our not-roaring twenties 🫠

Reflecting on history and a few bite-sized essays on some creative conversations.

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Trump's trade war draws swift retaliation
US backtracks on Canada-Mexico tariffs
Hegseth to Stop Cyberoperations Against Russia
The US: A Global Sports Supervillain
Vance criticised after comments on UK-French
Marine Le Pen condamne «la brutalité»
France to consider protecting European allies
To the point of last week’s essay on decentering America, here are a few stories from the frontlines of these shifts. This doesn’t mention the Marco Rubio and Elon Musk fight because that ain’t nothing until it’s something.

Fact-checking claims in Trump’s address
Democrats sent a scary message
“a ridiculous thing to do”
“sitting there holding signs”
“Democrats rn”
State of the Union was dumb but not as dumb as the literal 2016 “RESIST!” politics of the Dems or Gavin Newsome’s pivot to anti-trans or the censuring of Al Green. Loser behavior! Blow shit up, dumbasses! Be like the French or that person in Oregon and light up a Tesla dealership!! Stop Lin Manuel Miranda-ing and DO SOMETHING!!!!!!!!!

Must Be Devastating for Vance
J.D. Vance Memes Explained
Who Is Posting Those Unflattering Vance Memes?
Are the many, many, many JD Vance memes and their AI video (along with the Kash Patel and Riley Gaines) edits funny? Yes. Not to be the friend that’s too woke though — but: I don’t think we’re making the connection — SOMEHOW!! STILL!! — between memes of the dunking variety always being good press for the subject. As Vance is already “owning” them and that many are of right wing origin, this is going to collide with Vance’s smart (Read: Frightening.) campaigning for 2028 in the first month of his job, by doing shit like he did in the Oval Office and Munich and Fox News. Trump will step down in 2028: duh. But we’re being primed, in real time, for the real big bad to step up, legally (or even forcing Trump out, to look all “good guy”), which is to say we may be starting a twelve year journey of “this” if we aren’t careful. Imagine if Kamala ran a presidential campaign for four years instead of being “quiet.” What a different world we’d be in!

How Covid Remade Our America
The countries that never locked down
Why China's artists do not reflect on Covid
Does Covid Lead to Dementia?
“Almost five years”
Happy fifth Covidversary 🫠

Companies to Stifle Climate Talk
Fascinating, but also it’s not just green brands downplaying their green-ness: it’s also brands and businesses who aren’t doing shit not talking about these things to pretend the issue isn’t happening.

History has always been my gay Achilles’ heel, the subjective rock in my shoe when it comes to knowledge. Also: as an academic subject, history is just so aggressively heterosexual male, so Gym Teacher Who Has To Teach A Class, so 1500 page book about Abraham Lincoln, so seven hour documentary on World War I, so Band of Brothers: so everything-I-am-not. I am not entertained or interested in the looking back as I find — and have always been concerned with — considering where we’re going, the next, that on the fringes or at the end of the history book. This is also because my education was quite inconsistent, not that I had big gaps but that I attended ten schools from kindergarten through high school (twelve, if we include undergrad) because of constant military relocation. That meant my history learnings were all over the place, starting and restarting in a way that created gaps by institutional assumptions. No wonder I “don’t” like the subject! I say all this because I’ve been thinking about something over the long past few weeks that has to do with history then and now. It’s a brain rotted theory — but walk with me.

We know history repeats itself, that nothing is that unique, but there seems to be a bit of a rosy or simplistic thinking about what happens when. A good example: people saying Charli XCX and brat was the final hurrah of good times before mass descent, which echoes the sentiment that the 2020s are spiritually akin to the 1920s, that brat was a part of how we roared in our twenties. I feel like that’s a misdirect, despite the Covid and Spanish flu connection, as this is where the big brain thinking comes in that I’m sure someone else has traced: we’re actually further along in parallel timing, closer to the mid-1930s, which means that the 2010s were closer to the blithe, rebellious, liberal 1920s Weimar Republic as we were reaping the benefits of the second industrial revolution via app-based start-up culture and huge wins for equality and democracy, which means the 2000s were more like the 1910s, with the Gulf War into September 11 into the Iraq war more akin to a sweeping conflict like World War I. Now — with Netanyahu’s genocide of Palestinians and Putin’s dictatorial, imperialist mission paired with Trump (et al) inciting madness and pushing to become symmetrical to them — it feels like a new new Axis of Evil is emerging as we’ve just said Goodbye to Berlin to debate whether or not we’re entering a new Great Depression. But why debate that when Depression meals are all around us? Why wonder if we’re edging economic collapse if, for the past near-decade, homelessness has become a national (if not international) problem, as the job market has been in an incredible pee pee poo poo state for most of this decade? We are deep in a self-imposed neo-prohibition movement, we’ve got dust storms raging, we’re coming to the end of an “open door” policy of immigration thirty years in the making: it’s fairly obvious, to me, where we are in history — and we know how things yo-yo down before up again.

