Notes from Hype Studies Barcelona

I ran a workshop on “Hype and its impact on the City,” I ran in at the first-ever Hype Studies Conference we kept coming back to a single theme: technology hasn’t just changed how culture circulates. It’s stretched its half-life.

My tennis players, born in the late 2000s, are fans of the Gilmore Girls, which really tripped me out before I realized that they were getting this stuff from Tiktok. They know the music of the early 2000s, not as kitsch, but sincerely. When I was younger, this seemed unthinkable. Disco didn’t suddenly wash back over the 1990s, because things like AOL or whatever didn’t move fast enough to exhume it, remix it, and resurface it to new audiences. Now cultural memory is frictionless, endlessly recirculated.

This creates a kind of pre-postmodern existence, kids inherit not just the present but multiple pasts, all running concurrently, mediated by feeds. They aren’t conjuring a sound so much as an identity, they see themselves in archives of an era they never lived through. Their parents have been posting them since before birth; every moment has been surveilled. Reinvention is no longer a private act, it’s a performance. And so we drift. Instead of working out what comes next, people loop through past feelings, seeking recognition in someone else’s moment. Political imagination suffers. The space once held by criticism, by civic associations, by the messy work of collective invention, that void is filled by hyper-mediation, by vibes, by “relatability.”

Meanwhile, the scaffolding of 20th-century civic life collapses. Rotary clubs, Key clubs, VFW halls, the associative glue of American towns: gone or dying. The only institutions still recruiting are churches and grifts. The future is narrated through tech pathways and hustle scripts. The “good life” is reframed as a slot machine, speculation, startups, side hustles, scams.

So what does it mean to live here, now, in this double exposure of accelerated past and absent future? What replaces the institutions that held communities together, however imperfectly? If cultural hegemony now lasts forever, endlessly reanimated, what gets crowded out?

The question I left this session with was this: When nostalgia becomes the dominant cultural operating system, who is left to build what comes next?