What is a feed if not a funeral procession? Memento mori. Raucous like a New Orleans parade, always pointing to the underworld, it has a quasi-feudal flavor. The pious serfs line up to admire the emperor’s new clothes. Ariana doesn’t own her bikini. It’s sponsored.

"Wanderer Above the Sea of Fog" (circa 1818 by Caspar David Friedrich) is one of the premiere works of art representative of the Sublime Courtesy

Things are falling apart and we all inhabit ruins. In that sense, it is a picturesque era. Romantic painters in the 18th century juxtaposed collapsed churches with sweeping moors in attempting to portray the sublime. Our ruins are not so literal. They are the life scripts and media formats we inherited from the 20th century. Our sublime is not the incomprehensible power of the divine, but the hyperobjects that hang at the tips of our tongues (climate change, the Internet, globalization) yet escape our full grasp…

I think about this as I ponder the last decade. What happened? Historians with more distance and training will debate when America jumped the shark, whose fault it was, and whether or not it was unavoidable. I’m less concerned about those specifics than what post-empire means as a cultural shift. How does it feel to live in a culture no longer defined by confidence, but anxiety? One that’s ceded causality to magical thinking? Who are the barbarians at the gate and who are the patricians? Which cities will sink and which will swim?

Sinking Cities

I wait on Sunset for a friend running late. There’s a once-fashionable club that squeezes right up to the edge of the sidewalk. A sheer wall of stucco, monolithic, built in a Mediterranean style: terra-cotta and tile with water features and those crooked silver space heaters that look like privatized street lamps. Aesthetically out of date, yet familiar. A mix of on- and off-trend influencers disembark from Ubers. Hypebeasts in monochrome streetwear: bucket hats, cross-body bags, and slides mingle with girls vacuum-sealed into Hervé Leger dresses, teetering on Louboutin platform heels. They disappear up the stairs to a club I can’t see from street level. Behind the club are the Hills, which I also can’t see, but know are there, hunched and twinkling in the night sky.

Los Angeles is the capital of the 2010s, a city whose attributes anticipate collapse: flat and amorphous, rather than vertical and defined; kitsch and pop, rather than avant-garde and tech; individualistic and mass, rather than institutional and elite. You can suggest San Francisco, HQ of disruption, or New York, backdrop for protest movements (#OWS, #BLM). But both places fail to capture the spirit of the age, because they are fighting so hard to change it. They are relics of empire, unsure of themselves after a decade in which success was indistinguishable from failure.

Los Angeles in smog Mario Tama Getty Images

On a summer night in New York, the only sound is the hot wind howling down Sixth Avenue: Manhattan emptied by wealth blight and climate change. A continent away in San Francisco, tents line the street beneath I-80. Screens stream Netflix, light up the domes like nylon lanterns. But in Los Angeles, action happens at a distance. Steam and chlorine obscure the view from the infinity pool, a glittering circuit board spreads to the horizon. The city is and isn’t there. It was never intended to last. It was never intended to make sense. That is the casual apocalypticism of Los Angeles.

Built on celebrity, media, and lifestyle, L.A. doesn’t presume to be building the future, merely inhabiting it. It’s a pick your poison kind of place. Do coke and fuck strippers at Chateau Marmont. Spend half your paycheck on inscrutable health food at Erewhon. Commute four hours so you can live in a Riverside McMansion. Drive Uber every day, write screenplays every night. Sell out, drop out, suck up, fuck up. There is no right or wrong way to do L.A.

AaronP/Bauer-Griffin Getty Images

Without a patrician class or any hallowed institutions, Los Angeles always operated with a libertarian cultural mind-set, unembarrassed by the demands of the market or the future. First to celebrity, first to gossip, first to influence—the city cultivates not only the industries that support mass culture, but also the personalities that thrive in it. It comes as no surprise it has a more sophisticated perspective on influencer culture. The individual as a media object didn’t erupt out of nowhere. The groundwork was laid in California decades ago.



