Drew Austin

It’s popular to point out that our phones never appear in our dreams. I’ve always believed this is because our devices frame our reality so comprehensively that we imagine we live inside them, and only in dreams do we escape the physical constraints that break the illusion…In physical space, despite our best efforts, the screen always ends somewhere. And like our dreams, virtual reality also promises a screen-free reality, with the frame sufficiently expanded. But the Sphere suggests a different possibility: We love the screens themselves, so much that even within our virtual worlds we’ll still build new screens to look at.

Despite our lofty expectations, the defining material of the 21st century so far has probably been cardboard: the consumer-facing surface of a logistically administered world; the last mile made visible and tangible; what we scan for, in box form, on our porches and in our mailrooms and lobbies, hastily gathering it all into our homes as we find it and then ripping each package open in a postmodern daily harvest ritual. Cardboard—unboxed, flattened, bundled, discarded, recirculated—is the disposable but essential outer sheath of the global economy in its physical state.

Cardboard embodies the actual values of our era—not the harmonious perfection of a high modernist sci-fi monolith like the Starship Enterprise or even a humanoid robot (the iPhone may be the maximum scale at which the “future” has delivered this quality to consumers), but instead flexibility, ephemerality, lightness, and modularity, all qualities that enable tiny parts to circulate within sprawling invisible systems.

[Rachel Tashjian writes in Real Fashion For the Era of Fake Trends],

“Mostly it seems that people are doing things humans have done for most of the past century—relaxing, working hard, having martinis, not having martinis—but now we cannot resist the urge to package them into something that feels more meaningful than mere consumer choices.”

In the atomized landscape of contemporary culture, to merely express a personal observation, disconnected from any broader significance, is to risk the cardinal sin of irrelevance. The microtrend is thus a vehicle for making something matter, however illusory, And it’s not just our audience we must convince but ourselves—that we’re not just shouting into the void. Mireille Silcoff argued recently that online aesthetics and microtrends provide a source of ersatz community, filling the vacuum created by the decline of physically grounded youth subcultures. That may be a stretch, but the practice does seem oriented toward meeting a deeper need.

...Rather than being part of a mass culture that we can either participate in or rebel against, like the punks of yore, our online selves are unique data profiles that are aggregated or disaggregated as different contexts require. Being part of a hive mind has its drawbacks, but isolation is not one of them.