ENTER THE YUPPIE DYSTOPIA
On the rising trend and feelings of the "yuppie dystopia" and the gross-tense feeling of more and more conspiracies "being right" now.
The Trend Report™ is a reader-supported publication. Consider upgrading to paid to support Kyle and such writing on life and culture now.
🗣️ Some recent happenings!! First, I had the pleasure of joining WEAR MANY HATS with Ben Dietz to chat our origin story and running publications like this: listen here!! Second, my friends over at sustainable fashion spot anxiety.eco asked me about my ~favorite~ vintage spots in LA and…I shared them: check it here!!
🇫🇷 Hey, Paris!! 🇫🇷 I’m in town the first week of March for Matter & Shape and Premiere Classe. Drop a line if you’re around: let’s grab a tea, verre de vin, etc.!
🦿HIP REPLACEMENT🦿 had on Leann Abad of Living Room NYC who chatted Clavicular (ugh), generational etiquette around wine, and what Khaby Lame selling off his likeness means: listen on Substack, YouTube, and or Spotify!!
A lot of stupid dramas this week that somehow became “central dramas” because I think people are bored and need a steady drip of fake news that gets forced into big news as a distraction, addition, etc. All of these “are bad” but also don’t need the breath its given, as it only forces more fire. They include —
The Colbert / Tallarico thing, a stunt on both sides as CBS playacts ABC, the world turning as it always does. (But what is interesting? CBS’ refusal to put names to statements involving this situation: losers!!)
The RFK Jr. / Kid Rock workout, which is funny in the context of RFK’s never nudity but was unnecessarily analyzed.
The dogs-or-Muslims thing, which seems to be a wheel of racism that spins to this point once or twice a year, typically around this time.
Supreme Court ruling against Trump tariffs
Trump Tariff Tracker
Love when Trump gets lawmogged, which adds another loss to his long list. Something else to add to that list? The unnecessary death of Linda Davis in Georgia by ICE — and the items directly below.
Epstein files ‘crimes against humanity’
The Trump team downplayed Epstein files
“Who had the most contact with Epstein?”
Andrew’s arrest prompts calls for justice in US
As we talked about last week, the Epstein story is finally resulting in some justice. Prince Andrew is proof, which yielded many very good posts and added to the genre of wild car pics of British elites. Who will be next from the messy list of names? Les Wexner, given how poorly he bungled his hearing?
Rubio’s ‘reassuring’ speech to Europe
“White House is normalizing Nazism”
AOC Steps Onto a Wider Stage
AOC: Trump ushering in ‘authoritarianism’
Two fascinating Americans-in-Europe things: Rubio gave a pro-colonialism, soft Nazism sequel to Vance’s 2025 speech while AOC looked very presidential in her conversations. Is she green as far as global foreign policy? Yes — but I feel like she can and will rise to the occasion. HASHTAG HOPE!!
South Korea’s former president jailed
Think you had a bad week? You’re not the president of South Korea, who finally got served (and avoided the death penalty).
California city freezes rent for all of 2026
“Did Vermont Make Child Care Affordable?”
Zohran has big plans for bathrooms
A few American wins, which certainly creates a constellation of change. What’s next? Turning talk of affordability into tangible, long-overdue change?
A lamb bleeds out before a choir and audience, the scarlet stream of its neck just missing the chalice before it, pooling a streak over the stage. A small machine stretches an orchid by its purple petals, twisting and pulling and threatening to rip through its pollen-full mouth with thin silver pincers. A woman walks La Brea under orange-pink clouds, a sherbert swirl alluding to fires past, present, and future. Two robots try to pass her, battling inner operations of speed versus pleasantries, illustrating the current sidewalk dynamics of Los Angeles. At China’s 2026 Spring Festival Gala for Lunar new year, children and robots perform a synchronized kung fu choreography of backflips, punches, and sword swings. “Thank you!!!!! What a beautiful picture,” an artist writes in an Instagram caption beneath a screengrab of recent press, featuring their artwork above the couch of a refined apartment, where a white couple pose with a dog. The headline reads, “Old Madrid disappearing under wave of the global rich.” Nuclear arms race, Sydney Sweeney’s got good jeans, protests, gambling apps, SNL Epstein jokes, wildfires, TikTok dances, bombing Palestine, AI puppies, Bunny Bowl, school shootings: “We can jump up,” Raffy sings over the mix, “we can get down low, mix it all up, we can go loco, whatever you want: there’s nothing we can’t do cause we can go up.”
