What hapens next? Maybe our post-nerd future will involve a return to genuine mass art. Maybe things will be good again. That would be nice! But I wouldn’t bet on it. The problem remains: we are still producing an unbearable volume of information; we still need some way to sort through it. The regime of the hipster was an inefficient way of sorting it; it died. The regime of the nerd was an overefficient way of sorting it; it is dying. The last remaining option is mal d’archive, the Kang solution: you ease the weight of all this cultural stuff by simply destroying it all. Like nerdery, this impulse has been waiting in the wings for a long time. It is also an emergent property of large stores of information, this drive ‘to burn the archive and to incite amnesia, the thing refuting the economic principle of the archive, aiming to ruin the archive as accumulation and capitalisation of memory.’ What comes after the nerds might be a descent into pure and infinite barbarism. We might finally become humans without any culture at all, not adorning our bodies, not singing songs, but fixed in terror by an endless stream of data that we spend our lives desperately trying to scrub away. We might remember the age of algorithmised junk-culture, faintly, as the last time we were not in a losing war against the records of our own words and deeds. In the end, we might regret the passing of the nerds. We might want them to come back.

Lmao what a conclusion. I don’t think so.

This reads exactly like how a hipster would have talked about the end of hipsters.

I think the big tipping point came in 2012, with the release of Marvel’s first Avengers film. At the time, I was living in Los Angeles; I went to see the thing with two of my fraternity brothers. (Long story.) One of them had the bright idea of sneaking in some alcohol, disguised in a large bottle of cranberry juice. He poured out half the juice and replaced it with vodka, before discovering that this cranberry juice was the unsweetened kind, and that drinking even a sip of it instantly dessicated your mouth and made your tongue convulse and sent sharp waves of acid pain zipping horribly through your mucous membranes and into your brain. But he’d spent money on the stuff, so he kept drinking it. After thirty minutes in the cinema, he’d polished off the entire bottle and was starting to show signs of distress. He kept lolling around in his seat. His head seemed too heavy for his neck, and he would disturb the other viewers by mumble-shouting fuck yeah! at entirely random points in the film. The person sitting in front of him turned around and told him to shut up, that some people were actually trying to enjoy their experience and he was ruining it for everyone. The culprit swayed and gurgled and called him a pussy. Then, about halfway through the film, he suddenly vomited an immense quantity of stinking blood-red liquid over his shirt, over the seat in front of him, and over its occupant. He gasped. I’m ok, he said. Then he puked again. Another hot, sour gush splattered over everything in a two-metre radius. This time it had chunks in it. After some tussling, we managed to carry him outside. My hands were sticky with half-digested spew. I’m fine, he said. I wanna see the movie. Viscous dribblings trickled off the edge of his chin. Let’s go back in there, he said. Let me find that pussy in front. I’m gonna kick his ass. Tryna talk like that to me. He stood up, tried to walk in two different directions at once, and fell over. We ordered a cab.

This was, I think, the first and only time anyone has reacted entirely appropriately to the Marvel Cinematic Universe.

lmao

A+ for provocative free association

F for predictive analysis

The author has stumbled on a core contradiction of surveillance capitalism. Capital has taken the business model of fast fashion and applied to all cultural markers. They need cultural churn to speed up over time in order to bolster growth. At the same time, they also work by bottling cultural moments and extending them for as long as possible. So on one side, they succeed by creating 1000 movies and milking the top performers, freezing those cultural moments in time and relying on them to remain valuable. On the other side, they need more interactions and engagement about their products, and every single one chisels away at that product’s relevance.

Something’s gotta give, but is the result going to be that people will stop fetishizing art products? Absolutely not. If I were a capitalist with the kind of influence to sway the tides, I’d say the splintering of pop culture into unknowable sub-niches seems like a good way to beat the dead horse for a while longer. Everyone will have their own version of what they think everyone else likes. And we’ll know it’s an algorithmically constructed bubble, but in a way that allows the delusion to creep back in.

This article is the embodiment of “my taste is better than your taste”.