I was recently reading and listening to Emily Dewitt’s “Health and Safety” at the Raleigh Public Library. Upon reading I resonated instantly with Dewitt but unlike her I feel trapped in the feeling that culture itself is over in 2024. Dewitt seems to be in the perfect place at the perfect time in the mid 2010’s. I consume millennial media yearningly, as it seems to represent the final moments that culture wasn’t an infinity mirror of sorts, where algorithms and commodification didn’t end all forms of authenticity. Where the capitalism of cancer hadn’t become all we could dream of. My post-collegiate life has been filled with chasing this reality and begrudgingly settling into the disarming reality of a post COVID-generation.
The New York in the show “Girls” and even the beginning of rapid gentrification as shown in “Broad City” felt like a time where the city represented this unexplored realm of possibility, with a generation that could spare to have fun with the perhaps misguided belief they could solve the world’s problems along the way. As I prepare for a move to New York for the The New School’s Media Studies program it’s common sense that the city I will move into is not the same as the one on those shows I fear.
Generation Z which I continue to find myself on the front lines of is not only chronically online but also a rabbit hole of replication. Content is now culture and its derivative nature feels increasingly like a complex math problem I’m trying to get to the root of. I found myself identifying with Dewitt in her footsteps not as a parallel pioneer but as an archeologist of sorts, excavating what once was.
I too had tried my hand at both the wellness and club lifestyles in my evenings, albeit much past their peak. In 2020 I was working at studios and taking their half-full fitness classes replete with masks and attendees that couldn’t replicate the intensity of their former regimens as they pushed 40, some of which shut down soon thereafter. I attended saturated semi covid safe EDM festivals with unfriendly people who cared more about their Instagram filters than creating anything resembling a healthy community with those around them. The exploratory nature of electronic music and drug culture had also been impacted by late capitalism and had become inaccessible to the people that were actually going to drive culture forward or had anything interesting to say. At Art Basel this year, at the CoinDesk stage at SCOPE, someone said that as culture and technology intersect with capitalism it feels impossible to prevent the early drivers of cultural pushers from being excluded or priced out of their own makings.
Professionally like Dewitt, I also had given up on trying to find community at work. Sharing the Z generational marker I made climate change my end all be all . Instead social media and individualistic influencer culture were beginning to swallow it whole. I did find a community in the national network of distributed volunteers of an organization I worked for. I traveled to Kansas City where I ate the local pizza and drank many a beer. From there I stayed on a couch in New Orleans in the historic quarter for a conference. I did site visits at our many co-living houses in Philadelphia and crashed after a long night at a college dorm in Washington DC. In my hometown of Chicago I saw at least three generations of activists take root and then get pulled out of the ground.
There I would hear the complaints of volunteers as we imbibed and I inscribed myself in service to them, only to climb the climate ladder and learn that the leaders of that movement were not the hopeful locals but instead were judgmental, competitive, and ran on the currency of virtue. I sang songs with them half-heartedly as I put my laptop away when the work day was over and like Dewitt spent my evenings and weekends away from my day job understanding immediately they weren’t complementary colors. This compartmentalization ended in rancor, disassociation, clinical madness, and then massive burnout- in that order- and so I had to leave and continue searching. Many young people seemed to be trapped in identities of their own making, constantly blaming structures around them and failing to see their own inter and intrapersonal shortcomings. After this, I decided my environmental and social justice work would mostly involve adults. Not all of those spaces have proven healthy, but I’ve found the ones that have.
In Chicago and Denver and San Francisco and Austin I tried to explore the small somewhat more alternative nightlife scenes that offered moments of comfort amidst rapid gentrification and inequality. This was fun, dancing and drinking with young people whose class just barely allowed them to do so; while this population was similarly politically aware they didn’t espouse the same grating virtue signaling of those whose job was being woke . But feeling the need to explore, I pushed myself into the elite arts scene. It was in warehouses turned luxury co-working spaces I had actually found the most fun even though I knew there was an inherent vacuousness to it all . In late capitalism it was deep within where it seemed people felt the most free . Where the end times or the fear of them weren’t swallowing their minds and ideas whole. With only quarterly unpublished poetry collections to my name, I somehow calculatedly ended up with access to big art, music, and film festivals, absorbing both the content produced and the culture surrounding it at parties and panels and premiers.
