satire is a collective sedative

Satire is a creative superpower that has the ability to liberate us from the status quo, but our overreliance on it has turned it into a collective sedative.

alexi gunner

The Hierarchy of Humor (from 2016)

Or Grant McCracken put it,

”If you are under 25, popular culture is on perpetual spin cycle. Everything is in motion. Except you.”

Memes by definition are idea viruses. And it feels like our cultural immune system is able to move on quicker and quicker. Perhaps built in remixing features on platforms have helped the viruses spread, but has diminish

ZINE • Vol.16: Rachel Greenspan: Fake Authenticity, Meme Fatigue + Reply Guys

The reason why our pervasive cultural irony is at once so powerful and so unsatisfying is that an ironist is impossible to pin down.

thefreelibrary.com • E Unibus Pluram: Television and U.S. Fiction.

Paul Venuto • feed updates

Movies and shows like Triangle of Sadness , Parasite , Squid Game , and The White Lotus are all social satires told with varying degrees of nuance and bite. They depict the wealthy and privileged as out-of-touch, morally corrupt, and repulsive—hardly role models worth emulating. The message goes, if we cannot beat the rich, we can at least make fun

SSENSE • What’s a Creative Director For, Anyway?

There are countless examples of how we turn everything into a meme or a joke online. Musician Ethel Cain (Hayden Silas Anhedönia) has noticed this too, ranting on Tumblr earlier this week about how “nobody takes anything seriously anymore“. “It makes me feel so crazy and annoyed because I am constantly bombarded by jokes,” she wrote. The now-delete... See more

Halima Jibril • Ethel Cain says we are in an irony epidemic – is she right?

A client and I were recently analysing the surprising success of the canned water brand Liquid Death, now valued at over $700 million. In case you’re not familiar with it, Liquid Death is notable because the entire brand is essentially one big joke – it’s water (obviously a pure and healthy substance), presented in a “dangerous” heavy metal kind of... See more

alex • Taste: The secret ingredient - Basic Arts

Never in human history have we possessed so capacious a knowledge of the various and specific iniquities of the world — and so little hope of them ever being rectified.