This is the landscape of popular music in 2026, where many “new” songs follow a virality formula, build on old musical structures, or rely on sampling—the literal recycling of the past.

There’s a term to describe all of this: “hauntology,” popularized by the late theorist Mark Fisher in an essay for Film Quarterly, and immortalized in his book, Ghosts of My Life. Hauntology first described a predicament Fisher saw in electronic music: tracks composed mainly of archival recordings, leaning into nostalgia over novelty. But today “hauntology” is used by culture critics to describe the stagnation of the music industry writ large: new songs reproduce popular styles or sample older hits, creating a feedback loop where nothing truly new can ever be made.

This issue might seem trivial. But as Matt Bluemink argues in his book, The Future Is Not Lost, music is how humans inscribe their consciousness into time. It’s how we perceive the flow of events, and by extension, perceive our march towards the future. Earlier genres like disco and techno had often been a key way in which humanity imagined its progression towards a more utopian, more just society. And as Fisher warns, music’s regurgitation of the past signals a “deterioration of a whole mode of social imagination: the capacity to conceive of a world radically different from the one in which we currently live.”

With no new music, there is no way to map humanity’s progression through time. With no new music, there would be no future.

That is the prevailing wisdom of the moment if you’ve been reading what all the culture critics have to say. And many of them are right when they argue that the 2020s lack a clear, unifying genre that defines the experience of the decade—at least not in the way that, say, “poptimism” defined the 2010s or “indie sleaze” and “recession pop” defined the 2000s.

But that doesn’t mean that music is not evolving. For one, with the decline of a totalizing, Western narrative of history and progress, and the shift towards a multipolar world, perhaps there won’t be a “decade-defining” genre for the 2020s, but instead a transition towards a networked, hyperlocal music culture.

So, to challenge conventional wisdom: can music still have the power to imagine a new cultural future? Music is not evolving in the way we expect it to. But it’s still transforming in ways that are unique and particular to the 2020s.

I moderated a talk from a dingy basement in Hong Kong last Saturday, titled “WHY THE FUTURE WAS NEVER LOST.” My panelists—art curator Angela Liu, journalist , and DJ/producer Marcus Lam/Voel—all said that music culture was definitely not stagnating, and that somewhere—in the “ethernet” or real life—there are musicians, DJs, and producers actively imagining new sounds that articulate what it means to live today.

“We’re also living in the Age of Aquarius,” Angela Liu said, “which is full of technological innovation, and we’re all pretty excited for what’s to come.” We talked about the new trend cycle re-commodifying cringe in electronic music (some good examples: trance, budots, vinahouse, manyao, and more), organizations both local (Hong Kong’s Panic Library, Kindred Spirits, Exit Entry) and international (CTM Festival, FWB Fest, Mira Shintendo) paving the way for innovation through sound, the best techniques for actually finding new music, our very hyper-referential era, and among other things, the seven ways electronic music scenes are still imagining a new future:

1. “You can find innovation in music outside of music.”

[00:12:42] Marcus (Voel): For me, newness doesn’t stop at the sonics. What’s very important to me—and something I’m trying to experiment with—is how you present sounds and music. And I think it gets really segmented: the artist on the stage versus the audience “down there.” That’s one of the things that needs to go, or has to change. New dynamics have to be introduced. One of the best shows I’ve ever seen—actually the best show I’ve seen live—was at Eaton Hong Kong, by a guy called FITNESSS. What he did was create a suit with his controller mounted onto it, everything controlled over Bluetooth, so he didn’t need to be on the stage at all. He was just rolling around in the crowd, bumping into people, rolling on the floor, with lasers in his hands. That was the best show I’ve seen in my life. And a huge part of it came from how he presented his music. Maybe he wasn’t even doing anything with the music. Maybe he just pressed play. But it doesn’t matter, right? The way it was presented—that worked.

[00:13:58] Salomé: I think you’re touching on an interesting point, which is that you can find innovation in music outside of music. You need to look at tech, you need to look at art, and at all the institutions that invite music in through other industries.

[00:38:50] Marcus (Voel): I’m seeing a lot of my peers—sound designers, and also visual producers—starting to work with dancers. A lot, actually. Some of you might know him: Fursk. He was working with a group of tap dancers, and they made a pair of tap shoes with sensors in the metal plates, so he could send signals to his synthesizers. I think a lot of innovation now comes from collaborating with practitioners from other fields, like dance. I think that could be the new thing.

2. Innovation is happening in hyperlocal networks. As genres like trance, budots, vinahouse, and more rise in popularity, “cringe” is being reappropriated in these settings as we enter a new trend cycle.

[00:22:50] Angela: When I observe what’s new, I understand ‘new’ not in a phenomenological sense, not as a feeling of newness, but as how current music responds to the failures or the cringeness of the past. Because for me, new and old are trend cycles: it’s what’s cool and what’s cringe.

[00:22:25] Angela: Trance is also making a comeback. I think it started with Evian Christ in 2020, when he first extracted the most melodic—and the cringiest, moodiest—elements of trance and really amplified them, confronting the cringeness of ‘90s trance.

[00:29:36] Angela: The reason younger producers are drawn to these local hyper-rhythms from the early 2000s—Budots, Vinahouse, Funkot, Taike (台客), Manyao (慢搖)—is that there’s a callback to something really kitschy. To quote the music writer James Gui, it’s a very betel-nut-chewing, bass-boosted, hyperpop-before-Gen-Z-did-it kind of music. It’s a very kitschy kind of consumption. But rather than kitsch in a mass-produced way, it’s kitsch as a subaltern or postcolonial practice—people reclaiming or looking back at their local context. Things that were often previously regarded as vulgar, excessive, too sweet, too campy or too gaudy are now being re-celebrated. I think that also reflects the times. Honestly, I don’t want to be cliché, but… recession indicator. Every time there’s a recession-indicator phase, things go a little more maximal, a little more kitschy.

[00:24:32] Angela: Asian Dope Boys is the collective by Chen Tianzhuo, and what he does is work with a diaspora network of artists who ground their whole content and music in Southeast Asian and East Asian grassroots folk elements almost, reinterpreting them and creating this very trans-experience that’s steeped in geopolitics and very local folklore and lore. Thinking about that, and about how this whole idea of cringe—this whole idea of very localized music from Southeast Asia in the 2000s—is a cringe element that has been recycled for the 2020s to consume and produce.

3. The death of a “decade-defining” music genre represents the decline of a totalizing, singular Western narrative of history and progress.

[00:27:43] Marcus (Voel): Whenever you talk about what kind of music represents an era—okay, what represents the 2010s? We think about Katy Perry and Justin Bieber. Back in the ‘90s, we think about Whitney Houston and Michael Jackson. And as great as they are, I feel like it just comes down to which artists the labels are pushing the most, which artists exist in the consciousness the most. It doesn’t bring any inherent value with it. And these days, human consciousness is so scattered by the internet that everybody’s part of different tiny pockets and radicals and tinfoil hats.

[00:28:38] Salomé: Something interesting you just mentioned is that all these artists representing the ‘90s and the ‘80s are all American—except, technically, Justin Bieber, who’s Canadian. I think it shows that what used to work when America was still regarded as a soft power supremacy just doesn’t work anymore. The world is so multipolar that I think we need to get a bit more [honest] about it.

4. Yes, there is a way to use AI to create new music. But it won’t be through a complete surrender to LLMs, or through Suno. Instead, it is leaning into the unique idiosyncrasies of generative tools to create new forms.

[00:34:45] Marcus (Voel): I don’t think we need more tools. We have way more than enough tools… In the past decade or two, I feel like we’re getting less and less human experience in the process of a creative practice. Every tool is trying to make creation better and faster. And of course, the prime example, the elephant in the room, is Suno—when it comes to music, you don’t even need the process itself anymore.

[00:33:47] Angela: …playing with the machine, learning to talk with it and play with its hallucinations, and understanding how to generate datasets from the very first prompt—creating your own signature style and your own dataset, to the point where you no longer have to take primary source material from the machine, and instead have a whole range of archival material you generated yourself that you can keep inputting and keep generating from. I think that’s one of the coming trends for image-making, fashion and design that I’ve observed.

5. When a machine can generate anything, novelty shifts back towards presence and the human body.

[00:20:42] Salomé: These days I’m actually trying to pay attention to non-electronic music.

[00:20:53] Marcus (Voel): Same here, actually.

[00:20:56] Salomé: I think I’m spending my life surrounded by tech at the moment. Conversations about AI have affected me a lot personally, and the whole concept of reality, of originality and of creativity has been a challenge—at least for me. So my way to disconnect from that is to reconnect with something I find profoundly human. And for some reason, for me, that’s percussion—because it’s also something that grounds me in my body.

[00:21:34] Salomé: I don’t know if it’s the same for anyone else here, but these days I’ve been feeling much more of a need to feel the music with my body and to have a full experience. So live music works a lot for that.

[00:35:00] Marcus (Voel): I wish we could just have an occupation shuffle. If we threw musicians into being, I don’t know, construction workers for a while, I actually think that would be good for us. I think we need more human experience outside the art and music world… So I feel like you just need to touch grass, artists.

6. Thinking (and making music) through a post-European lens will allow us to create “the new” in a multipolar, fragmented world.

[00:37:22] Patrick Kho: The Hong Kong philosopher Yuk Hui… argues that to innovate in culture, or to move through the world as it is now, we need a kind of post-European thinking. By that he means not doing away with what Western frameworks have taught us, but learning about Eastern traditions and frameworks without returning to them entirely: borrowing from both and bringing them together in surprising ways to do things in a new and interesting way. And where better to do that than the one city in the world most clichéd as ‘East meets West’—Hong Kong, right?

[00:41:40] Salomé: Hong Kong is hyper-focused on what sells. So at the end of the day, I think what brings innovation are the spaces that aren’t money-driven—and usually that comes down to cultural spaces and museums. And, as we’ve been mentioning a lot in this talk, the places that blend different industries together. We’re talking about dance; I was mentioning technology earlier. Maybe grants, maybe research that can blend all of that.

7. We’re arriving at a fluid, networked future. Our music is just a reflection of that.

[00:43:35] Salomé: …I hope we’re creating a future where identity isn’t fixed—where you don’t have to define something at the end of the day. Something that can be playful and colorful and change shape and form. And, talking about the commercialization of music and movements: the music scene in particular has become more and more vocal about being co-opted [aka they express when they don’t like it and fight against it], and that’s something we should enable and cultivate more.

[00:44:28] Marcus (Voel): [Unlike throughout history], I don’t think there will be any trends stemming from music itself. Music, fashion and everything else is going to follow the internet, wherever that goes.

[00:44:47] Angela: I think [the future will] go in the direction of smaller pockets—more underground gatherings and networks of curation, selection, community. I think that’s where you’ll find the trendy music circulating. And also queer folks making music. This whole ambiguity of genre translates across into ambiguities of identity, queerness and community.

[00:45:26] Patrick Kho: Is that fragmented, hyperlocal, networked, fluid future brighter than the one we have today, or is it bleaker?

[00:45:50] Salomé: It’s just following us, right? It’s what we are.

[00:46:05] Marcus (Voel): I think it’s going to be bleaker. Although, of course, we always project the future as something worse than what we have right now; we always think we’re at the worst point in history… I think everything’s moving toward a more cyberpunk-ish future, from everything we’re seeing. When it comes to music, maybe it does rebound.

[00:46:49] Angela: People can be optimistic about the accelerating direction, but we’re also living in it right now—so I think only historians in the future will tell.

Shoutout to CRITICAL MASS for platforming the talk.

A booming soundquake travels from the DJ booth to the dance floor to the bar to the glass windows dividing us—near the balcony’s glass ledge—from the club. A girl, probably around nineteen, wearing a bedazzled top, asks her friend, “Wait, are The Twins on right now?” But instead of responding, that friend is leaning his leather boot heels on the table stretcher, combing his mid-part fringe against the reflection from his phone screen, playing a livestream of Canada vs. Morocco in the World Cup Round of 16, which, on Sunday at 2:00 a.m. HKT, has just begun the second half.

That girl is wrong, because from the balcony Trin and I can still hear garbled, deadpan mumble rap verses that could only belong to jackzebra, a 24-year-old rapper from Chengdu, crowned by netizens as the Chinese alternative to Bladee. He enunciates Chinese verses in what Pitchfork once described as “an Auto-Tuned slurry that leaves even native Mandarin speakers scratching their heads,” in a “listless, soupy” texture, almost oracular in the way that it renders “a certain Chinese urban ennui palpable across language barriers.” jackzebra is a fixture in China’s cloud rap scene and the global internet underground. But here in Hong Kong, he’s the opener for tonight’s event: the “GOTHIC” Tour, an intermittent album tour—hopping from Shenzhen to Taipei, and finally arriving at a mushroom-themed nightclub called Mushroom HK—for the release of local hyperpop rapper dlwindle’s latest album, GOTHIC.

When jackzebra’s more icy, mellow SoundCloud-style rap ends, Trin can tell dlwindle is now on the stage when we hear the twinkling synths of “Liberty,” GOTHIC’s opening track. In an instant, she stops talking to me about the trippy dreams she’s been having lately and pulls me back to the club.

As the synthesizer moonwalks between octaves, our way back is marked by a few sights: a man dressed in black jeans, straight-cut but leaning baggy, with an exposed belt, and a gray T-shirt with diagonally cut sleeves and a faded print—a fit that looks less like a collection of thrift store finds and more like Taobao Americana. A Supreme shirt armors another male partygoer, but replacing the classic red-and-white imprint in the front is the brand name on the back, in a stenciled, geometric, military-inspired typeface. Others in black tank tops—mostly men, too—adorn themselves with apocalyptic jewelry from BLACKHEAD, Chrome Hearts, or off-brand stores on Taobao. From far away, I catch a glimpse of a Chinese man who looks like one of the Frost Children: dyed orange hair down to the waist, covered in a cream beanie, wearing a collared T-shirt with alternating stripes of neon green and light gray, paired with flared acid-washed jeans neatly flowing over a pair of black sneakers. (Later, I find out this is Billionhappy, the figurehead of Nu China, or Chinese underground rap.)

I don’t exactly remember when goths started listening to more electronica than punk, or dyed their hair orange instead of jet black. But I’m not the only writer in the 2020s struggling to make the subculture a tangible thing. In The New Atlantis, Robert Mariani offers one vision of the “diner gothic”: a messy combobulation of “Hello Kitty ketamine” ravers, downwardly mobile furries and anime lovers, “Tumblr alumnus,” “alt-prole girl-autism,” men in dark gray graphic tees listening to Bladee or Ecco2K. This 2020s gothic, Mariani argues, gathers various “alt” internet aesthetics into a new messy monoculture, and the phenomenon is uniquely American: when economic stagnation leads to worsening futures for youths outside major cities, the internet becomes a more functional “third space” than an underpopulated provincial downtown—and “Discord becomes more real than [the] cul-de-sac.” This goth, living in this post-post-industrial decline, is less a specific identity, and more a convergence of references from anime, online forums, fetish Discords, and SoundCloud rap, all serving a “downwardly mobile mass aesthetic.”

Mariani’s view isn’t wrong, just limited, because Discord can feel “more real than the cul-de-sac” even if you live in a populated metropolis. Subcultural “alt” internet aesthetics, for example, are likely used about as often in content from fitness influencers in Hong Kong or content creators in Guangzhou as they are by the “transgender assistant manager at CVS.” Mariani is right, however, when he says that the “goth” is increasingly a “lazy shorthand for alternative aesthetics.”

Back at “GOTHIC,” the bass pulsates and thumps like an alien heartbeat—a Xenomorph rhythm pushing blood towards its vitals at 180 beats per minute, yet jittering and feinting a step or two every so often; when its vitality travels downstream, from the DJ booth to the dance floor, through the red LED matrix panel on the ceiling, to clubbers clustered, wet like cells, and jumping up and down in unison to “FRANTIC” (dlwindle’s garish, abrasive mid-album track with record scratching), Trin and I can hardly see anything because it’s a little dark and our view is obscured by more bodies, more waving arms, more dark smoke, and more cameras flashing back and forth between the stage and the crowd. Somehow, between the cracks, we do get a glimpse of dlwindle himself, singing with autotune set to max, head in a sloppy bowl, fringe hovering downward-diagonal, wearing black square shaped glasses like the alien from The Disastrous Life of Saiki K.. A few meters to my right, I can, vaguely, make out the image of a man dressed in a characteristically striped e-boy long-sleeved shirt, accompanied by dark navy-purple pants. Bold choice for a party in mid-summer, maybe, but more sensible when the party is named “GOTHIC,” with promotional materials depicting dlwindle like a ghost-incarnate version of L from Death Note.

The goth in “GOTHIC” can still be prole-ified, anime-pilled, and chronically online without being provincial: in one concert, you can listen to jackzebra rap about doomerism of urban Chinese youth and watch as a sequence of digital occultism-style animations play on the screen behind dlwindle as he performs. But perhaps this resistance to taxonomy might suggest novelty: these artists’ discographies have more in common with new-gen electronic acts like fakemink, underscores, 2hollis, and Ninajirachi, all of whom fuse a mix of sonic references from rap, indie sleaze, and electroclash, and pull from “alt” internet aesthetics to create a new genre of music straddling “underground” and “mainstream.”

And as one essay for Dazed points out, no one knows how to name this new genre. One proposition is “sleazepop,” but when I bring it up to Trin on our smoke break, she thinks that name is a little too lazy, a little too derivative of “indie sleaze.” “Today’s digital age makes it harder to identify distinct genres than ever before,” Solomon PM, the journalist for Dazed, writes. “Where previous movements like hip-hop had a clear origin story rooted in a particular time and place… space and time on the internet are often warped in ever-hybridising ways.”

It’s a (largely) correct and often-repeated argument that pulling aesthetics from the internet obfuscates their real-life origins—the “goth” rises from the ashes of a Pinterest board, not the historic F Club or the Batcave. But can there still be a way to understand the goth in the 2020s? Perhaps it’s easier to start with its antithesis: prep.

In the 1980s, preps were juxtaposed with punks and goths. But just like the modern goth, “prep” in the 2020s is undergoing a definitional shift. Once associated with “old money,” the Ivy League, Oxford shirts, J. Crew, and Polo Ralph Lauren, today’s “prep” (according to trend forecaster Sean Monahan, the Aesthetics Wiki, and a number of TikToks) now prioritizes frilly bright colors, athleisure from alo and adjacent brands, maximalist accessories, and expensive skincare from Sephora. “The aesthetic is characterized by conspicuous consumption,” one entry in Aesthetics Wiki notes, “and a specific set of “status symbol” items, such as Stanley tumblers and Lululemon belt bags.”

As with many aesthetic movements, the styles and symbols were only shorthands for a deeper, widely-felt sentiment. And if new-gen preppy is conspicuous consumption and the pursuit of “status symbols,” then how does the goth, its greatest antithesis, react?

Maybe it’s through rejection. In Hong Kong, at least, the rise of this new-gen, hard-to-name “prep” is equally matched by a rise in a new-gen, hard-to-name “goth”: for every matcha pilates coffee “rave” with strivers in Lululemon, exalting traditional status codes and the virtues of conspicuous consumption, there is an equal pushback in alt-zine launches where all the artists and editors have raccoon-dyed hair, piercings in odd places, and clothes only in black. Maybe the 2020s “goth” will one day coalesce into a moodboard that makes sense, but for now it begins with a feeling—a big fat “NO” to brand-driven social climbing and lifestyle flexes, from anywhere between the American heartland to Southern China, from the cash registers of a run-down CVS to a mushroom nightclub in Hong Kong, and instead an opt-in to a loosely defined subcultural “alt” wardrobe or an MP3 library of alt-internet music.

Actually, that might be more in line with the original goth’s ethos. Gothic writers—the goths before “goth” was a subculture—didn’t exactly pull from a particular moodboard. Their fictions and their prose tapped into Medieval superstitions and barbarisms, rejecting the reason-based intellectualism of the Enlightenment.

The Twins finally come on at around 2:00 a.m.. A Pakistani-British electronic music duo from London, they’re fresh off the release of “FUCKERSBY,” a track featuring breakout star fakemink. According to internet music news page Trending Raps, The Twins belong to a long list of contemporary electronic music duos (Bassvictim, Brutalismus 3000, MGNA Crrrta, Frost Children, Femtanyl, The Femcels, EQ, and more) “pushing the internet’s new electronic underground wave forward.”

One of The Twins dances with a popular local fitness influencer, frequently seen in gothic clothing, while the other is mixing a high-pitched synth-pop remix of Ke$ha’s “Tik Tok” back-to-back with “2” by 2hollis. That girl in the bedazzled top is jumping up and down in excitement—my vision of her is clearer now that most of dlwindle’s fans have left and the crowd has thinned. But the dance floor in the mushroom-themed nightclub remained heavy with sweat, something new was emerging.

