When I say that the 2010s were a decade of lost millennial creative labor, I am largely referring to a unique post-recession rebound starting around 2012 when a whole lot of corporations and venture capitalists were willing to spend money on internet content. ⊠And all the millennials that jumped over to digital media companies and social platforms ⊠spent a lot of time and energy making content that, 10 years on, basically doesnât exist anymore. And I mean this quite literally in the case of all the essays, short stories, magazine features, comics, and other written works have been lost to digital rot. But the stuff that you can still find, if you dig deep enough in an archive, has very little legacy, if any, because much of it was meant to game and algorithm or news cycle that no longer exists. âŠ
Why does everything feel so stale and so boring? I think the lost millennial decade has a lot to do with it. Making art, making culture, has always involved some sort of dark deal with the infernal machinery of capital, but the rise of big tech and venture capital in the early 2010s changed the terms of the deal. Culture stopped being something the consumer paid for and cultural industries became kindling for digital furnaces that only wanted to monetize our data anyways. An entire generation of young creatives were paid to dump terabytes of posts and videos in a black hole, trying to entertain users long enough to be surveilled and train AI.
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