Earlier this month, I caught the tail end of the Nakagin Capsule Tower exhibit at MoMA (thanks for the suggestion Mike). Constructed in 1972 and demolished in 2022, the Tokyo high-rise comprised 140 single-occupant “capsules,” originally designed as micro-dwellings for commuting businessmen who required minimal space because they lived or traveled alone and expected to spend most of their time outside of the apartment. The MoMA exhibit’s centerpiece was a single fully restored capsule unit from the tower; each one contained a bed, a small bathroom, and a wall of appliances including a kitchen stove, refrigerator, TV, and tape deck—a sparse, compact room that evokes a spaceship cabin. The Nakagin Capsule Tower was the most famous expression of Metabolism, a Japanese architectural movement that conceived of buildings and cities as dynamic organisms rather than static objects, able to adapt to changing environmental conditions; Nakagin’s modular capsule units were thus prefabricated offsite and then plugged into the building’s centralizing frame, implying that those capsules would be added and removed as needed, although none ever were. Ironically, the Nakagin Capsule Tower fell into a state of disrepair that precipitated its ultimate demolition, despite a significant preservation effort. Many of the capsule units themselves were independently preserved, however, including the one displayed at MoMA—perhaps the purest expression of the original Metabolist vision, achieved in the building’s afterlife.

If the vision of modular adaptability didn’t quite pan out, the capsule tower arguably realized a different set of values more effectively: the embrace of urban density taken to its extreme, with individuals minimizing their residential square footage and living most of life outside of the house, whether that entailed work or leisure or both. This, of course, is how many people have always inhabited cities and still do. The capsules’ rudimentary entertainment and kitchen setup can be understood as the bare minimum needed to differentiate an apartment from a prison cell, and the image of a bachelor salaryman, supine and solitary, watching TV on his capsule bed after a meager stovetop-heated capsule dinner is fairly depressing without the corresponding image of a vibrant life outside of the capsule (and of course, in this example we imagine that counterpart to be an equally uninspiring office existence). But the point is that home is not one’s entire life—certainly not in a dense metropolis, at least—and domestic space should be understood as complementary to its surrounding environment. Capsule life doesn’t take place in a vacuum, and could even facilitate a more vibrant public sphere under the right circumstances.

Does this vision still resonate in 2026? From the vantage point of the 1970s, looking toward the future, we might actually have predicted a further condensing of residential space, enabled by the technology to come: the advent of personal computers and eventually iPhones compressed an array of cumbersome entertainment hardware into a single handheld device, theoretically reducing the quantity of essential household objects and the space needed to accommodate them, while also untethering computer usage from domestic space entirely. Today’s version of the capsule apartment could do away with the entertainment panel and squeeze the same itinerant bachelor into an even tinier bed-bathroom ensemble with just enough clearance to prop a phone or laptop in front of his face and occasionally sit up to eat a DoorDash order, also summoned via the phone. Presumably, this would minimize rent and let one live closer to where they wanted to be. Maybe it could alleviate the housing crisis. I find it interesting that nothing like this ended up happening, at least not among the affluent professional classes: Phones only increased the amount of time we spend at home and therefore the domestic space we require (a typical goon cave is probably bigger than an entire capsule unit in Nagakin). If the 70’s capsule tower was defined by a centrifugal force that pushed its inhabitants outward into the city, the contemporary urban high-rise is centripetal, pulling food delivery workers and Amazon packages inward through its doors and lobbies toward the sedentary remote workers above. The capsule’s appeal, after all, depends upon a rich public sphere one can step out into. Maybe that is what went missing.

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Reads:

• New Models on how digital protocols and infrastructure shape politics, with different ideologies as different flavors of a singular output. “Merch is where the immaterial experience of web 2 culture touches down in lived human space. It is the physical precipitate of the ‘digital’ layer.”

• Sachin Benny on stadium design and “carnival time”—how the porousness of stadium boundaries shape the role they play in their environment. “High permeability indicates a porous boundary and an experience embedded into daily life. Low permeability indicates a harder, brittle boundary and a lack of embedding into civic life.”

• The decline of “elsewhere” as a Western ideal and why travel is getting harder. Includes a nice historical summary of the role international travel has played in Western culture.

Carousel, which I’ve never been to, has a conversation pit, an interior design feature that seems to have become a meme in its own right, a perennial object of social media desire (although this could just be bots yearning for the embodiment that would enable them to lounge in the pit). Conversation pits are certainly photogenic but I’ve always suspected they went away for a reason. Rapine concludes his post with this note on Carousel’s version:

“The conversation pit can be reserved in advance because of course it can…Why in a world where I select my movie theater seat and make dinner reservations one month ahead of time exactly as they become available to me via Resy would I leave an evening out drinking up to chance?”

I think about this line quite often—this idea that the spread of reservations into new spaces is an anxious rejection of uncertainty and spontaneity in domains that ought to be carefully stewarding those resources—and I recently thought of it again when my main neighborhood spot started accepting reservations for tables during Knicks playoff games.

Part of what I like about this particular bar, which I’m not going to name—not that me doing so would make anyone want to go—is that it’s relatively normcore (in a way elaborated here and here) and thus not at risk of ever blowing up in the TikTok-popularity sense. It’s not photogenic, but also not a “dive bar,” and the food is fine, and the prices are slightly too high and the beer selection leans toward millennial-core IPAs. This bar is not quite anything, really—not even quite a sports bar, although it is more of one than anything else nearby, hence its popularity during Knicks games and other peak sports moments.

What is really special and unique about this place, though, is that it’s very close to my apartment.

Ultimately, I don’t want to watch a basketball game surrounded by people who made a reservation to watch a basketball game, and certainly not at a place I am accustomed to drifting in and out of as I please with minimal friction. But I get it. The Knicks reaching the Finals meant unprecedented explosions of brief demand for spaces that will be quite empty again next month when the World Cup is over and there’s nothing on their TVs but a Pirates-Brewers day game. So you can’t fault people for wanting to make reservations, or bars for accepting reservations. I just won’t be there at those times. And that’s probably the idea—give the spot to someone who wants it more.

I don’t really mind this, but it seems more likely that I’ll have to make reservations at this bar again in the future, now that they’ve set up the infrastructure for it, and this happens to be the one place where I value spontaneous coming and going the most. My best hope is that the place never becomes more popular—which to be fair, it probably won’t.

THE ARISTOCRACY OF THE REGULAR

New York, like many other cities, requires its inhabitants to navigate spatial scarcity and the various systems that manage excess demand for limited space (an example of which I’ve just described). Reservations are one such system, as is waiting in line for something. High prices and exclusivity are two more. Another system, crude but enduring, is straightforward crowdedness—the anarchic non-system that just lets everyone figure it out for themselves. Each has its advantages and disadvantages, which probably came to mind as you read this list. And, as I recently wrote, you might adapt yourself to these conditions over time by “intentionally avoiding and grouchily rejecting things that seem broadly appealing, or otherwise randomizing your schedule to decouple it from peak demand.” Hoping that your favorite places don’t attract more customers is related to this attitude.

Lately, these various systems for managing and allocating scarce consumer experiences—particularly the sudden proliferation of long lines for treats—have become objects of broad interest, accompanied by effervescent cultural commentary. A few years ago, the ascent of Resy and other digital reservation platforms got a similar examination in the discourse. If NYC is a laboratory for refining new crowd management techniques, then we seem to be in an extended period of innovation (and like so much else, the pandemic accelerated what the internet had long ago started).

“Line culture” is obviously not just waiting in lines, which we have always done, but a new openness to something we used to instinctively dislike and avoid whenever possible. Blackbird Spyplane, pondering the phenomenon recently in a post titled “Why are we addicted to standing in line for treats?” posits that these queues “were invented by market forces during the rise of Millennial purchasing power,” another product of ZIRP froth, and that their essential mechanism is “infusing a regular line with the sort of eager anticipatory energy that was once restricted to actual events,” thereby turning everyone into a tourist.

The essay’s tone is ambivalent, first seeming to criticize the emptiness of “line culture” while admitting occasional participation in it, but ultimately empathizing with the line-waiters, perhaps too generously, suggesting that we seek embodied, communal experiences in physical space endowed with an aura of meaningfulness, and that waiting in the treat line fulfills this need. Also, the lines are egalitarian:

“You don’t need a ton of money or elite connections to score a Japanese-style Basque cheesecake ‘everyone is talking about.’ You just need to wait your turn. There are people who pay other people to wait for them, and there are entire resale economies centered on coveted non-perishable treats. But while that is bleak, it doesn’t undo the intrinsically egalitarian nature of the line. (At least until the airportification of all life is complete and they figure out how to put ‘platinum-tier’ expedited lines everywhere.)”

