satire is a collective sedative

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.”

“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

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,

As a result, rather than their ideas being explicitly and logically argued for, they are slipped into the zeitgeist through the use of humor, both in the positive sense and in the snide, sarcastic sense. This cynical “It’s just a joke!” façade is a convenient mask for an ideology that dare not expose itself completely.

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

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