summer is evil now 🫪

Charting the vibe shift of summer from a season of fun to a season of misery, and investigating what's at the overlap of art, tech, and culture.

Jul 05, 2026

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🎙️ PODCAST CHECK-IN!!!
- First, I had the great pleasure of joining kate lindsay of Embedded on her Slate podcast, ICYMI, this week, where we talked about creators retiring — and how it feels like the loss of a friend!!! Listen in here.
- Second! This week on HIP REPLACEMENT, Ben Dietz and I had on Georgia Addo — aka please don't make me focus — where we discussed heatwaves, Love Island, Taylor Swift’s wedding, and lots more: listen in on Substack, YouTube, and Spotify.

Lebanese villages erased by Israel

Not to be the Too Woke™ friend but a quick reminder of the devastation in Lebanon.

Putin Faces Increased Pressure
Russia rocks Ukrainian capital

This news has been buzzing for a few weeks now, as Ukraine is clearly escalating things — and putting pressure on Russia. It’s so bad that Putin’s reelection efforts are straining.

White nationalists July 4 march through DC

An otherwise uneventful July 4th — save for this bullshit. Sad, insane, yet fitting.

Court Upholds Birthright Citizenship
“barely good news”

Sigh, I guess this is good — but we really have to get the Supreme Court (and many courts) back to normal. The other big court case of the week? A trans athlete ban.

Melat Kiros defeats 15-term incumbent
“the third win in two weeks”
“capitalism versus socialism”

Politics are shifting big time. And the Democrats who keep standing in the way of change? Stop. Lots of this is racism! Anyway, Melat is a baddie. (And, in the other corner, though, we have people like this.)

OpenAI Proposes Giving Gov 5% Stake

OpenAI is framing this as giving Americans a stake in the company, but we needn’t pretend normal people will get paid: this is a means to appeal to the Trump family the best way possible, by bribery. (Unsurprisingly, Trump made over $1B in his first year from crypto alone — and $10M from Amazon for the Melania doc.) Meanwhile, China is hoping to work together on such tech to reduce risks — but America seems to be disinterested. Very dumb!

Breakaway Catholic group excommunicated

The Catholic girls are FIGHTING!!!! This story is so wild, playing into Pope Leo’s ballerness as SSPX — the group in question — are a long-standing hate group. This monsignor on TikTok explains the context of this well.

Parasitic Outbreak Causes ‘Explosive’ Diarrhea

HAPPY JULY 4TH WEEKEND!!!!!!

More may be at risk for allergy caused by ticks

Again: I am so worried about ticks.

*Back, back, back again: Q2 Trend Report: Trend Report™ drops Tuesday. Catch up on Q1 here.*

I

2020. Did we even have a summer? We were stuck, longing to escape Covid, having discos at home whilst battling for racial equality under a dictatorship during an election year that would inspire an insurrection. Lost, this summer, in the limbo of longing for a normalcy that still hasn’t returned.

2021. An anxious time! We were flirting with rethinking and reshaping our relationship to the system as workers were empowered enough to stand up. Brands coaxed us to break the rules, risking our health for the fleeting high of fun money spent. We were mad and tired, desaturated watching the happenings on resorts from hell, worried about getting cancelled or getting sick, numb watching life on TikTok. Longing again, yearning still, waiting for something.

2022. Things were still in flux, but the general feeling was that a shift was under way. Winding down from the pandemic, our feet were coming back to the ground — and we were wobbling forward as we navigated great changes. Summer colds and racial tensions, it was easy to feel off because things weren’t “right” just yet.

2023. A bad summer that felt good because it was our first summer “back.” We mistook this for normalcy, trying to ignore that we were fucking around and finding out thanks to bright pink capitalism, everything made cutesy with “girl” added to it, femininity as sales force. A preview of the future, of distractions like aliens being rolled out to make us forget our precarious financial circumstances, of wanting to be ugly and dumb in an over-optimized world. It got to a point — and that point was fighting over if leisures like summer vacation should happen at all. This was the first “new normal” summer, of sales smoothing suffering.