The difference, as we know, is our technofeudalist oligarch state or, as Ingrid Robeyns notes in Limitarianism of our neoliberal now, we’re in a state where the view “that we should implement ‘technocratic’ solutions to problems, rather than solutions that emerge from democratic deliberation,” reigns. These are different empowering forces to galvanize poor people to become more racist and more evil —Fascist. — in the ways that something like economic instability enabled Nazism: all the ingredients are there, to me, which is less about the “ARE NAZIS AROUND US RIGHT NOW??” stories and more zooming out to think about the context and circumstances. This isn’t to scare but to situate: what do you see here? Because I keep seeing a similar play with different characters which, undoubtedly, I’m not the first to point out. The false flag here is that it will “be the same” and it will take place “at the same time”: we know that isn’t the case. No singular person with an unsightly mustache is going to rise, arm raised, literally burning books: that’s a misdirect. Instead, the problems and solutions take new forms. Wars look different, for example. We don’t have talkies or Triumph of the Will or Jewish scapegoats but we do have podcasts and Kai Trump’s YouTube channel and anti-woke/trans/DEI/pronoun people: these aren’t the same things, by any means, but they traffic down the same roads.

We know life doesn’t stop, that your job doesn’t pause because of atrocities or disaster, which is probably why we’re waiting for a sort of “big bang” of governmental disaster to happen. Let’s be the smart people that we claim to be and recognize the symmetries of time — and understand that “the threat of Hitler” isn’t squashed by raising signs before him. And if that’s how our leaders choose to “fight back”? Woof. We clearly have our work cut out for us, which means we have to figure out how to translate the then to stop the now, both in our individual countries and as similarly minded people worldwide. That’s a huge difference from “then” that somehow is over and under-harnessed: communication and knowledge is hypothetically at an all time high. But what do we have to show for it? The noise of information deafens as it enlightens. How can we reframe and rethink our tools, to do something more meaningful? The answer ain’t TikTok trends — or laughing at JD Vance memes.

Mixue: Bubble tea chain bigger than Starbucks
Pop this on the mood board of decentering America too.

Why are so many chefs de-spicing their menus?
Now this is a conservative culture indicator, versus Pretty Things and Anora winning or “paralyzing” facial features. Bye bye, adventurous minds and palates! We can also add the Pretty Little Thing’s loss of the BBL too (but not their “post” fast fashion move, which we should all be skeptical of).

You don’t need a smartphone
What happens when design ditches big tech?
“Ditching big tech” is going to be a defining conversation of the latter 2020s and these stories (the first old, the second sent to me via

Nicolas Cevallos

) capture this. I’m doing a story related to this, coming the Tuesday after next: stay tuned!!

"being annoyed is the price you pay"
“paying for convenience with loneliness”
"they want your money"
To ditching tech and the economic blackout: third eyes continue to open, as people are realizing that tech (Duh!) is profiting off our being good people, by having community and doing things for each other because we love each other. Who would have thought? I think we can pin this to secular culture as I can bet churchy people never stopped picking people up from the airport. This reminds of how AI ads are so anti-human and absurd.

Political poll news site 538 to close
Speaking of ditching tech (again): officially the end of an era for 2010s, Obama-era politics. Too bad the Dems still think that moment still exists!

Digg is coming back
This is cute but…it ain’t gonna do much of anything. Sorry, Bluesky pills!

I’m going to try to keep this brief, as I had a too-full week of work and running around art fairs, which you’ll be getting full coverage of on Tuesday including a few interviews with artists, designers, and more. Stay tuned! It’s a lot. So we’re speed running three thoughts I would have written full essays on, if I had more time.

• The Hannah Berner/Megan Thee Stallion situation sparked a huge discussion about needing journalists on red carpets as, if you’re not familiar, Hannah basically did a very awkward and very micro-aggressive interview with Meg at the Vanity Fair Oscar party. This dovetails into what we talked about last week, with creators becoming Hollywood and or the establishment, as Drew Afualo wisely pointed out that this discussion goes both ways considering the AP’s Babyface interview at The Grammys. To me, this is less about journalists versus creators and more about preparedness because red carpet spaces are neither “journalism” nor “creator” spaces: it’s television. Having produced a few red carpets in my day, the reason why red carpet coverage is any good is because there is a team behind talent who prepare them with understanding who a person is, the guardrails around conversation, and generally how to show up in a way where everyone wins. I’m not doubting that that still happens. What it does feel like now, is that red carpets are less controlled spaces for media and more content zones intended to supersede actual award shows or ceremonies enabling wild west antics by people-with-or-from-platforms fighting for “views.” That means less space for production teams, expertise, and preparedness: it’s a race to the bottom on red carpets, all on the backs of stupid ass Glambots. Say it with me: red-carpets-as-content are a tool in dismantling Hollywood, journalism, media, etc.

