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
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
... See moreMatt Klein • 3_TRENDS_Vol.16: Rachel Greenspan: Fake Authenticity, Meme Fatigue + Reply Guys
“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
... See moreSSENSE • What’s a Creative Director For, Anyway?
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
then how have irony, irreverence, and rebellion come to be not liberating but enfeebling in the culture today's avant-garde tries to write about? One clue's to be found in the fact that irony is still around, bigger than ever after thirty long years as the dominant mode of hip expression. It's not a mode that wears especially well. As Hyde puts it,
... See morethefreelibrary.com • E Unibus Pluram: Television and U.S. Fiction.
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
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
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?
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.