EVERY CITY IS THE SAME NOW!!!!!!!

On the creep of the techno-based smothering of culture and why young people pivoting to creating is a sign of many an industry's end.

• NEXT SUNDAY: TREND REPORT LIVE!!! If you are in Barcelona, come through for this lil monthly event we’ve been doing: RSVP here, entry fee goes to ~free drinks and snacks~

• We’re getting real sporty on 🦿HIP REPLACEMENT🦿 this week as we’re joined by Nia Robinson, who runs the social handles for the WNBA’s Chicago Sky. She,

  Ben Dietz
  , and I chat everything from cigarettes to Cannes Lions: listen on Spotify and YouTube now!!

Ceasefire is unclear
Trump declares victory
Strikes only set Iran’s nuclear program back months
This is all concerning, particularly that Trump’s approach to conflict is playing upon the “audience” assumption that wars end as quickly as internet trends. I wonder if this will inspire a proper anti-war moment — or if the past three years was all digital yapping.

Supreme Court wraps term
Court limits judges' power to block presidential policies
Court dramatically expanded president powers
Bad. We gotta set term limits on these goons before they really dissolve democracy 🤡 I can’t wait to get to heaven and fart in front of RBG.

Zohran Mamdani stuns Democrats
Democrats Tried to Crush Zohran Mamdani Notes
“People overcame this”
Exciting! And should cause some Dem soul searching, particularly as Eric Adams pivots right. Is the takeaway here that he took the Pop Crave/Subway Takes/Hasan approach? I’m not so sure, as that’s only part of the story given how many friends pounded the pavement paired with his intersectional approach and appeal. It could help to craft a candidacies as if a leftist Trump, where the candidate is also a creator: duh! This is adjacent to the rage bait tactics

Curtis Fric

and I chatted about.

Vance Memes Are Back Thanks to Border-Control
There’s no way to know if this JD Vance meme/deportation story is real — but it fits into a larger picture of such activities. So…who would be surprised? Seemingly no one, particularly not the Irish government.

Pressure on Brussels to act against face scanning at Pride
Crowds gather for Budapest Pride
Another ringing of the alarm for Europe’s right wing takeover, not that anyone is surprised by Orban’s politics. Record attendances did happen, which is fantastic — but the face scanning item is real concerning.

Why Heat Index Makes the Temps Worse
“A lifeguard impaled”
As someone not-suffering-in-silence, the heat that has been pummelling both Europe and the east coast US has been brutal, largely because of suffocating humidity. Sadly this feels very “new normal” vibes alongside pests like killer bees and ticks going crazy, all of which makes me want to chop off my head. Remember this, whenever you use AI!!

China shuts down AI tools during college exams
MrBeast removes YouTube AI tool after backlash
A.I. Is Starting to Wear Down Democracy
One good, one okay, one bad.

FICO credit scores to include buy-now-pay-later loans
As

Ryan Broderick

said, this is “like seeing those early reports of a mysterious flu” back in March 2020. This is going to hit like a bomb. (If this isn’t concerning enough, just wait until you hear about the crypto mortgage thing.)

“New York was more interesting. It wasn't a giant suburb of nothing yet,” Gary Indana wrote of the city’s history, in 2015’s I Can Give You Anything But Love. “By 1982, though, a hamster-wheel culture of recycling and imitation was well underway, in appropriated art, sampled music, postmodern architecture — the idea of originality had begun looking questionable.” Times haven’t changed, have they? Guy Trebay agrees, as noted in 2024’s Do Something: “I’ve disciplined myself not to get too attached to some fantasy of the boroughs. A gritty Fantasia. A CSI set. Danger Disney. Still I sensed the driver and I had a shared slant on how much more alive the place felt when there were places that you knew better than to be at after hours, clubs that didn’t cater to college freshmen with credit cards from their parents, when it was a proper underbelly and real tenderloin.”

These NYC icons are bemoaning the time when the city was arguably its definitive. The loss they speak of isn’t literal but spiritual: like many of you (and likely because of many of you), most cities are losing their edge, resulting in cultural dead zones. Suburbs of nothing. A fantasy of the boroughs. The suburban flood of cities isn’t the issue but it’s the deluge of consumerism and the smudging of every city’s culture into each other, creating what I call global homogenetic culture (GHC). GHC is Trader Joe’s bags outside of the States. GHC is people en masse wearing the same exact outfits on accident in public. GHC is adult dorms. GHC is a Louis Vuitton in every city. GHC is Shake Shake going global. GHC is Nobu Hotels going worldwide. GHC is the global use of Uber and Airbnb and Temu and Canva over regional specificity. “You with that thing there,” you say. “I want it.” — and then you get it: that’s GHC. Everything, everywhere, all at once: every city as the same city, which evolves the futuristic feeling of having the same exact creature comforts anywhere you go, all making a geographic nightmare remake of Groundhog Day.

