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This week, a response to Marvel’s new animated TV series, Your Friendly Neighborhood Spider-Man, caught my eye: “I thought it was awesome. My biggest fear was that it was gonna be annoying and woke, and it wasn’t.”
My intrigue was especially piqued by the fact that this came not from some boorish commentator on GB News or free speech bro on X, but from the young man who voices Spider-Man himself: the extravagantly named Hudson Thames, an actor and singer based in Los Angeles who, at 30, is only about a year too old to be considered a member of Generation Z.
After a backlash from the online left — how dare he say “annoying and woke”? — the show’s producer was forced to step in to defend the actor. “He’s a guy who cares deeply about the people around him and always tries to do the right thing,” Jeff Trammell said during a Q&A session on Reddit. “I believe he simply misspoke.”
I don’t believe he did, actually, unless by “misspoke” we mean breaking an unspoken rule that says you have to toe a particular line if you want to be employed in Hollywood. The fact is that it is no longer hip or cutting-edge to be “woke”, or even to proclaim that you are. Creative young people want to be countercultural, and being “woke” feels mainstream and virtually middle-aged these days. This, instead, was just the latest sign of a profound “vibe shift”. Saying what you actually think — or at least being seen to — is cool now; sticking to a prescribed social etiquette about what you can and can’t say is not.
The return of a distinctly anti-heroic, four-times-indicted convicted criminal to the Oval Office is closely connected to this shift. Young people swung sharply to the right in November’s election, with Donald Trump winning 56 per cent of male Gen Z voters, according to Associated Press’s VoteCast poll. A recent CBS poll found that young people are the most enthusiastic of any age cohort about Trump, with 67 per cent of 18 to 29-year-olds feeling “optimistic” about the next four years, compared with just 51 per cent of those aged 65 and over. Remember those takes about how Trump’s Fox News-watching ageing voters would die before he could get re-elected? It doesn’t seem to have quite turned out like that.
But is Trump a symptom or a cause of this cultural drift away from all that has been so dominant for the past decade and a half? Politics might be downstream of culture, but when the politician in question is a cultural icon, discerning the direction of flow — Hudson, Thames, or any other waterway, for that matter — is rather trickier.
Sean Monahan — a “trend forecaster” credited with first using the term “vibe shift” in 2021 and for coining “normcore” before that — believes that Trump is a product of a shift in the culture that began in the wake of Covid-19. This was when a kind of nostalgia for a less restricted, more licentious time started to take hold.
“Covid really pushed a lot of people over the edge,” Monahan tells me. “Young people who both felt like they couldn’t say what they thought, but also couldn’t really do what they wanted to, because they were going to college through Zoom and it was illegal to go to parties in many places. These things kind of all became tied up together with a general sense that the past was a freer, more hedonistic era.”
Since then, Monahan believes we have been moving gradually into a new cultural phase, one he’s calling the “boom boom aesthetic”. This is all about conspicuous consumption, ostentatious displays of wealth and “supervillain vibes”. It is a kind of throwback to the last time that conservatism captured the culture: the 1980s. With his 80s taste in suits and music, his shameless touting of worthless crypto tokens, his supervillain-esque presidential portrait — a riff on his contumacious mugshot — and his opulent Palm Beach palace, is there anyone better to capture this new cultural epoch than 47 himself?
Edmond Lau, a luxury “memeologist” (yes) and cultural strategist, offers a similar assessment of the cultural shift and Trump’s place in it. Lau argues that we’re moving from a “light mode”, embodied by sanitised, discreet luxury brands like Aesop — what good city-dwelling progressive has not had a pump-bottle of Resurrection Aromatique in their bathroom at some point? — to a new, more individualistic, “dark mode”. Welcome to the “mask-off era”. “This is about a rejection of virtue and an embracing of vice,” Lau tells me. “It’s about abandoning the pretence of following this set of societal virtues.”
Virtue-signalling is out of fashion; signalling vice is in. The right is back, baby, and nobody’s even shy about it this time around.
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