It follows that Airspace is shorthand for gentrification gone viral. When taste-making is subject to the tastes of those who see themselves as connoisseurs, it goes without saying that some people will get shut out. As Chayka writes, ‘you either belong to the Airspace class or you don’t.’ In a recent interview with BBC Radio 4, he further makes plain the seamlessness of this gentrification-as-virality: ‘If the image of a very stark space with minimalist furniture works very well on Airbnb the internet platform, then the more people who see your house…the more people are going to rent it out…the more popular it will be…the more Airbnb will then promote your house. The aesthetic rewards the people who adopt it, and then even more people adopt it.’
Like a barbed-wire fence (or a linked meme, depending on how you see it), these mimetic reflections extend, unyielding. As travel becomes more widespread for the western creative classes, it’s not enough that Airbnbs and coffee shops look like the ones back home, but workspaces do too. Consequently, as ‘digital nomad’-ism become more and more appealing for these same moneyed ranks in a time of start-ups and remote work facilitated by the internet, the idea of leaving home to be at home transcends even more borders.
In a time of start-ups and remote work facilitated by the internet, the idea of leaving home to be at home transcends even more borders.
Roam, a ‘global community of co-working and co-living spaces’ with franchises in Miami, Tokyo and Bali, is seeing that this lifestyle is running more rampant as affluent creatives flock to exotic locations to embark on Instagram-worthy working holidays. In Bali, this is leading to devastating effects as housing shortages and labour exploitation work hand-in-hand to evict locals from the places they’ve lived in their entire lives. Workers working in co-working spaces and cafes are quoted as ‘living on the edge’ while the ‘digital nomads’ they serve live in gated bubbles made possible by the start-up and gig economies. Wake up in a Roam, take an Uber to an artisanal cafe for breakfast, meet someone on Tinder, go to a luxury spa next to the Roam, eat dinner at an ‘authentic’ vegetarian restaurant in the vicinity, go back to the Roam.
Further afield, this kind of redlining amounts to spatial apartheid. The residents of Woodstock and Bo-Kaap – two Cape Town suburbs which survived forced removals during apartheid – are seeing themselves gradually displaced as tourists and start-ups flock to the area. Rents and housing prices rise to astronomical heights. Urbanism researcher Sarita Pillay calls this an ‘aesthetic of exclusivity’ and a ‘violent aesthetic’. This is no different from the displacement that has occurred and is continuing to occur in so-called Australia: on the stolen lands themselves, then in suburbs like Redfern, Footscray, Fitzroy, West End and others. When places of memory gain value, it must be asked whose memories they are.
*
SHOOT IT INTO MY VEINS.
What’s next? Perhaps it seems like text has escaped the clutches of aestheticisation. But as I spend more and more time online, the homogeneity that now firmly makes up an Instagram experience continues to creep into the many interfaces that make up my digital landscapes. Loud websites and customisable (think MySpace or Geocities) pages are now, more often than not, considered kitsch; instead a stark minimalism appears to reign supreme. One can only imagine that these templates were designed by a user experience architect in a well-lit Brooklyn loft, or a cushy WeWork in some corner of the world.
On these interfaces, fonts like Helvetica are used to denote a sense of casual chic, while Garamond gives off an air of professionalism. I’m drafting this essay in Comic Sans but will file it in Times New Roman. Dark-coloured text on light-coloured backgrounds, large images, strong typography – Apple’s website looks like Forbes’ looks like VICE’s looks like Monocle’s looks like The Cut’s looks like Frieze’s looks like Medium’s. Art and literary magazines like Granta and Artforum trail the breadcrumbs.
Of course, when content management systems (CMS) such as WordPress and Squarespace act as the backbone of many modern websites, it seems more practical and cost-efficient to lean on what’s already available. But as Chayka points out, CMSes ‘increasingly influence not just how stories look but how they are produced, discovered, read or monetised.’ In other words, not only are stories or images jonesing for eyeballs, the software is too. Meanwhile, you can carry a luxury handbag that screams this sophistication.
