Midway through 2025, it’s safe to say woke and anti-woke are exhausting themselves. Cultural clashes that characterized so much of the last decade just do not matter any longer. Woke has dissipated, and the blindly anti-woke have lost their raison d’etre. Some have defaulted to furious Israel advocacy or embrace of MAGA, while others keep their free speech commitments. The woke have mostly gone quiet, with a few outliers straining to revive a movement that is mostly done. If they have any hope for a comeback, it’s in Donald Trump’s overreach. But while Trump’s attacks on civil liberties and academic freedom have provoked a great deal of backlash, they have not created any environment remotely like the 2010s, when many different social justice causes were dominant and the power elite were desperate to keep up. Ibram X. Kendi and Robin DiAngelo will never be cultural giants again. Their moment has passed.
All of this is easy enough to declare, but what is actually next? What is post-woke? Post-anti-woke? We are now going to find out. On the whole, I am optimistic: culture is reaching a healthier state, and you’re slowly seeing a richer, calmer discourse. The histrionics of the last decade are absent, and hustlers on each side of the war are not able to drum up so much attention. If I understood the allure of anti-woke in those years bookending Covid, much of it now seems stale, and most of the writers and intellectuals worth paying attention to have moved on. Cultural shifts do happen, as much as some might pretend otherwise, and we’ve got to take stock of where we are and what this all might mean. This is hardest to do in the moment itself, but that doesn’t make the work any less vital. It is important to try to grasp at the fluidity of culture itself, even when the waters run right through one’s fingers.
The new age is neo-Romantic in scope, but it’s early yet—it’s difficult, still, to describe particular works of art appearing today as “Romantic” or sharing a similar sensibility. In part, this is because novels, movies, and even music can have long incubation periods, and the individuals creating them may be reacting to currents that are more personal in scope. At the same time, 2025 is starting to feel like a turning point for art broadly: this year, the writer Mo Diggs has argued, is already a great one for cinema, and it feels there is a hunger again for excellence from filmmakers and movie-goers alike. The retreads can still dominate, but we’ve passed peak Marvel, and are exiting the Hero era. The Hero era transcended the movies themselves and extended to virtually all facets of life: politics, the internet, and the rise of Silicon Valley. In the late 2000s, 2010s, and early 2020s, the influencer model was dominant. Influencers, in most contexts, are individuals who post frequently on YouTube and TikTok, amassing large followings and parlaying the attention they receive into sponsorships, brand deals, and other marketing opportunities. These influencers were in deep parasocial relationships with their audiences, to the point where many viewers believed them to be their personal heroes. This engagement extended beyond YouTube—consider, for a moment, how men like Elon Musk and Mark Zuckerberg and even Jeff Bezos were once viewed by the culture. Musk, in the 2010s, was Iron Man, the brilliant, cosmopolitan polymath who could turn any company he touched to gold. Zuckerberg’s Facebook, in the late 2000s, was considered a new political Eden that could usher in America’s first Black president and make us all less lonely. Silicon Valley titans were not so different than Marvel superheroes, worshiped by millions while convincing the younger generations that such fortune-making—and even blatant monopolization and oligarchic behavior—was to be celebrated. How many Americans truly worried about Zuckerberg’s decision to buy Instagram and WhatsApp? Who truly fretted over Amazon acquiring Whole Foods? The tech heroes were rarely questioned.
A hallmark of the new era is skepticism of leaders in all walks of life; I can’t remember a time in which Americans were more jaded by celebrity culture and the range of influencers who exerted so much pull on the zeitgeist over the last decade. Katy Perry is a punchline and the Kardashians are a punchline. Taylor Swift is impregnable, but the heights of 2023 will never return again. Travis and Taylor are increasingly passé. Who is cool anymore? Who are today’s heroes? In any other period of recent history, these were very easy questions to answer. No longer. I wrote, a year ago, about an American left wing devoid of leaders—and not wanting them—and I am starting to believe that this trend now extends everywhere. Politicians are no longer unifying figures, and whatever fan bases they boast are deeply polarized—if these politicians, excepting Donald Trump, can truly exert a pull on most voters. Celebrity endorsements have certainly never meant less, as Kamala Harris’ failure demonstrated. The emergence of Trump and then AOC marked a sort of Hero era apotheosis; close your eyes and try to imagine, in 2025, a candidate for Congress winning one election and becoming a national celebrity literally overnight. It just would not happen.
