The Slow Cancellation of Culture

In decades past, popular culture felt fresh and innovative. For a high school student during the latter half of the 2010s, exploring culture was exciting. Reminiscing on this era, I’m flooded with memories of discussing leaked streetwear collaborations with friends in the cafeteria and concealing my phone in my English class to compete with full-grown adults with corporate jobs to cop Supreme’s weekly drops. Soundcloud-era rappers like Playboi Carti, and Tay-K brought compelling unique sounds to the mainstream, and fashion, though in hindsight mostly atrocious, was distinct; from the post-apocalyptic yet minimalist designs of Kanye West, to the satirically maximalist chunky sneakers like Balenciaga’s Triple S, to brands like Virgil Abloh’s Off-White and Jerry Lorenzo’s Fear of God breaking down the barriers between streetwear and luxury fashion. Things were fun. 

Today, I don’t feel this way. Admittedly, a large factor in this is that I’m no longer that twinkle-eyed 16-year-old in upstate New York anymore. But being a jaded 24-year-old in New York City doesn’t explain this disillusionment entirely. In the two years since my last blog post, I’ve been completely stuck with what I wanted to (or even could) say; culture felt stagnant, leaning more on nostalgia rather than innovation, an idea theorized about by cultural theorist Mark Fisher. 

The banality of life we face today can be attributed to two main forces, sterilization and nostalgia, both of which feed into each other. Though not as literal as during COVID, sterilization is abundantly apparent anywhere you go today. You go outside, and every new building looks the same, and they’re all decorated with the same furniture. But this problem is not uniquely American; in my travels, I’ve seen this sameness practically everywhere. Things today lack innovation, risk, and most importantly, beauty, all for the maximization of profit. 

In the music industry, managers are pushing artists to produce and release frequent singles, rather than full-length albums. Artists are pushed to do this to play streaming services’ algorithms with the hopes of landing on popular playlists, leading to increased listeners. The frequency of releases and the subsequent promotion also help artists grow on social media platforms, as frequent posting is rewarded by social media algorithms. By playing the algorithms, artists and managers increase streams, engagement, and in the end profit. But this pace stifles creativity, leaving the artist less time to ruminate and innovate. The biggest problem with singles is they lack the depth of full-length projects, flattening an artist’s creative vision to constant, lower-quality releases. 

The film industry today faces a similar problem. Since the 2010s, private equity has pervaded the film industry, resulting in the film industry focusing more on profit.  In a 2019 New York Times op-ed, Martin Scorsese prescribes the problem with contemporary film as a problem with the funding structures in contemporary cinema, rather than a lack of talent or consumer taste. Films today are market-researched, audience-tested, and modified before release to minimize risk for corporate investors. Though this can be written off as a problem affecting only blockbuster studios, private equity has recently begun encroaching on independent studios as well, most notably with Stripe’s 2022 $225 million investment in A24. 

Another culprit for the lack of innovation in film is the ubiquity of streaming, which was catalyzed during the pandemic. Before the rise of streaming services, the only way to see a new film was to go to the theatre, making the act of seeing a new film in itself a novelty. This novelty was expanded by technologies like IMAX and 3D, which pushed the envelope of what was possible in films; 15 years later, I still remember the mind-blowing idea of the 4D smell-o-vision technology used for Sky Kids: All The Time in the World, despite it being just a scratch-and-sniff card. The shift from theatre releases to streaming debuts has flattened the magic of cinema to watching a made-for-streaming movie on your Black Friday sale Roku smart TV. The ever-presentness of streaming debuts also undermines cultural moments around film releases, as consumers are free to consume content on their terms rather than actively participate in a film’s release. Additionally, while writing this paper, actor Matt Damon spoke on the Joe Rogan podcast about how Netflix wants movies to restate the plot three or four times to ensure viewers can understand it while scrolling on their phones. This backs up what streaming insiders have been saying for years, that Netflix purposely dumbs down the plots of their original content to cater to viewers on their phones. 

The result of this widely appealing, thought-unprovoking, easily digestible content meant to be consumed constantly and passively, is slop. Defined as “digital content of low quality that is produced usually in quantity by means of artificial intelligence,” slop was 2025’s Merriam-Webster’s word of the year. I don’t think there could have been a more fitting word for 2025, but I think its definition is too narrow, slop is more than low-quality AI content. We watch slop movies, we listen to slop on the radio, we eat bowled lunch slop in slop buildings, while scrolling slop on our phones. Our social media has been hijacked with slop by brands trying to convince us to hand over our money, by politicians trying to propagandize us, and influencers trying to approximate our interests. Slop is inevitable in the modern day, and with it comes the diminishing of attention spans and atrophying critical thinking skills. 

