Trending on . Society after Gen Z
I’m getting old. Like, really old. And I can see it in how I start to miss the bic picture on trends. While at the same time, it’s the most important aspect of looking at theworld.
I remember in 1990s, there was not much of any trend. Smoking was hip and rebellious. Girls were fed magazines that fetishizes shaved overly fit-gym bodies which still causes mid-30s women to be alone. Crack was selling in NYC and New Jack City, 2Pac and all was a thing. Rap was in his prime and TV, Movie Theatres and Radio were still big. The 8 o’clock news were still a prime channel for general public news and appeared somewhat rational to a young 10 year old mind. And the internet was just around the corner and everybody talked about wardriving, phreaking, blueboxes and greenboxes and phone jacking. Japanese Toys and Animes were a big thing and everybody talked about Japan eating the world. Before they send the Harvard boys in and crashlanded the entire country Princes of the Yen style.
I recall German Wirtschaftswoche mocked China stating that they copied everything but failed miserably. A chinese bicycle would not last a single week on even the best and most modern German road. Meanwhile, in the late 80s and early 90s, massive fortunes were made that would lead 30 years later to movies like Crazy Rich Asians. Chinese Soft Power diverted via Singapore and Southeast Asia rich kid images, while core main land neveau cinema was pushing K-Drama inspired history movies on Drama Fever teaching the basics of Han Fei and court politics while pushing the idea of the new Shenzen Entrepreneneur rockstar that dined fine and wined in the basement while backstabbing family members in the company board.
But I am digressing. So the 90s were rough edged and lifestyle of the instagrammer was confined to a 20 second shot of Dylan riding Souther Californian beaches in Bevery Hills 90210 . But the dream was there.
It was really the internet that was pushing the dotcom bubble and a new financial markets regime that would kickstart the modern era Banker in NYC and the new age of Hedge fund Managers, who were riding the quant wave ofter Long Term Capital Management collapse while Rainaissance was doing its thing faking quant algo trading while really being a psych meets fundamental shop experimenting with alt Data.
Those bankers were really pushing it in the emerging Silicon Valley ecossytem and it was that joint force of Holly Wood Hills Soft Power with the Sales Skills of Ballmer and Jobs — the Steve Duo — mingling with ex-CIA hobos running global sales for corporate America as the Cold war era ended and everyone was partying like it it was 89, eh 99, forever .
In the verge of this era and on the back of dialogues on geocities, AIM instant messenger, news chan, IRC and warez websites, the new porn industry was building the foundation of biometric and social media data that later would bring everyone together on Facebook to share memories and humble-brag about social skills before searching events and travel opportunities for the camera. It was really this google spirit coming together with the iPhone and instagram that then killed everything.
Death to the Radio, TV, Newspaper, Hollywood Drama. There was the influencer. But I am falling into prose.
We had the sexual liberation and the breaking apart of the old women model and family model. Patchwork, working mom, lower income, stagnating real wages, the 68 are and 69 positions and weed and coke and LSD. That was the big death blow to the Christian family trandition model and the emerging point in asking the right questions: “Who the fuck am I?” The individualism thing was coming off hard with hippies and chantras and boogaloo sexdolls and parties in Thailand sex tourism.
With Schwarzenegger and MTV, drug, decay, self-hatred and body fetishes joint the sexual liberation and body fetish area that is still running wild on instagram for the above 30 year olds. And it was that liberation angle that now drives the travel FOMO and keeping up with the Jones in “I do it harder, I do it longer, I do it without faking” drama we see unfold in instagram land where Billionaire after Billionaire shows of their lifestyle and makes young womens lifestyle and liberation dreams turn wet.
After the DotCom bubble burst, shit go pretty real. Southeast ASia was being rebuild. The hot pot spot was in china. Europa was re-inveting the service economy and the US was pushing the new oil : data.
AI was around 2010 already. But the focus was Cloud and Software as a Service companies. Services are everything. Customer centricity, upselling, cross-selling. The big behemoth corporates were opening global markets and industrial systems were running wild pumping margins from the periphery to the core with Wallerstein’s system theory becoming slight more prominent and driving the Occupy Wall Street Movement.