2024. Finally a good summer! America felt alive, the world rejuvenated after a month of deep despair. Bratty blah blah blah? Sure! While good, while hopeful and packed with joy, this summer offered a taste of the tea we’ve become steeped in: an overly algorithmic stewing of man-made trends, a culture cut by the clipping economy before the clipping economy.

2025. The pendulum swung! From hope to nope. This was a cruel Millennial summer, songless and apocalyptic. By August, we realized summer was stolen, the season liminal and lost, a purgatory passed by obligation, time a chore and not a blessing. All we had to show for it were transactions (Labubu! Matcha! Dubai chocolate! Love Island!), which was less cultural proof of live and more proof of money spent.

2026. We are here — and it feels like summer will never again be a season of relief as it is a jaded, boiling season in hell. If tracing this decade’s summers reveals anything, it’s that summertime trends more down than up. Themes we’ve watched grow each northern hemisphere summer since 2020 have not evolved but have just gotten bigger and dumber: heatwaves start before the season, offering the hottest of hottest times of all times; America celebrated its bicentennial and a half with an extended mess of evil programming, captured best by a swampy pool reflecting a national malaise; surveillance is being forced upon us as accessories and aesthetics, the male gaze less a sphere and more a place of constant looking that seeks to oppress, everything a bet that profits by exploiting more than just culture; love and marriage — a proposal at the top of the Empire State Building, Taylor Swift and Travis Kelce married in a stadium — are similarly outsized and exhausting; tech shifted from a tool to low-humming electrocution as Google’s Sergey Brin meddles in California and New York politics as Google and A24 co-meddle in film as Elon Musk meddles with our 401Ks as OpenAI and Anthropic meddle in international affairs; everything pivots to AI as Palantir unloads on all of us; Work? What work?

Summer is now a season of dread and not childlike excitement. A week into July, that feeling has become fixed as the defining theme seems to be exhaustion. Summer comes with it an oily disgust akin to high caloric excess as the new “normal” we craved and desired in 2020 has come, delivered as a bigger-is-better, louder-than-loud-ness that leaves one feeling gross. Culture is now a hot dog eating contest no one wanted to enter and summer sees such an exaggeration taken to its grossest conclusions. The refrain — “I’m tired of everything being… like… this”; “Is this just how shit is gonna be forever now”; “kinda how everything feels now”; “I honestly just don’t have time for this right now” — reveals that it is indeed possible to be so big that you fail. Everything shopping, our sole function ingestion, compounded by culture becoming a form of laundering and occupation: the sixth year of the decade is not marked by progress taking us to new heights but by everything that came before getting louder and louder and louder and louder, the pile swelling and stinking in the sun — and nothing will make it go away. Noise, as I wrote in April, is now a currency that subjects the world to a test of durational performance. Who will break first? And how will such a break be monetized? We scream into the summer sun and it screams back at us louder, its breath hot and humid, happy to burn us as the season smears itself from an escapist three months to six months in hell.

Nepo Babies Taking Hollywood’s Entry-Level Jobs

This shit pisses me the fuck off. More stories exposing the classist truths of industries!

Ad-free streaming is a luxury now

Of course we’re at the point in culture where the new things become the old things.

The Kahlo you can’t buy in the gift shop
Kahlo is a blockbuster with a fatal flaw

Frida is clearly having a moment because of the Tate show and…the exhibition sounds very okay? A shame the show doesn’t uphold more progressive values, an irony as it frames identity in such a Woke 1.0 way (which is very dated, even if I disagree with the critique of this in the second piece).

Scientists built a cell from scratch

Fascinating and cool and hopefully something that will help — not harm — people, in ways things like AI continues not to do. This is still a far cry from being “a real cell” but it’s a start. (We chatted about similar developments and the “future of birth” in summer 2023, by the way.)

