when a market has low barriers to entry, undifferentiated goods, and perfect information, new entrants flood in and compete the margins down to zero. nobody has to be evil for this to happen, everyone just has to be allowed in and everyone has to be able to see what’s working. the race to the bottom is just what markets do once the conditions are met.
for most of cultural history, the conditions were not met since participating in a scene required some combination of geography, social access, years of skill, and any other number of factors. you couldn’t see what was working in real time because nobody was publishing the numbers. friction protected culture from market dynamics but we’ve spent two decades and a few trillion dollars sanding it off, enthusiastically, and called the sander the social internet.
every participant can now see exactly what’s winning with engagement counts attached, a public order book of community, which is the feed solving the information problem. generative tools solved the entry problem since the marginal cost of producing trend-conformant material is now approximately the cost of wanting to.
an economist looking at these conditions would predict one outcome and it’s the one we got. culture became a commodity market because we built the market infrastructure around it and then were surprised when market behavior showed up to use it.
at street level it goes like this: you used to have a route home that saved 11 minutes. your private genius, your one piece of earned local knowledge, discovered through years of being stuck on the main road and one desperate left turn. then waze found it. now there are 400 sedans idling through a residential street at 5:40pm and the shortcut is the traffic. nothing about the road changed, the asphalt is identical, but the shortcut got known and known was the only thing it couldn’t survive.
every trend dies this way now and those in quantitative finance call it alpha decay, a profitable strategy stops working the moment it’s known because everyone trades the edge away and the better a market gets at spotting edges, the faster the edges die. culture runs on that clock now where visibility is the murder weapon, the gap between discovery and death keeps shrinking, and you can watch the compression happen across a single lifetime. a subculture used to take a decade to strip-mine, then years, and the aesthetics cycling through the feed today last weeks if not days if not hours, named and mass-produced before they’ve meant anything to the people allegedly living them.
crowding alone doesn’t explain the rot, though, because a crowded market is still a market, and for things to go fake you need the burlap.
there’s a stand at every farmers market now run by a guy who figured out the whole genre is reproducible. you buy a flat of produce from costco, drive it four miles, arrange it on burlap and charge double for the privilege of proximity to the word local. the tomatoes are the same tomatoes, the burlap is doing all of the work. and the genius of the move is that there’s no way to check because the entire value proposition of a farmers market was that you didn’t have to check. the dirt under the fingernails was the certificate of authenticity and dirt, it turns out, can be applied.
so now you’re at the market squinting at a man’s hands, developing theories about tablecloth wear patterns, and when you notice one stand’s peaches carrying the faint adhesive ghost of a plu sticker your whole morning is ruined because now every stand is a suspect.
one burlap guy doesn’t cost you one stand, he costs you the ability to believe any of them which was the entire product and nobody prices this part in. meanwhile the actual farmer, the one with the uglier tomatoes and the 4am drive, is competing against costco margins while paying real costs and his only differentiator just became fakeable for $11 a yard. so he stops coming and the sincere exit, the staged remain, and the market is still open every saturday, fuller than ever, voted best in the region.
every trend runs this exact market, where the early participants are there because the thing is the thing. then someone notices that participation has a surface and surfaces can be manufactured, and the manufactured version is cheaper to produce and indistinguishable at feed distance.
you know the types. the reply guy performing enthusiasm. projects that experiment for the audience. collectors with convictions they could not describe under oath.
none of it is checkable and checking was never supposed to be required. so the people for whom the thing was actually the thing do the only rational move available and leave and what remains looks identical to a scene. it has the stalls and the foot traffic and the burlap, it gets written up, and everyone walking through it is selling.
the economics textbook stops being useful right about here and so does the standard complaint. the usual word for what money does to culture is commodification but the word picks the wrong crime in this case. in a normal commodity market the race to the bottom is brutal for producers but the good survives. wheat doesn’t stop being nutritious because it got cheap.
a trend sells something stranger, scarcity of meaning, belonging that derives its entire value from being bounded. economists noticed goods like this in the 70s and called them positional, things that can’t be mass-produced because the boundary is the product. so new supply doesn’t lower the price so much as poison the inventory and every additional participant is both customer and vandal. no commodity works this way.
the nearest analogy is a currency event where every new participant prints a little more of the trend’s money and for a while everyone feels rich, engagement is everywhere and the line is going up. then one morning it takes a wheelbarrow of participation to purchase a single second of feeling early to something and people start burning the banknotes for warmth because the warmth is now worth more than the denomination. hyperinflation was the correct charge all along.
and in any hyperinflation you stop to wonder who’s holding the hard assets. a race to the bottom is supposed to hand the surplus to consumers meaning cheap goods for everybody, and cheap trends hand it to nobody you’d recognize as one. the surplus goes to the venue and the platforms that own the booths, calibrate the basketball hoops slightly oval, take a cut of every throw, and the grand prize after a perfect night is a photograph of yourself having fun, which they then sell. everyone at the carnival is competing against everyone else at the carnival except the carnival.
the financialization gets read backwards, since the standard account says some outside force came and dragged something innocent into the casino, while the standard rebuttal, that every scene already kept score and the chart just put the scoreboard front and center, has been recited countless times by now. both miss what actually changed which is that the language stopped being language. when eugene wei ran scenes through monetary vocabulary in 2019, social capital inflation, proof of work, the whole ledger, it was an analogy and a brilliant one, and six years on it reads like a spec sheet.
