satire is a collective sedative

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

“The role of a creative director has become a meme,” says Chris Black, the founder of Done to Death Projects, a consultancy. It’s a quippy summary of the fast-changing pace of creative director appointments and the fact that the same group of people periodically move between major luxury houses, to the extent that one would think there’s a dearth o

What if there’s nothing we can do,

and we’re just stuck in a creatively stagnant era? Well, stagnation can lead to explosive change. The Renaissance in Northern Europe came after war, the Black Death, and religious turmoil. The Harlem Renaissance of the ‘20s and ‘30s sprang out of segregation and poverty. The counterculture movement of the ‘60s erup

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.

The critic Roy Christopher has called irony “the most abused trope of our time, a ‘get out of judgment free’ card, an escape route, an exit strategy.”