I’ve argued before that culture isn’t stagnating so much as migrating into forms we don’t have the language to recognize yet — internet personalities as continuous works of art, TikTok as digital vaudeville, and aesthetic curation as a kind of immersive storytelling. My friend Sam Buntz makes the opposite case: his claim is that streaming platforms and TikTok have flattened cultural time so completely that Gen Z can’t form the generational chain of influence that has driven every major artistic movement for centuries. Gen Z reacts to everything and nothing, lost in what Sam calls “the Archive” — a Borgesian labyrinth where all of recorded culture is equally available and equally weightless. I’m still torn and much more optimistic, but I loved his articulation of this argument. — KatherineLast summer, I was at a bar with a few friends. Rapidly discovering more and more veritas in vino, I found myself giving an impromptu oration on the musical tastes of the generation junior to my own. I argued that Zoomers don’t really have their own music: they’re willing to listen to everything because Spotify, Apple Music, and the various songs that all pop up on Tik Tok are presented devoid of history and context. You like what you like and are free to choose from the phenomena bubbling up around you. Kate Bush, Billy Joel, Laurie Anderson, Paul McCartney—songs by these artists were always popping up on my Zoomer ex-girlfriend’s Tik Tok feed. She accepted all of it. None of it seemed corny or out-of-date. (This article from Activaire calls TikTok, “the most powerful music revival machine we have ever seen.)One of my friends, a keen observer of the contemporary scene, well-versed in generational difference, said that my claim was somewhat false and that Zoomers do in fact have their own trailblazing avant garde music. She held up 100Gecs and nettspend as examples. I was like, “I bet you that only 0.2% of them know who those artists are.”Serendipitously, a pair of Zoomer whippersna