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Sadly, we live in a society – or, more accurately, a mid-ocracy. As I write this, news of media layoffs at VICE and Buzzfeed News is sweeping across social media, Hollywood screenwriters are striking, fighting what they are saying is an ‘existential threat’, while persons are lazily churning out increasingly banal images using (the aptly named) Midjourney and label it art. “Mediocre consensus-building culture deserves to fail,” tweets Dean Kissick – and nevertheless much I need to withstand the reductiveness of this statement (surely, we should always be pointing fingers on the late capitalist greed of those corporations, not the actual writers), he has some extent.

Today, culture is each flattened and gamified. Content is overstimulating and numb, algorithmically optimised for mass appeal. Arguably we’re more hyper-individual than ever, or so claims The Business of Fashion, citing Gen Z’s diverse and gender-fluid values: we have now diverse casting and it’s now not taboo to be neurodiverse. But culture feels so homogenous – boring ahh even – and there’s not been anything remotely interesting online since psyops, except perhaps the Mschf boots. I sip my oat milk cappuccino and set free a depressed Wojak sigh.

Despite all of the crises we face – the fee of living, climate change, AI – any of which should surely be enough material to encourage real and meaningful art, the overwhelm of knowledge paired with exhausting post-capitalist forces has created an environment that’s nihilistic and excruciatingly mid. There’s a way that society is running in circles, and regurgitating the identical trend cycles ad infinitum, while Big Tech churns out increasingly big and scary technology that has the scope for infinite creativity, but as an alternative (bar a select few) has resulted in the identical homogenous AI-generated slop that has people sharing anime watercolour renditions of themselves on Instagram. I’m reminded of a painting by British artist Richie Culver that reads “Make Something So Average A Gallery Wants You” – if the message is the medium, then today’s medium is mid.

Of their 2015 book The Age of Earthquakes, Shumon Basar, Douglas Coupland and Hans Ulrich Obrist coin the phrase ‘smupid’ to explain the concept we’ve never been smarter as individuals, and yet someway we’ve never felt more silly. Just like the 600 likes v 15 likes meme, mid is mass appeal, while anything un-mid is devalued – “the mid is elevated to the esteemed level of excellence,” elaborates Basar. Mid is market value, beauty without substance. It’s the weaponised clout of late capitalism’s little warriors, the type who would moderately sit in Soho House and attend inner-city day festivals with Fred Again than make anything even remotely inspiring. This isn’t to say that everybody should strive to un-mid themselves – it’s entirely unrealistic to demand that we step away from all things market powered and unexceptional. Besides, simply because something’s mid doesn’t mean it’s necessarily bad. We just need to know that mid is the epicentre of the Overton window of taste, and we shouldn’t pretend it isn’t.

We also need to simply accept that mid is an illusion of cool, sold to you on a search engine-optimised plate. Pre-packaged into industrial, UI-friendly bytes, it drip feeds social cachet by means of Instagram’s Explore Feed, whether that’s a Rat Girl tee or a pastel-coloured bubble mirror. It’s like a horseshoe with cool on one end, basic on the opposite, and in every single place in between in The Mid. There are in fact nuances here: there’s upper mid (Marc Jacobs Heaven, avant-basic, A24) and lower mid (hipster aesthetics, Veja trainers). But there’s also an interplay here: what’s cool (aka that which scares the normies) will all the time turn into mid – even essentially the most bizarre, unfriendly Backrooms content will eventually get the A24 treatment.

The last month has seen several publications comment on the phenomena, that are also satirically mid of their approach. We’re told that the style pendulum is swinging away from the performativity of post-internet statement wear and back towards minimalism – or stealth wealth – and that it’s no longer possible to be cool because web culture has made every thing accessible . While it’s actually true that it’s now easier than ever to purchase into these social cachets – algorithmic models let you know what to hearken to, dress, who to decorate as (today it’s Gabriette, tomorrow, who knows) – the excellence between pre-packaged and actual cool isn’t anything latest. There have all the time been mid-dle men in managerial class jobs shopping at Goodhood and attending watered-down parties. What has modified is the economic conditions that created such a mid atmosphere to start with.

The conditions that gave birth to the freewheeling creativity of working-class collectives within the 90s, like Throbbing Gristle or designers like John Galliano and Alexander McQueen, are very different today. We’re at what theorist Francis Fukuyama coined the “End of History”, a terminal plateau of free market liberalism, where the death of social mobility and political potential has created an environment so miserable it feels inconceivable to see another. At the identical time, we live in a cyberculture where social and capital are inseparable, and everyone seems to be subject to market powers. To be mid is subsequently inevitable: a symptom of the post-capitalist now. 

But there’s more serious implications in our seek for mediocrity beyond fashion trends and badly generated AI art. The middenning of knowledge, as tailored towards the largest majority, is especially concerning for the health of democracies. If essentially the most attention-grabbing, sensationalist content is essentially the most effective (as demonstrated by the recognition of reactionary figures equivalent to Joe Rogan and Andrew Tate) in reaching the widest pool, information is incentivised towards the extremes. That is something we saw with the 2016 elections, and more recently Elon Musk’s Blue Tick chaos. As trolls and conspiracy theorists spread fake images and misinformation for optimum click-payoff, it becomes increasingly difficult to discern what’s real or not. It will little question be turbo-charged with the rise of AI: next yr’s elections in Britain and the US could be swayed by a wave of AI-powered disinformation, as propaganda bots generate viral images, text and deepfake videos – it’s already interfering with elections in Turkey and India.

Searches for ‘mid’ currently has 2.8 billion views on TikTok. The term has turn into a catch-all for anything neither based nor cringe. Not cool or basic, but a 3rd more sinister thing. Basar suggests that cool is the lightning, mid is the thunder. He’s right, do anyone thing long enough and you’ll inevitably be given the mid treatment – that’s in case you weren’t already playing the sport to start with. Perhaps anything un-mid isn’t a thing in any respect, but a way of thinking. While the irony of publishing on a media platform (we’re all mid now, too) isn’t lost on me, we live in a society that’s all too mid.

Want to search out out more? Hearken to the inaugural Logged On: The Dazed Podcast, a monthly podcast exploring all things web culture, from memes to emerging trends, deep web conspiracy theories and beyond