How the Algorithm Ate the Era

by Bradley Lau | The Underground Mirror

“We’re not living through a cultural moment.
We’re scrolling past it.”

Welcome to the Feed

Before the coffee. Before the morning light. Before remembering their own name. They open their eyes, grab their phones and tune into the 15 second micro-bursts of stimuli.

There it is: the feed.

A girl lip-syncs a line from a movie no one remembers. A man cries alone in his truck. Gaza drone footage flickers under a slowed-down Taylor Swift song. A dog plays piano. A preacher misquotes scripture and warns of hell. A memorial for 9/11 scrolls by in vaporwave. Then an ad: a tiny printer that turns trauma into pocket-sized, tear-resistant stickers.

Another scroll. Another scroll. Another scroll.

This isn’t a curated experience. It’s a climate-controlled hallucination, algorithmically tailored to each user. Not overwhelming. Just endless. 

“Culture, here, is not conversation. It is consumption.
Not ritual, but residue. Not meaning, but momentum.”

No one designed it to make sense.
But it’s where we live now.

A Moment That Never Arrived

We used to live in eras. Not better ones, just more coherent.
The ‘60s had revolution. The ’80s had excess. The ’90s had apathy. Even 2016 had a ‘mood’ of sorts.

But what does 2025 feel like?

Not a decade. Not a movement. Just increasing volume.

Culture isn’t empty; it’s overfull.
Too much to hold. Too much to mean.

Your coworker is deep in conspiracy TikToks.
Your niece is collecting digital cameras from 2007.
You’ve binge watched four shows this month. You remember none of them.

There’s no central stage. No monoculture.
Just main screens—each one tuned to a slightly different hallucination.

“We’re not living through a cultural moment.
We’re scrolling past it.”

The present is too fast to notice.
We used to ask, Where are we going?
Now we ask, What’s next?

And we’re already exhausted by the question.

Echoes, Not Scenes

Once, we feared the monoculture.
Three TV networks. A handful of newspapers. The same ten songs on every station.

Now there are no gatekeepers… just the gate. And it never closes.

You don’t discover culture. It’s streamed to you.
Your feed knows your neuroses better than your friends do.

Your friend’s taste is mushroomcore aesthetics and vaporized trauma memes.
Your boss is locked in an endless loop of rage reels and cold plunges.
Your nephew is on his fourth “analog revival” and scrolling ’anti-fiat currency’ clips. 

This was supposed to be a golden age of individuality.

Instead, we got taste tribes, aesthetic fiefdoms optimized for engagement and novelty.

“You don’t join a scene. You scroll into one.
You don’t outgrow it. The algorithm rotates it when engagement drops.”

Everything morphs.
As soon as a vibe coheres, it collapses into cliché.
Trend → saturation → parody → fatigue → silence.
Then: another trend.

Even subcultures now come pre-templated. Pre-flattened. Pre-branded.

Q:“What’s your aesthetic?”
A: “Whatever the feed says I should have been nostalgic for.”

Trend Fatigue & Nostalgia on Tap

We’re not just tired of newness.
We’re tired of caring.

Tired of pretending every new microtrend is a cultural reset.
Tired of reacting. Tired of performing attention.

So we turn to nostalgia. But not ours, the algorithm’s.

An old cereal commercial becomes “core.”
A VHS-filtered home video becomes a nostalgic emotion you never had.
A pop song from 1995 returns, but slower, sadder, captioned in lowercase.

This isn’t remembering. It’s a content strategy.

“Nostalgia used to be longing.
Now it’s a moodboard for monetization.”

Even resistance becomes aesthetic. Analog life becomes a brand. Digital detox becomes a post.

“We don’t follow culture anymore.
We survive it.”

And every act of survival becomes content.

Creators in the Attention Mines

To make something now is to perform for a machine.

You write, record, paint, design, teach. And then you format.
Hook early. Add subtitles. Smile, but not too much.
Post at the right time. Repurpose. Rebrand. Repeat.

“Art used to ask, “Is it true?”
Now it asks, “Will it be seen?”

Every creator becomes their own manager, marketer, and AI compliance officer. Even burnout is monetizable. Even disappearance is brandable.

When something real breaks through—a poem, a voice, a flicker of sincerity—it feels accidental.
Like a glitch in the system. Like a signal slipping through the static.

“In the attention mines, meaning is a byproduct.
Not a goal.”

And still, somehow, people keep digging. Not for virality. But for contact.

The Center Cannot Hold

The algorithm doesn’t care what you love.
It cares what you’ll watch. Again.
It cares what others might share.
It cares how long you’ll stay.

And so memory gets flattened.
The past becomes a slideshow.
Protest becomes a trend.
Art becomes scrollable until it isn’t.

“We mistake reach for relevance.
We confuse exposure with experience.
We take format for form.”

You used to live in a culture.
Now you swim in a feed.

And if culture is how a society remembers itself, what happens when the memory is outsourced to a server with no soul?

What happens when the present is untraceable, a flicker, a feeling, an infinite scroll of almosts?

“Culture doesn’t feel like something we live in.
It feels like something being harvested from us.”

We are not in a culture.
We are inside a feedback loop.

And the loop is hungry.

Coda: After the Scroll

Close the app.

Not forever. Just long enough to notice the room.
To feel what you’re feeling before it becomes content.

You don’t have to disappear.
You just have to look sideways—off-screen, off-trend, off-script.

“You won’t find the center by refreshing.
You find it by remembering.”

That song you didn’t skip.
That sentence that stopped you.
That moment that didn’t go viral but didn’t let go of you either.

Culture isn’t gone.
It’s scattered.
Waiting to be reassembled by those who still remember how to listen.

“The feed didn’t destroy meaning.
It replaced it with motion.”