TECH KILLED ART
On the relationship between creative industries and technology and why chartreuse may be the color of the decade.
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🍎 I just landed in NYC!! And I have a few events that I’d love to see you at!!
First, Ben Dietz and I are hosting two *live* podcasts at Air in Chinatown: this Tuesday, Jan 20, join us for a conversation with Nikita Walia — RSVP here! — and then the following Tuesday, Jan 27, we’ll be in conversation with Willa Bennett, editor-in-chief at Cosmopolitan and Seventeen: RSVP here!
Second! I’m doing a meet up on Thursday, Jan 22, in Bed Stuy at Bearded Lady: RSVP here!
🤓 Two stories I was recently featured in! I chatted with Meena Alexander for EE72 for a story about intellectualism as a flex and I was quoted in a (very smart) story by Mara Dettmann on how media legacy is lagging behind culture conversations.
🦿HIP REPLACEMENT🦿 is back, with our first episode of the year and special guest Antonio Gary Jr., who chats with Ben and I about 2026 predictions, the rise of friction, and why vintage is better in LA than NYC: listen on Spotify and YouTube!
What comes next in Iran?
Following a year of protests that actually made meaningful change worldwide, something feels different with what’s happening Iran (which — in truth — I haven’t fully grasped as I’ve been so busy this week). One thing that does feel resonant: viral videos over the past months of women living freely in defiance of the government now have a bitter aftertaste.
Federal Agent Shoots Man in Minneapolis
DOJ issues subpoenas for Walz, Minneapolis mayor
“I see a White House panicking”
Minneapolis Neighborhoods vs. ICE
“The ICE agent who fatally shot”
“arrested the people who had served them”
Quite the week in Minnesota, where the White House continued its reign of terror and has exposed just how unstable they are. Things are very bad, but also: people are standing up and pushing back against this fascism which is remarkable — and is trending with larger anti-ICE sentiment and signaling the shift noted last week. For some context, I highly recommend Garbage Day’s mini-doc on the ground in Minneapolis.
US experienced negative migration
US suspends visa processing from 75 countries
For the first time in fifty years too. The right can take the W on this, but…are we really winning? Of course not, as we see above, which is why white nationalist rhetoric is trending in tandem.
President Trump Filmed Flipping Off Worker
CBS Evening News’ Viewership Slips
“Let them eat a piece of chicken”
Bank chiefs ‘ in solidarity’ with Powell
“Trump is trying to discredit him”
All of this is making me crosseyed, that every little stupid thing is political. Also: milk is so political now. (And…sexy? Raw milk? Hole milk? Get a grip!!)
Venezuela’s Machado gave Trump her Nobel prize
“President Trump with Nobel Peace Prize”
Real loser convention at the White House this week.
Doubt cast on discovery of microplastics
This buzzy science story posits that maybe you don’t have to worry as much about microplastics. Sure? I don’t entirely believe it but I’ll reserve my concerns.
“You mentioned Netflix shouldn’t be eligible to run for the Oscars,” the reporter Fatima D. of Brut. asked James Cameron in December. “Well, if they release a film in theaters, in a true release, not a token release, not a one-week-five-theater kind of token release to fulfill minimum requirements,” James Cameron clarified. “The Academy…should be protecting the idea of the motion picture as it appears in theaters,” he continued. “I don’t think you defend it by allowing [a] vast multibillion dollar industry to take advantage of a narrow loophole to essentially commandeer the award.” Just weeks ago, Deadline reported that Netflix was interested in culling down traditional 45 day theatrical releases to just seventeen days. (The streamer has since walked back the idea.). Just yesterday, Matt Damon and Ben Affleck appeared on Joe Rogan to blast Netflix’s model while promoting a Netflix film. There is a feeling in the creative industries — movies, music, visual arts, fashion — that something has fractured. The tension that James Cameron spoke of best represents this: tech has killed the arts and we’re living with various Frankenstein’s monsters that we’re being told as the apex of creative output. Unfortunately, they have convinced many of us that the flatline is just as exciting as the heartbeat.
