I recently saw a short video on Twitter and Instagram that perfectly encapsulates the disconnect between the digital ecosystem and the real world.

In the video, a young woman in her mid-twenties shares her morning routine. She’s in an upscale home with minimalist furniture. Everything is a soft, neutral palette– even her athleisure outfit– and carefully lit with warm lighting to make her appear effortless.

As she gets ready (despite already wearing a full face of clean girl makeup and not having a single fly-away in her high ponytail), we see her engaging with health and wellness concepts. She detoxes with celery juice and takes a shot of pure olive oil. Everything is organic and GMO-free. There are no scary chemicals anywhere. 

It’s a video that very clearly intends to encapsulate a specific aesthetic. There’s no real substance to it. A content creator is trying to project a high-income, unattainable image… the same thing we’ve seen online for a decade.

The most entertaining part of seeing the video in constant circulation is the commentary around it. I couldn’t begin to estimate how many variations of “all this organic BS and a face full of filler” I’ve seen in comments and retweets of the video.

But what does this video of pseudo-wellness and health fear exploitation have to do with writing, literature, and creativity?

Aesthetic Obsession Shapes Art

All art—there are no exceptions—exists within the context of the society that created it. It will subvert or reinforce dominant power structures, culture, and technology.

This is a natural byproduct of the unfortunate condition known as being human.

Because digital media is so pervasive today, one’s exposure to trend-seeking online media will shape how one creates art. The subject matter, the presentation, the tone, and many other variables are vulnerable to this influence, whether we like it or not.

I don’t mean to imply that watching viral videos like the one referenced above will result in today’s writers making their characters trendy with clean aesthetics and an obsession with wellness pseudoscience. Maybe they will, but that’s not a guaranteed outcome.

What I’m more interested in and expect will influence the current generation of artists is the pushback against hollow aesthetics.

People are increasingly bored with or frustrated with the current paradigm of influencers, social media, and the attention economy. This frustration manifests in several ways.

Think about how many books and think pieces have been written about shallow interactions and the attention economy. Tim Wu's Attention Merchants: The Epic Scramble to Get Inside Our Heads, Tim Fisher's Chaos Machine: The Inside Story of How Social Media Rewired Our Minds and Our World, and Nicholas Carr's The Shallows: What the Internet is Doing to Our Brains are all great examples.

We also see apps and hardware—Brick, Opal, SelfControl, Serene, and many more—designed to limit your time on non-productive websites by blocking them from your phone and computer. (I own a Brick device and pay an annual $99 to Opal; both were sound investments for me.) 

I think this is even reflected in the tendency for the digitally naive to share copy-and-paste scams on Facebook that claim to “reset the algorithm” so that they see more content from their friends and less from other sources. While these posts are (a) dumb and (b) don’t do anything but make you a target for scammers, they speak to many folks’ desires to reclaim a sense of authenticity in their online interactions.

The prominence of AI tools has accelerated the pace at which individuals are growing frustrated with online interactions. Constant attention being given to manufactured media, having to constantly question whether the “people” you’re interacting with online are real or not, and the churning out of mediocre content for no purpose other than to promote, promote, promote have had the unintended effect of leaving people feeling burnt out, stressed, and craving the ability to disconnect.

This collective shift toward technological frustration and distrust is already influencing art, and I suspect we’re only seeing the tip of the iceberg.

We’ve Seen This Cycle Before - The Atomic Age and Post-Post Modernism

We’ve seen similar cycles in art and literature before. Consider the Atomic Age or Space Age and the way people’s interactions with technology shaped culture. Technology and culture were developing at seemingly unprecedented speeds. Between putting the first man on the moon and the threat of entire cities being annihilated, science and technology held equal potential for utopia and dystopia in the collective consciousness of the United States.

As such, we see art and architecture that projects itself as future-thinking and ideal– bright colors, organic and sweeping shapes– but also works of cultural significance that spoke to the shadow side of that technical advancement: books, films, essays, poetry, and more that sought to encapsulate the fear that such amazing technology would be used against people rather than for people, as it had been in Hiroshima and Nagasaki. We see George Orwell’s 1984 coming out in 1949, Ray Bradbury’s Fahrenheit 451 in 1953, and Pat Frank’s Alas, Babylon coming out in 1959.

