“At its best, a party is a place where intoxication and intellect are simultaneously welcomed, and where personal mythologies can take root and flourish into collective ones.”

- A. L. Bahta, Club Chess

At any given moment around midnight, amid the warm hum of chatter in a bar, two strangers will strike up a conversation, and soon a future collaboration is in the making. Somewhere else, a dancefloor is in a state of rapture, collectively entranced by a performance. On the other side of town, a party draws an unlikely ensemble of musicians, artists and weirdos. And as a constellation of disparate influences collide, a new creative scene takes root.

With the darkness of night dissolving our social armour, and interactions eased by inebriation, bars, pubs, clubs, and gig venues in any city play a crucial role in sparking ideas, brokering encounters, and allowing us to collectively revel in the arts. By day, we may have grown accustomed to passing each other like ships in the night. But as the sun sets, given the right infrastructure, a nocturnal, shared consciousness begins to form.

Musician Brian Eno once coined a word for these interpersonal dynamics, crucial for nurturing creativity: scenius. Combining ‘scene’ with ‘genius’, the term refers to the collective thinking that emerges when artists, visionaries, and thinkers live in close proximity, forming an interwoven community. Like a new joint brain, these clustered nodes interact in wild, unpredictable ways, sparking radical ideas and birthing the cutting edge of culture.

Scenius emerges, as writer Ian Leslie points out, in what becomes melting pots of passion, creativity and ego: “the stimulation of seeing what others are up to, the headspinning conversations, the clashes of different perspectives—creative, theoretical, commercial”. And nowhere are these sparks as fiery as at the places and gatherings of the night, where creative conversation, communal experimentation and altered states collide.

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The mycelial sprawls of after-midnight scenius can be traced throughout history across the underground network of clubs, bars and basements, giving birth to some of the most influential cultural scenes of modern history. From the cabarets of Weimar Berlin and the Ball scene in New York, to the emergence of house in Chicago and techno in Detroit, and the rise of grunge in Seattle, some of the world’s most significant cultural scenes were forged within tightly knit, vibrant nightlife cultures.

But what exactly is it about nightlife that makes it a potent facilitator of creative scenes? Observing a variety of cultural communities and movements across music, art and theatre, we identified 3 attributes that are particularly prevalent in after-midnight scenius: weak ties, collective effervescence and creative collision.

Weak ties

At local nighttime haunts, strangers turn into collaborators.

It’s 2013. We’re on Curtain Road in Shoreditch, London. Through a nondescript entrance and down a set of stairs, there’s a club called Plastic People. The venue, which shut its doors in 2015, is at first glance nothing special. A dingy, no-frills basement space with a pitch-black dancefloor. Yet today, the venue has taken on a near-mythical reputation. Partly because of its powerful audiophile sound system, which reportedly made revellers feel like they were dancing inside the speakers themselves. But more importantly, due to its influence in fostering some of the world’s defining electronic music scenes. From the party FWD>>’s part in incubating early dubstep, to the Co-Op night’s contribution to the broken beat sound, the events at the venue are credited with having an outsized impact on the electronic music zeitgeist.

In one recounted piece of lore that captures the venue’s tight-knit community of emerging creatives, musician Joseph Thornalley is hanging around at a regular party hosted by the label 1-800 Dinosaur. There, one night, the then-unknown producer encounters the artist James Blake. After a brief chat, Joseph hands him a USB drive containing songs he has made under the name Vegyn. Impressed by what he heard, Blake would later play these songs on BBC Radio in 2014, accelerating Vegyn into the spotlight.

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With its intimate creative network of locals that would return week after week to the venue and encouraged by its founder and resident DJ, Ade Fakile, Plastic embraced a no-holds-barred sense of eclecticism. It served as a hotspot for DJs, producers, and electronic music enthusiasts, connected through both artistry and friendship, to discover new, rare and diverse music and strike up conversations with other creatives pushing the envelope of their sound.

Like flows of electric current, certain nightlife spots around the world have a particular ability to expose us to new ideas and social connections, placing people with a shared creative passion in sustained, uninhibited proximity. Sociologist Mark Granovetter calls this the power of ‘weak ties’, arguing that our most valuable social connections are often not our closest mates and family, but rather the temporary friends we make in club queues, dancefloors and bathrooms, where spontaneous encounters between like-minded people lead to the exchange of ideas, numbers and, in Vegyn’s case, a USB.

Collective effervescence

Shared experiences that ripple far beyond the night itself.

It’s 1976. This time we’re in Manchester. The Sex Pistols, a then-obscure punk band on the rise, play to a small crowd at the Lesser Free Trade Hall. This is not just any gig. Every person in attendance will wake up the next morning viscerally inspired. Indeed, no single concert in British music history has seemingly had a higher ratio of attendees who would go on to become cultural vanguards. Among the roughly 40 people present at the show are future members of Joy Division, The Smiths’ Steven Morrissey, Mark E. Smith of The Fall, and Tony Wilson, founder of Factory Records. Many of them will mention that gig as a seminal moment that would forever shape their relationship to music.

What they experienced that night is what academics have come to call ‘collective effervescence’; a euphoric experience of a gig, performance or gathering that lasts far beyond the night itself. “Collective effervescence is an experience that we sometimes have when we’re in a crowd of people, when there’s a strong feeling of connection to others and a feeling of sacredness, that something special is happening,” explains psychology professor Shira Gabriel. And when a crowd is exposed to this communal high, the shared experience of the event ripples far beyond the night itself. Moments so charged that everyone present carries a piece of them forward, shaping the culture to come. It can happen at a live gig, at a club, or at a black box fringe theatre.

Sometimes, like at the Lesser Free Trade Hall, this communal rapture happens in intimate settings, generated by proximity and rawness. Sometimes it happens on an awe-inducing scale as well, as with Daft Punk’s performance at Coachella in 2006, a moment of collective effervescence experienced by the 40,000 or so people in attendance. The duo’s 11 pm slot at the Sahara Tent, where they performed inside their famous illuminated pyramid, is considered a tipping point in American EDM. As music critic Philip Sherburne notes, “the gig truly introduced Daft Punk to the rock kids…a lot of Americans, aside from ravers, hadn’t actually seen live electronic music before Coachella”. Electronic music producer Skrillex later cited the performance as an experience that fundamentally shaped his approach to music and visual production.

Creative collision

In the dim haze of nightlife, disciplines, influences and styles cross-pollinate.

It’s a Monday night in 1997 at The End, a club in London, and Trash, the party hosted by DJ Erol Alkan, is in full throttle. The club has become a gathering point for an unlikely coalition: techno heads, indie sleazers, and club rats, whose tastes would otherwise never intersect. Alkan’s playlist effortlessly moves from punk to pop to rock to disco, introducing a crossover sound that would eventually lead to some of the most prolific bands and emerging genres of the noughties. As NME’s Leonie Cooper later wrote, Trash was “the greatest indie crossover disco of all time.” The weekly party would provide early platforms for artists exploring the convergence of rock and electronic music, including Ladytron, Fischerspooner and Peaches.

Whether birthing hybrid sounds or novel combinations of aesthetics and styles, nightlife offers a space where scenes, subcultures, and ideas that would never meet in the daytime are forced into collision. Amid the haze and strobes of eclectic parties and genre-fluid nights, disciplines, influences and styles melt together to create something entirely new.

Nightlife establishments can act as a great leveller: a kind of third space where boundaries dissolve and artists from disparate mediums and across strata can gather, hang around, and mingle. Like the Mudd Club, integral to the NYC party scene in the 80s, where painters including Basquiat and Keith Haring spent time with Madonna and Klaus Nomi, leading to the New York no-wave scene. Or in the case of the Cedar Tavern in the East Village in the 50s, where painters like Pollock and de Kooning, musicians like John Cage, and writers including Frank O’Hara, John Ashbery, convened to drink, share ideas, critique each other’s work, and occasionally brawl.

The state of midnight scenius in 2026

In many places around the world, IRL nightlife is in a perilous state. In the UK, 75% of nightclubs have shut since 2005. British pubs are closing at a rate of almost two per day. Industry surveys suggest nearly half of Berlin’s 150-plus venues have considered closing.

And when venues close, we’re not simply losing places to escape to for hedonistic revelry and fleeting entertainment. When clubs, bars, and live-gig venues are integral to a city’s social fabric, the loss of nightlife often also leads to a slow but certain demise of the local creative scenes. Whether it’s live music, club culture, theatre or the visual arts, these scenes depend on physical venues and gatherings as spaces for minds, bodies and creative expression to converge.

Yet, the picture isn’t entirely bleak. Across cultures and cities, a dynamic sense of nightlife scenius continues to pulse.

Weak ties are still nurtured, especially at timeless institutions that refuse to die, which continue to act as centres of gravity within scenes. Places like Cafe Oto, the jazz bar in East London, that has long provided a home for eccentric musicians operating outside the mainstream. The venue was famously mentioned in music composer Daniel Blumberg’s Oscars speech last year when he accepted Best Original Score for The Brutalist: he later explained that most of the musicians he worked with on the film’s score were people he had met through visiting the jazz venue.

Beyond the old guard, new places are also opening that have all the necessary attributes to become breeding grounds for new creative movements. Open Ground - a recently launched club in the unassuming town of Wuppertal in Germany - has become a pilgrimage site for nightlife enthusiasts and DJs from all over the world, thanks to its programming and impeccably tuned sound system. “These spaces are rare,” producer dBridge declared after recently playing at the venue: “it’s the kind of club that can birth new scenes”. Appleblim, another artist, compared the sound to that of the mythical London club Plastic People mentioned earlier in this piece, urging those who “like to be moved physically and emotionally by music” to make the trip.

Amid the surface-level spectacle of many venues and gatherings, we still witness flashes of true collective effervescence. Moments when artistry, ambience and passion lock into perfect sync. We want to draw particular attention to party and festival organisers who are committed to designing spaces that can unlock that sense of transcendental awe. Places like the coliseum-esque Loop stage at Dutch electronic music festival Dekmantel, a circular arena, bathed in lighting that at once spears into the heavens, and collapses back down onto the mass of dancers at its core. It’s the work of the artist duo Children of the Light, whose work was once described as “a phantasmagoria: an illusionary, shifting, dreamlike spectacle re-enchanting spaces.” As they explain: “Our goal is to make you feel part of something larger—a particle of light in a vast, boundless cosmos.”

And while many nightlife scenes continue to narrow their appeal to specific niches, there are still those who see physical gatherings as opportunities for creative collision. In Berlin, DJ Courtesy runs the Against Interpretation club night, which challenges mainstream, formulaic notions of club culture, featuring a hybrid format that combines music, theatre, and art, “an experience between a group show and a dance party, a night where musicians, DJs, and contemporary artists explore performance, music and sound.”

In her book The Lonely City, writer Olivia Laing observes the strange sensation of collective solitude that comes with living in a densely populated city: “you can be lonely anywhere, but there is a particular flavour to the loneliness that comes from living in a city, surrounded by millions of people.” This is what it’s like to live in a metropolis today: vast numbers of inhabitants in close physical proximity, filled with creative energy and passion, yet isolated, with fewer and fewer places to convene, share, collaborate, and experience the beauty of art together. Increasingly, social networks are expected to replace these real-life encounters. We expect inspiration, conversation, and community to emerge from social content feeds, live streams, and Discord servers. And when the internet begins to replace the collective encounter of a night out, nightlife loses its once-de facto role in society as the engine of culture, and creative scenes are often reduced to hollowed-out versions of their former selves.

Championing midnight scenius means re-embracing the idea of a city at night as a vital, interconnected organism. As the architecture think-tank AMO argues in their Club AMO report, cities are the most ancient social network that have stood the test of time: “the art, fashion, and the city’s magical ability to connect us at the right time, night or day. Hundreds of different places to hang out, be inspired, meet up, or split up.” We need this physical social network as a place where spontaneous, unlikely encounters happen, where scenes can effortlessly collide, and where we can collectively experience creativity in all its forms and feel viscerally inspired.

This is the second chapter of The Nocturnal Otherworld, an episodic trend report exploring the culture, communities, and experiences that come alive at night. You can view the first chapter here, where we explore partying in the age of constant optimisation. Thanks to Jack Arnhold for supporting the research for this piece.

Across mythologies, the otherworld symbolises a supernatural realm distinct from everyday human reality. A place of perpetual youth, abundance, and pleasure, where time flows differently.

I’ve always felt that the collective gatherings and physical spaces that come alive at night - from the bustling ‘third spaces’ of bars and pubs to dark, dingy clubs and illegal raves - offer something similarly ethereal. A uniquely intimate and liminal reality beyond the well-lit sensibility and structured productivity of daytime.

The nocturnal otherworld is an episodic trend report that offers a deeply human, imaginative, and cross-disciplinary look at how after-hours culture fosters a special sense of connection, identity, escape, and excitement.

The findings in this series of essays have been informed by on-the-ground ethnography, social listening, and various interviews with nightlife insiders, from industry advocates and DJs, to clubkids and urban planners, connecting hundreds of dots across the diverse facets and perspectives that represent the nightlife experience.

When former 24/7 cities are today frequently devoid of activity after midnight, and younger generations are championing a new relationship to partying and socialising, the questions we ultimately want to answer are: what do people lose when they lose their nightlife? And what do they stand to gain by keeping the nocturnal otherworld alive?

Expert collaborators:

• Lutz Leichsenring; Berlin Club Commission, global nightlife advocate

• Andy Crysell; author, Selling the Night

• Mike Evans; ex head of marketing at Dekmantel, Vienna nightlife advocate

• Harumi Arrascue; urban planner; nighttime culture; Sydney District Council

Research and editorial support by Jack Arnhold

In Human Traffic, a noughties cult classic film that follows five friends through a debauched weekend in the UK, the impulsive, hedonistic weekend warrior Jip captures the giddy anticipation before a night out:

“I’ve got 48 hours off from the world, man! I’m going to blow steam out of my head like a screaming kettle, I’m gonna lose the plot on the dancefloor. Anything could happen tonight, you know? This could be the best night of my life!”

It’s a scene that evocatively captures the role that a night out has played for many generations. A chance to let loose, to blow off steam, escape the daily grind. As the sun sets, the world of bars, clubs, and afters opens up, offering a temporary reprieve from office cubicles, Zoom meetings, traffic jams and domestic obligations. From Friday through to Sunday, exciting uncertainty replaces monotonous predictability. Anything could truly happen. These could be the best nights of your life. A place to lose track of time, to lose yourself entirely, to chase your instinctual urges until the sun reluctantly rises again.

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However, in an era defined by economic precarity, the dominance of hustle culture, and an increasing obsession with wellness, this once-inherent desire for reckless abandon is fading. Young people who might once have craved escape and release from routine now prioritise ‘locking in’ and reasserting control. When the cultural narrative celebrates optimisation of time and body, the impulse to let loose and lose the plot feels counterproductive, wasteful and irresponsible.

As a result, a new kind of party paradigm is emerging, one that seeks to solve our collective need for social, offline interactions, without the frenzied alcohol-centred hedonism of late-night partying.

From the rise of matcha and coffeeshop raves to dance parties at gyms, saunas, bakeries and beigel shops, these daytime-oriented, wellness-focused events offer what their organisers call “conscious partying”. Spaces and gatherings that facilitate music, movement and socialising in a way that attempts to coexist with the equal desire for control and balance, a way to party that also intersects with a desire for wellness, sleep, health and mindfulness.

Soft clubbing promises to make partying calmer, intentional, and balanced. But shouldn’t a night out offer a respite from these very sensibilites?

Speaking to nightlife participants who have attended sober daytime raves, there are clear benefits to the soft clubbing trend. For many, these gentler forms of partying offer an opportunity to find genuine connection and release in a way that feels more casual, inclusive and sustainable. A party experience without hangovers and regrets.

However, despite these virtues, a niggling dissatisfaction persists. When partying is so governed by restraint and balance, designed to slot neatly into lifestyles of productivity and intention, is something lost?

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Beyond the matcha rave enthusiasts, there’s a growing faction of sceptics, who view this emerging trend as antithetical to the OG partying ethos. As Rory Bradshaw, a pro-partying wellbeing influencer, exclaims in a TikTok protesting against the confluence of raves and daytime sensibility:

“They say partying is one of the most unproductive things you can do, but you won’t see me at a coffee shop rave anytime soon. Partying matters. Dance out our emotions, feel safe being exactly who we are.”

This sentiment is at the core of the anti-soft club movement. Coffeeshop and matcha raves offer an opportunity to connect with others and have some fun in a casual, accessible space. But to truly achieve emotional transcendence and a sense of escape from the shackles of everyday life, one must embrace the frenzied chaos of sweaty clubs and the intensity of late-night raves. Only then can we truly let our guard down, unravel our tidy daytime identities and achieve a total loss of oneself to something larger.

Music artist FKA Twigs coined a term for this exact feeling with the title of her 2025 album Eusexua, which she describes as the feeling of pure bliss and the sensation of losing oneself, and losing track of time; an experience she recounted feeling at the early hours of the morning in a rave in Prague:

“That feeling of when you’ve been out all night and you lose 7 hours to music, and you look at your phone and you think, ‘Oh, my gosh, it’s 8:00 in the morning.”

