8Ball — live players pt. 2
the aesthetic trajectory of the twenties
In the first part of this report, we noted the social stack is in flux. New hyper-agentic
forces—at present, mostly human (brands, corporations, NGOs, internet personalities, cults, intelligence services), but increasingly post-human (memes, algorithms, LLMs, AI, drones, UFOs)—are overturning the status quo.
Not everyone knows what to make of change. Grill-pilled boomers aren’t interested in the future. They can barely grok the present. Movie-brained millennials just want a happy ending to…whatever is going on. Or for the apocalypse to hurry up and happen already. The suspense is killing them! For the children of the end of history (and their parents) it’s hard to get back in the historical flow. Wasn’t this stuff all figured out already?
In this report, we address the aesthetic trajectory of our current moment. Which trends are stuck in a doom loop of nostalgia? Which offer a path forward?