😈 time to shadow network 😈

Explaining how the best of culture is iykyk, existing beyond algorithms as it spreads offline, and trying to predict what the next rosé will be.

May 24, 2026

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🤠 PODCAST BOY!!!! 🤠 I was on Rashad Rastam’s WEAR MANY HATS this week, where I rambled on the need to uncapitalize the arts (and taking time off), along with why I love smoking but quit for love: listen on Apple and Spotify!!
🦿HIP REPLACEMENT 🦿 this week features consumer trends expert Matt Smith who joined Ben Dietz and I to talk AI inevitability, Spencer Pratt for mayor, and James Charles representing the fall of influencer’s influence: catch the convo on Substack, YouTube, and Spotify!

Judge orders White House staff to comply
How Trump’s settlement could block audits
January 6 rioters and Trump allies eye $1.8B
Republicans squirm as Trump pursues legacy

I know Trump is a corrupt con and, while I think many of his awful things are awful, this suite of sours is in competition for some of the worst shit he’s done.

Bezos Praises Trump’s Second Term
Bezos: Amazon’s $40m Melania ‘good business’
Bezos defends billionaires, hypes AI
“Bezos calls for for zero income taxes”
”Fact-checking Jeff Bezos”

To the above! Billionaires and tech leaders starting to act like their third eye is opening when it comes to class consciousness isn’t going to fly. More and more will realize that the American oligarchy fucking sucks and that more of them need to kiss the blade of the guillotine. Also: he looks like shit. Sister is pickled!!!! (Similarly evil is Zuckerberg killing his entire workforce as they watch themselves die in the third person.)

7 charts explain why job market is tough
“Why is the stock market ignoring reality?”
“If economy is good, why doesn’t it feel like it?”

You know things are bad when the New York Times, Bloomberg, and The Economist drop stories about the disconnect between rich money people and those in the real world.

Minnesota to Ban Prediction Markets, Feds Sue
Probe into insider trading on Kalshi

This is somewhere in between all of the above items.

“Why has this New Jersey lawmaker been missing?”
Rep. Wilson eyes reelection despite absence

Not loving the trend of representatives going literally MIA, which is a very good representation of current American micro and macro-politics. Loosely related is Tulsi Gabbard exiting, making Trump cabinet departures four-for-four as far as gender. Hm.

Ebola Raged for Weeks in Congo
Cuts by West left them ill-equipped for outbreak
The price of when “we” became “me”

Hantavirus who? People are pretty worried about ebola as it has its once-a-decade fright moment, now exacerbated by Trump and Elon’s calloused cutting of USAID. Then again: such cuts were designed to enable a situation like this, as defunding of USAID will come to be viewed as a genocide enacted by rich racists.

The Quest for Clean Hydrogen
Less Support for Solar, Wind, More for Nuclear

Watch the alternative energy space, as something seems to be going on. To the second item: why are right wingers so uniformly stupid when it comes to considering wind and or solar? Nuclear, sure, but let’s diversify, honey.

U.N. climate: worst-case scenario ‘implausible’

Some good news! Although the right is certainly weaponizing this to excuse unclean energy, a la: the second story directly above.

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If you’re reading this, I assume you probably read Casey Lewis too. I’d guess you have a New York Magazine subscription, or check The Cut and or Vulture and or The Strategist a few times a week. You almost certainly are an iPhone person. You shop at Uniqlo and hope SSENSE doesn’t go away. You know who Chris Black is, listen to Addison Rae, read Audition, are ready for the Hacks finale, and likely dabble in protein. If you use AI, it’s Claude or Perplexity. You very likely live in a city (Los Angeles, London, New York, Paris, etc.), or at least lived many years in a city that raised you for much of your young adult years. You likely work in marketing or, at the very least, in a creative field. You subscribe to too many Substacks that it’s a problem, to the point that most go archived as your want to read is eclipsed by your available free time. You deleted Twitter a long, long time ago.

Is that you? Did I come close? In meeting so many of you, the audience largely breaks down into three communities: young (majority women) people embarking on a creative career and looking for help; a marketing person who reads “for work,” squirreling away stories in the service of getting leadership, clients, etc. to approve creative; or you’re someone (typically of a certain age) invested in culture as an extension of interests, someone people would call a tastemaker even if that word is yucky to you. These three domains circle each other, as many of you likely occupy two or three of these spaces. I’m fully aware that my readership and I are of-a-kind (despite Substack being quite cagey about reader stats), we an extension of the very exhausting conversations about taste but also proof that culture truly is a matter of taste, preferences: you are what you eat, which is why those of us keep coming back to the same natural wine bars to snack on these small plates together.

