WHY’D YOU HAVE TO GO AND MAKE THINGS SO COMPLEXicated?
WHY’D YOU HAVE TO GO AND MAKE THINGS SO COMPLEXicated?
happy new year, welcome to the dark ages
You can argue that we’re in the attention economy now. Or perhaps the experience economy. Information economy. Moral economy. It doesn’t matter. You could make the case for whichever sort of economy you feel is most fucking us over at the moment. And you’d be right. No single pattern can capture every nuance of our individual experiences. But that won’t stop anybody from proclaiming that they’ve figured out the grand, overarching and sweeping issues that plague every single human’s existence today.
Por ejemplo, at the end of the year, the cultural consultants from Nemesis declared that we are living in a time of “Max Pain.” The term comes from the world of stocks and refers to the point at which the largest amount of investors lose money. (Some people are betting on the price of a stock to go down, others are betting on it to go up. And, at Max Pain, somehow, neither happens. The stock evens out at a price where everybody involved loses money.) Nemesis takes this concept to the arena of culture, rebranding it as “the trials and tribulations of meaning and value under increased cultural and economic volatility.”
AKA: nothing means anything in these unprecedented times~*
The memo laments that, thanks to the internet, everybody has become smarter. We can learn how to make tamagoyaki at home. We can watch a TikTok on how to look better in photos. The average chess player is stronger today than they were 20 years ago. But when we all become photogenic chess-playing Japanese chefs, Nemesis believes that we long-term struggle. “When everyone gets smarter, things get harder,” they write. The article goes on to grieve the fact that “everyone’s opinion is right at some point, but never at the right time” and that the only people who “win” are those who profit from the flow of information.
Bleak, right?
Yeah, obviously, seems pretty grim. But let’s consider who is delivering this cultural death knell. Nemesis, for those who haven’t heard of it, is “a consultancy and creative studio with nodes in Berlin, Los Angeles, and New York” that “publishes self-initiated cultural research” for clients who “range from emerging technology protocols to established luxury brands.” Translation? They’re trend forecasters. (But they’re not like other trend forecasters, they’re cool trend forecasters.) And they’re forecasting that — thanks to the flood of cultural commentators on TikTok and, yes, Substack — we’re headed straight towards a cultural burnout, a period of numbness in which no one can win. (By “win,” they mean “be right.”)
“When winning gets harder across the board, culture enters Max Pain…Max Pain punishes people betting on the future, regardless of the direction.”
But it’s worth asking: is the loss of “winning” at trend predictions really such a bad thing? And isn’t “nobody can bet on the future” a prediction in and of itself?
Why is trend prediction a hobby now?
Trend prediction developed as a way to protect investments and assets. Businesses hire trend forecasters for consumer intel to stay relevant in the marketplace. So why is it becoming a hobby for anyone with a microphone and a TikTok account? Why are so many people flooding our feeds with their opinions on microtrends like indie sleaze and coastal grandmas and (guilty as charged) cottagecore?
Surely, you can understand the impulse to identify trends, however farfetched they may seem. To quote David Graeber and David Wengrow’s The Dawn of Everything:
“social theory always, necessarily, involves a bit of simplification…[it] is largely a game of make-believe in which we pretend, just for the sake of argument, that there’s just one thing going on: essentially, we reduce everything to a cartoon so as to be able to detect patterns that would be otherwise invisible…one must simplify the world to discover something new about it.” (p. 21)
Pattern-spotting helps us make sense of the world. But this way of thinking isn’t some newfangled conception and this basic aspect of human nature doesn’t explain the recent proliferation of So Many People touting So Many Trends.
One could argue that this explosion of opinion can be linked to Robinhood users’ crusade for GameStop in 2021, the dubious decentralization of Web3 and the rises of both Donald Trump and Bernie Sanders in the U.S. Simply: it’s populism. More people have more access not only to information but platforms from which to voice their opinions. It’s the rise of democracy. In theory.
In reality, most of the time, these movements do little more than shuffle power like a dealer who’s rigged the deck. Even though it looks like the cards are changing, the order stays the same.
