Oliver Bateman Does the WorkVerified account

think of all the subcultural references dropped into the innumerable thinkpieces written by 90s and 00s "kids" and how those references are no longer even part of the monoculture. they're dead and gone; they mean to signify something but they're anchored to nothing but air

the effect of aging on these cohorts is that a vast swath of their lame thinking, MY lame thinking, is becoming obsolete or simply irrelevant at a faster rate than ever before. yet they're still being paid to speak to no one in a vernacular on life support

occasional nods to stuff like "here's what the kids are doing on youtube, here's a story about someone the REAL kids follow" is a fascinating sub-genre of this, since it singles that out as an exception to their norm, another kind of anthropological study

pop culture is of course something to be studied, since it represents the shifting winds of the mass culture at various moments of its constitution, but it is also always already a dead language, and one that, unlike all other languages, lacks commensurability