Thoughts on Our Gray Slop Culture
I think most people no longer feel allowed to be weirdly particular in a system that rewards and monetizes sameness and scalability.
Mass precarity is rendering everything interchangeable, including labor, space, and even personal aspirations. It has produced a visual language of studied neutrality where nothing is offensive and nothing is memorable but everything is scalable. The system does not reward the strange, local, eccentric or complex.
If your position in the world feels precariously contingent, you begin to value what is legible and easily explained, and then edit yourself accordingly. People end up pre-flattening themselves in anticipation of the system’s banal algorithmic judgment. I think this might be at the root of the fear of "being cringe".
We have built a set of incentives that quietly, but relentlessly discourage anyone from trying to produce complex beauty or meaning. I fear that artists, musicians, true teachers, craftspeople, or anyone who insists on doing something well rather than merely at scale, will be recast as unserious because they resist the metrics by which value is currently measured.
Not everything worth making should scale, and not everything that scales is worth making.