Resy is also egalitarian, in theory: Just as anyone can wait in line, anyone can make a reservation, or at least has the same opportunity to make one when they become available. There are notable exceptions to this, which I’ll get to below, but in their platonic form, reservations and lines are both democratic, working similarly for everyone.

What is not democratic, on the other hand, is being a regular somewhere. At a given establishment, not everyone has a realistic opportunity to become a regular. The regulars usually live nearby, so they have better access to the place than everyone else, which is not fair, and they are also usually treated better by the staff than non-regulars, which is even less fair. The regulars also tend to know one another, so they have a better time. As I mentioned above, these are some of the main reasons I like hanging out at [redacted] and regularly choose it over other “better” options. This bar’s embrace of reservations during Knicks games unsettled me not because it prevented me from going (I could have just made a reservation myself) but because it foreshadowed a world where the playing field is leveled in alarming fashion and my special status is diminished. Again, my only hope is that it never becomes popular in the way it was during the 3-hour windows when the Knicks were playing (and again, it probably won’t).

If the aristocracy of the regular crowd is inherently not egalitarian, then neither are reservations and queues, both of which simulate equal opportunity and fairness while smuggling in less transparent forms of favoritism through the side door, often literally. Reservations have always been subject to favoritism and preferential treatment, just as knowing the right person or being otherwise special often lets you skip the line. Digital reservation platforms like Resy add another unequal layer on top of this, offering special access tiers (to AmEx card holders, for example), and there are also members-only reservation apps with their own special access, as well as secondary markets where all of these reservations are bought and sold like the commodities those platforms have made them into. The queues at airports and amusement parks are similarly bifurcated via FastPass systems and loyalty programs—something the Blackbird Spyplane essay alludes to in its remark about how the “airportification of life” will result in “‘platinum-tier’ expedited lines everywhere”—which reads like a joke until you think about it a bit more and realize that is probably what will indeed end up happening in many instances.

Reflecting upon the above, it seems like these demand management systems progress through three stages:

1. The unmanaged crowd (first come, first served)

2. Reservations and queues (when the crowd becomes difficult to manage, or when more risk-averse customers demand a legible system)

3. Airportification (formalization of tiered access)

The “regular crowd” forms and flourishes in Stage 1, and is progressively undermined in the later stages. There are no “regulars” in an airport lounge, just Diamond and Platinum members. Resy dissolves borders and opens up new commodity markets: the perfect neoliberal instrument.

EMBODIMENT AS EDGE

This progression from Stage 1 to Stage 3 is also a passage from embodied individuality to disembodied fungibility. In the beginning, you are a person physically showing up somewhere, being seen, speaking to those around you, and navigating a particular environment; by the end, you are effectively reduced to your digital footprint, only distinguishable from a bot by your ability to solve a CAPTCHA (even if you still eventually show up to the physical place you’ve made the reservation for). In between those two end points, you might occupy an appropriate intermediary state: waiting in a line with a bunch of other people who are undifferentiated from you in any meaningful way.

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NPC is admittedly a loaded term, often deployed with an unbecoming bitterness or spite, and encountered in the worst realms of internet discourse—and, as one commenter on a previous post amusingly put it, was “popularized by the people it was made to deride and subsequently lost all meaning” (no one despises NPCs more than NPCs themselves!)—and for all these reasons the term annoys people and causes them to tune out when they hear it, for which you can’t blame them—but I still enjoy it and find it quite useful as a concept. The deep irony at the core of the NPC concept is the deep solipsism to which its usage confesses: The observer is the only candidate for guaranteed personhood, by definition, but if you’re saying it, you can’t help but suspect that some of the NPCs would apply the same label to you. Many of the headaches associated with living in New York City arise from wanting to do things at the same time everyone else does, which confronts you with the possibility that they are not that different than you, which ought to be inspiring and life-affirming, and often is, but also fosters deranged behavioral patterns over time, like intentionally avoiding and grouchily rejecting things that seem broadly appealing, or otherwise randomizing your schedule to decouple it from peak demand. Line culture flies in the face of all this, rejecting the fundamental premises and basking in our inescapable basic-ass sameness.

Gamification is well past its prime as a buzzword, but that is partially because the game dynamics of digitally mediated life got so all-encompassing that they became invisible. What formerly described an app’s UI/UX on a screen now describes our internet-infused (-poisoned?) worldview. Google Maps reversed the Copernican revolution by geographically re-centering the individual within the universe, a transformation that requires us to have our phones on our person at all times—itself an assumption so reliable by now that Find My Friends can equate the location of a person and their phone without anyone wondering whether the two might occasionally diverge. As an older millennial, the Find My Friends interface reminds me of GoldenEye on Nintendo 64, where you used a similar map to hunt your friends down rather than merely monitor them (and for most of us in that age bracket, hunting them in GoldenEye represented the more intense phase of camaraderie). Ten years ago, during the summer of 2016, Pokémon Go foreshadowed how digitally-generated side quests could unfold in physical urban space—one last burst of Obama-era millennial fun before it all fell apart. In that case, it was animated creatures, not fellow humans, as the NPCs. The game boundaries were still barely constrained, and we could still tell the difference easily enough.

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Reads:

• A rigorous definition of slop from Mike Pepi (shots fired against Kneeling Bus, stay tuned for rebuttal). “Art and creativity describe our relationship to processes and labor, not discrete, existing objects or end states. This is to be expected from those who tend to view everything as information manipulatable by mechanistic processes. In reality, creativity is found, relationally, among a series of works acted out by humans.”

• Chenoe Hart on how AI sees the world. “AI vision systems…perceive the world in terms of average and standard representations.”

• Matt Shaw reviews the new New Museum and Mark Krotov reviews the JPMorgan Chase Tower.

The problem for the makers of lo-fi imagery is that this existential crisis, if it is indeed what motivates them, can’t be resolved at the level of aesthetics. AI can emulate most legible aesthetic styles easily enough; embedding any sort of recognizable pattern in digital content seems like one of the worst ways to prove your humanity, and if that pattern appears more “human” it just implies that the machines are just getting better at making us dance for them. As Venkatesh Rao has written, “Everything is now about AI except AI. AI is about the shapes of human beings.” Producing intentionally flawed content to assert one’s humanity is like solving an elaborate CAPTCHA.

Anyway, janky is often just a straightforward transformation of smooth, as illustrated by “lo-fi” being the name of an Instagram filter, as well as a keyword signifying the authorless sonic filler that populates lifeless Spotify playlists. Similarly, intentional typos and all-lowercase writing are transparent gimmicks which, as they become more recognizable, feel a bit tryhard, as does so much of what we encounter online, due to users’ growing ability to recognize cultural patterns and cheaply copy them, or wear them like Halloween costumes. Most people understand that smoking a cigarette is a way to look cool, and a multitude of such signifiers are now close at hand; digital posturing, unlike its physical counterpart, usually costs nothing. The term “tryhard” doesn’t deride effort itself, but rather a contextual dissonance, a clueless misplacement of that effort—and the worst kind of tryhard is one who is just savvy enough to think they’ve concealed their intentions: the lo-fi tryhard.

This is what Emily Segal’s essay on tasteslop recently articulated: the glib exploitation of legible cultural symbols in digital space. “Tasteslop is what happens when the classifying function is automated, overly explicit, or reduced to spitting out rote taste tokens,” Segal writes, describing its production as a mechanical process of copying and pasting. “Tasteslop is cultural capital after extraction, after it’s been through the blender.” Chayka’s piece on lo-fi aesthetics cites this essay, equating tasteslop with “instantaneous slickness,” but tasteslop’s definition doesn’t require it to be high-resolution, and tasteslop doesn’t need to be AI-generated either (an “influencer dinner for Claude at a classy restaurant” fits the definition). Tasteslop probably just happens to be glossy as a result of who’s using it and what they think is “tasteful”—a long hangover from the 2010s millennial aesthetic, which furnished much of tasteslop’s raw material.

REVOLT AGAINST THE MILLENNIAL AESTHETIC

The millennial aesthetic, as described by Molly Fischer in this piece from March 2020 (the very final days of the “long 2010s”), is a useful reference point for Chayka’s lo-fi thesis as well as tasteslop, both of which point to the fallout from digitally-induced cultural legibility. The millennial aesthetic wasn’t just a visual style—pastel colors, sans serif fonts, hard edges, flat design—but a structural product of Instagram and other social media that defined the decade. Fischer writes,

“‘Instagrammable’ is a term that does not mean ‘beautiful’ or even quite ‘photogenic’; it means something more like ‘readable.’ The viewer could scroll past an image and still grasp its meaning, e.g., ‘I saw fireworks,’ ‘I am on vacation,’ or ‘I have friends.’”

