Even with smartphones up, stream speeds up, download speeds up, everything up all the time, Y2k is back. It's back in fashion, it's aesthetics are back, but in a context of totalizing digitization it resembles something more than the latest entry in the 20 year culture cycle. The gaps between history's reiterations are happening in shorter and shorter intervals, and the children of the Bush and Obama administrations get to pantomime the dead cultural landscape of those decades in the zombified terrain of democratic 'back-to-normal'/'America is already great' paradigms. Everything has become seamless and stultified, and one app's endless scrolls are replaced by the next. Time does nothing to alter, slow, or differentiate between endless, constant, accelerating information consumption. People are craving for things to break. A good machine breaks down. A good machine is not on all of the time. Some people's brains were molded to fit the ADHD logic of the algorithm. Some broke themselves into pieces, disassociating themselves from the thing disintegrating them. American's sociality, psychology, being have been shaped in a context wholly mediated by the internet. For most of us, there's no offline anymore. The only response to pain and powerlessness is to be more online. The cultural nostalgia for Y2k is part of the growing the reactionary need for to 'retvrn', to a before the internet, or to a moment where it could've broke, where it could've been over. It's part of the same compulsion that causes us to celebrate twitter 'dying.' We all want off. It's too much. The culture will continue turning back on itself, eating its tail, excrement and all, because there's no political program in sight, and only the spontaneous explosions of repressed desire to look forward to.

#nostalgiacore #kindercore #internetcore #2000sweb#coquette#2010s#2000s #weirdcore #liminal