AI Slop Also Gazes Into You
Best Way to Detect AI Slop Imagery

Two good Gizmodo stories on slop, the latter of which is very useful. Too pretty and too symmetrical are good tips for identification!

Rivian makes the iconic American car
“Amble One is a street-legal EV”

We talked about Slate cars last week and this story along with the Amble item — paired with our climate tipping point — shows American cars are in great need of updating and rethinking. Yeah, yeah, blah blah, Tesla — but they’re pivoting to AI and are evil. And the kicking out of Polestar? Stupid. Don’t take the foot off the pedal! It’s such abandonments of progress that prove the stupid capitalistic failures of tech, that they could solve the issue of cars but opt only for wealth. Imagine if they focused on mass improvements for people and planet, reinventing tools like wheelchairs and solving issues like cancer. But alas. We get SLOP because the “greatest minds” care not for innovation but MBA brain rotted profits.

A brutal heat wave disrupts the fantasy
Fashion That Makes Us Want Again

I kinda checked out of the recent men’s fashion week because there was just too much happening in the world — and it seemed ridiculous to have so many over-dressed rich people paraded before me amidst 100º+F heat!! The first story captures that feeling, making the event — and industry — seem foolish and pointless. The second story though, by the icon Cathy Horyn, is a fabulous look at the fashion that is working now. Justice for Dario’s Versace! She explained the story on TikTok too.

‘Mandela Catalogue’ Turning Into Spielberg Movie

Actually huge? Not just for YouTube analogue horror as such and Hollywood taking it seriously, but that it took this long for producers to take seriously non-traditional innovations in story. Just wait until they hear about literary journals and indie gaming 🫠

Madonna: CONFESSIONS II Review

We can all breathe a sigh of relief: Madonna’s new album is good and the Pitchfork review is very good too. Love wins! And the memes are very, very, very, very good.

Dunham made gay porn football joke

The only news from the wedding that really mattered, which was a tacky localized inconvenience, is to be seen how the artist will use it as an extended sales opportunity. Lena Dunham…come get your baddies chain. Thank you for all the very, very good posts and memes too, everyone!

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I met Andrew McClintock at the very beginning of the year, while in LA visiting family and friends. We grabbed a coffee, sharing how our lives and work have intersected between the art and tech and culture spaces, how we live within a swirl of them all: he came up through SF, running a gallery called Ever Gold [Projects] and having his brushes with tech that eventually brought him into such spaces while staying out of them; I came up in LA, writing about art in the area as a means to champion the city’s scene in the shadow of others, working in and out of Hollywood which eventually evolved into working in and out of the various iterations of entertainment-via-tech. It was a good conversation, one of the more interesting I had had on the trip — and certainly a conversation about the art world I hadn’t had in years.

Andrew also pitched me on an idea he was wrapping his brain around, having run a similar periodical for years called SFAQ: he was thinking of launching a magazine that explored the spaces we spoke about and lived within, bringing together tech people and artists and culture critics to explore the space between them, to explore the tension — and at-odds-ness — these spaces occupy. Tech and art and art and culture and culture and tech were at one point in the 2010s each thriving domains of opportunity that have soured. What does it all mean now? And what did people have to say about it? We discussed the idea for a few weeks, Andrew going on to develop it, bringing me on to help him identify culture critics of note who could participate in the project. Six months later, the project is a reality you can literally hold in your hands: meet Culture Slop, a magazine that Andrew speedran and that I helped him edit, getting stories going from thinkers I love like Cy Canterel, Marcus Bösch, Nikita Walia, Nicolas Cevallos, and more. You can grab a copy for **free** here. (You just have to pay for shipping, etc.)