Besides making us all, like, super retarded, slop also works to disillusion, distract, and desensitize us to our reality. Instagram Epstein edits help us forget the gravity of his crimes, the reluctance to release the files, and the implications of his known associates, including past and present United States presidents, prime ministers, academics, actors, directors, musicians, and global royalty. George Droyd and Charlie Clank, AI memes spoofing the late George Floyd and Charlie Kirk, distract from increased political division and violence globally. It does this all while not even being particularly entertaining after a video or two. 

Now, you’d assume that famously ethical social media platforms like TikTok and  Instagram would do their best to discourage content that’s unfunny, and literally brain-rotting. This assumption would, of course, be incorrect; rather, they’ve done their best to actually amplify AI content. Algorithms love AI content due to its meaninglessness; its messageless, attention-consuming content keeps users in a vegetative, reactionless state for hours, in turn profiting the platform, a strategy no different from the music or film industry. 

In Dietrich von Hildebrand’s Aesthetics, he challenges the notion that beauty is a subjective experience, arguing instead that it has objective value for people and culture. He states that beauty is central to human happiness, ethics, and philosophy, leading us towards goodness and truth. He believed that the cultivation of our surroundings and consumption have the utmost importance for our psyche and for our understanding of what is ugly or vulgar. With everyone consuming virtually the same slop content, our comprehension of ugly and vulgar has been skewed. With technoglobalization making our surroundings increasingly similar and social media platforms feeding us the same content, the beauty, or lack thereof, that we pull from and are inspired by is leading us to create more of this sameness we’re trying to avoid. 

Cultural theorists have prescribed this problem to a myriad of causes, including efficiency, the loss of faith, regional aesthetics, globalism, and overcommercialization. The global loss of faith has destroyed the sacredness of buildings, making way for profitmaxxed architecture, which is easily replicated worldwide thanks to the wonders of technology. Ostensibly, I agree with all of these, but they fail to fully address this problem, which is where I think the second force, nostalgia, comes in. 

Since the pandemic, it seems everyone’s nostalgic for something. This is most evident in post-pandemic fashion trends. The early 2020s saw the comeback of Y2K aesthetics with low-rise jeans, Von Dutch hats, and Ed Hardy everything. Just a few years later, and we’ve jumped a decade (see TikTok & Shein: Accelerationism in Fashion) into the 2010s. Cool kids are wearing skinny jeans, Maison Margiela Futures, studded belts, flatbrims, and praising Hedi Slimane. In the past year, searches for “2010s fashion” on Pinterest have quintupled among 18-24-year-olds. An easy retort to this phenomenon is the cyclical nature of trends, and while true, the cycling back to these trends is fundamentally different from the past. In the past, silhouettes, colors, or ideas would return and be reinterpreted in new cultural contexts. The wear-and-tear of nineties grunge aesthetics saw a comeback in the mid-2010s, but was recontextualized to fit the larger streetwear-centric fashion of the decade. The resurgences now are one-to-one copies, the brands, the silhouette, the styling, all of it. Participants are cosplaying an era rather than taking inspiration from it. 

Today, social media users push later and later in a nostalgic niche-off no one’s winning. Late 2000s older brother core, 2010s indie sleaze, early 2010s swag era. Soon enough, people will be wearing Bape NMDs and Off-White belts again. But what will happen when the trend cycle catches up with itself? I don’t know, that’s not what this paper’s about. 

In film and TV, private equity investors in studios also lean on nostalgia. This is clearly seen in their incessant need to revive successful IPs like Harry Potter, Star Wars, or Avatar, or just completely remaking films like Nosferatu or American Psycho. For the profit-focused industry, nostalgia sells, making it an extremely safe investment. Why would you risk an original IP tanking if another godforsaken Marvel movie will make you a bajillion dollars?  Why does nostalgia sell? Because it provides a sense of comfort and connection to consumers. If you liked the original Sex and the City series, why would you not watch its 2021 reboot, And Just Like That…? Where they’ve shoehorned all the contemporary politics and buzzwords they know you like. 

