Media & Culture

The aspect ratio of our lives has changed. By narrowing our field of view, cutting off our peripheral vision, the phone doesn’t just remove us from space and provoke a sense of claustrophobia. It isolates us.

Perhaps this pattern of radicalisation followed by recuperation has even happened with each emergent technology – newspapers, novels, film, (pirate) radio, the Internet. Each time, the new medium has a progressive force, dehabituating people from expected relations, offering new channels for experimental activity, mediatised subcultures, and the... See more

n this sense, Labubus do seem to be a defining moment of 2020s culture. For those interested in moving culture away from fads such as these, resistance requires much more than a refusal to consume. If fads are narratives as much as products, they need to be starved of engagement, as well. We haven't figured out how to do this yet.

One hallmark of our current moment is that when an event happens, there is little collective agreement on even basic facts. This, despite there being more documentary evidence than ever before in history: Information is abundant, yet consensus is elusive.

Successful platforms do not just discover what consumers want — they produce the consumers and the forms of consumer desire that they need.

Some More Insight Into The Gen Z Coolness Crisis

There are four sort of low-level generational discourses circulating the web right now that I want to try and synthesize into a larger idea. There’s the weird backlash around the word “demure” going viral after a trans TikToker popularized it. There are millennials panicking that Gen Z thinks we all... See more

Savior Complex is a slyly simplistic title.

we define moral-emotion expression in social-media text as representational expressions of affect that reliably signal, either to others or to the self, that something is relevant to the interests or good of society, as defined by the conceptual knowledge of the expresser.