Vacuous because those who benefited from the mid 2010 pushes in wellness, music, and the arts had sort of converged along class lines. All these millennial hopes had turned into somewhat of a monster, rather three monsters in a suit. And yet dancing on the stage at a private arts club DJ set and doing burpees in the desert at a venture capital fund-turned creative ideas summit was where I found fun. Where people expressed the most hope about moving forward and were committed to trying to understand the world and themselves without destroying everything in the process. While there is a certain amount of ego-centricity in continuous self exploration, development, and improvement, it was this that I felt many young people lacked, largely being relegated to surface-level identifiers and ensuing competing online discourse. Young people also lacked the time and space and funds to explore in person interaction in a meaningful way post-pandemic and so social media became the local watering hole.
While one side had presented a set of identities to be uplifted, the other side of the generation, the man-o-sphere had taken what was left. It’s a growing but active movement led but not exclusively made up of young men seeking to offer an alternative to the identity politics discourse that didn’t address them at all. Queer-coded Christian influencers, young Libertarians, and Joe Rogan listeners. What unites these competing generational movements is that they are rarely fun- and so I tend to wander away although I do my best to actively explore them in person and online, spooking them with stories of each other, respectively.
A weird third thing is the crypto-sphere. This I also had high hopes for and missed the boat. I had joined the online community of FWB a bit late, a digital web3 social club before meme coins, crypto-scams, and the same derivative online discourse had overtaken them in notoriety. But I did find some interesting people here that had a vision of an internet that was more democratic and less reductive. And that movement is moving in interesting ways. The current CEO, Greg Bresnitz was at that panel I mentioned earlier. I think there are ways that online media has the power to move the cultural pulse in ways that can bring us together, since most of our generation is online. What excites me about folks like FWB is their continuous exploration of culture, ideas, and solutions that are less removed than other similarly powerful forces from the profit motive and more tied to authenticity. On web 2, Facebook, Instagram, and X offer no such alternative. These are the things that have led me to the Media Studies program.
It’s both a personal and professional search that is what will push me to make it mean something. I’m at Art Basel right now, and a health issue has sort of trapped me away from some of the parties. But, that’s ok. While I still have been moving throughout morning art breakfasts, 90-minute workout pop-ups, and most days across the various fairs, I think I've captured enough notes and had enough late-night fun at these spaces. In this edition, I don’t need to see Amaraee in a crowded tent, be behind Travis Scott in the DJ booth or at the BWM x KITH pop-up. Once at a film festival afterparty I had gotten into by simply knowing where the secret door was and helping someone else find it, I became known as the “guy with the notebook” occasionally turning my head down in a conversation to jot something to think about later. This didn’t always prove successful as I once got into a party within a party for my bold fashion choices but then was told I couldn’t stay by the organizer.
It’s both a science and art to master the massive lines, complex social rules, and networking at these spaces but nonetheless a rewarding undertaking. As far as depth and meaning in culture, finding those spaces here can feel frivolous. Almost every luxury car brand puts a car in the middle of each art fair, like a high school senior prank, reminding us of who really has the power.
But the artists and tiny text descriptors next to the images offer clues and ideas about both what was and what can be. Of histories recontextualized and of the way social movements are being cemented into cultural outputs. Like the other festivals I’ve attended, most of the creatives don’t attend the fair partially due to costs, but stay glued to the call that their work might have proved profitable.
As I begin this transition, I’m staying hopeful for the next few years- and what I said today on a call was that it was because of this book. To be sure, the work of political advocacy will be important and we must work to protect those most in harm’s way. At the same time, I will also study and explore the roots and cultural underpinnings of political discourse and the way they are moving, while continuing to have fun along the way.
Just as Dewitt chronicled the first Trump presidency in New York, I hope to chronicle the second in my time there.
Σχόλια