mindshare is a number a platform computes and traders act on. there are venues where you can take a position on a piece of culture without holding any of it, where the entire skill is recognizing the moment a trend hits peak saturation a few minutes before everyone else does. you can short a vibe now and somewhere between then and today the metaphor shipped as a product and every essay like this one stopped being criticism and started being documentation. culture caught its reflection in the glass and gagged.
so what gets out.
if the collapse comes from copyable surfaces and unverifiable sincerity, there are two exits and they point in opposite directions.
the first is to make the cost real, work whose depth can’t be faked because faking it costs the same as doing it, with technical commitment that takes years to imitate, time that won’t compress, and constraints that still hold when the attention moves on. the burlap guy can apply dirt to his fingernails in the parking lot but he cannot apply four seasons of frost losses because the only way to fake that is to farm. proof of work, in the oldest sense. this exit is slow and expensive, which is why it works and also why it stays uncrowded.
the second exit is weirder and a corner of the online art world has been running the latest iteration of an experiment for a while now. instead of making the cost real, make the surface unparseable. there’s a tendency in recent digital work that responds to the saturated feed by flooring it rather than retreating, stacking references and layers and registers until the image stops being a statement and becomes weather.
you can’t strip-mine a trend whose reproducible formula can’t be extracted and there is no formula here to extract because the work’s entire content is instinct and the specific intelligence of which thousand things to stack and in what order. the rarity spreadsheet can’t price it and whatever the spreadsheet can’t price the arbitrage can’t touch. read the fine print, though, because that defeats one generation of tooling and the machinery from a few paragraphs ago prices vibes without parsing any content at all. the work breaks the instrument that reads images while the instrument that reads attention idles outside the studio. these artists looked at the hyperinflation of meaning and decided to print the banknotes themselves, on purpose, the wheelbarrow run as a deliberate practice, and the diagnosis of this entire essay performed as style.
it would be a clean place to end, two noble exits, pick your fighter, but watch what’s already happening to the second one because it has happened before. post-internet art ran this exact arc, a tendency about the condition of the circulating image that got coined, absorbed into the biennale circuit inside a few years and disavowed by its own artists not long after. corecore ran it again as a speedrun, an aesthetics of saturation named in january and a format by summer.
the tendency got noticed then it got named. and the moment an instinct gets a name, anyone can search it, the weather gets a wikipedia-shaped surface, and the race to the bottom begins on the strategy that was built to be unraceable. the name is the formula the formula-extractors were waiting for and it works by manufacture rather than discovery, a searchable surface bolted onto work whose whole defense was having no surface to search.
naming is listing and listing is the ipo of an instinct where the allocation goes to whoever was early and the open fills with volume, and what any buyer walks away holding has nothing to do with when they showed up, only with what they can read. whoever can only read the name is long the name whether they minted on day one or arrived last month, and whoever did the slow work of parsing the instinct owns the part that survives the chart. earliness gets worn as the credential in this corner of the world but a timestamp only ever proved attendance and attendance was never the same thing as attention.
and before going further i’ll mark my own book, because a piece announcing that a tendency has been named and that the dying has begun, written from inside the discourse that does the naming, functions less as commentary on the trade than as the trade itself. this essay is a short, though read the ticker carefully because the position is against the word and the word only. on the work itself my book runs long, late entry and all, and you should price the whole thing accordingly.
you can already see the institutional absorption underway, the wild version getting hung in clean rooms where it reads as safe, though look closely at what’s actually on the wall because the room can only exhibit what it can read, the room reads names and the instinct never fit through the door in the first place. the first exit fares no better in the long run. cost stays honest only until the tooling catches up and the tooling always catches up. depth buys years instead of weeks but it does not buy out.
which leaves just one conclusion, and it’s one that isn’t redemptive so this is your warning to look away if you came for the part where i say community three times and we all feel better. there is no permanent escape from the burlap market, only strategies with longer or shorter half-lives. notice that this is the opposite of the fashionable diagnosis that culture is stuck, that nothing new gets made anymore. new things get made constantly, they just get executed on arrival which from a distance looks identical to stagnation, the way a forest of seedlings mowed weekly looks identical to a field.
but be precise about what dies in the execution because there are three candidate corpses and the mechanism only ever produces two. the name dies always, the scene disperses usually, and the instinct turns out to be a different organism. vaporwave’s name curdled into a punchline a decade ago while the instinct metastasized into mainstream production design where it lives anonymously in half the brand gradients you scrolled past today. post-internet died as a word while its formal vocabulary became the default grammar of the image. the inheritance pays no royalties, credits no founders and improves no markets, which is what keeps this from being the happy paragraph. the work outlives the word and nobody gets the check.
real cost decays slowly because cost is slow to fake and saturation holds out for a different reason because instinct takes the crowd a long time to parse. but anything the crowd can read gets arbitraged and anything it can’t read eventually gets named. a name is just the crowd’s reading arriving late with a press pass. the only durable position is to be perpetually between names, which never required going anywhere because the names are what move. the ones who stay and stack deeper hold that position by default, standing still while the words wash over and recede.
that’s exhausting and it’s supposed to be. the exhaustion is the rent and meaning is the only currency the landlord accepts. everyone else can keep the market, the foot traffic, the award, and the word. the tomatoes are the same tomatoes, the burlap is doing all of the work.