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Polymarket calls itself a “truth machine.” It first rose to prominence during the 2024 presidential election by appearing to be a more accurate source of truth than conventional polling; the website’s financial dashboard aesthetic evokes the stock market and thus creates an exaggerated sense of market efficiency. The utopian promise of prediction markets—and yes, it is funny to say that a gambling platform has a utopian promise—is that, as usage grows and every aspect of reality is reframed as a bettable event, we will progress toward an efficient market for the state of everything and the probability of future events, a perfect model of the world derived from the wisdom of the crowd, who are all wagering on everything all the time (this is essentially the what the stock market already accomplishes for financial reality, and what FanDuel/DraftKings metadata does for high-profile sports). Today, it might be elections and wars; tomorrow, the actions of public figures and celebrities; and eventually, granular details of the local and the personal, with an app setting an over/under line on how many minutes you’ll be late to meet me for lunch, and our other friends betting on it. Then the Polymarket truth machine will have fulfilled its destiny, its model of reality complete at the highest possible resolution.

The only problem is that, as you descend this ladder, the manipulation opportunities increase dramatically. Returning to Levine’s argument, elections, wars, and stock prices are “big realities,” virtually impossible to manipulate relative to any potential betting payout. But we have already seen Coinbase’s CEO intentionally recite a string of words on an earnings call because there was a Polymarket bet on whether or not he’d say them. Any event subject to individual control is a comparable “small reality,” all too easy to tweak. Sports betting is similar: It only works at all because professional and collegiate leagues are as regulated and rule-bound as they are, but within that universe too there are bigger realities, like which team wins a game, and smaller realities, like whether a specific baseball pitch is a ball or a strike—the latter being what was manipulated in a recent MLB scandal. “Now prediction markets exist and are a big business,” Levine writes, “so they are not only in the business of predicting reality: They’re also in the business of changing it.” I wrote last week about the ongoing divergence of physical and digital reality, suggesting that most social networks begin by straightforwardly reflecting the outside world to generate their content but grow progressively self-referential. More of what you see on Instagram now is imagery that was created for Instagram. The lament that more and more of the internet is fake is a lazy critique, typically meaning that AI slop and deepfakes are overwhelming and undermining the authentic (as if most of the human-made content is much better). A more valid version of this complaint would be that the internet has encouraged more of the world to disingenuously posture for it, offline as well as online, and that more and more of what we see is made specifically for networked circulation. The fallacy of prediction markets is the belief that distortion and data corruption only flow in one direction; that the physical world is inherently “real” and that only a digital representation of it risks being fake or inauthentic. The internet in its mature form exports plenty of artifice back the other way; a CEO reciting gibberish words on an earnings call is its own kind of slop. Polymarket’s terminal state is being a perfect model of a world it has created itself.

Become a paid subscriber to access more essays (about half of Kneeling Bus posts, and many of the best ones, are for paid subscribers only), or just because you appreciate this newsletter and want to support it.

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Reads:

• Robert Mariani on American Diner Gothic. “Regional accents and identities and cultures are vanishing. Liquid Internet flows into this void as a mass-vision event, the mythic power of fandom and content overflowing from and washing over millions of minds in placeless America, the new soul of a soulless world.”

• The Madison Square Garden surveillance machine. “The atmosphere is so rooted in paranoia that former Knicks players warn one another about rooms being bugged, and staffers worry about being watched when they go out to local bars.”

• “I wonder how irreversibly cooked our brains are as the first generation to have memorized the geography of non-existent spaces.”

“I think McLuhan was right that the post-literate age will have more in common with primitive society than it does with the industrial modernity that produced it. After writing, we will once again live in a world defined entirely by our direct sensory experience. But now, our direct sensory experience won’t be of the things that physically surround us, but the images streaming through our phones.”

Indeed, the digital era of post-literacy does seem to “rhyme” with the pre-literate culture of the distant past—both are apparently characterized by this direct experience of one’s environment instead of the rational detachment and abstraction that the written word facilitates. A huge obvious difference between the two is that the present era was built on top of literacy, and there’s an ongoing discussion about whether we’re leaving that behind due to civilizational progress (as represented by AI) or the onset of a new dark age. Another major difference, following from this one, is that what we experience directly is completely different now: “In the same way that a Tolstovian peasant has a deep, spiritual knowledge of the land,” Kriss writes, “we will have a deep, spiritual knowledge of (AI-generated Italian Brainrot meme) Tung Tung Tung Sahur…We will no longer try to think outside of the things we can see. It’s just that absolutely nothing we see will be real.”

I like the Tolstoy peasant analogy because it suggests a similarity between soil and internet content, each functioning as both a ground (literal or figurative) upon which everyday life plays out—something deeply familiar that we’re always at least passively aware of—and a fertile bed out of which something more useful and interesting might potentially grow. That seems to be the current promise of AI, at least: reframing the garbage-clogged internet as an input rather than the end product. Shit as fertilizer.

Dirt is also despised by the modern subject, particularly when it’s out of place (as if there is a right or wrong place for such a fundamental element of life). In 1989, Frederic Jameson described the thoroughly modernized world of the late 20th century as “a more fully human world than the older one, but one in which ‘culture’ has become a veritable ‘second nature.’” At the time, he was describing something closer to the human-made built environment, to which “culture” was still tightly coupled. But in the decades since, the internet has arguably formed yet another layer on top of that—a “third nature” that makes the built environment itself feel somehow natural or organic (the original nature, meanwhile, is largely invisible, or encountered as artifice). As late as the mid-’00s, digital reality was still relatively thin, in retrospect, but today it is a robust world of its own, finally possible to inhabit for extended periods of time, not just distinct from “nature” but from the broader physical world.

Part of the dream of AI, then, is that it will constitute yet another layer—one that will relegate the internet as we know it to the background. But if that happens, where will we spend all our time?

IMAGINING THE OUTSIDE WORLD FROM THE COUCH

“The internet is/isn’t real life” has remained an unresolved paradox (and basically a meme unto itself) for many years, although I haven’t heard it as much lately, and now that I think about it, you’d sound a bit clueless to recite such a platitude in 2026. It’s less about what the answer is, and more that it’s beside the point.

One can debate when exactly the internet coalesced into the totalizing environment it is today—I would argue for 2020—but it’s hard to deny that it happened. If someone tells you they’re averaging 16 hours of screen time a day, you might find it disturbing, but you would believe it. The desire to somehow escape from the online simulacrum seems to intensify in direct proportion to our ability to exist entirely within it. We long for a bygone world, in other words. Now “touching grass” means leaving your house and going for a walk on the paved sidewalks of a city, and is a break from the internet in the same way that going camping at a state park is a break from the modernized world.

Traditionally, the internet depended on the outside world—the so-called real world—for its content. Every social network began with users earnestly documenting what was happening in their lives (as epitomized by the early stereotype of Twitter just being people posting what they ate for lunch), but soon evolved its own set of conventions and norms that represented the world in a more stylized and distorted way. In 2012, Instagram may have been a visual index of the places where Instagram users spent time, but today it’s just an index of its own affordances and algorithmic incentives that happens to pull in external material, much of which was consciously designed to get posted on Instagram.

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Revisiting that Real Life essay five years later, it strikes me as an inflection point in the trend it attempts to describe. Back then, Allbird sneakers and Mark Zuckerberg’s Gap hoodies were still both amusing shorthand for tech fashion; today, the Allbirds company is circling the drain and Zuckerberg wears carefully curated post-streetwear attire. By 2021, tech was getting into fashion, but in its own alienating way, recognizing yet another commons to enclose. “Fashion is a mode of display that enriches public space and a culture’s shared meanings, but as it enters the culture, it ceases to strictly belong to anyone,” I wrote in the essay. “It creates positive externalities—benefits for which people don’t have to explicitly pay, but can enjoy just by being present in shared space.” The tech bro reinterprets this as pure consumption, the benefits of which are meant to accrue primarily to oneself. If the 2010s were about neglecting your personal appearance because you had bigger things to focus on and ZIRP money to grab with both fists, the 2020s seem to signify the decadent era that followed. By the fall of 2021, Facebook would rename itself Meta and cringely tag Balenciaga in a tweet about the dress code in the metaverse. The NYC-vs-SF cultural dichotomy and the stereotype of poorly dressed tech workers persists, but it is complicated by a growing subset of “taste bros” who don’t necessarily have good taste, but at least believe that they’re supposed to have it—a dangerous combination.