Amid a time in society plagued by loneliness and a constant pressure to maintain productivity, a feral night out, staying out until it’s suddenly 8 in the morning, enveloped by the thumping bass of a dancefloor, becomes a radical act of resistance. Pushing through to the break of dawn, encircled by the raspy chatter of the afters, transforms into a gesture of defiance.

Can this experience of dissolving into the mass, into the music itself, be achieved within the confines of a daytime sober rave?

A 2021 study in the journal Frontiers in Psychology exploring the cathartic power of dance-focused events, found that 4 ‘D’s were required for partying to unlock a sense of awe and personal transformation. Dance and Drums were prerequisites, but two other ingredients were equally vital: sleep Deprivation and Drugs. The research validates what the soft clubbing detractors intuitively knew all along: daytime coffee raves might minimise sleep disruption and help you to feel virtuous on Sunday morning, but those very disruptions, the deprivation, the altered states, are vital steps to the metamorphosis.

For advocates of soft clubbing, sober daytime parties are heralded as an opportunity to have fun, listen to music and connect with others without the physical repercussions and late-night excess of a traditional night out. However, for some, soft clubbing is not only dismissed as a subpar partying experience, but accused of being something even worse: a commodified betrayal of our leisure time. Derided as a version of nightlife that has buckled under the relentless pressure of capitalism, conformed by the need for constant productivity, where a hangover is seen as a waste of valuable time. Mocked as an act of performative status signalling, where losing oneself to something larger is irrelevant. As cultural commentator argues:

“I try not be too judgemental of people having fun, but I do detect something quite sinister here. Club culture is at its best is subversive, its anti-efficiency, it’s where misfits gather in liminal spaces to embrace freedom, abandon and embrace 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-optimisation.”

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Observing the abundance of sober daytime rave content on social media, the dancefloor indeed appears to almost always feel like a performance designed for social media flexing, filled with a sea of phones capturing the DJ and filming each other dancing, with cups of bright green Matcha in the air.

Speaking to nightlife participants about their first-hand accounts, they too describe a highly performative atmosphere. As Viktoria, a research participant with experience attending sober daytime parties in Dubai, explained to us: “they wanted to share that they’re part of that cultural movement. Because there is sort of an aura around cool people gathering there, a lot of biohackers, a lot of ‘cool’ entrepreneurs”. Another research participant, Cris, describes a similar experience at a bakery party in Paris, DJ’d by Peggy Gou: “They were there for the happening, not really for the culture. They were defo there to be seen and record the moment for the clout.”

Can ‘softer’ forms of partying exist beyond the trap of optimisation and productivity?

In The Birth of Tragedy, Nietzsche famously argued that culture, art and the human experience are shaped by two opposing forces. On one side, there’s the Apollonian desire: representing reason, control, the individual, the search for structure. On the other end of the spectrum, the Dionysian force, representing chaos, excess, collectivism and returning to a carnal state.

Soft clubbing, often rooted in the sensible logic of Apollonian reasoning, rejects the Dionysian desire for chaos, excess and impulse. But what if the future of partying could find a way to balance these two forces? Merging intensity with intention? Acting with impulse, but also reason? Pursuing our instinctual desires, while staying in control?

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Mike Evans, ex-head of marketing at the electronic music festival Dekmantel and a nightlife advocate in Vienna, who we spoke with for the research, paints a picture of an emerging partying landscape that explores that very intersection. A new wave of organisers, promoters and crowds navigating a new frontier where emotional transformation and a sense of unbridled escapism can be achieved without relying on the alcohol and stimulant-fuelled late-night excess of ‘traditional’ partying.

One of the examples mentioned by Evans is the DJ and producer Eris Drew’s Mystery of the Motherbeat parties, which position clubbing as a “space of healing”, a place designed around psychedelic introspection and sonic conjuring rather than total hedonistic obliteration.

Viktoria mentions ecstatic dance as another expression of a more mindful and intentional clubbing experience: a freeform movement practice in which participants dance without a prescribed structure, guided only by the music and their own bodies, free from alcohol, phones, and conversation. As she explains: “It’s about expressing yourself in the freest way possible, you can do whatever you want, you can move into whatever way you want, and it’s a safe space. Everyone is on their own journey.”

Elsewhere, this tension between transcendence and softness finds form in the rise of ambient clubs, such as Kwia in Berlin, described as a place of “quiet intensity, emotional openness, and deep listening”, un/becoming in San Francisco, and Tender Place in Melbourne; something in between living rooms and listening bars that offer a more gentle form of escape and transcendence from the everyday.

The shape of partying to come: soft, and intimate, yet still offering cathartic release

On one hand, we see emerging generations becoming less willing to engage in the excesses of a traditional night out and its consequences. On the other hand, sober daytime raves risk leaning too heavily into wellness culture, turning into a performative fad, stripping themselves of the intensity and transcendence that partying has always promised. So the question becomes: what comes next?

Based on our research, the future lies somewhere in the middle. Not a coffee shop rave, with dancers waving baguettes and matchas in the air. Not a 48-hour techno club marathon. But events and gatherings that enable us to escape the daily grind, fully let go, and achieve real communion, without the destructive repercussions of excess, chaos and impulse.

When people imagine the late 90s and early noughties, they usually think of Paris Hilton, Britney Spears and Justin Timberlake. They picture Juicy Couture velour tracksuits, low-rise jeans, Von Dutch trucker caps and Ed Hardy graphic t-shirts, lava lamps and bean bags. An abundance of blingy rhinestones, bubblegum pink, glitter and saccharine-sweet pop.

However, when I think about the turn of the century, I imagine something entirely different.

I envision sleek hotel lounges, dotted with transparent resin chairs and brushed metal tables, and stylish offices lined with translucent iMacs and frosted glass walls. Everywhere, people dressed in streamlined, monochrome outfits, sporting silver headphones and holding new, shiny gizmos that look like they’re straight out of a sci-fi film. Everything is enveloped in a soft blue haze, as if submerged in a cool mist.

This all feels like a strange lucid dream, but it turns out it was real.

Amid the economic recovery and growing technology industry of the early noughties, as the gaudy excess of the 90s was fading away, this new, sleek, urban vision of the future really was emerging. 25 years ago, when I was barely a teenager, I vividly remember living in this reality, a world filled with the soft silhouettes of minimal design and seemingly cutting-edge technology. There were subdued shades of baby blue, granite and seafoam green everywhere, and a sense of quiet optimism reverberating from every corner.

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This clean and restrained reality emerging at the dawn of the new millennium has retrospectively been dubbed ‘Gen X Soft Club’, a term originally coined by the Consumer Aesthetics Research Institute, an online community dedicated to developing a visual lexicon of consumer ephemera throughout modern history. ‘Gen X’: because it catered to the growing wave of middle-class Brits, Europeans and Americans entering adulthood at the time. ‘Soft Club’: because it offered a vision of urban living, socialising and partying that felt distinctly calm, serene and grounded.

“Thanks to a variety of new well-paid occupations in the new economy - technology, media and the creative industry - high earnings allowed them to lead a highly curated lifestyle”, Alium, a researcher at CARI who has been researching the aesthetic since 2018, tells me. “It was incredibly aspirational, meant to be mature, about showing off that you were a well-adjusted young adult leading a sophisticated life”.

And while this new sophisticated lifestyle had a specific look and feel, the thing I recall most vividly was how this version of adulthood sounded. When I think of Gen X Soft Club, I hear the thick, slow beat and hazy melodies of Portishead’s Sour Times and Sneaker Pimps’ Six Underground. I can make out the ethereal synths of Olive’s You’re not Alone, the melancholic piano and strings of Moby’s Porcelain.

Strung out and coming down from the high-energy rave culture of the mid 90s, as the new millennium began to unfold, so did a desire to slow down and chill out. Taking inspiration from the meditative sunset sessions at Ibiza’s Café Del Mar and the coolly detached moodiness of the trip-hop emanating from the basements of Bristol, a whole new sound was taking shape. Massive Attack, Air, Faithless, Thievery Corporation, Zero 7, to name a few.

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This distinctly mellow downtempo groove became the perfect soundtrack for the emerging wave of swanky hotel lounges, trendy bars and tasteful apartment studios that came to define the modern lifestyle afforded by the economic boom of the early 2000s.

My parents, the aspiring Gen X yuppies that they were, amassed a comprehensive collection of chillout and trip-hop EPs, stacked neatly in a CD tower in our living room. The album sleeves were as telling as the music: band members photographed in the middle of empty metro stations, record label logos transposed on plane wings, album names spelt out on departure boards. The artwork seemed eager to capture the new global, fast-moving, urban nomadic lifestyle that was becoming readily available to everyone through disposable incomes and affordable air travel. I’d daydream about this adult life depicted in front of me: constant globetrotting, seamlessly floating through airport terminals, boutique hotels and fancy bars, a constant rotation of chillout classics playing in the background.

A host of magazines emerged as style bibles for this neo-jetsetting, cosmopolitan lifestyle: i-D, The Face, Dazed & Confused and Sleazenation. But it was another magazine - Wallpaper* - that will be remembered as the ultimate instructional manual for the Gen X Soft Club. I recently came across an old issue of the iconic lifestyle magazine that catered to “urban modernists” at the time. On one page, an elegant woman wearing olive-coloured Jil Sander is posing in a modern, light and airy Tokyo office space. On another page, a handsome man gazes out to the reader, slouched over a tastefully squiggly Philippe Starck designer chair, dressed top to toe in stone-coloured Gucci.

There was something effortlessly cool about this moment in fashion. Menswear in particular. With a growing creative class eager to distance themselves from traditional, stuffy notions of luxury, designers like Gucci, Calvin Klein, Prada and Helmut Lang swooped in to offer something that felt entirely new and fresh: understated silhouettes in muted tones of mint, brown, lilac and granite. Dressed down tailoring and elevated nylon techwear that felt formal enough for the office, practical enough for the airport, sufficiently edgy for the club. As Alium from CARI explains, this was the advent of “anti-fashion minimalism”: stripped-back, clean outfits tailored to always-on-the-go urban nomads unimpressed by fussy style trends.

This was also an era defined by a distinctly techno-optimistic attitude, with an array of new gadgets taking centre stage in the cultural zeitgeist. With the first iPhone still a few years away, Sony and Nokia were introducing us to an exciting new world of digital communication and entertainment. Nokia’s tagline at the time was “connect with style”, and looking back at tech ads from that time, this truly was a time when electronic hardware felt like a genuine form of stylish self-expression.

A post recently found its way onto my Instagram feed - a carousel of various technology, fashion and style artefacts from the soft club years - the achingly nostalgic piano loop from Robert Miles’ trance anthem Children playing in the background. “This is the future I was promised”, a fellow millennial laments in the comments. As we hurtle towards a very different future, filled with geopolitical instability, a turbulent economy, and technological fatigue, I often daydream about this alternative reality we were all promised. A world that was meant to feel soft and grounded, yet filled with optimistic possibility.

I’ve recently noticed I’m not the only one with this daydream - a new generation of artists, designers and creatives are drawing inspiration from the GXSC vibe, eager to bring back a sense of calm futurism to the world.

I hear it in the sound of musicians like Oklou, James K and a.s.o, who utilise dusky basslines, spy-movie strings and cloud-like vocals to channel the soft club aura with remarkably authentic precision. I sense it in the ambitions of the indie tech brand Nothing, a company with a commitment to bring back the excitement of translucent electronic hardware. I see it in fashion brands like Minga London, reinventing Helmut Lang-like minimalism for the modern age.

In today’s state of tech ubiquity, we may not be able to fully reclaim that brief time of giddy optimism for shiny new gadgets. Since 9/11, the age of unrestricted, seamless global travel might be behind us. The illusion of economic stability we experienced in the 2000s has long since shattered. But there’s still hope of capturing some essence of this lost future. Whenever the world feels chaotic, stressful and disjointed, I invite you to put on some minimal nylon techwear, slouch down in a translucent resin chair and play some downtempo chillout, and escape into the cool, blue oasis of the 2000s.

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The full version of this piece appears in issue 2 of Noix magazine - ‘a modern lads mag’ -alongside writing on menswear, culture and taste that’s well worth your time. Pick up a copy online or at a handful of print stockists across the UK and US.

Diesel isn’t alone in leaning into music hardware as a fashion statement. This season, headphones, CD players and boomboxes have been appearing everywhere on catwalks, in collections and across editorial shoots.

There’s Alyssa Liu’s feature in Teen Vogue, where the Winter Olympics gold medalist poses amid a tangle of CD players and stereos. Sandro’s recent editorial features a model in bright orange 80s-style headphones. Miu Miu debuted a custom Walkman as part of its SS26 collection. And then there’s the Tati Fête Bag, a viral creation from Nik Bentel Studio: a personal stereo shaped like a bag, with a control panel for spontaneous sound-sharing. The list goes on, quietly multiplying.

On one level, analogue music hardware now functions as a convenient prop, instantly delivering nostalgic pop-culture charm. But on another, it signals something deeper about the way we listen. Audiophilia, once the domain of obsessive enthusiasts chasing top-tier systems, has evolved. Today, flexing music hardware – whether cutting-edge hi-fi or deliberately low-fi and retro – is performative and lifestyle-driven; a way to signal taste, style and cultural capital.

The theatricality of analogue audio first bubbled up with the rise of the “Wired It Girl.” Shelby Hull documented the trend on her @wireditgirls Instagram as early as 2021, tracking wired earbuds spilling from the ears of celebrities from Bella Hadid to Jacob Elordi. As Hull told CNN, it was rarely about a technical preference: wired headphones had become cool precisely because they declared indifference to tech: “there’s something so effortless about it, very cool, [they’re] very unbothered to keep up with the latest trends.”

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And just like the tangled wires of analogue earbuds have returned as an accessory that exudes something infinitely cooler than AirPods, retro MP3 and portable CD players have also made a comeback. These devices offer a return to tactile, physical players; buttons you can touch, a weight you can feel, a far more personable alternative to Spotify on a black-mirrored iPhone.

Apple’s now-discontinued iPods, in particular, are enjoying a renaissance. A lively second-hand market has emerged around customised iPod Nanos with altered shells and clickwheels. iPod Shuffles, with their Dieter Rams-inspired industrial sensibilities and bright colours, have even been repurposed as hairclips – wearable technology in its truest sense.1

Ultimately, the resurgence of MP3 players connects to a sense of excitement that many associate with Y2K tech. A time when we felt in control of our music taste, an era of our very own private music libraries, before streaming services inundated us with limitless choice, and algorithms flattened our once unruly music taste. Anyone old enough to remember the iPod silhouette ads from the early 2000s, featuring dancers, proudly holding their iPods, moving freely against backdrops of fuchsia, yellow and green to a soundtrack of N.E.R.D. and the Black Eyed Peas, will recall this sense of optimism, where music players represented creative passion and energetic liberation.

It’s no surprise, then, that Apple devices have become a touchstone for a new generation of pop artists. US singer Slayyyter has described her upcoming album - Worst Girl in America - as ‘iPod music’ - as a means to capture the pre-algorithmic eccentricity of its sound: “its when u put an ipod on shuffle and u hear a track by U2 then M.I.A then kid cudi back to back but they all feel sonically related”.

Producer Ninajirachi has also evocatively captured this nostalgic relationship with audio hardware through her music, earning her millions of fans around the world. In her break through single from last year, titled iPod Touch, the self-proclaimed ‘girl EDM’ musician reminisces about listening to her secret songs found in the murky depths of the internet, turning mundane moments on the bus into unforgettable memories. Indeed, for many young people, using an iPod today signifies a nostalgic return to a time when listening to music felt like a highly intimate and personable experience.

Performative audiophilia doesn’t stop with the more intimate signalling of analogue headphones and MP3 players. The conspicuous, public display of hi-fi sound systems, which uniquely live at the intersection of high-quality audio and aesthetic craftsmanship, have also become an effective emblem of taste in physical environments.

From Valentino’s L’Atelier Sonore listening room on Madison Avenue, to Pharrell’s use of the cult OJAS system design as part of Louis Vuitton’s fall-winter 2026 runway, artisan speakers and carefully crafted listening experiences have become a prerequisite for luxury spaces. Hi-fi audio has always represented the highest expression of musical culture, featured in spaces and rituals typically associated with tastemakers and early adopters, from Japanese jazz kissas to Jamaican sound system culture, and as a result offers a tangible way to signal cultural credibility. When you look at collaborations like artist Mateo Garcia’s architectural horns and geometric structures for Celine’s Fall Winter 2026 show, it becomes clear that featuring an artisan sound system is never just about ensuring immaculate acoustics; they are a canvas you showcase a commitment to detail, beauty and craftsmanship.

The same can be said for the rise of listening bars across London, Berlin, Paris and Barcelona. Dimly lit, intentionally designed, these spaces have become the new default hangouts for those in the know. Their popularity reflects not only a heightened regard for high-quality sound, but also an opportunity for its patrons to see and be seen by like-minded people. As Benny Howell, co-owner of UK audio space Holding Patterns, told Dazed: “They’re beautiful, well-curated and open. Listening bars draw from that Japanese influence, but apply it through the lens of community.”

