It Ends With a Swipe

With the End of Nightlife, NYC and Social Media on the Horizon, Where Can Culture Grow?

(Midjourney)

(Editorial note: After a few weeks traveling to the year 1989, Mo Diggs has returned to an unrecognizable present. He had predicted the end of comedy, the end of fame and the end of art rather successfully. But even he was rattled by the recent discovery that the youth does not want to go out anymore. Underneath all that penetrative skepticism was a deep, unconscious assumption that the youth would want to hang out (get drunk and high, socialize, dance with each other off-camera) and try to make it in, say, NYC (gentrification was a problem back in the ‘90s, didn’t stop LCD Soundsystem or The Strokes…) Nope. The youth would rather cloutchase from home, whether that home is Cleveland or Eureka Springs. Which would be fine, except his forecast about the end of social media may have been the most accurate.)

You know that scene you often see in a show about a genius detective when some guy drones on about something seemingly irrelevant to the case (the irrelevant drone always seems to strike exactly when our gumshoe is having a dark night of the soul, naturally) and then Genius PI is like “Wait, repeat that?” and the guy repeats a seemingly humdrum detail about honey garlic wings or paint thinner that seems to hold some cosmic, deus ex machina key to the case? That’s what it feels like sometimes when I read a really great news article, Substack, etc. When I click something that may have a little bit of interest to me, but then I stumble upon a passage that almost makes me drop the phone.

When I was reading Erik Hoel’s essay about high-tech pastoral weeks ago, I found this:

Zoomers, who just now should be hitting the cities en mass, seem less interested in night life, bars, or even physical events at all. They have their own weirding ways. And while there will always be enough bright young things to revivify a place like New York, what about other, mid-tier cities?

Perhaps this supposed decline of the American city isn’t even real. Perhaps it’s just on our phones. The thing is that it doesn’t matter. Let’s be blunt: a lot of people are scared of cities from short clips of shambling drug addicts they see on social media, and the stories they read about death on the subway, drug use, stranger danger. What matters is perception. Those who do live in the real San Fransisco, whatever their opinions, are in the minority when it comes to the perception of the imaginary San Francisco that lives in everyone’s head. Which is becoming ever more negative with every video of a slow drive past tents upon tents and every frustrated social media post about a broken car window—whether that reflects everyone’s lived life or not.

Perhaps it’s my age or my dwindling reading comprehension, but I have had the hardest time trying to figure out Gen Z trends. Are they liberal? Alt-right? Do they like rock or chill study beats? The one trend that seems to have been stuck to them like their birth year is that they really love that domestic cozy aesthetic. Why just these past few weeks “bed rotting” has been trending. You are not wrong if you think that everybody loves getting cozy. What’s different is that youths in the past loved it after a night of hard drinking the night before. But, thanks to growing up during lockdown and vaping stronger weed, staying in at home with the parents getting cozy in the racecar bed sounds better and better.

So what Mo? You are 47 and love staying in your Bushwick studio with your special needs cat your damn self! Is this Substack about to pivot to a younger demo? Tell me now. Don’t fuck with me.

Well, as anyone who reads this Substack knows, I am obsessed with scenius (here are all five of my posts). For as long as I have been writing this stack I have been hailing scenius as our Hail Mary pass. If a bunch of creatives could just get together IRL in NYC and start a scene, art might be resurrected yet and we wouldn’t have a parade of downtown NYC micro celebs in its place. Now, I am worried that we may be moving beyond the post-Warhol niche celeb menagerie of Chinatown into absolute nothingness.

This is a Substack about how we can look back at the legacy media past to see what can be done about the present and/or future of new media. Well, about that…this right here is unprecedented. Even at times like the early ‘80s when there was a brief dip in NYC nightlife attendance due to crime (leaving only the people who really wanted to die for their art and creating a weirdly romanticized NYC in the process) the idea was that, if you wanted to hang out with people, there was no substitute for going out of the house. At those times anyway. As long as we have had the web, we have had an alternative. But in the 2000s, Brooklyn hipster nightlife was invented. In the 2010s, the mobile phone turned the outside world into one big Instagram photo op. But after 2020 lockdown, the youth realized: just because they are on mobile phones, does not mean they themselves had to be mobile.

So we know that the yoots like to surf the web at home now, ‘90s retro steez. But where online are they going? Twitter and Reddit are bleeding users. Threads became the most downloaded app in history, but will it go the way of all those would-be Twitter replacements like Mastodon and Bluesky? A lot of this is FOMO of course. So many of us missed getting in on the ground floor of apps like Twitter, TikTok, etc. Threads will probably be nothing, but better to try and be wrong. FOMO is an interesting term for this phenomenon because when it was popular in the 2010s, it referred to fear of missing out on major IRL events like a huge party, a great restaurant, tropical vacation spots, whatever inspired envy on our Instagram feeds. Not healthy, but the nominal goal was to have a better life. FOMO for apps is fear of missing out on a chance of Internet celebrity.

It seems like today’s Zoomers don’t want to leave home and go to NYC or Hollywood not because they are lazy. It’s almost like those gamers that pee in Gatorade bottles near their couch so they can keep their numbers up. And that, more than anything else, is what the new generation is about. Numbers.

