A quote from A Supposedly Fun Thing I'll Never Do Again

then how have irony, irreverence, and rebellion come to be not liberating but enfeebling in the culture today's avant-garde tries to write about? One clue's to be found in the fact that irony is still around, bigger than ever after thirty long years as the dominant mode of hip expression. It's not a mode that wears especially well. As Hyde puts it,

exactly—irony was defeatist, timid, the telltale of a generation too afraid to say what it meant, and so in danger of forgetting it had anything to say.