meme mindset rots creativity 🫠

On how memes and the attention economy has shifted how we treat each other (and how we create), and a chat with a tech-culture leader that goes beyond taste.

Sep 20, 2026

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This week we’re exploring how meme ideology has rotted our brains along with a taste check in from one of the buzziest tech-culture voices 👀

If you’re in NYC, here’s my agenda for the week, in case anyone wants to join. It’s pretty light, which I’m thankful for because I’ve been doing a lot: Thursday: I’ll be at Breakfast Clubbing in Downtown Brooklyn, which will be my fourth attending in a row. It’s cute! See yous there; Friday: I’m hitting The Armory Show, mid-day, with coverage coming out early next week; Sunday, early: I’m hitting the NY Art Book Fair, likely folding in that coverage with the above; Sunday, later: I’ll be at Public Records for Jump Source and Jennifer Loveless! See yous there!

Shoutout to all of you who popped into Denayja Reese’s live, which you can watch in full here, along with everyone who came out to the live 🦿HIP REPLACEMENT🦿 on Thursday. It was cute! The episode is out this week, but we also had Kristin Merrilees on, who chatted with Ben Dietz and I about what being a young journalist today is like, how memes influence writing (and vice versa), and the psychology of this Stella Lefty situation: listen on Substack, YouTube and Spotify!

Swedish election on a knife-edge
Sweden Swings Back Left, Bucking a Trend
How Europe’s 2027 Elections Could Test EU

In the shadow of Germany’s recent not-great state election, we’re entering a year of shifts in EU politics as the right grasps — or nearly grasps — control. As we see with the Swedish election, the big question seems to be harm reduction. Is that possible? We’re about to find out, in real time.

Scottish, Welsh, Northern Irish meet to plan break-up

Is this definitely stunt queen behavior? You bet. Does it also play into the above geo-political wobbliness? You bet.

Carney’s romance with Europe can only go so far
Carney hails alliance, draws lines on membership

…and I’m not sure this helps! This seems mostly like a Pedro Sanchez style stunt for attention in the Trump era. Good for them — but will it change much? Eh.

Turkey detains dozens in crackdown on LGBTQ+

Reminder of just how fragile queer rights are — and what Turkey is actually like.

Trump, Vance midterm tour as GOP troubles deepen
“Give us another chance”
US billionaires line up to bankroll Republicans
Can You Trust General Election Polls After Primary Misses?
Why Trump’s Mail-In Voting Restrictions Could Backfire

The midterm crunch is on, which most of us know thanks to the constant James Talarico “Can you give me money?” ads that play before every video. Very curious — and a bit anxious — about how everything will net out, but am feeling optimistic given Trump and the right’s continued Big Tech talking points despite Big Tech’s unpopularity. Plus, even the right hates the right! Do nothing morons!

Patel defends FBI’s new policy on bestiality
“How much do you like dogs?”

Um. What?

Climate ‘feedback loops’ could worsen global warming
Surprising reason there have been no Atlantic hurricanes
Why the heat is killing more women than men

Dispatches from our climate changed now.

“China has a very different view of AI”
“serve the interest of no one”

Let this be water on the face to any of you who are “scared” AI is going to kill us all. AI won’t kill us: their makers will. As you were saying, Naomi Klein?

Fuel Prices Set Off Anger, Protests
Diesel spill from AI data center in Secaucus

Dispatches from the fuel disasterscape.

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“Two likes isn’t a lot?” the meme goes. “Imagine two fingers in your butt.”

Really makes you think, huh? I try to remind myself of this all the time, as ridiculous as this sounds. How many fingers have been in my ass? I scroll through my posts from the past few weeks and months, wondering, seeing my numbers rise and fall and rise and fall. Why aren’t my likes as high as they have been? Is it because of my subject lines? Are my ideas stupid? Am I posting too much? Not enough? Is my writing not “catchy” enough? Am I stupid? Are you mad at me? Am I annoying? Do you hate me? Should I quit? Should I call my mother? There’s a reverse parasociality that happens when you work long enough in public like this, which carries with it an increasingly fetid quality as it becomes more and more a part of your livelihood: as you wade through a new media landscape ruled by algorithms and views and “performance,” you shift from making something because “you love it” and into a state of constant auditioning, juggling what may perform with what you feel, all of which fatigues you while enabling a lightweight schizophrenia. What do you want from me? How can I make myself stick to you? I become Delta Work, down on my knees, pulling at her top, taking off her wig, begging the season three Drag Race cast as stand-ins for RuPaul herself: “Me! Pick me! Look! Pick me!”

