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.
satire is a collective sedative
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
irony—exploiting gaps between what’s said and what’s meant, between how things try to appear and how they really are—is the time-honored way artists seek to illuminate and explode hypocrisy.
David Foster Wallace • A Supposedly Fun Thing I'll Never Do Again: Essays and Arguments
I’m calling this trend “Chaos Packaging” until someone comes up with something better. https://t.co/Ekelqxpa2N
One thing I’ve also noticed is the gradual loss of the understanding of “imagination” as a category; it can sound a little Reading Rainbow to talk about, but wouldn’t you know imagination is actually an essential part of the human condition. In so far as the words “spirit” or “spirituality” mean anything beyond woo-woo or cliché they must include t... See more
John Ganz • Why Culture Sucks
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
... See moreSSENSE • What’s a Creative Director For, Anyway?
It feels like there’s been a dimming of our imagination and even of possibility. Are we somehow becoming less creative?
The New York Times • The Algorithm Has Been Hiding Something From You | NYT Opinion
To insulate ourselves from these seemingly guaranteed failures, Millennials, and Gen Z after us, adopted irony as a cultural strategy. Irony allowed us to continue life under late capitalism while psychologically sheltering ourselves from the demoralizing reality. Irony as culture became: “The band I like will inevitably sell out, so I might as wel
... See morenewmodels.io • IRONY POLITICS & GEN Z Joshua Citarella
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?
Sometimes, things are serious. Not everything needs to be turned into a joke. As Anhedönia said, we can still make jokes and laugh, but we’ve lost the ability to know when to stop – and it’s time we learned how.