Our obsession with nostalgia is driving a trend revival spiral

The playwright and novelist Ayad Akhtar described our “click-bait consciousness,” trained to interact with anything in the feed designed to be triggering. “The worship of algorithms is mutilating creative industries,” the television writer Cord Jefferson complained. “Culture is no longer made. It is simply curated from existing culture, refined, an

... See more

There is a ton of nostalgic longing for these previous eras and scenes like “Indie Sleaze” without any of the desire to create the environment to make new versions of them possible . [...'] This forced synthesizing of the past for the sake of our generational feeling of missing out is the ultimate sign of the times. It’s preferable to try and crawl... See more

There’s a reason, for instance, that TikTok has declared not just a handful of but twenty-something aesthetics to be the next big thing in 2022: It’s because TikTok’s bread and butter is creating microtrends that flare up fast and die out faster. Whether or not they actually last (or exist in any meaningful way at all) is besides the point; as Kels... See more