• The memes-as-dada conversation is a bit tired because we’ve moved past that point: it’s now a form of surreal performance art. For the unfamiliar, this trend started more or less by jckson44 on TikTok going places, in real life, with a binder full of printed out brain rotted memes, which are used in videos silently pointing out the memes to people who are otherwise unsuspecting or unknowing. It’s very funny and builds on the constant, hilarious “harassment” of the custom wood burning woman on TikTok via forcing her to encounter and then make brain rotted art and ollyybee on TikTok’s campaign last summer to knock on New York subway windows to show people brain rot and blow kisses. I love it all and I’m sharing this to say we’re fully inside a moment of memes-as-performance art given antics like blasting brain rot sounds in libraries to journalist Don Lemon knocking on subway windows to show brain rot or the things-that-my-fourth-graders-say videos, where teachers search for meaning in the brain rot stim language of Gen A. That’s the thing: memes don’t just “exist online” anymore as they are officially a language, a form of expression that goes beyond said or visualized slang, that now is a sort of Bird Box style you-must-be-exposed-to-this too, which is something the right (Somehow!) gets by sensationalizing while the left does baby brain shit that worked in 2010. Memes are now performance art and, like all performance art, it trickles into “the real world.” We’re beyond the tipping point here. (Coming soon: the “fiber optic cable” trend, where slowed down and sped up clips of shows from Curb to Drag Race put media into a dream state, always with ambient Aphex Twin underneath Clearly, the gestures of the internet are uncontained, slowing and corrupting media at large.)

• Moving into actual art — which, again, you’ll get more of this on Tuesday — something I’ve noticed at the art fairs this week in Madrid is that artists (at least from southern Europe but also South America and Taiwan) aren’t interested in portraiture or “capturing the world” unless it includes reflections of techno life like memes, anime, digital design elements, “pop culture” at large — or, surprisingly, if it abandons our world together in favor of another. This is to say: artists are dialoguing with the fantastic to create worlds of their own. These large-scale paintings imagined worlds or exaggerated our own, making literal Hieronymus Bosch-esque gestures or zooming into fictional vignettes to reveal pleasurable yet macabre worlds. Examples include Alexander Grahovsky, José Luis Carranza, Adèle Aproh, Amanda Tejo Viviani, Aldo Urbano, and lots, lots more. To me, this is a signal that these bad times and upsetting histories won’t be reflected literally and — to the point of Dadaism and surrealism — they will be presented back abstractly, as alternate universes while in ways more “heady” American and beyond artists will continue down the path of too dense conceptual art that makes itself meaningless. But these painters? They’re onto something. The world is too weird and too bad now. Why recreate it? Why pull objects to make references to? Instead, match the level of depravity, skewer it, create monumental mirrors on canvases to reflect it back.

"You're not gonna believe this"
“Mickey Mountain from Aloha”
“Mikey Madison is”
“?”
“let B-list celebs be B-list”
“HELPOOOO”
“Remember when the movie MA”
“how fast it happens for them”
“here’s how Coleman met his husband”
Oscar thoughts and memes! Which were the only thing I “watched” of the show, outside of skimming the stupid James Bond thing that was a bizarre Gen Z play. I didn’t watch Adrien Brody’s boring speech but the posts and thoughts on his art were great. Also: if you aren’t familiar, you must watch the Coleman Domingo video. It’s now a part of internet romance lore. (While we’re here — to the point of the B-list — I need a Chrome plug-in to block all things Tate McRae. As someone on Twitter said, she’s serving but nothing is ever on the plate. Drives me crazy. Anyway, any Tate hate posts is a post I love.)

“you can detect ai”
“humanising ai”
We’re getting to the silly/real fight-AI-with-people moment and, although the Tweet reference in the second one has been deleted, know that it was someone sharing pictures of a cute boy and sharing that they imagined that’s what ChatGPT looked like, a la this shit. Children: you need to watch her!!!

“paused an edit”
“let me be Kier”
“horny toward Adam Scott”
Three treats for my Severance-heads.

“normal ass room depressing”
Thoughts, Edward Hopper hive?

“Ozempic MIke Pompeo”
I had to see Ozempic Mike Pompeo so you do too.

“You win this round”
Yet another reason why I love LinkedIn.

“when the chile is tea”
“chile chile, bussy bussy”
To the point of nachos and nonsense from a few weeks back, “what the chile” is creating some gems.

“this hole in the ground”
Would you potty in the restaurant hole in the ground?

And, finally, me when I’m being dramatic in this newsletter.

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