Mushrooms, since Anna Tsing wrote The Mushroom at the End of the World, symbolize the “possibility of life in capitalist ruins.” Beyond clubs, I’ve noticed mushrooms appearing more often in subcultural, vaguely gothic, vaguely anti-prep spaces—at art galleries and creative communities where fungal life offers an all-purpose icon for the alternative, for what lies outside existing systems. Here at the mushroom-themed nightclub, in the monsoon season, you can feel it. Again, I’m no scientist, but when the air grows thick with moisture, particularly after heavy rain, mushrooms absorb the surrounding water to inflate their cells and rise above the destruction.

Far too many critics like to say that the 2020s are devoid of new art and music. But perhaps, the true newness can be found in what we’re struggling to name.

So I thought. Instead, I am sitting on my ass in a hotel room, zero-for-three. Nothing I’ve eaten has been spicier than my midnight Popeye’s run, at the airport and Hungry On Arrival. I’ve only purchased three t-shirts from COMMON SCENTS, a brand so minimalist an influencer once crowned it the “Chinese A.P.C.” And since I don’t normally smoke I’ve bummed two cigarettes at max, leaving both unfinished. The previous night, Brandon* and Nathan* and I sampled ABYSS, a techno nightclub whose parties Rick Owens famously attended. But even with the DJs playing maximalist 150 BPM bounce bass drops straight from a viral Chinese spin class, somehow I was left wanting more.

Tomorrow, my checkout is at 9AM so it’s time to end my underwhelming trip with a bang, and when Brandon and Nathan finish getting dressed, I order a Didi for three from our hotel in Xintiandi, bound for Fuxing Park, to the final attraction of this trip: INS Land, Shanghai’s most popular nightclub.

Though “nightclub” in the singular may not be the most appropriate descriptor here. Official branding describes INS Land as a “CULTURAL PLAYGROUND.” The venue is not a unified place playing one sound with one DJ at a time. Instead, “INS Land spans seven floors and over 20 venues, bringing together music, dining, and art under one roof, [where] every night tells a new story.”

And in recent months that story has slowly cemented into myth, ranking 12th in DJ Mag’s April 2026 guide to the “Top 100 Clubs in the World.” But long prior, I’d been hearing chatter in industry mixers, or from friends who’d finished months-long stints in Shanghai, that INS Land was the venue to see on a visit to the city: “a place to lose yourself and find yourself all in the course of one night,” writes DJ Mag. So mythic is the club’s status that, in the vernacular of some in Shanghai circles, “INS-ed” is an actual verb: pronunciation: [aɪ.ɛn.ɛst], meaning to be Christened by the club’s interiors, and if time and money allow, to soak oneself in its seven stories, swim through twenty dance floors, drift between Douyin hit mixed with Afrobeats, tracks from Western Pop divas, K-pop with EDM, or hardcore industrial techno.

Tonight, I don’t think we’re as lucky. It’s INS Land’s third anniversary this weekend, and according to a strange man Brandon, Nathan, and I met at a wine bar earlier in the afternoon, the club will be too packed to hop between floors.

Exhibit A: When the Didi pulls into our destination at 11 PM, a park opening under a highway, BYDs and Roewes and blue-tinted taxis and cars with fake fenders blasting C-pop line up bumper-to-bumper, inches from the curb. Women in Douyin face and sparkly, diagonally-cut cropped tops peer into cars—looking for friends or their way back home, I’m not sure, but it’s unlikely the latter because the night is young and, besides a few gay guys with Botox, the partygoers are too: walking in through the tree-shrouded opening, the crowd dons the Global Normie Club Uniform for Under-30s—cropped, low-hanging spaghetti straps for women; for men, baggy-leaning collared shirts or, if appropriately toned, a single black tank top.

If Berghain was once a power plant, sitting near the wall dividing East and West Berlin; if its transformation into a techno nightclub symbolized global capitalism’s victory—an industrial history repurposed for techno music and for modern pleasures—then INS Land was that, an embodiment of an era, except this time for the consumer-driven economy in the supposed “Chinese century.”

Glimmering pillars of gold fused together into a singular building, which, despite being six stories high, was more wide than tall. “INS新乐园,” reads the logo on the exterior, a “new paradise,” if you follow the word-for-word translation, standing in the heart of the city that writer Dan Wang once described as “China’s bleeding edge of consumption.” Shanghai’s Olympus of experience-for-purchase—a place where you could, theoretically, order Jianghu grill in one hour, grab post-dinner snacks at FuXing Bakery, pre-game your night with Japanese-Western fusion cocktails, and then hit the club right after. You won’t have to walk more than 100 meters. As INS Land’s President, Justin Guan, told Mixmag Asia in late 2025, “[the club] was inspired by the idea of: how can we make a physical place or series of places, feel like a dreamland? How can we create a ‘Disneyland for adults’?” Nearby, a conjoined statue of Marx and Engels and the former residence of Sun Yat-sen (the founder of China’s Nationalist Party) sit in the same 10 hectares of Fuxing Park, but at midnight the building’s golden glow devours any remnants of ideology.

“Wait, guys,” Brandon pauses. “I need to record my Instagram story.” He walks ahead, panning his rearview camera from his feet and then towards the large “INS新乐园” sign in front.

Such a video may soon become a historical artifact, and like in a factory, the core product constantly cycles through reinvention: Visit INS Land again a few months (or weeks, even), Guan told Mixmag Asia, “you are not going to get the same experience—we regularly change up venues, as well as change the theme and design of the main lobby every quarter.”

In mid-June, however, the lobby blends Disneyland with a Japanese arcade: an entrance wrapped in LED screens, glowing in pink, purple, and cyan makes way for rotating metal turnstiles impenetrable without a QR code on WeChat or on INS’s official app. Wooden signs, with arrows designed in Neverland-style, offer a directory on the ground floor. Maximalist videogame-style hyperpop emanates from speakers next to a DJ wearing a pink wig and dressed like Hatsune Miku, elevated by a booth built with neon bloxels.

Tonight, Nathan introduces us to Charis, a friend from college, who ushers us into an express elevator, to the top floor: La Fin, what is apparently the “most international” nightclub in the building, and according to official branding, Shanghai’s “home of global pop music.” Near the opening in front, a sphere with the club’s logo plastered in red neon signage spins globe-like above a circular bar counter, with bartenders—rotating, mixing alcohol and cranberry juice and soda and ice—circling left and right to drink-ordering patrons. Hip-hop (the sound of Global Asia) is playing: discs jockeys cycling through Lil Nas X to Central Cee to Ciara’s “Level Up” to Doechii to a heavy-bass remix of “ーアニョハセヨ (Annyeonghaseyo)” by Yuki Chiba & Lil Moshpit, a J-rap song that, over the past few months, had slowly become the meta track for fashion influencers in Hong Kong and Southern China. Sounds swirl and circulate around crowds of people whose presence in Shanghai might surprise you: a sinister-looking Wasian friend group near the bathroom, gossiping about a mutual’s bipolar diagnosis; the extremely American table of African American men in the VIP section; or the two Moroccan dudes, standing hips glued together, under a sign that says “WE ALL BECOME STORIES IN THE END.”

But if the club is an adult Disneyland, stories can feel two-tiered, pay-to-play. Charis pulls us towards the VIP section, blocked by a belly-button-high metal barrier, where girls in skin-tight leopard prints and cat ears, dance limp and unenthusiastically for a table of female clubbers. If you’re not inside, you can’t see the DJ booth—nor the jittery spectacle of blue flashing lights switching into mangled calculus of red-and-black, like the screen of a netrunner playthrough of Cyberpunk 2077, numbers moving in ordered disarray of seance-code. Stand outside the VIP section and you’ll be left to watch the partygoers who paid a little extra.

I slam a few shot glasses and wince right after. A tall man in a suit—chaperone for hire?—is there to manage my discomfort: he offers me a napkin from his chest pocket and flashes me his Alipay code. (I tip him ¥100.) I’m pulled into the smoking room with Nathan and Charis and Bruce (a random guy, not from our party) and he just tells me he wants to visit the Philippines one day. I grow dizzy as his words dissipate into the haze of smoke, while bodies next to him, of people dressed in Chrome Hearts and Comme des Garçons shirts with lipstick stains, vanish under the tar-soaked shimmer of the red overhead lighting.

The club experience feels like a constant negotiation of status, between live player and NPC, between partying in the style of a narrative storytelling game and an MMORPG. “Many partners in [INS Land] come from gaming backgrounds and we wanted to create something in reality that could be as close to the virtual experience,” Justin Guan also told Mixmag Asia in the same interview. “We wanted users to feel like they are a character in a video game going through different levels and each level has its own theme and its own mini universe.”

By 2:27AM, we get bored of the same hip-hop tracks, take an elevator down to the ground floor, and ascend an escalator, only to arrive at Hush, another hip-hop club on INS’ first floor. We get our new wristbands and enter a long walkway of dim neon orange lights. I’ll be honest and say that by this point in the evening, my head is throbbing, and I’m a little confused by how we’re supposed to enter the club. From here, we can peer into the dance floor through glass windows embedded in the walls and watch “characters” and “users” play along with sounds of Post Malone, as strobe lights blink like bright pixels on the dark 8-bit of an arcade machine.

Bored and equally dazed, Nathan and Brandon race back up to La Fin without entering Hush. I’m left alone watching the orange lighting cast a chiaroscuro on the faces of clubbers along the hallway, glowing in the dark like the keys on a gaming keyboard. I stumble towards the mirror wall facing the bathroom, while twenty-year-olds with American accents ask me to move out of the way because they want to take a mirror selfie. I step aside, bleed into the scene, and see a girl’s camera flash as her game continues to unfold.

The Italian Marxist philosopher supposedly etched these words while locked up in Rome’s Regina Coeli, afflicted with headaches so violent that he would beat his skull against the prison walls. But listen to how they’re used today and the Communist’s words read less like the ramblings of a dying, diseased man and more like prophecy.

Gramsci finds strange bedfellows in right-wing politicians, brand marketers, and Gen Z filmmakers alike: his original quote appears in speeches by Bart De Wever, the Prime Minister of Belgium, or in short-form videos by Eugene Healy, the internet personality and strategist. And while never mentioned explicitly, Gramsci’s words, to me, form the core thesis behind Backrooms, A24’s breakout film of the summer and the directorial debut of 20-year-old Kane Parsons.

Parsons’ film takes us through the “Backrooms,” a fictionalized, quasi-parallel universe, built like a mock-up of the real world, though not quite (to borrow a line from the film itself, they mirror our reality, but it’s like if you asked someone who’s never seen a dog to draw one from description). Clark, the film’s protagonist, enters a part of the backrooms that looks like a musty office from the ‘90s. From the yellowing walls, molding, unwashed carpets, and warm overhead lighting, you can practically smell the mildew through the screen. All this coalesces into an uncanny, unreality: dog-sized tunnels that connect rooms in place of hallways, floors connected by trash chutes rather than staircases, or doors that open to pure cement and serve no purpose besides decoration.

One can read this as a kind of LLM hallucination—what if you fed Grok a building plan, and it garbled, vomited, and spat it out in return?—but Backrooms’ main inspiration predates the advent of AI. Parsons’ story was primarily inspired by a 2019 creepypasta—text-based horror circulated through online forums—of the terror of waking up in a dilapidated ‘90s office building with the “musty, wet smell of carpet … that should have been changed decades ago.” A kind of liminal space where pure unknowing induces fear. One Vice writer argues these spaces sit on the precipice of new and old, familiar and strange. No surprise then that in this uncanny unreality, not quite here nor there, it is “the time of monsters”: In both Parsons’ film and the creepypastas, seven-plus-foot-tall monsters roam the backrooms, trampling, decapitating, and devouring any humans in a manner a la Gramsci.

For these reasons, I’m inclined to think that Backrooms is as much a film about economics as it is a psychological horror: the story takes place in the ‘90s (the office interior design and VHS footage make that clear), but the larger universe documents “the odd transitional period of the 2000s, where things from the past sat almost completely unchanged, unmaintained, buildings unrenovated,” Chris Frewerd, the original writer of the backrooms creepypasta told Vice.

In between the 2002 dot-com bubble and the global financial crisis of 2008, global GDP more than doubled and China rose as an emergent economic power. The first decade of the new millennium was one of seismic-level shifts. In recalling these events today, Parsons and the creepypasta writers are narrating the Gramscian milieu du jour, where rapid economic, social, and technological change in the 2020s guarantees a new world knocking at the gate. System-wide upheaval is simultaneously imminent and yet-to-be, and you sense that Parsons believes the monsters embody the population-wide unknowing of what comes next: “There’s a lot of simplicity in the setup that preys on the anxiety people have around the stage of industrialization we’re at,” he says in a profile with The New York Times. “The world is becoming increasingly atomized and sort of lonely. We have so much available to us now—at least in this part of the world—yet it feels like all the stuff we have means less and less.”

When past decades of change are deployed to narrate the approaching upheaval today, what does it amount to? Shirley Lau, a curator at Asian cultural think tank Serakai Studio, has a vocabulary for it that spans geographies: “dreamcore,” a “shared feeling [and] experience under massive changes.”

Dreamcore is the main subject of “dreamedcore,” a new exhibit by the Hong Kong based contemporary salon, GOLD, “bringing together artists, designers, fashion labels, and creative studios from across Asia.” The exhibit argues that dreamcore is neither style nor subculture, more a generational condition felt by creative practitioners born in the ‘90s, “growing up amid tremendous urban change and now hitting their 30s.”

As with Backrooms, icons from a childhood in the 2000s return “as hazy afterimages of an uncanny world, shaped as much by platform circulation and algorithmic repetition as by lived memory itself.” One installation at the exhibit features a Sony CRT TV playing a music video of three Chinese men singing “Ppo-Ppo (Kiss),” a viral North Korean kids song that praises Kim Jong-Un as a generous father bringing prosperity to his nation. 啾 Jiū society, the group behind the installation, repurposes the track as second-generation migrants to China’s Special Economic Zones, paying thanks to their parents who moved to cities like Shenzhen and Xiamen right at the precipice of the nation’s manufacturing goldrush. Elsewhere in the exhibit is baby-diaper-sized underwear from Hong Kong label Yat Pit. A subversion of the high-waisted underwear advertising by Calvin Klein—ubiquitous in the 2000s—the underwear’s waistband is nearly quintupled, colored in neon light blue with the words “夜長夢多” (“long nights and many dreams”) emblazoned in bold red.

As journalist wrote of the dreamcore aesthetic in Inside China, remixing cultural symbols from the turn of the millennium is “re-sanctification”: shrouding these objects in “an aura that is eerie, nostalgic, and tender all at once.” And at the “emotional core” of this aesthetic phenomenon, Gao continues, “lies a sense of relative loss: the modern world we inhabit is not the technological, romantic utopia we were once promised.”

“I was born in Guangyuan in Sichuan province, then moved to Chengdu when I was ten years old, when Beijing won the chance to host the Olympics,” Shirley, curator of “dreamedcore,” agrees. “I remember everyone was so proud about that era that [China] was actually achieving things. Every month there was some exciting news.”

Chinese dreamcore first began as an internet trend, when grainy VHS footage and pictures of internet cafes and the early evolution of China’s Tier 1 cities flooded platforms like Bilibili and RedNote. But much like how Backrooms elevates internet creepypastas into A24 films, Chinese dreamcore is following a similar trajectory of institutionalization. Shirley says the internet trend became a generational experience first, shaped the styles of Chinese creatives second, and later, became institutionalized in exhibits like GOLD’s.

“We miss that era [of national growth],” says Shirley, “but for now, there should be a way that we can take care of all the lostness for the time being.” And as Gao argues, slower national and international growth is transforming dreamcore into “a materialization of discontent with intergenerational economic inequality” where “everything beautiful about the past existed precisely because it was a time of economic ascent.”

That much is made clear in other pieces in GOLD’s “dreamedcore”: a beat-up hall stand by Xiamen design studio envy envy, representing millennials’ generational economic struggles and signifying, in Shirley’s words, that “our generation takes beats but never breaks”; or a video installation by Ming Wong, who travels between Hong Kong and American Chinatowns, gender-bending, slipping in and out of costume as both a detective from a Wong Kar-wai film and a femme fatale, mimicking a lost generation’s search for identity.

One underlying tension behind this aesthetic, of course, is in longing for the past—both A24’s Backrooms and GOLD’s “dreamedcore” pull from previous decades. But dreamcore is adamant that its gaze is more forward-looking than its less creative cousin, nostalgia-core: “We’re not doing a cultural revival here,” says Shirley. “It’s more that we cherish what we have in the past. But that doesn’t mean we wanna stay there forever.” For example, dreamcore leans heavily on distortion: the world of Backrooms is filled with rooms with deformed layouts and disfigured humans, while GOLD’s “dreamedcore” features works by Peng Ke, whose stained glass pieces connect fragmented memories of childhood—classrooms, neighborhoods, printing on snacks—woven together with cast iron “like thread.” Alternatively, pieces by LVMH Prize-winning studio Penultimate deploy “assemblage techniques from the wearable art movement of the 1970s”: in “Chinese Toy Story,” children’s stuffed toys are cut apart, stitched together, forming what looks like a disturbingly child-like remake of a slutty rave harness and a headpiece with the face entirely obscured.

Fragmented, distorted, a “world of monsters”—not all that different from what Shirley means when she says, “We’re losing our way of controlling our own lives and the lives of people around us,” where many changes are happening “but there’s not much we can do.”

Across time zones, mediums, and geographies—from white nationalists to Indigenous futurists, from Backrooms as a “first” in the canon of Gen Z horror filmmaking to Chinese netizens recalling the 2000s for a new aesthetic—more than a few are distorting the past to imagine the future. “The old world is dying, and the new world struggles to be born.” How else do we navigate the “now,” the “time of monsters”?

Actually, that original Gramsci quote is a mistranslation. As Philip Oltermann traces in The Guardian, in the most widely used English version of the Prison Notebooks, the Marxist philosopher writes instead, “In this interregnum a great variety of morbid symptoms appear.” No, it’s not all that different in meaning from the quippy, Davos-speech-worthy, viral alternative. But much like dreamcore, true history is conveniently remixed as a salve for contemporary anxieties. Distorting the past becomes a means of charting the future.

All photos of “dreamedcore” courtesy of Serakai Studio and the artists.

We’re sitting inside a sleek black BYD, ordered from rideshare app DiDi, accelerating 90 kilometers an hour on a wide, car-less highway at two o’clock in the morning. Andre can’t resist the urge to stick his arm out the window and hang his hand against the breeze. “Nevermind, sorry,” he says. “I sound like a white guy going to the Philippines.”

I don’t think Andre is wrong, though. In droves, people from Hong Kong have been trickling north to the neighboring Chinese city, Shenzhen. In a single week, residents from the former British colony can apply for a Chinese travel permit or tourist visa on a Monday, acquire it before Friday, and then come Saturday, take a 45-minute train north, cross the border on foot, and make an easy weekend vacation in the Mainland. On the weekend of Buddha’s birthday, some friends and I are among them—and our mission is to make use of what China’s manufacturing prowess has to offer: cheaper prices.

You can stuff your face with Xinjiang-style barbecue and Hunanese spicy pork for less than 60 RMB (US$8) a person, or shuttle from one side of the city to the next, get chauffeured in sleek EVs, and the fare could be less than 40 yuan (~US$6). “Nothing beats a Jet2holiday,” so they say. “You can save fifty pounds per person … two hundred pounds off for a family of four.” Try as you might, but you will get dealmogged by a weekend in Shenzhen: slobber your face in the best spicy food in the world and ride around the city in style, because when the costs of food, drink, transport, and the hotel are finally tallied up, the total bill amounts to roughly the price of a pair of New Balances.

After some scolding from the three of us seated in the back, some sense knocks into Andre and he pulls his arm back inside the car. The black BYD turns rightward from the highway, into a long, dark strip, lit up by 7-Elevens and mini charcoal pits from hawkers selling skewers. Four more friends pull in from another DiDi, and our party of eight files in line for Sauce, Shenzhen’s most popular hip-hop nightclub.

It was like a millennial designed a gas station: in a retro Americana typeface read the logo, “Sauce,” plastered on red rectangular roof protruding above the club’s exterior, with walls fully wrapped in a borderless LED screen casting a pink-colored glow in the dark. Pixels forming red and white ball-pit-style balls circled around the main entrance, as if pulling you to sink and swim in the muffled trap emanating from the club’s opening.

Entry is 100 RMB (~US$15) per person, says the bouncer, a man named Stan with arms fully sleeved in tattoos. Our bill is ¥800 but if we add ¥80, Stan says, we get a table and free tequila too.

“Guys it’s quarter past two,” Wendy* says. “Do we really need this?” Our start is later than usual so we don’t know how long we’ll stay and we’re not quite sure if the man named Stan is offering a scam. Besides, when everything in the city is so cheap, you get spoiled on good prices, and the line between Good Deal and (perceived) Theft grows paper thin. (We paid 800 RMB for a bottle of whiskey and five pitchers worth of green tea over a pre-game; Henry*, who grew up in Beijing, said we were being ripped off; I told him to shut up, that we should shoulder the cost and support the local nightlife industry. I don’t know who’s right).