But let’s back up: this may seem like an NYC thing when NYC is the place that most clearly and loudly articulates the problem. Here’s an example of something I encountered last week in London that captures the problem: a store display of Labubus set before a Union Jack and royal family memorabilia. Mind you: the Labubu is a Chinese toy intended to soft power a country to cool, all set before UK nationalistic totems. The fact that this toy is now on the bags of kids in Austin, on the purses of people in Paris, sold online in Sydney is GHC in action as is being able to get Kewpie mayo or Buldak or Takis anywhere in the world without having to go to an international market. Kinder and Nutella and Toblerone and Hi-Chew and Haribo and Hershey’s available anywhere: you no longer need to be in that place to get the thing from that place. Many will say “Great!” as this is global capitalism at work. However, this also means that everywhere has the same shit, that every high street in every city is now a collection of Zara and Aesop and Lululemon and Arket and Muji and Lidl and Uniqlo, all places that you once had to travel across the country or globe just to encounter: its inaccessibility was its appeal. Now? They’re normal. You no longer get excited for the chance to go to The Big City™ to visit That Very Special Store™ because you now have That Very Special Store™ in your city, as does everyone else — and it’s no longer very special. What’s worse is that entire parts of a city are becoming “that”: if you’ve been to Century City, you’ve been to Stratford Cross; if you’ve been to Stratford Cross, you’ve been to Glories; if you’ve been to Glories, you’ve been to Puteaux; if you’ve been to Puteaux, you’ve been to Atlantic Station. It’s the City Part of Town, the SoDoSoPa-ification of cities themselves: these are the ground zeros of a city’s culture death, which started forming in the early 2000s, became fully formed in the mid-2010s, and has “become” culture in the 2020s.

GHC is exactly why Trump has tossed around tariffs, a blunt tool to appeal to his base as a means to satiate the desire to kill the cultural vampire that is the “immigrant.” But, as we discussed in this week’s The Change Report™ and has been said several times before, the immigrant is a convenient scapegoat for all the problems that the GHC model has created: a lack of good jobs, a lack of higher wages, the need for more housing, the need to hold back big business from pummelling not only opportunities but life. It’s at this point where these problems-at-home crash into your vacation: it dovetails into the overtourism thing, where smaller cities are priced out of themselves because everyone wants to visit at the expense of locals no longer being able to live where they live. Unlike NYC or London, their infrastructures are fragile — and they’re buckling under GHC’s weight. The most fitting example emerged this week, a metaphor so good it’s actually real: Jeff Bezos and Lauren Sanchez’s wedding, which turned the historic city of Venice into a playground for the world’s richest, continuing the world’s cushiest to force this place to perform itself for money. Obviously the reaction has been protest after protest after protest by the locals, which inspired Bezos to donate a paltry $3M to the city despite spending $50M for his display of triumphant tackiness. “Some 100 private jets will fly to Venice for Jeff Bezos' wedding, and I recycle yoghurt cup lids”: it’s all the same shit.

Venice has struggled to protect locals from this constant drip of tourists who demand the city be a playground, all of which floods the site with GHC shit as global businesses pop up, forcing out local businesses, meaning locals have less power than international forces who cater to the more well off, less knowledgable, unadventurous vacationer: comfort culture over actual culture. The sickness that is Vacation Brain™. This is why Venice — and Barcelona and Palma and Lisbon and Athens, Kyoto, Bali, Oaxaca, Tulum, Mexico City, etc. — are putting their foot down: it’s not a “Wah!! Tourists!!!!” thing but an “Airbnb and TikTok and Kayak are enabling the gentrification and ghost townification of our cities, bulldozing local food and languages and businesses in the name of global homogenetic culture — and you are helping its spread.” That is what’s happening (and, if you read my recent trend spotting in Paris, you will read my heart breaking as I realize Paris has become GHC’d too). “Rich people buy their way into places where their creativity could never take them,” one person on TikTok said this week, talking about NYC but speaking to global gentrification. “That energy is the energy of the working class and the poor and the creative and the artistic.” This is what happens when greed, tech-based or not, replaces life. You getting sprayed by a water gun on La Rambla isn’t about you but about people in a place trying to live their lives as tech billionaires bulldoze their city to construct an Amazon mall, shifting the whole planet into a giant Duty Free. Every city is becoming San Francisco: so expensive that locals have to flee as culture dies, as its once beating heart empties. That’s one ending — but the other? The tech-assisted ecocide of smaller (American) cities like Phoenix, Arizona and Memphis, Tennessee and Boca Chica and Brownsville and Granbury in Texas.