But I also know this about all of you too: none of the descriptions I made are accurate. You likely think Eugene is whack and don’t think Addison is a star and haven’t watched Hacks and hate AI and have never lived in a city, nor do you want to. You may be a teenager! You may be very deep in retirement. Regardless: you’re here, which isn’t exactly by chance as an algorithm somewhere guided you here, no matter how fake the feed is or how clippers keep clipping up the timeline. Your sticking around is proof of a larger theory of culture via the internet that feels increasingly true in a post follow-for-follow landscape that is becoming bot’d: now is a moment of invisible culture groups, undefined people of diverse backgrounds and interests corralling in the same places in an almost impossible to quantify or qualify means given the stratification of digital ecosystems. If you’ve shown up to a culture event and clocked someone wearing a specific item you’ve been eyeing, you know what I’m talking about. If you’ve had a conversation with someone you just met where you traded similar memes and slang, you know what I’m talking about. If you like to hang out in the comments section of TikTok or Reels, finding yourself passing inside jokes about other videos with strangers, you know what I’m talking about. What was once obviously tribal, as seen with Black Twitter™ and Gay Twitter™, is now invisible: what drives is a spiritual ecosystem starts with the algorithmic corralled but transcends thanks to a human spirit remix that pollinates online and offline spaces, resulting in conversations like gingers being the Blacks of whites and “Ring My Bell” being a wealth manifestor along with along with the breaking out of thinkers like Jamelle Bouie and Kathryn Anne Edwards along with the emergence of the One Piece flag as a sign of rebellion and chrome items as the dinnerware of now. These are products of the social media culture factory of the early 2020s that have been pushed through the sieve of irl discernment of the late 2020s: this is what happens when culture respects the balance of the online and the offline.

I’ve been thinking about this, which I discussed with Rashad Rastam on WEAR MANY HATS, as similar ideas emerge about the loss of cultural groups as expressed by similar styles of clothes and specific positions yielding to ragtag groups divorced from aesthetics, products, and policies that come to signal shared worldviews. “We actually don’t have political parties anymore,” Sarah Isgur of SCOTUSblog explained to the New York Times this week. “We still have teams, that we call Republicans and Democrats, but it’s vibes based. It’s the sense that you belong to the Starbucks, Trader Joe’s, matcha latte group or you belong to the pickup truck, Yellowstone watching, Walmart group — and it’s not policy based. For the first time in American history, we have more people who identify as independent than with either of the two political parties…Political parties are meaningless.” Vibes are key, but so is a divorcing — or wanting to divorce — oneself from the systems at large, thanks to our dissatisfaction with the state of things. This is why stories of subcultures being dead trend in parallel to stories of niche communities thriving, which is multiplied by the death of brand loyalty as expressed as young people — and Americans in general — joining and quitting streaming services based on what’s on the platform. This is why the group chat reigns as social platforms crash. This could be attributed to finances but, as designer Heron Preston recently said, a subculture like streetwear is no longer a subculture due to mass consumption: the 2010s moment of culture being linked to the capital and normative is over, illustrating something @Patrick Kho tapped into in November, that the best of culture now doesn’t “always come from the centers” like New York and London. This is why authentic community is so coveted (and why “authenticity” is a nauseating marketing buzzword), dissolving community from the specific to the amorphous. We’re in an iykyk, game-recognize-game world where codes and references offer as keys to unknown worlds. “Power to the people,” Preston said, “it’s time to shake the system and do it our way.” No wonder the “hello my niche community” and the “it’s opinions based” phrase-memes are trending as they speak to our scattered collective cohesion: gang is really lowkey weird but solid af.

Invisible communities are what form when too many human spaces have become threatened and exploited by corporations and the police state. It fits into our rising anti-tech (and certainly anti-AI) moment, where what’s worth paying attention exists in literal and metaphorical shade. “Shade is, ‘I don’t tell you you’re ugly, but I don’t have to tell you because you know you’re ugly,” as the iconic drag performer Dorian Corey explained in 1991, which we can now apply to social cohesion. This is gatekeeping, in a way, but each of us acting as bouncers to safeguard a world of culture worth participating in: are you willing to protect your ecosystem from selling out? If Are you actually, truly adding to conversations, or are you stuck in the rising parasocial media loop of people watching people they think they know? The future is other people, the future is logging off: yeah, yeah — but this means nothing without having a trained eye to see the spirits moving between increasingly monitored spaces and times. Social networks only work now through shadow networks, it seems.

$1.1B Christie’s Auctions Shatter Records
Christie’s Recruited Nicole Kidman

This is all wild, showing how there’s a lot of money somewhere above us and that investment in the arts is almost always in older art instead of contemporary art. Also: actors doing sponcon like Nicole Kidman did posits they’re now social media creators by another name, that the age of the actor as cultural monolith is over, which means acting as a respected craft is on the way out (especially as everyone is an actor now). That said: Nicole Kidman remains undefeated, given she would not be caught dead doing something like paling with Palantir execs.

Banality, Body Horror at NY Art Week

This is a very smart assessment of New York Art Week which in turn is a critique of the larger art fair economy, which has turned our highest form of expression into commodities sold to billionaires, all as museums and cultural institutions become intellectually empty playgrounds.

The end of the ‘easyJet set’

Related to the above! A very smart story on how Berlin changing shapes means the shape of clubbing is changing, in that less visitors mean less clubbers as people travel less all as the city suffers from the global homogenetic culture. Subcultures die when people don’t have access or opportunity to explore the diversity that they offer! Not to say you have to travel for that, but that a lack of free time and economic mobility for normal people means culture makers are squeezed out.

