Ryan Broderick on LinkedIn: What is 2020s culture? https://lnkd.in/echUByJV

Yes, this is 2024, where life increasingly feels like a huge in-joke that started on the internet. Once upon a time we had subcultures: punks and goths, hippies and emos. Now we have Gen Z’s perceptive trendspotters pinpointing a style or a mood that is sweeping the zeitgeist, coining a label for it — often with the suffix “-core” — and sharing it ... See more

More significant than what trends represent on their own and in the moment is what they collectively symbolize. Ours is a period of increasing noise. Everything is bleeding into everything around it. All trends, large and small, now suggest a new cultural mood—but only until the next Vaseline-smeared obsession comes along.

It makes sense that norms are shifting in this direction as Gen Z’s influence spreads. Raised on social media, with access to once illicit bad-taste touchstones like Rocky Horror just a click away, they’ve largely replaced IRL subcultures with a constellation of aesthetics—cottagecore, dark academia, Y2K—to be performed, then discarded or demoted t... See more

Activities and practices, narratives, and knowledge, which are equally vital components of culture, will instead take precedence. Memes, discourses, aesthetics, language, specialized knowledge and activities, all taking place online, will be the vehicles of lifestyle performance and participation. We’re already seeing plenty of new reading groups, ... See more