Today, there is a huge amount of discourse about taste that seems to largely unfold in the shadow of AI, which will either make taste much more or much less important. I’ve tried to write a longer piece about taste but I’m still not sure I want to feed the fire, plus it has become increasingly clear that people using the word to mean wildly different things, to the degree that any additional commentary risks talking past whatever it’s responding to. But let’s assume that taste means “aesthetic discerment,” or liking things that are good, and then we can ask the question that always puzzles me: If you know you don’t have good taste, why would you want it? If the goal is personal satisfaction, you might as well just enjoy whatever you enjoy. But if the goal is to gain some sort of status or advance in the world, then it would make more sense to work on the skills that will propel you (or your business) forward, and it’s probably no accident that this version of taste is almost entirely a matter of consumption—acquiring a set of signifiers, throwing money at a problem you don’t really want to solve yourself. Friend of Kneeling Bus @brb_irl had the best assessment of this, tweeting “I’m trying to make ‘tastecore’ (derogatory) a thing. It’s when your taste is just trying to be tasteful, but really it’s molded by market forces.” Now that is something that’s available to all of us. iykyk.

Become a paid subscriber to access more essays (about half of Kneeling Bus posts, and many of the best ones, are for paid subscribers only), or just because you appreciate this newsletter and want to support it.

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Reads:

• The rise of the Manhattan mega-mansion. How multi-unit buildings in NYC are bought and consolidated into much larger homes, thereby reducing the housing supply.

• ATMs didn’t kill bank teller jobs—the iPhone did (via Robin Sloan).

• Ben Davis on reality decay.

Around the new year, I was hearing a lot of predictions about how offline is the new online, and how people were finally detaching from the internet and hoping to build up their neglected IRL identities (I was reading these predictions online, of course). Some people are indeed doing this successfully and thriving—no one actually knows because we don’t hear from them anymore—but I’m skeptical that this is happening at sufficient scale to constitute a trend. I am least confident that enough other people are ratcheting up their digital intake to offset anyone else’s reduced internet diet. As much as the Polymarket Situation Room annoys me, I have to at least acknowledge that they’re dialed into the zeitgeist. It’s not so much that people want to log off as that they want to be on the internet together, or somewhere other than alone in front of a laptop on their couch at home—again, a form of communal viewing that sports fans have always had access to. This is also why so many newsletters and internet presences have introduced in-person events, which generally seem quite popular: People understand that they are always on the internet, even when they’re not looking at a screen. Might as well embrace it.

Indeed, “monitoring the situation” is surely the real trend of 2026 so far, and now that we have that term, we can starting designing the world accordingly. Perhaps one person staring at one screen is an obsolete modality, one that has seen little innovation since the iPhone debuted. How might we optimize our intake? When the Apple Vision Pro came out two years ago, I noted that it was often being used to look at more screens in virtual space, and I have also argued that screens don’t appear in our dreams because the dream implies that we are already inside of the screen. Already well accustomed to managing multiple feeds and tabs on our personal devices, or watching movies while scrolling, the market is now responding by recognizing that a single person can be worth more than two eyeballs, and that the existing media environment hasn’t yet optimized the amount of information that can be stuffed into us. We’ve had 24/7 cable news our whole lives but now we have similarly round-the-clock markets and their derivatives, always fluctuating and updating, of which Polymarket and its ilk are most representative. A couple of months ago, Reggie James built a “situation monitor dashboard for the boys,” suggesting the business model of “making every man feel like he’s in the situation room for $50/month.” Borrowing so much of its aesthetic from sports gambling, again, the north star for situation monitoring is not just the 20th-century control room but the casino sportsbook, which truly fulfills the dream of wall-to-wall screens and their relevant metadata (a perfect setting in which to watch March Madness by the way), and the possibility that you could not just absorb it all but actually act upon it—that you, as a human, and not a computer, could take in all that extra information and then do something useful with it. In the meantime, until we figure out what that something is, we’ll keep monitoring.

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Reads:

• Sam Kriss hangs out in San Francisco and reports on the tech zeitgeist for Harper’s. A good examination of what “agency” means to the people who love saying it.

• An ode to plugs and cords by the great For Scale newsletter. “It is completely swagless of an experience to tap a lamp accidentally and have it blast a new level of light, or turn off completely.”

• A polemic against the usage of “-bro” terminology. “The ambiguity appeals to the essential paranoid fantasy of the internet, that a mass of similarly behaving others are conspiring against you, and that you are not one of them even though you do a lot of the same things.”

The aforementioned TikTok exhibits many of the qualities that define life on the internet today: the confrontation with vast troves of data, the crossover between distinct cinematic universes, and above all, a narrowing of perspective—pointlessness taken to the extreme. At a moment when computers are poised to not only perform this kind of task in mere milliseconds, but to take over our day jobs and hobbies as well, it’s somehow even more thrilling to see a human do it. We might expect this ruthless computer logic to eventually pull everything into its grand deterministic machine, but the crooked timber of humanity is poor scaffolding for such a project; for every fully rationalized system that emerges, expect a corresponding increase in nonsense, horseplay, and mysticism. What is prediction market betting if not stubbornly spurning the hive mind’s consensus to assert your own unique but flawed perspective? A pessimistic assessment of this situation is that humans will eventually just be the decorative ornamentation for the digital Stack—a hypothesis that an hour or two watching TikTok certainly supports—but at least that’s something we’re good at. AI might rugpull your productive value to society but will it ever know why it’s amusing to waste hundreds of hours sifting through the warehouses of pop culture detritus to find a single throwaway frame from an ‘00s TV show? That’s the kind of meaning that only humans can create.

I recently rewatched High Fidelity, the 2000 film adaptation of Nick Hornby’s 1995 novel about a guy named Rob who owns a record store and obsessively discusses music and pop culture with everyone he knows. My friend called it the last movie before the internet. In one scene that stood out this time, a TV show comes up in conversation when Rob is on a date, causing him to frantically gesticulate and ultimately interrupt his friends as he tries to remember the actor who starred in the show (McGoohan!). For generations who came of age during the ‘90s and early ‘00s, amassing such encyclopedic knowledge of pop culture and being able to spontaneously retrieve it in social situations was important in a way that seems increasingly absurd (and, let’s be honest, often seemed absurd back then too, something High Fidelity captures). The twilight of the analog fostered a relationship to media that would seemingly become obsolete once everyone had a smartphone and could Google every factoid that no longer needed to reside in their minimally-furnished memory—but that knowledge paradoxically feels even more valuable now, however anachronistic. Remembering Some Guys is great conversation, and hunting down a baseball game from an old Office episode is great content, specifically because of what about them continues to elude technology. Look at what computers are automating now to predict what humans will stubbornly insist on still doing for fun ten years from now.

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Reads:

• Robin Sloan on the persistent boundary between the physical and digital, and how each might evolve in the near future. “Software cannot, in fact, eat this world. Software can reflect it; encroach upon it; more than anything, distract us from it. But the real physical world is indigestible.”

• Mike Pepi proposes a slop tax to reign in the negative externalities of AI-driven cultural production. “In the future, access to non-AI-slop, authentic human creativity may be a luxury good sold at a premium. The slop tax is an attempt to democratize the access to this creative production before it becomes rarefied and accessible to only the most elite consumers.”

• Why so many industrial control rooms were seafoam green.

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Airport lounges are one of the great evergreen topics of internet discourse, maybe because the experience of the lounge mirrors social media itself, in the sense that your value as an individual is quantified and then publicly displayed to your peers, often with degrading results. The airport lounge and the social network both began as embellished limbo zones—places to spend time while on the way to something better, or in the dead time between stretches of “real life”—but both gradually evolved into more enveloping types of space, not quite destinations but self-contained universes where you could forget for a while that you were waiting for something else. We still reassure ourselves that the internet is not reality, at least when it’s making us feel bad, and we might similarly dismiss airport lounges as a ruse of advanced consumerism when we’re confronted with a status tier that excludes us. But as the spirit of each encroaches upon more areas of life, it grows harder to maintain one’s belief in the sanctity of some purer, un-gamified reality.

We’re fascinated by airport lounges, that is, because they’ve spread everywhere, having long since escaped the confines of the airport. In the wake of the pandemic, mid-2021, I started noticing this after a short stretch in which I went to the lounge-filled US Open and also encountered an open-air Chase Sapphire lounge in the middle of the South Street Seaport. NYC’s grimy facades seemed to conceal an archipelago of bland backrooms that an AmEx card can get you into. Lounges represent the possibility of physically inhabiting a brand, the power of embodied presence as a superior form of attention: “The final form of the physical store is an environment where prospective or existing customers just hang out, marinating in the brand without necessarily buying anything,” I wrote at the time. A company like American Express, whose product is not merchandise or even tangible services but an amorphous and ever-expanding idea of individual presence in the consumer sphere, are perfectly suited to provide this.

