Why Did Culture Stop Evolving? (2025=2015 But 1995≠1985)

Are we stuck in cultural quicksand? In this Based Camp episode, Simone and Malcolm Collins explore whether the internet, streaming, algorithms, and AI have collapsed cultural time — making it impossible for new culture to gain traction or evolve.

From the ball pit/avalanche metaphor to living in “the Archive,” they discuss why 1986–1996 felt like different worlds while 2005–2026 barely registers. They dive into Gen Z’s nostalgia-fueled listening habits, the death of linear cultural progress, and surprising pockets where culture is still advancing: anime, Korean webtoons (manhwa), reality fabricators/AI storytelling, VTubers, Roblox as the new Harajuku, SCP Foundation lore, Bronies, dead mall videos, and liminal spaces.

They debate subcultures in the digital age, the role of constrained communities vs. the chaotic global feed, culture hyperinflation from AI, and whether new cultures are dead — or just unrecognizable. Plus: family culture as a refuge, why old cartoons beat modern kids’ shows, and optimistic takes on building traction in walled gardens.

If you’re into pronatalism, cultural evolution, technology’s impact on creativity, or just wondering why everything feels like a remix, this one’s for you.

Episode Notes

* What if we’ve entered an age in which culture can no longer advance and we don’t even know it?

* We’ve already talked about how there’s only ‘one story left’—basically discourse about global politics, technology, and economics—because entertainment media is so fragmented and desynchronized that most shows, movies, and books can’t manage to enter the zeitgeist

* But it may also be the case that the way the internet has collapsed time, from a cultural perspective, has rendered society incapable of advancing culture, because new developments lack the ability to gain traction

* I started thinking about this when we did an episode on “The Modern Audience” and Malcolm found in his research that many of the people writing modern movies and shows primarily consume archival shows and movies, not new ones.

* Our kids are largely growing up watching cartoons and shows from the 1990s.

* We’re seeing an explosion of prequels and sequels rather than new unique properties

Will All Future Generations Grow Up in The Archive?

Choice quotes from Sam Buntz’s post on Katherine Dee’s Default.Blog, Gen Z Lives in the Archive:

* According to a 2019 article from Billboard, Shannon Cook, a trends expert at Spotify, said that Gen Z’s listening habits on Spotify were unusually broad and tended to delve deeply into the past. Tracks by Miles Davis (“Blue in Green”), The Grateful Dead (“Friend of the Devil”), and Joan Jett (“I Love Rock n’ Roll”) were all among Gen Z’s most listened to tracks at the time.

* Albeit, this article was from 2019—but the forces driving the trend, Tik Tok nostalgia and the buffet-like nature of streaming platforms, have only continued or accelerated their effects. The aforementioned 2025 article from Activaire argued that Spotify data showed Gen Z was connecting more with Gen X music on Spotify, beguiled by its apparent authenticity.

* Zoomers, you see, live inside the Archive.

* Perhaps it would be more accurate to say that they are imprisoned inside the Archive—a Borgesian labyrinth. Everything that has ever happened exists at their fingertips, assigned equal weight (or assigned whatever weight the fickle algorithm happens to be assigning on that particular day). This is also why they are a uniquely anxious generation, paralyzed by an inability to choose. They are confronted with too many options, unstuck in time.

* We think of time as being continuous, as involving one event following naturally, causally after a preceding event. But living within the digital archive disintegrates our basic, linear perception of time. Since every era is equally available, and all events are potentially happening at the same time, the chain of causality and influence breaks down completely. We think of musicians, artists, writers, and filmmakers as responding to those who came before them, generationally. For instance, Bob Dylan admired and initially imitated Woody Guthrie—but he also rebelled and created his own style, departing from Guthrie’s folksy populism and adding intensely personal and surrealistic touches. Changes in the arts always work this way. One generation responds to the previous generation. (Hemingway and Fitzgerald were reacting to Joseph Conrad, Edith Wharton, and Henry James, while Henry James was reacting to Hawthorne and Emerson, and so on and so forth.)

* Sometimes, I wonder if this will ultimately result in a state of cultural affairs in which fresh artistic creation stops entirely

Key Questions

Do we need a sense of a clear timeline in order to craft new culture?

From Sam Buntz: “In Plato’s dialogue, “Ion,” he describes how inspiration works: the first poet was inspired directly by the muse, like an iron filling attached to a lodestone. The subsequent generations of poets are like iron fillings attached to that first filling. The force of inspiration is still present, but it is exerted indirectly and weakens with every generation. Thus, the influence of the original impetus wanes until, presumably, we culturally reset and reconnect to the magnetic source directly. Gen Z finds itself in a state in which the fillings have all been scattered on the ground, perhaps experiencing some ambient attraction from the lodestone, but unable to really connect with it.”

Does “culture hyperinflation” prevent new culture from being innovated?