Zooming out and in on the project, to figure out what we learned in the process, Andrew and I hopped on a call to talk about it — and to hopefully figure out what’s at the center of these domains. We discussed how nothing and everything is a trend now, the stomach turning-ness of looksmaxxing, taste losing its meaning in a matter of months, and how painters are pushing beyond internet art and into a space of internet-as-culture.

What’s a trend that you’re like following that you’re really into?
It’s funny because I really froze up when I saw this question! What is a trend? What am I into? I actually don’t know - maybe I have trend anxiety. I think that’s a reflection of what I was trying to show with the magazine. To step back, when I was a young art dealer, at my contemporary art gallery, Ever Gold [Projects], which early on specialized in showing very emerging contemporary artists: that is where my head goes with what trends are, from a curatorial standpoint and an organizer standpoint. The ability to see something, and have a feeling of “That’s something really interesting, that hits.” I used to be so much closer to the ground floor of this “tastemaking” but it takes a heroic amount of energy. As time passed I began relying more on signals, which unfortunately became, “This artist is followed by these people … ” Essentially I started outsourcing the work of thinking about trends, or taste, to the algorithm. Sometimes it works, sometimes it doesn’t, it doesn’t feel as good though that’s for sure.
But when something hits, it feels like it’s a moment – or what I like to sometimes call a “move.” What I mean by “move” is akin to thinking about how an abstract painter makes the final gestural mark and knows to stop. A conceptual artist does a piece that has the right amount of restraint. It could be with a skateboarder, in a specific style, hitting a trick in a certain way and coming out of it: that’s a move, that’s style. Style, trends…to me it’s all mixed up and I don’t know how to unpack it because, to me, those moments could also be found walking into a Chinese restaurant and seeing a weird painting next to a flower arrangement and a water feature and it just hits in the ephemeral moment. I’m not sure how to make sense of them but I do know one when I see it.
But that does make sense: yours is a very modern condition. To the point of doing Culture Slop as an exercise, the magazine is an expression of this way thinking. It’s good that you are thinking about that because most people are not: life is just happening to them. They’re outsourcing to the algorithm but believe they’re asserting taste when it’s all been handed to them. Hence, all the discussions of taste we have in Culture Slop.
It takes a lot of effort and a lot of work to find what taste is, organically and outsourcing it to the feed. I know some people specifically within the art world that are so fucking good at finding it — but they’re on Instagram every second of the day. I don’t want to have that experience. I don’t want to have that much addictive consumer technology in my life.
I agree. What is a trend that you hope never dies? What is one that you hope goes away?
A trend I hope never dies: spirituality. Pilates. Grateful Dead. I guess it doesn’t matter if the trend dies or not, as I’ve been fortunate enough to see a number of full cycles at this point. Zombie formalism and the financial crisis, NFTs and crypto — and now AI: everything is a cycle, nothing is bullish forever. It’s math.
In terms of a trend that I hope goes away…I had this moment, when I was in New York last week and I was in a cab driving past a bunch of men’s slop fashion stores. There were all these $200 plain color shirts with tight, horrible pants that the majority of men seem to wear like Lululemon trousers. The homogeneity of men’s fashion that came out of the bad parts of normcore. Just go back to black normcore if you’re one of those looksmaxxers finance bros wearing Rag and Bone — buy some fucking LL Bean at least.
Those things are definitely related. Whether or not they’re willingly playing into looksmaxxing or not, it’s definitely a symptom. I know we’ve talked a lot about this in our work, but what do you think is at the intersection of tech, art, and culture? That is something the magazine seeks to investigate and I think it does a great job of that. But if those subjects are a Venn diagram, what’s in the middle?
Going through the exercise of trying to ask some very smart people about it, or at least people who have these positions who can help approximate what it means…My take away is that I don’t think anybody actually knows what anything means. And that’s great! As an example there are like ten different definitions of taste in the magazine, and all of them are perfect.
But to be more thoughtful: it changes, based on community and the physical environment, between San Francisco, New York, Los Angeles, and digital communities as well. There’s always been this super funny conversation around understanding New York’s art and tech scene and the digital global art and tech scene — but people in San Francisco think art and tech is putting some lights on the Bay Bridge or an LED screen on top of the Salesforce Tower. That’s “art and tech.” Not to be slippery, but it can be all of that and none of that. Of course those are generalizations but I’ve always been way more impressed with the art and tech scenes coming out of NYC rather than the art and tech cultural production coming out of SF. It’s too under the massive weight of the Valley, so it’s way less art, and culture, and taste and more about engineering and scalability - but that can still be a creative space. Also the valley’s ability to impact the world on a condensed timeline vs the slow speed of cultural production, is an art in itself. Andy Warhol did say that “being good in business is the most fascinating kind of art.” Time will tell if the hyperscalers and foundation models are actually good businesses and not just another example of the “Fleece economy” we are in.
Not to go broad strokes but this also gets into some of those conversations about cultures and subcultures in general, how they’ve collapsed on themselves. This is talked about in the magazine but…I don’t know what’s in the middle. Making the magazine made me feel like I actually know less of what’s in the center.
But in our economy of takes where everyone is an expert online - people are convinced they know what all this means but they are just most likely regurgitating AI Slop. I will stand up and raise my hand and say “I don’t know.”
I don’t think that you’re wrong because — unfortunately — art and tech and culture has created a series of snakes eating each other’s tails. It has made a bit of a void. Talking about what people are into — a la taste — is not talking about anything specific anymore: it’s just the idea of people liking things. Then…everything’s hypothetical now? That’s not culture then anymore.
Another thing I was curious about: given that you understand the influence of tech, culture, etc. on a space like art, what do you see as a trend of the moment in art? What will the next thing in art be, given how much these spaces are cribbing from each other?
A couple things. When you look at art, there are trends, schools, and artists. Each has their own universe that they build in, which is what is so fascinating about art. Tech, by the nature of it being on a screen and the limitations of code, it’s slightly homogenized from the get go, unless its pure innovation which is different. But typically art is art and tech is tech. And that’s ok!
To frame some of the things I’ve seen recently, that really stood out as these moments or gestures or moods…The new LACMA building I saw completely empty, before the art was installed. It is the most beautiful cement Brutalist space. The way the light interacts with it, I was almost disappointed that they had to put art in there. I heard they’d been wanting to build the Zumthor / Geffen building since 2009 – which is fascinating because it does feel like a throwback to 90’s/ early 2000’s biennial and exhibition making. But buildings move slowly.