Similarly, in music, underground artists have coasted on nostalgia-driven sounds and aesthetics, notably with the broad Indie Sleaze revival. Electronic musicians like The Hellp or The Dares’ electroclash and dancepunk revival sound is just that, a revival of mid-2000s bands like LCD Soundsystem’s electronic-infused indie rock. A sound that laid the groundwork for 2024’s most inescapable album, Charli XCX’s Brat, featuring The Dare as a producer. In rap, underground artists like the UK’s Fakemink and Feng have brought the underground into the mainstream with 2010 digital nostalgia, creating a sound meant to channel 2010s cloudrap and electropop popularized by artists like Lil B and Crystal Castles. 

On the other end of the musical spectrum, the 2020s have also seen a screamo resurgence spearheaded by bands like Catalyst, Widowdusk, and my personal favorite, herlovebeheadsdaisies, which resurrected the largely deceased genre whose heyday in the late-90s to early-2000s saw the combination of second-wave emo and hardcore. The gravity of this resurgence even saw the reformation of many of the bands, like Orchid or In Loving Memory, which helped create the original sound coming back for reunion tours and new musical releases. 

On many occasions, my father, who was involved in the late-70s/early-80s Buffalo punk scene, has told me a campfire-esque story about hearing Bauhaus’ 1979 breakout single, Bela Lugosi’s Dead for the first time. He describes the eerie drums, the potent bass, and Peter Murphy’s haunting vocals as something so inexplicable that he never forgot the moment. My mother tells a similar story about hearing Nirvana’s Smells Like Teen Spirit on a Wednesday at Hot Rocks in Franklin Square, New York. Like my father, she talks about how it was nothing like the hair metal typically played in Hot Rocks, both sonically and in subject matter. Throughout my life, I’ve thought a lot about these two stories, and when I’d have a moment of hearing something so unfathomable that I’d never forget it, I’ve yet to have it. To be fair, I like a lot of the new music I mentioned, but leaning so heavily on nostalgia has made their sound so comprehensible, taking away its ability to truly leave me shocked. 

But why nostalgia? This idea is theorized in Mark Fisher’s 2014 speech, “The Slow Cancellation of Future,” in which he discusses the loss of the future we were promised. Gone are dreams of Jetsonesque chrome utopias traversed by flying cars. With all the technological development we’re supposedly getting through massive overfunding and the laissez-faire attitude our government has towards tech giants like Peter Thiel, how has our material reality stayed the same? Our juicers may be AI-Optimized, but what does that even mean? For most, there’s no longer a clear and/or positive view of what the future holds, as Fisher puts it in the speech, “The Future has disappeared.” In his 2012 essay What is Hauntology? Fisher discusses Jacques Derrida’s idea of hauntology, which states that unrealized futures or lost possibilities will continue to haunt the present, manifesting itself through nostalgia and a lack of innovation; our loss of the idea of the future is preventing us from bringing it to fruition, thus we are stuck rehashing past ideas of it. 

When viewed through a hauntological lens, the prevalence of nostalgia in music, film, and fashion can be seen as a result of our cultural stagnation and loss of future, rather than a cause of it. This then leads into itself; stagnant culture stagnates culture. Our future is gone, and with it, cultural progression. 

The reason our lost future manifests itself through nostalgia is because of how nostalgia makes us feel. Defined simply as a longing for the past, typically for a period with happy association. With the grimness of the future, artists have decided against creating the future and instead pulled influence from the past, hoping to evoke happier times. The reason swag-era aesthetics work so well is that it reminds us of  better times and gives us a sense of connection with others participating in the joke. 

When I write essays, I send drafts to friends and family to make sure I’m not nonsensically rambling, that my thesis and flow make sense. The overwhelming response I got from everyone was how bleak this essay is. Typically, my essays are bleak, but this one really takes the cake. I promised the people I’d give it a positive spin, but I struggled with how to spin everything sucking positively. I originally wrote a manifesto-esque ending about how to enhance and channel creativity, but it felt too self-righteous. It focused too much on the individual, and as Scorsese said, it’s not a problem of taste or talent, it’s a problem of money. This problem is not going to go away; in fact, it’ll probably get worse, but somehow I still doubt that I just so happened to live at the end of beauty, but in the same breath, I don’t see a way out of our sterile desert either. 

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