it chaos overload.
https://whatsanu.substack.com/p/-maximalism-chaos-culture
https://whatsanu.substack.com/i/170234538/emerging-chaos-overload
there's a whitney phillips book - i think it's the ambivalent internet - that makes an adjacent point about it being a coping mechanism. check it out.
i disagree that the ironically cool to cringey uncool loop is all that fast. i will say, i do not know much about gen alpha or people who are under, say, 20. and that seems like it might be a fruitful culture to learn about though for obvious reasons difficult as an adult.
I think it's just faster than it has ever been before. It used to take ~10 years for something "cool" to be commodified. Amy's piece talks about that - https://substack.com/home/post/p-170921911
to go back to dimes square, if you divorce that lineage from older fringe right-wing components, it took about ten years for the fringe/dissident/online right to have a moment of coolness and it was a flash in the pan for a variety of reasons. same with sedevacantism/tradcaths. that broke "containment" in the 90s among weirdos, was a big thing online in the early 2010s, by the late 2010s we get people adopting the aesthetics until it becomes Cool in the 2020s.
hm idk if the dime square kids were actually part of that lineage though. these were artsy scenesters who temporarily played with the superficial aesthetics of the fringe/dissident/online right, thus giving it a moment of coolness. but the artsy kids were never actually ideologically aligned with that lineage. more to add to your reading list for this evening lol if you haven't seen them yet: https://antiart.substack.com/p/dimes-square-is-dead / but also curious to hear your thoughts later!
no... they definitely were part of that lineage lol. moldbug is a huge part of dimes square. there were hanger-ons and orbiters in the alt-right, too. look at some of the articles i've posted about the history of the alt and dissident right, and dimes square. it's not so neat.
haven't read amy's piece yet to be fair, or yours, but will once i wrap up my Work-work
Summerween is my anachro-seasonal metajam. It's not about watermelon jackolanterns. It's about being their father.
I like it too. At first, I thought they were putting out the halloween stuff too early but then the retail associate at Bath and Bodyworks explained it to me
It comes from a Gravity Falls episode about kids being bored on a summer afternoon. The Disney Adults got ahold of it and now it's a whole thing. I'm more of an observer than a participant, but I worked it into a recent article. I like my spooky times after summer loses its grip and everything starts dying. Regarding your polls, I love the internet culture takes, obvs. But I'd love more techno-mystical, computer cults, internet cryptids, haunted tumblr pages - Grok as Ouija board could actually be fun. You know I love when you lean into the Art Bell stuff. One of these days I'm going to give y'all a call.
What you say about "a culture that’s rarely articulated explicitly precisely because it doesn’t need to be" really (ironically) explicitly articulates a feeling that I have, perhaps, always had within myself, as a poster anyway. When you're part of a wider complex of (digital) people marinating in the same ideas, conceits, images, and of course aesthetics, it really is a fluency in identifying all possible types, an ability to engage in "meta-adoption," as you put it, that becomes adopted into one's identity. I would say this is a level of complexity higher than Marx's notion of people "[adopting] novelties into their core identities." And as long as we all have a shared faith that our other participants understand what's going on, even if it seems inscrutable to outsiders, we're fine with it. (And hasn't that really always been how fads have worked?)
I also find particular salience in what you note as the "jokey, self-aware nature of how people discuss these trends... a meta-awareness of how goofy it sounds to outsiders." This also is very much close to my experience on the Internet, and it actually reminds me of something that, of all people, Curtis Yarvin wrote on Substack almost five years ago (five years, Jesus...), after the Gamestop/Wall Street Bets Imbroglio:
"The ironic approach to democracy uses the same mechanisms, but plays by completely different rules. The normal state of the ironic voter is a state of nihilism; he believes in nothing; he is happy to do anything, “for the lulz.” The idea of sincere and instinctive collective spirit, Ibn Khaldun’s asabiya, is one he finds hilarious and/or horrifying.
Yet he is a human being and a human being is a social animal. He will cohere—he will act in concert with his fellow human beings—and he will enjoy it. But as a modern and cosmopolitan human, he can do so only ironically—as a game.
...
Normally, cohesion and commitment go together. But we expect cohesion to be the effect of commitment—you obey your officers loyally because of your passionate loyalty to your country. Here, commitment is the effect of cohesion—anyone who hodls side by side with you is your brother, regardless of the stonk.
The capacity for significant collective ironic action is very rare in human history—so rare that I am at a loss to think of another example. It must have happened. Irony is not a new invention—but its distribution across a whole population is unprecedented."
Yarvin's bailiwick is politics, and good luck to him, I suppose. But when this quote comes back to mind, as it does rather often, I find myself more focused on its applicability to culture, and it is precisely here where I think the spirit of his remarks are most interestingly felt. Is something not collective action because it is engaged in with puckish irony and cultivated self-awareness? I think surely it still is, and it still matters to people, and creates collective energy, even if all that is true. (And you also note that labubus and dubai chocolate are not entirely free-floating, contentless referents, either, but for the sake of argument let's accede that they are rather so compared to, I don't know, the fucking hula hoop.)
Thank you for bringing up this quote from Yarvin! It's very aligned to what I've been mulling over for the past month. I think we've been in a state of 'collective ironic action' for the past five years, and I think it may have culturally peaked this year. If you're interested in that -
https://www.linkedin.com/posts/atelieredmondlau_simone-oltolina-and-i-discussed-the-cycle-activity-7350750620460462080-4kB1?
https://substack.com/home/post/p-169686745?
I wonder if it goes back even earlier, the ironic stance feels decades old
the 1960s and birth of "Camp" as described by Sontag
I definitely think it existed earlier! I mean, it’s always existed, but meme culture really made it a thing. But the 2008-2020 timeframe was much more earnest overall, think millennial woke culture. It really feels like Gen Z owns irony as a mainstream cultural trend.
what a great comment - this makes me want to bring the mailbag posts back.