Why is everything so fucking boring now?

Once upon a time in Internet land, the World Wide Web felt like a space for discovery: unrefined, unpredictable, and uniquely personal. Subculture thrived in weird little corners of the web, often difficult to access unless you knew precisely where to look. These spaces mimicked the spirit of real-world underground movements, imperfect and often resistant to mainstream assimilation. But that dynamic has shifted, not simply because of the prominence of algorithmic platforms, but because those platforms are designed with purpose: to extract profit from predictability. 

The problem isn’t algorithms in the abstract. It’s the fact that they are engineered to benefit advertisers and tech billionaires, certainly not artists, users, and cultural innovators. The architecture of these platforms optimizes for engagement, and engagement favors the extreme, the statistically safe, the easily categorized. What we see online is not a mirror of creativity or desire, but a reflection of what is most easily digested and monetized. The result is a cultural landscape that feels increasingly flat, overproduced, and boring. 

This is coming from someone neck-deep in it. Today, as I scroll through Instagram, I’m met with a monotonous parade of hyper-curated content that masquerades as alternative (or “alt”) culture. Aesthetic diversity has been sanded down into a commodified spectacle, optimized for mass consumption. I keep scrolling as if I’ll stumble upon something radical or cool, strange or arresting, even though I know better than that. It’s not happening. It’s all more or less the same. 

This phenomenon is especially evident in the rise of what might, for convenience, be called “Instagram Alt”–– a version of alternative fashion that prioritizes palatability over expressive honesty. Despite the apparent celebration of non-mainstream styles, the same facial features and body types dominate the Discover page. This homogeneity is not incidental. It is the product of a larger system that rewards aesthetic legibility and conformity under the guise of diversity. 

To be clear, this is not a critique of individual creators, nor a moral indictment of those who participate in these spaces. I am one. Rather, it is a structural critique of the platforms that mediate our aesthetic experiences. The question is not what people choose to create, but what gets seen and rewarded. In the age of platform capitalism, visibility is shaped less by personal expression and more by algorithmic design. 

Social media platforms like TikTok and Instagram are not neutral stages; they are commercial infrastructures governed by engagement metrics and machine learning algorithms. As Zuboff (2019) outlines in The Age of Surveillance Capitalism, these platforms commodify human attention, shaping user behavior in ways that prioritize predictability and, thus, profitability. The algorithm’s preference for specific facial geometries, editing styles, and visual tropes means that even “subversive” content must be aesthetically palatable to achieve visibility. 

Take, for instance, the case of yabi gyaru, a contemporary Chinese interpretation of the Japanese gyaru subculture. The term “yabi” is a compound word that translates to “subcultural cunt,” and refers to a bold and indulgently maximalist aestheitc. At first glance, yabi gyaru appears to celebrate the audacity and expressiveness of its predecessor. However, upon closer inspection, the aesthetic variance collapses: the same homogenized facial features, skinny bodies, and styling choices result in content that feels not like a revival or a continuation, but more like an Instagram performance. This isn’t a jab at yabi itself, which contains a rich visual language, but at the narrow and Instagram-approved version of yabi gyaru that dominates the digital zeitgeist. What we are seeing is not the full spectrum of the style; it’s the part most aligned with dominant beauty standards and therefore most likely to be shared. 

Even traditional Japanese gyaru substyles, such as tsuyome, are being retrofitted to suit contemporary digital tastes. I recently came across an image of a 2010s-era tsuyome gyaru whose face had been digitally Frankensteined to resemble the Western “Instagram baddie” archetype: smooth, symmetrical, and stripped of the very roughness that once defined the style. The edit was widely shared, reinforcing a feedback loop wherein deviation must still conform to dominant beauty standards to gain traction. Even those doing subculture “correctly” are evidently not doing it correctly enough, according to social media. 

What happens to counterculture when its dissemination is governed by systems designed to eliminate unpredictability? What we’re witnessing is not the organic rise of new movements or the honest continuation of pre-established ones, but the mass production of simulated difference. Content engineered to appear edgy while remaining within cushy and comfortable boundaries. Genuine subversion cannot survive in environments that flatten expression into what Sarah Thornton (1995) termed “subcultural capital,” a form of stylized distinction that ultimately relies on the dominant order rather than resisting it. Hebdige (1979) similarly warned of the recuperation of subcultural signs, whereby resistance is absorbed into the mainstream and stripped of its political charge. 

There is a deep disappointment in realizing that while boundary-pushing creators still exist (and will exist forever), their work remains largely invisible beneath layers of algorithmically preferred sameness. If they’re even posted to these platforms at all because, of course, why should they rely on spaces that do not serve them and never did? On platforms like Instagram, fashion and subculture become content, and every image becomes a catalog. Novelty, speed, and conventional beauty reign supreme. There is little room for experimentation or eccentricity because those things are not the goal and never were.