Increasingly, Naomi Klein’s No Logo reads less like a warning and more like instructions, a world taken over by greedy tech and “philanthropic” brands claiming to help by filling in potholes and making third spaces while ultimately robbing a place of its spirit: my culture for a mall that I cannot afford to shop at. Capitalism is bad and we can rant about that all we want — but our inability to say no to our desires while doing nothing locally to refuse the creep of homogeneity and techno-homogeneity is how we enable these ever expanding suburbs of nothing. Jeff Bezos and Lauren Sanchez, every rich person everywhere: they made this problem. Not the immigrant but perhaps the kid whose life is subsidized by their parent’s credit card. This is what happens when you suffocate the local, the poor, the creatives who made a place possible: they pave paradise to put up a parking lot that you have no car to park in.

Anna Wintour Makes Room for New Editorial Leader
Who do we think it’ll be? And how hard will she be breathing down their throat? I wish it was Edward Enninful or Margaret Zhang — but I know it won’t be them! To the above: Anna should go to jail for putting Lauren on the most recent cover.

Beyoncé t-shirt some fans are calling offensive
"why bell hooks called her a terrorist"
"he’s been tap dancing for them ever since"
Bey (a la: her team) really fumbled it with the Indigenous extermination shirt. This wasn’t her only drama of the week either as a fan went to her show after a friend died — and then defended the action. People are wild.

"almost identical statements"
"closely resembling what the head of American Airlines"
AI Slop YouTube About AI Slop Motorcycles
"crochet patterns online"
These may feel unrelated — but they are. The first two are examples of Prime Ministers and post-crash airplane executives giving identical statements. Having done some work in crisis copywriting, someone (a la: a consulting team across copy, PR, safety, etc.) drafts the statement. That’s why the identical overlaps stink of ChatGPT when more human cooks typically make a more unique-to-a-situation statement. That’s how we get to the second item: what happens when all aspects of culture, from motorcycle reviews to crochet patterns to executive apologies, are based in AI slop? Is that when we become the Mirrorworld, full of human-acting humans?

Which Contains More Microplastics: Plastic or Glass
“glass is still great”
Concerning? But also a bit of a fakeout? Either way: paint on things like caps actually do a lot more damage than we think.

Why Did the Novel-Reading Man Disappear?
These men are doing the lord’s work, as we discussed last week.

The True Story Behind Netflix's Trainwreck
I keep getting TikToks about this doc and just want to say that I’m still shocked we moved on from the Astroworld crowd crush deaths. It reminds of how Rebecca Gayheart killed a kid and is still able to act: a death doesn’t matter if the murderer has proximity to power.

Lisa Kudrow Set for Season 3 of HBO Series
"Lisa Kudrow in character for ‘The Comeback’”
FINALLY SOME GOOD NEWS!!! Comeback hive, where we at??

I interned at MTV in the late aughts, eventually getting hired as an assistant. One thing that drove the other interns and I crazy was that the channel stopped playing music videos — and our bosses kept shrugging off our desires for more music, instead reiterating their reality television slate. As one development executive told us over lunch, music videos were bad business because they didn’t make money. Sure, we said, but we had ideas to make them work alongside show ides tied to MySpace and Facebook and other social sites but, no, the executives didn’t want to hear any of it. I even made my first formal Trend Report™ then, offering MTV insights (or at least “vibes”) to help steer them in the direction of recent non-teens as the brand was strong but we thought they had become uncool, that the MTV we knew and loved was dying and that the doctors needed to heal it before it was too late.

Cut to nearly twenty years later and MTV is a shell of itself, using the brief taste of sweetness from the “success” of the 2024 VMAs as an excuse to literally exhume a 2000s era executive to recapture the magic of the time. And for what? To court Millennials by nostalgia-pilling an event because its “stan culture” strategy didn’t work with Gen Z and it’s going to dig a further hole upon the items we were bemoaning twenty years ago, upon the Snooki and (VH1’s) The Surreal Life? If we peek under the hood of Paramount, such decisions collide into happenings like the very viral conversation around Tiny Chef, a Nick Jr. show that was cancelled — and inspired the internet to rally around the character and against the MTV sibling that similarly expresses this Viacom/Paramount ideology. While different circumstances, the cancelling of Tiny Chef like the cancelling of music videos represents this brand’s deep misunderstanding of what to do and how to market new properties (a la: the getting-then-giving VidCon) which subsequently sucks the life out of original things (a la: MTV’s Drag Race) all so the network can reboot shit like All That or Good Burger or Rugrats or Spongebob when it loses its way, hoping that aging repeat customers will save it from itself. That’s how we end up with this god awful landscape of riskless reboots and sequels: scared old executives clinging to power instead of embracing evolution. Business as the noose around the industry’s neck.