Social Media Empire

We think of reality TV as having emerged recently, a ’90s novelty that boomed in the ensuing decade. But that boom didn’t so much invent unscripted content as recuperate it. The first show, An American Family, aired in 1973 on PBS, tracking how mid-century social revolutions had upended West Coast home life. The Louds (yes, that was the family’s name) experienced separation, divorce, even a coming out. Their gay son, Lance Loud, would move from Santa Barbara to New York, live in the Chelsea Hotel, become a columnist at The Advocate, and eventually die of complications from meth addiction, Hepatitis C, and AIDS.

The Loud family on An American Family Getty Images

Lance Loud made the now familiar transition from media subject to media creator. By the 2010s this Ouroboros style would seem so obvious we would barely stop to consider what it meant. On The Hills, Lauren Conrad would not only be the star of her own show, but also an intern at Teen Vogue—at once a millennial workplace terror and an influencer in her own right. This was never admitted, but in the reboot that just began airing, The Hills: New Beginnings, it’s impossible to ignore. Conrad is absent, replaced by Mischa Barton, the washed-up teen starlet from The OC—the scripted template for the first installment of The Hills’s franchise, Laguna Beach.

Basing a reality show on a scripted show has a cart-before-the-horse quality that is revealing. By 2006, the cinema verité style of An American Family had gone out of fashion—though the real angle was never our repressed voyeurism, but reality’s clear commercial edge. Unlike scripted shows, writers and actors weren’t required: reality was produced, not written or performed. When the Writers Guild of America went on strike over streaming residuals in 2007 the choice was clear. Approximately 100 new reality shows went into production over the next year. Keeping Up with the Kardashians would be billed as an “unscripted family sitcom” just as Laguna Beach had been sold as an “unscripted teen drama.”

E!

At a private talk in 2015, an executive from a popular cable channel famous for its reality programming admitted their ratings problem was no so much creative, but structural. “We weaponized our own audience.” In the space of five short years, social media had gobbled up the youth’s mindshare. They no longer needed TV for an uncanny entertainment. Just pick up your phone. Even Keeping Up with the Kardashians can’t keep its ratings afloat. Kim doesn’t need E!, the network needs Kim. Post-empire means finding opportunity in the rubble, business strategies latent in old-media formats.

The Next Thousand Years

Pinterest

Imagine a millennial. What are they wearing? Skinny jeans. Ironic fast fashion. Maybe that sweatshirt with Kale written like Yale that Beyoncé wore in 2014. Quay sunglasses. The ones you buy off Instagram that are so reflective that when you take a selfie you can see the iPhone in the mirror finish. Of course the millennial is taking a selfie. She’s so narcissistic! What else is she doing? (She’s definitely a girl.) She’s on a ho-float in a pool. It’s a giant rainbow unicorn. She’s taking a selfie again, but this time in a bikini, with perfect, washboard abs. She got them by eating lots of kale.

She’s vegan, a locavore, does yoga, reads astrology. She’s woke, protested Trump at a rally in the city she lives in, because she definitely lives in a city (Venice, specifically). How else would she bike to work at that new start-up, [REDACTED]? She does something “creative” she’d rather not talk about. She’s entitled, so she hates having a normal job. Wanna hear about her side hustle instead? It’s this new project called [REDACTED]. It’s authentic, artisanal, designer-led, community-oriented: her personal brand more or less. She’s developing it because how else can she pay her student loans and Airbnb a villa in [REDACTED] every summer?

"Millennials are no longer the generation du jour, Gen Z now takes the brunt of hype. The anxiety is not whether or not they are special snowflakes, but that they might be wilting flowers, withering under the relentless heat of social media’s gaze."

She eats avocados, collects cactuses, wears pink, cuts cables, cancels culture, kills industries. She is not so much a person as a caricature of change. Or at least she was, before being unceremoniously dumped for her little brother, Gen Z. (The media is pansexual, it will fuck anything.) She’s the reason we find ourselves asking if generational branding is an incantation to summon demons, or if, more to the point, generations exist at all.

As with all social concepts, the answer ends up lying somewhere in the middle. And typically, just by asking the question, you reveal yourself to be taking a side. I’ve encountered two versions of the generations-are-bullshit argument. Both insist all social groupings are suspect, but plant their flags on opposite ends of the truth spectrum.