Sam Buntz quotes Cormac McCarthy in an interview saying: “I don’t know what of our culture is going to survive, or if we survive. If you look at the Greek plays, they’re really good. And there’s just a handful of them. Well, how good would they be if there were 2,500 of them? But that’s the future looking back at us. Anything you can think of, there’s going to be millions of them. Just the sheer number of things will devalue them. I don’t care whether it’s art, literature, poetry or drama, whatever. The sheer volume of it will wash it out. I mean, if you had thousands of Greek plays to read, would they be that good? I don’t think so.”

What would have to happen in order to enable more cultural progress?

* Luddite communities?

* Sudden loss of data?

* Sam Buntz wrote: “Poets have sometimes fantasized about total cultural destruction—something like the burning of the Library of Alexandria—to escape the sense that everything has already been done, has already been written. I wouldn’t go that far, since everything I love is part of the past. Maybe some brave artist can find a route back to the Original Magnet—a route that would presumably lie through the great works of the past, since the past is where we all start to feel magnetism acting on us. In any case, something needs to give. The links of the chain need to re-connect.”

Episode Transcript

Malcolm Collins: [00:00:00] So how different was 1986 from 1996, culturally speak?

Simone Collins: Right.

Malcolm Collins: It was two different worlds. .

Speaker 8: to the.

Oh my God.

Malcolm Collins: But if you go from where we are today to 2005

Simone Collins: mm-hmm.

Malcolm Collins: I mean, it’s different, but

Simone Collins: not really. Yeah. There’s, there’s not, there’s not that much different.

Would you like to know more?

Simone Collins: Hello Malcolm. I’m excited to be speaking with you today because I’m trying to wrap my head around something and I need someone to talk with about this.

And I, I, what’s getting on my mind so much and I. Can’t work it out is what if we’ve entered an age in which culture can no longer advance and we don’t even know it. And I’m referring kind of to what we talked about in a [00:01:00] podcast before where we talked about there being only one story left that basically discourse about global politics and technology and the economy is the only thing that everyone can really talk about collectively anymore because entertainment media is so fragmented , and desynchronized.

And that not everyone’s really watching the same show or movie or reading the same books at the same time like they used to anymore. But I feel like beyond that, beyond that last show left issue that we discussed, there’s this, it, it could be the case that the internet has really collapsed time from a cultural perspective, which has rendered society completely incapable of advancing culture because new developments lack the ability to gain traction.

Kind of like. Y you, you can, you can walk up stairs, you know, and progress onward and upward by pressing on the step, you know, that you’re standing on and moving up to the next step. But I feel like now we’ve gone from being on [00:02:00] stairs to being like in a ball pit. You know, you put a, a foot down and it just pushes through balls, you know, like a giant ball pit and we can’t, or really

Malcolm Collins: light snow.

Simone Collins: Yeah. Or really, yeah. Like, like in an avalanche. Yeah. And we’re just, we’re just buried in the very like light packed snow of an avalanche and we’re not able to move. And I, I really started thinking, so I think that you

Malcolm Collins: make an interesting point here and I wanna pull on it a little bit.

Simone Collins: Okay.

Malcolm Collins: Which is to say that if we look at the culture of today

Simone Collins: mm-hmm.

Malcolm Collins: Versus the culture of. The, what is it, 2025 now? 2015?

Simone Collins: It’s 2026.

Malcolm Collins: 2026, okay. Yeah. So how different was 1986 from 1996, culturally speak?

Simone Collins: Right.

Malcolm Collins: It was two different worlds.

Simone Collins: Yeah.

Malcolm Collins: And then if you go from you know, 1996 and then say, let’s go one decade back from that 1976, we’re in a different cultural universe at that point.

Totally. But if you go from where we are today to [00:03:00] 2005

Simone Collins: mm-hmm.

Malcolm Collins: I mean, it’s different, but it is less different than 1996 to 1986.

Simone Collins: Yeah. Not really. Yeah. There’s, there’s not, there’s not that much different.

Malcolm Collins: And I don’t think kids today, like our younger audience, is going to really grasp how extreme this would’ve felt historically speaking.

Yeah. How ho hor horrifically long ago. Let’s do that. The 1970 show. How, how far back in time would we be doing the 1970 show was made today

Simone Collins: that seventies show, is that what you’re referring to? Yeah. Oh yeah. That was, wasn’t that made like, what, 15 years ago now? What

Speaker: So the show. Premiered about 22 years and three months after it was set. And you need to understand when this show came out, this didn’t feel like the last generation, this felt like three or four generations ago in [00:04:00] terms of trends, , I remember growing up and the, that seventies show came out when I was a teenager.

And it felt like, uh, I remember talking about the trends of the hippies and stuff like that when I was a kid as something so distantly in the past. I could barely imagine it. and, and now, that 70 show aired more than, so it came out 22 years after it was set. It came out over 27 years ago. So much longer ago than it came out..

