The biggest movies of the Biden administration were just as aimless. This was partly due to the pandemic lockdown still affecting box offices, but even if we extend the timeline into 2024, we are basically exactly where we were in 2019. The three biggest movies of the year so far are Inside Out 2, Deadpool & Wolverine, and Despicable Me 4. All sequels, two of them from Disney.
Technology also stalled in the Biden years. Right after the president took office, Redditors organized a pump of the GameStop stock, which initially looked like a populist revolution similar to the insurrection that had just happened weeks before. And it was similar to the insurrection in that it ultimately resulted in nothing, aside from smaller and smaller subsequent meme stock pump-and-dumps.
The rise of the meme stock did, however, help set Silicon Valley off on a disastrous path of trying to force a new era of computing, even if no one could agree what it should be. First, cryptocurrency was supposed to replace Web 2.0 with Web3. Then it was the metaverse and the arrival of virtual reality. And now it’s generative AI and the promise of artificial general intelligence. None of these have panned out, of course. Crypto crashed, and not even Tom Brady could convince Americans that NFTs made sense. Sales of Apple’s VR wearable, the Vision Pro, are dropping after a few months on the market. And while AI has succeeded in filling our social feeds with endless amounts of garbage, it’s increasingly looking like a bubble as well, as the companies leveraging it keep missing their targets. Amid all that, Elon Musk bought Twitter, renamed it X, lost millions of dollars, and essentially broke the American news cycle. And yet, media and politics people still use it. Because there’s nowhere else to go.
The defining term for our current technological era, “enshittification” (coined by author and technologist Cory Doctorow), can be applied to the whole Biden era. Everything is old, nothing feels fresh, and yet we can’t seem to escape any of it. The only platform that feels relevant right now is TikTok, and this year the Biden administration signed a law calling for it to be banned. But the enshittification hasn’t been static. As journalist Max Read wrote in June, our flattened culture has given way to what he calls the Zynternet—a cultural wasteland where the Hawk Tuah Girl reigns supreme, every social feed is full of porn bots and crypto spam, and podcasters like Joe Rogan are using Netflix specials to rant about trans people. A complete bottoming out of culture. A world of slop.
The arrival of Vice President Kamala Harris’s presidential campaign, the Brat Summer meme, Kendrick Lamar’s thorough evisceration of Drake, and the attempted assassination of Donald Trump have made the last three and a half years seem like some kind of weird side quest, a political and cultural intermission. Even the success of this summer’s Deadpool & Wolverine, a movie built entirely around disregarding the sacred canon of Marvel’s long-running cinematic universe, supports this. Timothée Chalamet and Zendaya are proving movie stars are back. The pop-star monopolies of Taylor Swift and Drake are faltering as homegrown Gen Z artists like Chappell Roan are pulling in historically large crowds at festivals and club kids are doing nose drugs at Boiler Room sets. Republicans feel weird and Democratic strategists are throwing their hands up as Harris picks Minnesota governor Tim Walz over Pennsylvania governor Josh Shapiro. Everything is finally crashing down, and it’s invigorating.
The closest we’ve come to a moment like this was former president Barack Obama’s first campaign, in which pop culture, generational optimism, and a national desire to move forward dovetailed perfectly. And the most important thing we can do now is not make the same mistake we did 15 years ago. Whatever comes next is not the end of history. It is the start of it.
