If the media cycle is the beating heart of culture, the lifeblood of today’s media landscape is novelty and referentialism. Trends and countertrends pump cultural viscera endlessly, cycling and recycling it through new capillary means.
The niche online communities that result create cultural hypertension: pressure to refine your taste. Devouring glib Letterboxd or Goodreads or RateYourMusic reviews; Pair of Kings podcast posts; video essays. These seemingly bottomless personal reservoirs of culture that we dive into can be rewarding, but enjoyment is secondary. Legend says that if you get deep enough, there lies an unmapped Atlantis: correct taste. But in the meantime, you can always be more niche, more archive, more based.
These communities and spaces give us a feeling of kinship at the push of a button, the swipe of a finger. Once conditioned, to go without these bottomless outlets of culture can feel hypoxic; ending the transfusion of trend is dizzying, like stepping off a treadmill. The world moves around you, but you stand still, feeling irrelevant and left behind.
Niche online cultural spaces provide affirmation and guidance on the pursuit of this ever-elusive “correct taste,” but if we lose these digital guides, how do we know we’re consuming the right content?
Online, you are your subculture. Currentness is currency. To know the Jeremy Allen White Calvin Klein ad is to know masculinity. To watch “Love Lies Bleeding” is to know film. To follow Raf Simons on Instagram (and DM him every week or so asking for an internship) is to know the fashion industry. If you’ve seen the “right” one, you’ve seen ’em all. To love culture is to know it better than everyone else. To maintain this love, one must further pursue auto-tactile didacticism: constant new culture you can touch, place in your collection and anchor your identity to.
Find out what Twitter says, and do it. Forfeit your humanity, become a skinjob. I’ve seen things you people wouldn’t believe … I don’t wear clogs, I wear mules. Interlinked. I listened to the new Charli XCX remixes. Interlinked. With Instagram, interlinked.
It feels comfortable to be in community with those who share niche interests, to be fed constant talking points and be current. Only 24.5k followers on my favorite meme page means that I am part of the enlightened few. Only some will get it.
As consumers, we build our identities around the products, media and circles that we surround ourselves with. We use these cultural products as tools to express who we are and what we believe in. I am Jack’s Acne Studios jeans; I make Jack seem esoteric to female religious studies majors at Green Beach. Without access to information about these things that we choose to interact with or avoid, it’s hard to express yourself, or understand how others are expressing themselves. To know media is to fill one’s bandoliers with social ammunition and one’s wallet with cultural currency.
I got rid of Instagram nearly a year ago now, and dropped TikTok a few years before that. Yes, I am holier than thou. It’s been a gradual divorce, and I still look at Instagram occasionally on Safari. Feeling naughty, I am greeted by the spin cycle. Looking through the window, I catch glimpses of once-familiar logos, colors and patterns, transformed into strange writhing shapes. Logo T-shirts for cool bands and blank T-shirts from cool brands are the stock of the broth — stained with the sweat of superiority.
Though I mock them, I owe a great deal to the online media spaces that filled my past. I used to pride myself on my connection to all of these niche cultural landmarks. I knew the “it-shoe” and the “it-bag,” the new album and the soon-to-be big artist. What car LeBron bought. What bike Vingegaard rode — hell, even what socks he wore. I took part in shaping these online spaces as much as they shaped me, and I liked it. Giving that up was nerve wracking. I didn’t know how I could retain my sense-of-self as someone who was fashionable, into music — someone who was metropolitan. One might ask why I would ever eschew this cornucopia.
It would be wrong to say that I was the hippest, the most in touch. I’ve always been a comfortable cultural cast away. I didn’t grow up liking TV much, had a hard time recognizing celebrities and never followed sports. So when social media began to bore me, it wasn’t a surprise but more of an inevitability. The novelty had worn off.
After finally leaving Instagram, when people began to ask me if I had heard or seen something, it wasn’t new to say no. As I drifted away from social media writ large, I expected a gradual descent into apathy about my previous passions. In some ways, my fears have materialized — I now can hardly get a finger on the pulse of things I once was an encyclopedia on. I haven’t bought nearly as many new clothes, because I don’t know where to look for them, so I repeat outfits day after day. I used to pour over Pitchfork for songs to pad my Spotify liked songs list, each more obscure than the last. Lately, I’ve been into the Beatles and Rihanna.