Simone Collins: Yeah. Very

Malcolm Collins: new continue.

Simone Collins: Right? I mean, so I, I first started thinking about this when, when you mentioned in our episode on the modern audience, like the modern audience, that people making content for, like shows and movies for the modern audience were really primarily watching shows from their childhoods or from the nineties.

And I was thinking about it also because every weekend when you have our kids watching [00:05:00] cartoons. They’re cartoons from our childhood or even from before our childhood, like from the eighties, which is bizarre. So Simon,

Malcolm Collins: Is, is talking about something and I think it’s important to extract here. I occasionally will try to do like a deep dive into the social media history of somebody who I just like politically do not get, like they’re politically totally different from me.

I’m like, what are they engaging with? What are they? And there was this one like super woke person mm-hmm. And I was trying to understand what shows do super woke people watch. Mm-hmm. And what I realized is they watch no modern audience content. They watch no modern content at all. They are too afraid of something new, triggering them emotionally.

So they only watch content from their childhoods.

Simone Collins: The content that existed before trigger warnings, ironically and weirdly.

Malcolm Collins: Yeah,

Simone Collins: it is full of sexual harassment. And

Malcolm Collins: this is the people who are so triggered by this stuff are too afraid in a new context. Right? They’re like, oh, what if I get some corporate [00:06:00] messaging from Disney or something?

Right? So they don’t, they don’t go out and try new things. Mm-hmm. But what’s interesting is we do the thing to an extent I, for my kids I don’t play really any modern shows. I did for a while. Like we had subscriptions to like Paramount and we tried to watch some of the modern stuff with them.

But honestly, I feel like they enjoy it more and they get better values from old school Power Ranger reruns and Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtle reruns.

Simone Collins: Well now they’re all, they’re all GI Joe.

Malcolm Collins: GI Joe. Right. And GI Joe is cool. You know, they actually go out and shoot people with lasers and the United States is amazing.

And the, the there’s one episode I didn’t realize, like how real it was. There’s one episode where they, it takes place in like a stripper bar, I guess. Like a, like a, a, a sexy dance bar. Right.

Simone Collins: Okay.

Malcolm Collins: Clearly the intent. And the Cobra has all of her albums and is a big fan of hers, but she’s secretly helping the GI Joes and hiding them in her dresser room when the, you know, Cobra Commandos come in.

And it [00:07:00] very much felt like, like, like a, a James Bondy sort of a film or something like that. Like I was outside impressed. I think they do a good job of grabbing the kids. Oh. But I tried to show them you know, more recent stuff and they just find it boring.

Simone Collins: Yeah. Well, I find more recent stuff boring too.

But so there’s that, right? The fact that like we are raising our kids on archival content and that we’re also now like we’re the, just the stagnation. I feel like we’re seeing now we’re, we’re like stuck in these weird loops that we’re just seeing all these prequels and sequels and while there’s some new content, I’m not really seeing it get traction.

And it also just feels highly iterative on its own. Like, I mean, I. Obviously got on the Bridgeton bandwagon recently because I love stupid historical romances, but that’s historical romance. Like it’s, there’s nothing new or interesting about it. And that genre has been around for an extremely long time.

So again, that’s not like new culture creation. It’s just like,

Malcolm Collins: here’s where I’m gonna push back on you. This [00:08:00] isn’t happening everywhere. In some industries we have seen culture continue to advance at around the same rate as it did historically,

Simone Collins: where

Malcolm Collins: a great example is anime. If you watch an anime today versus a 2005 anime, you will immediately be able to clock.

This is a 2005 anime.

Simone Collins: Okay, you know what, that’s a really good. Point

Malcolm Collins: culture, and then if you go to a 1990s anime

Simone Collins: Oh my gosh. Yeah. A

Malcolm Collins: completely different universe again, right? Like mm-hmm. And this isn’t just in terms of the animation style. Mm-hmm. This is in terms of culture and ing and I mean, even the idea of like an isi is a modern concept, right?

Like this is a concept that was like invented and gained popularity in like the last 15 years, right? Yeah.

Simone Collins: Very new. Yeah.

Malcolm Collins: And that’s an entire genre. Mm-hmm. That is, that is large other genres are trapped in a video game. Trapped in a video game is something that the west has done, but not really in the way that these sort of [00:09:00] online trends are with, with, with anime.

And then you can go to other areas like the, one of my favorite forms of these days, I mean, one of my two is obviously reality fabricator and like AI interactive stories. That’s a completely new form of content. Yeah. It didn’t exist. And then the other is Korean Romance Maass. About maga, about the well, no, no, they’re called Ma

Simone Collins: Maass Maass.

Malcolm Collins: Yes, it means I don’t know, but it, it stands for something. But that’s when there are an online strip that’s meant to be read as a long vertical strip.

Simone Collins: Oh.

Malcolm Collins: Because they’re really designed for phone screens.

Simone Collins: Mm-hmm.

