K-HOLE and Box1824 captured the new landscape in their breakthrough 2014 report “Youth Mode.” They described an era of “mass indie” where the search for meaning is premised on differentiation and uniqueness, and proposed a solution in “Normcore.” Humorously, nearly everyone mistook Normcore for being about bland fashion choices rather than the grea... See more

The notion that creative people aren’t motivated by money, are always happy to be working, and prefer odd gigs to a stable career normalized the precarity and overwork of the post-Fordist world. The successful creative life calls to people like a siren song but fails to materialize for so many, who chalk their failure up to deeper personal deficien

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“I suggest that the death drive has something to do with it,” the piece reads. “Our aesthetic and behavior are certainly shaped by a sense of doom. There’s a nihilism to the way people dress and party; our heels get higher the closer we inch to death. It’s why people are smoking again, so says the New York Times.”

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 ... See more