But because Stan is nice and speaks to us in Cantonese, our verdict is “yes, fuck it, add the ¥80 (~US$12), split it between eight.” And for a hotly debated extra US$1.20 per person we get the table. Once Lauren* scans the AliPay QR code to top off our bill, we collect our wristbands and blitz inside.

The dance floor is packed but I hardly notice—the AC has all the right settings because even wading through the cracks between bodies, I don’t graze on anyone’s sweat. More obvious is the Skrillex mixed with Drake’s 2018 track “Nonstop,” the loud MC chanting with the song’s adlibs, or the dirty-blonde-haired white man I pass by on the walk to the table. He’s wearing skin-tight black jeans and black converse, with hair tied in a man bun over an undercut. At least to me, this does not feel like the culture of the 2020s.

The table’s diameter barely fits the eight of us (scam!). But the extra expense must’ve been essential because there’s about an inch of space between me and the dancers behind me (good deal?). The tequila bottle arrives (good deal?), but servers are too busy to offer shot glasses (scam!). “No one knows how to walk by someone without hitting them,” Alicia*, complains. “Even turning at the right angle, everyone seems to miss that here.” True, but it’s also nice to see that even after Charli XCX declared “the dance floor is dead,” there’s a club in China where the insides are bursting with patrons, the business is (likely) good, and the owners are (hopefully) making money.

Shenzhen is analogous to China’s rapid ascent as a global economic powerhouse. Forty years ago, the city was a poor fishing village, with a population of around thirty thousand. But after being named a “Special Economic Zone” by the CCP, Shenzhen became a manufacturing hub, creating low-end toys, textiles, and electronics in its factories during the 1980s. Later, this industrial might unlocked new opportunities, eventually bringing the headquarters of tech giants like Tencent and Huawei into its limits. Today, Shenzhen’s population is roughly 18 million, its GDP greater than Denmark’s.

A single generation in Shenzhen can witness centuries worth of economic growth compressed into fifty years. “A miracle”—as Xi Jinping once described this rapid development in a 2019 speech—“in the history of world development, created by the Chinese people.” Or, a “dream,” where, thanks to Chinese manufacturing, what once was a poor fishing village now lives in a complete, near-vacuous abundance: “Shenzhen is still the only place in the world with a full-stack metabolism for developing new products,” artist and theorist Gary Zhexi Zhang once wrote of the city in Spike Art Magazine. “Here, it was said that a product could be dreamed up in the morning, its components sourced in an afternoon, and its prototypes ordered by nightfall—the Shenzhen dream.”

Around the world, nightlife organizers sound the alarm that the clubbing industry is on its last breaths. Hope for the industry is in short supply, but at Sauce there’s faith in miracles: “GOD HAS MY BACK,” reads the words of a faded imprint on the t-shirt of a tall, Germanic man, who (if I wasn’t hallucinating) might’ve been a popular model from the Philippines that I knew from high school. The words “PRAY FOR JUUL” land on the shirt of another man—this time, French—sketched in bold above an image of the Girl with a Pearl Earring taking a hit from a vape. Who was this contraband god commanding his reverence? It is the e-cigarette, outlawed just a few kilometers south in Hong Kong, where sale and use are strictly banned.

Clubbers at nearby tables pass French fries, crumpled tissue paper, and vape smoke by the mouth, with the playfulness reserved for adolescents trying alcohol for the first time. “Why does it feel like the clubs people would sneak into when we were in high school? It’s so 2017,” I say to Alicia. Two TikTok-era classics—Megan Thee Stallion’s “Body” and “OUT WEST” by Jackboys and Travis Scott—mix back to back, triggering a speedy somnambulant sway of the shoulders in the Nepali tourists, dancing heels-off atop the sofa near the wall. Clubbers circle around the curved pillar in the club’s center—rotating, rewinding the spool of “today.” Suddenly, it’s like that magical thinking, the belief in miracles, bleeds and transforms into something else, something that feels like the bubbly optimism of the 2010s.

That’s likely the natural consequence of life in a nation that lifted 800 million out of poverty, where people travel for cheap prices. Chinese manufacturing is creating a new affective experience of “abundance”—an experience of the world that feels nearly identical to the Zero-Interest Rate Policy (ZIRP) era.

In late 2008, right in the middle of the Global Financial Crisis, the United States’ Central Bank set interest rates to zero, and ushered in the Zero-Interest Rate Policy. From then, money was literally free. Easy access to capital spawned some of the world’s most recognizable tech startups: Airbnb in 2008, Uber in 2009, DoorDash in 2013, many of which sought to eliminate friction from travel, transportation, and dining, offering convenient services at a price so low it felt like an inalienable right. As Brad Troemel recalls of the ZIRP era, “easy money gave rise to the Millennial Lifestyle Subsidy: A brief window during which startups, flush with VC funding, offered artificially low prices on goods and services in a race to acquire users and monopolize their markets.” As an additional side effect it created a wave of fake jobs: product managers who spent their entire days playing ping pong in Silicon Valley tech offices, or “journalists” at BuzzFeed getting paid actual salaries to write listicles all day. ZIRP technically ended in 2015-16. But global interest rates remained low, until 2020, when governments reinstated ZIRP as a response to COVID-19.

“Millennial Lifestyle Subsidies” and free money made “abundance” the defining affective experience of the 2010s: You could Uber to work, have a fake, low-effort, high-paying job at a tech startup, arrive home and DoorDash (or Deliveroo or Foodpanda) your dinner for an abysmally low price. Coming of age in this era, even halfway across the world, taught me that opportunities and resources would always be abundant and that through technology, humanity would progress towards a kind of Fully Automated Luxury Communism.

Obviously, I was wrong. ZIRP roughly ended in 2022 to curb pandemic-induced inflation. Now that money is no longer free, tightening company budgets are triggering industry-wide layoffs, and the price of eggs and gas triggers a “vibescession” around the world. But you can still get a picture of ZIRP-era abundance in China, particularly as a tourist riding in 40 RMB DiDis, ordering food delivered by DJI drones, or on weekend vacations that cost less than a sneaker.

For outsiders looking into China, the idea that “Chinese manufacturing” is the new “zero interest rate policy” is particularly apt. “Why travel to China is WAY Cheaper Than You Think” reads a clickbait headline of a YouTube video; on the thumbnail of another, the words “ONLY $2” point towards a Luckin Coffee cup. In a video, Singaporean creator Cayydences parodies this sentiment: “EVERYTHING THERE IS SO CHEAP… CHINA HAS EVERYTHING… I LOVE CHINA,” he says. “THE DRONE THAT CARRIES THE FOOD… OH MY GOD ONLY CHINA HAS THAT.” Where I live in neighboring Hong Kong, branches of Xiao Noodles, HeyTea, and Pop Mart are flooding into local malls. By offering affordable, high-quality food, drinks, and toys en masse, these Chinese brands are comforting a city where consumer sentiment is in slow recovery.

Just as the United States accumulated trillions in debt during ZIRP, China’s current surplus of cheap, high-quality goods is fueled by a similar mountain of credit. The nation’s total social financing—an official metric used by the People’s Bank of China to measure debt—continues to increase at a greater rate than GDP. I’m not qualified to predict how this will pan out, but it’s not clear how long these cheap prices will last for consumers coming from outside the country’s borders. On the weekend of our trip, the exchange rate had shifted in favor of the RMB. A year ago, the U.S. dollar was valued at 7.2 RMB; today, it is worth 6.77. Our Hong Kong dollars—pegged to the American currency—were worth less, and we were paying more out of pocket.

But in the meantime, we enjoy what Chinese manufacturing has to offer.

Just before we bounce at four o’clock, Carl* has the violent urge to start doing a bottle flip. Wendy copies him and fails. We finally leave after noticing the thinner crowd and that a different DJ is on the decks. On our way out, I catch a glimpse of the sign at the entrance: “票止阴阳怪气 / PROHIBIT YYGQ.” Directly, the phrase means that a bitchy passive-aggressiveness is unwelcome at the club. I may be wrong, but I imagine a *very distant* and much less literal translation could recall a ZIRP-era maxim that I grew up with, apt for the Shenzhen nightclub’s bubbly optimism and faith in miracles: good vibes only.

Around the world, demand for “authentic” African American jazz was soaring to new heights. And Shanghai was no exception: Clayton’s travels to the city, as Andrew Field and James Farrer note in Shanghai Nightscapes, were “part of a much larger diaspora of Black American artists and entertainers following World War I.” Between the 1920s and the 1930s, many such musicians quickly discovered lives more illustrious—and artistic careers more successful—in cities far from home, places where they could be free from “the degradations and humiliations that they often experienced in American society.”

Clayton and the Harlem Gentlemen’s entry into Shanghai was especially anticipated, in particular by the city’s elite circles. The troupe had set foot in China on invitation from Teddy Weatherford, a Black jazz pianist who’d already gained notoriety in Shanghai’s cosmopolitan cabaret and dance hall scene, and were set to perform at the famed Canidrome Ballroom on the night of their arrival. Rumors abounded throughout Shanghai—that allegedly, this was going to be the best jazz orchestra to ever perform in the Far East.

Jazz’s most high-profile fanatics would dress their finest—gowned, tuxed, or in dinner jackets, preened for the ball—and arrive to watch Clayton and the Harlem Gentlemen. Two of the Soong sisters were in the audience: among the patrons of the night were Song Meiling, or “Madame Chiang,” the wife of Kuomintang leader Chiang Kai-shek; and Song Ailing, a businesswoman wedded to H. H. Kung, the richest man in China during the early 20th century.

The Canidrome Ballroom’s main feature was two grand pianos, facing one another in parallel. Guiding the band’s melody was Weatherford, fingers dancing along the keys of one piano, while Eddie Beal, pianist of the Harlem Gentlemen, commanded the other. Though stakes were high, one news article presents their performance as a resounding success: “[Weatherford and Beal] combine perfectly… switch[ing] at intervals in a manner which calls for great timing,” Max Chaicheck, then a reporter for the China Press, wrote of the event.

“Buck Clayton… as a trumpet player, he has no equal here… The new all-colored band with its hi-de-ho rhythms set our feet adancing,” Chaicheck continued to write. “It played jazz as it should be played, hot tunes that called for expert handling of all instruments and the new bands-men proved more than capable… Little Harlem has been transplanted from America to the Canidrome Ballroom.” [Emphasis mine].

I bring up Clayton’s story as a reminder of what nightlife makes possible. The cover of darkness at a club or ballroom or a bar always had potency for worldmaking, projecting us towards realities that are not our own: for the night Clayton arrived in China, Harlem came to Shanghai.

Nightlife’s sense of transportive, disembodied worldmaking did also find itself in Clayton’s life in Shanghai, a place where he enjoyed many privileges that he couldn’t back home: a wardrobe full of fancy suits of Chinese tailoring, women of various nationalities worshipping at his feet, and adoring crowds wherever he went.

A less charitable reading of this story might see Buck as an early prototype of the “digital nomad,” a man who could not find success in the West, and sought it elsewhere instead. And yes, Black American jazz musicians (unfairly) enjoyed more privileges than their local Chinese counterparts, but I’m more inclined to think that Clayton understood China far better than a contemporary course-seller in Dubai understands the UAE. In his memoir, for example, Clayton recalls how he reconfigured American jazz for Chinese tastes: “I sketched out some of the most popular Chinese songs at the time and after a few rehearsals we were playing it like we had been doing it a long time.”

The more important lesson of Clayton’s story is how it highlights alternative and surprising ways of connecting between cultures. Clayton felt more welcome in China than in his own home in Kansas. He fled Jim Crow-era America to mingle with the Shanghai glitterati, and lived an early iteration of a “modern” “cosmopolitan” life.

Shanghai cabarets presented an early model of “globalizing” that has since faded from contemporary memory. And it differs from the top-down vision of organized diplomatic globalization, insofar as it arises informally, outside of the West, and from the margins. Like Clayton, other members of the city’s jazz scene were escaping challenges in their home countries when they first arrived in China.

Over 100,000 Russians escaping the Bolsheviks were among them, and roughly a quarter of them arrived in Shanghai. These “white refugees” included Oleg Lundstrem, a teenage leader of a jazz orchestra, traveling to Harbin and then Shanghai via the Chinese Eastern Railway. The Lundstrem Jazz Orchestra still exists today, a century after its founding, and the organization credits Shanghai for propelling the success of the orchestra, which debuted first at the Yangtze Hotel, and later at the popular ballroom at the Majestic Hotel. “Over forty” jazz groups led by Russian refugees (allegedly) came and went in Shanghai’s early cabaret scene, but none came close to Lundstrem’s orchestra or Lundstrem himself, who the Shanghai Press dubbed “the king of jazz in the Far East.”

There were plenty of Filipinos too. Many of them wound up in Shanghai from passenger ships that sailed between major Asian ports. And like the karaoke singers in reality TV shows today, they were excellent entertainers: Bao Zhengzhen, a Shanghainese man involved in the jazz scene of the 1920s, recalls, “In the lower-class dance halls you would have Chinese bands playing, but there is no way they could compare to those Filipinos.”1

In Davos earlier this year, French President Emmanuel Macron warned that we are shifting “towards a world without rules. Where international law is trampled underfoot.” The post-war dream of a society where we are united by global collective governance is slowly decaying, as member states at a recent Security Council meeting sound the alarm for a new “crisis of confidence” in international organizations.

Consider how the COVID-19 pandemic exposed significant weaknesses in the WHO’s global health governance or how the UN is regularly denounced for bureaucratic bloat. The World Economic Forum’s mantra, “you will own nothing and be happy,” is now widely criticized as an elite globalist agenda, while the Security Council remains suspended in complete paralysis in working towards peace in Gaza. These critiques, to me, signal an important shift: a deeply held disillusionment with the world of top-down, institution-led globalization.

This is not the “end” of globalization per se, but likely a change in what globalization will look like. In 2026, globalization is increasingly bottom-up: government-sponsored work visas are increasingly challenging to obtain, yet informal migration is on the rise; America closes several embassies in the Middle East, yet digital nomads flock to Dubai in rising numbers. And, like in the Shanghai cabaret scene, cultures can and will converge at the crossroads through nightlife.

Nightlife spaces, I think, are great incubators for bottom-up globalization in its most utopian form: they unite an unlikely mix of peoples and cultures into a shared practice, just as Shanghai cabarets brought the African Americans fleeing Jim Crow or the Russians fleeing the Bolsheviks together in the shared practice of jazz.

It goes without saying that Shanghai in the 1920s was not some globalist utopia. It was effectively a colony. Many ballrooms were run by gangs. The city’s cosmopolitanism arose following the collapse of the Qing dynasty and the chaos of the Boxer Rebellion, in which China was left divided and controlled by foreign interests. Many of Shanghai’s clubs had official—or unofficial—restrictions for non-whites.

But that informal cosmopolitanism and new ways for people to find better lives arose from this context makes it all the more interesting: it was a makeshift, “bottom-up globalization,” uniting African Americans, Russians, Filipinos and Chinese into an unlikely alliance of jazz. Bottom-up globalization is what anthropologist Anna Tsing might describe as “indeterminacy,” where “we are thrown into shifting assemblages, which remake us as well as our others.” Where we are forced to confront the trouble and create new, possibly better, ways of existing.

Shanghai cabaret globalization was not a perfect, utopian globalization. But perhaps it answers an important question today: If the post-war world of collective, top-down governance dissolves, how will our world continue to connect?

Andrew Field and James Farrer’s book, Shanghai Nightscapes: A Nocturnal Biography of a Global City (University of Chicago Press), was instrumental in pointing me towards primary sources for this essay.

Lin Heung Lau, one of Hong Kong’s most historic tea houses, was set to close by the end of April, relocating out of its two-story branch in Wellington Street, where its classic white Chinese tiling and moving dim sum carts had previously stood for nearly half a century. To pay respects, the dining area was stripped of its tables, chairs, and porcelain tea cups. And the empty space made way for a closing party, in the form of a dim sum “rave.”

History was ending, uprooted: the tea house, once featured in classic iconic Hong Kong films like The Longest Summer (1998) and In the Mood for Love (2000), would later move to a nondescript commercial building. And soundtracking its demise were some mid DJs playing nostalgia remix slop: deep house renditions of “Rhythm of the Night”; Gwen Stefani’s “Hollaback Girl,” chorus layered over thwacking bass. The partygoers filling in, I’m told, were offered free drinks in exchange for dressing up in “traditional” Chinese clothing. But the sense of cosplay is much more palpable than any nods to cultural heritage: that woman’s black qipao is paired with thigh-high leather boots; that white guy’s silk Chinese robe is cut to near perversion—the length so short, and the “auspicious” silk almost crimson, that it looks much more like Hugh Hefner’s smoking jacket.

“This is some weird shit man,” my friend, *Terrence, says. “You can get a real sense of homogenization of opinions on what Hong Kong is”: Like a simulacrum, where resemblance is so superficial that the substance of the original disappears.

I’m not qualified to police the limits of what a “rave” is, but I dare say that this was the kind of party that has much more in common with brand activations than actual raves—events with live music that are DIY, community-based, and anti-corporate. Instead, these organizers threw a DJ into an unexpected place (in this case, a Chinese tea house), invited a bunch of influencers, sold expensive tickets, posted “DIM SUM RAVE!!!” on Instagram, and called it a day. Slop incarnated as a party.

Case in point was the sheer amount of marketing at the event. ONLY, a health-conscious vodka soda brand (which, if I’m honest, tastes pretty good), was the drink sponsor of the evening. Plastered on the walls were posters advertising PLVR, an organization ripping off P.L.U.R. (the core of rave philosophy: Peace, Love, Unity, Respect) for its brand name and claiming to be “ASIA’S BIGGEST RAVER COMMUNITY.” A brief glance at their Instagram account, however, will yield plenty of skepticism to this claim: post captions read like AI-generated text and engagement rates are low, reaching levels that you’d only find on accounts where the followers are all bots.

Sitting on a dining table behind the dance floor was a small activation for Lemonbox, a Y Combinator-backed startup selling “AI-generative personalized nutrition,” with vitamin “supplement packs” optimizing recovery for ravers after a long night out. Marketing copy reads: “MADE BY RAVERS. FOR RAVERS.”

All this corporate slop-ification of rave culture makes much more sense when considering who the event’s organizers actually were. Cast on the dance floor was the glow of neon, from a sign shaped like the Eye of Horus. Its gaze peered at the partygoers swimming in the raveslop, and in lighting, carved the logo of the event’s hosts: RaveDAO.

According to their whitepaper, RaveDAO is the “TEDx for [electronic] music.” They connect local nightlife organizers, “whether in Seoul, São Paulo, or San Francisco,” to a global network, creating a unified web of nightlife communities around the world. According to their website, the network throws parties in cities like Singapore, Dubai, and Bangkok, where attendance often surpasses the thousands.

As a decentralized autonomous organization (DAO), RaveDAO uses smart contracts on the blockchain to enable its network for global nightlife. The organization’s social infrastructure is supported by $RAVE, a cryptocurrency like Bitcoin or Ethereum, except it’s for nightlife organizers to purchase in order “to grow the global community” of RaveDAO. A “stake”—or a purchase of the coin—offers nightlife organizers a number of privileges: $RAVE allows for “[franchising] RaveDAO IP”; bestows RaveDAO’s institutional backing upon production, beverage, and experience vendors; and provides artists with the ability to “co-launch digital collectibles, remix rights, or Web3 collaborations under the RaveDAO brand.”

In RaveDAO’s own words: “We are initiating a global movement that onboards millions of electronic dance music lovers to crypto.”

Crypto bros are infiltrating local rave scenes. But what might be more worrying is what they actually do when they arrive.

On Sunday, April 12th, $RAVE coin was valued at less than US$2. Only a few days later, on Wednesday, $RAVE had shot up in value to US$19. $RAVE’s value continued to fluctuate in the days that followed, dropping to around US$10. But during the day of the dim sum rave itself, on Saturday, April 18th, within hours of the party’s opening, the coin’s price had jumped to US$27.32—over ten times its original price at the beginning of the week. By then, it had reached its high. Only twelve hours after this peak, the price of $RAVE dropped to US$3, erasing nearly 90% of the coin’s value overnight.

By April 20th, the coin was worthless. As crypto watchdog @Watcher.Guru noted on Twitter, “$RAVE cryptocurrency falls 98% to $0.5, erasing $6.7 billion from its market cap in two days.”

Several accounts on X have called this out as a classic, pump-and-dump scheme—a form of securities fraud where the price of a stock (in this case, $RAVE) is artificially inflated through misleading information (pump), in order for a small group of owners to sell the stock at a higher price (dump). RaveDAO has denied these allegations.