Malcolm Collins: And these, these, the, the setting has like, an element of historicity to it.

Right. Like obviously it’s always like, duke es always somebody reborn. Is somebody, somebody from

Simone Collins: Yeah. And they’re like vaguely European typically, but they’re, they’re not based in like this region.

Malcolm Collins: Which is funny. I love reading about medieval European fantasies in a culture that is trying to be you know, [00:10:00] we, I should paint medieval Europe in a romanticized light. And I get that from my Korean online mangas. You know, but, but, but that’s, that’s new. So we are seeing some iteration, but it, it was in very narrow niches that I think actually build on your starting concept here, which

Simone Collins: is, yeah, that you have to have a point of traction.

Or you can’t move forward. You have to have like a blockchain or a, a chronological ruler that you can move along and understand where you are on the timeline in order to be able to push yourself forward. And if there is no foundation you, you cannot move forward. And this, this really solidified when I read this guest post on Catherine d.

Friend of the podcast’s default blog, which I highly recommend. Default blog. It’s on Substack. This guest post by Sam Buns was called Gen Z lives the archive. And this is really where I got this like, oh wow. Okay. So when, [00:11:00] when history collapses in on itself and when you live unmoored from time, it’s very hard to progress.

So I’m gonna read a couple choice quotes from it ‘cause I think it can help us kind of work through this idea and understand. Basically regions in which culture can’t advance or like culture crafting and creation will be unable to get a foothold. Versus regions like what you just pointed out with like anime and manga where there it can still sustain life.

It can still sustain. ‘cause the community, it’s almost like, you know, pretty

Malcolm Collins: narrow enough that you’re able to get a dense enough cultural lattice.

Simone Collins: Yeah, yeah.

Malcolm Collins: To take the next step.

Simone Collins: Yeah. Or, or, you know, just by default like that is the natural environment. Right. And maybe what we’ve, we’ve created through these online environments where there’s sort of, everything is available all at once is, you know how like in nature there’s those weird carbon monoxide pools in like there might be an indentation in the land and there’s some kind of like, offgassing from a [00:12:00] volcanic rift or something so that there’s just a bunch of carbon monoxide in a little like valley.

Or, or dent in, in the land and, and animals wander in there and just die because they don’t realize that they’re not breathing any oxygen. You know what I’m talking about?

Malcolm Collins: Yes.

Simone Collins: Yeah. So I feel like that’s, that’s kind of what this is too, is like people are wandering into it and not realizing that when they go in it just, everything kind of just no more life can be sustained.

But anyway. Some, some quotes from Sam Buns in Gen Z lives in the archive. According to a 2019 article from Billboard, Shannon Cook, a trends expert at Spotify, said that Gen Z’s listening habits on Spotify were unusually broad intended to delve deeply into the past tracks by miles Davis blew in green the Grateful dead friend of the Devil and Joan Jett.

I love rock and roll. Were among Gen. Z’s most listened to tracks at the time, albeit this article was from 2019, but the forces driving the trend, TikTok nostalgia, and the buffet like nature of streaming platforms, have only continued or [00:13:00] accelerated their effects. The aforementioned 2025 article from Active Air argued that Spotify data showed Gen Z was connecting more to Gen X music on Spotify.

Beguiled by its apparent authenticity, zoomers, you see live inside the archive. Perhaps it would be more accurate to say they are imprisoned inside the archive A board. Bium La Labyrinth, everything that has ever happened exists at their fingertips. Assign equal weight or assign whatever weight the fickle algorithm happens to be assigning on that particular day.

This is also why they have a uniquely anxious generation paralyzed by the inability to choose. They’re confronted with too many options unstuck in time. And I think that that’s really interesting. And we’ve never really existed in this period of history where an entire generation doesn’t really have this.

Like, here’s where we are. It’s more like they’re experiencing the 1960s, they’re experiencing the 1970s, they’re experiencing the 1950s, like wherever they [00:14:00] choose to have an affiliation. Well, I

Malcolm Collins: think in part because you’re not sure what today is ai, right? So they’re like,

Simone Collins: that’s also true. Yeah.

Malcolm Collins: This is how I know I’m consuming human made content.

Simone Collins: Oh, that, yeah, that reference to authenticity. Like that they liked Gen X stuff because they knew it was like real. And now who knows what’s real. Yeah, I guess that’s an additional layer that makes culture crafting really difficult now is like, you don’t even know what’s legit now. That’s a really good point too.

Malcolm Collins: Well, I I also think that the when I was growing up, I remember a lot of people were pulled to really historic stuff because it was like a flex over other kids. It was

Simone Collins: like, oh yeah, it was, wait, it was a way to look cool. But now I think it’s, it’s different. It’s more like, well this is just showing up on Spotify.

It’s like just in your feed.

Malcolm Collins: Yeah. Actually this is an interesting idea. Can we, can we capture, this was like the prenatal list movement. Can we be like, let’s, let’s recreate like the nineties, right? That I’d love to recreate the nineties. The nineties were pretty fun.