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That was my second encounter with a candy-colored early-‘00s iMac in the last two weeks. An identical one appeared in a play called “Initiative” I’d just seen, currently showing at the Public Theater for another week, which takes place over four years of high school between 2000 and 2004. The play is a coming-of-age story about a group of friends who live in suburban California and bond over an ongoing Dungeons & Dragons game that runs the course of their high school years. The play was excellent (and five hours long) but what initially interested me about it was the choice to set it in the early ‘00s, not just because I’ve been paying attention to how aging millennials like myself are reflecting upon our own past and narrativizing it, but because those years remain a surprisingly under-historicized era—now as far in the past as the ‘70s were in 2001, yet somehow not feeling all that distant or entirely separate from the present, the way prior decades did (in contrast, the ‘80s already felt quite dated in the ‘90s). The lime green iMac and similar props, along with constant AOL Instant Messenger usage and occasional references to background events like 9/11, thus perform an important function in the play: Without those details, the setting might pass for contemporary. The mall attire that the suburban teenage characters wear, for example, represents the early ‘00s but has also returned in various forms in the years since, and still does. You don’t have to look too hard to find “Y2K fashion” or cargo pants today.

“Initiative” is not specifically about the internet but it captures the technology’s rapidly growing role in early ‘00s social life. The specific time period it portrays, between the summers of 2000 and 2004, bookended by misplaced Y2K anxiety and arrival of Facebook, was solidly the AOL Instant Messenger era: AIM was released in 1997, peaked in 2001, and declined more rapidly after 2005, losing ground to SMS texting and social media. Early in the play, one character’s younger brother helps him download it, telling him that “AIM isn’t nerdy, it’s just a way to talk to people online.” The play is peppered with such amusing reminders of what it felt like to be figuring out the internet, before it was all so obvious (“message boards aren’t real life!”), and the janky early-’00s internet forms a backdrop for the characters’ similarly awkward adolescence: simultaneous spoken AIM conversations overlapping with in-person dialogue, case-sensitive usernames with underscores projected onto the walls of the set, Goatse links spelled out verbally by a character.

I rarely think about AIM today, despite the huge role it played in my life as a teenager. And when I saw the lime green iMacs I realized I never think about those anymore either. Napster endures in memory as an inflection point for media consumption and the music industry. But overall, that era will increasingly seem like a transitional phase, more difficult to place as time passes and history is divided into two parts, before and after the internet. September 11 was the ultimate historical event, meanwhile, occurring right in the middle of all this, during AIM’s peak year of usage. Perhaps 9/11 has drawn all the air out of the room, dominating our memory of that time so completely that it’s hard to see anything that didn’t align with the seriousness it dictated. Any work of fiction set around that time must carefully measure its proximity to that event, or risk being somehow “about” 9/11—a problem that ‘80s and ‘90s period pieces rarely face.

The migration of culture into digital space has surely made the recent past feel more ahistorical. In that sense, the early ‘00s were the end of something as well as the beginning of something else. It’s not that any less happened then but that more of what did happen resists straightforward depiction. The challenge of portraying online activity in film and TV has always fascinated me, because it raises uncomfortable questions about how we use that technology as well as how storytelling works. Showing a screen on another screen usually feels like the worst solution to the problem. Another option is to set the story in a time or place where screens don’t exist. There is an archaic but persistent idea that any drama worth portraying happens in real life, not on a screen, but that is probably just a holdover from when screens were one-way channels of static, pre-packaged entertainment, not portals to a dynamic environment where a lot does happen. People like to point out that screens never appear in our dreams, suggesting that deep down we all long to get off our phones, but as I’ve wondered before, maybe it’s just that the dream is the screen, our phones framing our reality so comprehensively that we already think we live inside of them.

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In the movies and TV that came out during the early ‘00s, when AIM still reigned, I began noticing that digital activity was underrepresented, as if pretending that important feature of contemporary life simply didn’t exist. As the internet became more and more central to everyday life, cinematic portrayals of that life lagged behind and thus began to diverge from reality (there has been progress more recently, but they still lag). Putting AIM conversations or social media activity onstage may be an inherently awkward proposition, but “Initiative” at least embraces the challenge and does not seem embarrassed to acknowledge that for teenagers in 2003, many of their important conversations would have happened in that medium. That this move still seems notable in 2025 suggests that dramatic depictions of digital activity need to catch up to reality.

“It’s hard to be nostalgic for what you don’t even remember,” I wrote in a recent column for Vice about that Edward Sharpe and the Magnetic Zeros video from 2010 going viral. “With mass media in decline and digital platforms having taken their place, reliable narrators and shared reality are elusive, replaced by atomized units of content that vanish and reappear in an endless cycle.” Our failure to represent contemporary reality in media is a complicated problem because the media itself has also warped our ability to see it clearly, and it’s possible that every subsequent era will share this same ahistorical quality as a result.

At one point in “Initiative,” a new kid from New York City arrives at their California high school and enters dressed like a member of the Strokes, in contrast to everyone else’s humdrum Gap and Pacific Sunwear wardrobes. I took it as a nod to the image of the ‘00s that has actually endured—now rebranded as “indie sleaze”—but which felt quite distant from most people’s everyday experience back then. And that aesthetic itself was borrowed wholesale from the ‘70s.

The early ‘00s, again, are too easily dismissed as pre-9/11 frivolity and post-9/11 tension, but the experience of everyday life was then undergoing a transformation that merits reexamination now that we’re firmly on the other side of it. As “Initiative” shows, they were the last years before the internet, in a sense: No one had a smartphone, screens were usually shared or viewed communally, and going online was less a destination unto itself than something you did while you were bored at home. In short, life was different than now. Today, the internet encourages us to see the past as a soup of content that mixes an infinite variety of times and places; our immersion in that mixture is so complete that it now inhibits our historical sensibility and our ability to maintain a strong sense of temporal difference. A play like “Initiative,” by looking back twenty years and restoring that sense of difference, is both an example of how to revisit the past and a glimpse of what was already then slipping away.

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Thompson thus articulates a popular narrative about post-pandemic life and runs through the usual talking points—the death of partying, the rise of wellness culture, the broader atomization of society—before settling on the somewhat obvious explanation that everyone is basically just addicted to their phones, and therefore alone more of the time (but likely still interacting with others online, whatever that’s worth). They are alone but not lonely, content in their solitude, hence the “monk” comparison. The specter of all the disaffected young men who have gone out and caused real trouble throughout history is absent here. These men are harmless.

Then Thompson gets to the “casino,” telling an equally familiar story about the recent explosion of gambling and its ongoing spread into mainstream culture. “Like an unstoppable virus, this logic is infecting more and more industries,” he writes. Are the industries being infected, or are they the lab from which the virus was leaked? It’s a cliche to claim that the “whole economy is a casino” but present trends are arguably the natural outgrowth of more legitimate economic activity—decades of deregulation, financialization, and the gamification of consumer experience. Ordinary Americans, who have been nudged further into risk assets and out of everything else by policy and macroeconomic forces, and progressively educated about options and more exotic derivatives, were already primed for Robinhood when it appeared in the latter half of the ZIRP decade. Like Zoom and DoorDash, the pandemic came at a perfect time for the Robinhood business model, which absorbed a surfeit of free time during pandemic lockdowns and a subsequent burst of stimulus money. The ascent of crypto enthusiasm followed a similar trajectory and it all fed into 2021’s blowout ZIRP party.

It’s easy to lump the gambling phenomenon together with risky financial speculation, probably because Robinhood, FanDuel, and Polymarket have converged on the same app-based UX, and because people like Dave Portnoy talk about them the same way, but unlike crypto and meme stocks, gambling is not a bubble fueled by easy money. People are gambling more because of deregulation and heavy marketing, not because they noticed a memecoin suddenly doubling in value. The upside of sports betting is also much lower. Unlike many investments, it usually has negative expected value; it’s harder to imagine that it will make you rich. But it is all similar in the sense that the traditional stigma attached to financial risk-taking has faded for the middle class.

App-based gambling is better understood as Advanced Content—not unlike porn—more addictive than other screen-based diversions but different in degree, not in kind (both are also male-coded, which make them useful examples for any inquiry into a crisis of young men). Like other types of content, these forms are increasingly ubiquitous, harder to avoid if you log a lot of screen time, always close at hand and no longer confined to the dark alleys of cyberspace. Advanced Content is more powerful than the regular kind and can negatively impact your life beyond just wasting your time or making you angry.

“Risk-aversion in the social sphere has combined with their risk-chasing in the market,” Thompson writes, “and it’s created a genuinely berserk modern life script.” It’s unclear, however, that gambling on your phone is something that keeps you home by yourself. There’s evidence that sports betting also introduces new reasons to leave the house, such as going to watch a meaningless non-conference college football game. Like TikTok, it’s a form of content that you wish would remain behind closed doors, but instead pollutes public space by ruining sports bars. The Zynternet bros certainly seem to be out and about, un-monkified.

