Current commenteriat class is tired. They have nothing novel to say, just reheated tumblr vs 4chan 2014 stuff.
I think the interpersonal drama took a toll. All the streaming and podcasting and house parties, all strong personalities cultivating their own parasocial fan bases, all start together by the whims of dortune and forced to produce Content. Now everybody’s dug into their takes and their relationships. The average media consumer does not realize how much of their information environment is driven by the grudges of people who were doing blow together in Brooklyn 10 years ago!
There was an ongoing set of narratives which you could use as shorthand or sort of open source splat book content for your show. The social justice movement and the escalation of fascism and socialism; the technological boom of the internet and the backlash; mean girls vs bad boys; neoliberal austerity vs populist outrage. All the pop culture was about the apocalypse, the end of the world, the sudden break in the work out narratives that was steely about to hit us.
And we got it! Things changed in the pandemic, but the popular commentators haven’t toasted their narratives, and these things don’t map neatly to the oncoming future.
A realignment is coming, as the acceleration of technology creates a growing divide between those who grasp it and become superheroified, and those who refuse it and find their world becoming increasingly confusing and scary. The pace layers are irrupting, deterritorializing.
The division of the future is between upwing and downwing, acceleration and tradition, abundance and degrowth.
Those who can speak to this dissonance will gather momentum in the new era. Those who can only reiterate the tropes of the past will fall off