One of the byproducts of the Atomic Age was the emergence of the postmodernist artistic era that really kicked off in the 1950s.

Postmodernism emerged after World War II as a reaction to modernism's failings, linked to totalitarianism or mainstream culture. Its traits appeared in the 1940s, especially in Jorge Luis Borges's work. Most scholars agree that postmodernism began competing with modernism in the late 1950s and dominated in the 1960s. Since then, it has influenced art, literature, film, and philosophy. Key features include ironic style play, skepticism towards the "grand narrative" of Western culture, a preference for virtuality over reality, and a motif of questioning what reality actually is, often resulting in characters having a splintered inner state that borders on schizophrenia.

Postmodernism is one of those eras of literature with so much gold in it, I want to devote an entire newsletter to it at some point. For now, though, I want to focus on the reaction to postmodernism.

Starting in the 1990s, we see an emerging trend of art and literature that is, in many ways, antithetical to the themes of postmodernism. Quiet novels. Stories of the mundane. A passive acceptance of the human condition as it is.

Rob Wijnberg of The Correspondent describes the post-postmodern condition by writing,

This sense of awareness plays out in the emergence of literary trends like New Sincerity, which was kicked off by David Foster Wallace in the 90s and carried into subsequent decades by writers like Jonathan Franzen, Zadie Smith, and Dave Eggars. Whereas postmodernism was primarily concerned with irony and questioning the nature of reality, post-postmodernism and New Sincerity seem to embrace a direct, penetrating gaze into that which is common.

David Foster Wallace, in his seminal 1993 essay titled “E Unibus Pluram: Television and U.S. Fiction,” describes the emergence of post-postmodernism by writing,

New Sincerity is sometimes quiet and subtle, but at other times, it loudly lambasts the lens of irony and doubt that preceded it.

With each shift– from modernism to the Atomic Age, the Atomic Age to postmodernism, postmodernism to post-postmodernism and New Sincerity– the response to dominant cultural norms and the role of technology.

While post-postmodernism certainly has space within its conventions to accommodate critique of the current technological landscape and online culture, I suspect that in the coming years, we’ll see the pendulum swing back toward content drenched in irony and amplified depictions of technological upheaval.

One of the hallmarks of the Atomic Era was the latent fear that nuclear war would upend society and bring about an end to life as we know it in the United States. In no way do I want to compare our current technological shifts to the threat of nuclear war, but I do think that as AI and robotics become more advanced, we’re seeing a similar undercurrent of unease across large sections of society. As people fear economic impotence and increased disparity due to technology, the systems that create that sense of fear will come under the microscope of literature.

Influencers, doom scrollers, AI enthusiasts, crypto bros, MAGA, chronically online keyboard warriors, cancel culture, obnoxiously loud TERFs, medical misinformation spreaders, conspiracy theorists, and NFT diehards (who are somehow still around) are all rife with material for writers to work with. They’re practically bubbling over with behavioral tropes that beg to be lampooned in literature. 

In addition, we live in a political climate in which corruption is blatant and widespread in the US and beyond. Our highest-ranking politicians are figures who once would have been deemed too much like caricatures to be taken seriously, yet here we are. A new type of billionaire class buoys corruption and despotic leaders in an ongoing cycle of exploitation and the pursuit of personal gain.

Between the absurdity of our political and economic reality, and the ludicrous paradigms that have formed online as a byproduct of this reality, I suspect that the earnestness of New Sincerity will give way to a reemergence of art and literature bordering on Dada.

To borrow from the Internet’s most reliable source and the current only textbook I have on Dada, Wikipedia, here’s a pretty solid overview of the movement:

Art– including (and especially) literature– is always a response to the society in which it is created. It is going to subvert or reinforce dominant paradigms. As folks continue to get burnt out on the superficiality of social and digital media, our interactions become increasingly polarized, and global tensions rise, I expect that how artists respond to society will be somewhat in line with how Dadaists responded following WWI. I anticipate a rejection of the aestheticism of modern capitalism and the incorporation of nonsense, irrationality, and anti-bourgeois sensibilities across art and literature.

We’re most likely to see these works coming out from Indie publishers, as major publishers still try to placate economic headwinds and won’t see the current wave of Dada reflected in the literary canon for many years to come. ButI wouldn’t be surprised if we do see a few 21st-century Dadaists entering the mainstream and shaping cultural commentary quite soon.