When studies have found that music quality deteriorates year on year, thanks to the increasingly compressed audio formats used by streaming services and the dominance of Bluetooth connections, it’s perhaps no surprise that audiophilia, in all its forms, has evolved into such a potent marker of taste; an opportunity to separate the devotees from the musically disengaged.

However, just as the concept of the ‘performative male’ emerged as a pejorative to describe the act of listening to Clairo, drinking matcha oat lattes, and reading bell hooks in public, merely to appear in tune with progressive values, performative audiophilia runs the risk of falling into the same trap. The open display of music hardware, whether it’s a hi-fi sound system in a luxury space, a custom, branded MP3 player, or the deliberate rejection of subpar wireless Airpods in favour of something more vintage, can signal a genuine appreciation for music culture. But without intention, depth, and functionality, these acts can easily come across as hollowed-out performances. Silent, wired earbuds dangling loosely around necks, merely in an attempt to exude cool girl energy, a customised iPod Nano with an empty library, a €10,000 OJAS stack proudly on display, but not plugged in; will only reveal you as an audio-poseur: all treble, no bass.

This is an extended version of a SEED originally published over at Protein.

Footnotes:

I joined recently for his That Business of Meaning podcast, discussing a wide range of topics, including: how growing up feeling like an outsider has shaped my approach to research, getting into cultural strategy, and the dark forest future of social media. Listen below.

THAT BUSINESS OF MEANING

Alexi Gunner on Signals & Culture

Alexi Gunner is an independent cultural researcher and strategist based in Melbourne. He is the founder of idle gaze, a consulting practice and newsletter exploring the hidden undercurrents of culture. He previously held strategy roles at We Are Social, AKQA, and Zalando, and served as cultural futurist and Berlin chapter lead for RADAR…

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3 months ago · 3 likes · Peter Spear

“All futurists are archivists, all archivists are futurists.”

In her essay on the importance of archiving, argues that diving into the past and thinking about the future are fundamentally inseparable.

I keep returning to this notion as I observe how some of the most innovative artists and forward-thinking brands today embrace thoughtful retrospection more than ever.

I’m not talking about the rose-tinted, nostalgic kind of reflection. I mean the ability to decode the cultural canon with nuance: digging into the back catalogues, obsessing over niche references, and unearthing obscure details. In a cultural landscape that trades on novelty, sifting through the archives is a quietly radical act. It’s not about seeking comfort in the familiar; it’s about treating the past as unfinished material, something to be decoded, challenged, and rebuilt.

A few days ago, MaisonMargiela announced that the house plans to open up its inner workings to the public through an initiative titled MaisonMargiela/folders, a digital archive, publicly accessible via Dropbox. The Margiela atelier will use the online folders to store reference images and inspiration from the brand’s previous collections, alongside project timelines and other working documents as they prepare for their Fall-Winter 2026 show. This is interesting on a few levels. For a brand with a penchant for anonymity, choosing to work in public is a significant gesture in itself. But it also reveals something deeper: a commitment to showing how carefully curated archival references eventually turn into fully formed visions for the future.

is just one of many recent initiatives across luxury fashion and beauty that explore the past as a path to innovation. Coty recently introduced a scent based on a 120-year-old blend from their archives, while cult Indian label Kartik Research drew on 70s archival textiles for their Fall-Winter 2026 collection.

Dior’s Spring-Summer 2026 show, helmed by Jonathan Anderson, stayed true to the house’s origins while carving a new path forward, by diving deep into the brand’s archive. The opening film, by documentarian Adam Curtis, provided astute symbolism for how the fashion house wished to frame its excavation of the past. Beginning with the caption “Dare to enter the house of Dior,” the film deployed Curtis’ signature whiplash digressions, menacing atmospherics, and near-psychedelic compilations of archival footage, flashing the house’s history before guests’ eyes, interweaving it with horror films, before imploding into a Dior shoe box. As if to say: our past is well understood and respected, but as a source of inspiration, not a template to be replicated.

This is archive futurism: a nerdy curiosity about a brand’s history and its place within the wider cultural canon, paired with the creative zeal to connect dots, recontextualise, and remix what came before into something entirely new. The most interesting creatives today aren’t simply referencing the past; they treat back catalogues, history books, and retrospectives as raw material for future visions.

When everyone seems to be leaning on the same recycled moodboards, archive futurism can play a pivotal role in enriching the creative ecosystem. As TikTok user 0scill8 argues in a video, one of the reasons culture feels stagnant right now is that artists simply aren’t reading anymore:

“They therefore end up using the same references and producing the same output competing to see who can feed it to the algorithm best. I think [creatives] who are nerds of their art forms, other art forms, politics and history, are able to inform their work in unique and interesting ways, and that’s something we’re really lacking right now. We need to bring back artists who can read, because otherwise it’s getting so boring.”

0scill8 names Grace Wales Bonner, Kode9, and Lubaina Himid as creatives who engage the canon with genuine curiosity and critique. Grace Wales Bonner, in particular, is a prime example of archive-futurism at play. In addition to running her namesake label, she serves as creative director of Hermès menswear, and across both roles, she is renowned for her approach to archival research. A function first and foremost positioned as a creative practice, described as: “the melding of ideas from not only her immediate peers but also the nuance that can be found in the films, art, and worlds of those she finds influential, finding a way to seamlessly integrate them into her output.”

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Take the Autumn/Winter 2020 collection Lovers Rock, an ode to the British Afro-Caribbean music scene that emerged from underground London house parties in the ‘70s. Or the brand’s recent campaign featuring UK rapper Dave, which channels Vermeer’s Girl with a Pearl Earring through a contemporary lens.

In a feature for WePresent, she explains how visual and historical research unlocks new meaning:

“I’m interested in what’s created in that between space, through things that already exist, through conversation, and in turn, creating something which I hope will be richer through that process.”

This same impulse, making something new from the spaces between, is equally felt in the music zeitgeist. One of my current obsessions right now is the American artist Oneohtrix Point Never, arguably one of this moment’s most influential producers, who operates as a kind of sonic archaeologist.

While many might not be familiar with his name, they’ll have heard his productions infiltrating the pop music zeitgeist through his collaborations with The Weeknd, Rosalía and FKA Twigs, and in his scores for films including Uncut Gems and Marty Supreme. His latest album, Tranquilizer, pulls from a vast archive of once-ubiquitous digital samples from the nineties, the kind that seeded themselves into the soundtracks of TV shows, video games, corporate videos, and ads of the era. The result is an album that feels futuristic and otherworldly, yet eerily familiar, what Sasha Geffen at Resident Advisor aptly called a “wonderland of decay.” A perfect example of forward-thinking work built from the ruins of the past.

Archive futurism might be exactly what culture needs to escape its current malaise. In his recent book, Blank Space, a Cultural History of the Twenty-First Century, argues that over the past twenty-five years, pop culture has suffered from a perplexing lack of reinvention. As a result, we’ve entered a cultural ‘blank space’: an era when reboots, rehashes, and fads flourish, while bold artistic experimentation struggles to gain recognition. To restore cultural innovation, he proposes, paradoxically, that we once again need to become intimately familiar with all that has come before:

In the past, conservatives treated the canon as a sacred and complete archive, something to be preserved rather than expanded. This is precisely why the avant-garde sought to destroy it. But in truth, even the avant-garde need the canon. The only way to invent something new is to fully understand what came before…the goal should be a disciplined engagement with historical works, paired with a futurist drive to forge entirely new creative pathways.

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Today, re-engaging with the canon is not just a creative necessity; it has clout. We are entering an era of what calls ‘wisdom-signalling’. In an age of algorithmic flattening, where information is abundant but insight is scarce, appearing well-informed is becoming powerful social currency. Amid the democratisation of information through search and AI, basic domain knowledge is no longer enough: “people want others to see them as someone who can think deeply and broadly in a world that so rewards quick hot takes and simplified soundbites”.

As a result, I’ve noticed that contemporary artists, who may have previously dismissed works of the past as stuffy anachronisms, are now far more likely to flaunt their knowledge of the 20th-century pantheon. Take Charli XCX, for example. She consistently pushes pop culture forward, yet also shows genuine appreciation for the canon. She recently went on Criterion Closet Picks to showcase her love for classic auteurs like David Cronenberg, posts Letterboxd reviews of obscure indie flicks from the 70s and proclaims an appreciation for Turner Prize-winning photographers in her recommendations. Digging through the archives feels more chic and aspirational than ever.

Last month, in a now-famous speech at the World Economic Forum, Mark Carney, the Canadian politician and economist, argued that “nostalgia is not a strategy”. He’s right. Yearning for how things used to be is unproductive. But there is still immense value in studying what came before, not in hopes of repeating it, but in order to create something radically new in the spaces in-between.

Yet, despite this abundance of enthusiasm for cultural research, it often feels like it’s easier than ever to slip into the gravity well of banality. Cookie-cutter essays optimized for algorithmic engagement. Hot takes stripped of depth. Fleeting fads interpreted as extreme, paradigm-shifting hyperbole. We resort to dramatic binaries, either painting the future through the lens of stressful dystopias and exclusionary utopias.

The limitation of our vision is not due to insufficient data. Instead, what I think we’re missing is a sense of imagination, creativity, and genuine curiosity. Without these elements, the act of research itself has lost its potency, our findings and interpretations reduced to a shallow performance, where the same ideas are recycled and repackaged in an endless feedback loop.

In this essay, written in partnership with Sublime, my main personal knowledge management tool, I’ll share how I approach research as a form of pattern disruption, an intentional practice for breaking free from the hall of mirrors that traps so much of today’s trend forecasting. I’ll walk through how I use Sublime to collect, connect and create meaning from information in ways that resist the common shortfalls: confirmation bias, surface-level analysis, and the pressure for immediate answers. It’s an approach that embraces discomfort rather than absolute certainty, curiosity rather than conclusions. Fuelled by a desire to explore the unknown, to go down deeper rabbit holes, I believe the greatest research skill you can have is, indeed, “being a nosy b***h who wants to find out“.

Tuning in to weird signals

In the world of trend research, we are traditionally taught to be on the lookout for ‘weak signals’ - small, low-frequency indicators that hint at a potential shift in culture. And while scanning for these weak signals is a fundamental part of the process, it’s easy to get stuck in a pattern of only noticing evidence that confirms our preconceived notions about the world. We develop tunnel vision, unconsciously conforming to the ideas and beliefs that dominate the zeitgeist of any given moment.

Instead, what I have trained myself to look for, more specifically, are ‘weird’ signals. Weird signals are behaviours and phenomena that feel strange or out of place. But importantly, they also tend to hint at unanticipated future cultural upheavals. As cultural futurist explains: “weird signals usually give us a glimpse into the future we can’t see yet. Every major cultural shift that changed our lives once started as a small anomaly in the system.”

It’s easy to avoid these uncomfortable anomalies, because they create cognitive dissonance. But by embracing discomfort and attuning ourselves to weird signals, we can begin to spot unexpected and alternative realities that are vastly different from our current day.

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In William Gibson’s 2003 cyberpunk novel Pattern Recognition, the protagonist Cayce Pollard, a coolhunter and creative consultant, utilises her body’s visceral reaction to the world around her to detect irregularities and deviations. Like Pollard, spotting weird signals requires us to tune into our nervous system to cut through the noise to find glitches in the matrix, embracing the discomfort that comes with stumbling across the peculiar.

Glitches in the system, like punk birding groups, and luddite teenagers promoting self-liberation from social media and technology. ‘Or the rise of ‘homebars’ across China, designed to replicate the experience of living together with friends, and the emergence of study raves in Australia, helping students to focus through high-energy beats.

Weird signals can take the form of almost anything - snippets from articles and essays, images, social media content, a conversation on a podcast. Sometimes, it’s a strange meme that hints at an emerging shift in our collective mood, societal worries, and desires.

To spot weird signals, you need to go down rabbit holes. Follow your intuition. And remember, pursuing rabbit holes is not always an act of procrastination. Sometimes, it’s simply your mind telling you to follow your curiosity. Weirdness can present itself at any given moment, through any medium. When I see something, I instantly save it with the Sublime web extension. Or I use the Podcast Magic app to capture soundbites from interviews and podcasts. Like an eager digital forager, I highlight, screengrab, upload, and save with reckless abandon whenever strangeness presents itself.

Avoid algorithmic rabbit holes, because they will dull your exposure to weird signals and trap you in a bubble. To spot anomalies, you need to escape your Instagram feed and FYP page. Don’t let social media platforms shape how you see the world! A lot of work goes into manually curating my information feed. Read widely, and actively. Follow interesting researchers who publish on Substack. Lurk in the dark forest of Discord servers, where fringe conversations thrive.

When I’m foraging for signals, I don’t worry too much about organisation or classification. With Sublime, unlike other PKMs, you don’t have to incessantly tag it to find it later. With a solid AI search engine, it’s easy to find things you’ve previously saved. Instead of tags, I’ll intuitively create a collection for the signal that frames an initial hunch about whatever you’ve captured (or save it to an existing collection if an instant connection presents itself in your mind).

Spotting non-obvious connections

At regular intervals, I’ll return to my research on Sublime, to sort, reflect and connect. After all, collecting without connecting is just hoarding—a library full of signals collecting digital dust.

Traditionally, I’d use a variety of pre-defined tags to start to make sense of the signals. What sectors are involved? Psychographics? Relevant markets? Maturity level? Underlying need states?

I’ve often felt that this approach to organising research tends to guide you towards a more linear, stale way of making sense of trends. It funnels you towards drawing connections between similar signals, across interlocked domains in culture. Like uncovering a trend that encompasses food, drink and hospitality. Or identifying a new, emerging tech sector. Not wrong, or inaccurate. But perhaps a little obvious? And with so much homogeneous thinking out there on the future of culture, obvious holds little value.

With Sublime, instead of traditional tagging, I’ll curate research by specific questions or theses. Perhaps it’s a provocation, or a question I’m aiming to explore, or a shower thought about the future of culture. But it’s always based on an intention. Something specific I’m personally intrigued by, or niggling problem I’m trying to explore for a client.

What if we reintroduced more friction into society? Resolving the loneliness epidemic through third spaces. What comes after the hipster? The death of mystery.

Arranging research into these broader, more abstract themes encourages me to go non-linear, embracing expansive, freeform sense-making. Suddenly, it’s much easier to connect dots between vastly different areas of life to explore the defined intention. It invites me to find connections across a multitude of subcultures and demographics. Across both mainstream discourse and the experimental fringes of society. From highbrow and lowbrow culture (and everything in between).

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There are also ways to tap into the wisdom of the crowd to find the non-obvious. ‘Save one idea, discover 100 related ones’ - Sublime’s discovery engine that shows you related cards in the Sublime database - helps me to uncover new ideas and quirky tangents related to my collections. Recently, a collection I’d built around the death and rebirth of nightlife unearthed a post exploring the rise of fluid, fragmented, and decentralized clubbing communities beyond the massive entertainment venues that have otherwise come to dominate nightlife worldwide. An idea was hand-saved by a real person, which sent me down an unexpected but wholly relevant rabbit hole.

Once I’ve gathered these disparate signals, and go from collecting to connecting, I need to work spatially, using mind-mapping tools. Usually, this is Miro or Figma, but recently it’s mostly happening in Sublime’s Canvas function, where I can automatically create boards that link to my collections. This is what makes Sublime unique compared to other typical bookmarking tools - there’s a seamless bridge between curating information and creating meaning, where I can automatically create boards from my collections, giving me space to draw arrows between information, scribble tangents, and cluster research. This way, I can make far more interesting connections and create coherent meaning from all the noise. It syncs up new cards added to the collection, so you can keep coming back to the board as the research grows.

Machines for breadth, human intuition for depth

, co-founder of K-Hole and writer of the 8Ball newsletter, recently argued that, with the advent of AI, the human trend forecaster will become obsolete. I disagree. What I think will happen instead is that LLMs will raise the standards for our trend research. Machine and human sense-making operating in tandem, expanding what’s possible and helping us break free from our filter bubbles.

AI offers breadth - it aids me in cross-referencing unprecedented amounts of disparate information sources and millions of data points. With Sublime’s ‘Chat’ function, I’ll export particularly big collections to my LLM to kickstart the sense-making process, or when I feel overwhelmed by the sheer amount of research it contains.

Meanwhile, my own cultural intuition offers depth - it helps me to identify emotional nuance, uncovering unexpected angles to a trend. What’s the opposing force that exists in tension? What’s the uncomfortable angle that needs to be acknowledged? How would an outsider see this differently? What’s the destructive or distressing dimension?

calls this new breed of centaur analyst the ‘synthesized strategist’: “They wield AI like a sixth sense while maintaining razor-sharp human judgment. Most importantly, they’re masters of synthesis – weaving together insights from multiple domains, perspectives, and tools to forge clarity from complexity and light new paths forward.”

Resisting immediacy

“In an age of speed, I began to think, nothing could be more invigorating than going slow. In an age of distraction, nothing can feel more luxurious than paying attention. And in an age of constant movement, nothing is more urgent than sitting still.”

In the art of stillness, Pico Iyer argued that in our madly accelerating world, there’s never been a greater need to slow down. There is a similar urgency for stillness in cultural research. We are living through an era where trend cycles move at hyper-speed, compressed into 24-hour cycles. Every day, there’s a new shiny fad, a new viral moment, flocks of forecasters and oracles eager to crown them with a new catchy title, in an attempt to drive engagement and visibility in the feed. Yet, these isolated spikes flatten the story and miss deeper patterns. As cultural theorist astutely points out, we are “conflating trends with what’s trending”.

