Digital Natives

Like a bad fever dream of the worst cultural artefacts from 3am trash TV, a sitcom punchline was elected to the United States presidency by a swooping horde of senile boomers in 2016. This basic action is nothing new. American presidents have always had more in common with old fashioned kings than prime ministers or popes, elected figureheads that emerge to symbolize the vibe of the times and the spirit of the nation, their body propped up by the million hands of the nation, in the manner of Melquíades the Exhumed Archbishop in Blasphemous, the corpse alive by the sustained puppeteering of the crowd who have their souls and destinies caught up in it.

Yet when this happened, should it not have been predicted? Beginning the year and the era, three movements took place, all towards the same end - the killing of Harambe, the disappearance of MH370, and the emergence of Vaporwave. The first and last of these strikes a chord in the long-running obsession of this era, nostalgia. The 1990s and early 00s appear to the generation today as a strange fever dream presented in “aesthetic” montages that bring back hazy memories of strange rituals in constructed spaces, media consumed and theme parks visited. The shibboleth of one of these was thus ruthlessly slaughtered like a sacred goat, and, as many others have pointed out, the chaos portal was opened. Trump was elected, Quantitative Easing known today as JPoww’s Money Printer, Jeffrey Epstein, Coronavirus. Like a great ritual constructed atop the hazy, doped-up remixes and remembrances of Vapor-mind, the past childhood destination of the zoo was brought forward into the consciousness and then violently brought into contact with reality, a folding-into-oneself like spacetime being bent to form a wormhole.

Unexplainable disappearances are nothing new. For as long as there has been enough of a paper trail to ponder over whenever someone decides to shuffle off the face of the Earth, disappearances have been pondered over that previously would have had a certain rumor attached to them as truth. Yet here the very symbol of this grid that forms the outlines of fascination goes missing, the plane slipping through the very grid it represents into absolute nothingness.

When the 20th century was in full force, it was always intoxicated with its own alienation from what was known. All the great builders saw what they did as xenogenous to themselves and the people they imposed on, dazzled by how different glass and steel and concrete were from the default of the previous era. The supposed decline of the 20th century, that spoken of by vaporwave was this, as it wore off. The frontier of technology as technology enveloped the world and with the millennials, the first generation was born where technology is to be taken so much for granted that it becomes the very known that all previous generations had been obsessed with as an image of the untouched to be pushed over by the new. There is no new for millennials, the first generation to live as generations before the industrial era did, in a world where the environment simply was with no expectations of being completely remade by the alien future. Vaporwave was their cry as they saw, a protest of how I see tech, as the concrete jungle, as the environment itself, as natural as the forest would have been to the medieval mind. It simply is.

Trump’s election was, like vaporwave, a cultural outcry of culture beginning to be separate from Modernism. Modernism, so plagued with its own newness and perpetual revolution, has died and its creations settle to become the taken for granted environment. The worldview of this is reflected in Vaporwave’s most direct descendent, Liminal Aesthetics, Backrooms content of empty schools (remember the tagline Music for Abandoned Malls?) and nostalgic dreams of scenes half remembered, parts of the city never seen with no function except their own existence… The liminal space need not justify itself, the same as the forest need not. The chord of Trump, of a celebrity of his stature arising to president, of the yellow backrooms that feel so much like home, is the chord of the generation to wake up after the 20th century’s perpetual revolution into the concrete jungle and experience it as just that - a jungle, the world, natural, as it is.