These are scenes from the yuppie dystopia, the space between the human past and full-techno future, a present of helplessness and spoils, of extreme comforts and extreme discomforts. You can do anything but you are becoming nothing. This concept has emerged in recent weeks via images and posts of human suffering against tech accelerationism, of the highest highs and lowest lows held not only in the same timelines but in your own hands, the personal suffering of income inequalities and democratic slippage washed over you constantly, broken up by your hopes and dreams arriving at your door daily via Amazon. This “feeling” isn’t “new” nor is the phrase as it has floated around for years: artist Margot DeMarco’s eleven year old logging of the concept is the best example but also nine year old Reddit posts and artist Adriana Mora’s 2021 NFTs. Every iteration circles a Don Henley quote, “It’s a fine line between the American Dream and the American Nightmare.” That tension tightens our golden handcuffs, the borecore of comfort culture becoming a helplessness, watching the world burn and governments dissolve as you order groceries online and take a Zoom call, all the things you do as an NPC witnessing disaster.
The signals of this are becoming numerous. Dancing for Renee Good and Alex Pretti, white wine mom dark wokeism, “in this house” signs and “I’m tired of living through historical events” memes, the economy of forgetting how to be human, a third No Kings Day, “total boomer luxury communism,” Jennifer Welch and Angie Sullivan declaring “life is a lazy Susan of BLEEP sandwiches,” “your politics must be represented by one of the following warehouses” written above the options of an Amazon fulfilment center, an ICE detention center, a Costco wholesale center, and an AI data center: the tragi-comedy of the present, awaiting a future through the past as we wade through venture capital slop, brandish spoons to eat the slop before us. While political, the yuppie dystopia dwells within the tension between man and machine, the app-based comforts of the 2010s evolved into prickles on the vine, peas under the mattress that we sleep on as an NPR host sues Google for stealing his voice, as translators fight to keep their jobs from robots, as creators read en masse from scripts, as we become pets to technology. “The People vs. AI” TIME declares depicting the faces of regular ass people determined to stop the spread. In all of this, it’s unsurprising that the optics of this dystopia is best represented as mostly white women, a group long associated with “comforts” and their disruptions yielding change, from suffragism through temperance. Yuppie dystopia is best represented as the white suburban wonderlands destroyed, from standoffs with CorePower Yoga to the murder of Renee Good: the final frontier of comfort, the richest and “most privileged,” being pulled down to their knees to suffer among us, to be made human after decades of indulging as if gods. “my biological glock is ticking,” she screams.
This dystopia is easily an us problem, but it’s smudging up too: those who crafted the simulation are undergoing similar cock-and-ball torture by USB-C cords. Our politicians — specifically liberal leaders — have long been in this state, as the Barack Obamas and the Pedro Sanchezes and the Emmanuel Macrons and the Kier Starmers talk big talk about change (for the climate, for Palestine, for the poor, for the immigrant) but are revealed as performative or weak, defanged against the larger global attitude and politico-economic forces blowing culture one way over another. Even if the laws themselves cower in dystopia, the rich, cushy, and “creative” are being held to the fire from Australia to the US. This is best represented by Adam Mosseri being dragged to court by cavernous nostrils and Garrett Leight glasses where he opined the need for you to watch the small screen for full days at a time. “It’s not a good moment for creativity because it’s not a moment of freedom,” Miuccia Prada tells Robin Givhan. “The moment is becoming, and fashion is becoming, more and more conservative. You see it in art. You see it in movies. You see it in fashion. So to work today, it’s not easy.” It’s not easy, she — a literal billionaire — gripes. Entire industries of comfort are crumbling: the restaurant industry is getting pummelled (“Hospitality in general is getting killed.”) because of consumer shifts but also food is becoming hypothetical and political; we’re watching Hollywood’s techno-induced existential crisis (“[AI]’s damn sure going to infiltrate our category.”); AI itself is failing up and down and all around (“They need your help to manufacture consent for this.”). It’s not just AI political ads but also AI generated messages from constituents that thwart political action like improving air quality. The literal slop of it all!
The yuppie dystopia is a battle for reality under tech-induced comforts, of our seeking to maintain the definition of human as we enter wherever-the-fuck we’re going. Not that “all tech is bad” but, within this growing pain, the problems are very clear: this is a madness of the developed world, a final act we keep seeing play out again and again as we fight the human body to save the human body. Just look to the movies for answers: it’s unsurprising that The Substance has become — and will become — the 2020’s defining feature, a statement of the real you against the horrific “better you” that was sold to you by crumbling systems. From Slanted to The Beauty to the new Toy Story, these are sites of the yuppie dystopia where the wrong doppelganger often wins, destroying both in the process. “It is all so unbearable,” Naomi Klein wrote in 2023’s Doppelganger. “No wonder we work so hard to look away. No wonder we erect those walls, literal and psychological. No wonder we would rather gaze at our reflections, or get lost in our avatars, than confront our shadows.”