This is perhaps why the 2020s has been so steeped in conversations of the “performative,” as many of us who have become so disenfranchised from the traditional economy have turned to the attention economy to survive, which means our relationship to each other and to what we make changes: you have to become content. This is where words like “larp” and “polyester” come from, which signal someone has abandoned authenticity to fake themselves for attention as everything is unprivatized. Now is a time of crisis as we all aura farmer in our own ways, fishing (Phishing?) for each other’s attention, life now an aura battle to see whose encyclopedic knowledge of culture can be the stickiest within the span of 45 seconds to earn a like, to earn a response, to earn a job interview, a lover, a life. Performative culture is no longer that of the male but all of us on screen. Can you perform well enough for your own survival? They Shoot Horses, Don’t They? is now a documentary about creators and musicians and artists and journalists and designers and regular people, with or without the help of AI, suffering through an endurance race on these social media tracks. “These wonderful kids deserve your cheers,” our Great Depression marathon promoter yells to viewers. “Each one of them is fighting down pain, exhaustion, weariness, struggling to keep going, battling to win — and isn’t that the American way?” Looksmaxxing, we can assume, is the product of this. Cursive dancing like cursive singing, we can assume, is the product of this. Peptides, Katseye, Ozempic, jingles, deportations videos, police brutality, hundreds of executive orders: these are expressions of our performances, of our becoming honey traps to each other, seeking to be stuck in the heads and hearts of others for profit, not pleasure.

This is a meme mindset, reflective of a definitive medium. Memes go viral less because of their content but because of the medium: these are stickers containing contagions with the ability to package so little yet so much, to be gum on the shoe or a germ in the nose. It sticks to you, hence why most governments now use this medium to propel messages (Ukraine posting to court NATO support; the US posting to boast deportation wins; Iran posting to reveal America’s weaknesses) and why most political movements are now tied to meme languages (the One Piece flag uniting global Gen Z uprisings; India’s Cockroach movement coalescing from cockroach posts; Filipino voters mocking movie star candidates with fake movie concepts). The medium helps flattened ideas travel faster, which is how and why brands and businesses and you and I use memes and meme ideologies in our normal and working lives: we have all become memes. Our brain rot is less about slop itself, or being a soup of slang; instead, we are abuzz marketing ideas to each other, in a constant dialogue that is less about traveling thought and is more auditioning ideologies to court reshares. This is why people hate AI, especially creatives: it takes memetic stickiness and further flattens. “Everything becomes a meme, which is to say meaningless and trite,” Derek Guy said of the GENER8ION “STORM” AI trend.

This is classic marketing in the social age: if something works, do it again and again and again, post and post and post until the numbers stop rising. This is why companies — like people — have become so obsessed with “authenticity” and being “genuine”: the pursuit of stickiness eliminates relationships, turning someone as a target for consumption as if everyone is an object in a Katamari Damacy level. But, like filmmaking now being the domain of anyone with a camera phone, so too is marketing. Say what you will about Stella Lefty, but she best embodies this mindset, becoming the mascot for a generation’s thinking and our wider mindset of attention exploitation. This approach abandons a traditional work ethic, eliminating a creative process based in expression in favor of a business minded selling. The result is not art but products, soulless expressions designed not to speak but to stick: she rose to fame by auditioning hooks on TikTok, sharing snippets of unfinished songs that were fleshed out after they performed well. “On TikTok, the only thing I sang was the first half of the chorus,” she explained to Bobby Bones in July, of the song “Boston.” “So nothing else existed…One line of a song. There’s literally no song. I didn’t even have an idea of what this verse was gonna sound like.” This mindset is how choreography shifted from movements based in expression to easily made gestures designed for replication. This is how we’ve moved from food that nourishes to food that looks better within the frame of a camera than on the tongue: sell not something good, but something that sticks. Curse someone with something they cannot stop thinking about, envisioning, being. Rewire them with your code. Who cares about the morals attached if it’s sticky enough to sell? “Engagement is engagement,” we say.

Like the B2B-ification of our lives, our adopting this meme mindset is certainly why communication is so impossible and why we’re so quick to disagree. It’s also why we’re steeped in a crisis of explainers, a crisis of cool, and charts topped by ghost songs, as millions of people try and fail to stick, embarrassing friends and family for hundreds of views, trying so hard to appeal that they end up in constant humiliation ritual for nothing. Each of us becomes Drake with a fake goth fake girlfriend. Why? Because we wanted more likes? Actually: all this, because our lives became dependent on an attention economy that taught you to flatten yourself and others, where only those with the best ten second hooks win. Perhaps this is the swan song of someone tired of the game, or who is failing at it: I don’t know. I would like a bath, to become clean of this honey tap. But here I am before you, a pelican gluey with the oil of an environmental disaster I didn’t ask for.

Ms. Rachel on Controversy, Fame, and the Future

A great feature, on one of this era’s most interesting — and important — figures. She’s also matching Macklemore’s $1M to Palestine too!

10-Year-Old Children Predict the Future

This was a viral story, as these young kids have a very doomer vision of the future. They’re truly a product of these times. Very “I learned it from you, Dad!” vibes.

