It’s not a new idea, but it is one I’ve been thinking about a lot lately. Then I read this Wall Street Journal article about how people are nostalgic for 2016 culture. That article sent me into a death spiral of pop-culture overthinking, leading me to conclude that people nostalgic for 2016 are nostalgic for the last moment when culture (the meta view of it, at least) still felt like it was progressing. It was still allowing itself to evolve in interesting new directions before that door mostly slammed shut.

No idea comes from thin air. Everything is inspired by something that came before it. But culture in all its many facets, whether you’re looking at film or TV or music or whatever, used to be better at being inspired by something and then spinning it off in a whole new creative direction. Over the past 10 years, it feels like we’ve just been recycling things one-for-one, exactly the way they used to be, because we can’t think of anything better.

Gen Z fashion is just the clothes I wore in middle school and early high school back in the early 2000s. There is almost no original twist on any of it. They just took the gigantic jeans and oversized shirts of my sophomore year of high school and gave them to a new generation, as if I had handed down my old wardrobe to a little sibling. It’s not Gen Z’s fault. If the fault lies with whichever influential fashion designer decided to turn the dials back to what they wore when they were young.

Why Nostalgia Is Everywhere Nowadays

I’ve heard too many pop songs that lazily sample tracks from that same era, with their producers making almost no attempt at subtly incorporating the sampled elements into a whole new track. It’s essentially the old song, altered just enough not be a cover but not enough to be considered a piece of art that anyone put any actual effort into creating. It feels hacky to point out that Hollywood isn’t even trying anymore, at least not at the studio level. Since Marvel became Hollywood’s dominant force, everyone is pillaging every intellectual property they can get their hands on, creating reboots and sequels and re-imaginings and prequels, because, as the logic goes, people just want things they are familiar with.

Is that true, though? Or is it that you’ve spent the past 20 years conditioning two and a half generations, that the only things worth making are things you already know exist? Why bother trying to make something original that challenges everything that came before it when you can just follow a pre-established template?

Nostalgia isn’t just a romantic feeling anymore. It’s a business model that nearly every industry seems to follow. It’s plainly obvious to see, though, that it doesn’t mean new, daring, interesting stuff isn’t happening at all. Plenty of strange, exciting, innovative things are being made right now and have been during this great stagnation. The problem is that they’re buried under a tidal wave of content slop churned out by disingenuous creators—from creatively bankrupt executives to small content-farm collectives—that has created a kind of creative inflation. Any new idea gets copied immediately, its edges sanded off, optimized for engagement, and mass-produced back to us, seemingly within seconds of the original’s breakthrough, threatening to kill the daring new thing soon after it was born.

Sadly, None of This is New

To be clear, this has always been the case. Modern technology has just sped up the process. Nirvana had been around for a while, slowly gaining steam in the up-and-coming grunge scene before exploding with 1991’s Nevermind. By 1997, Creed ruled the charts, becoming the kings of the post-grunge movement, which sanded off all of grunge’s edges to be more palatable for mainstream audiences. Grunge had about three years of explosive, powerful relevance before it started to get watered down into irrelevance. Now, Nirvana itself has been reduced to a trendy T-shirt, like the Rolling Stones before them.

It feels like that whole process takes about a year now.  

AI is the perfect symbol of this moment, and its logical (if depressing) endpoint. It doesn’t create; it remixes. It statistically predicts what should come next based on what already exists, which is exactly what culture has been doing to itself for years, but now it can cheapen originality in an instant. Real, genuine originality and creativity will never go away, no matter how good AI gets at copying it, but it is revealing how much of culture is just pattern recognition and copying. The machine can do it fast and without shame.

None of this is sustainable. A culture that only looks backward eventually collapses under the weight of its own references. Genuine innovation feels alien, even threatening, but thankfully, it isn’t extinct. You just can’t find it as easily. Yes, Hollywood is creatively destitute if you only pay attention to the big movie studios’ output. Every year, there are at least a dozen, if not several more, films of legitimate audaciousness and inventiveness that are taking inspiration from the past without stealing it whole cloth; they’re just not going to get the same marketing budgets as Avengers: Doomsday.

True creative breakthroughs are rare. They always have been. Most people aren’t visionaries. They’re followers, iterators, refiners who can sometimes still create great things even if they aren’t groundbreaking. That’s how culture works.

The problem is that the signal-to-noise ratio has never been more in favor of noise. The creative geniuses are out there; they’re just being buried under the operative term of the day: slop.

It might seem like nostalgia is all we’ve got left. It isn’t. It’s just easier to mine. If you want to find the good stuff, the original stuff, the stuff people actually put effort into, you’re going to have to put in a little more effort to find it.