When I visited again to see the art from the permanent collection on these cement walls, art from thousands of years with no clear hierarch, it hit. It was perfect. I hope that becomes a trend, to revisit the “togetherness” of post 89’ curation like the groundbreaking Magiciens de la Terre at the Pompidou.
When I was in New York last week I also saw this exhibition at Amanita that had three dinosaur skeletons and a large John Chamberlain piece. That was the coolest show I had seen in a long time, which has nothing to do with trends but it was this moment or gesture of dinosaur sculptures with this crazy John Chamberlain. I was like Fuck.
In terms of painting trends, I’ve seen this for a couple of years — and I feel like Mario Ayala along with his assistants like, Mia Scarpa, and also his long time peer Henry Gunderson — is painting internet culture. There’s now a lot of artists doing that. They’re painting these hyper-realistic yet surreal paintings… I don’t even have the right terminology but its scenes of the internet and internet culture reflected back as the main source of what’s around them, which we can trace back to the surrealists and Dada. Painting the internet or painting technology, but not art-in-tech or art about technology. They’re making art about their lives, which happens to be completely infused with tech. Mario and Mia are both in the magazine, along with Problem Child Advisory, who is very on the pulse of this current art making practice.

Grab a copy of Culture Slop here. Follow Culture Slop on Instagram to find out about upcoming events too. Speaking of: if you’re in Barcelona, we’re doing an event on July 25. More info soon!