Simone Collins: How there’s like Disney towns and maybe we can just create a nineties town [00:15:00] with that.

Malcolm Collins: What everybody’s like, I wanna go back to the 19. I’m like, who wants to be in the 1950s? The 1990s were so much cooler. They like Godot God style stuff, you know, for kids and everything. Why?

Simone Collins: What was that show that had like the nineties character that was like on a skateboard?

Speaker 3: Uya erased my country too. The most outta control radical place the world had ever seen. Slam Zone. Your country was called Slam Zone. The United Republic of Slam Zone. In titles, totality, ah. The only thing that still makes sense to me is a nice ice cold Capri sun.

Speaker 4: I’m not really in the mood for a Capri Sun. Here you go. Drink up.

Speaker 3: Sorry, friend. But do you know what I do know? What’s that? I know another ice cold.

Capri sun would really hit the spot. I don’t want

Speaker 4: another one. I don’t want the first one. You gotta

Speaker 3: hydrate yourself. Drink up.

Malcolm Collins: Oh, oh gosh. Yes. I love that.

That was Detective Heart of America. And you’re thinking of slam Zone, the zone, the entire [00:16:00] world that was stuck in the nineties.

Speaker 2: Coming at you. Capri Sun by the pitcher. So whenever you want, you can make as much as you want. All natural Capri Sun drink mix.

Simone Collins: Yeah. Yeah. You, you just wanna create Slam Zone

Malcolm Collins: and I, I do, I wanna create Slam Zone. That’s what we should do. That is what prenatal, well, super high tech Slam Zone. What everyone thought nineties mad scientist was.

Right. You

Simone Collins: know? Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Okay. Hmm. Things to think about there. Let, let me give you another quote that might, might elicit some thoughts again, from Sam Buns, we think of time as being continuous, as involving one event following , causally after a proceeding event. But living within the digital archive disintegrates our basic linear perception of time.

Since every era is equally available and all events are potentially happening at the same time, the chain of causality and influence breaks down completely. When you think of musicians, artists, [00:17:00] writers, and filmmakers as responding to those who came before them generationally. For instance, Bob Dylan admired and initially imitated Woody Guthrie, but he also rebelled and created his own style departing from Guthrie’s, folksy pop populism, and adding intensely personal and surrealistic touches.

Changes in the arts always work this way. One generation responds to the previous generation, Hemingway and Fitzgerald were reaching to Joseph Conrad, Edith Wharton, and Henry James.

While Henry James was reacting to Hawthorne and Emerson and so on and so forth. Sometimes I wonder if this will ultimately result in a state of cultural affairs in which fresh artistic creation stops entirely. And I think that’s a really good point. I mean, so many of the artistic journeys that I’m aware of from like the, the Beatles and the Beach Boys to Authors that I really liked were.

Definitely riffing on like the people right before them. And I don’t see why this shouldn’t be possible for people to take inspiration from people at any point in [00:18:00] history, but I do wonder if, if it makes traction impossible to gain. You know, like there’s, there’s no, like, how can you catch on too? And how can you be influential if everyone’s listening to someone slightly different?

You know what I mean? There’s no critical mass.

Malcolm Collins: Yeah.

Simone Collins: I still think that people are able to build on other people regardless of when they existed in history. Like you don’t have to build on someone who existed, just, you know, who works 10 years before you did.

Or who is, is, is con creating content at the same time that you are. But I also feel like part of the issue is that people aren’t going to be able to get the traction or critical mass that they need. Like one of the reasons why Hemingway got big was because a lot of people started reading his work and talking about him at the same time.

And how are new people going to be able to contribute to the cultural blockchain to, to become icons? Culturally speaking, when [00:19:00] there isn’t a critical mass of people all kind of forced or, or a, a captive audience like, oh, how can I put this? Linear time creates a captive audience because everyone is just at the whims of whatever is available at the time, right?

Mm-hmm. Whatever the newest book or movie or radio show or TV show might be, right, but now everything is available at once. There isn’t a sufficiently large captive audience looking for something novel. To be able to be talking about you at once, to be able to then build upon what you have contributed to human culture on the whole.

Does that make sense? Like I, I worry that there won’t be enough traction.

Malcolm Collins: Mm. I can understand what you’re saying. But it’s not that we don’t get figures like say an asma gold who build a sizable following and represent a new cultural force.

Simone Collins: I don’t, does he, I think he just represents kind of the views of.

Your average based American, [00:20:00]

Malcolm Collins: I am gonna push back here. I think the new right is significantly politically different from the old, right. To an extent that really is meaningful. And you can watch our episodes on like the anthropology of the new writer or something more about this, to call it a completely new cultural movement or rather the, the, the reclamation of an older cultural movement in the United States over the the old rights former dominance.

