Lana, Taylor and anti-institutional realignment

Recently, I watched the Grammys and learned more about Lana Del Rey. I had no idea she was friendly with Taylor Swift, or that she and Taylor shared the same producer. These women have been pop stars for over a decade: Taylor the establishment good girl; Lana, the anti-establishment shock and awe “other woman.” When they emerged in 2012-2013 as fully-fledged pop stars, Taylor was right-coded. Lana, the Brooklyn baby smoking hydroponic weed, coded old-school left.

But here we are in 2024 and Taylor is now coded left while Lana somehow codes right. It makes no sense in the traditional sense of ideological markers. Taylor is still the sweet ingenue, with two parents who love her and a boyfriend who plays football. Lana’s first single on her last album is titled A&W, a wink at the chorus “being an American whore.” Drug use is not uncommon in Lana’s world; meanwhile Taylor shocks crowds when she pounds a beer at a football game.

The markers that used to define culture and political affinity have completely flipped. How did this shift happen so quickly? And why is it happening across every industry and every cultural category? Just as Lana Del Rey is now right coded, so are many artists who in previous times would have been considered boundary breakers, dissidents, protest artists, revolutionaries. Those leftist monikers are now almost exclusively used to describe a growing amorphous “right”— even though the values of these individuals look nothing like the classical right (ie conservatism, meaning to conserve the past) and are a hodgepodge of weird ideologies that have no cohesive stance.

Perhaps that’s why the lines by which we draw political affiliations have nothing to do with ideology now. Institutionalists code left. Anti-institutionalists code right. And its making for strange bedfellows across politics, culture, academia, et al. The boat rockers, the weirdos. Almost all are being pushed rightward, and many are very surprised by their new affiliation.

In tech, this is even weirder because almost all of tech codes right by this new definition of right as anti-institutionalism, except big tech, which is institutional by nature. You want the status quo if you’re a massive publicly traded company or seeking institutional capture. But little tech? Startups? Protest companies? You want change. These companies — and most tech movements now— almost all code right even though the values they espouse in previous worlds would have been hard left. Transhumanism. Accelerationism. Protest. Change we can believe in. These are not the rallying cries of the conservative right.

It’s weird to visit California and see how many people with “leftist” impulses or worldviews in both tech and culture are now casually lumped together with the new right. There’s no cohesive value set— it’s become a term that simply means protest against institutional authority.

All this is to say, the terms we’ve long used to describe political affiliation or ideology are pretty much meaningless now. And when language changes so swiftly, it means we’re living through a hard realignment. Don’t look to the recent past to bet on the future — it’s bound to look wildly different.

Katherine Boyle • Tweet

Twilight of the Media Elites