matthew beck

From Balenciaga’s tongue-in-cheek €2,000 IKEA FRAKTA shopping bag dupes to e-commerce platform Ssense’s self-deprecating takes on the absurdity of fashion subculture elitism, the runway sometimes feels reduced to one big meme generator.

Culture refers to the emerging social, cultural and political values; it also refers to definition of the core social terms (e.g. influence, community, taste, equality, aspiration); mood, attention and vocabulary. E.g. early on, Glossier mastered the language of modern culture: BFF, intimate, personal, direct. The brand behavior reflected how... See more

Why is this happening? Firstly, we need to look at brain rot not merely as deterioration, but also as cultural alteration . A distinction Drew Austin also recently made, where he argues that digital slop - rather than decomposing like rotting fruit - acts more like a poison that stays in cultural circulation:

I prefer “brain poisoning,” [to describe

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