And it is like, if you watch a figure like ESMA Gold, ‘cause I have, you know, reporters I talk to, you know, I’ve gotta send them like Asma Gold n who I’m like, this is, this is what’s in the right, right now. Right? Somebody like Nur the way he talks that he’s a v tuber, the way he acts that he comes off is entirely new, right?

Like, this is not, especially for a right wing space, you know, the flamboyant dress, the, you know, even, even us, you know, this is,

Simone Collins: I don’t know, right Wing am Radio shock Jocks had stylistic ways of talking and commented on what was happening in real time. The format is different. Like the tech is [00:21:00] novel.

Malcolm Collins: No, no, no. The delivery is novel. I don’t think that they, I I hear there is similarities between nug zor and the classic am shock jock that I hadn’t considered. They do have a lot of similarities to them now that you put it that way. Because I used to listen to conservative am shock jocks when I was a kid because my parents did.

Oh. Which is funny. Is that what we’ve become conservative radio shock jocks of our generation.

Simone Collins: It’s filling the same kind of void. It’s the thing that people are having playing in the background of their lives as they go about doing things. Yeah.

Malcolm Collins: Yeah.

Simone Collins: We’re people listen to their AM radio shop jock while they like drove to work or were doing laundry, or we’re doing, you know, drudge work at, at the, at the workplace.

Malcolm Collins: Yeah. More broadly the culture of the new right, I do think is, is meaningfully new. And I do think that you get meaningful new cultures bubbling up, but they emerge in places and within things that we do not recognize as culture because we are so queued to old scenes. So if you look at cultural shifts that [00:22:00] happened in the eighties and in the nineties and in the seventies, what drove the cultural shift was predominantly subcultures, whether it was hippie or grunge or goth or anything like that.

Right.

Simone Collins: Okay.

Malcolm Collins: The reason why you don’t get new subcultures being born today is because when they are born, they do not look like that. The old subcultures that you saw in those periods were born from young people who were accumulating in locations and in scenes that were often counterculture, that had unique ways of presenting yourself and unique identities you were trying to get across.

Mm-hmm. And in a modern context what environments have done that? It’s been games, it’s been you know, let’s say Minecraft in fact, Minecraft is probably larger as a scene, as a place. I’m not talking about as a video game, I’m talking about as a social scene.

[00:23:00]

Simone Collins: So are you saying like Roblox is the new Harajuku.

Malcolm Collins: Yes, like Roblox is the new Harajuku. And within communities like Roblox, you have subcultures that are meaningful and that cycle over the lifetime of one of these, you know, products or environments. Mm-hmm. And it’s not just there. You also see this in the streamers, in the vtu space, everything like that.

This is new. V tubers are new. Especially conservative.

Simone Collins: Yeah. They’re,

Malcolm Collins: yeah. And yet huge, huge and hugely influential as well. And was in, you know, from. The aughts to [00:24:00] now, you know, you had the the Death of Fortune during that period. I love when younger people are like, so like, oh, you guys seem like boomers talking about, you were talking about like the death of Fortune.

And I was like, bro, you either, either you are my age or you weren’t alive at the height of four chan. Right. Like that this is when I, when I was young was when that was big. I don’t know what,

Simone Collins: yeah, like Jeffrey Epstein was influential in Fortune. He old. Was right?

Malcolm Collins: Yeah. Yeah. That is he’s old.

So, but that culture was really important for like generative online culture for a period it generated big scenes, consider the Brownies, right?

Like that was a fad that grew and got big and had a giant culture around it and then died.

Simone Collins: That’s true.

Malcolm Collins: You know, is true.

Simone Collins: Yeah.

Malcolm Collins: And, and the brownies were, I would say, significantly more culturally distinct than and likely in [00:25:00] terms of total identified people than goth culture ever was, than punk culture ever was potentially even than hidden culture was.

Simone Collins: No, I totally disagree. I mean, there, there weren’t like you, you couldn’t find in any random small town. A Brony clothing store where you could find like the hippie store. You could find the goth store. You know what I mean? Well, it

Malcolm Collins: might be because that wasn’t how they purchased their differentiators.

It’s through clothing stores.

Simone Collins: Yeah.

Malcolm Collins: I, I don’t know. I mean, I think I, I’m trying to actually think through this. In, in well, I think the reason why the Brony movement got so much larger than those other movements is because it didn’t require that people who were in it publicly identify as members.

Right. I mean, some of the more extreme ones did, but, but the vast majority did not. Outside of like online avatars and stuff like that. Yeah. So that was, you know, interesting.

Simone Collins: Well, what you’re describing [00:26:00] is, is when you have a small enough community where there can be. History and people building on each other.

Then you, you can have culture creation and, and this innovation. What you’re describing though, in all of these instances is, is constrained communities where this is able to happen.

Malcolm Collins: Well, and I think that this makes a lot of sense. What allowed for the Brony culture to be born in the first place?

