https://samkriss.substack.com/p/the-internet-is-already-over
It’s a bit of a verbose article, but it does say something extremely real:
“In fact, one of the things that will not survive is novelty itself: trends, fads, fashions, scenes, vibes. We are thrown back into cyclical time; what’s growing old is the cruel demand to make things new. It’s already trite to notice that all our films are franchises now, all our bestselling novelists have the same mass-produced non-style, and all our pop music sounds like a tribute act. But consider that the cultural shift that had all those thirtysomething Cut writers so worried about their survival is simply the return of a vague Y2K sensibility, which was itself just an echo of the early 1980s. Angular guitar music again, flash photography, plaid. We’re on a twenty-year loop: the time it takes for a new generation to be born, kick around for a while, and then settle into the rhythm of the spheres.”
On top of my mind:
1996’s Twister and 2024’s Twisters.
Michael Jordan retired in early 00s and he’s still on Reddit’s front page or r/NBA regularly if not all the time.
Video games. OMG. It’s the same video games since 2000, just with better resolution and the wind in trees.
TikTok is already kind of passé because fads are faster than ever and that none of that is substantial enough to last. Reddit keeps looping, serving the same video that showed up in the morning or the 2018 meme that we all saw at least once.
The current betting culture soaring in the US is inherently cyclical. Bet, done. New bet, done. New bet, done. Ad nauseum.
The 90s were already cycling and recycling 70s aesthetic and whatnot, but you would still find folks doing their own thing without searching. Brand new stuff came up. Today, not only you have to look for them, but most people don’t care about novelty. Everyone seems to be in a comfort loop, content with version 42,456 of something and feeling dead at the same time.
Everything in the western culture feels like it very surely happened in the past 20-30 years already. Seriously. That’s kind of a first? Isn’t it hell? Not sure.