Pump-and-dump schemes have become endemic to cryptocurrency. Some recent high-profile examples include Donald Trump’s $TRUMP and the Hawk Tuah girl’s $HAWK coins. In both cases, the cryptocurrency’s value rapidly shot up through a collection of internet memes, and owners sold near the peaks for quick cashouts.

But what’s especially unique about $RAVE and RaveDAO is that this pump-and-dump scheme is explicitly targeted at local rave scenes and community nightlife organizers.

With $RAVE’s erratic price movements happening at the exact week of the party at Lin Heung Lau, one might imagine the following possibility: A nightlife organizer in Hong Kong hears about the dim sum rave, and purchases $RAVE in order to join RaveDAO’s global community. They may have bought at the peak—on the weekend of the party—only for the coin’s value to drop back down again twelve hours later, and for the nightlife organizer to lose their entire investment.

Thankfully, I haven’t heard of any such thing happening. And most nightlife organizers I know are not easily fooled by scammy meme-coin tactics. But it does highlight an important trend that many organizers are noticing: rave culture is increasingly susceptible to corporatism and capitalist capture.

The party at Lin Heung Lau is one of many “raves” that look more like brand marketing pop-ups than, well, actual raves. Sauna “rave.” Cold plunge “rave.” Raves with Illenium as the headliner and boba-loving striver tech Asians in the crowd. Or raves by John Summit where the target audience is consultants who work at Deloitte. An endless number of mutations of “rave culture” are so far removed from the early versions in derelict warehouses in England. The dim sum “rave” is just one of them.

British music journalist Simon Reynolds reminds us, however, that these are not necessarily alien to the form: “rave culture’s motor has been anarcho-capitalist and entrepreneurial,” even right from its beginnings in the ‘80s. A rave’s scrappiness and aversion to fixed rules are the kind of qualities that can make raves “temporary autonomous zones,” potent spaces for release and collective pleasure. But these exact qualities also make raves easily appropriated by brand marketers and crypto bros.

Our time at the dim sum “rave” is cut short. The DJ barely has enough time to slowly fade out the final track when the lights go on at 1:55 AM, five minutes before the party’s official closing time. The restaurant staff needs to pack up. And the crowd moans, disappointed.

The fixed closing time did feel a bit disruptive to the party. And it was a reminder that, even with greater access to resources, corporate incarnations of rave culture have many more restrictions than actual raves, hosted in shoddy locations and with ending times far beyond two in the morning.

I’m reminded of another quote by Simon Reynolds, that “Even after its co-optation by the record and clubbing industries, rave music’s cutting edge comes from the grass-roots: small labels, cottage-industry producers with home studios, specialist record stores, pirate radio”—places that are immune from attempted hijackery by crypto bros and brand marketers, where rave culture will continue to thrive.

As of Thursday, April 30th, 1;40 PM HKT, $RAVE is valued at US$0.75.

There’s one club named 33, tucked on the third floor of a tower nearing the stretch’s end, where the lines are long and the bouncers are mean and occasionally Russian, but the only thing they guard is a dance floor where the newest song played is “Unholy ft. Kim Petras” by Sam Smith, released nearly four years ago. Table service is bought, mostly, by sexpat white guys in their late-40s, youth long past expiry, who just stand, close to motionless, and nod in sync with the bass drop, while their fifteen-years-junior Thai girlfriends shake ass and offer free alcohol, “free” because the men paid for it, to young club goers whose presence alone prevents 33’s cool from flatlining.

There is a reason Hong Kong’s mainstream clubbing scene, clustered around the historic Lan Kwai Fong district, is a Neverland of lost futures. When the commercial rent is high and the threat of closure is real and the youth have no money for a costly cover charge, then DJs refuse creative risk-taking and waiters plead desperately for you to buy a drink. Precarity comes first, then stagnation, as tastes eventually become dictated by monied, middle-aged millennials with Peter Pan syndrome. A popular DJ in the scene once complained to me that, “It’s been 14, 15 years since they were popular—Lan Kwai Fong is still playing the Black Eyed Peas.”

It’s easy to dismiss a stagnating club culture as trivial. But I can promise you there’s much more at stake here. Because when DJs start recycling playlists for more than a decade, we lose a “whole mode of social imagination.” Such was the warning of the late philosopher Mark Fisher, who believed that electronic music—often born in the club—was how humanity gained “the capacity to conceive of a world radically different from the one in which we currently live.”

After all, the club is where subculture is frequently incubated and new music is found. Jazz in particular owes its rise to the underground, gangster-run jazz clubs, which platformed the genre when its sounds were outlawed from public life in America, during the 1920s. Likewise, “disco” today describes the defining music genre of the ‘70s, but the word was first an abbreviation of the “discothèque,” the French nightclubs exported around the world. It was in venues like New York’s Studio 54 where Donna Summer’s “I Feel Love” was often played, where disco was raised to maturity.

Summer and her producers were proponents of how synthesizers, sequences, and software could create a sound that evoked a science fiction film, that hinted towards a future of universal, collective pleasure. Eventually, this utopian dream would be later found in Cybotron, the early techno pioneers whose darkly mechanistic, looping style evoked the alien. These sonic techniques scrambled the ability to assign identity to music, which, when the sound took the dance floor, imagined a society where class, race, and gender ceased to matter.

But where does this lineage find itself today? And has a stagnating club culture killed the dream of a utopian future?

“When you think about raves or clubs, you think about drugs, people dressed in black, stylish in Balenciaga. But it doesn’t need to be just that,” LOVELESS, a DJ in Hong Kong’s independent rave circuit, says. “It can be many things: punks and emos can exist in the same space.”

LOVELESS, along with Manila-born DJ Baby Diwata, are using stagnation as a way to create something new: the duo are the founders of Panic Library, a punk art and rave collective based in Hong Kong, which, for a little over a year, has been injecting sounds from hardcore and deconstructed club into the local scene.

“I don’t know any club in Hong Kong that would allow us to play [these sounds],” says Baby Diwata. “I grew up in the Philippines. And I always looked up to this queer party collective called Elephant. When I moved to Hong Kong, I was like, wow, something’s missing. I was fed up with these bros playing boring music and people just being okay with it. The bros were booking other bros.”

Panic Library, which acts as “a space and platform for women and queer artists and audiences,” was what Baby Diwata felt she needed to do.

“That punk mentality of ‘everyone can and should take up space [at a party]’ is something I’m trying to bring forward,” says LOVELESS.

“For Panic Library, it’s more about making sure that people outside of [our core audience] respect the space,” Baby Diwata says. “Because at the end of the day, it’s also about the music. And there’s a lot of hardcore kids who want to freaking rock and join the party.”

Said parties travel in secret between warehouses in Hong Kong’s industrial districts and collapse a vast set of references into one world. Black and pink branding, cut-out collage-style graphics, and generous use of red-purple strobe lights all draw inspiration from riot grrrl, the American feminist punk movement of the ‘90s. But the project’s branding also extends to include references to the co-founder’s interests and upbringings: LOVELESS pulls their DJ name from My Bloody Valentine’s shoegaze album Loveless, and draws aesthetic inspiration from fantasy games like Dark Souls and Magic: The Gathering; while Baby Diwata derives her alias from the “diwata,” an indigenous Filipino nature spirit, and regularly integrates Catholic imagery into Panic Library’s branding. In one of the collective’s launch posts, she is seen dressed like an angel, and reading The Bible.

“We want to have this world where people are free to create ideas that aren’t so accepted in the mainstream,” says Baby Diwata. “For me, I gravitate towards music that’s quite sexy, dystopic, and experimental. The sound is quite abrasive but there’s a nice swing to it. Something about the hard bass is so masculine, and a swing to the beat is so feminine. I love when it comes together and creates this new genderless sound.”

That genre-fluidity is characteristic to the sounds of Panic Library. In the words of British music journalist Simon Reynolds, hardcore is a “continuum” of “drastic stylistic shifts,” and the DJ duo’s own sounds echo this propensity for real-time evolution.

The pair’s sonic tastes include popular hardstyle acts like Snow Strippers, drain gang, or Underscores, but LOVELESS might mix a club-y Caroline Polachek track into a rock song by Bloc Party, or blend the sounds of Romanian producer Miss Jay with American rapper Playboi Carti back to back. Meanwhile, Baby Diwata’s “biggest inspirations” include “brutalist” techno artist KAVARI and experimental reggaeton producer Safety Trance; her drops as a DJ are characteristically hardcore, but recently Baby Diwata has incorporated drops from “dubstep and Baile funk.”

“When you say, ‘hardcore,’ people usually think 160-BPM or up, sounds that are hard and abrasive. But for the last rave we did, we ended up inviting a DJ duo that plays hyperpop and bass,” LOVELESS says. “The music that we create is not just hard in sound, but also hard in spirit.”

“Hard in spirit” is probably how I would describe my most memorable club experience. Panic Library was hosting a rave inside the dark room of a warehouse in Kowloon. Manually-hammered wooden crosses, dressed with DIY rosaries, clustered in the front of an elevated DJ booth like a makeshift cemetery for island castaways; behind the decks, the words “START A FUCKING RIOT” cast in pink and black by the glow of a projector.

My feet were growing sore, dancing at an hour when the industrial buildings in the streets outside outnumbered cars and people, along to the outro of A. G. Cook’s “Britpop,” where the speed of the track had been nearly doubled and the chorus had been layered over a hard bass. My energy was about to expire, until I heard “Person (Angel Mix)” by Petal Supply, a Canadian hard trance artist, for the first time.

For the song’s entire three-minute runtime, the beat accelerated and the pitch ascended upward—a marathon-sprint towards crescendo. Hearing the mechanized vocalizing of an angel and the elongated purr of the synthesizer, I reached into the air, swayed in a sea of purple strobe lights and my own sweat, and felt the waves of the dance floor wash me towards something new—like a destination undiscovered, or a world yet-to-be.

“It sounds like you’re constantly reaching for something. It’s very euphoric,” says Rena Izokay, the DJ and music producer behind that set. ““Person” isn’t like a normal EDM song, where you’re taking away energy and building to a drop. The song is high energy, and it’s just building—but I don’t know what it’s building towards.”

Rena, whose sonic influences include hyperpop legend SOPHIE and the PC Music label, once tried bringing these sounds to Hong Kong’s mainstream clubbing scene. But since tracks in the genre often lack clear structure, the city’s club managers weren’t too receptive. “[One of them] told me, there’s no intro, there’s no outro. It’s hard to DJ,” she says.

But electronic music never had to follow strict rules of form. “To me, when making music, I’m not willing the song into existence. It’s more like a discovery process, in some ways it’s relinquishing control,” Rena says. “It’s almost like I have to ask the song, where do you want to go?”

Writing for The Wire in 1992, Simon Reynolds once observed that hardcore “abolishes narrative: instead of tension/climax/release, it offers a thousand plateaux of crescendo, an endless successions of NOWs… It’s an apocalyptic now, for sure: [hardcore] fits only too well the model of terminal culture… ‘a switch from the extensive time of history to the intensive time of momentariness without history.’” This can easily be read as pessimistic: that unlike the synthesizers of disco and techno that sounded utopia on the dance floor, hardcore’s soaring tempos and “octave-skipping synth riffs” bring us to no final destination. This gritty, abrasive sound reverberates the slow cancellation of the future, where we are locked forever in the present.

But when I listen to hardcore—and intersecting genres of trance, deconstructed club, and hyperpop—it feels more like a state of constant sonic discovery: bass forever drumming in a constant head turn, synthesizer switching between directions left and right. “Momentariness without history” is not a curse, but an invitation to relish the world as it is, and instead imagine the future through our everyday actions: “I think the future happens bit by bit, person by person,” says Baby Diwata. “Working with artists and friends that we admire… that’s how we’re building our imagined future through Panic Library.”

There’s a schizophrenia of contradictions in a punk meets cradle Catholic meets Dark Souls meets PC Music meets Filipino folklore meets hardcore and deconstructed club rave project. And there’s no exact reason why it should exist. But for me, Panic Library proves that club culture still imagines a better future: When steered by people with agency, vision, and taste, dance floors resist cultural stagnation, and introduce us to new worlds that we could never imagine on our own.

Besides, “my hot take is that nothing’s ever truly new. If you look at rock n roll, it comes from blues. If you look at hardcore punk, [a lot of it is inspired by] Iggy Pop or even raggae and dub,” LOVELESS says. “What we do as DJs is pull our own references together, new and old, and somehow it sounds refreshing… you make something new from that.”

In the world of independent nightlife, long-term planning is an impossibility. A month can spell the difference between a thriving scene anchored in one nightclub and its eventual closure. In a state like this, imagining the future is difficult, yes, but it is still possible, if only through the tireless work of the day-to-day: “I’m not worried about rave culture in Hong Kong dying,” says Baby Diwata. “We know so many organizers that are just doing their thing, keeping so many genres alive.”

“There’s all these talks on how do we keep club culture alive? But I think that’s killing it. I don’t know what the future is,” says LOVELESS. “I’m not even thinking about the future, because I believe in Hong Kong and I believe in our people. If we’re doing what we love now, it doesn’t really matter.”

“I was just talking to friends [in the Philippines] about how their lives are going,” Baby Diwata adds. “We did touch a bit on the future. And we all said we can only think of the present. Because of the war going on, the future, on a bigger scale, is not guaranteed. All we have, really, is the present. To keep going, day-by-day, to keep supporting our friends and our communities.”

We’re the only two people in a cold blue elevator ascending to the 30th floor of a skyscraper. It’s a little after midnight on a Friday in Hong Kong’s Sheung Wan neighborhood, and fresh from an over-extended pregame, our evening is bubbling with possibility: A new clothing brand by the name of valentyne—stylized as “V*******e”—was hosting a part merch drop, part launch party event in the infamous “pool room,” an events space at the top floor of Soho House Hong Kong. “It’s great up there,” alleged one videographer friend we ran into at the club’s lobby, just minutes before. Leslie, a member of Soho House, brought me as a guest. And we decided to crash.

The blue elevator doors open. A swarm of over twenty wrinkly, pointed-nosed white expats and their cake-faced Chinese girlfriends squeeze in front of me like rats. I extend my arm forward to shuffle Leslie and me through the crowd.

“Excuse me,” I say, pulling Leslie by the arm. Downstairs, the line to the elevator going up was empty. But on the top floor, a crowd is gushing towards it, racing back down.

My vision clears, and the function room is cosplaying as an oasis. A ceiling of sandy beige hovers parallel to an oakwood floor. Potted plants cluster near the middle of the room—two kentia palms, two snake plants, one weeping fig—like guarded flora in the middle of the desert. Sandwiching the pots on one side is the bar, with liquor hanging on a dark beige, near-ceiling-high shelf. On the other side is a pool, though not the typical kind dug into the ground. This pool was built above the floor, with cement and ceramic shaped like an inflatable. It covered nearly half the room, and was no taller than my mid-thigh.2

This, after all, was the infamous quirk of the infamous pool room in Soho House Hong Kong. And I’d seen it before—in afternoon meetings or in one-off ice cream sandwich hangouts with friends; in the stories of an unfortunate number of status-anxious young people, usually around my age, who thought it’d be a good idea to strip down to their undies inside a room where the air conditioning is perpetually on full blast, hit record for the ‘gram, and jump into a pool only appropriate in size for a toddler.

Inside, most of the crowd circles the bar. Nobody is swimming. It’s hard to guess why the pool ever needed to cover half of the room, and what kind of partygoers it was ever built for.

More often I’ve started to hear a similar line of questioning around the city, except about Soho House itself. The club is a globe-spanning entity, providing a living-room meets co-working-space meets restaurant-cafe for an internationally mobile creative class, jet-setting between skyscrapers in Dubai, London, New York, Barcelona, and Hong Kong. That model is increasingly being scrutinized, and some are beginning to wonder, What is the Soho House brand even for? And who are their members, really?

Founded in London in 1995, Soho House had flipped the original idea of a private members’ club on its head. Once the domain of boarding school types with family crests, founder Nick Jones’ vision was for the cultural elite: he prioritized recruiting creatives to Soho House’s ranks more than the professional class with pockets full of cash.

“Unlike most of the members clubs … that are crowded with the super-rich, we are not looking for that,” Tim Geary, a British novelist and early Soho House committee member, once told The Observer. In the early 2000s, The Guardian notes, the club successfully recruited trend-forward types with jobs in advertising, film, and the early internet boom, and often hosted screenings with emerging documentarians and launch parties for novels. In its 30-year history, Soho House rarely turned a profit. But that was always secondary to the world it was building: a global creative elite united under an exclusive roof, governed by a meritocracy of cool.

But what happens when that cool is lost, or even called into question? When asking both scene and industry friends their thoughts on Soho House’s Hong Kong branch, responses aren’t always aligned with the brand’s original vision, to say the least. Recently, an events organizer told me she canceled her membership because it “just wasn’t worth it,” while a designer admitted that in the last year she “only used it to grab coffee with Patrick” (a.k.a. me).3 “It’s not that useful,” a tech founder once told me in passing, adding that only the club’s Lower East Side branch really came in handy, during his business trips to New York. Two curators at a large gallery told me it’s primarily functional—that they like to “sit and talk” and “people watch” there—but don’t actually care to engage with the other clientele. Another friend, a member who frequently visits Hong Kong, told me “I don’t know if Soho House is cool, but maybe it’s just not uncool?”

“Is Soho House still cool?” is an impossible research question to operationalize. But you can piece together fragments of an answer without surveying the club’s members. In Shonda Rhimes’ Netflix series Inventing Anna, con artist Anna Delvey is asked if she was rejected by Soho House in episode two. She replies, “I’d rather hang out at McDonald’s.”

Soho House clapped back in possibly the least cool way imaginable: by publishing an opinion column in their magazine calling Delvey “a poor little faux-rich girl” and “a spoiled rich trophy girlfriend.”

Another more recent, more widely circulating meme is more scathing than the fictionalized Delvey: “[I] recently invented the word chubai, which is when something is both chopped and spiritually dubai. examples: soho house.”

Back in the pool room, only pink strobe lights crowd around the DJ booth, and the space in front of the man on the decks is empty of dancers. Dressed in a baggy white T-shirt of Uniqlo proportions, he cycles between Calvin Harris’ “Feel So Close” and Peggy Gou’s “Nanana,” with more volume and pitch changes than any mixing.

valentyne is a streetwear brand, but most of the crowd at the launch party consists of aging European millennials in checkered dinner jackets and Gucci Horsebit loafers. Standing in front of Leslie and me, they gather in a horizontal line for a photo, faces bored like apes.

Leslie jolts back. “Please dear God, I can’t have my picture taken here,” he says to me. “I can’t be seen at this party. Everyone is a cheugy Dubai European.”

No one else looks like they live in this city. Not the pale, bleach-blonde woman in a tight, brown cocktail dress, speaking to the bartender in a vaguely Eastern European accent. Nor does the photographer, with one-shade-darker-than-golden skin and curly TikTok-style broccoli hair, who, all of a sudden, decides to snap a photo of me scribbling my observations into the ripped pages from a Moleskine.

I decide that if he’ll catch me secretly reporting the party, I might as well talk to him.

“What’s your name?” I ask.

“Kareem,” he replies.

“Oh, like the guy who does Subway Takes?”

“Yeah, exactly like the guy who does Subway Takes.”

“Where are you from?”

“Dubai, but I’m Egyptian and Lebanese.”

“You got lucky then, leaving before the war,” I say.

Leslie chimes in, “Are you Catholic?”

“No, I’m Muslim,” Kareem replies, before taking a large gulp from a pink cocktail in a curved drinking glass.

I gasp, form my index finger into a wag, and say in disapproval, “That’s haram.” Kareem’s face flushes red. He laughs, walking away coyly to his friend behind him.

There is a language for places like these—where ethnic or religious identities like “Egyptian” or “Lebanese” or “Muslim” all melt into a blob of amorphous “global” identity. Kyle Chayka, tech critic at The New Yorker, used the word “AirSpace”: places across the globe “that share the same hallmarks everywhere you go.” AirSpace describes cafes, bars, and members clubs for rootless cosmopolitans. AirSpace is the world in which people with ambiguous origins and little to no cultural values find most comfort, filled with a “profusion of symbols of comfort and quality, at least to a certain connoisseurial mindset.”

When Soho House scaled and exported its “meritocracy of cool” across the globe, it created an AirSpace. With over 40 outposts in 19 different countries, the brand needed to maintain legibility and palatability to an estimated 194,000 members (as of 2024). That meant creating a brand universe that coalesced into a lower quartile of good taste: muted brown interiors, cream and beige walls, dark oakwood chairs, and warmly toned sofas. A room in Soho House, to me, is colored like a film camera photo—always idyllic, never offensive and never out of place, even when exported to cities as varied as Nashville, São Paulo, or Mumbai. “The homogeneity of these spaces means that traveling between them is frictionless,” Chayka continues. “Changing places can be as painless as reloading a website. You might not even realize you’re not where you started.”