Mm-hmm. By the way, one of my favorite videos that we made is, is how far right? My, the, my Little Pony show actually was. Yeah. And you haven’t seen that episode. It’s hilarious. ‘cause it’s like actually true. It’s super, they have like literal anti-communist episodes where the communist sign is the same sign that they used today, the Blue equal mark for like, LGBT groups and stuff like that.

Speaker: You can have a nightmare if you never dream.

Speaker 2: I’m sorry, I’m just having a hard time understanding. Different talents lead to different [00:27:00] opinions, which lead to bitterness and misery.

Malcolm Collins: Like it was, it’s wild how it, it’s a literal. Show argues that you shouldn’t be racist theocracy when people take jobs in accordance with the racial proficiencies. Yeah. Like it’s, it’s, it is wild. Anyway.

Simone Collins: Yeah, watch

Malcolm Collins: that episode. Hold, hold on. What I wanted to make clear is what allowed the birth culture in the first place was that you had a rigid enough culture within four chan at the time, which is where the Bernie culture was born, that you could be radically sive by saying, you know what, no, I’m gonna be 100% wholesome and about little kids and about traditional ideas of goodness.

Mm-hmm. Which was really subversive to four chan culture of that period.

Simone Collins: Mm-hmm.

Malcolm Collins: Right. And so you were able to create something that was. Antagonistic to that, which was huge with an online culture. The core online culture at the time was troll and angry and mean [00:28:00] and pessimistic, and it was what if we create an inversion of this?

But you don’t always need that to create new subcultures. A great and modern example of a subculture that produces a lot of content that I very much enjoy is the SCP community. Are you familiar?

Simone Collins: What is that? No.

Malcolm Collins: Okay. Now that I’m describing it from scratch, it might be a little bit harder to describe than I thought.

So it is a shared. Community of storytellers Okay. Have crafted a very detailed lore around a universe in which something called the SCP exists. What is their SCP is an organization that captures stores supernatural events and beings. Think of it like a men in black, but for the supernatural.

Okay. And they have like a very detailed [00:29:00] Wikipedia, very large communities they create. And what’s interesting about it is it’s like there’s canon within the SEP world. There’s like ways that things get voted into being canonically. An SCP. Creature. So examples of SEP creatures you may have seen because you’ve likely seen a lot of it and not know it.

I’m pretty sure Slender Man started as an SEP phenomenon. What another one that was much more clearly in the SEP community was, have you seen that giant figure that has sirens on his head?

Simone Collins: Yeah.

Malcolm Collins: And it’s very late siren head. Mm-hmm. That siren head. Yeah. That’s an example of an SAP. So there’s, there’s a, actually just look up, SS are, it’s a cool community ‘cause I like lore.

And so I love looking up like long breakdowns of like lores that people have created around. And I love scary stories. When I go on long flights, I’ll download scary stories to listen to. And a lot of that,

Simone Collins: yeah. The SEP Foundation community is a massive collaborative internet based creative writing product project dedicated to producing [00:30:00] horror and sci-fi stories about containing anomalous entities.

Originating from a 2007 four chan post. A community operates as a user-driven, wiki based universe where members write, critique and vote on stories called files or tales, building a shared decentralized lore. That is fascinating.

Malcolm Collins: Right? That sounds cool. Like you read that, like that sounds cool.

Simone Collins: Well, but again, this is, and, and, but that, that’s one of those things where like there is, it’s constrained.

They have a process, there is a wiki, there are votes. And that’s one of my key questions is do we need a sense of a clear timeline in order to craft a new culture? And I’ll give you another quote from Sam Bun to kick off this. Like, is this a firm thing? He wrote in Plato’s dialogue Ion He Write, he describes how inspiration works.

The first poet was inspired directly by the muse with an iron filling attached to a load stone. The subsequent generations of poets are [00:31:00] like iron fillings attached to that first filling. The force of inspiration is still present, but it is exerted, indirectly and weakens with every generation. Thus, the influence of the original impetus wanes until presumably we culturally reset and reconnect to the magnetic source.

Directly, gen Z finds itself in a state where, in which all the fillings have been scattered on the ground, perhaps experiencing some ambient attraction from the load stone, but unable to really connect with it. I liked his metaphor there. But like, like the sort of the wiki’s been lost. You just hear about siren head.

You just hear about these things, but you can’t really build upon them because y you’re missing the fact that there actually was and, and is this, this, that like SEP exists and that there is this place where people, I think is if you want

Malcolm Collins: a subculture today, you can find a subculture to be a part. But they’re not as in your face as they were historically, because there’s not a reason to be in your face.

Why [00:32:00] dress differentially if you’re not even going to school because of COVID. Right. You know, like why if all your friends are online and that’s the cool place to be, why invest all of this money in these differential outfits and everything like that outside of how they make you appear on camera?

Right.