With my departure, I see the march of culture less consequentially. It’s true that I’ve missed the boat, but from down here on my desert island, it looks like It’s on a different course than I believed it to be when I was on board.
In the whirlpool of the media cycle, it was hard to recognize that I was going in a circle. When I had my nose an inch from these cultural outlets, everything seemed exciting and impossibly large. It seemed like the latest trend was always more visionary, more creative, more relevant.
After I left social media, rather than a march toward excelsior, it seemed more like a cycle. The pace of social media obscured the circular goal of the march.
Much of the fun of interacting with new things was just that: newness. With the glow of novelty extinguished, the features of last month’s hot topic began to look sallow and creased. On board, I didn’t care; I always had something new fed to me to replace it. I wasn’t even sticking around long enough to watch it happen. My closet ballooned, I made a new playlist every other week and I had the library of Babel for a watch-later list.
I felt like I was part of an iterative process. I was developing my style, my opinions, evolving, and theoretically getting closer to my core: the ultimate, perfectly curated taste. In reality, the core was ephemeral: constantly changing with every new “it-thing.” I had frenziedly joined this incessant chase, not realizing I was after my own tail.
The only requirement for an “it-shoe” was that it was different from the last it-shoe, and that you didn’t have it yet. As Stanley cups and Sambas replaced Nalgenes and New Balances, the chase continued. When I stepped away, I finally surveyed the culture I had made my identity. Some of it was bad, much of it good. But I found that, after the fire of novelty had dimmed, the newer stuff was not much better than the older —— just different. My collection of it-things became … things.
My new life as a castaway meant that, while I had all this wreckage and refused to sort through, I had all the time in the world to do it. While staying up-to-date with every cultural cairn took a lot of time, I don’t claim that I spent my time much differently once I stepped away.
The time I once dedicated to scrolling hasn’t been replaced by thorough mindfulness routine, cold showers or early morning studying. Instead, I finally have time to sort through all that culture I accrued with a newfound perspective. When I gave up on keeping up, I stopped looking for where he inserted the blade, and I started feeling 22. I couldn’t try to like what was cool, and dislike what was basic, because I was out of touch with both. I was forced to enjoy what I enjoy. I don’t think about my next pair of shoes, because I love my current ones.
Giving up the chase of the novelty fix has allowed me to work through the massive reservoirs of cultural artifacts I collected and look at them outside of their intended context online by bringing them into the context of my life. If they fit, great, but if the change in setting has made them unseasonable, I let go.
I began to work through my movie list, and began to thin out my dresser. Through the process, I rediscovered lots of things that I had given up on, or simply forgotten about. I still had, and I still liked these things much more than I thought I would. I realized that it wasn’t that I didn’t have enough culture, or not the right culture. I had all I needed.
I won’t claim that my new lifestyle is somehow cooler than being cool, and that by being so out of touch I have somehow worked my way around to cultural relevance, horseshoe style. That would miss the point — you only have so much space in your life. Even though I have given up coolness, I now allow space for whatever else might inhabit its once-warm nook.
Like that movie where Tom Hanks is on the desert island, I admit I have become overly attached to my shrunken pile of cultural crap. Eventually, I’ll run out of things to read, watch and wear, but I don’t see myself diving back in any time soon. Like a rollercoaster, the media cycle is most fun the first time around, and every subsequent time, the ride just seems slower. Ask yourself: are you seeing new details each time around, or is your head just spinning from the speed? The pace of culture can make consumption into a near-spiritual experience, with every tiny thing imbued with endless meaning and importance by the sheer newness — but at a certain point, new meaning is hallucinated.
I enjoyed my time on the ride, but I also enjoy being off of it. Although I miss the detail an up close view afforded me, I believe it’s more beautiful from afar. So next time you feel out of touch, unfashionable and uncool, give a thought to what it might be like to stay that way for a while. If you don’t like it, don’t worry: the boat is moving in a circle, so you can always get back on next time around.
Parker DeVore is a second year at Pitzer hailing from the mean streets of Seattle, he is greenpilled, and is wondering if you would like to be too
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