When did we become so vapid?
There’s a particular species of despair that creeps in when you spend too long online. Not the existential kind of despair you might feel reading about war or ever-increasing homelessness, but something duller, a nausea brought on by the endless stream of slop that passes for culture in the digital age.
You log on and within moments you’re knee-deep in clips of someone eating bull testicles for likes, self-styled thought leaders preaching in PowerPoint cadence. Either that or it’s just porn and broski ‘alpha’ males puffing on cigars (though with the increasing rise in AI-generated slop, we should probably count ourselves lucky to encounter human-made content at all).
The cultural mainstream now is all just performance and desperation.
When did we become so vapid?
I’m showing my age now, but there was a time when the internet offered so much more. Before ‘platforms’, monetisation schemes, and the dopamine arms race of algorithmic feeds, the web was messy and amateurish, but it was ours. You didn’t log on to be surveilled or sold to, you logged on to build and explore with your people. It was a digital commons comprised of forums, webrings, IRC chats, and personal blogs hand-coded in HTML.
But platforms built on engagement don’t reward thoughtfulness, they reward engagement. Content is now king, and content is everything; not substance, just content (the word itself is a giveaway, a vague catch-all that flattens everything), slurry being pumped into a pipeline by people desperate for their piece of the profit-driven content machine. The only real metric is attention, and the only way to get it is to perform ever more grotesquely for the machine—we are all trapped in a hall of mirrors, watching ourselves watch ourselves.
We’ve built a culture that is fundamentally allergic to reflection. We’ve allowed the algorithms to train us to want what they can supply, that being immediacy and spectacle. If it can’t be skimmed in seven seconds, most consumers won’t give it their time. If it can’t be monetised or turned into clout, creators won’t consider it worth doing.
I’m not romanticising the past, and every era has had its distractions and vulgarities. But the particular flavour of our present vapidity is different because it is systemic, and worse, it’s engineered. The attention economy is not just built to waste your time, it’s built to erode your capacity to know it’s being wasted. A life spent endlessly consuming low-effort sludge is a form of soft imprisonment. We think we’re just choosing to be entertained, to tune out, when in truth we’re being trained to be numbed.
It all dovetails with neoliberal values: individualism dressed up as empowerment, self-optimisation as morality, and of course, visibility as success. The gig economy merges with the influencer economy, and we’re all supposed to hustle our way into relevance, curating ourselves like brands and performing our personalities until we forget we ever had unrecorded thoughts.
Sometimes it feels as though certain romantic relationships exist solely for the sake of content creation, love that cannot survive without the accompanying captions. Then there are the home economics ‘gurus’—frankly, I have no interest in your recipe for the perfect lemonade to serve at a summer garden party, but it does trouble me to see someone devote their life’s work—however profitable—to producing vapid ‘lifestyle’ advice devoid of substance or public good. Dear influencers: You’re not enriching lives, you’re feeding the problem, helping to keep people transfixed by their screens, squandering your own time and energy to churn out empty content so that Meta’s share price can edge a little higher, built, ironically, on work you gave them for pennies on the dollar.
So, when did we become so vapid? Somewhere between Web 2.0 and whatever godforsaken phase we’re in now, we were nudged, gently, towards an ecosystem designed to reward noise over nuance, and now we’re drowning in a culture that seems increasingly incapable of saying anything without it being flattened into a meme.
Of course, we can log off, and many are, but many others are hooked, and the damage is psychic, lingering in how people think and create.
I don’t have a solution, but the further down this path we go, the less substantive our culture will become. Meanwhile, many will choose to remain in the shallow pool of self-reference, clicking, scrolling, watching other people pretend to live.