The fact is, culture moves slowly. Sometimes, painfully so. What starts as an anomaly gradually accumulates into a pattern, eventually entering the mainstream zeitgeist itself. It’s these slower-moving undercurrents I’m interested in. The subtle drifts beneath the media hype cycle that fundamentally shape how we behave, connect, consume, and express ourselves. These currents only become visible over time, as signals accumulate and the ground beneath our feet shifts, almost imperceptibly.

A movement challenging people to go offline forever becomes part of a bigger story about the great rewilding. ‘Scream clubs’, at first seen as a quirky anomaly, shape up to become one of the many ways we fulfil a desire for collective catharsis. Purposefully dirty makeup, initially a temporary beauty fad, begins to tell a broader story about our exhaustion with the pressures of modern life.

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In strategist ’s critique of TikTok oracles, she argues that cultural commentary today favours brevity, at the cost of depth, algorithmic performance over exploration, virality over rigor. All of which prioritize speed and instant output: “rather than a participatory culture that deepens understanding, we have one that accelerates interpretation at the expense of complexity, where discourse is less about discovery and more about domination.”

Amid this competition for algorithmic domination, where there is pressure to constantly decode and make meaning from the 24/7 internet hamster wheel, I have to remind myself to resist this manufactured immediacy. A PKM like Sublime helps me slow down and take a far more iterative, contemplative approach to cultural research by encouraging me to treat my collections as digital gardens.

When you think of your research as part of a digital garden, it’s less about solidifying and publishing thoughts across my Substack and client work as part of a linear process, in the hope of being the first to classify a cultural phenomenon. Instead, it becomes something far more slow, fluid and organic, where broader trends and undercurrents are continuously revised, and nurtured as the proof and signals grow over time. Deeper, more nuanced layers begin to reveal themselves, and a broader story takes shape.

My collections will evolve over time, as they grow. Many of them are now several years in the making, taking on new shapes and meaning. I also acknowledge that they may go through periods of rot and weeds, during which I must choose to actively prune irrelevant signals or change the direction of the collection entirely. I put time in my calendar once a month to tend to my gardens. In contrast to the usual frenzy of client work, the gardening feels mindful, quiet, reflective - a digital equivalent to touching grass.

Excavating your own perspective

There’s a quote saved in my Sublime library that I think about all the time: “research is the sacred ritual of excavating your own perspective”.

Ultimately, this is the end goal of my cultural research. It’s chipping away at all the chaos, uncertainty, and mystery, tuning into weird signals, making non-obvious and expansive connections across a multitude of domains. It’s about embracing a slower sense of reflection, until a path forward begins to illuminate itself. A vision of a new potential future that feels vastly different than our current reality. Not shaped by the echo chambers of the internet, but one that has taken shape through my own process of self-discovery.

The ideological goal of the noughties was to make everything available for everyone. Algorithms promised to rid us of elitist gatekeeping, removing the friction of discovering ideas and information. And of course, this cultural demystification isn’t without its virtues. The same forces that have stripped mystery away also democratised knowledge for the better. When Kylie Jenner earlier this year revealed the exact specifications of her breast augmentation in response to a fan’s TikTok plea, her radically transparent approach to a usually intimate, gatekept topic was heralded as positively refreshing.

Yet despite the benefits of celebrities choosing to blur the line between the public and private, we can’t help but reminisce about a time when prominent pop cultural figures maintained the allure of a secretive inner life. There’s a common grievance among online commentators about the loss of the ‘mysterious celebrity’, a concept that increasingly seems like a relic of the past. As fashion and trend analyst Mandy Lee points out, Gen Z have no Alexa Chung, Olson Twins or Jane Birkin of their own - personalities shrouded in secrecy, yet globally famous - “because that combination of fame and mystery can not be achieved in this social media obsessed space”.

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The truth is, a world dominated by social media, by way of design, is simply not optimised for mystery. It favours the kind of explicit sharebait where any ounce of ambiguity (poetic or otherwise) is deemed a flaw, rather than a feature. Taylor Swift, perhaps the most famous artist in the world right now, understands this better than anyone else, fully embracing the power of hyper-transparency and reverse-voyeurism as a tool for social virality. While the reviews of her latest album - The Life of a Showgirl - garnered polarising reviews, one common criticism among her detractors has been its overuse of unsubtle, thinly veiled innuendos. Take the track Wood for example, where she sings about her fiancé’s “magic wand” opening her thighs. As Layla Soboh ponders: Is anything sacred anymore?

In this flattened culture, where everything becomes instantly knowable - every secret broadcast as a spectacle - we deprive ourselves of the anticipation that comes with guesswork. Because art, seduction, intrigue - these fundamental cornerstones of culture, require blank spaces for our imaginations to fill in. This sense of the ‘unknown’ can manifest across a spectrum of different depths. To reappropriate a framework from the late military strategist Donald Rumsfeld, there are 3 realms of the unknown1.

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We have the known unknowns: things we know we don’t know. A delicate but potent cultural strategy that requires the intentional manufacturing of intrigue - the careful breadcrumbing of hearsay, enough to build a sense of mythology, not enough to give it all away. It’s the increasingly rare ability for celebrities to carefully curate their external persona, public enough to feed the lore, sufficiently private to maintain the mystery.

Then there’s a second, more absolute kind of mystery - unknown unknowns - things we don’t know we don’t know. These are the undiscovered subcultures growing quietly across private Discord servers. It’s the artists who have retreated into stealth mode, hiding at reclusive creative residencies in remote forests. It’s not a great strategy for building intrigue, but it gives innovators space to create beyond the prying eyes of the public, before releasing to the world.

However, the most elusive kind of mystery at work in culture today is one that lives inside us. When we can sense when the vibe is off, or when we can intuitively feel that someone has good (or bad) energy, but we can’t put our finger on why. These are the unknown knowns. Subconscious signals we haven’t yet consciously recognised, operating beneath our awareness. Artists and creatives thrive on their ability to give shape to these vibrations that linger underneath the surface. Like Gracie Abrams’ ability to tap into a specific flavour of Gen Z melancholia that’s otherwise hard to describe, or Charli XCX’s success in harnessing a once hidden yearning for hedonistic release.

The role of films today is also often to capture and bring to life these ambient emotions hiding within our collective consciousness - whether it’s ‘eat the rich’ narratives like Saltburn and Triangle of Sadness channelling our disdain for the elite, or The Substance’s ability to externalise anxieties around beauty and ageing.

Amid the current tyranny of known knowns, where nothing is left to the imagination, there are small signs of mystery re-emerging, a return to the rich emotional texture of subtlety, suggestion and restraint of the various unknowns. Celebrities have begun gatekeeping their favourite haunts. Social media posting fatigue has set in, people withdrawing from public feeds, operating in stealth mode. Perhaps when we have finally weaned ourselves off the need to constantly perform our private lives so publicly, may a new generation of Alexa Chungs and Olsen Twins emerge: famous, but with mysterious public personas. Known to everyone, but also, at the same time, completely unknown.

This essay is a continued evolution of a SEED originally published over at Protein. Become a member to read the original piece.

I’m good, cos I gatekeep,” Tyler quips back. “I like special things, and damn, that’s my thing! That’s just me though. Companies, restaurants, and clothing that some people really love can get f*cked up because someone makes a TikTok and now everything is sold out.”

Tyler’s pushback exemplifies an increasingly common sentiment. The aggressively efficient social algorithm has a tendency to blow things up. That hard-won insider tip of a neighbourhood bar à vin in Marseille. An indie music gem from an obscure Japanese shoegaze band. A boutique jewellery brand from Athens. Some small batch skincare product with a gooey miracle ingredient. Suddenly, that secret thing (which was wholly unprepared for such an enthusiastic swarm of interest) has unavoidably become everyone’s thing.

With this in mind, the re-emergence of gatekeepers was bound to happen. The gatekeeper - broadly defined as anyone with the power to control information or access - is increasingly viewed as a necessity, to safeguard our favourites from the brutal rapture of the feed.

Despite the gatekeeper’s perceived necessity, no archetype is quite as contentious as the one who restricts the flow of culture. Amid digital and physical abundance, the gatekeeper is perceived as gluttonous. The stubborn, unyielding gatekeeper selfishly hoards something that deserves (demands!) to be free, to run wild. The anti-gatekeeper fights for culture to exist as an artery of abundant rivers, not as a system of tightly controlled, gatekept dams.

The gluttonous hoarder: that’s the singular image of the gatekeeper that reigns supreme today. The tight-lipped, greedy elitist. Someone who fiercely guards hidden treasures, for fear of losing the valuable currency that puts them at an advantage in society.

However, this homogenous idea of the gatekeeper obscures a more nuanced reality. Gatekeeping isn't a single practice, but a spectrum of behaviours and ideals. Each with a fundamentally different value system, trading in distinct forms of cultural capital.

They serve a variety of functions in the cultural ecosystem. Some guard knowledge. Some guard literal access to a space or experience. Some are in place to keep the gate closed. But others are driven by a desire to (cautiously) permit entry to the right people. A gate can be closed. But equally, it can be opened. This is the often forgotten duality of the gatekeeper. As remarks: “only seen to be a fence, its hinge is forgotten”.

Across our research, documenting various kinds of gateopeners and gateclosers in culture, idle gaze has identified 4 prevalent archetypes:

The snob, The enthusiast, The doorman and The host.

The snob is the gatekeeper who hoards knowledge to maintain their cultural edge. They are the Rick Owens fanatics who pride themselves on encyclopaedic knowledge of rare archival pieces, and relentlessly judge the dilettantes who lack that wisdom. They are the crate diggers who linger in the local record store, fiercely guarding their rare white label releases and track IDs. Snobs are the staff at Dover Street Market who are trained not so much to sell you garments, but to judge your worthiness to wear them.

It’s tempting to dismiss the snob as prickly and rude, but deep down, there’s a sense of vulnerability. They live in constant fear, because they have constructed their social worth around exclusive cultural knowledge, a currency always at risk of depreciating.

Have you ever walked towards the entrance of a club and felt your heart pounding? Have you ever felt your palms go sweaty dialling the number of a hyped restaurant, praying for a miracle reservation? Then you may have been in the presence of a doorman - the cold, intimidating arbiter between the inside and the outside.

While the snob hoards information as a mark of superiority, the doorman deals in vibes and clout. The snob might care about what you know, but the doorman needs to understand who you are, to quickly and efficiently place you in the social hierarchy. As Quentin Belt, front of house at the (once upon a time) zeitgeisty restaurant Casino in Dimes Square explains in a feature on the gatekeepers of New York’s most coveted tables: “I’ve already googled every single guest… I mark them if they’re industry. I mark any publication someone’s connected to. And then, any names I recognize.” This determines who gets the best table in the house, and who gets to sit in proverbial Siberia.

Paris’s most renowned restaurants, London’s most desirable members’ clubs and New York’s top-tier wellness studios all have doormen, dressed up in all kinds of guises: squads of maître d’s, bouncers and unscrupulous membership selection committees designed to create an unobtrusive barrier between the eager crowds outside and the carefully curated atmosphere inside.

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When we think of gatekeepers, we usually think of the above - the snobs and doormen, who operate first and foremost as gateclosers. However, in our research, we uncovered two other parallel archetypes. Gatekeepers driven by a desire to (cautiously) share and permit entry to the curious and deserving: the enthusiasts and hosts.

The enthusiast - like the snob - deals in knowledge. But instead of hoarding and protecting, they are driven by an urge to shepherd people beyond the sea of mediocre slop to discover awe-inspiring music, literature, art and food. To guide them towards the light.

A few months ago, I found myself in the presence of an enthusiast at the Zenner Ballroom in Berlin. was hosting his ‘Radio Hour Live’ show. Derrick is a music curator who found widespread fame on TikTok diving into obscure trivia and nerdy music discourse, with topics ranging from Korean alt-rap, to explaining the vintage soundscape of Mitski’s latest album (an effect called “slap-back echo”), to the details of his at-home hi-fi sound system (rare La Scala’s, copped from eBay).

Framed as a mix between a listening session, live podcast and talk show , ‘Radio Hour Live’ featured Derrick sharing a playlist of songs, enjoyed collectively in silence, interspersed with spoken word essays about the virality of Aphex Twin and the merits of Ed Sheeran. Seated in a space designed to resemble a temporary living room, adorned with houseplants and a sofa, I felt as though a gate had been opened into a deeper, more considered world of music beyond the cold and shallow metrics of our Spotify algorithms.

While the snob belittles those with inferior knowledge as a means to boost their own ego, enthusiasts - like Derrick - are driven by an impulse to share their findings. However, there’s a caveat: the sharing of these hidden treasures can only happen in the right intimate setting, free from criticism, in front of a crowd who are open to expanding their taste.

Unlike the snob, the enthusiast does not believe in good culture (to be gatekept) vs bad culture (to be dismissed). What matters is curiosity and open conversation. As Derrick explains in a Ssense feature:

“It's all about positivity. It's knowledge and passion, and a personality that is non-judgmental. I'm not out to criticize anyone. If you think some album that I hate is the best album of all time, I'm very happy for you.”

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The doorman - driven by a desire to block someone’s access - also has a softer, more considerate alter ego: the host. If the doorman is a gatecloser, the host seeks to open the gate to the deserving but underrepresented, to invite those who might otherwise feel unwelcome.

Keith McNally, the legendary restaurateur known for defining New York’s downtown dining scene with iconic restaurants like The Odeon, Balthazar, and Pastis - showcases all the hallmarks of the host.

Keith’s establishments maintain a standard of consistent exclusivity. Getting a reservation at the Odeon is no small feat. But what makes him unique in fine dining is his urge to disrupt the classic social hierarchies found in luxury hospitality, creating welcoming, intimate spaces otherwise dominated by snobbishness and exclusivity. Ex-Balthazar staff Cheutine Fong recalls a conversation with Keith about his desire to greet the right guests warmly:

“There are going to be people pushing their way to the front of the line to the podium. And then, there are gonna be people who come in, who are going to be intimidated because of the grandiose nature of how big and bustling Balthazar is. But I want us to go to the back of the line and help those people, who don’t feel like they belong here.”

With recommendations for outfits, restaurants, skincare routines and home finds becoming the bread and butter of the algorithm, while streaming services offer a bottomless well of content to consume, the gatekeeper plays a dual role in culture.

We undoubtedly need gateclosers to stem the flow of interest and crowds. But with such sheer overwhelming abundance of content to discover, places to go, things to buy, gateopeners play an equally important role. But it’s a delicate art: the ability to cautiously permit entry and introduce new knowledge to the genuinely curious. It requires discernment, authority and impeccable taste, to sift through the slop and lead us in the right direction.

We need gateopeners just as much as we need gateclosers, because culture ought to exist as an artery of abundant rivers, not just as a system of tightly controlled dams.

Sometime in the future, when we look back at the twenty-twenties, I think we’ll reminisce about an era when creative expression felt more dynamic and entertaining than ever. We’ll remember a decade where we mastered a powerful form of artistic ammunition which involved our ability to combine comedy and critique in masterful ways to question the status quo. And perhaps we wouldn’t be wrong, these could very well be the golden days of satire – that delicate yet potent weapon forged from equal parts humour and social consciousness. The all-revealing mirror, reflecting the collective absurdities of this strange and surreal time back at us.

For starters, take a look at all the ‘eat the rich’ entertainment on our screens: an abundance of films and shows that expose the glaring gap between the rich and poor, haves and have-nots. A time when productions like White Lotus and The Menu have become watercooler moments, drawing our attention to the oblivious entitlement and performative social awareness of wealthy resort guests and Michelin-star snobs. This is indeed the height of social class schadenfreude, where films like Bong Joon-ho's Parasite and Ruben Östlund’s Triangle of Sadness – darkly comedic meditations on the fragility of social hierarchies – win hearts, minds, and awards like no other.

And while quick-witted subversion can be a scathingly sharp tool, like any blade wielded too frequently and eagerly against every surface that presents itself, it gradually loses its capacity to cleave through what truly matters. Don’t get me wrong – I think satire plays an immensely important role today in how we create and consume culture. Nothing can quite so effectively pierce the veil of power structures otherwise hidden in plain sight. However, I worry that we’ll look back at this as a time when everything in art, music, fashion, and entertainment became so steeped in comedic irony that creative expression began to lose its bite.

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Let’s revisit the ‘eat the rich’ genre as an example – a phenomenon that reached fever pitch in the last decade. Today, we engage in class critique more than ever. Yet herein lies the ironic truth: no matter how loudly we mock, laugh at, and curse the elite, nothing changes. There is no revolution or revolt in sight. As observed in an article in New York Magazine a few years ago: “Never in human history have we possessed so capacious a knowledge of the various and specific iniquities of the world — and so little hope of them ever being rectified.”