The big stretch in Thompson’s argument, though, is that digital risk-taking is a broad response to the declining accessibility of middle-class hallmarks like home ownership and having children, which “feel like luxuries that require the sort of unlikely windfalls that only come from risky speculation.” This implies that young men are effectively buying lottery tickets as hail mary passes to land the white picket fence dream, an absurd scenario that other parts of the same essay cast doubt upon. Having introduced his two exemplary types, the Gooner and the Gambler, Thompson focuses on the latter, which actually muddles his point by suggesting that there is a productive goal (making money) rather than just an endless flow of content. The Gooner actually offers a better support for his argument than the gambling addict, because there is no pretense of any higher purpose, just digital immersion for its own sake.

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Yesterday I went into my usual Chipotle in the middle of a torrential downpour and was next in line when the store started flooding and the staff announced they would close. This Chipotle bookends Williamsburg’s slop corridor, which also has a Sweetgreen, Dig Inn, Cava, and Just Salad, one after another on a single block (there’s also a WeWork thrown in for good measure). As you might imagine, there were hardly any people out in the storm, but the block was far from desolate because DoorDash and UberEats were popping off and delivery bikers were swarming. This was only a more extreme case of a pattern I’ve observed occasionally in NYC, more often than I’d expect and much more since 2020, particularly in bad weather, where I suddenly notice that the only other people around are delivery guys. Whenever it happens I picture apartment buildings containing row after row of adults tucked into bed or cozy on the couch with multiple screens arranged around themselves, having ceded the nighttime streets to the pleasure seekers, the indigent, and these “essential workers” who move ghostlike through the dark, not meant to interact with anyone else but to quietly uphold a fragile supply chain that ends at every residential front door. That this all seems too ordinary to be worth pointing out is a sign of how complete the transformation has been, as this Atlantic piece notes. Today, 30 percent of the orders at full-service restaurants are eaten somewhere else. The widely discussed explosion of post-pandemic food delivery has this second order effect that is still less acknowledged: the ad hoc reallocation of people and activity in urban space, the thinning out of once-vibrant zones, the reconstitution of that life within the domestic sphere, and the recoding of vacated public space for new purposes.

In the spirit of Halloween, a reader (thank you Samir) sent me a surprising post about the decline of trick-or-treating in many American neighborhoods. It’s not necessarily that fewer people are trick-or-treating but that certain “destination neighborhoods” have become magnets for the tradition, offering exquisite decorations, top-notch candy, and vibrant crowds, and thereby attracting families who drive in from elsewhere to partake rather than staying in their own neighborhoods. This is a self-reinforcing phenomenon, with the destination neighborhoods investing more in the experience as more people show up and everywhere else getting worse as trick-or-treating dwindles—a winner-take-all dynamic that is especially prevalent in the social media age. The best candidates for destination neighborhoods, of course, are affluent walkable communities, the kind that are also thriving more broadly. Near the end of this piece, the author describes his new neighborhood as a place where nobody trick-or-treats, mentioning that he didn’t bother putting up Halloween decorations this year because no one would notice. I couldn’t help but imagine similar dead or dying zones across America, incrementally drained of the small civic pleasures that are theoretically available to everyone, the social version of a small town deindustrializing. It’s easy to simply blame the internet, although this doesn’t seem that straightforward; the internet, however, is not good at accommodating negative space, training us to stop seeing sites of inactivity and always directing our gaze toward the spectacular. When the void finally materializes, we’ve usually already departed ourselves. With any luck, there’s a Spirit Halloween ready to fill it.

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Reads:

• Dean Kissick on the rise of the “vulgar image,” the visual culture of AI, and the revolt against good taste. “Culture has been cultivated and refined to the point of maddening blandness, and the Vulgar Image is a reaction against this tasteful mediocrity.”

• Kelly Pendergrast on Bryan Johnson and the dream of collective blood circulation. “The life extensionist biohacking of Silicon Valley’s young plasma crowd exists somewhere between the fluid interchange of the communist Martian horizon and the deranged linear cruelty of the human centipede.”

• A brief history of the Factory Pomo aesthetic.

I’ve never been able to fall asleep listening to music or podcasts. I wish I could, because then I would drift off to something like Northwoods Baseball Sleep Radio, which airs broadcasts of fake minor league baseball games, recorded for that purpose. Content stirs me up rather than winding me down, unfortunately. I do love my white noise though. When I’m somewhere nature can provide a background soundscape, even better.

The sounds don’t have to be natural, though: I could easily fall asleep to the background noise of a casino floor, I recently realized—that mixture of muffled chatter, slot machine jingling and chiming, and the clinking of glasses has always struck me as peaceful, like the manmade equivalent of crickets chirping. I’m not sure why it appeals to me but I also know I’m not alone, because there are casino ASMR tracks on YouTube. I don’t think wanting this is a sign of a gambling addiction. Counterintuitively, there is something about a casino that is calming, that evokes a simpler time, the same way a ‘90s mall does. Maybe it’s because the logic of gambling increasingly suffuses everyday life—not just explicitly, in the form of betting apps and prediction markets, but implicitly in cryptocurrency and the UX of platforms like Robinhood and the broader logic of investing. And gambling, like work and shopping and so much else, is no longer confined to the physical spaces built to accommodate it. Because all of this accompanies us everywhere we go, inhabiting the digital aether that we access constantly through our phone screens, all mixed together into an experiential sludge, it’s a relief to recapture that fading feeling of things being in their designated places, separated and not everywhere at once.

Casinos are hauntological, a concept introduced by Derrida and popularized by Mark Fisher—they are residual elements of a cultural past that continue to haunt the present, serving as reminders of an alternate future that was not realized. Casinos are still widespread, yes, and even proliferating. But, like malls and offices, again, such spaces no longer contain their programmed activities the way they once did, instead functioning as relay points for networked information, networked people, and networked money, all of which circulate ever more quickly. Their original lost purpose gives those spaces an archaic quality, however subtle.

Casinos are also soporific by design. In Learning from Las Vegas (1972), Robert Venturi and Denise Scott Brown wrote that casino interiors, “in their exaggerated separation from the environment, have the quality of an oasis.” This particular type of oasis, which the authors call “big low space,” is dim and dreamlike:

“The combination of darkness and enclosure of the gambling room and its subspaces makes for privacy, protection, concentration, and control. The intricate maze under the low ceiling never connects with outside light or outside space. This disorients the occupant in space and time. One loses track of where one is and when one is. Time is limitless, because the light of noon and midnight are exactly the same. Space is limitless, because the artificial light obscures rather than defines its boundaries…Walls and ceilings do not serve as reflective surfaces for light but are made absorbent and dark. Space is enclosed but limitless, because its edges are dark.”

Casino space, in other words, induces a kind of noctural floating sensation. “You are no longer in the bounded piazza but in the twinkling lights of the city at night.”

Now, casino logic pervades contemporary experience; we fall asleep in the casino every night and wake up there again every morning, but without any of the sensory comforts that help take the edge off. Dreaming about bets is the new dreaming about social media. As I wrote last year, the rest of America is becoming more like Las Vegas, and vice versa. A massive NBA gambling scandal comes as no surprise.

It’s more and more obvious that gambling is a pillar of the post-pandemic zeitgeist, and there are plenty of thinkpieces pointing this out. To make a more respectable case for this phenomenon, you might say “prediction markets” instead of gambling. Indeed, prediction markets are gambling’s generalized form, but like using “blockchain” instead of “cryptocurrency,” the term also implies a set of productive (or at least non-speculative) applications for something with a sketchy reputation. I wouldn’t rule out the productive potential, either. Polymarket has become my first stop for assessing election probabilities and various other current events at a glance.

Alex Danco, longtime tech blogger and new editor-at-large at venture capital firm a16z, recently published an essay declaring that “prediction” is the successor to postmodernism (and modernism before it). Prediction, Danco writes, “is the movement and meta-aesthetic that defines our main branch of society going forward; about how we interpret the world and participate in the AI century.” The word “gambling” only appears twice in the essay, but its main point is that the broader logic of prediction markets is a transformative movement that will encompass every facet of culture and society, as modernism and postmodernism did. This is probably an overstatement: Prediction markets are probably more similar to a specific technology under the modernist umbrella, but Danco is correct that they represent a new way of seeing the world. “How early or late you are to something is now an essential component of your relationship to that thing,” he writes—an ethos that unites the hipster and the VC.

In a less optimistic assessment this week, Matthew Gasda attributes the rise of prediction markets to economic precarity and the downward mobility of the American middle class, for which various forms of gambling are meant to compensate as a source of easy money. Gasda describes the prediction “movement” as an end product of an information economy where every event has a digital footprint:

“The emergence of prediction betting markets like Polymarket, Kalshi, and Robinhood, moreover, suggests that an entirely novel economic system—the casino economy—has emerged from the information economy, the same way the information economy emerged from the midcentury industrial economy.”

