Cultural theory explains modern trendsfrom @eugbrandstrat

Transcript

Soft clubbing rank coffee shop raves? I relate capitalist sigh off. Today I wanna talk about soft clubbing and the cultural ice age. I saw a particularly depressing cultural artifact earlier this week, TikTok's songs of the summer. Lo and behold, good my hand is number one. I think it's very telling that a song best known for accompanying content slop is all we have for our monocultural moment this summer. The cultural theorist Marc Better described this sentiment at length in what he termed the slow cancellation of the future. As late capitalism shuts down our cultural and political imagination, we're effectively consigned to an everlasting present in which our futures are just endless remixes and recycles of old cultural forms, hence the pervasiveness of nostalgia. But this feels like something worse. It's as if there isn't even the energy anymore to resurrect old cultural forms. The ice is starting to freeze over, and I see a real depressing correlate here in the phenomenon of soft clubbing. Generally, I try not to be too judgmental with people having fun, but I do detect something quite sinister in this. Club culture bad its best is subversive. It's anti efficiency. It's where misfits gather in liminal spaces to embrace freedom, abandon, and the possibility of becoming both wholly oneself or someone else. Soft clubbing feels like the exact opposite. It's a sun drenched performance of self optimization. Privacy is replaced by hyper visibility of bodies, of consumption, of social capital. It just becomes yet another opportunity to brand oneself. And that original premise of dreaming what life might be is reduced into yet another simulation of how things are and will always be. This is made all the more depressing when gentrification is leading to the mass closure of spaces that actually enabled alternate ways of thinking and living. And therein lies the real danger of the cultural ice age. Not just that things feel boring, but that they feel inevitable. I think we need to ask ourselves, right now, does culture need yet another soft iteration? Or does it need rank, strangeness, people willing to break the loop rather than reinforcing it, reminding us that something different is actually possible? This post brought to you by LateChronotype Rank. Together we can resist morning propaganda.