Rob Engvall

The first are the dataheads: people who love nothing more than a spreadsheet. They see human behavior as fundamentally quantifiable and when faced with the granularity of the information available on how people spend, click, watch, vote, and move can’t help but point out that there are only individuals—each with their own particular circumstances and peculiar tastes. They don’t see a nation of generations, each with their own historical experiences and competing interests. They see a nation of datasets. The fact that some millennials zig while others zag renders the conversation moot.

The second are the romantics—I keep one foot in this camp—the artists, writers, and quote-unquote creatives. In 2013, when I coauthored the trend report that spawned normcore, our initial brief was to define the values of digital natives, a micro-generation squatting somewhere between millennials and Gen Z. Our hypothesis, which I still stand behind, was that youth ≠ age, youth = freedom, and that the digital technologies discombobulating the world were affecting everyone, not just teens. (Rewind to grandmas sharing “POPE ENDORSES TRUMP!!!” on Facebook in 2016 and I would say we clocked it.) More than anything, we argued, generations and the inevitable media speculation about them served as a focal point for general anxieties about the future.

For millennials, this was a story about snowflakes. It was Hannah Horvath proclaiming to be “a voice of a generation.” Wait But Why’s Tim Urban explaining that Happiness = Reality - Expectations. It’s a topic you can still hear Bret Easton Ellis ranting about while promoting his latest book of political essays, White.

Lena Dunham as Hannah Horvath in Girls Rex Features

But America was in the throes of peak millennial. Barack Obama was sworn in for a second term. The damage the Great Recession did to young people’s prospects hadn’t been fully quantified yet. Social media and smartphones just passed the threshold from novelty to ubiquity. Most importantly, tech as an industry still seemed like an unambiguous good. It elected Obama, right?

Fast forward six years and the story has changed. Millennials are no longer the generation du jour, Gen Z now takes the brunt of hype. The anxiety is not whether or not they are special snowflakes, but that they might be wilting flowers, withering under the relentless heat of social media’s gaze. Rarely do talking heads worry Gen Z was raised with unrealistic expectations. Because they weren’t. Born after 1996, they came of age in an America already pock-marked by Recession. A poorer, more unequal America wasn’t a risk, it was a reality.

Rob Engvall

When we talk about generations, we’re not talking age cohort astrology for desperate brand managers—we’re talking history. The three big groups that dominate discourse are really three different experiences of empire. The boomers got a full dose, and despite the MAGA paroxysm remain irrationally exuberant about America. While post-empire Gen Z has no idea what the fuck they’re talking about. The middle-class country that boomers insist still exists is Netflix Original nostalgia-porn. Only millennials experienced the promise of empire and the reality-check of its implosion as the unfortunate trajectory of their lives. For the datahead, focused on the present, and the romantic, hoping for the future, it’s this fact that is hard to grasp: generations are fundamentally about the past.



Barbarians at the Gates

Ten years ago is always cringe: too close to be repackaged as nostalgia, too far to feel aesthetically familiar. If the past is a foreign country, ten years ago is Canada, not incomprehensible, just off. In 2010, the most popular TV show was American Idol, not Game of Thrones. The bestselling album was Eminem’s Recovery, not Ariana Grande’s thank u, next. Kim Kardashian’s favorite color wasn’t beige, it was blood red.

American Idol Season 9 judges, circa 2010 Michael Becker

It was an era in which we thought the Internet would conquer reality TV, not the other way around. A time when taste in music was understood as a social sorting mechanism, before it had been algorithmically neutered by Spotify. Culture writers publicly grappled with the implications of irony. Coolhunters grokked neighborhoods like Silver Lake and Williamsburg for the future. And the cultural pejorative of the moment wasn’t millennial, but hipster, that ever-elusive term simultaneously referring to everyone cool and no one cool.

From Hipster to Influencer

Harpercollins

In 2008, Adbusters questioned whether or not hipsters might be the end of western civilization, coining the infamous cheeseball line: “If only we carried rocks instead of cameras, we’d look like revolutionaries.” By 2010, Brooklyn literary magazine n+1 published their coroner’s report, What was the Hipster? Far from a diagnostic on a subculture in decline, it was a report on a subculture going mainstream.