Mass culture, as a concept, is rapidly dying off. It exists, and there are certain movies or streaming shows that can get Americans talking, but it is frailer than ever. There might be figures who are famous to one person who may mean nothing to another. There are fewer cultural totems, fewer shared reference points. The internet has created an eternal present and handed off the task of cultural curation to the users themselves. The term user speaks to how the relationship between human beings and digital technology has long been framed—the goal, from the perspective of anyone who reaps a profit off this tech, is to make the human being addicted, to own their time as much as any drug might—and it’s one, in this new protean era, that we are now aware of, if we haven’t necessarily broken free. Smartphone bans in public schools are becoming more and more common. Jonathan Haidt’s The Anxious Generation is a massive best-seller. There are more people conscious of their tech consumption in 2025 versus 2015, and there are growing, if limited, movements built around rejecting the smartphone. Physical books endure, and readers defiantly purchase them. The mere fact that AI is being challenged at all speaks to how differently technology is being approached in the 2020s; we are more reflexively wary. If ChatGPT had emerged in 2014, Sam Altman would have become, by now, a household name, with fawning media coverage burnishing his image as one of the great thinkers of our age. AI is popular, no doubt, and its usage will only expand with time. What is clear, though, is that techno-optimism is not returning soon. The tech titans will not be heroes again.
The new age is neo-Romantic in scope, but it’s early yet—it’s difficult, still, to describe particular works of art appearing today as “Romantic” or sharing a similar sensibility. In part, this is because novels, movies, and even music can have long incubation periods, and the individuals creating them may be reacting to currents that are more personal in scope. At the same time, 2025 is starting to feel like a turning point for art broadly: this year, the writer Mo Diggs has argued, is already a great one for cinema, and it feels there is a hunger again for excellence from filmmakers and movie-goers alike. The retreads can still dominate, but we’ve passed peak Marvel, and are exiting the Hero era. The Hero era transcended the movies themselves and extended to virtually all facets of life: politics, the internet, and the rise of Silicon Valley. In the late 2000s, 2010s, and early 2020s, the influencer model was dominant. Influencers, in most contexts, are individuals who post frequently on YouTube and TikTok, amassing large followings and parlaying the attention they receive into sponsorships, brand deals, and other marketing opportunities. These influencers were in deep parasocial relationships with their audiences, to the point where many viewers believed them to be their personal heroes. This engagement extended beyond YouTube—consider, for a moment, how men like Elon Musk and Mark Zuckerberg and even Jeff Bezos were once viewed by the culture. Musk, in the 2010s, was Iron Man, the brilliant, cosmopolitan polymath who could turn any company he touched to gold. Zuckerberg’s Facebook, in the late 2000s, was considered a new political Eden that could usher in America’s first Black president and make us all less lonely. Silicon Valley titans were not so different than Marvel superheroes, worshiped by millions while convincing the younger generations that such fortune-making—and even blatant monopolization and oligarchic behavior—was to be celebrated. How many Americans truly worried about Zuckerberg’s decision to buy Instagram and WhatsApp? Who truly fretted over Amazon acquiring Whole Foods? The tech heroes were rarely questioned.
A hallmark of the new era is skepticism of leaders in all walks of life; I can’t remember a time in which Americans were more jaded by celebrity culture and the range of influencers who exerted so much pull on the zeitgeist over the last decade. Katy Perry is a punchline and the Kardashians are a punchline. Taylor Swift is impregnable, but the heights of 2023 will never return again. Travis and Taylor are increasingly passé. Who is cool anymore? Who are today’s heroes? In any other period of recent history, these were very easy questions to answer. No longer. I wrote, a year ago, about an American left wing devoid of leaders—and not wanting them—and I am starting to believe that this trend now extends everywhere. Politicians are no longer unifying figures, and whatever fan bases they boast are deeply polarized—if these politicians, excepting Donald Trump, can truly exert a pull on most voters. Celebrity endorsements have certainly never meant less, as Kamala Harris’ failure demonstrated. The emergence of Trump and then AOC marked a sort of Hero era apotheosis; close your eyes and try to imagine, in 2025, a candidate for Congress winning one election and becoming a national celebrity literally overnight. It just would not happen.
Mass culture, as a concept, is rapidly dying off. It exists, and there are certain movies or streaming shows that can get Americans talking, but it is frailer than ever. There might be figures who are famous to one person who may mean nothing to another. There are fewer cultural totems, fewer shared reference points. The internet has created an eternal present and handed off the task of cultural curation to the users themselves. The term user speaks to how the relationship between human beings and digital technology has long been framed—the goal, from the perspective of anyone who reaps a profit off this tech, is to make the human being addicted, to own their time as much as any drug might—and it’s one, in this new protean era, that we are now aware of, if we haven’t necessarily broken free. Smartphone bans in public schools are becoming more and more common. Jonathan Haidt’s The Anxious Generation is a massive best-seller. There are more people conscious of their tech consumption in 2025 versus 2015, and there are growing, if limited, movements built around rejecting the smartphone. Physical books endure, and readers defiantly purchase them. The mere fact that AI is being challenged at all speaks to how differently technology is being approached in the 2020s; we are more reflexively wary. If ChatGPT had emerged in 2014, Sam Altman would have become, by now, a household name, with fawning media coverage burnishing his image as one of the great thinkers of our age. AI is popular, no doubt, and its usage will only expand with time. What is clear, though, is that techno-optimism is not returning soon. The tech titans will not be heroes again.
by Ross Barkan, Political Currents | Read more:
Image: uncredited
[ed. See also: MAGA in Twilight.]