Simone Collins: Well, what I see actually, instead I, with young people, with really a lot of people, is people, get slotted into kind of like, a cart on, on a road where, you know, like the, the, the wheel holes get like worn down and you get slotted into it. They fall into these algorithmic holes and start dressing for their algorithmic ecosystem.

And so they have this, this subculture that they take on sometimes unknowingly because they, and perhaps many of their immediate, like, convenience friends, people they work with or go to school with or live with, have also fallen into this rut where then they start dressing this way. But what I’m starting to come away with here [00:33:00] too is this feeling like when it comes to culture.

If you are a feed-based person and if you passively consume media online, you will not be able to contribute to crafting culture or witness the development of culture. You are, you are basically in this chaotic world where all the fillings are on the ground or like you’re in the ball pit or you’re in the loose snow and, and there is no, there is no traction, there is no sense, there is no narrative, there is no progression.

But if you want to, you can choose to enter one of these closed spheres where there actually is development and generation taking place where there is the wiki and the lore and the development or like in the anime world where everyone is kind of watching the new show at the same time and getting inspired by it and then building upon it and building upon it.

And these new trends are coming at, new genres are emerging, or you are on YouTube and you are sort of evolving with the new way that people are, are [00:34:00] coming to. Consume news media and understand the world through this like network and, and broadly connected groupings of, of YouTube influencers and things like that, right?

But you have to be one or the other. Like if, if you’re, if you can either be an active consumer of media, online or passive consumer of media, and that will determine whether or not you are witnessing and contributing to culture creation. Does that seem like it makes sense.

Malcolm Collins: Active. Yeah. Well, I mean, I also think that it is possible for things to be more atomized.

So consider our wider cultural circle, which is this new right cultural circle, right? Mm-hmm. And I can look at the overlapping YouTubers we have and, and you know, these days we dress like medieval people, right? Like, we have a very distinct style of dress that people would say, I’m wearing a, a gammon vest and a, a medieval shirt, and you’re wearing, you know, full medieval gammon like head thing and everything.

They, that historically people [00:35:00] would’ve looked at us and assumed that we’re either part of a religious cult or part of some subculture that they’re not aware of. And yet, if you look at

where the other people, like the people who watch us, the other things that they’re watching mm-hmm. The other things that they’re watching, they don’t dress like us.

Like n taku looks like a completely different subculture than us. And Asma gold looks like another subculture still. Mm-hmm. And legally it looks like another and equally distinct subculture still. And, and that’s important there. It’s not that everyone in sort of our influencer social, oh, and Romanian v Tuber, the Romanian TV guy, right?

Troll guy. Again, another unique and distinct subculture, distinct from all of these other subcultures. Who’s one of the other ones that talks in our spaces? Goth, conservative guy, whatever his name is, again, completely distinct. Tim Pool, again, completely distinct, maybe somewhat similar. Toma Gold, but not really.

So with every one of these influencers you are seeing not like a well, we [00:36:00] are the weirdos. We, we are dressed no more weirdly than Nux or, or leaflet are dressed on their shows. No more weirdly than Romanian TV is dressed on his show, right? Like,

Simone Collins: well, they’re v tubers. So,

Malcolm Collins: they could choose a, there’s a lot of v tubers out there that choose more traditional models where I wouldn’t be saying this.

So there’s a V YouTuber. I don’t like him as much as the other ones, but he’s a dresses as like a little crusader guy who like bounces around a screen. And I wouldn’t be saying, he looks weird. I’d be saying, okay, he’s trying to be like trat in some way. But Leaflet wants to look like a goo girl, right?

Like, that’s pretty distinct in, and that’s one of her personas. And then she’s got the Nongo girl persona this like a little elf thing. And then Nno is a spectral Jew. I, I don’t know, he’s got a little

Simone Collins: spectral Jew,

Malcolm Collins: some sort of Jewish specter. Okay. That’s a, i, I don’t know if he’s supposed to be a specter, maybe a ghoul of some sort.

And Romanian TV is definitely a troll. Yeah, which is an interesting model for him to have chosen because it like goes [00:37:00] with his voice really well. Like I imagine a troll would have that sort of like very. Cynical and exasperated voice.

Simone Collins: I don’t know, but I love it.

Malcolm Collins: Yeah.

Simone Collins: I, I, I, I, yeah, don’t know exactly what you’re talking.

Should we do VT tubing

Malcolm Collins: instead, Simone? Is this, is this a problem that we’re not V tubers? Is that

Simone Collins: we look cartoonish enough? I think we’ve, you know, met the threshold. We don’t need additional avatars to look more cartoony. The glass help a lot, so I’m not too concerned about that.

Malcolm Collins: Well, and a lot of v YouTubers are people who are pretending to be much younger than they are, or who need to, you know, use sex appeal, which I’ve never we’re, I don’t think that we’re gonna be good at that.

Simone Collins: We’re not selling on sex appeal. What about culture hyperinflation? Because I do feel like people are so overwhelme