Walk into any Soho House and it looks pretty. But they’re hard to describe as “tasteful.” Actual taste, or “aesthetic cultivation in response to one’s individual circumstances” (as the trend forecaster Sean Monahan argues), is antithetical to Soho House’s mission of scale and of creating a globe-spanning members club.

Indeed, Soho House is incredibly successful at chaperoning a global creative class under its roofs. But at the party, this is achieved through flattening, by melting all cultures, ethnicities, and identities away into a formless blob. And in 2026, it’s becoming increasingly clear that good culture is antithetical to scale and antithetical to an unfettered globalism.

Because when Soho House Hong Kong does host cool parties (in fact, they regularly do), locality is often part of the selling point. Yeti Out, one of the city’s most popular local music collectives, regularly uses the club’s spaces for parties that hybridize genres like Cantopop and UK Grime into one. Once, Soho House hosted ¥ØU$UK€ ¥UK1MAT$U, the internet-viral DJ rising from the Osaka-Kobe club circuit, for a packed, sold-out event. Neither act, however, seems tied to the same formless globalism that curses a course-selling Bali bro or “influencer” in Dubai. Both are deeply embedded in scenes, subcultures, or universes only partially scraped by the internet.

Leslie and I spend our remaining time at the party exchanging notes and people-watching. But the unnamable, formless blob grows less interesting to observe by the minute: Broccoli hair. Instagram face. Little top big pants. Accents that betray little to no cultural origin. By 1am, we’ve been around for less than an hour, but it’s time to go somewhere else. Walking back towards the elevators, we see a man in a black Gymshark tee.

“Who the fuck wears a Gymshark shirt to a party?” I say to Leslie.

There are still thirty or so (different) people crowding near the elevator. I start to feel like eating McDonald’s. But before I can propose the idea to Leslie, he says to me, “I think I’m gonna cancel my membership.”

2

From Oriental Daily, see:

On a Thursday mid-twilight, I’m standing on a concrete staircase outside an art gallery in Hong Kong, asking two Singaporeans why their former leader had come to haunt me: “There’s a running joke back in Singapore,” Rafi Abdullah, an art curator, says. “Once Singapore goes to shit, Lee Kuan Yew will rise from the dead and come save us.”

“You can never hold a dead person accountable,” Brandon Tay, an artist, adds. “His legacy is sacred and unchanging. I mean, just like with any state defined by so-called ‘Great Men,’ they’re always haunting the subsequent history. They’ve done their part, and they’ll be judging you forever from the grave like an Asian parent.”

It would be challenging to summarize Lee Kuan Yew’s legacy in one paragraph, but he is remembered for his strict, paternalistic, highly-effective governance. His “illiberal democracy” with strict rule-by-law transformed the poor, post-colonial island of Singapore into one of the world’s most prosperous and efficient cities. In Lee’s own words: “Over 100 years ago, [Singapore] was a mud-flat, swamp. Today, this is a modern city.”

Now a decade after Lee Kuan Yew’s death, Singapore’s story of rapid growth and transformation is becoming increasingly seductive in the West—and somehow the specter of the late Singaporean politician looms larger among crowds who were never meant to hear his speeches in the first place.

The ghost of Lee haunted the tech mogul Elon Musk, who, late last year, tweeted saying Singapore’s founder was “genius next-level” and “so based.” The ghost of Lee haunted an ex-friend of mine, a socially-awkward Jane Street trader born and raised in the American Southwest; he often confessed to me that Lee’s speeches had hypnotic powers, that the pull of his right-wing Southeast Asian politics was too strong. The ghost of Lee is—in present tense—haunting much of Silicon Valley: For the emerging neo-reactionary tech movement that plans to “exit democracy” and establish their own sovereign nations built on blockchain, Lee’s Singapore is a “proof-of-concept” for how to build an independent country from scratch, a “network state.” Lee is the false god hoisted on the altar of a venture capitalist, an optimized authoritarianism is his phony gospel.

Among futurists and technologists, this is only one of many recurring Orientalizing obsessions with Asia. Today, Singapore is fashioned as the model for the tech-right’s “network state,” but in earlier decades, Los Angeles in Blade Runner (1982) was inspired by Hong Kong and the ‘80s cyberpunk novel Neuromancer took place in “Neo-Tokyo.” Out of both fear and fascination, somehow the future we imagine is always “Asian.” Kanji dresses the Cyberpunk 2077 skyline, while D.C. technocrats and the think-tank industrial complex foresee the looming “Asian century”: the projected dominance of Asia in the 2000s, driven by rapid growth in China, India, and the ASEAN.

Nick Land, Silicon Valley’s hottest right-wing accelerationist philosopher and a key influence in the writings of venture capitalist Marc Andreessen, projected this future years ago. In his seminal 1994 essay “Meltdown,” he prophesizes, “A sino-pacific boom and automatized global economic integration crashes the neocolonial world system… Neo-China arrives from the future.”

The daylight overstays its welcome, and the two Singaporeans crack some cans of Asahi. We’re all waiting for Square Street Gallery to open for “HEX STATE SERVER,” an exhibition the pair had been working on: Brandon had traveled from his home in Shanghai for his first solo exhibition in Hong Kong, while Rafi curated the exhibit with the Institution of Niche, a bootstrapped side-hustle by local art curator Angela Liu that’s been slowly injecting post-internet art events into the city.

From what I could gather, “HEX STATE SERVER” was set to be the most widely-anticipated accelerationist art party in the city: Brandon’s installation pieces drew “parallels between Chinese divination and computation,” and featured an opening performance by welainej, an experimental musician making (what she calls) “transmutative dark ambient poetry” with obscure software and wearable controllers.

By 6:45pm, people are crowding the street. But with half the crowd in folk punk mullets, tabis, and baggy black jeans, and the other half dressed in work-appropriate suits, you can tell that not everyone is here for “HEX STATE SERVER.”

Four people in formal dinner party attire carrying violins and a cello walk in single-file on the steps behind me. From the corner of my eye, a short, stocky WASP in skin-tight gray slacks raises his arms, and in a thick Northeastern-American accent, says: “Good evening everybody! I am very honored to introduce the Romer String Quartet, who will be performing the first movement of Debussy’s String Quartet.”

“You can’t make this up,” I whisper to the two Singaporeans, giggling. “A futurist art exhibit on Chinese computation run by Singaporeans is fighting for space with a white guy and some French music.”

The accidental poetry here is that East and West (which are really just shorthands for the US and China) are pitted against one another, caught in a never-ending battle for who will reign the future. But even when Elon Musk espouses the virtues of Singaporean governance or when Nick Land says “Neo-China arrives from the future,” life out East is not so blindly optimistic. Friends and colleagues in Hong Kong do notice a renewed interest and excitement in the region, but for a young person in the city, anxieties might not be all that different from their counterparts on the American coasts. Across the region, many of my friends in their 20s are either underemployed or see their white-collar jobs as dead ends. The rest are juggling three or so gigs on average, but in the back of their heads, can’t shake the paralyzing fear that one day they might wake up and be made redundant.

That is, “Asia is the future” or the “Asian century” are fun concepts at surface level, but with similar narrowing economic opportunities for the region’s youth, I doubt they clearly translate on the ground. The “Asian century” you imagine will not exist. And on display at Square Street Gallery’s party, Brandon Tay’s “HEX STATE SERVER” had explanations why.

“I’m very suspicious of apocalyptic narratives,” Brandon tells me, on the Friday after the party. A global collapse, the Protestant Rapture, or even “things like the AI singularity, I find them to be seductive, but kind of stupid.”

The idea that “Asia is the future”—whether China, Japan, or Singapore will one day rule the world—isn’t all that different; whether celebrated or feared, the narrative is a fixed, determined end-point that prophesizes West ceding power. In Chinese tradition, however, “the future” is not nearly as set. During China’s modernization in the 20th century, leaders like Liang Qichao and Lu Xun believed in the concepts of linear time and a straight-lined march towards progress, but this was a departure from the earlier Taoist and Confucian emphasis on cyclicality. Likewise, one current in “HEX STATE SERVER” is that rather than progressing forward, time is circular and history moves in cycles.

The main sculptural installation, sharing the same name as the exhibit, begins first as a small, GoPro-sized computer system, wrapped in metallic embroidery, standing atop a makeshift table of bound-together steel pipes. On the wall across, the computer projects an eight-sided portal (like if the New York-Dublin Portal were an octagon). Rather than providing a view into another city, the “HEX STATE SERVER” portal opens into 64 “hex-states”: “micro-fictions,” or stories and worlds with the goal of creating a “dreamlike, mesmerizing, monotonous quality that can feel a bit uncanny.” Every time a viewer presses a button on the GoPro-sized computer, a new “micro-fiction” appears at random.

“ There’s two hours of video in there. And through the process that reads the temperature of the CPU and the programs running at the time, and the computer picks a number out of 64 randomly,” says Brandon. “ It doesn’t spread out across averages. So sometimes you might get the same result twice.”

The logic of “HEX STATE SERVER,” Brandon says, draws from the I Ching, an ancient Chinese divination text that, much like the installation, points its readers to parables at random. By highlighting the randomness present in both systems—whether through Taoist clairvoyance or algorithmic approval—“HEX STATE SERVER” suggests that the algorithm and divination are deeply intertwined. A new technology repeats an old practice.

“The easiest frame to understand the truly unknown is through the frame of the very recently understood,” Brandon says. For him, works like “HEX STATE SERVER” belong to a longer tradition—one where technology does not accelerate us forward, but in fact, pushes us closer to the past.

New technology has always had magical qualities. Early telegraphs were used for seances and the first photographers claimed their cameras could capture ghosts. In New York, the writer Max Read argues that the internet is not too different, that spell-casting sigils and speaking to ghosts haven’t gone away—they’ve only been replaced by QR codes for Foodpanda and ChatGPT-induced psychosis. Read asks, “What if we aren’t being accelerated into a cyberpunk future so much as thrown into some fantastical premodern past?” And even as Asia is often described as “the future,” more often the region retreats towards the ancestral.

Asia’s rave subculture—despite its roots in imagining the future—is taking a sharp turn towards pre-modernity, with electronic music festivals thrown at colonial castles in Manila or temples in Taipei and Shanghai. “Ancestral Frequencies,” a widely anticipated art party in Hong Kong’s Eaton Hotel, combined “sensual trip-hop” with “voices, rhythms, movements, and mythologies sidelined by colonial and patriarchal histories.”

Nick Land should’ve written that “Neo-China arrives from the past.” What these emerging art exhibits suggest is that, paradoxically, humanity’s future is one of constant repetition. We are not hurling towards apocalypse or utopia, but recycling history—a process mapped in Brandon’s accompanying piece, “PHANTOM INDEX.”

Plastered as wall text in a room adjacent to “HEX STATE SERVER” is a “speculative timeline” of major events in Chinese history, from 1046 BCE to our present. Across this continuum, “PHANTOM INDEX” identifies seven “HEX STATES,” recurring themes “latent in Chinese computational thought.” Here, Brandon and his curators draw direct parallels between the nation’s past and present: China’s special economic zones are new configurations of 19th-century treaty ports; the modern Gaokao reincarnates the Sui Dynasty’s Imperial examination.

“One [HEX STATE] that feels most apparent to me is ‘PERMISSIONED REALITY.’ In China, everything you do is based on levels of access,” says Brandon. Introduced in 1958, China’s current Hukou system assigns citizens movement rights based on “urban” or “rural” status—but the Baojia system, a similar social sorting protocol, once existed in imperial China. Plastered on the gallery’s white wall, the piece reads, “These are not periods but conditions… history ceases to move as a single line and begins resolving in parallel environments.”

Ironically, it was Westerners who thrust the idea of a “Chinese/Asian century” into the mainstream. But the Sinofuturists, Brandon tells me, didn’t share these ambitions for global domination: “Sinofuturism [or Chinese Futurism] was more observational, and somehow it generated its own energy due to several different factors—cultural and political—like China-maxxing.” Now, with the nation’s continued rise as a global power, the narrative that China is “living in the future” is forced upon it, mostly from the outside.

More often, this sentiment feels increasingly universal across the globe. New technology is viewed with increasing suspicion. We’ve arrived at a future that most of us do not want. A dystopia thrust upon us against our will.

But if Brandon’s work suggests that time and history are cyclical rather than linear, that reads to me as an invitation: to see how we might short-circuit our current doom loop; to understand that futures are never fixed. “People say China is the future. But the future of China is always changing,” says Brandon. “Definitions about what Asia is and will be will always change, as ‘Asia’ and ‘China’ are constantly shifting. Like a hyperobject.”

In that sense, suggesting that “China is the future” or we’re “living in the Asian century” might not project a hypothetical end-point where East dominates West. It might be a tacit acknowledgement that the future—like Asia—remains open, free, full of change and possibility. And among an infinity of possible realities, what matters is the world we want to create.

Most often, I think of albums like Migos’ Culture (2017), where the beats are woozy and drooping in a way that sounds a lot like the high school house parties of the decade. That may be because my function-hosting friends would cycle through the group’s singles like “Bad and Boujee” or “MotorSport,” on speakers where the bass was set to max. But Culture’s sloppy melody reminds me most of the deafening smell of vodka, the kind sprayed all over under-buttoned chests dressed in blue shirts, soaked on necks wrapped up in black chokers, or splashed on sweaty bodies I’d come into contact with, on the dance floor or when greeting my friends upon an hour-late arrival.

The rap verses had the kind of ditziness that felt endemic to the 2010s: “Slippery (wow), ‘scuse me, please me (please) / I’m up (up), oh, believe me, believe me (believe me) / Get beat (beat), ‘cause I’m flexin’ ‘Rari’s (skrrt),” Migos’ Quavo raps in “Slippery.” This was the era of mumble rap, where the verse was enunciated so poorly that it bled into the beat, where hip-hop artists overcompensated by generously littering their tracks with ad-libs. It was not cool to take anything seriously back then. So nor was it cool for the rappers to properly pronounce their lyrics.

In 2017, I was obviously too busy living on Snapchat to ever read The New Yorker, but back then Carrie Battan, a music writer for the magazine, confirmed my suspicions: “Everything [in Culture] slows to a self-assured ooze, lines drawn out and accented with irreverent takes on ad-libbed parentheticals.”

Keep in mind that most of this craze for the Atlanta-based hip-hop trio happened between house parties in my hometown, Manila, the Philippines, where Migos’ “irreverent takes” “oozed” in near-40°C tropical heat, under backyards with palm trees and swimming pools, in village homes meshed between Catholic churches. The simple and lazy explanation for all of this is that it’s just one of the many afterlives of American cultural influence on the Philippines. But hearing similar stories from former rap-obsessed kids who grew up in Hong Kong, Malaysia, Korea, and Singapore, it seems that more of it was to do with the kind of world hip-hop in the late 2010s imagined. Or, how hip-hop of this era felt so deeply familiar to kids in Asia, even if they lived halfway across the world.

There was plenty of borrowing “Asian” culture from American hip-hop artists at the time. Take Nicki Minaj’s “Chun-Li”: a 2018 track named after the famed Street Fighter character, which features repeated banging of a gong and lyrics that borrow from “Asian” motifs. “Bitch, it’s King Kong, this is King Kong / Chinese ink on, Siamese links on,” Minaj says in the song’s second verse. The music video for “Chun-Li” opens like a Chinese noir film—black and white, with Chinese subtitles and two guards dressed in closed-collar Zhongshan suits. When Minaj herself appears, roughly a minute later, she is wearing a qi-pao wrapped in red neon signage, with a neon light stick holding her hair in place, remixing Japan-inspired cyberpunk tropes with Chinese dressing.

Only a few months earlier in 2018, Migos had a similar undertaking with “Stir Fry,” a track that used the Asian cooking style as a euphemism for making drugs. This line of thinking—borrowing “Asian” motifs and symbols to describe their own lived experience—seemed to drive the rest of the creative direction. Neon Chinese characters cover the album cover: “亞特蘭大” and “北邊,” meaning Northside of Atlanta, pay homage to the group’s origins; the track title “炒菜” (“Stir Fry”) and album title “文化” (Culture) are plastered on the side, and roosters—it was the year of the rooster in January 2018—occupy the bottom corners. Even the music video, set in the fictional “Migos Stir Fry Restaurant” in “Kowloon,” riffs off of Wong Kar-wai, with soft blue-toned shots, scenes in smoky back kitchens, and gangsters playing mahjong, very much like the kind you’d see in the assassination scenes of Fallen Angels (1995). At the video’s end, there’s a very poorly choreographed martial arts fighting sequence in a characteristically Chinese-red restaurant.

“Stir Fry” still had the “Triplet Flow,” a rap style popularized by Migos, where a single beat is divided into three notes instead of their usual two or four. The structure dominated much of popular hip-hop during the latter half of the 2010s—in Cardi B’s “Bodak Yellow” or in 21 Savage’s “Bank Account”—but that beat structure somehow found its way to Asia.

Three years before Culture’s release, you could hear traces of the Migos-inspired “Triplet Flow” in “It G Ma,” a 2015 track by South Korean rapper Keith Ape, featuring Korean and Japanese artists JayAllDay, Loota, Okasian, and Kohh. The song represented a new shift in Asian hip-hop: Like the African American artists who would soon borrow from Asia, these Asian artists were copying from Black culture too.

“It G Ma” had the same oozing, wandering echoes as a Migos track, with a sharp, staccato-like trap melody that may have been imported straight from Atlanta. In the music video, the rappers had the same gold-plated grillz often donned by Quavo and Travis Scott. Keith Ape, however, was far from alone in his attempts at mimicry of Black culture. Indie rapper Chow Mane, for example, used a moniker reinterpreting Gucci Mane’s name as a Chinese dish. Or, take Rich Brian’s original, infamous debut as Rich Ch*gga, with a trap-inspired song “Dat $tick” as his first release. The Higher Brothers, perhaps the most well-known group to emerge from the trap scene in Cheng-du, China, once cited 50 Cent, Kendrick Lamar, Migos, and J. Cole as direct influences.

Not all of this borrowing was done in great taste. A lot of it wasn’t. With rap aesthetics so ubiquitous in Asia, I knew too many private-school-educated Asians who embarrassingly tried to act “hood” in their teenage years. But the frequent borrowing and remixing did at least make for interesting culture.

Immerse in this era of hip-hop, and you might guess that African American and Asian rappers were making psychic-level coordinations with one another, seemingly borrowing from one another’s regional motifs to create cool new shit. These coordinations soon permeated into other parts of culture, through rap’s love affair with Japanese streetwear brand A BATHING APE, where the loud, mosaic ape-shark hoodies became a genre staple. BAPE collaborated with Gunna and Kid Cudi, and appeared in the lyrics of Juice WRLD (R.I.P.), Cardi B, and Trippie Redd. “It’s loud, it’s colorful, it’s brash,” hip-hop artist Pusha T once told Pitchfork. “I don’t think any brand says hip-hop culture more than BAPE.”

You also saw the same kind of intermixing in the world of Hypebeast, the Hong Kong-based sneaker blog that slowly became the global authority on street culture. Looking back today, the magazine’s early issues brought names from both Asian and Black street culture together into one legendary archive. The K-pop star G-Dragon, basketball player Michael Jordan, and designer Virgil Abloh were all cover stars at one point, forming an oddly cohesive universe between the alleys of Gangnam, Causeway Bay, and Chicago’s South Side.

One possible explanation why Asian and Black street culture mixed so well was that both originated from cities. Streets in, say, the Bronx and Sham Shui Po more closely resembled one another than the townhouses in the Hamptons or in Greenwich, CT. This kind of vaguely similar lived experience was conducive to shared borrowing between Asian and Black artists, who seemingly ignored white EDM counterculture of the 2010s in favor of one another. But another explanation is a longer, shared history from before the 21st century.

After all, it was the Wu-Tang Clan, the American hip-hop group formed in Staten Island, that named themselves after Shaolin and Wu Tang, a 1983 martial arts film from Hong Kong. In one interview, GZA, a founding member of the group, compares rap to the Taoist martial art Wudangquan: “Wu-Tang represents the sword style of rhyming. We are lyrical or verbal assassins. We are fully aware that the tongue is symbolic to the sword.”

Even earlier in 1974, the Jamaica-born British singer Carl Douglas released “Kung Fu Fighting,” the iconic disco track that eventually became one of the biggest-selling singles of all time. The song’s opening featured a Chinese flute, as well as “Hurgh! Hurgh!” exclamatory ad-libs as a kind of rugged, more masculine “Hai-ya!” In the “Kung Fu Fighting” music video, Douglas is seen donning an “Oriental” get-up while performing generic chopping moves. All of this did reek of capital-O Orientalism, but there is a genuine earnestness in how Douglas apparently was inspired to create the song after seeing youngsters doing mock-kung fu moves in the street. Chinese martial arts were, to him, simultaneously distant yet familiar, alien yet aspirational.

