.webp?h=11 "Nuzzles, pounces on you, UwU, you're so warm!..")
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.
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technological improvements in communication have always lead to media homogenization and we seem to have reached the end game on that front
but the flip side is accessibility… as a kid we'd have to go to the friggin department store customer service desk in some weird backroom to buy concert tickets and then drive from central pa to philly or baltimore or dc… now there are so many venues in a thirty mile radius it's crazy. sure im going to drive to philly to see Nick Cave but most weekends i just dont feel the need… id rather check out metal night at the dive bar or some obscure band that's swinging through one of the nearby medium sized venues
not to mention the sound card i worked such long hours to buy in 1999 is basically free now (being the pro tools guy back then was probably the height of my popularity lol)
there will always be weirdos putting a unique spin on the human condition and for every one of those there will be thousands of morgan wallens or whatever selling out… but it's easier than ever to seek out the interesting stuff
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Not merely—concomitant must be monocultural invasion along those lines.
We, in the anglosphere
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wdym "in the anglosphere"
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Eg. we are still largely segregated from e-Russians, e-Chinese, e-Brasilians
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gotcha… by "reached the end game" i meant that i dont see communication getting much more "democratized" than it is today… it's possible we've peaked with regard to the amount of technological and political power the average individual can access
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