Across culture, we’re seeing the same trend: an overabundance of satire that reveals the problem underneath, but a deficit of agency to actually tackle it. The frontlines of fashion were once places where perceptions and norms could be legitimately changed, rather than merely acknowledged as an inescapable reality. In the 1970s, Vivienne Westwood challenged class structures and authority through her punk collections, while Yves Saint Laurent's Le Smoking line introduced the first women's tuxedo suit, challenging gender ‘rules’ in formal wear. In the 1990s, designers like Stella McCartney fought for sustainable and cruelty-free garments, eventually cementing the use of real fur as a faux pas.

I can’t help but juxtapose these pioneering, convention-breaking movements with the satire-drenched fashion industry of today, where it seems like everyone is committing to a bit and nothing is ever serious. From Balenciaga’s tongue-in-cheek €2,000 IKEA FRAKTA shopping bag dupes to e-commerce platform Ssense’s self-deprecating takes on the absurdity of fashion subculture elitism, the runway sometimes feels reduced to one big meme generator.

The critic Roy Christopher once famously called irony “the most abused trope of our time, a ‘get out of judgment free’ card, an escape route, an exit strategy.” But perhaps it's no surprise that we have become conditioned to avoid – rather than face – reality head-on. Millennials, Gen Z, and Gen A have all had to adopt their own unique flavours of irony as a coping mechanism; a way to psychologically shelter themselves from the constant hardships and guaranteed failures of modern life.

It’s quite telling that the most successful artists of our era are the ones who have learnt to speak the language of self-referential depreciation fluently – as a means to engage with the fans of today – even when they want to say something earnest. Charli XCX's Brat wrestled with complex themes like motherhood, ageing, and grief. But Charli’s team knew very well that these big, thorny questions had to be wrapped in layer upon layer of irony – low resolution, slime green promo material and terminally online TikTok marketing – to achieve breakthrough popularity.

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Unsurprisingly, many creatives find this fear of sincerity frustrating. Musician Ethel Cain ranted on Tumblr last year about how “nobody takes anything seriously anymore”, exasperated by the fact that her debut album, Preacher’s Daughter, a harrowing tale of sexual assault, domestic captivity, and murder, was so often reduced by her fans to worn-out online memes and predictable jokes.

She’s not wrong. In this irony epidemic, I fear we’re losing more than just the ability to be serious. We’re losing the capacity to sincerely engage – not just with art, but with life. When satire has become the great collective sedative of the modern creative era, we are on some level lobotomised, unable to truly connect with the rough edges of humanity. Sometimes, things are serious. Not everything needs to be turned into a joke. It’s important to remember that some of the sharpest, most imaginative forms of self-expression can emerge when we resist the urge to constantly caricature and poke fun at the world, instead embracing earnest expression in all its raw, vulnerable glory.

ps this essay appears in the Playground print alongside beautiful illustrations by Hugo Sundkvist.

I struggled to put my finger on this vague intuition until I saw a post on LinkedIn from Edmond Lau, when it all suddenly clicked. In a post, titled “The Dark Mode Shift”, Lau argues that we’re moving away from “light mode” - an era defined by a “cultural push to project positivity”, where the world “wore a clean, hopeful facade”. A moment in time defined by “pizza parties and mental health seminars trying (and failing) to hold together a crumbling social contract”. But today, as resentment rises to a breaking point and the optimistic veneer begins to crack, Lau believes we’re moving into a new, more individualistic, 'mask-off' era, where the vibe has shifted. “You’re either a supervillain ruthlessly chasing the bag, a nihilist reveling in debauchery, or ngmi.”

‘Light Mode’ was embodied by sanitised, discrete markers of taste - wearing Le Labo Santal 33, living in a bright, airy apartment loft, with NTS playing in the background, subtly showcasing an Aesop Resurrection Aromatique pump bottle in your bathroom. ‘Dark Mode’ on the other hand, abandons these symbols of virtue in favour of vice. Here, the darker undercurrents of pleasure and greed are embraced with full force: indulgent luxury goods, opulent power dressing and a return to the boom boom aesthetics of the yuppie era.

This edition of idle gaze features a conversation with Lau; the designer, art director, and “luxury memeologist” who coined the ‘Dark Mode’ shift. We discuss our joint reflections on the abandonment of performative virtue - the rejection of smiling assassins and faux artisan ‘if you know you know’ taste, and the embrace of nihilistic vice. How will this resurgence of opulent exclusivity, supervillain behaviour and cool detachment from positivity shape our collective aspirations, behaviours and desires?

Alexi: What were the initial signals that made you think something significant was happening culturally?

Edmond: It's very hard not to tie this back to politics, because it is such a big event with such an impact across many different levels. Over time, as the political and economic rifts in the US and the anglosphere grew - we started seeing inflation get worse and worse - It just seemed like there was an overall feeling of bleakness that had really set in.

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Another aspect I was thinking about was the return of conservatism in areas like music. I was thinking about FKA Twigs a lot, and Mk.gee. Just the tone of the music that was coming out, which on a purely production level was very stylistically raw sounding.

Alexi: FKA Twigs’ Eusexua is an interesting example. On the press tour she’s been speaking at length about her inspiration for the album. She spent a lot of time in Prague when they were filming The Crow. She started going to warehouse raves in the city - these really dark, intense places, filled with ominous energy. But this was where people went to fight their demons and ultimately found a sense of self-fulfilment. This, to me, is a perfect representation of the emotional tension that defines this vibe shift: you have to embrace the darkness to reconnect with your inner self. Rejecting virtue and embracing vice might at first feel evil, but ultimately, it’s about getting closer to our carnal desires.

Edmond: When FKA Twigs describes what Eusexua means, it’s essentially the height of human experience. It's like when a comedian or songwriter has that moment just before an epiphany, where it all kind of clicks together, and your mind goes kind of like: Aha. That kind of mental release of Eusexua across the human condition, that resonates with what I'm trying to capture with ‘Dark Mode’. It’s about embracing the most visceral, pure moments of experience.

I always go back to the Anne Hathaway HR Zoom meeting meme as the counter, I think it’s such an embodiment of ‘Light Mode’. For me, it’s the smiling assassin, doing something evil under the veneer of virtuousness. It’s the perfect encapsulation of all the failed promises of that time. It was very two-faced and performative, which, on some level, is more ominous than just showing your true face from the get-go, right?

Alexi: Another significant consequence of shedding this virtuous mask is how we behave online. This expectation to radiate positivity has been fuelled by a need to carefully curate our public social media feeds with smiley, well-lit photos and meticulously edited captions communicating our do-good values. But in the ‘Dark Mode’ shift, there’s a retreat to more private spaces, posting - without fear or judgement - to close friend lists and in Whatsapp group chats. This is also something we’re seeing happening in the offline realm, with the resurgence of members' clubs and photo bans in nightclubs.

Edmond: It’s also happening in the world of luxury. I was talking to Harry Salmons at edition+partners about the resurgence of closed door VIP events and chess nights hosted by jewellery brands, all hidden away from cameras. And it made me think of this idea that we’re returning to exclusivity. Before, it was FOMO - you could have attended. But now it's: you’re not invited: it's not for you, luxury is for an exclusive elite that you are not part of, unless you pay an exorbitant amount of money, in which case maybe we’ll let you in.

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Alexi: It’s the return of elite ‘safe’ spaces where people can pursue their vices away from the public eye.

Edmond: Yeah, I think it’s also this yearning for the third places we’ve lost. Private spaces that provide not just somewhere for people to come together, but where you are also encouraged to be debaucherous.

Alexi: You’ve previously compared and contrasted Mercedes-Benz’s "Grow Up" campaign with the Hyundai Grandeur as two examples that epitomise ‘Light Mode’ versus ‘Dark Mode’. The former disguises luxury through the language of moral self-actualisation. The latter is the ultimate “Neo-Yuppie" symbol that represents a return to formality, unabashed greed, and privacy through blacked-out windows. What other examples have you seen that embrace ‘Dark Mode’?

Edmond: Haider Ackermann's Tom Ford Debut for AW25 was a start-to-finish collection showing someone being very glamorous and at the same time looking down to party. There was one look with a dressing gown, where you could imagine someone throwing it on the morning after the party and lighting a cigarette. Luxury cars in general are just getting more and more imposing. Just look at the grill of the new 7 series - it’s gargantuan. And in hospitality, you have places like Chez Fifi in New York, or the Aman, where you see all these gilded age details at the front.

Alexi: It’s certainly a far cry from the notions of discrete, ‘quiet’ luxury that have dominated the zeitgeist over the past decade. As you’ve pointed out in another classic Edmond Lau meme - the new luxury pyramid - obscure tote bags, ‘smol plate’ orange wine dinners - traditional markers of esoteric and high-brow consumption and behaviour - are starting to lose their cultural capital. Why is that?

Edmond: Because this ‘if you know you know’ knowledge is increasingly seen as a pretence. Having your own internet radio show, having the level of abundance to pursue your passion, while being unemployed, while your parents pay your rent, used to be a status symbol. But pretending to be poor doesn’t have clout anymore. For the past 10 years, it wasn’t cool to be wealthy in that really brash way, and in some ways it is now.

Alexi: You’ve mentioned in previous conversations that the unapologetic bagchasing and limitless material greed of ‘Dark Mode’ is ultimately an act of self-destruction. It made me think of Mark Fisher’s concept of “depressive hedonia”1 - the paradoxical state where individuals constantly pursue surface-level pleasure and stimulation yet remain fundamentally unsatisfied and depressed. At the same time, there is a sense of salvation in the darkness. Once we can shed all the performative lightness that didn't serve us, only then can we discover our real identities and purpose. What comes next? Where do we go from here?

Edmond: I think that people will eventually start to snap out of it. This is a moment of catharsis we're in. Only after people have unveiled their true selves can they find some actual common ground. I don't think anybody fundamentally hates on a purely evil level. Those who decided to chase the bag in ‘Dark Mode’, once they realise they haven't gotten what they wanted - that might be the tipping point.

You can follow on X and LinkedIn.

Footnotes:

I recently had the chance to sit down with long-time editorial collaborator to discuss everything from my chaotic research process, the role of trends in brand-building, a recent obsession with cyberpunk novels and favourite Berlin routines:

Playground

In conversation with Alexi Gunner

‘In conversation’ is Playground’s newsletter series, where we invite friends, acquaintances, and individuals we admire to share their creative thoughts and explore the art of playfulness…

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a year ago · 12 likes · Auste Skrupskyte Cullbrand

“the supposed deterioration of a person’s mental or intellectual state, especially viewed as the result of overconsumption of material (now particularly online content) considered trivial or unchallenging. Also: something characterised as likely to lead to such deterioration.”

There is some truth to the deteriorating effect of “brain rot”, that feeling that something is putrefying in your mind, as you’re lying in bed, the room pitch black except for the blue-tinted, harsh glow emitting from the endless algorithmic well of content on your phone. Every video aggressively optimised to drill into the deepest layers of the brain’s pleasure centre, while at the same time numbing the electrodes of the mind into apathetic oblivion.1

Whether it’s mindless ASMR sludge on TikTok or skibidi toilet videos spewing out primary school slang, imprinting rizz, gyatt, and hawk tuah into the collective mind like a digital branding iron - brain rot has all the hallmarks of what society, since the 19th century, has compartmentalised into the bucket of “low brow” culture, the endemic of shallow entertainment that lacks intellectual engagement (as opposed to the high horse of "high brow" culture- referring to everyhting considered intellectually demanding, complex, or sophisticated).

The rule has always been this: high brow and low brow culture do not mix. They do not intermingle. In fact, members of the high brow elite wouldn’t be seen dead engaging with low brow culture. But with brain rot, something interesting - strange even - is happening. The seemingly degraded quality and aesthetics of online content is no longer just living in the gutter of low brow mind decay. It’s slowly but surely making it’s way into “high brow” culture too, from luxury brand TikTok channels to literature and art, infiltrating a realm usually associated with intellectual thought and finessed, carefully considered content.

Why is this happening? Firstly, we need to look at brain rot not merely as deterioration, but also as cultural alteration. A distinction also recently made, where he argues that digital slop - rather than decomposing like rotting fruit - acts more like a poison that stays in cultural circulation:

I prefer “brain poisoning,” [to describe brain rot] —it feels more precise. We are not decaying online so much as being incrementally loaded up with heavy metals like tuna in the ocean over the course of a lifetime, carrying this accumulation inside of us wherever we go.

Brain rot might start off in the murky depths of social media’s dopamine dispensers. But like undersea creatures swallowing tiny bits of microplastics - it inevitably makes its way up the cultural food chain, eventually finding it’s way into a fancy omakase joint, contaminating the blood flow of high brow culture.

This is how digital slop rots upstream.

Step 1: Mainstream cultural osmosis

This is where brain rot achieves a sort of contradictory double presence: becoming simultaneously meaningless and deeply meaningful. You start hearing empty phrases like “very mindful, very demure” and “it's giving" used in common water cooler parlance. ASMR videos and split screen subway surfer gaming content is adopted by big brands and mainstream entertainment as shortcuts to fleeting relevance. Brain rot transcends its original context to become a shared touchstone among the masses.

Step 2 : Achieves IYKYK flex

Next transmutation: brain rot becomes further detached from its origins, permeating the communication and visual language of luxury brands - an arena once considered a stronghold of “high brow” culture, as they capitalise on the if you know you know status of brain-fried online digital overflow.

Whether it’s LOEWE and Marc Jacobs creating content for the social media savvy, like soothing videos of hydraulic press machines crushing miscellaneous objects or wild CGI depictions of gargantuan tennis balls rolling over cityscapes, brain rot transforms from mindless low brow sludge - functional by design to ease our minds in the digital chaos and numb the anxiety - into something more akin to a cultural flex.

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A way to signal to your audience (and for the audience to signal to each other): “I understand online culture, I am terminally online”. In this IYKYK culture, where niche knowledge reigns supreme, understanding the nuances of online culture offers a certain sense of cultural cachet.

@marcjacobs@bellahadid039 is ready for summer!

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Step 3: Attains high culture status

Eventually, brain rot begins to seep into the highest echelons of culture, shaping the vernacular and themes of a new generation of internet first authors and artists.

Today, the literary zeitgeist is awash with ‘internet novels’ that leverage the niche references of online discourse. As Becca Rothfeld points out, the way Twitter/X, TikTok and Instagram is shaping novels today presents a strange juxtaposition - going against the assumed role of literature in culture as an antidote to the perceived harm of online content: “The internet scoops out the mind and mashes it into wet pulp, which is to say that it is the opposite of a novel, at least when the novel is working.”

Books like Woo Woo by Ella Baxter, and Honor Levy’s My First Book (in which the writer even proposed the internet as co-author) embrace the scrolling binge rather than offering a respite away from it. They indulge in in-jokes originating from weird corners of Twitter/X threads and Discord communities, making a point of reproducing the fractured texture, drawn out and under-punctuated sentences and tonal quirks of the chronically online.

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Meanwhile, artists like painter Chloe Wise, have similarly bridged the gap between still life paintings and online brain rot culture. Wise’s portraits feature youthful muses with very online sensibilities. In “Some pleasant lies would be nice”, a woman with bleached hair and a butterfly tattoo stares at the viewer with a pouty gaze. She’s nude, save for a pair of wired Apple headphones. Wise’s other pieces recall headshots of influencers with meticulous skincare routines, or zoomed-in selfies you might receive from a friend - capturing the intimate essence of, let’s say, a TikTok Get Ready With Me video.

This is the mindless low brow sludge → high culture flex pipeline. Common discourse paints out brain rot as intellectual poison: refined sugars and seed oils for the mind2. But it’s also become something more useful and valuable than junk food alone. In today’s surreal cultural landscape, it’s become a ‘badge of honour’3, offering people a semblance of a community and connection.

It offers what cultural anthropologist Mimi Ito calls a ‘genre of participation’. There’s a reward if you get the obscure reference: you are in communion with the author; your specific habits and tastes are seen, confirmed, and validated by the knowledge that someone else is watching the same TikToks, following the same online conversations, reposting the same posts as you.

The very content that supposedly rots our brains has become a form of cultural literacy, a marker of sophistication. Is it irony? Or is it simply the natural physics of online culture, where even digital detritus can be turned into valuable art, commerce and connection?

They’re working harder than ever to delay ageing. But at the same time yearning for the cool confidence that can only come with growing old.

On one hand, ageing is seen as an almost moral failure. From the obsession with celebrity’s looks who haven’t changed, to the collective mob-like lambasting of those who do show their age. There’s TikTok plastic surgeons posting “real or sus” videos nitpicking anti-ageing procedures. And beyond the desire to delay the realities of ageing, there’s the corner of Silicon Valley currently on a pursuit to reverse ageing, like Bryan “Blood Boy” Johnson, the tech millionaire on a mission to reverse his biological age through father-son blood plasma transfusions and draconian diets.

Yet at the same time, when you look at the world of fashion, entertainment and beauty, we’re entering an era of unprecedented intergenerational pollination that instead fully embraces the idea of ageing.

Youth focused brands everywhere are partnering with ‘mature’ icons. Some recent examples: 69 year old Willem Dafoe featured in campaigns for both the streetwear brand Palace and e-commerce giant Zalando, while 70 year old Jerry Seinfeld made his modelling debut with New York label Kith.

When relevance has for so long been intertwined with the idea of youth, why has there been such a steady uptick in clout-driven consumer brands courting younger consumers with celebrities twice or three times their age? 