Indeed, there is a longer, often-overlooked history of Kung Fu in Black communities. “African Americans loved [Hong Kong] Kung Fu films because their themes often reflected their own social and political oppression,” the South China Morning Post argued in 2021. Underdog stories in titles like Fist of Fury became easily translatable to their own lives, and many Black youths in the ‘70s came to love Bruce Lee: “The fighting spirit and prowess of Bruce Lee made us aware of what we were lacking as men,” the Alabama-based martial artist Donald Hamby told the Black-led publication Andscape. “Bruce Lee strengthened the Black man’s manhood. His philosophy of life and combat was ahead of his time.”

The “fighting spirit” of Kung Fu inevitably wound up shaping Black radical political praxis. As Richard Raya documents in the Tapestries journal, Bruce Lee’s thought influenced the Black Panthers’ philosophies of reactive self-defense and the balance of forces, and anchored their work in a shared anti-Western struggle—against systemic racism in America and against British imperialism in Hong Kong.

So where is this long creative lineage left today? Afro-Asian hip-hop was unlucky enough to grow at the peak of cultural appropriation discourse, back when a white girl in a qi-pao was enough to cause a firestorm on Twitter. The cultural climate led to some “cut fruit poetry diaspora” types thinking that Minaj’s “Chun-Li” was racist, as well as plenty of fighting between Black and Asian communities over who could borrow what: Could the NBA’s Jeremy Lin wear dreads? Could Kenyon Martin—another basketball player who called Lin out on his dreads—have tattoos of Chinese words that he doesn’t even understand?

The movement may have stalled in the last few years, but there are some hints of Afro-Asian hip-hop’s revival. A sneak peek of North West’s (Ye’s daughter) upcoming song features a sample of Chief Keef’s “Love Sosa” with a Japanese anime voice squealing “North-chan!” at the opening. For me, this rings as good news. Afro-Asian hip hop—and its antecedents in disco, in martial arts, and in activism—always unearthed what was possible when the world was left open: that familiarity can be found even in the furthest reaches of the map.

Something strange happened in the 2026 Winter Olympics. There had been talk, coalescing online, of an illustrious god-woman emerging from the Italian snow. In Lombardy, fresh from her long slumber, she is seen dressed in a white Olympic bib, drifting down a sharply-inclined slope faster than a snow leopard. With her skis, she flies off the ledge, gliding into the air, pirouetting mid-atmosphere, and landing backward on the piste without friction.

The god-woman had won medals in all three women’s freestyle skiing events. Upon removing her helmet, she is captured, in photos, sharp-jawlined and symmetrically faced, holding Gold and Silvers next to teeth of pearly-pristine-white, with her face tilted, optimally-angled for the camera. She is the “most decorated freestyle skier in Olympic history.” She is Eileen Gu. And for many, she is “a human 2.0 prototype”—“a glimpse of what humans [will] look like in a few decades.”

Mythology has always been central to eugenics—a set of prejudiced beliefs aimed at “improving” humanity’s gene pool through selective, “ideal” reproduction. Heinrich Himmler, a leading military figure in Nazi Germany, was obsessed with the myth of Atlantis. The lost underwater civilization was thought to be ruled by beautiful Nordic ‘God Men,’ the kind of society that Himmler and the Nazis would seek out and, through a literal multi-year genocide campaign, attempt to restore.

Now, a parallel myth is emerging, except not for cookie-cutter, blue-eyed “Aryan-race” eugenics. It is instead more futuristic, more technological, and a lot less white; its focus is on Gu as a genetically-engineered Hercules, as an “ideal” human specimen of demigod-likeness.

As one user says, she has “biracial optimization,” on account of her mixed Anglo-Saxon and Chinese heritage, and a “dual-market value” in both the US and China, on account of being multilingual. She possesses “mega generational wealth”—and speculatively, an alleged projected longevity of “120-150 years.” Analyze her with a less cool distance, and the story still stands: She models for Louis Vuitton, studies international relations at Stanford, and makes $20M+ a year in brand deals. In interviews, she quickly shuts down dumb questions from journalists—not with a mean, Trumpian brashness, but instead with words carefully selected and sharply enunciated to make her intelligence obvious. She is perfect. And in this new myth of eugenics, she is of prime “value” in an economy with narrowing opportunities: “permanent underclass score: 0.00.”

But this obsession with Gu did not grow in a vacuum. Over the last few years, eugenics has increasingly averted its gaze away from white “Aryans,” and taken a multi-racial turn instead. On Joshua Citarella’s Doomscroll, podcaster Brace Belden warned of “post-race fascism”: figures like Andrew Tate and Myron Gaines, both of whom espouse white supremacist Nazi ideology despite having African heritage themselves. If you keep up with tech-adjacent circles on the internet, you’d know that their desirable society is one where social hierarchy is determined by high IQ, a trait that seemingly any person of any race can have. Late last year, there were ads encouraging people to “Have your best baby” in the New York subway, marketing the services for IVF and genetic engineering startup Nucleus. The race of the “best babies” in question? Every single kind. The founder of Orchid, a rival gene-screening startup backed by the Thiel fellowship, is Indian. And even Elon Musk, who screens embryos for “superior intelligence” and warns of a “white genocide,” is still technically African; his baby mamas span different countries.

In a previous decade, eugenics may have once been ruled by fringe political subcultures. But in 2026, it’s slowly making its way into the mainstream. And the world it imagines is one where “blood [is] the only passport you need” (to borrow a line from Gattaca, a film where eugenics renders race and nationality obsolete). Elites, for this new eugenics, can be of any race, so long as their DNA endows them with the brains, beauty, and brawn that commands a position at the top.

But ideas of who possesses genes worth spreading are often entangled with how they can be passed down. And for the new eugenics advocates, one question still requires answering: How can society ensure more demigod-like “human 2.0s” are born?

This is nothing more than a rumor, but in late February, The National Enquirer, an American tabloid, “exclusively obtained [Eileen] Gu’s birth certificate” and found that “the space designated for the father’s name is blank.” On other parts of the internet, similar speculations on the real story of Gu’s birth run amok. A netizen from China confessed in r/aznidentity, the controversial Asian politics subreddit, that on Chinese social media, “[there’s] a lot of gossip around [Gu’s] birth background, including IVF, surrogacy, and who her father is.”

Eileen Gu is the daughter of Yan Gu, a single mother. And in absence of any public information of her biological father, there is wild, preposterous speculation that Gu was genetically engineered—that, on the grounds that her father did not raise her or does not play an active role in her life, he was functionally a sperm donor.

Conspiracies are even more sticky and persistent when we consider the rising star from this year’s Winter Olympics: the figure skater Alysa Liu.

Liu has custom-made tooth piercings, frequently uses the word “mogg,” and has an alternating blonde and black raccoon hair dye. She is characteristically relatable, possessing the whimsy of a Gen Z woman who spends a lot of time on TikTok. And for these reasons, Liu is often placed in diametric opposition to Gu’s goddess-like perfection. She is not a “striver” in the way that Gu is. She does not attend Stanford. Once, at age 16, she took a long hiatus from ice skating to recover from burnout. And she represents the United States, while Gu represents China.

On the surface, these differences position these women as parallel opposites, and by representing the opposing US and China, both are often caught in online geopolitical debate-slop. But the two women are far more similar than they might seem. Both were raised in the Bay Area. Both are half-Chinese, half-white. And according to widespread rumors on the internet, Liu, like Gu, is an alleged product of genetic engineering: one viral X post reads, “Seems like both of them were lab-made.”

Alysa is the daughter of lawyer Arthur Liu. She has four siblings, all of whom are half-white. None of them were conceived through sex—as Arthur’s only ex-wife is Chinese—but instead through two Caucasian egg donors that the Liu family does not know. According to a since-deleted story in Sports Illustrated, Arthur chose white egg donors because he “felt his children would benefit from a diverse gene pool” and multicultural upbringing. Easily, this is the kind of logic that invites speculation: one widely-read Substack essay has taken the liberty to report that, for Alysa’s birth, “[Arthur] curated eggs from intelligent, athletic white egg donors, and genetically screened them to pick out the best ones.”

No source on the internet that I’ve found can seem to verify that claim. But as with all rumors, truth is beside the point. What’s more important is that these slanderous un-truths underscore a terrifying new idea: that Liu, like Gu, is a proof-of-concept for eugenics. “Alysa Liu was actually made in a lab via an optimized donor and surrogate,” writes another user on X. “[Maybe] the most viral case for eugenics.” Another user on a viral r/changemyview post makes the point more explicit: On account of being high-achieving and allegedly genetically-engineered, “Alysa Liu’s existence proves that eugenics is a good thing.”

“What’s interesting about both Alysa Liu and Eileen Gu to me is not that they are both half-Chinese but a far rarer circumstance: they’re both unconventional babies,” wrote the Taiwan-based business reporter Angelica Oung in February. “In both cases an Asian parent selected a white sperm/egg donor.”

What shift is this signaling? Even after side-stepping whiteness, eugenics finds itself ironically bound up in race again. Old prejudices are simply repackaged for the technological age: This time it is seeking genetically-engineered test tube babies of mixed Asian and white heritage. As one netizen puts it, “Eileen Gu is essentially a lab-grown Übermensch,” fusing genetic selection with “IVFmaxxing + top Asian parenting + Western individualism.” With reproductive technology, egg and sperm donors, the prerogative becomes to reproduce these “Übermenschen” at scale. The Wasian is the new “supreme” “ideal” race. This is the rise of Wasian eugenics.

Wasian-ness might be increasingly in fashion for pro-eugenics subcultures on the internet, but being mixed-race always had cultural cachet. In the 2010s, a number of breakout stars in film, music and TV were Wasian—the list is long, but to name a few: Charles Melton, Henry Golding, Naomi Scott, Olivia Rodrigo, Charli XCX, Zayn Malik, Hailee Steinfeld, Laufey, Conan Gray, Mitski.

Wasian-ness always symbolized the rare ability to straddle between two different cultures, functioning like a cosmopolitan post-ethnicity. To be Wasian was to be post-modern, making concepts like “race” and “nationality” feel tribal, obsolete, and even “backward” in comparison. In a way, the Wasian captured the beauty of the world at the height of the globalization era: no border was too tall, no country too far apart, for love to ever cross over and make a baby.

But now as the world continues to “deglobalize,” the Wasian becomes a kind of remnant, a haunting reminder of a borderless world that we were once hurling towards but now can no longer exist. And when cross-cultural understanding grows in rarity, Wasian-ness is converting into a new currency. Straddling between multiple worlds, after all, has immense economic value—no less when the two worlds in question are the US and China, two countries that Gu and Liu seem to find themselves enmeshed in between.

In an essay titled “Do Wasians hold the key?” cultural strategist argues that the Wasian’s exposure to both East and West creates a “double consciousness”—“a sensitivity that is particularly useful for navigating this moment.” In a world where the US and China are locked in an AI race, a trade war, and a quest for global political domination, that ability to straddle between two worlds is increasingly necessary. “For those caught between cultures,” Lau writes, “perhaps instead of lamenting the division of two selves, it’s time to recognize it as their greatest power.”

Caught in a sudden death race for global domination, both America and China represent competing visions for the future of the world: the lawyer society versus the engineer society, as Dan Wang’s Breakneck argued last year; “free market” capitalism versus “socialism” with Chinese characteristics; the Protestant ethic versus Confucian values. Uncle Sam or Chairman Mao, Disney’s Mickey Mouse or Kasing Lung’s Labubu, The White House Cabinet or the Politburo, OpenAI and Anthropic or DeepSeek and Manus, Move Fast and Break Things or the 996. The “New Cold War.” Both sides suspended in lockstep, dancing till death. As of now, it is still impossible to know which will ascend victorious.

Or, perhaps we already do.

The winners will be those who don’t have to choose—those who can exist seamlessly in either the East or West; those who, by DNA alone, are innately built to fit within these two competing worlds. No wonder then that pro-eugenics subcultures desperately fawn over the Wasian, of white-American and Chinese heritage: Eileen Gu and Alysa Liu might be representing opposing sides, but both are guaranteed to stand on the podium, medaled in glory. By the mere fact of their existence, their bets are perfectly hedged.

Much of Fallen Angels is really just ambient city background noise and music. But even when a character is speaking it’s seldom with another. Stitched together throughout the film are four internal monologues, overlaid over silence, of four people living in Hong Kong’s underbelly: a gun-for-hire; his blonde, ditzy girlfriend; his business partner who collects his trash and is secretly in love with him; and a mute, Taiwanese ex-convict with a talent for using camcorders. As the American film critic Stephen Holden wrote in The New York Times, “The movie feels as weightless as the tinny pop music that keeps its restless midnight ramblers darting around the city like electronic toy figures in a gaming arcade.” Some characters’ paths intersect, but for the most part they’re kept in isolation, mostly trapped in their own microcosms, all living alone in a big city. It’s the kind of problem that feels very characteristic to the 2020s. And the three-decades-old film’s focus on the interiority of each character makes the “loneliness crisis” much more legible than some stats or a Substack essay ever could.

There is no singular, unifying plot, no linear narrative throughout the Fallen Angels’ 90-minute runtime. In absence of this, time in film moves less forward and more circular. Less like an arrow and much more like a disk on a DJ booth, progressing clockwise but at times jolting back and forth under Wong’s behest, as frame rates throughout Fallen Angels rapidly rise and fall—switching in and out of blurry shots and back into the standard thirty frames per second. It’s chaos slowed down, but not enough for the eye to fully register everything.

All of Fallen Angels takes place at night. Characters pace around a city colored in a blue-green tint or in underground spaces dressed in fluorescent lighting. Perpetual darkness and aversion to linear time perhaps helped Wong articulate the liminality eclipsing a city in transformation—after all, Hong Kong was due to transform from British colony to Special Administrative Region of China just a few years after the film was released. But I imagine these techniques also capture a world much like our own, suspended in the present and haunted by lost futures.

As the late philosopher Mark Fisher once argued in Film Quarterly, society has lost “the capacity to conceive of a world radically different from the one in which we currently live.” At the time of writing in 2012, he was talking about stagnating creativity in electronic music, but look at politics and culture and his words feel even more relevant today. The idea that the world would slowly march towards universal humanist progress is long gone by now, while today’s mass culture—driven by algorithms, performance metrics, and AI—grows increasingly derivative and decreasingly original.

Perhaps the affective experience of living in an atomizing time-freeze is best put by the hitman in Fallen Angels. Describing his targets, he says, “I do not know who these people are and I do not care. Soon they will be history.”

But all the prescience of Fallen Angels might make a little more sense once you consider how impactful it was on futurist aesthetic movements at the turn of the millennium.

There is an entire genre of forward-looking advertisements and fashion editorials from the late ‘90s and early ‘00s that seem to follow Wong’s style. A cover for the Surface design magazine features a luminous dressing room project by artist Pierre Huyghe, accompanied by the same blue-colored tones and blurred photography captured mid-movement, not unlike the action scenes in Fallen Angels. Another fashion editorial featuring Japanese singer Ringo Sheena in a subway reappropriates Wong’s signature tinted blue-green, with the same hazy, fluorescent lights glowing in the background. Or alternatively, take the slightly-warmer, blurred shots taken inside a moving subway in one “:JOURNEY” campaign for (what the train logo indicates is) the Southeastern Pennsylvania Transportation Authority. Stylistically, it’s very similar to early scenes in Fallen Angels, where characters walk through dimly-lit tunnels in Hong Kong MTR stations.

“Blur as genre” is how one essay on Artforum describes Wong Kar-wai’s body of work, but you can make a similar statement about this aesthetic of hazy mid-movement shots, tinted in green-ish (or anything ranging from lime yellow to blue) with a generous amount of fuzzy background lighting. Early digital camera sensors were more sensitive to blue light, which meant that the tones of this aesthetic leaned cooler. And combine that with their limited autofocus and low-resolution sensors, and you get an aesthetic that certain corners of the internet describe as “Gen X Soft Club.”

This visual language emerged at the turn of the millennium, and was often found in the electronic music that, back then, was slowly being subsumed into the mainstream. Ergo: “soft club”—as a more palatable, mainstream version of what the ‘80s rave scene offered. Songs like Björk’s “army of me” and Madonna’s “Ray of Light” brought rave-like sounds into FM radio, and much like Fallen Angels, their music videos shared similar cool dark tones, dizzying cities captured in a blur, with plenty of fluorescent backlighting.

All the blue made “Gen X Soft Club” feel futuristic: cool tones evoked the sky, the sea, and a machine-like scale all at once, which, as the designer Mike Sunday says, created a “breathable future that’s not so distant, but just outside of our reach.”

The aesthetic is, according to Mike Sunday, to lists on Aesthetics Wiki and IMDB, and to the archivists on Facebook who first coined the moniker “Gen X Soft Club,” heavily influenced by Wong Kar-wai. All point to films like Fallen Angels, as well as Chungking Express and Happy Together released in the same decade, as some of the aesthetic’s antecedents. In some blurry stills from Chungking Express, where a lone character is set against a city in a frenzy, or in the music videos of Björk and Madonna, or in the fashion editorials too, you can sense some shared anxiety towards the problems of hypermodernity—the alienation in big cities, or late capitalism’s demands for speed.

But in 2026, all of this is somehow viewed romantically. According to a few netizens online, “Gen X Soft Club” was one of the last few times mankind was able to envision a future that was new—even if it was built on the anxieties of its time. As trend researcher Sloane Angel Hilton notes, “Gen X Soft Club” was more terrestrial: “Its futurism was a mix of sterile and organic,” in a way, narrating the creep of urban life, high-tech, and late capitalism onto human societies. “[It depicted] city life through a colonialist lens. First wave gentrification… Urban life influenced graphic design.”

“Soft Club” was not so much a repackaging of old cultural movements—as Y2K fashion repackaged disco—but more so the kind that still inspired wonder and pushed our gazes forward: “We can still create this future,” one user on Instagram writes; another quips on Reddit, “They took so much from us.”

Why does this aesthetic resonate so much today? Examining today with hindsight, perhaps this vision feels futuristic and speaks to many because we’re now beginning to unpack the anxieties they once foresaw. In mixing the “sterile” with the “organic,” new tech and capitalism continued to encroach towards us, but humanity was never threatened. We still remained at the center.

But perhaps the biggest lesson that “Gen X Soft Club” might offer is for us to reconsider what even counts as a future. Something can be paradoxically bound to its time—as Fallen Angels was to the ‘90s—while simultaneously serving as a blueprint for what looms ahead. Wong Kar-wai’s films are not “futuristic” or “modern” in the sense that there’s aliens, high-tech, or an end-of-the-world-level plot. But with style and narration, their vision of the world ahead comes by depicting problems of the present that, as the world accelerates, only become more relevant in the near future.

The world had ended but you did not know. You wake up from a coma, throat parched dry, talking out loud in an empty room. You are speaking to your friend who you think is sitting next to you, in the chair next to your hospital bed, only to realize that the room is empty, and the flowers your wife had brought for you have withered. You call out for a nurse, but get no response.

Trudging along with an IV drip and pole, you leave the room.

Lying on the floor across from you, at the other end of the hallways, is what looks like a human body, stripped almost entirely of all its flesh: a woman’s head with ribs and a spine. You turn, and dark, dried blood is streaked on the walls, marking a path towards a pair of metal doors, with handles wrapped in chains, locked; streaked in black ink are the words, “DON’T OPEN, DEAD INSIDE.”

So goes an early scene in the pilot episode of The Walking Dead, one of many apocalyptic media where walls tagged with graffiti are a recurring motif. Graffiti appears in the zombie film, 28 Days Later (2002), where the words “REPENT. THE END IS EXTREMELY FUCKING NIGH.” are etched beside the stairway of a church. In Mad Max: Fury Road, “WHO KILLED THE WORLD?” is an often repeated question, one scribbled, graffiti-style, in the makeshift desert palace of the film’s antagonist, Immortan Joe. Or, in the walls of the infertile, doomed-for-population-collapse society in Children of Men: “LAST ONE TO DIE, PLEASE TURN OUT THE LIGHTS.”

In all cases, the world ends. And whether with a bang or a whimper, we are always left with graffiti as a final cry, the last form of human expression.

This is hardly by accident. Go to any set of graffiti-tagged walls in your nearby metro and they emanate a similar feeling. I keep thinking about the writing scrawled throughout Paris early last year: spray paint tagged on centuries-old limestone, illegible sketches of words and phrases, drawn out with a talisman-like intricacy. The letters—if you can even call them that—look more like ancient scripts for spell incantations than the work of a few angry protesters, like a language from a time that is not our own, from a far-flung, post-apocalyptic future we do not belong to.

“Tagging” a wall, according to cultural criminologist Jeff Ferrell, has always been a way for graffiti artists to reclaim space from any forces deemed hostile. For some, that might be zombies, as in The Walking Dead and 28 Days Later, but for others that could be the French government, or (more often) a private equity firm gentrifying the local neighborhood. The medium finds itself most at home with those needing resistance or release. Perhaps this is why it always appears in stories where the end of the world takes place. When our very existence is threatened, how else will we let the world know that we were here?

Graffiti artists in Arc’teryx and The North Face.

