[Week 14 open discussion] Where is interesting new culture happening?

This isn't an original observation, but I feel like modern mainstream culture, and most niche online culture, too, is a warmed over rehash of things that have been done before – AI slop without the AI. Even the edgy right are pushing monarchy and racism: they don't have any new ideas.

Are there places where new, interesting culture is happening? If so, where?

I know there was a hot minute when Tao Lin and the autofiction boys were supposed to be the shape of the new, but that was more than a decade ago now. In the 2010s, Tumblr was the cultural vanguard; dumb shit reblogged there wound up on the NYT three years later. Is it TikTok now?

Is Dimes Square a real scene? Or was it a scene, since Vanity Fair has already written the obituary?

I'm too old for it but hyperpop sounds genuinely new to me. quinn is doing something I haven't heard before – she's trans MtF and swings wildly from brash violent hip-hop masculinity to surprisingly introspective vulnerability in the same verse:

Bitch, you oppin', flodgin', posted on my watch list

Say that you invincible, okay, nigga, watch this

One phone call and his brains we'll get to moppin'

Sorry I'm so hyped up, I'm just dumb obsessed with violence

Anxiety, I'm runnin' out of options

Cut 'em out my life just like a photo, I just crop 'em

If-if-if they start to bother me, I cut 'em off or stop them

Why am I so ignorant? Why am I so toxic?

I don't want that many friends in the first place

I don't really enjoy hyperpop, but I can recognize that these kids are throwing hip hop, pop, and EDM into a blender and trying to produce something new.