{"text":[[{"start":8.18,"text":"Elon Musk — he who showed up to the first cabinet meeting of Donald Trump’s second term wearing a “TECH SUPPORT” T-shirt, a Tesla belt buckle and a Maga hat — would like to talk to us about fashion. "}],[{"start":21.97,"text":"“Fashion in 2026 still looks like 2006,” he posted on his social media platform, X, last week. “Time for change!” It wasn’t the first time that the near-trillionaire (and parody T-shirt-and-suit devotee) has pronounced on the stagnation of style; he made similar comments on The Katie Miller Podcast in December."}],[{"start":45.72,"text":"But while in fashion terms Musk is what one might refer to as an NPC (a gaming term denoting a “non-player character”), it is hard to disagree. Take a look at footage of any major western city from 2006 and you will see very little difference from the way people look today. If we were to teleport back, the only thing we might find unusual would be people looking at each other rather than at their smartphones."}],[{"start":73.75,"text":"And yet, had we time travelled further back, to the big-haired, shoulder-padded, shell-suited and pixie-booted 1980s — the difference would have been stark. Things would look “retro” in a way that 2006 simply does not. In fact, while it is easy to think of a defining style from every decade from the 1950s to the 1990s, it is much harder after that. Sure, there might be reasonably distinctive “Y2K” fashions — Juicy Couture velour tracksuits, unacceptably low-rise jeans, over-straightened hair — but from the latter part of that decade until now, we have stalled. "}],[{"start":118,"text":"This sartorial stagnation is part of a broader cultural slackening across the board — from the prevalence of prequels and sequels in cinemas to the enduring popularity of decades-old TV shows like The Office and Friends, or the dearth of new music genres. The biggest-selling artist of 2025, Taylor Swift, released her first album 20 years ago. Modern K-pop stars riff heavily off the styles, sounds and choreography of American girl and boy bands from the 1990s."}],[{"start":153.94,"text":"The most popular musicians of the 1960s, ’70s and ’80s experimented with time signatures, key changes and recording techniques in a way that only niche artists would dare to — or their record labels would allow them to — now. "}],[{"start":172.28,"text":"One of my favourite albums, the British electronic producer Aphex Twin’s Selected Ambient Works, 85-92, wouldn’t sound dated if it were released today, more than four decades after some of its tracks were recorded. Imagine saying the same when it was released in 1992, about music recorded between 1952 and 1959 (think Elvis Presley, The Everly Brothers). Some of that is down to technological advances, sure; most is due to the rapid evolution of music in those heady decades."}],[{"start":209.22,"text":"What’s going on? Is it possible that we have tried out all the ideas about fashion, music and other cultural forms, to the point that there are fewer new ones to come up with? Is it because we have had, until now, such a prolonged period of relative peace? Or can we blame it, like everything else, on the internet, and in particular smartphones and social media? "}],[{"start":232.26,"text":"It can feel a little too easy to put all our political, social and cultural ills down to today’s twin bogeymen. And yet, given that our cultural stagnation seems to have really set in around the time they both hit the mainstream (Facebook opened to the general public in 2006; the iPhone was released in 2007), it is hard not to see these things as inextricable. "}],[{"start":261.7,"text":"I will never forget the first time I realised I was at a “Facebook party”. It was in 2008 and it was deathly boring. People weren’t there to have a good time; they were there to take images that convinced other people they were having a good time. "}],[{"start":277.69,"text":"It was around then that “content” started to replace cultural output. And it is the need for such “content” to feed the ever-hungry algorithms of the distraction economy that has, more than anything else, produced this state of being stuck. Nobody — not film studios, not record companies, and not even we as individuals — is willing to take risks anymore. If you do, the all-powerful algorithms of the attention economy punish you. "}],[{"start":309.43,"text":"The problem is that these algorithms are by their nature backward-looking: they serve us content based on what we have already liked. And so we keep on being fed the same diet. We talk a lot about AI slop, but often it’s simply regurgitating the human-generated slop already out there. And so we find ourselves in the grips of what Theodor Adorno might have called a “mimetic regression” — and a ferocious one at that. We must fight back against our algorithmic overlords. If we don’t, we might be stuck in a risk-averse, slop-filled, cultural feedback loop forever."}],[{"start":355.7,"text":""}]],"url":"https://audio.ftcn.net.cn/album/a_1774856416_4808.mp3"}