This is not the kind of story that surfaces in the endless sea of trend discourse, but graffiti artists were some of the early proponents of brands like Arc’teryx and The North Face.

“Graffiti is a largely outdoor hobby, so you want good clothing to help with the elements,” one graffiti artist tells the writer Chris Danforth in a series of interviews on Arc’teryx’s role in the graffiti subculture. “[T]hey have chest pockets. It’s a good place to put your cans of spray paint.”

A similar story is told for The North Face, which became a staple in New York graffiti culture of the ‘90s and early ‘00s. As one feature series by Living Proof New York puts it, the mountaineering brand struck a perfect balance between function, status, and street symbolism. “[For] a graffiti writer in the ‘90s, this was the uniform back then,” the artist Mike Irak recalls in one segment of the feature, while fiddling around with a pair of North Face Mountain Pants from 1995. “This was an armor.”

“You come out [near Houston Street] at any time past 5, you’re going to bump into somebody chilling… that’s where the night began and all the fuckery started,” another New York-based graffiti writer, POST VSOP, tells Living Proof. “And everybody was in North Face jackets.”

This was “gorpcore” at one of its earliest forms: Long before outdoor brands like The North Face, Arc’teryx, and Salomons were repurposed into elevated streetwear, graffiti writers of the ‘90s dressed themselves in jackets like the Search and Rescue Light or in navy-colored zip-ups with Arc’teryx’s famed skeleton bird.

You could also say that, for these young men, the New York of the ‘90s was quasi-apocalyptic. Under Rudy Giuliani’s tenure as mayor, surveillance and policing—especially on graffiti—were on sharp ascent. In a sense, mountaineering gear became a kind of survival armor: not the suede jacket and holstered revolver of the zombie-killing Rick Grimes, but young men dressed in jackets to wade through the cold.

“I feel like this part of New York City history is a part of world history,” Mike Irak tells Living Proof. “This type of style, this type of movement spread around all over the world.”

Observe your nearby city long enough and you’ll find that gorpcore has already become one of the defining “looks” of the 2020s. Stripped of its outdoor (or even subcultural) functions, brands like Arc’teryx, The North Face, and Salomon have already become wardrobe staples. Manhattan financiers will commute to air-conditioned offices in Arc’teryx windbreakers. In Hong Kong, Salomon trail runners can be spotted as easily in hikes to The Peak as in industrial warehouse raves. And the North Face’s 1996 Retro Nuptse—an inflated puffer coming in a seemingly infinite range of colors—has kept its staying power as a normie winter jacket essential for half a decade. As the strategist Victoria Buchanan wrote in late 2025, “consumers now want performance fabrics and functional aesthetics, from summit to subway.”

Today, Maison Margiela engages in collaborative drops with Salomon. And in spring of 2025, cult-status Japanese designer Junya Watanabe released a collection inspired by The North Face’s Stow Away rain jacket. Even in a space as cutthroat and crowded as fashion and lifestyle, “gorpcore” brands have been raking in an enviable profit: “Amer Sports, parent company of Arc’teryx and Salomon, reported $2.71 billion in its first-half 2025 revenue—up 23.5% year-over-year, driven by lifestyle adoption,” Victoria reports. “Salomon alone crossed the $1 billion footwear mark in 2024, a once-unthinkable milestone for a brand rooted in alpine sports.”

Last year, a friend of mine once joked at an industry networking event that “gorpcore is a psyop.” Search online and there’s little evidence backing that claim—some conspiracies begin with the fact that contracts for US Special Operations—but the theory did point to the large amount of cynicism placed on these outdoor brands’ mainstream-ification, especially on the internet. One meme in particular mocks Arc’teryx for its use by trendy urbanites. “WHAT IT’S MEANT TO SEE”: mountains of snow. “WHAT IT ACTUALLY SEES”: mountains of Ketamine.

But at its core, “gorpcore” is about adapting to adverse environments—surviving the cold in a jacket with high-fill-power goose feathers or synthetic warming technology, regardless of whether or not it has a trendy print of a bird’s skeleton. As Christian Dior once famously quipped, “without foundations, there can be no fashion.” He was talking about the importance of shape, how clothes fit on the body, but I also speculate the French designer was hinting that clothes need to fit the environment around you.

The graffiti artists dressed in Arc’teryx and The North Face knew this. In the sheer cold, inking walls to mark space as their own against quasi-apocalyptic threats, while writing, tagging, letting the world know they were here, clothing was treated like a wearable technology, where street cred naturally followed behind functionality.

Where do these ideas find themselves in a world where catastrophe looms?

Fourteen inches of rain, dumped all over Spain, in the span of twenty four hours. Jamaica lost one-third of its GDP to a single storm in November. We are, according to scientists at Yale, entering a period of “overshoot,” where rising temperatures near the tipping point for when the Greenland Ice Sheet melts into water, where heatwaves cause fires in Argentina and Chile and LA. The climate is increasingly K-shaped, in the sense that it is becoming more extreme: the Northern Hemisphere freezes in “polar vortex” cold snaps, while heatwaves cascade across the equator. These problems are entirely man-made, but the question of how we’ll survive an increasingly hostile environment still requires answering.

“I’ve always thought about this question of ‘temperature control.’ We’re very used to thinking that we’re going to temperature control a space or building,” Stephanie Sherman, a curator of the London-based environmental fashion collective, Earthsuits, said in a lecture last year. “But why don’t we just temperature control ourselves?”

Perhaps it’s no surprise that “gorpcore” is an increasingly popular style in an adverse climate. In a world mired by climate anxiety, it drives style from function, becoming more a protocol, a technology that, as the Earthsuits collective writes in their philosophy, “can provide direct access to previously exclusionary infrastructure.”

That includes everything from body-cooling textiles and raincoats to concert-friendly earplugs, but also “gorpcore.” An Arc’teryx wind breaker finds itself at home at an air-conditioned office in Manhattan, but it also keeps the body warm in a city colder than Antarctica. Your Salomon trail runners work at both a mountain hike or industrial warehouse rave, and while the scenes are different, both help the human wade through adverse environments, man-made or not. As the graffiti artists of the ‘90s understood, “gorpcore” is how we might survive in a world teetering towards apocalypse—and how we can do that in style.

The air coats in tar because all the windows are shut. Rooftop access, we’re told, is prohibited from the third floor. And twelve people have the genius idea to crowd around the building’s only fire exit, flick lighters and burn cigarettes with a large birch wood table and a woven wicker basket standing right next to them.

“Are we seriously going to be smoking around that?” my friend Henry* dryly says. “Zero fucking survival instincts.” I’m recovering from an overstaying cold—my nose is runny and my body still tired and for some reason my solution is to stand in a hotboxed fire exit in an industrial warehouse and drag Henry along with me.

We’d just listened to a twenty-five-year-old in a SCARFACE hoodie rap in screeching agony. His accent changed three times (from British to Chinese to American and back) throughout his thirty-minute set, while his friend, a shirtless, pudgy white guy, drummed in the background.

“Is that even legal?”

Henry and I turn around to the voice behind and see a short girl with bleached ‘man-repeller’-style eyebrows and a septum piercing thick enough for a cow. Here in Hong Kong’s Kowloon peninsula, she seemed fashion-forward, donning a short, inch-long fringe that you’d probably find in Berlin and carrying a tote bag from a North American hardcore band. “I heard that you’re only allowed to smoke indoors. Or you get fined $3000.”

Henry and I shrug because after years of living here that’s never been our experience. Septum Girl introduces herself to us as a brand-new transplant to Hong Kong—an art curator from Canada who speaks “少少” (very little) Cantonese. We all head back inside, returning for what we—Henry, Septum Girl, the smokers, and I—are here to attend on a Saturday night: a private concert at a secret location organized by Rice, one of the city’s leading punk music events organizers.

On social media, Rice is branded as “ur local youth outreach program.” But in a sea of pruning skin and salt-and-pepper hair, hardly anyone here seems that young. Only five people have the energy to take the mosh pit seriously. A young girl in the bottom left of my view is convulsing of her own initiative—but for the crowd of around fifty, everyone else is playing it safe, nodding heads to the guitar strums and standing still.

Last summer, someone lamented to me about a shocking number of Nazis in the punk scene, which is obviously horrible, but also really weird because I know a maximum of one Jewish person in the city. Who are the Nazis even picking a fight with at that point?

That means the Nazism is entirely a Western import. It’s a view not generated organically in Hong Kong, but instead a force that sprouts from 4chan’s dark corners and eventually lands on a local teenager’s Instagram explore page. And though its substance might be the most extreme polar opposite, you might also observe a foreign-ness about the event that Saturday night: PERSONA, a New York City-based “anarcho-punk” group, had just arrived in Hong Kong and was the evening’s final act. They were touring around Asia throughout January, hosting concerts in Batangas, Legaspi, and Manila (three different cities in the Philippines) and in Taiwan.

Just a few decades ago, the idea of a globe-touring “anarcho-punk” band may have been the target of finger-wagging accusations of hypocrisy. As David Simonelli traces in Contemporary British History, early punks were not the sort of crowd with the means to travel across continents, even if on a budget flight. In mid ‘70s London, for example, the movement catapulted first with working-class teenagers left unemployed during a recession. “There was little hope for a future in 1975 if you were young and working-class,” Simonelli writes. So what did they do? Channeled agony and transformed it into sound.

Punk was first a genre that mirrored economic malaise. Here, a DIY spirit, fondness for the shocking and the offensive, and anti-establishment views all fused to challenge traditional ideas of respectability and the monarchy that had failed them. For one, the lyrics of singer Johnny Rotten called on working-class youth to rebel against a society that had ignored their interests for too long. “There is no future / In England’s dreaming,” so goes the second verse in Sex Pistols’ classic punk song, “God Save the Queen.” “The working-class punk was unemployed because he could not find work,” Simonelli writes. “And punk was his angry protest against his lot in life.”

The lights turn on after the second performance, and it’s abundantly clear that the punk genre’s fans are a little different, now half a century later. From the crowd, I can make out the image of a man in a plain t-shirt from BEAMS Japan, the kind of retailer that someone generally buys to signal high taste, cultural fluency, and well-traveled-ness. People seem to belong to some kind of transient global class: at least a third of the concert-goers are white expats, and while lining up for the bathroom, someone nearby admits to attending one of Hong Kong’s most expensive high schools:

“He and I went to French International School, until I got kicked out,” I overhear one woman say.

Henry finds me once I step out of the bathroom to pull me aside and whisper, cynically, “Everyone here seems like a spoiled rich kid.”

There is a valid argument that something cannot truly be “punk” if its biggest proponents are not angsty working-class youth, but instead well-traveled millennials and privately educated Gen Zs. But debates about the purity of “punk” are as old as the genre itself. As early as the ‘70s, the same decade as the genre’s emergence, popular bands like the Sex Pistols and The Clash abandoned the independent labels for more lucrative contracts with large companies like EMI and CBS, calling their anti-establishment politics into question.

But, as Dick Hebdige writes in the seminal book Subculture: The Meaning of Style, “punk was forever condemned to act out alienation… to manufacture a whole series of subjective correlatives for the official archetypes of the ‘crisis of modern life.’” Put more simply, it’s not the reasons for punk-ing out that actually matter. You might be complaining about unemployment figures, the recession, surveillance capitalism, patriarchy, the rise of fascism, climate change, or, in 2026, the rise of AI—but substance is secondary to the fact that punk is an expression of discontent. “In punk,” writes Hebdige, “alienation assumed an almost tangible quality.”

You can still find traces of this sentiment in popular expressions of punk today. A few months ago, a video had been circling around of a band of young, shirtless, lanky American males, moshing in what looks like a spacious living room in a white-walled suburban home. The band featured in the video is literally named “Private School,” and the lyrics hint at a very specific white-collar malaise: “Coulda been a corporate motherfucker / But I’m this,” the band’s lead singer shouts into the microphone.

I’m inclined to think it’s not so much that punk has “changed,” is “dead,” has “lost its original spirit,” et cetera, and more so that the sources of discontent are changing. At least in global cities like Hong Kong or in the McMansions of the American suburbs, populations are (generally) fed and housed. But opportunities are scarce, and a life of stability is slipping from view.

“The traditional path to wealth accumulation is closed. Not difficult. Closed. When boomers hold ~50% of national wealth while comprising 20% of the population, and millennials hold ~10% despite being the same share [sic], the game reveals itself to be fundamentally broken,” reads a widely-shared X.com essay on young people’s diminishing prospects. “The implicit deal used to be simple: show up, work hard, stay loyal, and you’ll be rewarded… That deal is dead.”

There is a generation-and-a-half of people—people around my age or slightly older—raised entirely on zero-interest-rate period (ZIRP) optimism. During the long 2010s when money was free, opportunities were assumed to be in perpetual abundance. Budget airlines and e-commerce—brought to the world at scale through cheap borrowing—connected the world in ways we had previously never imagined. And life, we believed, would only improve linearly with time.

Of course, that has changed: deglobalization, a looming economic crash, a tightening job market, what have you. What remains is a collective sense of disappointment in a future that never arrived, a disaffection towards the reality we face instead, and plenty of no-longer-youths in desperate need for release. Events hosted by groups like Rice offer a peek into how this new “crisis of modern life” crystallizes: a “punk” might wear a BEAMS Japan shirt because they can travel across continents on Ryanair or AirAsia, but can’t get a job, afford a house, or raise a family.

The main event of the evening was actually quite a blur for me. I was getting a little more dizzy from the cold. Even from the video footage I recorded, I can barely make out the lyrics PERSONA’s lead singer was enunciating. But I do remember them whispering breathlessly into the microphone, saying “thank you everybody… it’s really important that we have these DIY communities to connect across borders.”

It’s hardly “punk” in the original sense. But when DIY communities connect across the globe, when discontent is expressed against a world where “you can survive but can’t get anywhere,” where punk concerts are attended by the worldly and the well-educated, what does it amount to?

For me, it’s “punk globalism.”

It’s the angst that remains after ZIRP-era optimism, from a worldly, globalized generation-and-a-half of people raised on a bright, prosperous future that failed to materialize.

Silly as “punk globalism” might be, there are signs it can be both useful and productive. It’s the punk spirit, after all, that pushed Rice to fundraise HK$21,000 for We Feed Gaza, an independent grassroots Catholic movement distributing food in Palestine, late last year.

“We are all living through a very dark period. With our own worlds full of problems, it may be easier to look away than to show compassion for others,” Rice’s organizers wrote on Instagram. “But one day, you may look back and wish you had done more when you could have.” In the words of Hebdige, it’s “acting out of alienation” against the “crises of modern life.” The original punk may not have been as well-traveled, but this new punk spirit, with its globalist tendencies, expands concern and action to new causes around the world that, in a previous decade, might’ve been left unseen.

You’d think that nearly thirty years after Hong Kong’s handover to China, British influence on the city is dormant. Edwardian-style architecture lines along the central business district, and every now and then you meet an alum of Harrow or Eton or another boarding school in Southern England. Blue-eyed British expats cluster around the International Finance Center, or “chic” districts like Sheung Wan, but now they are much fewer than before. Friends might speak in an accent that is at once British and American and Chinese, but because of Netflix and Instagram people have been sounding a lot more like a mix of the latter two.

This is the “British” in the former British colony of Hong Kong: persistent, still existing, but more so acting in the background rather than maintaining a continuous influence.

But the city’s nightclubs will tell a different story.

I’m lounging in a dimly lit room for a pregame at a friend of a friend’s apartment, sipping on a glass of whisky straight from the bottle. Some friends are circling around the kitchen island, drinking lemon chūhais and giggling about the latest scene gossip, but from the black velvet couch I’m seated on, the chatter is drowned out by the music playing in the background.

Terrence* and Sandy* are on aux tonight.1 But instead of controlling the speaker from an iPhone and a bluetooth connection, they’re spinning the decks—the friend of a friend has a DJ system plugged in his computer to mix tracks whenever he’s bored. The apartment is tiny, but the entire system controls two human head-sized speakers from an off-brand seller on Taobao. Sandy—a Hong Kong-born Korean—is teaching Terrence—a half-British-half-Chinese events organizer—how to DJ. I can vaguely make out what Sandy’s saying behind the chatter and the music, but since I’m not a DJ none of it makes sense to me.

“Pay attention to the bars,” Sandy says, pointing at the rekordbox app on the screen. “And make sure you time it right.”

Terrence looks dazed and doesn’t reply, so Sandy returns her attention back to mixing tracks. Warped bass and skittering breakbeats slowly fade into a woman’s howl—Sandy’s blasting “Rhythm ‘N’ Gash” by Rebound X, a track that I’d begun hearing around scene-y clubs on Saturdays nights since it went Boiler Room-viral earlier that spring. According to several YouTube netizens, the song is “possibly the best grime instrumental created” and basically “the English national anthem.”

Perhaps the choice of music was deliberate. We were killing a few hours before heading to a party in the Wanchai Harborfront where Conducta—a UK Garage DJ and the producer behind AJ Tracey’s hit song “Ladbroke Grove”—was set to play. He’d arrived in Hong Kong a week prior and, at one of the largest venues in the city, was sharing the decks back-to-back with scenesters Eugene and JUST BEE, two local DJs whose styles are characteristically British.

Thirty years ago and at the opposite end of the world, ravers would spill out of London’s Ministry of Sound Club at 9am, in search of Sunday morning after parties, where US house records would be played fast to keep weary dancers moving. These bright church-time events are where UK Garage was born: a “2-step” rhythm genre that the music journalist Simon Reynolds describes as “a distinctly British hybrid” between “house’s slinky panache [and] jungle’s rude-bwoy.” Fast forward to 2026 and the sound has evolved to often include warped basslines, syncopated hi-hats, skittering beats, as well as samples from UK Drill, with DJs like Conducta, Interplanetary Criminal, and Sammy Virji at the vanguard.

This kind of sound finds a home today in the clubs of Hong Kong, nearly 10,000 kilometers away.

“I actually had this conversation with guys like Conducta and Interplanetary Criminal… talk to them and one thing they all said was that they’re really shocked to see an audience for UK music in Hong Kong,” says Eugene, one of the DJs who had played with Conducta at that event, and with Interplanetary Criminal and Sammy Virji at other parties. “If you show someone in Hong Kong who’s never stepped foot in the UK to the clubs here, week after week they’re hearing UK music.”

“That by itself is a very borderless feeling,” Eugene adds. “They’re having fun, there’s entertainment, but they’re also getting to know the subculture.”

Few can empirically explain this phenomenon, but it’s not hard to formulate a likely hypothesis for why British music is so popular in Hong Kong. A kid from the city might go to college in London and return home with a tracklist from club nights at the Ministry of Sound. Or, an English teacher from Bristol might take on a job in Hong Kong, and in their spare time, inject themselves into the local scene and share UK club hits.

In the last few years, plenty of ink has been spilled on the DJ. Mixing tracks and controlling basslines is a new fascination, not only because of the viral DJ set as a popular internet medium, but also because DJs reveal features in our cultural milieu. For some, the DJ is symbolic of our culture’s obsession with remixes and “reheated nachos”—everything in film and television is a prequel or a sequel or a live-action remake. Or, for the writer , our obsession with DJs represents an obsession with taste in the information age, the ability to trawl through the slop and find great sound.

But can the DJ represent something else?

“Deglobalization” is one of the defining threads of the 2020s: working visas grow difficult to acquire, US-China tensions are rising, the global order that ruled the 20th century is disintegrating in favor of multipolarity. “[This is a] shift towards a world without effective collective governance, and where multilateralism is weakened by powers that obstruct it or turn away from it,” French President Emmanuel Macron warned in a speech at Davos this year. “And rules are undermined.”

But the work of a DJ seems to run counter to all of this. DJs actively fuse cultures, taking samples from disparate countries and combining them together into a final sonic product. One might recall the image of a chiseled ¥ØU$UK€ ¥UK1MAT$U: a shiny bald head mixing hyperpop from the American midwest with Chinese folk techno and verses from Palestinian jazz singer Nai Barghouti, all from a nightclub in Tokyo.2

“I think that’s the most fun thing ever,” says Eugene. “When you’re listening to a set and you’re hearing a heavy, dark German techno track, and the next track is Daft Punk, it does something to your brain. For me, I light up when that happens.” The DJ is not constrained by genre. No two tracks are too different to mix, and in the world of sound, no border is too towering to cross.

Landmark, a mall in the center of Hong Kong, captures the city’s globalist aspirations: in only 24,000 square meters, it compresses stores for almost every global luxury brand in existence with 16 Michelin stars (only two of which belong to Chinese restaurants) and the offices of multinationals like Sotheby’s, Point72, and PwC. Here, the world collides, but you’ll find a similar—and more interesting—version of that story in the mall’s basement.

Tucked underneath a few escalators is FM BELOWGROUND, a radio station directed by DJ Arthur Bray. The space outside had just been renovated, with six brand new speakers embedded inside a gradient gray marble wall. Arthur is sitting on a stool inside the DJ booth, a small room with an iMac and brand-new cotton padding for sound insulation. A shelf hovers near the ceiling, with vinyls collected from record stores around the world in one section, and in another, circa-1990s covers of The Face mixed in with zines produced by Arthur’s music collective, Yeti Out.

