The Death of Yuppie-Capitalist Aesthetics
Platform capitalism has made our culture aesthetically incoherent. Could we at least have kept the 80's apartments with a telescope in them?
The towers represent a bygone era of late 20th century, yuppie capitalism.
The young, urban professionals of the Reagan-era just had such a great pastiche, far superior to the tech-bro, platform capitalists of today.
(Look at what we lost…)
The neon-and-chrome malls, Memphis design, VHS fuzz, and genre-bending pop culture of the 80s and 90s was critiqued at the time as being highly ironic and commodified.
Frederich Jameson argued in the late 90s that the aesthetic of capitalism was playing with signs detached from meaning. Think of shopping malls with mock-Roman columns.
However, at least the 80s offered a shared visual grammar at all… Today, the cultural aesthetic is so fragmented, broken up into micro-aesthetics, moodboards and subcultures, and controled by algorithmic churn on tech platforms.
I like to think the destruction of the World Trade Center in 2001 symbolized a shift in the economy - in which the most powerful locus of capitalism moved from wall street to silicon valley.
We went from the stockbroker to the tech-bro…
(Zuck jumpscare.)
Silicon Valley did a great job of co-opting the critiques of capitalism stemming from 1960s counterculture, which emphasized autonomy, creativity, and non-hierarchical organization.
This makes the exploitation less obvious. The techno-lords now wear plain tees and not Italian suits. They talk about decentralized platforms… neglecting to mention that the rent is due…
Today’s exploitation under capitalism is harder to identify because it’s disguised as freedom - freelance gigs, personal brands, and self-improvement - These all mask structures of control and extraction.
This also meant the shared aesthetic of capitalism died too. It went underground, but unlike the exploitation, it was dead and buried there.
Jameson further pointed out that capitalism removes us from any linear historical timeline and is instead a constant recycling of history. However, I believe this recycling has since become incoherent.
I think the 90s was the last decade where you could feel situated in a historical time.
You have probably thought before that, until the 00s, each decade had its own unique look and feel. For example, if you watch a movie from 2005, there is much less to give away what era it is from.
The importance of a society’s aesthetics is that is makes us look forwards to something. It allows us to imagine the future.
Today’s culture is fragmented and ironic. There are no cohesive aesthetic projects. Ergo, it has a kind of flatness to it. It is without color or depth.
And so, we also have nothing to look forwards to…
(A moodboard on Tumblr is the closest thing my generation has to a unified aesthetic grammar.)
A major contributing factor to today’s fragmented culture is algorithmic churn. Music, film and media has always suceeded on the basis of what makes money - but in today’s world of social media - we have the added motive of what brings engagement.
Engagement on social media prioritises immediacy, recognizability, and shareability over coherence or depth. Not to mention, there is much less concern for originality in short-form content. Creators happily copy the success of others in ways that would have meant a lawsuit in traditional media.
On the radio, the lifespan of a hit could be months. On social media, posts typically get engagment for a few weeks before petering out. The algorithm churns at a much higher rate than traditional media.
This speeding up of the cultural cycle can only add to the sense of disorientation and loss of historical consicousness. In the rapids of cultural acceleration, many cling to the microcultures they do recognize, fragmenting things even further.
There are people in the 20s who already feel out of touch, alienated from the cultural present, feeling too old to be with it.
(I used to be with it, but then they changed what it was. Now what I'm with isn't it, and what's it seems weird and scary to me, and it'll happen to you, too.)
For this reason, despite the yuppie aesthetic of the 80s being commodified, neutral in style, and cheaply immitating bygone history… at least it was some kind of unified, cultural expression.
Our nostalgia for a shared visual grammer is probably why large corporations, like Pepsi, Pizza Hut have revived their retro, corporate aesthetics. TikTok is also full of corporate glamorization and “old money aesthetic”.
This yearning for a unified aesthetic under capitalist is everywhere.