Word of this has been grumbled about for years, in ways we agree with (Theatrical releases at home!) and ways we don’t agree with (Making some media items wholly inaccessible!). But, when we reflect critically on the state of entertainment — from the more pedestrian to the more refined — it’s hard to ignore that tech killed art, spending more than a decade dragging down the whale human creativity, billionaire tech goons seducing creatives to the bottom of the sea so it can feast upon it as it dies. Hollywood is the perfect example: even with a dip in 2024, the entertainment and media landscape has lost more than 50,000 jobs in the last three years, which has many blaming the writer’s strike when the reality is more that the industry is continuing it’s courting-to-caving ritual of inviting in people like the Ellisons, enabling a dictatorial imbalance that all seemed to start with Netflix as a “move fast, break things” mentality was applied wholesale to the film and television model. (Mind you: Netflix “won” in all this — but that’s a best case worst case scenario.) Algorithmic shows like Stranger Things are a grab bag of optimized references that have primed audiences for mash-up AI slop. “What is the definition of the leadership of Hollywood? The definition is that it has moved to technology companies,” Barry Diller posited in 2024. “Netflix, Amazon and Apple are really the controllers of what we would call the worldwide film and television business…That’s, to say the least, a country mile from what our imagery of Hollywood was.” Enter not only losers like Kevin O’Leary making their Hollywood dreams come true but also entities like YouTube, who will host the Oscars in 2029 while being the reason people like George Clooney bemoan the lack of stars, that he is the part of “the last generation of stars who were a beneficiary of a studio really investing in them.” Now? You have to be nepotistically blessed and or rich to play dumb popularity games like press tours driven by algorithms, which is why I always bring my ax to grind on someone like Timothee Kardashian. “The business hasn’t changed: I was on The White Lotus and now I can be in a Broadway play,” the actor Carrie Coons told CBS Morning News recently. “We live in a country that is fundamentally unsupportive of the arts…Now, in order to do a play on Broadway, you have to do The White Lotus or else you’re not allowed. They have to replace you with somebody more famous.”
Hollywood is an easy punching bag but this sensation is everywhere. In music, Napster pushed into streaming and evolved into TikTok catering and has landed us in a landscape where AI music is hollowing the form from the inside out (all as the underground pivoted to Boiler Room only for that to kill clubs). In art, it’s not just NFTs decimating a landscape or that tech bros being illiterate in art patronage but that too many artists are now making for the camera, as the Instagrammable KAWS has forced all artists to ditch bigger thinking and pushing mediums forward to instead make everything from Yayoi Kusama escape rooms to Kathleen Ryan’s step-and-repeat sculptures. In fashion, mass pivots to ecommerce and various digital “discount” concepts from Amazon to SHEIN reshaped the industry only for entities like Farfetch to SSENSE to Net-a-Porter (alongside Saks, Macy’s, Kohl’s, etc.) to rise and crash, all of which has fused together fast and luxury fashion as brands try to suck up to social media and video games as larger sales tremble. None of this is to mention how technology like artificial intelligence relies upon stealing from artists big and small while watering down what it means to make art, dehumanizing not just artists but all people in the process: the fall of Hollywood is the fall of all arts, a playbook that is happening again and again that leaves humanity much worse off — all because a handful of people wanted to profit off of selling creativity for a lil short term cash. We will recover, but we will be worse off.
Yes, times change and — in many ways — these are all “antiquated” artforms that are fading as new art forms rise. (For example: video games very much are to the 21st century as to what film was to the 20th century. That is the most meaningful medium now — and what true tech-and-art fusion look like, versus the aforementioned raping and pillaging being marketed as “innovation.”) Movies will become like books and jazz and paintings now, just as Leonardo DiCaprio posited, but it’s also going to help enable a movement toward and greater value in human arts and human culture, which we why there is so much buzz about things like Laika and cigarettes.
“Hopefully you’ll see it in the cinema,” Stellan Skarsgård said of the Norwegian indie Sentimental Value as he accepted his Golden Globe last weekend. “They’re an extinguished species now…You share the pulse with some other people. That’s magic.” Indeed it is. The question is if any of us will fight to hold on to that, or if we’re content to let it all go.
Why is everyone posting about 2016?
Is 2026 the new 2016?
“2016 psychosis”
“where did the light”
The 2016 nostalgia trend is propaganda I am not falling for as this is maybe the first instance of looking back at a time from a decade ago where the now-versus-then isn’t that different at all. The bad times are still bad! Why romanticize such a terrible time instead of manifesting a better one?