“Death feels awfully close these days,” Klein continued. “What would it take to stop running? To know — really know — what we already know?”
The End is the Beginning is the End
Rabbits Between the Staves
Very proud of my boo Bobby Aaron Solomon graduating from nearly two decades (!!) of running a big blog to shifting into a new studio practice called Horstman. Check it out! He’ll be sending posts out biweekly on Saturdays: consider him your HTSI to my FT lol
What 42 decaying heads say about America
It’s not hard to see why a bunch of crumbly US presidents have become a breakout attraction. It’s a fascinating counter balance to the garish and gaudy plans for the 250th anniversary of America. See also: the bald eagle who got lead poisoning from eating bullets.
We tested those gross piles of snow
NYC Is Drowning in Dog Poop
“An urban mountain”
Why Winter in the U.S. Is Crazy This Year
When was the last time winter was this cold?
As NYC thaws (Maybe??), there are lots of stories about what is in the snow, how the poop made it “worse,” and how glaciers have formed. What’s also interesting is how the “cold” of the eastern US is fairly siloed, a la: this “is” a huge story but is being met with near record warmth everywhere else (but Russia lol). Such is our era of weirdo weather, meaning: summer is gonna be a lot 😭
Inside the Gay Tech Mafia
The pictures aren’t just great but so is the story, which helps to further suggest why and how we’re now in a space where all men are gay. Ban looksmaxxing!!
America’s Top 25 Philanthropists
I love Mackenzie Bezos and will use any and all opportunities to shout her out, hence this fascinating list of “America’s top philanthropists” which highlights how few super wealthy people are actually giving away their money. The list details what percentage of someone’s wealth is being given away, where you find the majority are like Mark Zuckerberg and Sergey Brin and are giving away 3% and 2%, respectively, while others like George Soros and the Schustermans give away 76% and 47%, respectively, making them the highest givers. (My girl Mackenzie comes in at 46% and is the third-biggest-giver overall.) Meanwhile, in the Bezos-Sanchez nightmare, they donated 2% of their $250B net worth (“$4.7B” in a lifetime), a cute fact considering they “gave” $75M to fund Melania flopaganda.
“How did they get there?”
The Babies Kept in a Mysterious LA Mansion
The mini-doc is honestly more crazy than the story itself (It’s about crazy people just…having tons of kids and abusing them in an adjacent pro-natalist way.), which certainly highlights how systems like surrogacy are overdue for regulation. I’d put a Polymarket bet on that! And on weed getting similar regulation!!
I washed my hair and shaved on Sunday so I wouldn’t risk my prosperity on Tuesday. I wore red and bright colors that day, avoiding black and white (along with sweeping and cutting vegetables and taking out the trash). This Lunar New Year welcomed the fire horse which coincided with solar eclipses, with “Saturn and Neptune uniting at 0 degrees of Aries,” all as we enter Pisces. Everything is magic, nothing is magic: all a conspiracy, nothing a conspiracy.
“I don’t think he committed suicide,” someone says on TikTok. “The guards lied on their reports…All the cameras didn’t work…They never recovered the so-called noose…I could go on and on. The reports are very odd.” Who is this? I wonder and find it’s investigative journalist Julie K. Brown — the winner of a George Polk Award and Pulitzer, the writer of Perversion of Justice, a recipient of TIME’s most influential people — not mumbling alone but to the New Yorker. Seven years ago, we were making memes about this: “EPSTEIN DIDN’T KILL HIMSELF!!” sat between “rip harambe” and “my government agent watching me,” “arrest the cops who killed Breonna Taylor” and “a second plane has hit.” Maybe Pizzagate was real, both Vanity Fair and New York muse this week. The crowd — Reddit — goes wild: a conspiracy to define the time.
I lay in bed and I read about how people aren’t reading, which somehow turns to God and gets me thinking about how when I was younger I would constantly “bet” against God, my own divine Polymarket to prove his existence. If the light turns green, I’m not gay. If no one honks, I won’t die before I turn thirty. If the next car is red, I’m not going to hell. A common spiritual psychosis for the insecure and uneducated, those staring before the blank page of life and betting on Our Lord And Savior™ taking the wheel versus confronting truth, versus proactive change. “We’re going to die,” I read a man say of his religious practice, “but even if nothing matters — and I don’t think there’s proof anything does — you want to make something matter.” The man — a college professor — has been getting attention for getting young people to read, which he explained to New York along with his own relationship to religion. He believes, or tries to, as if a compass in the dark that sometimes aligns with him given the year, the month, the week, the minute. A shepherd of convenience in the storm: a quiet conspiracy, humanity’s gentle magic of peace.