Overwhelmed L.A. parents are hiring house managers

A very emblematic-of-these-K-economic-times piece. Can you imagine? Actually I can, as I have definitely met people who hire and who work as family house managers.

Netflix’s ‘New Stanford Prison Experiment’ Set

To come out in October. Here we are, at the bottom of the barrel, which was designed by Mr. Beast. Talk about shitty stickiness 😵‍💫

Pope Leo inaugurated new work by JR

It’s interesting that JR and the Vatican are now buddies, but also that JR has become such a global “good guy” now. Not that he was ever bad, but it’s a good example of what maturing and evolution looks like for a modern artist.

More than 100,000 in Japan are now 100
Map Shows Countries With Most Centenarians
Man, 119, seeks recognition as world’s oldest

It feels like a lot of stories about centenarians are emerging, which is great but illustrates how — even in the end — the Silent and Boomer generations will continue to keep their grasp on the world’s economy. This is becoming a profitable space, hence why Alzheimer’s cure chat is ramping up (along with depopulation scares).

Few Reasons For the Existence of the AI ‘Actress’
“How does she respond to the outrage?”
“glitches and starts speaking CHINESE”

Here we are, at the Tilly Norwood cancellation, less because she did anything bad but because she — like the rest of AI — can’t prove their worth.

An interview with fashion’s power couple

Miuccia Prada and Raf Simons have the best PR team, as their joint interviews charm every season. Can they save the industry from its evil cringe? I don’t think so.

New cat species identified in Bolivia

NEW CAT DROPPED!!! FIRST IN OVER A CENTURY!!!!!

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There are big thinkers, and then there is Ruby Justice Thelot. The designer, artist, and cyberethnographer is someone who I’ve seen around these internet halls for years, who I’ve admired from afar for his ability to synthesize and exorcise life now as it relates to our straddling the URL with the IRL and all the messy ways that they crash into each other. He’s the go-to tech writer for the non-tech set: think artists, think fashion people, think designers, think the capital-H Humanities types.

Ruby Justice Thelot’s someone known for talking taste, which has made him a guru as every tech entity working now is scrambling to prove their humanity via the ephemera they ooze — and the minds they co-opt — onto culture. Curious to get granular with him about his own taste, I sent a note to hear about the trends he’s into and not-into. The results crack a window into one of the buzziest minds now. We talk loving Butoh, the need for trends to die, nostalgia’s allure, and why defining humanity now is so complicated.

Tell me about a trend you’re following that you’re really into.
I’ve been really into Butoh. I had the great opportunity to interview the astound[ing] choreographer and dancer Trajal Harrell, and it’s a big part of his practice. He mixes butoh with vogue and contemporary dance. In preparation for the interview, I started reading different tomes on Butoh, such as Shades of Darkness, looking at the work of Hijikata and Kazuo Ono, and just watching a bunch of Butoh videos online, and it’s just been like my thing now. For instance, the collages by Hijikata are really, really wonderful. How does it tie into my life, work? It’s just something that I’m into. There’s no connection. It’s just little rabbit holes that I go down into.
What’s a trend you hope never dies?
I don’t know. I do, however, think things should die. I think things should have a beginning and an end, alpha-omega as they say. So I welcome the end of things. More trends should die.
What do you make of trends that long for the past?
Nostalgia interests me because it correlates proportionally with the number of artifacts we have from a period. What do I mean by that? I mean that the weight of the past increases the closer we get to the present. So part of the reason why you don’t see people wearing clothes from the 1920s is because there are fewer images, therefore fewer memories, fewer artifacts around us that can remind us of what that time was. The convenience of Y2K or indie sleaze is that because of the advent of the digital camera, they are rich for “mining”. There are a lot of “cultural deposits”, if you will, from which to extract cultural images and memories. Lots to reblog, lots to curate, lots to be nostalgic about.
What do you think it means to be human now?
The question of what it means to be human is the fundamental query of philosophical anthropology. It is a rich and heavily studied and debated topic for the last 3,000 years, (around Plato roughly). I doubt I’m going to answer this in the context of a short Substack post. I do not have a short or clean answer that can even start to elucidate the myriad directions, beliefs, and overall ideas around something like this. It is complex, but I do have an answer, just not a short one. It’s best answered in the context of a lecture or over a few cocktails.

You can follow Ruby on Instagram and be on the lookout for his new book, In Defense of Being-On-Line, out very soon.

“This is unreal”
“Can we get a thumbs up?”
“Are you pooping?”
“Me at the red light”
“The A/C is ON”
“He’s so hot”
“My fight song”
“She’s skinny”

Mitch McConnell memes went wild this week, after the Senator made some strange appearances this week. It feels like this news (like the Kennedy Center news) overshadowed the government going on break until post-midterms, so they can dodge any AI politics bullets.