Nikki Glaser Outshines a Tone-Deaf Telecast
8 Stars Nikki Glaser Roasted
Podcasts Are Ready for Their Close-Up
“not everyone’s gonna get it”
I haven’t done this in years, but Lindsay and I watched the Golden Globes before Trend Report Live™ last weekend and it was…pretty good! Or at least Nikki Glaser was great!! Viewership was down, by and large, and the whole podcasting thing was weird (People paid $5K just to be considered!!!) and yet it was a good time, a reminder to enjoy things sometimes rather than constantly looking to “make a point.” But, to the above essay: the Polymarket tie-in was weird.
Gourmet Is Back. It’s Not Sanctioned.
Obsessed with journalists stealing back this mag, which feels like a good representation of the “future of media” and fits the theme of recycling things that enter the public domain.
Toned arms offer strength — and status
Why My Resolution Is to Start Drinking Again
These two stories may feel at odds but I assure you they’re related as they tie into the friction mindset. “Doing the work” continues to be a path to a fuller life!
Ai Weiwei: ‘You can’t compete with China’
“Ai Weiwei has returned to China”
What’s up with Ai Weiwei? Unsure, but I would put money on this mindset taking stronger shape, that China is in the future, the US is in the present, and Europe is in the past. That has been on my mind for months and I may write more about that at some point in the future!!
“Mega Church Pastors LOVE Money”
Druski’s Mega Church Skit Sparks Debate
“underestimated how big Druski’s skit”
I don’t think Druski is funny but I do think he does a great job identifying subjects to satirize, which is exactly why this sketch went absolutely wild this week. The critique is right on!!
I don’t remember how or why I stumbled into chartreuse hair. I think I had bought a ton of Manic Panic dye after coloring my hair red and blue and pink and rainbow and stumbled upon the color after mixing the brand’s Electric Lizard with Electric Banana, resulting in a glowing green-yellow. “It glows like Strega,” a professor told me at the time, marvelling at the brightness while offering another suitable liqueur comp for the color. The color lasted for months as the yellow seemed to agree with how my naturally brown hair blonds after bleaching. It was unique and different, something that wowed people while feeling uniquely “me”: I had stumbled upon the color myself and found that it best expressed an attitude and outlook on life while serving as a calling card because, unlike my other hair colors, it caught people’s eyes. With chartreuse hair, people repeatedly know me as “that,” in a way that I did — and still do — use as an identifier crowds or as a means to follow up from an event, citing myself as the guy with bright green hair who asked the question about such-and-such subject. I owe a lot to Manic Panic as a result, as the hair color has become my branding has become an identity has become me. This is going to sound crazy but I’ve had my hair this color for a quarter of my life now as I went chartreuse in 2017 with only a handful of detours into other hues like bubblegum pink and buffalo sauce orange.
What’s most interesting to me is that it’s starting to feel like this color is quietly defining the 2020s. Let me explain! Coming out of the 2010s and into the early 2020s, The Mandolorian gave us a new Yoda: Grogu, whose green skin became synonymous with certified cuties. Spotify’s dominance rose too with Spotify Wrapped hitting the 2020s like a cultural bomb. Singers helped to popularize the color too, largely via Billie Eilish in the late 2010s through early 2020s along with RM from BTS taking on the color in 2021 for their “Permission to Dance” era. Naturally, we cannot forget Covid which was sometimes represented as a neon green sticky splat, which is likely because that’s how the microbe emoji looks (which debuted in 2018). This was also the time of green energy, greenwashing, and other “green” avenues tied to sustainability. 2020 also saw the start of an era defining game: Wordle, whose use of green and yellow-green has become synonymous with a certain style of neo-word play.
In 2022, things started to evolve a bit more but green still didn’t have its major breakout — but got close: Beyoncé performed at the Oscars on a tennis court in tennis greens, tying into the tennis movie King Richard; notorious Australian streamer Kick dropped, becoming a viable alternative to Twitch that maintained bad seeds like Adin Ross while hosting the livestreaming of a death; Marvel debuted the show She-Hulk, whose green super powered lawyer became somewhat controversial because of the now-obvious misogynistic anti-woman-show vibe of Marvel fans. 2023 was when the shift happened, or at least things started to turn direct: the year started with Rihanna donning a neon green fur coat to advertise her Super Bowl performance while even Barbie pink was complimented by neon green padding, all as the color became a runway staple branded as “lime” all as designers like Jonathan Anderson experimented in this space with items like a coat made of grass.