Aliens? Two presidents claim they are real, building on centuries of rising and falling extraterrestrial conspiracies. Covid? A theorized lab leak that was too unbelievable to be true — and yet the CIA and German intelligence entertained the idea, which China disagrees with but some scientists suggest to take seriously, all as the right rejoices. A gay mafia? Yeah, kinda. Hazing? More likely than you think. AI? Haunted by civil war ghosts. Prince Andrew? Arrested on his 66th birthday, 666 days after a blood soaked horse ran through London. “At this point I’m believing everything,” the crowd says. No wonder everyone is obsessed with true crime! People stare at lasers to see alternate realities, people see Trump as a saviour, people start conspiracies just to feel something, a door to a nihilistic reality yawning open because nothing but everything matters: life now is a long, paranoid investigation of conspiracies, real and unreal, to solve as we take a test of true and false that no one passes but everyone does.
These times are too unbelievable to be true and yet the truth is stranger than fiction. We pace a room where everything is covered in the oil that our bodies secrete. We try to grip anything for stability (Newspapers! TikToks! Articles! Newsletters!) but so many lead us to an end that is a beginning that is an end: truth is only so real when every “conspiracy” circles it so closely. “Everything probably feels like a conspiracy when you’re stupid,” we say, but also: look at the material. “We’re living in a world where people don’t agree on what is real anymore,” the director Ari Aster told Brut at Cannes last year. “We’re amplifying each other’s paranoia because there’s nothing in the ether to hold us together anymore…There isn’t this fundamental sense of the real.” No wonder conspiracies have the world gripped: there is no longer a center to hold us, to pull us away from this delusional present.
Dog Suddenly Crashes Winter Olympics
The Olympics were kinda a dud, no? At least we got this hard pic of a dog out of it! (My other favorite dog post of the week was the replay of The Onion’s year-long barking dog video.)
“Justin Trudeau & Katy Perry in 2005”
This is a remarkable post that folds space and time and musical genres at the same time.
“Wendy’s Home!”
If this is your house, please let me know so I can send you some spit in the mail.
“my ceiling fan”
I live in fear of the day when whatever-is-on-my-ceiling-fan-blades is swept off onto me as I sleep. That may be worse than ingesting a spider in the night.
“Trailer dropping soon”
“another EMOTIONAL scene”
Can’t wait for more movies filmed with Meta glasses!
“The Honey Bee Detective Agency”
“crash lands on Earth”
“The Milk Family”
This man who paints stories on his clothes is one of the best storytellers: I am so serious about this. When I complain about there being no cultural evolution, I exempt him because — if given proper resources — this would kill. (We are also seconds away from a brand like Loewe hiring him.)
“the worst person you know giving acting advice”
“question from the audience”
The worst people in the LA and NYC film scene make for the best content (and, no, I am not going to highlight the stupid improv trend because improv is the greatest Millennial chungus sport of their time) (that and posting AI selfies).
And, finally, my regiment for healing myself.
Subscribe to Horstman and gift a paid subscription today.
“Yuppie dystopia” is one of the sharpest cultural framings I’ve read in a long time!!
So many journalists are circling around the same sensation (a floating, dissociated moment in history) but few manage to name it with this level of precision. What feels so accurate in your diagnosis is not just the coexistence of extremes, but the way comfort itself has become destabilizing. We are hyper-aware of systemic collapse, algorithmic acceleration, political theatre, ecological emergency, and yet we are simultaneously buffered by unprecedented convenience. The friction has been outsourced, but so has meaning.
What strikes me most is the ontological tension you describe: the gradual erosion of substance. We are still “doing” endlessly, consuming, posting, optimizing, reacting... Yet there is a thinning of interiority. The human past and the techno-future are colliding inside the same nervous systems. The result is not explosion, but disorientation.
I also appreciate that you resist the easy “tech is evil” narrative...
If anything, I would push the idea even further: perhaps the yuppie dystopia isn’t only about comfort collapsing, but about the implosion of narrative coherence. There is no longer a shared temporal direction, only feeds. Without a stable story about progress, decline, or even resistance, we default to micro-pleasures and micro-outrages. And that's where I add a little bit of my utopia ;)
Genuinely brilliant work, as usual Mister Fantastic!
Kyle, I do NOT need a fresh dystopia this Sunday.