The New Yorker Roundup
Thoughts on "our" culture in three pieces from Kyle Chayka, Kelefa Sanneh, and Joshua Rothman
Kyle Chayka: "IRL Brain Rot and the Lure of the Labubu"
Bloomberg's Amanda Mull wrote about Labubus, prompting me to write about Labubus, which prompted Katherine Dee to defend Labubus, and now The New Yorker's Kyle Chayka (of Filterworld and “AirSpace” fame) has provided his own take on Labubus. This is discourse, people.
Chayka rejects the idea that Labubus are just a fad. He calls this kind of online-based consumer culture “IRL brain rot,” which “represent(s) a survival kit for the ecosystem we find ourselves in, in which we must manipulate our bodies and images for the screen; tune our moods to the vicissitudes of ambient or gig-based labor; and deploy magical thinking to navigate the incomprehensibility of shifting norms.” Moreover, IRL Brain Rot strikes Chayka “as an almost radical aesthetic movement.”
Chayka's use of "we" here gives me pause. The most influential theoretical framework on my cultural analysis has always been the “Culture of Production” school in sociology, which frames pop culture as the aggregation of products created within an industrial field rather than a series of aesthetic changes that simply float up into the ether to form a “zeitgeist.” Did we manifest Labubus as a collective psychological crisis or did specific companies create them as products to be sold to specific audiences (that don't read The New Yorker)?
Mull’s initial piece did a good job of tying these trends not just to the internet, but to geographies where New Money aspirational aesthetics dominate. Yes, high-minded art critics can read Labubu as “avant-garde” in the long narrative chain of aesthetic changes, but they were not created with that intention. The design feels very post-2000 Japan-inspired Hong Kong consumer culture; they're sold through a hypebeasty blind box retail strategy conjured up by Chinese company Pop Mart, legitimized by a Thai singer in a Korean pop group thanks to her dangling one from a bag created by a France-based multinational publicly-traded luxury syndicate. There are millions of young people around the world who desire Labubus as fun status symbols rather than as remedy to the ennui of hyperreality. Americans may be scarred from years living online, but they play almost no role in the Labubu moment. China Talk's Lily Ottinger just went to Kyrgyzstan and found piles and piles of off-brand Labubu. That is the real Labubu story.
But New Yorker readers being lumped into the Labubu "we" proves my original point: Educated people feel a duty to know these trends as part of cultural literacy. They don't buy Labubus, yet they join the "we" and descend into introspective angst about what Labubus mean for the state of "our" collective psychology.
As a general strategy for cultural consumption, omnivorism was very smart: Erecting artificial barriers against “low” or “foreign” culture denies us potential pleasures. But the low overwhelmed the high. Consumers who can enjoy more complexity and ambiguity are spending a lot of mindshare inside the "Labubu we," and in the most extreme cases, justify that time by projecting depth and innovation upon IRL brain rot that doesn't deserve it. Chayka has no authentic desires for a Dubai chocolate sundae (and doesn't enjoy eating it!), yet he clearly felt a sense of duty to consume it and wonder whether it deserves inclusion as "our" latest chapter in the Story of Art.
But what else can he do? The default is to include the self in every mass trend, because otherwise it would require delineating taste worlds — something that has become extremely distasteful.
Kelefa Sanneh: “How Music Criticism Lost Its Edge”
I admittedly write way too much about Kelefa Sanneh’s landmark 2004 New York Times piece “The Rap Against Rockism,” but understanding the 21st century requires acknowledging the pro-commerce values inherent in the pro-pop ideology.
I’ve always wondered what Sanneh himself thinks about the impact of his 2004 essay, and now we have an answer: It wasn’t me. “Critics in thrall to the sound and ethos of rock and roll—loud guitars, sweaty authenticity—were sometimes accused of ‘rockism,’ a musical prejudice.” (bold mine) The passive tense is working overtime here; Sanneh takes no active-verb-level responsibility for his own anti-rockism. (He also, oddly, chat with Ryan Schreiber as if he didn't spend the early 2000s in a spat with Pitchfork, who he accused of calling for his death.)
There have been many groans at Sanneh's piece, from both anti-poptimism and pro-poptimism angles. (Jody Rosen calls the current poptimism discussion “debased” and hints that a corrective is coming.) I have long felt similar to Sanneh. I've spent the last 15 years becoming a much less acerbic critic while secretly wanting other critics to be much meaner. But now forced to have a take, I'm not sure meanness is the source of our crisis.