Danco makes a similar argument, using postmodernism in place of the information economy. Speculation has long since infused mainstream American society; many would argue that this is a hallmark of postmodern culture, not a path out of it—what happens when information is fully decoupled from its physical sources. If postmodernism was all low-stakes surface and simulacra, “where your consumption was wrapped in an unthreatening fuzzy blanket,” then prediction is a reassertion of the underlying reality, where losing and winning are both possible.

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I rarely work in coffee shops anymore because the vibes are usually awful, for the obvious reason that any coffee shop where you’re allowed to bring your laptop is full of other people who have also done the same, and the kind of work usually being done in a coffee shop is what became derisively known in post-pandemic parlance as fake email jobs, following the explosion of remote employment and the contrast of the “essential worker” designation. Whenever I overhear a loud Zoom call in a coffee shop, I always have the same thought: The less I know about this person’s job, the better. And they would probably say the same about me. I’ve come to think of physical offices as fulfilling the same purpose as trash containerization: keeping that category of activity in its own rightful space where no one else has to see it, thereby upholding the delicate spatial balance between public and private activity that makes city life tolerable. One of the great cultural shifts precipitated by COVID was the accelerated breakdown of physical boundaries between activities that had been traditionally separate—both at home and in public—and that is especially visible in the transformation of urban space into an ad hoc distributed office for people who lack anywhere better to work. The well-documented harm of remote work, which extends the logic of email to its extreme, is that you never disconnect to a satisfactory degree and that work breaks free of any remaining temporal or spatial constraints to follow you everywhere in your pocket.

If we can containerize trash, perhaps knowledge work and other activities that have diffused into the ambient experience of public space should be understood similarly. In an essay about the current feeling of the city, the Meals Meals Food newsletter considers the apparent backlash against SubwayTakes, which is quintessential NYC internet content in ways both good and bad. The incessant encroachment of work upon the rest of life, he writes, is “perhaps why we lash out when we see someone making short form video content on the subway, once a liminal space between work and life, now turned into both by a man who couldn’t make either work on their own.” Such liminal space is a defining pattern of post-2020 urbanism. Choices about which types of activities are appropriate for different types of space, of course, are in the eye of the beholder, and much of the traditional usage was largely upheld by norms and conventions that the pandemic disrupted. Those favored uses also raise questions about who has the means to claim space for themselves in the first place. In her book Virtue Hoarders, Catherine Liu emphasizes the yuppie phenomenon of the 1980s as a turning point for the bifurcating middle class, writing that yuppies “helped to birth a new world for capitalism, a world of public austerity and private luxury,” which has only solidified in the time since, even if seems to have reclaimed that abandoned public space for itself. Getting piles of trash off the street could be a small reversal of that paradigm, at least in theory; the forms of luxury consumption that the yuppies pioneered have only proliferated, meanwhile, and unlike knowledge work these are mostly still grounded in physical space (even if TikTokers do call Manhattan “Work Island” on TikTok). An ever-present, free-floating anxiety about your job may just be the price of getting to play outside.

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Reads:

• Sachin Benny on prediction markets and sports gambling as a form of simulated reality. “Markets continually invent new edges for bettors—new niches, more obscure sports, and finer-grained bettable units. As these edges multiply, they create conditions for Truman Show–like tournaments that exploit the asymmetry of knowledge between the bettor and the game.”

• Karl Ove Knausgaard on the technological disenchantment of everyday experience and how to restore it (featuring a pilgrimage to visit the great James Bridle). “While knowledge has no particular time or place and can be transmitted, experience is tied to a specific time and place and can never be repeated. For the same reason, it also can’t be predicted. Exactly those two dimensions—the unrepeatable and the unpredictable—are what technology abolishes.”

• A brief meditation on a beloved restaurant, Main Character Syndrome, and the misuse of public space.

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Moneyball and The Right Stuff are both stories about romantic traditions being discarded in favor of technocratic efficiency: the devaluation of tangible human skill and popular narratives as new kinds of machines and new sources of information diminish the significance of the prior regime’s heroic protagonists. I thought about both books this week when I saw the new Cracker Barrel logo and learned about the chain’s ill-fated rebrand, which seemed like yet another case of a prosaic new system trying to overthrow the old. Beneath the tedious culture war skirmish over the logo itself, there were fairly interesting tweaks to the physical restaurants, like making their interiors more brightly lit and less “cluttered”—Chipotlefying them, basically. Sounds like a bad idea, but then again, how often do you go to Cracker Barrel now? The other day, someone posted a meme about the debacle with the text, “Vintage food chains were an experience, modern food chains are an interface.” Unsurprisingly, one of the “vintage” examples was the iconic red-roofed Pizza Hut, which has become virtually synonymous with millennial nostalgia for childhood in the ‘80s and ‘90s—the hazy memory of red plastic cups and checkered tablecloths, endless afternoon pizza parties with everyone you knew, and lunch buffets that invited you to hang out indefinitely. At the end of the ‘90s, Pizza Hut pivoted away from all of this, embracing delivery and torching much of its distinctive visual identity. Now you can find Pizza Hut Express kiosks inside Target. All that is solid melts into air.

One lesson you could infer from Moneyball is the idea that something might have to become less fun in order to achieve greater success—which is a bummer when it involves baseball, or anything that exists for the purpose of entertainment. It’s an axiom of sports that winning is the ultimate goal, but you can still win boringly (whether that applies to the style of baseball Michael Lewis describes is subjective). The transformation of a chain like Pizza Hut is the restaurant equivalent of watching a batter foul off 10 pitches in a row before drawing a walk. It’s not that fun, but it represents a coherent strategy, the advantages of which are not necessarily perceptible to the naked eye. Chain restaurants, moreover, are arguably infrastructure as much as they’re places to hang out—additional links on the supply chain, an extension of the transportation system that supports the ultimate goal of mobility. Cracker Barrel itself originated as a scheme to increase gasoline sales by attracting highway travelers. Last year, I wrote about the origin of Starbucks as a turnkey third place and its evolution into a “transactional liminal space that happened to tolerate your presence,” supported by mobile ordering, drive-thrus, and hostile minimalist interiors that keep customers moving. Food chains were always interfaces but now the technology for making them function as such is more sophisticated. Contemporary life demands smooth spaces that we can glide across without stopping. When winning gets dull enough, you start to wonder what other goals are available.

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Reads:

• An analysis of NYC’s “urban textscape” using Google Street View imagery fed through text transcription software, with the goal of making every visible word on the city’s streets searchable.

• Michael Friedrich on the creeping privatization of New York’s public parks via the conservancy model. “There are, of course, some experiences that you just cannot realize without the paternalism of private enterprise.”

• The New American Inequality: The Cooled vs the Cooked.

The popularity of “slop” as a concept points to something significant about how we experience digital culture in 2025, just as “algorithms” did last decade. In each case, the term’s usage gets less precise as it’s overloaded with everything we hate about the internet. And while the word itself becomes less meaningful, it reveals more about how we feel. It’s tempting to define slop as Potter Stewart did pornography (“I know it when I see it”) but that would just further obfuscate an already murky concept. Today, “slop” implies AI more than anything else, and primarily refers to the AI-generated content that is flooding the internet. The subtext is that slop is being dumped on us against our will—that it’s something that happens to us—but that lets us off the hook far too easily. Most of the slop we see is still made and distributed by real people, often with no AI assistance. If AI is able to suddenly pump slop into our environment it’s only because we already turned on the faucets ourselves. Just think about all the garbage content that people you actually know send you via text, or the DMs that feel like they’re from bots but are actually from real people driven by platform incentives (Instagram, LinkedIn, Facebook, etc). The arrival of AI slop is simply the culmination of a long process of cultural slopification, and one of AI’s unexpected functions has been to launder the human slop so we can pretend we didn’t create it.

I call the REM song I heard slop because it’s a good example of this process: The automation of personal music listening, a process accelerated by Spotify but long underway in places like the supermarket aisles, is ultimately a process of “learning to care less about details and perceive distinct things as interchangeable,” as I wrote last year. In slop utopia, there is no right or wrong place or time for anything to happen, because context has been eliminated. The end result of this process, as Liz Pelly has described, is an opportunity for AI content creation, which barely registers because the human-made content with which it coexists has already become fungible. The appearance of AI slop is not something new, just a sign that an ongoing slopification process has been completed. REM is one of my favorite bands (although I don’t need to hear “End of the World” much more) but the key characteristic of slop is appearing for no reason. Slop can be made from high-quality ingredients, after all, if the context is properly eliminated. Interestingly, the word “slop” has drifted toward AI and away from its previous meaning, amorphous fast casual food served in bowls. The two uses are consistent in the sense that both describe the shapeless recombination of ingredients that may or may not be good into something that can be delivered efficiently via stream infrastructure. Reading an entire book, listening to an album, or even finishing a full-length film thus feels heroic now that most content is broken down into tiny bits. Avocado toast famously became the symbol of frivolous millennial excess, but at least the toast provided a solid foundation for the mash on top. Now we understand: There was more slopification yet to be done.