What happens when more people become trend forecasters?
Before we go any further, please allow me a brief meander into an explanation of complexity theory. (Promise this will be relevant.)
Complexity theory comes from the world of the natural sciences and is basically just a way of looking at “complex systems.” The theory differentiates between complicated systems and complex ones:
COMPLICATED SYSTEM = many small but different parts; each serves its own unique function and together they create a predictable outcome
COMPLEX SYSTEM = many different but similar parts and their limited interactions create a sort of “whole is greater than the sum of its parts” outcome
A complicated system is a computer. A complex system is a company.
So how does this relate to trend prediction, you may ask?
Well, it’s fairly easy to declare that we are living in complex times. Like, duh. Of course we are. Particularly when the illusion of populism adds more voices and more conversations to the public sphere. In the era of technological acceleration, every system is moving towards complexity. Even seemingly trivial fields like fashion and lifestyle trend prediction. So if we’re living in complex times when even trend prediction is a complex system, we can look at that either from the micro level or the macro level.
Biologists often illustrate the idea of complexity by talking about ants. If you watch a single ant crawl across the pavement, it will seem to move in chaotic and unpredictable ways. But an entire ant colony works as a unit, capable of complex collective functions like temperature control or creating nests from their own bodies.
Microtrends are metaphorical ants. They are confusing to watch on their own. Nobody is really sure if indie sleaze is over or if it’s just getting started. Nobody is really sure what sort of jeans are cool right now. Nobody is really sure of anything. As more people enter the chat via TikTok commentary or Substack, we have more opinions to consider. And which of these opinions is right? Who is the authority? Are Peter Pan collars back in style?
Why do you give a fuck what trend forecasters are saying?
Undoubtedly, this complexity has bred a sense of trend fatigue. It’s not just Nemesis saying there are Too Many People predicting Too Many Trends. Last week, The Cut published “Could Anyone Keep Track of This Year’s Microtrends?” and when I talked to friends about the phenomenon, they labeled it “OTT” and “overwhelming” and “ugh.”
But the real fatigue isn’t that trend prediction is becoming a populist and over-saturated arena, it’s the fact that at the end of each season, microtrends are utterly boring. They don’t actually reveal anything interesting about our time because in the era of complexification, any sense-making project focused on microtrends is doomed to fail.
As an example, I’d like to talk about Twitter for a second. (I know I know. I’m sorry.)
More than 237 million Twitter accounts are active every month and from the swirl of these 237 million voices emerges what people may refer to as a “cesspool” or “godforsaken place.” It has its own language, style of moral law enforcement and sense of humor. (The whole is greater than the sum of its parts.) This is what scientists would call “emergence.”
In a complex system, micro actions do not creating meaning, emergence does. In the same way, it is not microtrends that are interesting but what arises from the swirl of their interplay. As the fashion trend system becomes more complex, the best trend forecasters and analysts will begin to analyze their own emergence.
Now you may be saying, “Wait, isn’t this what Nemesis did?” Didn’t they look at the recent history of microtrends and then analyze that? Well, yes, but what they arrived at isn’t emergence. Trend fatigue is a reaction to complexity — and reactions to trends are just trends themselves.
The Rosicrucians believe that reality is multifaceted and that the more viewpoints you can accept, the closer you’ll get to truth. In this same way, if we begin to take microtrends as parts of an emergent whole, we may gain a clearer sense of pattern. Or not.
We’re stepping into a complex system that may not offer us immediate answers or patterns that we can understand while still inside them. (Which our brains do not like!) But if we can learn to sit with the uncertainty and overwhelm, we might come a bit closer to some truth about humanity.
We analyze trends for a sense of understanding, then attempt to predict them for a sense of security. Reality is that both understanding and security are illusions. If there’s one human truth that microtrends have dragged to the surface of the fashion world, it’s that chaos is inherent / everything is complex / and we’re still not entirely sure what that all means.
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P.S. If you’re upset that there wasn’t one single Avril Lavigne mention throughout this whole piece, here ya go: