ROTTEN CORE

Part of the problem here is that the pillars of culture that defined coolness, that were also ransacked by it every five-to-10 years and would begrudgingly canonize it, are pretty much gone now. You could write a big feature like TIME Magazine’s “Generation X Reconsidered” cover story about Gen Z now, but no one would care. Hollywood lost to YouTube. Magazines lost to TikTok. Radio lost to Spotify. And most artist management teams are basically just hype houses now. As The New York Times’ Jon Caramanica said recently (on a livestream, it should be noted), "The gap between 'I'm a comedian,' 'I'm a content creator,' 'I'm a musician' — we used to think of those as three different jobs. They're not three different jobs anymore. It's basically just one job, which is getting attention. That's the main job.” The question of our time is how do you artistically rebel — and win — against a totally flat cultural landscape? And before my readers, who I assume are all approximately 36 years old and very tired, say, “so what, who cares?” This does matter. I mean, just look around right now lol. You know things are bad when even OpenAI President Greg Brockman is posting stuff, like “Taste is a new core skill.” If people had taste, your company wouldn’t exist, Greg. But if everything is just attention now, and attention is completely commodified by algorithmic tech platforms, how can you push back against that? Well, I am slowly coming around to a theory on the new cool: You have to essentially pre-deplatform yourself.

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