On some level, it’s as simple as offering a sense of creative juxtaposition. When we see 69-year-old Whoopi Goldberg in an Ami campaign, or 85-years-young actor Anthony Hopkins in the LOEWE Fall/Winter 2022 pre-collection, there’s a particular spark of joy in seeing seemingly different areas of culture collide unexpectedly.1

But there’s something deeper and more meaningful at play too. The idea of ageing, once treated as an inconvenient, shameful reality, is increasingly being embraced as not just something positive, but something to aspire to.

With the emerging desire among younger cohorts to step beyond the confines of their age group, who with increasing frequency showcase an interest in tapping into the carefree style of older generations, it’s a marketing strategy that makes sense. Take for example the linen-clad, New England “coastal grandmother”, or the staid country club uniforms of ‘old money aesthetics’, or the the musty cardigans of grandpa-core taking over TikTok, which all embrace dress codes associated with otherwise fuddy-duddy elders. When you observe the newly-acquired swagger of the kids engaging with these trends, it becomes clear it’s not just about the outfits. It’s equally about the unburdened sense of liberation they associate with older generations, who have been able to move past the fear of judgement and self-doubt that so greatly inhibits the young and insecure.

In the age of fleeting fads and relentless trend-chasing, this maturity is associated with a sense of steadfast, cool confidence. As Carina Chocano observes in an essay in The New York Times about the rise of 50+ mentors in the fashion industry:

“This is a different kind of aspiration than the one found in closet tours of young influencers and celebrities…many of those figures seem focused on stockpiling luxury brands and reacting to trends. Part of why [older fashion icons] feel so reassuring is that, like all cool older people, they seem comfortably past all that, as though they've already seen the trends, chased the goods and graduated into freedom.”  

This new age of future aspiration also implies a fundamental shift in our collective psychology. It indicates that for young people, their future selves are no longer deemed irrelevant. When we perceive the trajectory of our lives, current research tells us that when we look back at our past and into our future, we can typically be categorized into two camps: ‘dividers’, and ‘continuers’2. Dividers tend to perceive more distinct boundaries between their life phases, viewing both their teenage self and future self as strangers - fictional characters from a novel. Continuers on the other hand, are more likely to feel emotionally connected to the past and future, feeling a strong, unbroken thread of identity running through their life stages. When young people exhibit a sense of shared resonance with older generations, it indicates that the illusion has shattered: their future self is no longer a distant stranger. They are seen as one and the same.

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In The Substance, one of the most provocative and talked about films of the year, where faded Hollywood star Elisabeth Sparkle is fired from her TV show and, desperate for youth, injects a black market serum that splits the main character into two beings — a new, younger, vibrant self and her original, older self, elevates the debate to a new conceptual extreme. “Remember, you are one”, a recurring line in the film, has evolved into a cautionary message for Gen Z, who today grapple with the desire to fight back against the realities of losing their youth, while finding ways to embrace the virtues of maturity that can only come with age.

To see our older and wiser future self and younger, vibrant, but ultimately more naive current self as one, rather than two strangers in conflict, has taken on a radical aura in a culture that continues to stigmatise the realities of ageing. As Ingrid Fetell Lee, an expert in design and joy, imagines:

“What if instead of seeing ageing as something to defeat and conquer, we were to embrace what gets better with age, and work to amplify these joys while mitigating the losses of youth? In a culture where angst seems to prevail, and young people face uncertain futures, ageing with joy is an act of humanity.”

The traditional marketing playbook used to follow one commonly accepted rule: if you want to sell to the youth you have to show them that you are youthful too. Elevate the voices of their generation, partner with role models that represent the zeitgeist of their era. ​​

The brands that today feature millennials that might have once been derided as cheugy or boomers dismissed as cringe are not simply indulging in a dose of rebellious creative juxtaposition. They’re offering a statement that age = relevance; a proclamation that the best (and coolest) is yet to come. These are the brands that now understand that the allure of staying young is fleeting but the confidence of growing old runs deep.

A version of this essay was originally published in Mediacat Magazine.

Footnote:

📚 Had the pleasure of contributing to excellent “the resurgence of text media” report (alongside some of my favourite researchers and thinkers including and ). The 30 page dossier explores the changing landscape of media production and consumption, diving into everything from the rise of the text image format of style not com & BRAT style album covers, to subcultural advertorial print magazines and literary it girls like Ottessa Moshfegh strutting down runways. Highly recommended reading for anyone remotely involved or interested in modern media!

On one side; the rational realm: led by legions of mathematicians, economists, scientists and engineers, bastions of the purportedly level-headed, praying at the altar of the measurable and quantifiable, charting their course through a reality built on the premise of what is objectively known to be true. 

On the other side; the mythical realm: operating beyond the grasp of numbers, data and equations, instead fuelled by a sense of intuition and interplanetary connection, charting their course through a reality built on the premise of what is felt to be true. 

Throughout the noughties, the rational realm reigned supreme. Across boardrooms of Wall Street and campus grounds of Silicon Valley, the logic-driven mindset dominated, elevating scientific and mathematic reasoning as the de facto, superior method of sense-making.  

Meanwhile, the mythical realm was banished to the lower echelons of mindless party chitchat and psychic readings down dingy Chinatown alleyways, snake oil sold to forlorn lovers and naive, lost souls. Yes, the mythical could be appreciated for its beautiful visual metaphors and poetic symbolism, but no, this metaphysical woo woo could not be taken seriously as a legitimate tool for important and consequential decision-making. 

While these two realms were once divided by a massive, irreconcilable chasm, this boundary has recently begun to blur. The gap between 'rational' analysis and 'mythical' sense-making is closing in, becoming increasingly difficult to tell apart. 

Because the reality is: we live in a world where nothing makes any logical sense. Events come and go like waves of a fever, leaving us confused and uncertain. The GFC blindsided us, seemingly from nowhere. With Covid, the scientists that were once cornerstones of objective authority were failing to give society any coherent answers at all. With a few swift blows, the cold, hard data that once dominated had lost it’s influence.

Instead, another mode of thinking has been taking hold, rooted in the stars and sky. Like liquid gold, it fits into the cracks that many feel rigid, logical sense-making cannot fill. As a result, astrology and the esoteric; once banished to the whimsical realm of the mythical, has begun infiltrating domains of society once deemed strongholds of rational thinking.  

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This is the age of enchanted decision-making. A time when rational logic has run up against its limits. We are now in an era where MBA-educated analysts and quants, armed with their data and algorithms are competing for relevance against a very different breed of analyst and analysis: fortune tellers, tarot readers and oracles, armed with tarot decks, crystals, incense and an inquisitive gaze up towards the skies. 

This is the age where captains of industry, who built empires off the back of spreadsheet formulas and profit forecasts, are increasingly speaking the language of energy, intuition and divination. It’s telling that Elon Musk - the poster child of the science-y Silicon Valley mindset - has begun leaning in on the idea of vibes, telling Tesla executives to pause all hiring worldwide simply because he had a “super bad feeling” about the economy. Pat Gelsinger, CEO of Intel, recently called on higher spirits to make the tides turn, posting enigmatic bible scriptures when the company reported weaker-than-expected earning and saw it’s stock price drop by 26%.

The power of the stars; the gaze up towards higher planes, is re-enchanting otherwise rational forms decision-making in many different ways. In the spirit of the tarot, I’ve decided to group them into the karmic themes of major and minor arcana cards: 1

The wheel of fortune

“After scanning the market from 8:30AM till 9AM and picking the stock I’ll be trading that day (today it was Amazon), I do a single card pull to confirm my decision or get guidance. Today I pulled the Ace of Cups, which represents abundance; this gave me the needed assurance to trust in my strategy.” 

25 year old Stefaniya Nova’s day trading approach reflects an emerging strategy among a new generation of investors, who wield tarot cards and lunar cycles with the same unwavering confidence that traditional stock pickers employ data models and profit projections.

Just like the wheel of fortune card represents the cyclical nature of life, the inevitability of life’s ups and downs, this new wave of investors see stargazing as just another model for tracking the ups and downs of the market."What's astrology? a social media influencer and trader who goes by "TJR" asks in a video on TikTok. “It's like predicting something based off of past events. That's all trading is. Predicting something is going to happen, or something is going to do something a certain way based off of past events in the market because the market repeats itself".

And it’s not just retail investors using astrology to inform decisions, but large-scale crypto institutions too. Maren Altman, dubbed crypto’s “personal poet for the stars”, tracks correlations between planetary cycles and cryptocurrency markets, combining astrological pattern recognition with technical analysis, like candlestick charts. She has become a cult figure in the crypto community, who depend on her expertise to go bullish during full moons and short stocks during phases of the new moon.

The devil

If you are inclined to gaze up and find meaning from the skies above, you can find signs from the universe everywhere. Even on fashion resale platforms, where a Dior Bag selling for £555 is not a ripoff, but an angel number reaching out to you with a portal to freedom and personal growth. A message from the cosmos that the decision has been made for you; buy the designer saddle bag, and good luck and transformation is all yours.

So naturally, resellers on websites like Depop, eBay and Vinted are increasingly using angel numbers to price items as a strategy to increase the chances of a sale, transforming a vintage designer item into a spiritual omen from the angels. Because wherever there is an exploitable weakness in how the human psyche makes decisions, the devil is ready to sweep in and turn a profit, capitalising on the seductive attractions of the material.

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Two of cups

Like the meme where the mum tells her son to stay away from the girl asking about his birth chart, the current cultural discourse paints astrology fanatics as gullible, irrational creatures that should be treated as red flags.

But as the rational world becomes enchanted, there’s a rising sentiment that the rational number-cruncher and esoteric stargazer are not two opposing entities, but two elements that can combine to create a perfect sense of harmony.

There’s another meme that reflects the emerging zeitgeist more accurately: the astrology GF and stock trader BF as the ultimate couple. It’s a play on the perfect romantic symbiosis we’re fed by Hollywood scriptwriters; the whimsical and aloof girlfriend and normie, level-headed bf. Two very different worlds and worldviews that shouldn’t work together, but somehow do, like yins to each other’s yangs.

It’s an acknowledgement that every cold and calculated Elon Musk needs the enigmatic, emotional depth of a Grimes. Every earnest Scott Pilgrim needs and adventurous Ramona Flowers. Every normie Philip J Fry needs an idealistic Turanga Leela. Two opposites working together, equally lost and confused in the world, trying to make sense of it in their own way, both stabbing in the dark.

Judgement

Are you wearing the right clothes? Is your speech slurred? Are you on the guest list? No? Do you know the DJ? Approval and rejection in the world of clubs, hospitality and social spaces has traditionally been rooted in a robust and strict social protocol based on external appearance, dress codes, wealth and social status. But in this new era of vibes, intuition and divination, some establishments are leaning into what’s written in the stars to justify who to let in and who to bounce.

A club named Zamboni in New York, for example, is denying all Aries from entry into their club. The owner noticed that those born between March 21 and April 19 started the majority of fights. They also charge Geminis double entry fee (just because).

In tarot, the Judgement card signifies a moment of reckoning, reflection, and rebirth—a point where choices made are confronted, weighed, and resolved, often with a higher sense of understanding or transformation. This sense of calling and accountability parallels the evolving culture of exclusivity and admission in modern social spaces, where age-old gatekeeping is taking on new, almost esoteric forms.

The enchantment of decision-making plays into a broader desire to double down on something that lies beyond the grasp of rational, data-driven thinking alone. We are entering a new chapter of culture increasingly steered by what social theorist Zach Lamb calls “noetic feeling”2, guided by interconnection and planetary guidance. We are jumping the rationalist, techno-optimist ship steered by the Silicon Valley Wall Street industrial complex, instead diving into the ethereal lagoon of our internal, subjective, felt sense of truth, embracing the mythical plane.

In a piece of cultural analysis for The New Atlantis, journalist, author and scholar of religion, Tara Isabella Burton, has summarised this current cultural chapter eloquently:

“More and more young, intellectually inclined, and politically heterodox thinkers are showing disillusionment with the contemporary faith in technocracy and personal autonomy. The chipper, distinctly liberal optimism of rationalist culture that defines so much of Silicon Valley ideology…is giving way, not to pessimism, exactly, but to a kind of techno-apocalypticism. We’ve run up against the limits — political, cultural, and social alike — of our civilizational progression; and something newer, weirder, maybe even a little more exciting, has to take its place. Some of what we’ve lost — a sense of wonder, say, or the transcendent — must be restored.”

After all, is this ‘weirder’ approach to sense-making really that different to purportedly more ‘rational’ modes of thinking?

“Both technical analysis and astrology use the same mechanism where you’re looking at past cycles to predict the future,” Maren Altman, cryptos personal poet of the stars says in an interview. “One simply has a lot of pop culture with magic around it and the other is a little more academic sounding.” 3

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This is about the re-enchanted decision-making, because making a considered decision used to be far more about looking up at the stars, rather than down at spreadsheets and data models. Coincidentally, someone told me recently that consider has its origins in stargazing. The latin considerare, which combines con- (with) and sidus (star or constellation), was used in ancient Rome to refer to contemplating something deeply or carefully.

And so as the world becomes increasingly chaotic, when nothing seems to quite add up, data cannot tell the whole story. We’re breaking free from the confines of the rational realm, embracing whatever forms of sense-making make sense, even if that means leaning into the mythological. It reminds me of a quote from Douglas Rushkoff: “In a world where we have surrendered our spiritual complexity for the rigid and abstracted metrics of X/Twitter, Facebook, and Fitbit, we lose access to the squishy, indeterminate, and speculative”. To once again embrace this squishy reality, a sense of wonder; a sense of transcendence — must be restored.

PSA: On November 15th, I’m speaking on a panel organised by Salmon Labs on how to avoid over cooking your social strategy, where we’ll dive into the wild west of social media and try to go beyond the fluff, snake oil and BS to get to the marketing fundamentals. The core, practical principles relevant to any company - big or small (not just the Ryanairs and Duolingos of the world). You can RSVP here (limited spots available, so be quick ;) )

The inevitable reality of growing up is witnessing the innocent curiosity and infinite imagination of youth make room for the concrete rules and serious sensibility of adulthood. The future, once seen as a dazzling kaleidoscope of possibilities, starts to set in stone, diminished to a limited set of blueprints and paths set out before us. What ifs are reduced to what shoulds. Endless opportunities quashed by cast-iron protocols.

But let's travel back in time for a moment, back to early childhood. Remind yourself how it felt when the world was not yet fully in focus, instead filled with exciting unknowns and mysteries aching to be solved.

Learning to walk, we would stumble around, finding our feet. We would stumble with our vocabulary, too, smashing syllables and vowels together at random angles to see what would stick. We created made-up words and secret languages – language was our verbal Play-Doh. We invented whole new universes where the only rule was that there were no rules. 

The passing of time is inexorable and as we enter adulthood, life becomes ridden with rules. We are expected to use correctly assigned dictionary words the way they were intended. You can’t simply go about daily, civi life and invent new phrases without being met with at least a few raised eyebrows and confused glances. 

Luckily, there is still one domain of adultness where caution is thrown to the wind, where the only rule is that there are no rules: office lingo. In the wild west of modern business parlance, anything goes – nouns can be turned into verbs (please action that ASAP!), verbs can be turned into nouns (what will be the impact of this decision?). Who would have expected that the realm of Slack messages, email chains, and Zoom meetings would become the last bastion of play in adult life? A place where we still have total agency to experiment endlessly with language like verbal Play-Doh?

It makes sense that office workers often refer to the end of the business day as ‘end of play’, because judging by the language we use, the workplace is where we go to play pretend. Project managers talk about projects like they’re daring pilots, maintaining ‘holding patterns’ while discussing status updates at the ‘30,000-foot level’. Sometimes, when things get a little chaotic, the team must do the unthinkable: ‘build the plane as you fly it’. 

Meanwhile, executives in cutthroat strategy meetings will often – with total sincerity – discuss ‘low-hanging fruit’ (referring to easily achievable targets). Every time I hear that phrase, I can’t help but reminisce about childhood summers sneaking around gardens stealing ripened cherries and blackberries from unsuspecting neighbours. 

Marketing managers, strategists and industry experts are modern-day Lewis Carrolls, creating surreal universes filled with newly invented portmanteaus and nonsense words. Like Alices in Wonderland, they love pulling apart and reassembling words in strange formations, rolling them in glitter and paint. Content you can learn from? Why not call it ‘edutainment’? Teams working together synchronously? Let’s zhuzh it up and say ‘synergy’. Prefixes and suffixes are added to established trends with reckless abandon (influencers who don’t wanna influence? Let’s call them ‘de-influencers’). 

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And like kids drawn to candy, we’ve realised that everything is more fun when there’s a food analogy involved, elevating the mundaneity of work terminology into a tasty puzzle adventure. Content that’s short and engaging? Snackable and bite-sized. And if that content is good enough, we add it to the agency’s sizzle reel.

And it’s not just the marketing industry that likes to dabble in whimsical language. Silicon Valley loves it, too. VC firms have a knack for injecting the objectively disenchanted world of spreadsheets and bottom lines with magical creatures, referring to one billion dollar valuation start-ups as ‘unicorns’ (and in an additional stroke of toddler-like genius, dubbing soon-to-be one billion valuations as ‘soonicorns’.) Even negative outcomes are rebranded with playful imagination – soon-to-be-abandoned business ideas are not merely dismantled but dazzlingly ‘sunsetted’.