In Chapter Eight of Status and Culture, I write about the four main functions of mass media in turning innovations into trends:
- selecting cultural works (out of many contenders)
- broadcasting them to a large audience
- explaining why individuals should consume them
- evaluating their quality
In a world without critics, selection and broadcasting will always be dominated by Big Capital, because companies can use their money and market power to overwhelm selection and then broadcast their works through their own marketing channels. Pitchfork is a good example of how critics can serve as a countervailing force. The site's anti-pop approach entailed selecting non-mainstream releases, broadcasting their existence to curious listeners, and then explaining their importance from the perspective of a quality evaluation, which accelerated consumption. This kickstarted the careers of many non-pop artists.
From this perspective, meanness-versus-niceness is a just a debate about the manners of evaluation. Poptimism changes the entire function of criticism before we can even ask whether critics are too nice to Taylor Swift. Poptimist critique weakened the countervailing power criticism just in over-indexing releases from Big Capital.
Where critics are dedicated to the elevation of inventive works, they have been very successful in doing so. Being mean about conventional works can be a part of that mission, but most mainstream criticism of the moment has other priorities than assisting in cultural progression.
To encourage more inventive culture (which is not a rockist postition!), there need to be more centralized platforms for the selection and broadcasting of left-field cultural works. I enjoy the site Hearing Things simply because they select a lot of music I wouldn’t otherwise listen to, such as the bonkers new Dijon album. The tone of their praise/dismissal seems tertiary to the value they provide.
Nick Susi wrote in 2024 “We Can’t Fight Attention With Attention,” and I increasingly believe that this phrase sums up the key crisis of the 21st century. "We" — consumers who desire complexity and innovation — are giving so much of "our" attention to things we hold in contempt. Even a negative review of Addison functions as the selection, broadcasting, and validation of Addison. In the 21st century, the worst members of society have become the most successful members of society, and they owe so much of this to their skillful abuse this mechanism.
Joshua Rothman: “A.I. Is Coming for Culture”
This is a very long piece, with some occasional bursts of optimism: “A.I. will have peculiar strengths and shortcomings, more won’t necessarily mean more of the same. New forms, or new uses for existing forms, will pull us in directions we don’t anticipate.”
It seems fair to already conclude that the downsides of AI culture outweigh the upsides of AI culture. The 21st century has already been a crisis of human cultural proliferation, and AI has made things a lot worse very quickly. It's very clear that the major platforms aren't going to police AI. Amazon could easily fix its AI-produced fake-book problem, but they don't seem to care. In 2022, Status and Culture spawned a dozen fake study guides before the book even came out, and now, after my friend Craig Mod recently published his book Things Becoming Other Things, he now has to deal with garbage like THE BIOGRAPHY OF CRAIG MOD: Detailing How Things Always Become the Other Way: A 300-Mile Walk in Japan, Memory, and Photography by Audrey T. Winthrop (who is most definitely a real person.) I just received a Google Alert for a video promoting my book Ametora, hosted by a woman who may or may not have been real at some point but now is condemned to live life in cyberspace as an AI animation.
The general consensus about technology and media at the moment is:
- Pop culture has become formulaic
- Mass media is overwhelmed by clickbait
- App algorithms push us towards the worst content
- AI is already boring and extremely sinister
My optimistic take is that the faux-culture ecosystem will drive more people towards small-scale, humanistic culture. But this brings us back to the “we” from Chayka’s piece. The vast majority of people on earth are going to drown in a lukewarm bath of AI gruel, and there is probably no effective means of mass resistance on their behalf. The consequences will be very bad. But it also means we’re likely to return to the common pattern of cultural consumption from previous centuries, where sophisticates live in their own separate taste world that is not AI-dominated. I refuse to believe this is an “elitist” position when anyone with self-determination and curiosity is also free to join in this separate taste world, and its members should encourage others to do so.
What "we" need, however, is a group consciousness of being in this sophisticated taste world and not in the AI-algo taste world. Every successful cultural movement, from Native Tongues to Lilith Fair to the European avant-garde, has had this consciousness, which powers the construction of the initial infrastructure. "We" have enough time and resources to create our own taste world — especially if we commit to spending much less time pondering the deeper meaning of superficial dreck.