2024 was when this turned most direct, first with Challengers and the subsequent “tenniscore” but also — And obviously! — the rise of brat, brat summer, “kamala IS brat,” etc. which took us to the end of the year with the emergence of Cynthia Erivo’s Elphaba in Wicked. 2025 kept the pace with matcha and Dubai chocolate and Wicked’s sequel. Of course, we cannot forget the rise of meme characters from The Grinch to Shrek to Pepe the Frog to the Green M&M to whoever else. 2026 is already shaping up to go green too, not just because of viral chartreuse loving posts but because the color is still being played with and taking on nuances, as seen on people like Tessa Thompson at the Golden Globes and Jeremy Pope at the premiere of The Beauty. None of this is to mention brat 2.0 via the forthcoming The Moment, which has Charli already parading displays of bright green for promo.
Obviously other colors have trended too. The most notable is the 2020s best “opposite” and similarly highly favored color: hot pink, which we saw with Barbie and Wicked and Squid Game, all of which paired both colors close together. The question here is why, as such a color and a trend don’t “just happen” “just because.” As I mentioned in its appeal to me, the color is bold which is probably why people turn to it: to stand out. It’s bright, it’s fun, and it’s an exaggeration of one of the most natural colors in the world. It’s not lost on me — and likely not on you too — that we’re seeing a sickly and unnatural green rise alongside the loss of so much green in our lives (money, environments): like the liqueur itself, chartreuse represents a complicated combination of ingredients, a mess of too many things that shouldn’t work but do, a mixture that can very easily be out-of-balance, enabling the loss of integrity in both flavor and vibrance. This green seems to represent the end of an era and the start of something new, a synthetic version of what life was, the impossible turned real. Is this a good thing? No and yes, but this hue truly is a fitting color for the present — which is exactly why it has “stuck around” for the better part of this decade, trending and retrending as if to reveal the sickly color of our aura. Until these times change, we’ll be keep being green — which has been anything but easy.
“jaw hit the floor”
“straight out of Sucession”
I have not been keeping up with reading the full stories about the dumbass father-son duo that is the Ellisons, but I have caught the strays. The second one is wild.
“go quadruple platinum on The Soup”
“Katya come get your son”
I hope the Heated Rivalry press tour never ends.
“choppleganger”
I meant to share this last week but lock this into your vocabulary and know I have many chopplegangers.
”Owl from Trinidad”
”Owl from Jamaica”
”Indian Owl”
”Maya Angelou if she was an owl”
”owl from Australia”
I hope the owl trend gets the attention that the 2016 trend is getting. It’s much more entertaining!
“Mitski reveals cover”
It is true that this painting looks like the new Mitski cover — but also? This painting is a masterpiece that reveals a surprising culinary truth.
“Bjork:”
This video has been all over my feed and, yes, it’s a great video that sums up situations just like this.
“you can see their path”
This feels like a great reminder to do something different with your life!!
“I’m nervous”
“The episode is out”
In case you were wondering, My Strange Addiction is still crazy. Just ask this lady who “snorts” her food!
“I’m a professional Spanish teacher”
“hope you learned”
If you’re looking to learn Spanish, I highly recommend this teacher. He’s helped me a lot!
And, finally, how it felt flying from LAX to EWR over this weekend.
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The Starbucks snot rocket omgggggg, have not had a reason to laugh this hard in a long while, thank you!!
Lovely work, as always! I’m finally getting back to reading newsletters after a couple months of a break.
When it comes to art being killed by tech - I agree, though I feel like the issue only applies to mass-consumer. I’ve recently joined art classes and I’ve to say, it’s been amazing learning something new in a non-digital environment. Meeting like-minded people has taught me so much, especially things that I wouldn’t learn, had I been only taught by what the algorithm thinks is worthwhile.
Creating physical art has also been wonderful for my development in general - my taste has developed, my eyes sharpened and my appreciation for human skill has increased. Now I go to museum and wonder - how did the artist achieve his vision, what was the technique, what brush did s/he use? Those things wouldn’t come to me had I stayed on YouTube and only watched tutorials or people describing art and techniques - it’s an earned skill, a tool in my toolbox like my teacher says. Also something that only comes through practice.
I think the pendulum will swing back at some point and the appreciation for physical, deeper art will be back in the future (nothing against digital art, I love it, but I feel like AI has somewhat killed my interest in it). Perhaps it will never have mass appeal, but that’s good - maybe some things should be gate-kept. If enough people care about it, then it’s meaningful enough for me - maybe it will avoid terrible takes on social media if good art stays niche. The discourse around some of my favorite TV shows would be probably better, if less, but better educated people have seen it.