The Molloy-verse - The junk drawer for my interwebs

New Trend: Please Shut Up

Too many consultants, news people, and infotainment sources are trying to spot the next new trend.  They want to be first. They want to create it so they can show the world how savvy and astute they are. The problem? Too often they're just full of shit.

New trends come about because people (either individually or collectively) begin to behave in the same way and then feed off of others behaving like that.  It's kind of like the wave at a football game. One drunken idiot (the forward thinker in this case) spends half the game screaming at everyone to stand up and do the wave.  At some point, the entire stadium does it a few times and then it dies down because we all grow sick of it. Chances are, you have no idea how it started and barely notice when it ends. But you may or may not take part in a little group think.

The Internet seems to have given voice to too many of these drunken idiots, I mean self-actualized forward thinkers. Too many experts are pointing at every new thing they see as a new trend (thus the picture I retrieved from a twitter feed proclaiming "New trend: fun socks for men." God I hope not). Even brands are trying to push their crappy wares onto consumers and claim them to be a trend. Occasionally consumers are duped into adopting these trends.

The best trends are the ones that happen organically. By the time the experts and Fortune 500 companies notice them, they're already played out. 

Killing the Past Doesn't Help the Future (or Why I'm Tired)

Why does every article I read lately feature the death of something or the end of another thing? We keep hearing that the past is dead. Murdered by progress.  Good riddance because we'll never need it again. The hipster hordes want to stamp out the imagery and completely remake the world in their image and ideal. Is this the insecurity of my generation coming to the forefront? Or is it a younger generation living entirely in the now and wanting to stamp out nostalgia?

 If it's the end of everything like newspapers, what will happen to those scenes in movies when the spy is sitting on a bench, passing time reading a newspaper. You know the one, the spy is waiting for his next meet up (maybe he never lowers the paper) or is using the newspaper to conceal his identity. If we kill the past, a newspaper might make the spy stand out as suspicious. It's interesting that in fiction, various technologies always look forced or dated. The iPad in someone's hands in a movie today might be this generation's version of the 70's porno mustache. Does our culture really need to move that fast and constantly be up to date?

Can we all agree to stop with the hipster aesthetic? I don't need everything to be the apex of design and functionality. It all makes me tired. Is the need to murder the past borne from the same hell that gave us jumpsuits, disco, and the pet rock? Is it the cousin of the Swatch watch and acid wash jeans?

It's accelerating. Maybe not in the way Douglas Coupland imagined, but things are getting faster and faster. On the one hand we're awash in information. It's delivered to us in both raw and curated forms: Information Democracy. On the other hand, the zombies haven't vanished. They're still here cycling through meaningless trends and the need to be first (at a much quicker pace). Instead of raising the discourse, the fad-hogs are just hungrier. The rest of us? We're just more tired. While we never worked to keep up, it's become more of an arduous task to fight it off.

So as I hear more often that I'm weird for not liking soccer or NASCAR, for continuing to read paper (instead of digital or nothing at all), for desiring open solutions to technology and information gathering (instead of choosing design or a fear of technology witchery), I'll just wish it would all slow down again. Just a little.

What do I want/believe in?
  • Not being available 24 hours a day
  • Apple is just another big tech company and is sometimes not the best option
  • Physical books and newspapers
  • Big companies should be regulated but individuals should be left alone to make (sometimes poor) decisions for themselves
  • Children should be kept out of bars but smoking should not
  • Baseball doesn't need replay but football does
  • The 1980s were the worst decade known to man and should never be celebrated
  • There is nothing wrong with a healthy does of cynicism
  • Everyone is too worried about being productive all the time