“In the beninging” changed me. This TikTok hopecore edit from late 2024 reawakened the obsessive pattern-noticer in me. A couple of weeks later, I came across a New York event headlined by Chris Smalls, titled Post-doomerism. Then Bjork declared, “It’s time to rise again”. Metalabel began manifesting a new era with their From Doom to Bloom newsletters. Liam Young titled his new Venice Biennale film After the End. 

If we zoom out beyond my demonstrably insignificant algorithmic bubble, we can still point towards the energy of Chappell Roan, Doechii and Zohran Mamdani; or Luigi Mangione’s grassroots legal fund surpassing one million dollars. We didn’t just get a new pope – we got a new Balenciaga creative director. 

Now, if anyone tries to frame this as some kind of hopeful return to radical optimism (side-eyeing Dua Lipa), they'd be deemed delusional. For anyone watching the news, these wishful nano-signals are drowned out daily by vogue fascism, snowballing climate collapse and unprecedented man-made horrors. Big Tech has turned heel – publicly endorsing Trump, doubling down on AI slop, mass surveillance, genocidal software. V-Dem recently declared that US democracy will be obsolete by summer. 

As the 2024 US election exit polls and multiple surveys show, younger Gen Z are increasingly leaning conservative, while Gen Alpha is getting captured by alt-right pipeline algorithms. So the old hope – that things would improve once boomers aged out – has vanished. The bottom has fallen out.

On the more apolitical side, brand and trend forecasting people are auguring a new era of shamelessness – calling it “the dark mode shift, “the boom boom aesthetic”, “the era of brand brutalism” and other marketable names I’ve unfortunately forgotten. All of them describe a culture that celebrates the murder of quiet luxury and corporate woke. NewWorld just dropped Everything’s on Fire, a report mapping trust across 33 industries, 23 institutions and 21 professions – and not a single institution breaks 40%.

Edmond Lau; Eugene Healey

Yet despite there being more reasons than ever to doom today, many are sick of the black pill. Just as optimism became obsolete, pessimism got stale. Taking a “realist” stance is gaining traction – especially when it comes to chasing the bag. According to Peter Nimberg’s IRL, we’re entering the Internet-Realism era, after the eras of Internet-Optimism (1990s-2000s) and Internet-Pessimism (mid 2010s-early 2020s). 

For me, at least, Internet-Realism is characterised by a kind of sobering up. There’s a growing embarrassment about how terminally online we’ve become – lying about our screen time, the blatant data and content farming, endless feeds of slop and the calls to “touch grass” have all contributed to a collective ick around internet indulgence. Realists know there’s no quitting cold turkey, but they’re entertaining consciously microdosing restraint.