Everything is Dead and We Killed It.

SaaS is dead. Punk is dead again, for approximately the four hundredth time since Sid Vicious actually died in 1979. Rock is dead. The novel is dead. Cinema is dead. Blogging is dead. Privacy is dead. Expertise is dead. Irony is dead. 

We have collectively decided that the most interesting thing you can say about anything // everything is that it no longer exists.

This is weird, right? 

Arguably, we live in an era of cultural abundance. You can access more music in thirty seconds than a medieval peasant could hear in thirty lifetimes. There are more novels published each year than anyone could read in a century. SaaS companies continue to proliferate like bacteria in a petri dish full of venture capital. 

But we have this compulsive need to stand over the corpse of every cultural phenomenon and deliver its eulogy while it's still very obviously breathing.

I think there are (at least) four different things going on here.

The first is what you might call definitional gerrymandering. When someone says "punk is dead," they don't mean there are no punk bands. They mean there are no punk bands that meet their specific criteria for authentic punkness, criteria that have been carefully constructed to exclude everything that currently exists. 

The Sex Pistols were punk. Green Day is not punk. Why? Because Green Day is successful and popular and still making music. Real punk, the definitional gerrymanderer insists, was raw and dangerous and uncommercial. The fact that the Sex Pistols were signed to a major label and manufactured controversy for profit is entirely ignored. 

You can mark anything dead-as-Marley if you define it narrowly enough. Jazz isn't dead, but "real jazz" is always dead, because real jazz is whatever was happening forty years before you started paying attention.

The second mechanism = status signaling through pessimism. Optimists are rubes. If you think things are fine, you clearly haven't looked closely enough. Declaring something dead signals sophistication, insider knowledge, refined taste, seeing inside the honeycomb, etc. 

The person who says "cinema is dead" is implicitly claiming they've seen enough cinema to know what it was supposed to be, and what it has failed to become.

"I thank the Lord that I am not like these naive moviegoers enjoying the latest Marvel film; I am a connoisseur mourning the death of Tarkovsky's vision." 

Pessimism is a cheap way to purchase intellectual credibility. Anyone can enjoy something. Critics recognize decay.

The third factor is "peak experience regression." Most people encounter cultural phenomena at a particular moment in their lives, usually their teens and early twenties, when everything feels maximally intense and meaningful. Your first punk album, your first internet community, your first startup job, your first life-changing book. These experiences are unrepeatable because you were unrepeatable at that moment. 

When you try to access that same feeling later and fail, the most available explanation is that the thing itself has degraded. It can't be that you've changed, that your neurological capacity for novelty has diminished, that you're now approaching from a position of familiarity rather than discovery. No, punk itself must have gotten worse. The internet must have died. The magic that was obviously once there has clearly departed.

It’s a “cultural fall” narrative. In the beginning, there was the pure thing. Then came corruption, commercialization, normies, and death. We're all walking around with these little creation myths about every domain we care about, and they all end the same way: with us as witnesses to a decline that began right after we showed up. How convenient that the golden age always ended just as we aged into it…

The fourth mechanism: death declarations as territory marking. When you announce that something is dead, you're claiming authority over its corpse. You're the historian as eulogist who can identify the precise moment of expiration. 

If the internet is dead, then those of us who remember the living internet become important. We're the witnesses; we carry sacred knowledge of what was lost. Declaring death creates a before and after, and places the declarer firmly in the before, among the elect who knew the thing when it was real.

This is why death declarations are, so often, so premature. If you wait until something is actually dead to announce its death, you're just a reporter. But if you call it early, if you identify the fatal wound before the body stops twitching, you're a prophet. You saw what others missed. The earlier you call it, the smarter you look when everyone else finally catches up to your refined perception.

I accept that the acceleration of culture makes death declarations feel “necessary.” When everything moves fast, when trends rise and fall in months rather than decades, we lose the ability to distinguish between transformation and extinction. Punk isn't what it was in 1977. Neither is anything else. But continuous change feels somehow less narratively satisfying than discrete death. Stories need endings. If punk just gradually mutated into a hundred different subgenres, each with their own purists and their own death declarers, that's complicated and unsatisfying. Much cleaner to say it died and hold a funeral.

I think the endless death declarations tell us something about how we process cultural change, which is to say, very bloody badly. We're nostalgic creatures who mistake our own diminishing capacity for wonder as evidence of external decay. We're status-seeking creatures who've discovered that pessimism codes as intelligence. We're territorial creatures who claim ownership through loss.

None of this means we should stop talking about cultural change, or that everything is fine, or that nothing ever actually dies. Some things really do end.

But it’s worth asking, from time to time:

Am I describing the world, or am I describing what it feels like to have been young once and not be young anymore?