In this context, platforms themselves become architects of culture, privileging the familiar over the experimental. As Baudrillard (1981) might suggest, we inhabit a “hyperreality” in which representations of subculture replace their original referents. We consume simulations of alternative aesthetics that are easier to digest, share, and monetize, while the disruptive potential of subculture is neutralized or hidden behind a metaphorical curtain.

It’s what's in our digital diet. We are fed the same things over and over again, sometimes seasoned with a veneer of something “new,” but not really. It doesn’t shock, challenge, or upset. It simply performs difference while reinforcing the same aesthetic values that have always been socially acceptable and encouraged. After a while, our ability to imagine something beyond the machine starts to fade.

We spend so much time living online that the borders between digital life and embodied reality are blurred. The internet used to be a destination we visited and returned from. Now, it is the space in which we live. Our phones are not just tools; they are extensions of our hands, our eyes, our identities. And the more time we spend there, the more likely we are to internalize the aesthetic logic of these platforms as a reflection of the world itself. We begin to see algorithmic beauty as objective beauty. What gets liked becomes what gets desired.

Coined by writer Jia Tolentino, “Instagram Face” describes a specific, surgically achievable aesthetic that dominates social media: smooth skin, symmetrical features, plump lips, catlike eyes, and a racially ambiguous yet predominantly Eurocentric look. As more and more people filter themselves through this aesthetic, digitally or physically, we begin to see real-world beauty standards mutate in its image. This is not just imitation; it’s transformation. We begin to desire the face we are constantly shown, and in turn, we produce content that reflects it. We feed it; we become it. This is the algorithm’s most insidious effect: not just flattening expression, but reshaping desire itself. 

Subculture and alt aesthetics in the Internet Age are less about subversiveness and more about identity. They function like a character selection screen: pick your appearance, assign your traits, and join the fray. It’s not about pushing boundaries, but signaling belonging. The purpose isn’t to rebel. It’s to fit in with the right kind (or your preferred kind) of different. In a world where your online presence is your resume, your brand, and your social capital, subcultural style becomes a skin you can wear to stand out just enough, while still keeping one foot planted safely in the zone of acceptability. 

And so we arrive at a central tension: can true innovation and true alternative expression exist on platforms that demand sameness in exchange for visibility? Can formally subversive subcultures survive in spaces owned and designed by capital, where every interaction is mined for data, and every expression is either monetizable or invisible? I would argue it cannot, not in any lasting or radical form. Because the internet we occupy is not neutral ground; it is a commercial infrastructure designed to promote what sells, what spreads, and what sustains the system. 

True alternative culture requires friction. It requires resistance. But friction slows engagement, and resistance threatens stability; two things the algorithm cannot allow. So even our “rebellion” becomes optimized: a miming of chaos, but not truly disruptive; interesting, but not unsettling; different, but not too different. What we’re left with is a pantomime of innovation, alternative in style, but not in substance. 

As Caroline Busta writes in her piece The internet didn’t kill counterculture—you just won’t find it on Instagram: “To be truly countercultural today, in a time of tech hegemony, one has to, above all, betray the platform.” This betrayal doesn’t just mean abandoning social media; it means divesting from the performative self that exists to feed the beast. Subculture that survives the algorithm must do so outside its reach, perhaps pseudonymously, perhaps in encrypted corners, or perhaps not online at all. 

If true subversiveness is to exist, it is not going to be found on Instagram. The dark forest theory of the internet, as adapted from Liu Cixin’s science fiction of the same name and expanded upon by Busta, imagines a digital world in which users retreat from constant visibility in favor of partial obscurity, where community and creativity are cultivated in shadows. In these dim corners, culture is not flattened. It grows like mushrooms in the dark. 

The flattening we’re experiencing isn’t just aesthetic. It's mental. It erodes the muscle memory of rebellion, of eccentricity, of the ugly, the beautiful, and the strange. And maybe that’s the real disappointment of it all: not that it changes what we see, but that it changes what we want to see. And eventually, what we can even fathom at all.

I wrote this because I was bored to the point of despair. It made me want to scream. Not just at the content, but at myself for looking. I found myself craving disruption: something strange, or ugly, or alive enough to cut through the haze. Instead, I now sit with a more personal fear: not just that I have nothing of value to offer, but that whatever I do have (whatever I create or express) is neither subversive enough to matter nor conventional enough to be popular. What does it mean to create under these conditions? I long to be free of this fear entirely: free from optimization, from the attention economy, from the hollow logic of platform performance. I simply want to feel new things. 

Like many others, I’m searching for a medium of expression that resists extraction, for something meaningful that isn’t quietly angling to sell you something. And I have to believe it’s out there. Perhaps it’s just not in the places we’re taught to look.