Become a paid subscriber to access more essays (about half of Kneeling Bus posts, and many of the best ones, are for paid subscribers only), or just because you appreciate this newsletter and want to support it.

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Reads:

• Overcrowded airport lounges as a sign of elite overproduction.

• Construction Physics analyzes whether selling federal land for homebuilding would actually help alleviate the housing shortage (answer: not really).

• The building in China where stolen iPhones end up.

“Gatekeeping” is an internet neologism that quietly split off a second definition from an existing word, gaining new relevance in post-pandemic culture. If gatekeeping originally meant holding a position of relative power and selectively excluding others from opportunities you controlled, it now increasingly means withholding information, or not wanting others to know what you know—trying to keep a secret in a world where secrets are generally doomed. This newer definition is a departure from the image a literal gatekeeper evokes: Today we might “gatekeep” a neighborhood restaurant, or music we like, or any other kind of hard-won cultural knowledge, in a quixotic bid to preserve some hypothetical personal edge that is always threatening to slip away (the word “taste” is often shorthand for this dilemma).

If, again, the older version of gatekeeping implied power, this newer version is a response to the loss of that power—the erosion of institutions and communities that actually had gates to keep and their ongoing replacement by an atomized landscape where information is the primary resource many of us can still claim. And our grip on even that is tenuous and fleeting, of course.

The internet redefined gatekeeping by repositioning the gates themselves—or eliminating them altogether—and thereby changing what could be gatekept and who could gatekeep it. Universal access became a normative (if often illusory) condition, rather than an exception, which was liberating at first and in many ways still is, especially for those who had previously been on the wrong side of it.

The digital democratization of information needs no explanation here, and its second-order effects have included the equally familiar destabilization of countless societal structures, a process often described using an array of colorful terms: disruption, fragmentation, flattening, enshittification, slop, etc. The broad replacement of institutions with platforms, a shift that Mike Pepi just wrote a great book about, tore down many longstanding walls (and gates) but also left us exposed to the outside elements, while substituting symbolic capital for material prosperity. By constantly threatening to commoditize everything that had formerly made us unique, and often succeeding, this process made information more valuable in the aggregate yet harder to possess, in the old sense, but because it was all we had left we still had to try. When there’s nothing else to gatekeep, we just gatekeep our selves.

THE COOL CRISIS

Nothing feels cool anymore and we wonder what changed. Something obvious that changed is the media infrastructure that transmits culture—the internet, and social media in particular, which erodes traditional cool in various ways: the glut of poorly filtered user-generated content, the incentive to overshare, the need for constant self-promotion. But that’s a matter for a separate post and others have summarized it well lately, such as this piece about the NBA’s swag crisis and this Blackbird Spyplane essay about a generalized version of the same, which identifies “a longing for some solid signal amid the idiot noise.” Importantly, the latter essay concludes with a call for better institutions that can support a caliber of culture that digital platforms inherently cannot (this is also Pepi’s argument in Against Platforms).

Diagnoses of this contemporary Crisis of Cool often praise the kind of gatekeeping that the internet has undermined. When every once-cool domain seems to be full of chumps, as is often the case, you can’t help but wish that some scrupulous door guy existed to turn most of them away. You also must consider the possibility that you would have been denied entry yourself. But even that would be okay: It’s better to know that something good is thriving without you than to be inside and realize it’s over, or even worse, that you had a hand in ruining it. To paraphrase Groucho Marx, maybe you don’t want to pass through any gate that would actually let you through.

The platonic ideal of gatekeeping was always the gate that nobody could get through, something Blackbird Spyplane wrote about in the post linked above:

“WASPs are the purest domestic distillation of A Class You Can Emulate but Cannot Join Except Through Birth. To put this in the contemporary parlance, WASP culture is America’s foundational genetic expression of ‘gatekeeping.’”

The enduring fascination with WASP culture despite its obvious problems provides an instructive example of what this pro-gatekeeping discourse is often really about: an indirect yearning not for the exclusivity itself, but for the bygone world where universal access (as enabled by the internet) was not yet a default assumption—a segmented world made of coherent communities and institutions as well as localized subcultures grounded in physical space, where we transacted in currency that was harder to counterfeit and the cheat sheet for faking it was more than a Google search away. What we now describe as gatekeeping was also supported by limited mobility and slower information flow, meaning the gatekeeping often happened somewhat organically. Being part of various scenes that seem inaccessible in retrospect may have merely required you to actually be there, which few were. Geography is a natural filter—having to physically show up somewhere eliminates a lot of people right off the bat, and most people who could show up wouldn’t even know to, much less want to. Similarly, being part of a community in the traditional sense restricts your ability to be a part of others, if only because one takes up too much time. Even the truly exclusive enclaves of pre-networked society had less difficulty keeping the hordes at bay because fewer knew what they were missing. It’s easy to idealize all of this and forget what the drawbacks were, but the good parts certainly feel elusive in late stage internet culture.

GATEKEEPING AS SECRECY

Back in the heyday of Twitter, probably ten years ago, someone described the site as a party that too many people showed up to (fittingly, I can’t find the tweet or remember who said it). In post-pandemic inflationary culture, everything sort of feels that way (except Twitter itself, ironically, which now feels like a party that you should have left an hour ago). Unlike its physical counterpart, the nature of digital space is to admit all comers, expanding as needed to contain the swelling crowd. Here, the bottleneck is no longer space but attention and processing capacity, which are managed by different means. Everyone gets into the club but most people remain invisible once inside. Social media feels like an overcrowded party not because the lines are long but because no one can hear you speak.

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The forms of advertising that have replaced those static ads are harder to escape because they’re mostly on our phones and thus follow us wherever we go. They are closer to our bodies—literally. Last year, I wrote a speculative piece about self-driving cars and their eventual impact on the built environment, arguing that when humans no longer do the driving, cars won’t even need windows, which would in turn make billboard advertising obsolete. (In theory this would make the landscape more aesthetically pleasing, but advertising signage often turns out to be covering something that looks worse.) This wouldn’t mean that we’d be living in a post-advertising world, of course, but that the ads would be coming from inside the car, with our attention freed up from the road and redirected toward the various screens within the vehicle. Again, the ad as fixed environmental feature melts into the environment and becomes a fluid element that swirls around and envelops us, not only closer to our bodies but personalized like the clothes we wear. With this fluidity, the ads’ clear delineation also breaks down and they are integrated more seamlessly into their surroundings. Podcast ad reads wax and wane gently within the flow of recorded conversation, lacking obvious boundaries, so that we barely notice before they’re half done and anyway we don’t mind enough to bother skipping ahead. Short-form video trains us to press skip as soon as we recognize an ad, which paradoxically intensifies our engagement with them. The paywall model purports to replace ads but it really just relocates them within the content itself: I could suggest to you right here that you should become a paid subscriber to this newsletter (and you totally should). See what I did there? So much of the digital landscape is effectively an ad for itself that the distinction becomes irrelevant.

The late-20th-century dream of a human environment untarnished by visible ads is arriving, but not the way we imagined, via AI: computers advertising to other computers, the models having ingested the existing ad-saturated internet and spit a finer mixture of it back out—a hybridized world where marketing is rarely explicit but also implicit in everything. The nature of digital technology is to embed, mix, smooth, disagreggate; too often, the image of decentralization conceals a quiet recentralization elsewhere. It’s not just advertising that is closer to our bodies, but every kind of information. With cryptocurrency, the spaces of traditional finance are reconstituted in the self, a grim condition highlighted by the recent kidnapping and torture of a Bitcoin whale, in which the access point for dematerialized wealth is no longer the bank vault but the individual and their personal knowledge (their private key). As Deleuze recognized 30 years ago, it was already becoming harder to physically leave work, school, or any other institution: “In a control society, businesses take over from factories, and a business is a soul, a gas.” We never clock out and we’re proud to say it. Today, a TV commercial break is almost charming in its unsophistication—that when you notice it beginning you can just walk away from it. You can’t take a bathroom break from yourself.

Become a paid subscriber to access more essays (about half of Kneeling Bus posts, and many of the best ones, are for paid subscribers only), or just because you appreciate this newsletter and want to support it.

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Reads:

• Elena Burger on paperclip-punk as the defining visual aesthetic of today’s internet. “The weightless, cloud-like, visuals of paperclip-punk are an implementation detail, but feel to me like the elimination of unnecessary clutter and distraction, which are an encumbrance to machine thought.”

• Blackbird Spyplane diagnosing the crisis of late internet culture. “As the waters rise, clinging to some sense of vestigial institutional coolness and prestige is like clinging to a slender, beautiful piece of driftwood, hoping it alone will keep your chin above the waves.”

• A good tech criticism reading list from Mike Pepi.