When places of memory gain value, it must be asked whose memories they are.
Does flooding our attention with a certain aesthetic pave the way for taste-making? After all, all desire is mimetic; we like things because we see others liking them too. Walter Benjamin observed in 1938 that taste is established only when commodity production outpaces other kinds of production:
As the expertness of the customer declines, the importance of his taste increases proportionately – both for him and the manufacturer. For the consumer, it serves as a more or less elaborate masking of his lack of expertness. For the manufacturer, it serves as a fresh stimulus to consumption.
*
IT ME.
In a dystopia driven by clicks and metrics, it seems almost certain that the content that trends the hardest are the ones that float to the top, inspiring the ones below to aspire to spin offs. As op-eds and news media jostle for our attention, diversity suffers. To use digital media conglomerate BuzzFeed as an example, it published 914 posts in April 2012, with the number rising to 6,365 posts in April 2016. They are not an outlier; other outlets have reported similar statistics.
The thought of producing that much content in a month sounds ludicrous, even more so as reporters and staff writers struggle to keep their jobs amid layoffs. Unsurprisingly, this creates a feedback loop not unlike Airspace or Instagram posts: when media influencers are plugged in to the same streams (be that via the algorithm or simply out of overwork or convenience), the pieces of content that get churned out start to resemble each other. At its worst, this can create a standard that others in the field then aspire to.
As the attention economy continues to thrust content at us, populist ideas and imagery end up wielding an inordinate amount of power.
At this, we might look to other platforms, hoping that user-generated media can buck this trend. But on Tumblr and Twitter, people are using similar figures of speech to communicate online, creating a certain voice and lexicon that – while it can act like an insider language (‘I’m baby’) – can end up being misunderstood, appropriated or weaponised. Already, we are seeing instances of this happening: in the hackneyed uses of AAVE and queer lingo (‘bae’, ‘lit’, ‘daddy’, ‘yas queen’, et al), as well as in the incorrect interpretation of terms like ‘emotional labour’ and ‘intersectionality’. Even if the latter’s broader presence outside of academia is giving way to new understandings of selfhood, conservatives turn certain words like ‘triggered’ or ‘gaslighting’, on their heads, mutating their meanings. Otherwise, they are chewed up and spat out by the culture machine as corporate brands lean into these shibboleths, in the hopes of affiliating themselves with some semblance of contemporaneity. But like dad jokes, the machine looks just as quickly to move on, as soon as these usages reach their saturation points.
Indeed, as the attention economy continues to thrust content – and, implicitly, our (refracted) tastes – at us, populist ideas and imagery end up wielding an inordinate amount of power. There’s a vague sense of disrupting the status quo, but like the Spotify ‘Discover’ playlist, old epiphanies get re-marketed as new. As cultural critic Soraya Roberts notes in an essay on the dangers of virality-as-resonance on Longreads, ‘We shift around the same ideas, and we shift around the same people, creating an over-recognised few and an under-recognised many.’
If we relate to the things that become more familiar if only due to its repetition, it slowly becomes difficult to differentiate what is ‘relatable’ to what is projection or conveniently applied. Why are we all writing like this now? It was the way the portal wrote. And if relatability gets assigned more value, it only follows that there will be others who get left behind. The social becomes obsessed with itself; through this auto-information, this permanent autointoxication, it becomes its own vice, its own perversion. Or, like Awad’s protagonist Samantha, they will aspire not to be abandoned:
But I look at Vignette, at Creepy Doll, at Cupcake, the Duchess. All of them staring at me now with shy smiles. ‘I think I’d like to see more of the soup too,’ I hear myself say.
Content and knowledge are not the same thing. When there is no continuity of context, we will keep reinventing the wheel. And the wheel will keep spinning until it glitches out.
