The Ouroboros of Influence

When you become the culture you’re critiquing

When you’ve been in the discourse long enough you start noticing patterns. It’s not only that you notice patterns in the culture but that you notice patterns in yourself. There will be a point in time when you’ll reach a certain moment, and in this moment that you’ll realize that the very thing you’re railing against is the same thing you dreamed up ten years ago.

Welcome to The Ouroboros of Influence

Lately I’ve been having this creeping sensation that I’m standing in a hall of mirrors, except that every reflection is just me from a different era, and that they’re all pointing at each other accusingly. I spent years advocating for a certain kind of aesthetic extremity. The merging of high fashion and transgression. The idea that beauty and danger should coexist in the same frame. I wrote manifestos. I threw parties. I cultivated entire scenes.

Now I see it everywhere. It’s diluted, debased, and castrated. My first instinct is always disgust. Well, here’s the joke the universe played on me: I helped cause it.

Not directly, maybe. I’m not sitting in a boardroom at some advertising company deciding to appropriate underground aesthetics for mass consumption. Yet influence doesn’t always work that way. Influence is a virus. You release it into the ecosystem and it mutates, spreads, and evolves into forms you never intended. You’re patient zero for a plague that you later catch yourself.

This is especially true for anyone who was involved in what I’ll generously call the “alternative internet” of the 2000s and early 2010s. We thought we were building something different. A new kind of discourse. A new mode of expression. A new way of being transgressive in a culture that desperately needed transgression.

So what happened? That energy got absorbed. Processed. Regurgitated as “disruptive” startup culture, “edgy” marketing campaigns, and the general vibe of irony-poisoned nihilism that now permeates everything.

So yes, the language I helped popularize shows up in places I never expected. The ideas I championed became weapons wielded by people who didn’t understand them. Or worse yet, these people understood them perfectly well and used them for purposes I find repellent. The joke is that some of these purposes were my own, filtered through time and iteration until I no longer recognized myself as the source.

There’s a certain kind of intellectual who never has to face this. They work in academia or some other sealed off environment where their ideas stay theoretical. They critique without consequence because their critique never touches the machinery of culture. They stay outside of the system they’re observing.

Yet the rest of us who actually build things, throw events, publish journals, create communities, and host salons don’t get this type of distance from the behemoth. We have to confront the Frankenstein problem. The monster we’ve created is wandering the countryside, and the villagers are right to be upset, but we also kind of forgot that we created it.

This isn’t a confession and this isn’t an apology. It’s a field report from someone who has been doing this long enough to see the wheel turn.

Here’s what I’ve learned.