But the real things happened in a re-covering tech ecosystem and the rise of the Gig economy /SLASH/ entrepreneurify everything /SLASH/ every dog and whistle now works in Venture Capital /SLASH/ the Rich Kids hang in Samui on the weekend, party in Macau on a Sunday and dine out after work in Shanghai when the family business demands their presence. This was the new global thing and if you weren’t Asian, your chances in US elite colleges and global businesses started dimming. While silently and forcefully, Indians were taking over the Valley and Mohdi started wearing more colorful kilts.
The recent trends are all more of a relaxation. The Hippies turned New Agers and are now unhappy single and married women in their 30s seeking God on a Yoga mat and posing their ass on Tinder and Hinge. Meanwhile of them only ate eggs and eventually even stopped with that and became vegan and talked about Kibbutz, while looking kind of increasingly sickly and working for the World Economic Forum before eventually gluing themselves on some street to stop climate change and shooting themselves in the head. Some of them jumped off the train quickly and merely feed their narcissistic ego with buying food without packaging and overspending on second and third hand 1800s tiger car furs pretending it is synthetic. The new rich that made their money in the German 40s and who now sit on real estate milking the new academics who want to leave their marks in a dying corporate world stopped going to ibiza and now eat expensive but terribly unhealthy shrimp somewhere in the Alps while going to see Art they do not understand in the boring museums of the Hague and sipping Matcha Lates.
When you look closely, the very young 20 year olds kind of look like 90s punks again. They realize that the AI is always nicer than the guy next door and have their revival of Sartre’s “L’enfer, c’est les autres”. The dress down and uglify themselves and claim the death of the object and beauty fetish. Talking about mental health and family systems and overall being a bit more gory and ugly again than their counterparts in Lulu Lemon JEans wearing Birks on the Yoga retreat where they push gender boundaries by posing as coke snorting bimbo DJs or Hijab Wearing Martial Art Queens and Fempreneurs.
In the middle of all this madness, the rich kids try to find themselves and scream and chant their angry attention-seeking songs. While the working class actually has become either angry and protests for the acceptance of flat earth or the ending of reptilian alian dominance in global politics. Or they have entirely secluded themselves and reached hermit status in the forests and woods of Bachheim in the middle of nowhere, rediscovering what it means and how beautiful it is to be a hillbilly. And they do have a point.
The old guys whose wives have long feasted on other young boys, and whose money never runs out and whose trusts are so opaque, they don’t know their own wealth themselves, they get caught up on sex trade and they listen to soulless warmongers like Musk and Harrari on how the AI is going to kill everything and how defective everything is.
It is really very hard to see where all of this is going. But here is my bet.
Generation wellbeing — the vegan, yoga, experience hunting and socially accetibly smiling, mental health seeking and trip-advisor meets reddit loving crowd will come off age and run the show for quite a while. They will be idealisitc and push their agendas and propaganda into mainstream. But eventually consensus thinking will fall apart and it they will got after each other’s throat quite quickly, leading to the next really ugly dark times on the global parkett. It won’t be the xenophobes and MAGA crowd which belongs to a dying Boomer sentiment. It will be more of a “be nice or fucking die” kind of dialogue and among all that are nice, it will be a “I’m the leader, you will follow.” kind of realism that will dominate geopolitics and economic policy.
The still younger and emerging generations are post-indvidiualists. They accept that the others are hell. And they accept that individual freedom is not the highest good. And that the social collectivism is also not the answer. The splendid Isolation of the American continent will reach the small micro-communities in which lives actually happens. And people will stop talking and communicating and meeting online. They will build in communities and cliques and families. Maybe even trying to go back from patchwork to core families. Rejecting ownership and hierarchy inside of the community but fiercely competing with other circles. You can call it tribal. Because you can see it in the tribal societies of the Middle east and Africa. There will be clans. And they will compete for understanding how reality really works. So a small microcultural hive mind will replace the individual. These community will be cut throat in their selection and affeliation processes. Kind of like cults. But they will reject any notion of hierarchy or cult leadership. They will be equals. Loyal to each other. And trying to overcome fetishes, empty pipe dreams. They will be frugal. They will be creative. And tribal. And absolutely distasteful and opponent to the anyone trying to put his ego over the community. Collectively psychopathic against the other world. Charminlgy narcissistic. But open and authentic inside of the community.
If you watch closely, you can see them already on Reddit. In the hidden darkest corners. And they still take some time to really come to light. But they will come after the GenZ wellbeing generation. And they will be hardcore realists. Probably destroying all that is left from modern society.
But who knows. I might rethink my position.
