The Era of Cringe

“Where we once justified our daily anxieties by doom scrolling through bad news, we now post memes that epitomise our sense of mass existentialism, taking part in a sort of performative negativity that, as a result, protects us against reality,” says Holly Friend, deputy foresight editor at futures consultancy, The Future Laboratory.

That labor amounts to constant self-promotion in the form of cheap trend-following, ever-changing posting strategies, and the nagging feeling that what you are really doing with your time is marketing, not art. Under the tyranny of algorithmic media distribution, artists, authors — anyone whose work concerns itself with what it means to be human — ... See more

but whether parasocial content is desirable or not, it points to a growing crisis on the internet: So much of what we encounter online just doesn’t matter , and even worse, offers no mechanism for us to start caring about it. The average human living today sees more things they don’t care about in one week than a medieval peasant did in their entir... See more

Suddenly, being on a laptop in the middle of a work day is an act worthy of someone’s attention. Maybe they’ll see the picture and notice more than just you at work - a decoration in your house, a new haircut, an alarming error in a SQL query you wrote. We’re suddenly funneling attention into the parts of our lives that we would never even journal ... See more