There is probably no critical argument more risible to me, personally, than the idea that culture is bad. That music is boring, now; that games “used to be” good. Perhaps the dancefloor is dead, as Charli XCX has recently claimed, but so was rock music for a long time. This stuff is cyclical.

Cool is permanent. When people bemoan a sameness in culture, or a death of the monoculture, they typically pin the blame on algorithms. This gestures toward the right diagnosis, which our friends at Garbage Day have written about beautifully a few times this year: Today, cool evades the algorithm. Trying to be cool online isn’t cool, which means posting isn’t cool. This is a fundamental sea change in the economics of culture, with roots dating back past Frank Ocean, past No Logo, past Think Different, into the very origins of American cool and commercialism. That’s right: We’re on our Thomas Frank bullshit.

In order to pick apart what this sea change means, we produced a visual trend report that answers such questions as:

• Where does cool come from?
• How did the internet become bad, and why is the answer “dropshippers”?
• What’s cool today?

You can read it here.

You will likely disagree with some of the many arguments contained herein. Please believe that the actual team of EX Research disagrees with each other about some of the many arguments contained herein. But we think we land on a pretty agreeable spot, which is that culture remains interesting and vital and worth celebrating, and that, as always, finding it is a skill issue.

If you like the report, send it to a friend. If you want to chat about it, hit reply.

Maybe you have heard of Roko's Basilisk. This is a thought experiment, for lack of a better term, popular among a certain set: hyper-rationalists, futurists, effective altruists. Tech-industry guys. You get the idea. The most exhausting humans who ever lived, that is to say. People who at present happen to command a critical share of the world economy.

If you're not familiar with it, Roko's Basilisk, in broad terms, supposes that at some point in the future a sentient and omnipotent artificial intelligence could arise, and that this intelligence could then decide to punish all those who had anticipated its possible arrival and either worked to prevent it or refused to participate in its development. In that case, the wise course of action for people now, who are aware of even the theoretical possibility of this scenario, would be to work in good faith to bring this AI into existence, lest they put themselves or their descendants in its future crosshairs.

I have been thinking about Roko's Basilisk this week. The occasion was a pair of engineers at the Anthropic artificial intelligence company using Twitter, as AI exponents regularly, exhaustingly do, to warn, as one of them put it, that "the people building AI earnestly believe that it could kill us all by the end of the decade." The other guy was even more strenuous about it: "We really do earnestly believe AI could kill all humans! I personally think it is >10% within the next decade."