Understandably, there’s a sense of scepticism with language taken to an unreasonably abstract extreme. As Molly Young argued in New York Magazine a few years ago, the intermingling of modern business and New Age speak can often feel like a trick mirror that either hides a lack of understanding (“a series of false bottoms – you just keep falling deeper and deeper into gibberish”) or inflates importance (“hiding a deeper anxiety about our relationship to work — a sense that what we’re doing may actually be trivial”).

That frustration is valid. But there are two sides to this coin. Approached with sincere curiosity, playful corporate wordsmithing is anything but trivial. Yes, language can muddle and confuse. It’s easy to hide behind made-up words and nonsensical jargon. But it can also be the vessel in which radically new avenues of thinking can be unlocked. If you have the courage to name, reframe, and contextualise ideas in a way that defies limiting conventions and captures the collective imagination, you can encourage teams, industries and even society as a whole to think a little differently.  

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The reality is that we’re living in a fast-evolving, highly networked and complex world, where new ideas and paradigms are emerging faster than we can establish terms to describe them. We glue words together and invent new phrases, like bright-eyed children stumbling across new and mysterious experiences, because it is a necessity in order to not be left behind. And if you want to envision a radically new world, you need to be able to break free from the rigid linguistics that adulthood enforces on us. 

Courtney Hohne, former chief storyteller for The Moonshot Factory – Google’s vanguard innovation lab – once argued that the secret to creating cutting-edge technology can lie in something as soft and abstract as daring to get creative with language:

“Everyone has the potential to be brave, audacious, and radically creative, but we often put ceilings on ourselves with mindsets or habits that trap us on conventional trails of thought. A powerful vocabulary can help us resist forces that limit our thinking without us even realising it…chosen carefully, words don’t just describe innovation – they enable it.” 

When you begin to appreciate this subtle yet powerful influence words can have on unlocking new thinking, you see it everywhere. Unusual linguistic choices that hint at a vision of the world or a deeper yearning for what an idea can achieve – fuelled by a youthful naivety.

I thought about this while reading up on the origins of generative AI and GPT. It all started with eight former Google employees and a paper introducing the notion of ‘Generative Pre-training Transformers’. Why call the key mechanism behind the technology a ‘transformer’? According to a Wired profile detailing the origins of the paper, the founders needed a name that would represent just how disruptive this emerging technology was. One of the paper’s authors – Jakob Uszkoreit – picked the word ‘transformers’ because he had childhood memories of playing with the Hasbro action figures – robots that could shapeshift into planes, cars, and animals. He felt it was the perfect, relatable representation of how GPT could magically ‘transform’ as much understanding from data as a human might. 

A digital system so advanced its output often feels like the product of an alien civilisation – described through the lens of a childhood memory. To me, that sums up the power of imaginative wordsmithing – the ability to turn the inexplicably complex and abstract into something tangible and inspiring. That’s how I remember trying to make sense of the world as a child, freewheeling my way through endless summers, inventing silly words for ideas and feelings I did not yet fully grasp. A time before the playful curiosity and infinite imagination of youth had made room for the concrete rules and serious sensibility of adulthood.

A profile in The Gothamist mentions that Lombardo wears camo pants and Birkenstock Bostons and likes to say things like “birding is punk”. But could something as quiet, serene and wholesome as birdwatching really be regarded as ‘punk’?

Does the act of sitting in a park, patiently looking through a pair of binoculars and reading through field guides really deserve to be described with the same adjective usually reserved for angsty hardcore punk music, crusty anarchos and angry outcasts with ripped leather jackets?

If one considers punk as anything defiantly anti-capitalist, anti-establishment, anti-mainstream - then the answer is actually yes.

While the aura of ‘punk’ may have traditionally been about being harder, louder, faster - with all the perpetual exhaustion from the constant, ever-accelerating intensity of modern life, the notion of softer, slower, quieter has instead turned into this era’s most radical act of rebellion. Lombardo was right - in 2024, birding is punk as f*ck. 

Forget the aggressive and distorted sound of Sex Pistols, Black Flag and Bad Brains. If you want to fight the system, instead you have to keep quiet and listen for the sounds of birdcalls, whispers and rustling leaves. The weirdos and skaters are no longer interested in shouting obscenities and smashing windows, instead they want to leave their phones at home, be present and touch grass.

The idea of ‘slowing down’ - once derided as weak and lame, a feeble surrender to apathy - has increasingly taken on an empowering and commanding vibe. When speed is the status quo, the rebels are the ones that dig their heels in, while everyone around them keeps on running the race. As essayist Pico Eyer once argued, stillness has become the one thing we need and crave in our accelerated lives:

“In an age of speed, I began to think, nothing could be more invigorating than going slow. In an age of distraction, nothing can feel more luxurious than paying attention. And in an age of constant movement, nothing is more urgent than sitting still.”

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From this urgency; the urgency to put a stop to the artificial, manufactured speed of technology - meditation groups, birdwatchers and devoted slackers are emerging.

In the long lineage of modern punk subcultures, from the King’s Road punks of the 70s through to the ‘low life, high tech’ cyberpunks of the 90s and radically hopeful solarpunks of the noughties, this is the rise of the genre’s next countercultural iteration: slowpunk .

This loosely connected constellation of collectives and behaviours - fighting against the unbearable speed of modern life - is quickly becoming the defining underground movement of the modern zeitgeist.

Often, it’s small, but ultimately bold acts of resistance that point at a growing resentment: a bitter, angry realisation that our attention and energy are finite resources that shouldn’t be wasted so cheaply. A resentment rooted in the most cunning lie ever weaved by the tech industry : the promise that software, apps and phones were going to free us and make our lives easier. Instead, they made everything unbearably hectic. As argues in an essay about this illusion of convenience: “The basic rule is this: technology doesn't make our lives easier. It makes them faster and more crammed with stuff.”

So now, there’s the growing phenomena of people aggressively beginning to revoke other people’s access to their attention online. They’re taking digital sabbaticals, setting strict communication windows for checking and replying to messages, ignoring or archiving messages unless they’re from known people, turning off all app notifications. They are featuring “protecting my time” disclaimers on personal sites. Writer coined this set of increasingly prevalent behaviours as “ping minimalism”; small acts of digital resistance underpinned by the idea that attention is the most valuable asset we have, and must be protected at all cost.

Pushing back against the unrelenting speed of capitalism can also take on softer, yet equally provocative forms that imbue the symbolic slowness of nature. A decade ago, the closest thing the corporate world had to a punk movement was the rise of the ‘Girlboss’, a celebration of female empowerment and glamorisation of hustle culture, originally popularised by entrepreneur Sophia Amoruso. But after years of devoted grind mentality, leaving in it’s wake a scorched trail of burnt-out office workers, the modern zeitgeist has now pivoted towards another, very different aspirational archetype: Girlmoss.

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Girlmoss was originally coined in a tweet by X user MeganJKaleita, where they proclaimed:

“I don’t want to girlboss. I want to girlmoss. Grow on a cool damp stone in the forest, feel the breeze and hear the birds, be harvested by gnomes and turned into clothing. Girlmoss” 

While the Girlboss aspired to ascend the corporate ladder and max out productivity levels, the Girlmoss yearns for a more mellow life that moves at the unhurried speed of forest floor flora and fauna. Girlmoss yearns for WFH fake email jobs and midweek lunchtime Pilates. Or they decide to ditch the urban rat race altogether, escaping to a cabin in a beautiful place out in the country.

Slowpunk has an aversion to city life, because city life forces us to move at an unnatural speed, out of sync with our body clocks, out of sync with nature, inducing a sense of disorienting, tech-induced jetlag.

Slowpunk seeks to resolve this internal misalignment by leaning in closer to the organic rhythm of nature. unearthed a study in his Creative Destruction newsletter that illustrates how the natural environment can offer a very potent solution to the increasingly widespread feelings of time scarcity caused by contemporary urban lifestyles. The research found that feeling ‘in touch’ with nature expands our perception of “temporal duration”. In other words, time feels longer, stretched out, when we are immersed in natural settings, in contrast to the compressed timelines of urban gridlock. It proved something we’ve all inevitably experienced at some point: how a 30 minute walk in the city goes by in a blink of an eye, while a 5 minute stroll in nature can feel like a mind-bending eternity.

But Slowpunk is about more than just re-adjusting our pace to the speed of nature. It’s also about slowing down the rhythm of our ambition to a speed that feels more tender-hearted and human. Every counterculture has it’s soundtrack that points at a certain lifestyle ethos - and while punk movements of the past have been accompanied by angsty songs that reflect a sense of restlessness, that soundtrack is changing. It has recently been reported that young people have attached themselves to far softer odes that oppose the relentless intensity of modern life.

Billy Joel's 1977 hit Vienna, for example, has apparently become Gen Z's new anthem. With it’s refrain of “slow down, you’re doing fine”, it’s said to soothe a specific kind of malaise, reminding kids raised on the immediacy of social media and the restless news cycle to take a step back.

Joel has said that the song reminds listeners that “you don’t have to squeeze your whole life into your 20s and 30s trying to make it, trying to achieve that American dream, getting in the rat race and killing yourself. You have a whole life to live.”

Joining the slowpunk movement can take many forms. Sometimes it’s about escaping the rat race and resisting the urge to rush forward. Sometimes its a complete identity shift. Sometimes its smaller acts of resistance, like turning off your app notifications. But fighting through the collective fear of being left behind - going slower than everyone else - is never easy. That’s the nature of being a punk; it’s a commitment to take a stand and risk societal rejection. That’s what it takes to fight for your right to stand still and enjoy life at a slower pace.

Footnote:

• The 2nd issue of Playground Magazine - a lovely new bi-annual print publication for creative minds by - features an essay where I explore the role of imagination in corporate-speak. You can read more about the issue and pre-order below:

Playground

Behind-the-Scenes: The making of the magazine

Playground readers…

Read more

2 years ago · 12 likes · 7 comments · Auste Skrupskyte Cullbrand

• and big shoutout to Ben at BT Digital for the new idle gaze design <3

And nowhere have these trends seemingly planted themselves more firmly than in London. From idle gaze’s HQ in Berlin, I sometimes go for a scroll down the TikTok algorithm to catch a glimpse at what’s happening in the UK capital. And from the outside looking in, it sometimes feels like the city is turning into one big social media fulfilment centre.

Every neighbourhood I had grown to adore during my 7 year stint there in the heyday of my twenties seems to have turned into a sprawling, interconnected eco-system of hyper-local memes and microtrends. Hackney, Dalston and Bethnal Green; places which had once kept hold of at least some their original patina, appears to have evolved into their final form as shiny meccas of third wave coffeeshops and shoppy shops. Soho, meanwhile, looks to have been entirely annexed by corporations and sanitised of it’s fun and sordid past; refurbished with LED-screen-lined private streets and multi-million entertainment multiplexes.

But I always knew this was just one particular version of London that was being curated for me online. I knew there were other layers that only revealed themselves whenever I step foot in the city, places that the digital algorithm didn’t want to show me. That’s until my For You page decided to reward me with a peak beyond the tastefully beige backdrops of minimal natural wine bars and TikTok-optimised small plates purveyors. It started to show me content from a TikTok account called Deadpubs.

Dead pubs is (mostly) dedicated to showcasing old school boozers in London. Some of my favourites include a review of The Nag’s Head in Belgravia; (“a very good pub in a very weird part of town..located on the type of mewsy backstreet beloved by insufferable hidden London content miners everywhere”), and one of the The Crosse Keys in the City (“amongst the glass and steel monoliths of the square mile, where the cinq a sept is as commonplace as bailouts and embezzlement”).

@deadpubsA Swift One at… Rose’s, SE18 6NE #deadpubs #pubtok #pubreview #pubreviews #londonpub #pubculture #londondeadpubs #review #londonpubs #london #pubs #woolwich

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The narrator’s sombre, deadpan voice layered over eerie ambient background music gives the videos a mysterious, almost otherwordly essence. As the protagonist explores dimly lit watering holes to sink Mediterranean lagers, he assesses the patrons participating in karaoke, while marvelling at the amenities and decor at hand. Sometimes it’s a decent selection of fruit machines and a framed bullet hole from a gunfight, sometimes it’s the weekly meat raffles and an admiration for the pub’s resident speed garage DJ. An evaluation on the state of the urinals is a mandatory.

On the verge of suffocating on the stifling monotony of my social feed, stumbling across Dead Pubs’ reviews felt like a breath of fresh air. Suddenly, in the palm of my hand, was a portal to a side of London I had missed for a long time; a version of the city that hides down dark laneways, away from the panopticon of content capture.

@deadpubsA Swift One at… The Joiners Arms, SE25 5EU. #deadpubs #croydon #southlondon #pubs #fypシ #review #london #england #uklife

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For me, the videos are on one hand a fun, entertaining approach to championing the dying breed of ‘proper’ pubs across the nation, but on a deeper level they also have this uncanny ability to capture a certain haunting undercurrent that flows through London. An inescapable feeling that the city is entrapped in a sort of liminal space; where old boozers in forgotten corners of the city - warm, welcoming, anachronistic relics of the past - mingle with the city’s steely push towards a dystopian future: high rises filled with vacant luxury condos, cut-and-paste retail box parks and soulless winter wonderlands.

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My essays this year on how social media shapes the cities we live in sparked quite a bit of interest, so I was keen to reach out to the creator of Dead Pubs to have a chat about this particular cornerstone of London culture that’s currently caught in the crossfire of digital content creation.

Below is our conversation where we discuss what makes proper boozers special, and how to celebrate them on social media in a way that does justice to their unique aura. An aura I personally feel should be protected at all costs.

To kick things off, could you please give a swift intro on yourself and why you decided to launch the Dead Pubs TikTok account?

JM: My name is Jimmy McIntosh, a writer from London. Dead Pubs came out of my Instagram account londondeadpubs where I was chronicling the closed and demolished pubs of London. That started during lockdown, but the seeds of the Dead Pubs TikTok were sown at the beginning of the year. I was watching a lot of Jonathan Meades, and thought it might be fun to do surreal reviews of London pubs.

I think this surreal - funny but also hauntingly eerie - nature of your videos is what makes them so compelling. I can definitely see the Meades inspiration in terms of exploring very ordinary public spaces and architecture with a level of profound (and sometimes scathing) cultural commentary, delivered in a serious but also ironic tone. What exactly do you think it is about the videos that makes them feel so surreal?

JM: I think the kind of places I go into — maybe a bit off the beaten path, a little bit rough around the edges — lend themselves to this noiry, moody feel. The early ones were all shot in the winter, so it was always dark, but I’m finding as we’re now in summer in the UK I either have to wait until 10pm to get that same feel, or just go for it in the daylight. I was very conscious to make sure the videos themselves were shot well, and a bit weird — I have an excellent cameraman called Luke — as I think often pub reviews on TikTok are just some bloke going into pubs with a front facing camera in one shot. You want to tell the story of these places, and get across just how good they are!

Your pub reviews feature a scorecard based on ambiencé, interiors, drinks and DPF. Could you please elaborate a little on what DPF entails?

JM: DPF stands for Dead Pub Factor — I had to shorten it to get through TikTok’s stringent word filters. It’s that mysterious quality every good pub possesses — the invisible, ineffable je ne sais quoi that’s somewhere between vibe and soul. A pub either has it or doesn’t — and you normally know it as soon as you walk in.

Speaking of blokes going into pubs with front facing cameras, it seems that TikTokers have recently become quite infatuated with traditional pubs ('pints, chit chat and good people', splitting the G challenges and so forth), which, some people say, has contributed to certain pubs, especially in east London, to become totally rammed with 20-somethings on the weekends.

Of course, what makes your content different is that you don’t try to treat these boozers as Instagram backdrops or whatever, what you seem to be interested in is actually the opposite, celebrating all the things that make them a bit unfashionable and ‘dank’.

So with this in mind, I was curious to get your thoughts on whether an influx of crowds and increase in popularity is an automatic DPF killer? Do you think these pubs should stay off the beaten track and retain their rough edges, or could they benefit from some love and attention from Londoners who might not usually venture into dark and dingy boozers?

JM: I think (maybe hope) there’s a movement brewing that wants to return to these very maximalist, seventies pub interiors — you see it in the influencers like Max LePage with the blue posts in soho. If I was really intellectualising it I’d say it’s a reaction to the millennial pub aesthetic of exposed brick and austere interiors. That was just sooo boring, and not really a conducive place to meet your mates, have a few pints, and then get off. My twenties were characterised by very average gastropubs in north and east London, catering to a bunch of people with kids and no idea of a good time. I think the hopelessness of the current economic situation has led a lot of younger people to want something more from their night out beyond a roast dinner and pint of boring craft ale.

I genuinely think no pub should ever be gatekept. There are soooo many amazing pubs out there that people don’t want to go into because they’re deemed too “dodgy”, but as soon as you walk in they’re the best place you’ve ever been. I think I’ve always wanted to turn people on to those places, especially in a time when pubs are doing so badly economically. Saying that, there are very few “untouched” pubs in zones 1 and 2 now. Places like the Army & Navy in Dalston, which I remember back in 2013 having a garden which was just rubble, have now become these Time Out must-go places. It’s good though. But I do think it’s a good thing. Hopefully it’ll make any new publicans think twice about stripping their place out, and make them realise that people want the genuine pub experience — carpets, banquettes, and darts. It’s just inherently more glamorous than a boring giant Victorian pub that stinks of cooked meat.