Or, as Ryan Broderick said in response to this great Drift takedown of Jack Antonoff:

I would compare the Antonoffication of music, or the industry-wide adoption of the aesthetics of mid-2000s iPod commercial indie rock, to the dwindling distinction between a low-budget streaming TV show and a high-budget YouTube channel. At a certain point, you’re just making middling pieces of content, shaved of all their edges, that can play fine across any device in any consumption experience. Because who gives a shit? It’s all just metrics now.

We live in an age of Medium Neutral Content for Maximum Engagement. The difference between TV content and online content is blurring. Is the titillating shock of MILF Manor better than the titillating thrill of a dancing girl on TikTok just because its medium has a richer history? Of course not. Are books about fucking Mexicans off OKCupid that much better than the Substacks about it? You answer that one. So if we live in an age of medium-neutral content, why move to New York to break into publishing? Why move to Hollywood to be a star of stage and screen? Now we see why there’s a mad scramble for yet another cheap rip-off from Zuck that we all know will suck.

But what if it doesn’t pan out? I have discussed IRL community enough on here, but let me recognize the value of online community. It may not be a substitute for actual community, but, being a community, it still has value. There is plenty of classic Internet weirdness to spare online, from all the weird AI stuff to this truly bizarre web series:

But those are isolated incidents from isolated weirdos. Weirdness on the web is not as communal as it once was. There’s been a decline of chan culture, Twitter and Reddit. This was where memes grew from. As these communities dwindle in population (like NYC and LA might), our loneliness epidemic gets more severe and we are all the more ready for solitary communion with our AI CompanionGods.

Communities are important not only for their emotional benefits. Anything great requires patience. Communities online and off help support artists and creators that are different. Especially with our glut of content. That’s right. Online communities are shrinking, cities are becoming too expensive, but there is more content online than ever. Not all of it human of course. This past week the number of songs in the world doubled. Regardless of whether that content is AI or human generated, the more content there is, the less patience there is. And patience is how we nurture gardens of bizarre delights as opposed to isolated weeds here and there.

When I last wrote about the dark ages of the web, I mentioned how Tumblr might get us out. This was when Tumblr was seriously being considered as a Twitter alternative, before it was revealed that Tumblr was losing $30M each year. But one thing that still stands from that post:

The more compelling and fascinating a post is, the less disposable it is. Algorithm-based apps like Twitter and TikTok thrive because their user base always wants to know what is next. I am convinced that the pleasure of TikTok has less to do with the visual pleasure of the videos themselves or even the catchy tunes we hear. It is all about the tactile pleasure of swiping up mindlessly.

Now, with even less vibrant online communities, mindless swiping is more friction-less than ever before. This is how it ends, not with a bang but a swipe.

From the recent issue of The Drift:

It’s commonplace to note that sociopolitical upheaval and artistic experimentation often flourish side by side. But today — despite an alleged “polycrisis” — new modes of cultural production don’t seem to be emerging. Three years after the start of the Covid-19 pandemic and the subsequent George Floyd rebellion, the arts seem stagnant and stubbornly centralized: franchise fare dominates at the box office; literary output is hampered by monopolized publishers…[t]he internet, meanwhile, tends to both homogenize art and silo audiences by algorithm…. For Issue Ten, we asked artists and thinkers across disciplines — novelists, sculptors, composers, dancers, critics — to reflect on the current state of the avant-garde.

One of the responses:

[I]n New York, where resolutely non-franchise fare — the experimental, the underground, the unclassifiable, the avant-garde — has been a vital, if not a defining, part of the filmgoing ecosystem since at least the founding of Amos and Marcia Vogel’s Cinema 16 in 1947. That spirit seems especially apparent in the past two years. Multiplexes may be going dark (the Cinépolis in Chelsea and the Regal UA Court Street in downtown Brooklyn are now shuttered; soon the Regal in Union Square will be), but micro-cinemas, notably Light Industry and Spectacle in Williamsburg, are thriving.

A couple of things: it is true that multiplexes are going dark and it is also true that Hollywood has seen better times. Also, micro-cinemas may be in the black. YouTube and TikTok definitely are. So perhaps there is hope. Maybe we can see a future where up-and-coming video creators move into NYC to see their works eventually get shown at a micro-cinema if their work is good enough. After all, many TikTokers live in New York. OK, but TikTok and YouTube are not the easiest place to build thriving communities. Both platforms are more known for solo efforts than community-driven works. As for micro-cinemas in NYC, this is incredible news for older filmmakers (assuming the micro-cinemas nurture them as an endangered minority). As we saw in the first block quote way at the beginning of this post, there are plenty of TikTok videos of scary NYC lunatics. And not all of them are park junkies or muggers. A few of them are wannabe TikTok stars doing field pieces in Washington Square Park. Just when you thought it was safe to leave your apartment, some dumb rando sticks a fake mike in your face asking where you got your fresh kicks.

Sorry to be Old Man River here, but stick it out, kids. In early ‘80s NYC, rappers and musicians braved being jumped and shot to rock the crowd. This led to a true golden age of NYC culture, so the risk was worth it. And the risk IS worth it. Yes, you may be mugged OR have an Impractical Loser make fun of your eyebrows in Washington Square Park. You may also save New York City, the Internet, and human culture. Swipe wisely.