Baseball with shorter attention spans
Is Sports Coverage the Solution?

The World Cup may be approaching a flop, but it’s certainly fascinating that sports are having a cultural moment that extends beyond typical audiences. From baseball revamping for this lack-of-attention-span era to Vanity Fair courting athletes, the suggestion is that this form of human-driven entertainment rises as tech-driven gestures (and the waning of Hollywood) lose cultural steam. It’s also deeply conservative and heterosexual culture so none of this is a surprise!

The quiet grief of adult friendship

This story went very viral, which speaks to the above three items and to something I’ve been wanting to write about but won’t because it feels so on-the-nose: no one is happy and everyone is exhausted, which is the result of all of life having become corporatized, making us all employees in a tech factory instead of real people living real lives. You know this! Everyone is your co-worker, which makes you your only friend.

The Sad Wives of AI

All those dudes simping for AI? Their wives hate them! Yet another signal of cultural divides. Justice for all of us normal people!

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If we think about wines within the context of modern trends, you’ll notice a few storylines. The 2010s was the era of “rosé all day,” of bright pink sippers from France that saw popularity double in the time period, inspiring celebrities like Brad Pitt and Angelina Jolie to drop bottles all as rosé festivals celebrated the drink. The 2020s have been about natural wines, orange wines being the breakout, inspiring soul searching about what wine can be as the conversation becomes increasingly mainstream. (Example: Aldi has launched an orange wine while boxed wines brands like Ami Ami and Nomadica get in on the beverage.) As we begin our descent out of the 2020s, this is the moment when the sprouts of the next big wine trend emerge. What, then, will the next rosé be? What evolves natural wine, specifically orange wine? I’ve been wondering this for some time and decided to ask friends and wine professionals to see where they think it’s all going.

“I see the everyday yet exciting fizz moment taking hold,” my friend and wine educator Nika Shevela explains, spotting playful bubbly wines with lower-ABV as a breakout. She has proof of this too: “Recent IWSR data shows sparkling participation rebounding to ~27% of US legal-age drinkers in 2025, with the segment outpacing some more traditional still wines.” Jared Hecht, who works at Via Carota in New York (and who I met when I was last in the city, when he worked at Cove), takes the sparkling idea further while acknowledging greater specificity. “I’ve seen a lot of folks gravitate toward the alpine style wines of Savoie,” he says, alluding to a region offering Champagne alternatives and “textured” white wines. “New school style grenache in Spain has been popular as well,” he adds. “These are wines that were thought of as inky and very purple previously, which now have a lot of frivolity but still stand up straight.”

This gets at another serious-but-silly beloved natural wine that feels increasingly like the 2030s come down drink: the chilled juicy red, which is an area I’d put my money on that is already popular but curious given it offers a twist to a wine world classic. My friend Rachel Pereira — who runs a Barcelona south Asian restaurant and natural wine spot called Mog — concurs, which we discussed at a recent dinner, carrying the conversation into text. She sees peppy natural things like pét-nats continuing, but making way for something more niche and perhaps a little bit more complicated. Thus, a chilled red like Grégory Guillaume’s Testard and L’étranger’s Porco Rosso. “[Pét-nat] defines the basic quality of natural wine for me,” she says, of the fun and easy drinking glou-glou types, ”but I also feel the low tannin reds that are served cold for me are at the same ‘next’ thing in natural wine.”

But, as natural wine is all about questioning wine traditions, what if what’s “next” for wine is less about a varietal and more about how we drink? What if the question isn’t about the drink itself but about the act, the context? That’s what Jill Bernheimer of Los Angeles’ (recently closed, and an all time favorite of mine) Domaine LA and Bar Etoile wonders. “The future of wine is certainly unclear to me,” she wrote to me via email. “It isn’t just what people are drinking, but how and where they are. To that extent, post pandemic has seen a shift away from retail and consumption at home and more toward consuming in more public spaces.” This may mean wines become less specific, making way for “wines that fit whatever context,” less wine-as-soda but more wine as experiential additive. (To the point of the first essay: wine-as-shadow-network-accessory.)

So…what comes after natural wine? Nothing and everything, making the theme that unites all these wine workers’ mindset being serious fun: natural wine is about rejecting the norm, considering new possibilities while enjoying the process. The old, fusty ways of the wine world are out as the industry considers its fate given their being on the right wing’s bullseye of wellness and purity. “[Sparkling wine]’s clearly not just about lower ABV,” Nika says. “Younger drinkers are gravitating toward wines that feel personal and culturally relevant,” she adds, speaking of drinkers questioning Eurocentric wine styles, making way for the wine curious and forward-thinking to look to atypical and emerging wine hubs like the UK, Brazil, Baja California, Japan, and Lesotho. Then again: anyone doing anything with wine in times like these is a win. “At the end of the day, the number one concern to me, as a wine person, is that the wine fits inside the glass,” Jared says.