If it’s a question of class — well, I think the best pubs should be classless places: somewhere where everyone can go, no matter their background. That’s what a lot of them were at the very beginning on their existence. Ultimately they’re just places where people can let loose, and make friends. And that’s the same whether it’s some bare-bricked gastro in Nunhead or a 70s estate boozer in Debden. It’s about the people.

Yeah I think the discourse has recently turned into a question of class, with accusations of people 'cosplaying' working class lifestyles by frequenting 'proper' pubs, which I agree is a shame. Ultimately, there's a dearth of places in cities like London right now where people can genuinely relax in public and connect with others, and pubs have always been a cornerstone of that

With the wisdom of all the pub reviews under your belt so far, what would you say are the 3 most important or common features/traits a boozer tends to have to score highly on the DPF score?

JM: I think for me the three things they often have in common is a sense of coziness — a feeling of being a home away from home. You walk in and you can imagine yourself spending an entire evening there; it’s a place hard to leave. Then I think the clientele play a big part. The best pubs cater for everyone, from all walks of life. You want an interesting spread of people! Then finally, and this is maybe the most subjective of the three, I think the decor plays a huge part. Pubs should be a spectacle — there’s nothing more boring than a stripped back, battleship grey boozer.

Have you come across any new spots that have been able to ‘replicate’ the rustic charm of a ‘dead’ pub? or does it always require a certain patina that can only grow over time?

JM: I suppose the most recent famous pub opening is the Devonshire — which does go some way to replicating the old school vibe of a proper pub. It is, objectively, a very good pub. But it does still have a strange, otherworldly feel to it, a bit like drinking in a pub in Disneyland. Is that just because it’s still so pristine? Is it because it’s always so rammed? I can’t quite make my mind up.

“Choose life. Choose a job. Choose a career. Choose a family. Choose a f*****g big television. Choose washing machines, cars, compact disc players and electrical tin openers. Choose fixed-interest mortgage repayments. Choose leisurewear and matching luggage.”

So begins the iconic opening monologue in Trainspotting, as anti-hero Renton mocks conventional life choices. The scathing commentary on the dullness and futility of mainstream existence succinctly captures one of the defining anxieties of the modern age: the fear of conformity. A fear that fuels the relentless push towards carving out our very own edgy identity away from the herd.

This dogged determination to zig when the ‘sheeple’ zag has underpinned countless iterations of hipster movements in search of differentiation. Coolhunters wade deeper and deeper into the murky fringes of culture, seeking unconquered tastes to territorialise. They forage for obscure music genres, eclectic if you know you know fashion wardrobes, and early adopter artisan goods to adorn their rare vintage shelves.

Layer by layer, this glimmering allure of unique identity creation has begun to fade, dulled by a sense of burnout with the constant need to externalise and commodify our quirks. As Tara Isabelle Burton, author of Self-Made observes: “From the college essay to the dating website to Twitter or Instagram, we’re constantly expected to cultivate our ‘original’ personality: transforming that which is unique and irreducible about ourselves into a source of clickable and monetizable content.”

Beyond the cult of self-making, a counterculture is taking shape - a collective realisation that we don’t need to seek difference to establish an authentic self. There’s unity in ordinary. Within the depths of plainness, we might just find comfort and belonging.

As the cultural pendulum swings away from individuality, the marketing zeitgeist is shifting too. In recent years, we have witnessed millions of advertising campaigns framing personal self-expression as the ultimate goal, encouraging customers to consume, connect and express themselves in their unique way. Yet, a new value proposition is gaining prominence: the promise of fitting in and conforming. With increasing frequency, brands are leaning into the pride that comes with blending in with the sheeple. 

The consumer electronics space is usually flooded with shiny new tech for showing off. Yet emerging brands are shifting to design with blandness and anonymity in mind. The aptly named electronics company Nothing offers phones and accessories stripped to bare, industrial uniformity. In fashion, both luxury and high street collections are filled with items and collabs that would once have been embarrassingly basic — from the resurgence of dad-style sneakers and caps to mass-produced Crocs and Stanley Cup water bottles.

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On social media, where the algorithm usually elevates the exotic and extraordinary lives of jet-setting influencers and solopreneurs, our feeds are increasingly filled with windows into the radically normal. One champion of normie lifestyle is Tony P, a 25-year-old consultant and bachelor in Washington with a penchant for purple ties, aviator sunglasses, morning walks to work, Miller Lite happy hours, and Subway lunches. Like many of his normie peers, Tony advocates shrugging off the relentless pursuit of one-of-a-kind individuality. “[Life] isn’t some puffed-up, showboating thing,” he says. “Sometimes it’s ok to sit back, listen, and let someone else take the lead.”

When we’re feeling lonelier than ever, trapped within our cages of niche identities and alternative tastes, it’s refreshing to fall in line with the crowd. As we melt into one big, gooey puddle of shared interests, jobs, and outfits, there’s camaraderie in liking what everyone else likes.

A decade ago, the trend forecasting group K-Hole famously predicted the rise of normcore. They identified an emerging cultural mode of ambiguity, “finding liberation in being nothing special”. As the collective fear of conformity resides, the dawn of a new post-individuality era presents itself on the horizon. An era that reconnects us with each other. So go ahead and choose a boring job, choose generic leisurewear, choose to be basic. Choose a mundane life and bask in its communal glory.

On some level, it offers a window into the cutting edge of upcycled textiles, biomorphic shapes, modular furniture, and integrated greenery, but beyond the design innovations, what it seems to really be about, more than ever, is whipping up a sense of aesthetic lifestyle FOMO.

This year, enthusiastic aesthetes gushed over Marimekko and Apartamento’s Bar Unikko pop-up - a traditional Milanese café dressed up with poppy prints adorning every surface - and Highsnobiety’s Sbagliato-themed Bar Basso takeover (with an accompanying merch drop).

But no branded activation seemed to generate quite as much attention as Caffe Rimowa: a pop-up promoting the collaboration between the luggage company and Italian espresso machine manufacturer La Marzocco. Objectively, a very nice space, a marriage of brands that just makes sense. Two companies merging their expertise in high-end metals and machining, two kinds of chrome colliding into a thing of beauty.

The pop-up pushed all the potent levers of the modern aspiration economy: artisan coffee, sleek stainless surfaces, tastefully retro colour schemes and workshop-like streetwear outfits behind the counter. By combining forces, Rimowa and La Marzocco had - maybe inadvertently - shaped the perfect symbol of the modern digitally nomadic, international AirBnB lifestyle of which Milan Design Week represents in so many ways.

While this is an obviously successful recipe for drawing in crowds, a fair few critics have begged the question: is it possible to really stay true to the event’s ethos of experimentation and innovation if the exhibitors are designing spaces to fit with whatever increasingly narrow stylistic values are trending on social?

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This perceived homogenisation of public spaces is happening everywhere. There’s the rise aesthetic “shoppy shops” - a term used to describe a certain kind of highly aesthetic retail location (most often a grocery store or bodega); stocked with tinned sardines, premium squeeze bottle olive oils and crunchy chili; the kind of pantry items that feature in countless TikTok videos.

Meanwhile, high-end restaurants all look increasingly the same, tastefully beige backdrops with visually dramatic dishes (like steak topped with a super-sized cacio-e-pepe filled ravioli), food designed to trigger the urge to snap a photo. One restaurant critic aptly described these establishments as “instagram fulfilment centres” (more on this back in idle gaze 035).

Kyle Chayka covers this destruction of nuance in his book Filterworld, where he documents the turning point in 2010 when public spaces started to be moulded, physically and literally, by the market advantage of luring patrons looking for highly instagrammable shots: “sufficiently minimalist to appear classy, possessing some aspect that seems covetable and exclusive, conducive to the square dimensions that the app mandated”.

Like moths to a flame, we’re drawn to these photogenic spaces. It’s second nature to think first “will this make great content?” before considering “will it actually be nice to spend time here?”

But that flame is beginning to falter. There’s another, more welcoming glow beyond the tree line, away from the panopticon of content capture. A renewed affection for places that would have up until recently been dismissed as dank, messy, outdated. You can find them in every city, hiding in plain sight: old school Italian joints with tomato sauce splashed against countertop surfaces, coffeeshops with ancient decorations, lunch spots with menus that haven’t been updated since the 90s.

In London there’s a renewed appreciation of ‘caffs’ (documented lovingly by the likes of [non-aesthetic] Instagram accounts like caffs_not_cafes). Greasy spoons with gingham curtains, linoleum floors and laminate tables, with nothing on the menu but slight variations on an english breakfast. Nothing to drink but builders tea.

Every time I find myself in London I try to squeeze in a fry up at E Pellicci, an art deco adorned caff in Bethnal Green. Despite increasingly long lines of tourists outside hoping to experience a slice of UK nostalgia, there’s a staunch refusal to cave in to any pressure to modernise or pander to trending stylistic or service industry norms (the cash registers haven’t been updated since the 60s). The space retains a messy old school charm that can only be felt, an essence that could never be captured on camera. It feels like the Kray Twins, who used to famously frequent the premises 50 years ago, could walk in at any moment.

The fashion newsletter coined a great term last year for these kind of places: “Un-Instagrammable-Hang-Zones”: warm, welcoming, unpretentious venues, like teahouses, coffeeshops, dive bars, pizza parlors, that proliferated in the ‘90s, back in the quainter, earlier days of globalization —

“a lovely and welcoming place to actually hang out, in other words, the kind of place where you were not remotely tempted to indulge in the modern cyborg tic of whipping out yr phone and documenting yr visit for the timeline…”

Beyond the digital content machines of third-wave coffeeshops, brand pop-ups and shoppy shops, the sentimentality for Un-Instagrammable-Hang-Zones is about feeling sentimental for a time before the loneliness epidemic had become a defining characteristic of modern life. When ‘hanging’ was the main activity for which one would frequent a coffeeshop. Places to come as you are, relax, open up and feel at home. And don’t even bother wrangling a TikTok out of it, it’s too dark and messy, everything will come out blurry. You just had to be there.

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And while entrepreneurial restaurateurs and brands on the prowl for emerging consumer desires have caught onto this yearning for more homely spaces, their futile attempts to replicate the Un-Instagrammable-Hang-Zone makes it evident they can neither be forced or co-opted.

Cue all the eye-rolling going on around Frog Club, a newly opened and much hyped restaurant in NYC pulling out all the stops in it’s attempt to replicate a certain nostalgically musty aura. Reservations are made by email (not Resy), and photographs aren’t allowed inside. To enter, you have to cover the front and back cameras of your phone with stickers, to make it clear this not a place to TikTok their spinach soufflé into oblivion. The interior has been described as one early visitor as a ‘bondage den’, featuring “an almost laughable number of plates hung from chains overhead”..It was like Bemelmans Bar had ripped a few lines of adderall and decided to rewrite Frog and Toad.”

However, by forcing patrons to stop capturing content, and attempting to generate an artificial sense of mystique, it all feels a little contrived. As over at wrote in her review of Frog Club: “don’t treat me like a child and put a sticker on my phone, give me free bread, allow walk-ins, and stop trying so hard”.

Burberry is another brand which has recently been accused of trying too hard to break free from content optimised sterility. During London Fashion Week last year they announced a takeover of Norman’s, an iconic, cozy caff in the capital, and were broadly slated for “cosplaying British working class culture”. The pop-up was denounced as a crass misappropriation of an everyman institution by a not so everyman brand, with overpriced dishes served by staff wearing trendy matching and branded uniforms to serve influencers.

I’m writing this essay sat comfortably in Johnston Street Cafe in Collingwood, Melbourne, where there’s no aesthetic, overpriced dishes or Instagrammable backdrops. It’s a nondescript but very charming coffeeshop filled with rural knick knacks, old rusty farming tools, framed, fading pages from vintage cookbooks. There’s a crackling cast-iron fire place in the corner. There’s a certain patina in places like this that can only develop with time, and a patient commitment to never cave in to temporary fads. It’s too dark here and everything is far too dishevelled to even consider capturing content. Free from the pull of the algorithm, there’s space to just be.

When we talk about the nineties and noughties, there’s plenty of head-shaking and eyebrow-raising at the absurd marketing and inappropriate lad culture of the era. But it equally seems to trigger a yearning for a simpler time, when there was such a thing as a ‘capital m’ Monoculture, when we all felt excited when brands offered a sense of edgy subversion that could shock and spellbind an entire generation.

Selling subversion

Why we feel nostalgic for the vulgar, bizarro advertising of the noughties.

When most people think of the late 90s and early 2000s, they usually think of things like Blockbuster, LimeWire and that cool ‘S’ everyone used to doodle everywhere. And while it was an era full of sensible, laidback optimism, I like to remind everyone it was also a decade filled with utterly absurd and surreal advertising.

For example, what brand in their right mind today would portray their consumers with bloodshot-eyes and bulging veins? Or feature a man sitting on a couch, trousers undone, sniffing underwear? This is exactly what Sony did when they advertised the Playstation 2, in a set of notoriously edgy ads from the early 2000s.

Other iconic relics from this absolutely feral era of PS2 marketing include the girl with Playstation-branded ecstasy pills on her tongue and an ad for Wipeout—a racing game exclusively available on the console—featuring a pair of heroin-chic models lying down with bloody noses.

These print ads have today gained cult-like y2k artifact status. “Playstation ads used to be so cunty what happened” someone online recently lamented. And it’s true, the Sony marketing department at the dawn of the new millennium was truly serving cunt.

These ads represent everything that was objectively fun and cool about this period; the edgy counterculture aesthetics, the cyber-futuristic fonts and soft neon colorways. But they also represent everything that was shockingly inappropriate and annoying about the era as well; all the revved-up testosterone and stubborn rejection of anything earnest.

Going through the films, music and art from that time, that restlessness is palpable. Rebels everywhere, without a cause. Thom Yorke captured it best on Radiohead’s 1995 track, "The Bends," where he whines; 

“I'm just lying in a bar with my drip feed on. Talking to my girlfriend waiting for something to happen, I wish it was the sixties, I wish I could be happy, I wish, I wish, I wish that something would happen”.

Films like Office Space and The Matrix funneled this pervading disillusionment with modern society onto the silver screen, featuring white-collar protagonists finding ways to escape the mundaneness of their 9-5 cubicles. In 1999’s Fight Club, its anti-hero Tyler Durden offers the now iconic war cry for disillusioned Xennials: “We have no great war. No great depression. Our great war is a spiritual war. Our great depression is our lives.”

The Playstation 2’s tagline at the time was: "Different Place. Different Rules". The noughties were indeed a different place, with different rules. The advertising of the time was a far cry from the saccharine-sweet, purpose-drenched morality of modern marketing. This was a time when Levi’s hired indie auteurs Michel Gondry and Spike Jonze to direct smutty spaghetti western skits and heartstopping operating theater musicals. I marvel at the freedom bestowed upon the creative directors back then; given total authority to spend marketing dollars on sowing fear, confusion and disgust far and wide across towering billboards and prime-time television breaks.

The TV spots for the PS2 were equally strange and surreal. David Lynch directed a couple of promos; 60-second fever dreams with extremely tenuous links to the gaming console (did Lynch even know what product he was advertising?) One featured a young man walking down a dark, confusing corridor, his arms and head detaching, eventually confronting a speaking duck and its entourage.

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The provocative advertising of the time distinctly reflects this great depression that lurked behind the shiny veneer of the late 90s, pre-global economic crisis vacuum; a moment in time plagued by a collective sense of ennui. If a brand wanted to capture people’s attention and sell them something, all they had to do was swoop in and acknowledge the absurdity of it all, offering a nihilistic sense of surreal escapism from the soulless hamster wheel of capitalism. An opportunity to break free from the shackles of mediocre middle-class comforts.

And that’s exactly what some of the seemingly most innocuous brands in the world set out to do. This was the era of darkly comedic Skittles ads featuring absurd characters stuck in corporate hell. My favorite is the darkly tragic tale of ‘Touch’, where Tim shows his colleague Joel that everything he touches turns to Skittles. The anguish in Tim’s eyes when he recalls the man on the bus whose hand he shook, who will never see his family again, is heartbreaking.

Sometimes it does feel upsetting that consumer culture has lost this brash energy. “Can a historian tell me why as a society we got less cunt”, a recently trending TikTok from musician Cray observed, as she exhibits the sheer cuntiness of her bubblegum pink Motorola razor flip phone and emerald green Xbox 4 from 2004, in contrast to her modern, sleek and dull iPhone.

Today, we want so much of what we watch, buy and consume to feel serene, an antidote to the hyper-stimulation of modern life. But in 2004, when I was barely a teenager, I remember the collective, voracious appetite for the garish and subversive. I remember watching late-night TV, flicking through magazines and sitting eagerly at the cinema before the trailers started, waiting for an advert to shock me, jolt me awake. It was equal parts exciting and terrifying, and for better, or for worse, nothing in advertising today comes close to triggering that same sensation.