The litany of cultural clichés pours down on the hipster with the same sound and fury as on the millennial: plaid, beards, fixed-gear bicycles, American Apparel, Urban Outfitters, Pabst Blue Ribbon, American Spirits. It’s another consumer aesthetic, another marketing demo. And like the millennial, the hipster is a figure both ubiquitous and foresworn. No one ever self-identified as a hipster the way no one really identifies as a millennial. It was a story told over and over, working its way into the warp and weft of reality, creating a collective hallucination. Finding a hipster in Brooklyn circa 2010 was like identifying a witch in Salem circa 1690. The accusation was all that was needed to make it stick.

Rob Engvall

But from 30,000 feet, the millennial is just the hipster with a dose of sunshine. Authentic products, ethical consumption, and digital media can mean desert boots, mason jars, and blogging, or it can mean Allbirds, Whole Foods, and Instagram. What alt commentators missed when they bemoaned marketers’ interest in hipsterdom was that they were not co-opting a subculture, they were mining it for less transgressive values that could be scaled.

If hippies could be kicked off their communes and reintroduced to urban society as yuppies, then hipsters could be de-grimed and reintroduced as pro-social influencers. Leggings got renamed yoga pants, American Apparel’s retro porn aesthetic was repackaged as Lululemon’s athleisure. I’m not an asshole who refuses to wear pants—I love exercise! Party photography decentralized, coke- and disco-fueled art parties became brand experiences. The generation-defining magazine Vice literally renamed itself Virtue and became an ad agency. It’s not narcissism—it’s a personal brand! We are all entrepreneurs now, our eyes ever on how to turn a crisis into an opportunity.



From Disruption to Radicalization

If a millennial’s first cultural identity was hipster, then her first economic identity was disruptor. There was a sense that things were falling apart, but only in the service of new things being built. The beginning of the decade felt chaotic, yet fertile. By 2010, Facebook had made Mark Zuckerberg the youngest self-made billionaire in American history. He’d be followed by fellow millennials Kevin Systrom of Instagram, Evan Spiegel of Snapchat, Joe Gebbia and Brian Chesky of Airbnb, and Logan Green and John Zimmer of Lyft. Call it Web 2.0, call it social media, call it the sharing economy—whatever it was, it was rewiring the world for revolution.

Pinterest

In 2010, the Arab Spring toppled dictatorships and we thought hashtags could bring about democracy. In 2011, Occupy Wall Street led a failed revolt against finance and we thought maybe we can change the world. In 2012, Barack Obama was reelected and the arc of history seemed like it was bending toward justice. In 2013, Black Lives Matter made police brutality impossible to ignore and we wondered if cameras could make us revolutionaries after all…but by 2014, something ugly and ambiguous leaked out of 4chan. We called it Gamergate and moved on. In 2015, Donald Trump launched his campaign. By 2016, Brexit and inevitably the election. 2017 and Unite the Right and Russiagate and the Mueller probe. 2018 and Cambridge Analytica. 2019 and Christchurch and, and, and…

The Washington Post Getty Images

What a decade before we called “democratizing culture” suddenly seemed like something much more dangerous. It began so innocently (microblog lunch on Twitter), but had gone unimaginably wrong (elect a racist reality-star president). Straddling the old reality and the new, millennials were unable to immediately disentangle the myths of empire from the new facts on the ground. They had yet to realize the lessons of their youth were dangerous simplifications: people are good, change is progress, information should be free, deregulation creates wealth…

These ideas, foundational to the disruptor mind-set, were the last gasp of the neoliberal ’90s: apply empire ideologies in post-empire times, presume that institutions and norms can and should be deconstructed, without any proportionate sense of risk. Maybe there is some alternate universe where the first dominos toppled by social media aren’t the authoritarian regimes of the Middle East, but the banks on Wall Street, resulting in Silicon Valley taking a much more taciturn approach to the quality and character of the information they chose to accelerate…

Unfortunately, reality missed that exit.

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