Normcore Was Always a Misunderstood Fantasy | SSENSE
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Normcore Was Always a Misunderstood Fantasy | SSENSE
This dialectic is muddy from the get-go, of course. It’s a version of the more familiar hipster trap: over time, the marginal labor of the bohemian experimentalist and taste-maker is swallowed up by the smug cartoon of the in-the-know consumer clone. But the near inevitability of this process also suggests that the first hipster was already part of... See more
Erik Davis • The Weird and the Banal
In an era more profoundly organized by Big Tech than our own elected governments, the new culture to be countered isn’t singular or top-down. It’s rhizomatic, nonbinary, and includes all who live within the Google/Apple/Facebook/Amazon digital ecosystem (aka GAFA stack).
Caroline Busta • The Internet Didn’t Kill Counterculture—you Just Won’t Find It on Instagram
Moodboarding as a practice is maxed out. It’s become a nearly absurdist consumer hobby, and it’s part and parcel of our algorithmic reality, targeted yet vague. Similarly, slop can’t be meaningfully curated because there are too many actors, algorithms, and microtrends being expressed simultaneously, in too many automated iterations.