To be blunt: the problem here is a lack of listening to or employing young talent, from Gen Z to Millennials, which is why these channels are failing to speak to audiences as peers instead of as parents — and this is exactly how one loses the battle of relevance, of time. This isn’t a unique entertainment problem but a fact of “the working world” now. This is why so little advancement is happening in jobs: businesses are aging without new minds being fostered or elevated, all of which is made worse by AI eating away at entry level jobs, disallowing young people to enter said systems.

Example: in this week’s 🦿HIP REPLACEMENT🦿,

Ben Dietz

shared how this year’s Cannes Lions saw a strange age divide, as “older” executives and industry players were present but all the young people were creators versus others who “work in the industry.” As I noted on the episode, that is another example of the noose being tied — but this time around the agency model, all by its own hand: because (older, perhaps Gen X and beyond) executives in these spaces are not fostering or mentoring talent, providing fair wages and respect and opportunity, young creatives must work outside the system, creating their own paths forward by becoming creators and subsequently creating their own agencies in the process. That is why the only “young people” at Cannes were creators: these are young people boxed out of modern media who are earning work from brands, creating campaigns and building their own business because the systems that they once participated in didn’t develop or appreciate their talent. It’s the Generation NDA problem by another name, Saturn devouring his son but, after a decade or so of this, the son is now devouring Saturn. You see this happening in politics, with Zohran winning big by forging a new path that the Democratic party denied of someone like AOC, like David Hogg. “What is the Democratic party today?” Bernie Sanders asked on MSNBC. “It is run by inside the beltway consultants who really have very little clue about what’s going on in the real world.” Or, as someone on TikTok said: “Zohran Mamdani’s win is a sign that the DNC no longer controls the narrative. Social media banded us all together…That does not bode well for the rest of our leaders.” This problem and idea extends to lacks of diversity too, to how someone like Willy Chavarria continues to make bold, grand political statements that moves fashion forward as luxury houses fade away, trading designers like sports players, only to end up doing a drag version of what a house once was: rebooting old shit instead of new music.

The institutions have to change, meaning the leaders have to change. It is beyond the time, as this century has been marked by the old continuing to kneecap the young. Clearly! But they aren’t listening and it will be the death of us all. We know this — and the problem is only going to get worse: as

Daniel Giacopelli

pointed out in this week’s For Starters, nearly half of Gen Alpha already have side-hustles. There won’t be an MTV or an agency or a Democrat party or luxury house for them to work at by the time Gen A is old, nor will they need those things: it’s because of the literal gatekeeping by older generations at work and their failure to mentor younger talent that so many under forty have constructed their own kingdoms, growing their “side-hustle” to escape — and accidentally (or intentionally) topple — the powers that once governed them. Relevance, then, isn’t bought by “acquiring” the property or ideas of the young: it comes from rejecting the mind virus that is financial or vibe-based conservatism that inhibits risk taking, that demands the same shit while pretending that the world doesn’t change. Yes, music videos might be more expensive to run than reality shows: sure. But what is lost when you sell the future out for a dollar today? You end up empty, not just in the hands but in the soul — and everyone can tell but you.

"They look like studs, idk."
“hair always so boring”
“the rainbow”
“tries to seduce”
“it’s after the draft”
“100 Drag Queens Vs 1 Gorilla”
“such interesting taste”
“jake gyllenhaal was really up”
“both look like cole escola”
Some treats as you enjoy the last weekend of Pride 2025.

"absolutely demolish a predator"
“like a latina”
“Happy Pride”
“what reading the Financial Times does”
Favorite Zohran memes.

“Frog radio getting political”
“only way I can handle the news”
“Please keep us updated”
“TikTok will know before I do”
I love the frog radio. I need the frog radio.

"24 karat gold Labubu"
"24k gold labubu test"
“the tag is white gold”
"LOL"
"LA BEW BEW"
Obsessed with this lady on TikTok’s grift of saying she has a “24 carat” Labubu.

"a study that examined 408 sleeping cats"
What are we to make of this study of the direction that cats sleep in? Anyone have any ideas?

“shes not speaking english”
Lost count of the amount of times I have watched and still no clue what she’s hollering about.

“Is this normal?”
This sleeping dog is the thing I laughed at most this week. This is Joni Mitchell thing is what I laughed at second most.

And, finally, the average experience of reading this newsletter.

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