“The great thing about running a radio station is being exposed to talented DJs that come in and share what’s in their USBs,” Arthur says. “You’re always discovering new stuff.”

Artists from around the world have graced the booth, from the Manila-based label transit records to the London-by-way-of-NYC house artist Karl Phenom. That makes FM BELOWGROUND difficult to categorize, but a similar observation can be made about Arthur’s style as a DJ. Some of his sets fuse “rap and rave” with more grassroots Chinese genres: “A Yeti Out sound is probably a mix of electronic music from our Western influence, because we started doing parties in East London,” Arthur says. “But then mixed with Chengdu rap, Tibetan rap, Yunnan reggae. All those influences are multiplied by our travels and curiosities on the road.” It’s somewhat of a “Silk Road mentality,” he adds, a convergence of East and West.

A “Silk Road” metaphor might be a fitting way to capture the world of a DJ. These vast trade routes from the Classical era to the Late Middle Ages transmitted knowledge, ideas, cultures, beliefs between nations, and birthed the borderless concept of “Eurasia.” DJs operate on a similar infrastructure: budget flights from Hong Kong to Tokyo to London, bookings made through Instagram DMs, local nightlife circuits receptive to global talent—an improvised, informal global trade system. Goods and people and culture flow between borders, but it’s DJs instead of merchants and sound instead of silk.

Now is a good time to mention that “Silk Road” is the inspiration behind Silk Road Sounds, a Hong Kong-via-London-based record label Arthur founded with his twin brother, Tom, that bridges “the sonic gap between the East and West.” But listen to a recent set from their monthly NTS show and that may be an understatement: the pair blends “Typhoon version” Cantopop with a Japanese DJ’s remix of Brazilian funk and the Slam Dunk anime OST. “We didn’t even prep that show,” Arthur says. “But it’s such an extension of me and my brother’s taste.”

New hybrid cultural fusions emerged as a result of the Silk Road. An image of Herakles, for example, transformed into Shukongoshin, the Japanese guardian of the Buddha, when the Greek hero’s story traveled eastward. The DJ, traveling across borders on an improvised infrastructure, creates hybrid forms of their own: They might be mixing French rap with Indian jazz “but the connection from rap to jazz to you is exactly what’s true to your creation,” Arthur says. “It’s just that you’ve been able to find these connecting loops in ways that make sense to you.”

“Silk Road Sounds [is] an extension of who we are, being half-Cantonese, half-British, but also our A&R process,” Arthur says. “Who do we work with? We’re not sitting at a long table with Evian bottled waters and looking at who’s gonna make us the most money. It’s literally people that we fuck with or jam with backstage. Or people we meet on tour at 3AM.”

The globalization we know—vaguely acronymed organizations (“UNESCO,” “WTO,” “WFP”) in The Hague—may be in decline. But for the DJ, another world remains open: “Some people wonder, how can you go to Thailand or Seoul and find people that fuck with what you do? For us, that’s just the way we always thought it was,” Arthur says. (A recent Fall/Winter Yeti Out tour, for example, spanned Macau, Singapore, the Maldives, Pattaya, and Saigon.) “We’ll go to a different city and somebody will be like, yo, you gotta hit this guy up, he’ll get you a gig. Growing up in a multicultural family, it was always possible to move the way we move. I think within these communities, you’re always gonna have people in different cities putting you on.”

While it’s true that UK music holds a lasting influence in Hong Kong, the exchange is hardly unidirectional. Halfway across the world, some DJs are dropping Cantopop (Cantonese pop) between sets at bars and clubs in East London.

One such DJ is Chris Cho, a recent London transplant and a member of the city’s growing Hong Kong diaspora. “If I only play songs from another city or culture, even if I have the best technique, best transition skills, I’d never be able to resonate because I’m not from there,” says Chris. “[As a DJ,] this doesn’t feel generous to me. If I have the chance to play outside of Hong Kong, I’ll absolutely share a song that can represent myself.”

People aren’t necessarily looking to be educated about a foreign culture on the dance floor, so Chris’ approach usually involves a build-up, careful timing, and then quietly inserting classics like Teresa Teng’s “香港之夜” [Hong Kong Night] or “我要你的愛” [I Want Your Love] by Grace Chang. It is a sound that reveals less about how the world evolves to be “global” after deglobalization, and more about what remains in the wake of a British empire in retreat: the movement of people from peripheries to imperial cores—Hong Kong or Lagos or Punjab to London—spawns other hybrid sounds.

Like Arthur, Chris’ sound resists neat categorization—his set with HÖR Berlin mixes Cantopop and UK Garage with dancehall and the siren sound from Kill Bill. But his style also gains a new dimension wherever he plays: “When music moves from city to city it never lands in the exact same way,” he says. “The crowd will give new meaning to the song.”

“[Now,] I’m trying to mix [Cantopop] with baile funk,” Chris says. “I think those two are a great combo. They make old school Chinese songs feel more dance-y and modern.”

That’s one example. But there are an infinite number of permutations for unexpected mixes between sounds, and fusions from cultures separated by borders: German hard bounce and Filipino budots, vinahouse and South African gqom. For Arthur, it’s “the unlikely blend of drum and bass with a rap track or drill beat.” Similarly, a recent Bandcamp release by Eugene mixes Gwen Stefani ska-punk with early UK jungle.

The DJ is the future of globalization—

—insofar as “globalization” is increasingly informal and unstructured. “We create in the daytime, we play and party at nighttime. In between, we’re doing radio shows. It’s just the way [DJs] live,” Arthur says. “We always like to connect the dots.” The new Silk Road is maintained by DJs exchanging music like traveling merchants, by budget airlines and gig bookings via DM, by spinning decks that converge disparate cultures into one, by hybrid forms left behind after imperial decline, or by sounds unfixed and dynamic in their meaning.

Yes, the world is disconnecting, retreating, growing further apart. But perhaps with the greater distance, we are also left with a world that expands; a world wider, larger, more vast. And for some DJs, there remains a naive and hopeful optimism that there are cultures still hidden from view, sounds yet to be surfaced, experienced, and heard.

Arthur remembers visiting Tibet, 10 years after Yeti Out began throwing parties. A promoter was running a festival in Lhasa, one of the highest major cities in the world. “[He told us,] I think you guys would be pretty on-brand because your crew’s called Yeti Out. And we believe in the Yeti up here,” Arthur says. “I remember seeing this rap group called The Black Birds. They all came out in traditional monk outfits, and all [started] rapping in a Tibetan dialect. Crazy shit. Chills in the back of my neck. I’d never seen anything like it before.”

“It was familiar in the fact that it was a 140 BPM trap beat. But the language … It’s not even really about the language,” he recalls. “It’s just like, are you good vibes? You know what I mean?”

Some friends and I like to say that if you join your local creative arts scene, you’ll never have to watch a TV show ever again. Every weekend, there’s enough fresh canon material to rival an HBO series. Nightclub X might be hosting party Y on a given Saturday, debuting DJ Z—a newcomer to the scene. Or maybe: underground artist A starts dating event producer B after festival C, creating an unlikely alliance between the city’s “alternative” and “mainstream” creative circles.

Twice a year—once near the end of summer and another towards the beginning of Christmas—a large-scale event occurs and all plotlines from “the scene” converge. Maybe an international DJ will be arriving in town and playing at Soho House till 5AM, a scene-y nightclub will run out of investor money and throw a closing party, or an evening marketplace will aggregate the city’s most well known artists into a room in an industrial warehouse. Regardless of the substance, said large-scale event will bring all members of “the scene” together and act as a series-ending climax or a season finale.

The night begins and artists D and E are gossiping with DJ F at the bar—they’re all brainstorming a new creative project and debating whether or not it will succeed (new storyline). From the opposite end of the counter, G photographer is mad that H content creator keeps snubbing him, even though both have worked together several times before (conflict and eventual resolution). Writer J is taking a shit and, while in the bathroom, overhears that K nightclub owner just got shadow-banned on Instagram, destroying nearly half a decade’s worth of tireless brand management and shameless self-promotion (killed-off character). Word spreads through whispers on the dance floor that L magazine editor is a nepo baby and her latest issue is a desperate act to launder daddy’s money into clout (end of an arc).

Now, influencer friend group M is crowding the space behind the DJ booth, but model friend group N arrives to challenge. The fight gets a little violent, but not in the way you’d expect. Instead of throwing fists, groups M and N are desperately trying to “mog” one another: swaying hips or shining biceps in front of the video camera facing the DJ booth, vying for pixels in the eventual video shared on YouTube. The models win against the influencers, but not without a few casualties: O, group leader of N and former Balenciaga model, is mogged to death by P, a lowly member of M with less than 10,000 Instagram followers. P just had a sharper jawline. After the large-scale event—the season finale—O disappears from the scene, never to surface again.

Plotholes are filled. Old arcs end and new storylines emerge, characters die and new personalities appear. The archetypes are plenty: DJs fight to be the main character, events organizers quickly rise to fan favorites on account of actually doing the important work, content creators are the much needed comic relief. On the weekends, I don’t often feel the urge to spend ten precious hours binge-watching an entire season of a prestige TV show because maybe there’s a gallery launch event this weekend held by Q curator at makeshift studio R, and I, an occasional party reporter, desperately want to cover it. Reality is a lot more exciting when you treat it like fiction.

I’m obviously writing in hyperbole. And my experience in the Hong Kong scene is far more mutually supportive, open, and friendly than the last few paragraphs make it out to be. But in a hyper-online, stay-at-home world, there’s plenty of joy to find in entertaining yourself by dramatizing your base reality.

Not every young person feels this way. When the New York Times published a feature on New York City’s 2025 summer interns, it wrote that “[many are] hustling to realize a version of New York that had danced across their social media feeds”—brunches in the West Village by day, parties in the Lower East Side by night—but in “reality, after work they tend to pass out watching Love Island USA.”

By now, the idea that young people are not socializing enough and spending too much time at home has been beaten like a dead horse. Gen Z is on the internet more is doomscrolling more has fewer friends on average is spending fewer hours outside the house. What might be more nauseating than this discourse are the vague, lobotomizing platitudes thrown around in response: “we just need third spaces,” “yeah mom was right it really is that damn phone,” or “in order to have a village I need to be a villager,” declared like incantations that would magically solve the loneliness crisis.

But for me nothing is more unhelpful than the vaguest platitude of them all: You just need to find community.

The word “community” was inescapable in 2025. The general thesis that bringing people together would heal our collective loneliness crisis was repeated ad nauseam by a countless number of writers, influencers, and thought leaders. The idea is numbingly simple: have more communities, and we would have a functional society again. Fewer phone-brained teenagers with 11-hour screen times, and instead a more happy and fulfilled population.

But today the word reads like a meaningless catch-all. “Community” is a nothing—it can mean anything from gyms to churches to discord servers, but also all the houses and stores on the same street, your political ideology, or people who all buy the same brand of clothing. And there’s often a more sinister assumption that lies behind the desire to just Get People Together and Call It a Day: that a happy, fun, unproblematic, uncomplicated group of friends with similar personalities to your own will eventually arrive to you on a silver platter.

That is, “we need communities to solve the loneliness crisis” severely misses the point—it assumes no contribution or effort on the part of the community seeker, and overlooks the uncomfortable truth that finding people who understand you requires work.

My 2025 began in limbo. I was reaching the tail-end of a transitional period, taking far longer than my family would’ve liked to figure out what I wanted to do after graduating from college. That usually meant spending my day juggling freelance assignments that failed to total towards a real income, and arriving home with a mix of dread and shame. I’d spend the rest of the night cooped up in my room, locking myself up with my own company. I saw friends regularly, but in droves, many had begun moving to other countries, beginning new chapters of their lives elsewhere.

I did at least end up channeling the solitude somewhere. With all the extra time by myself, I’d spend weekends typing from my computer at a cafe overlooking the harbor, sitting with my thoughts and a keyboard as I watched junk boats and pedestrians pass my view. I wrote a lot, and it was primarily through writing—releasing parts of my soul out into the internet’s vast ether—did I find new people to connect with.

I’m serious when I say that I met many of my recent friends from the internet. Doing the work and putting in the effort, contributing to the world and sharing a part of myself online, pulled me towards new worlds: to the local creative scene in Hong Kong, and to other scenes around the world. Writing pushed me into networks of people that understood me, to people whose interests were similar to my own.

I have a hunch that by zeroing in on “community,” we’ve arrived at the wrong solutions to the crisis of belonging in the 21st century. Perhaps: you don’t need to find “community,” you need to find a “scene.”

Scenes are extended universes. They are localized hotspots of activity that aggregate loose networks of people. Scenes can be a subculture, a network of artists and creatives in a city, but they can also describe interconnected religious youth groups, university student life, an industry with a surplus of networking events, or your extremely extroverted friend who mixes all of his friend groups into one.

Communities tend to imply fixed-ness—a fixed meeting time, fixed location, fixed group of people, fixed interests. Scenes are not so constrained: there are many people, many interests, many events happening at once, but all have a similar experience or principle (e.g. a creative scene is anchored around being creative).

Scenes also tether work, belonging, and identity to a wider cosmology. For example, you might know friend A because you were introduced by friend B, but maybe you connect with them a lot better because you’re both part of the same think tank circuit, or are in nightlife collectives that both play drum and bass. Scenes are the reason why your super washed uncle says college was the best time of his life: In a scene, you’re not a node within a single network; you’re linked to a larger web of intersecting sub-networks, with access to a wider universe of people to reach, know, and understand. Small fish big pond rather than big fish small pond.

Most importantly, you can only take from a scene as much as you give. For example, you’re friends with an event organizer precisely because you go to their events. As a DJ, you’re booked and invited to shows because you make great music, or, as an artist, other creatives are drawn to you for your sheer dedication to craft. Social networks in a scene hinge on an important principle: If you care enough about your own work, someone else will too.

It’s entertaining whenever new lore arrives at “the scene” at twice-a-year “season finale”-level events, but I’m honestly more impressed by the variety of people gathered together in one space. At one moment you’re dancing with a photographer who captures subjects with a Baroquian intensity. At another, you’re bumping into a post-internet art curator in the line for the toilet, or exchanging a cigarette with the first DJ in the city to ever play jungle. A friend of yours will be doing a vox pop for a local magazine; another is making you a yuzu-flavored cocktail while working the bar. We’re listening in on drama and tracking emerging storylines, but that’s all secondary to the larger mission at hand. We’re making a scene. We’re creating a new world where, together, we can belong.

Towering skyscrapers shrouded in gloom, a sky forever kept dark and dreary, like “the color of television, tuned to a dead channel.” Day-to-day life here would probably get you down, if not for all the bright, colorful neon lights.

This “low life, high tech” society is how cyberpunk authors, filmmakers, and artists like Gibson imagined the future. Its visual language hinged on contrasts—bright and colorful despite the darkness, dirty alleyways at the gaps in between luxury skyrises, quadrillion-dollar companies and obscene wealth versus poverty on the margins, a messy fusion of high tech and the analog—all to consider who and what are left behind in a world of unbridled economic growth and technological development, in pursuit of “the future.” You can find the same dark cities and rogue AIs in works like Blade Runner and Ghost in the Shell, but even four decades after the genre’s heyday in the ‘80s, it’s hardly a stretch to say that cyberpunk remains one of the dominant visions of the future. “High tech, low life” and the never ending glow of neon are still found in contemporary sci-fi anthologies like Love, Death and Robots or in a 2025 film like TRON: Ares.

Indeed, there’s an allure to cyberpunk that maintains its staying power. A frame in the TV series Altered Carbon, when the protagonist Takeshi Kovacs (Joel Kinnaman) stares at the dystopian metropolis of Bay City, might capture this best: Here, a lone renegade is seen hypnotized by company logos and bright colorful ads. Living under complete corporate rule and insatiable capitalism might induce terror, but who knew that billionaires and monopolies could make a society verging on collapse look so sexy?

“The aesthetics of Cyberpunk are incredible btw,” Elon Musk once tweeted in 2021. That was in reference to the art direction in CD Projekt Red’s Cyberpunk 2077, but it underscored an important idea: cyberpunk is terrifying, inviting, alluring, all at once.

But if you consider that none of the new tech-elite have the taste codes or creative vision to create a dystopia so visually appealing, the idea of cyberpunk starts to feel dated. On a social level, that’s the case too.

Cyberpunk’s visual codes borrowed from punk and hacker subcultures and fused them together. Both groups already shared a DIY-ethos and anti-establishment politics, but when a hacker’s scrappy computer tech merged with the dark anarchy of punk, rebellion became the language of the future. Think: Cyberpunk 2077’s V taking down immortal executives at trillion-dollar multinationals, or cyberhumans like Motoko Kusanagi tearing down government conspiracies, as in Ghost in the Shell. Most cyberpunk stories are “stylized revenge or power fantasies,” Sam Chen () observes in a video from 2025. And we like them not because we fantasize about obeying corporate power, she adds, but because “[we] fantasize about rebelling.”

Punks and hackers haven’t kept their staying power through the 2020s, and their rebellious ethos has failed to keep pace with the $1.4 trillion or $423 billion market caps of Tesla or Palantir. Cyberpunk promised us that rampant inequality and a capitalism without limits would turn us into cool netrunners, underground biohackers, or marksmen clad in neon armor. But now in a world with an accelerating divide between the rich and the poor, we have gooners, men with gambling addictions, and urbanites on ozempic. “The future is already here,” as William Gibson once wrote—it’s just filled with AI porn and prediction markets.

Cyberpunk is no longer a fair or accurate vision of the future. But what actually comes next? Reflecting on these questions towards the end of 2025, I visited one of the birthplaces of “the future” to find out.

Akihabara, a district in central Tokyo, has over 20 consumer electronics stores on a single 500m-long stretch. It’s known as the city’s “electric town,” with several seven-plus-story buildings selling everything from laptops, cameras, and computer chips. But somehow, the untrained Western eye always looks at this electronics hub with fascination: “It’s equal parts Blade Runner, The Fifth Element, Ghost in the Shell and, well, just about every other sci-fi movie you can think of,” as one CNET travel guide described Akihabara in 2010. For some, Tokyo’s “electric town” is a prototype of the future, an on-the-ground forecast of what the world might look like in a few decades.

Even some Japanese might be inclined to agree. In an essay for Gentosha, cultural theorist Kaichiro Morikawa argues, “In a way, Akihabara was a place where people came to buy symbols and idols of the future.” The district was always in the vanguard of emerging technology—selling washing machines, refrigerators, and televisions post-WWII, and shifting to computers in the ‘80s. One blogger claims that engineers in Akihabara “pioneered the radio boom,” bringing one of the earliest mass communication channels to Japan.

Today, there’s still traces of that futuristic promise in the district. Walk out of the subway station at 6pm, the lights start to shimmer as the sun begins to set: thick, blocky signs attached to buildings, brightly colored blue, red, yellow, or orange with the help of a backlight; bright LED signs carve out store logos in a glow.

Akihabara is characteristically “cyberpunk”—there are neon lights and large billboard-sized screens with glossy-skinned women advertising skincare products, much like what you’d see in Blade Runner. But now a quarter through the 21st century, when almost every East Asian metro is a “futuristic,” “high-tech” “smart city”, Akihabara—the original cyberpunk “electric town”—leaves much to be desired. It doesn’t feel all that different from Tokyo districts like Ikebukuro or Shibuya. You could even say the amount of light and color here are underwhelming when compared to districts in rival Asian cities like Chongqing or Seoul.

Perhaps this is all just a distraction from what Akihabara is really known as: the mecca of Japanese anime and the center for otaku subculture.

It might as well be known as the anime town. You can easily make this conclusion from the district’s many anime billboards and maid cafes, which possibly outnumber the electronics stores; or because Animate, a Japanese manga retail giant, has two towering branches in Akihabara sitting within 180 meters from one another. But you need not look that hard. The unkempt Westerners dressed in sweats and circa-2016 Adidas running shoes (one of whom, I heard, said the words “I gooned too hard!” in public) and the lingering stench of body odor at each store already make one thing obvious: the Japanophiles and the “weaboos” are here to play.

On the hunt for Christmas gifts for friends, my siblings and I found ourselves in the same vicinity. My sister had directed us to a store to find Hunter x Hunter figurines, but by some mistake we landed at the fifth floor of GIGO, an arcade, only to find that the escalators could only go up. We were trapped with rows and rows of claw machines and glossy gaming music, where every thirty seconds there’d be an adlib of a girl squealing “onegai” (which is Japanese for “please”).

It took us fifteen minutes to find the back entrance, which eventually led us to Akihabara’s main crosswalk. Pinned on each corner was an office building with reflective glass, a second-hand home goods store, a flagship branch of a consumer electronics retailer, and anime maid billboards with low-hanging, unnecessarily-visible cleavage. All context—work, home, tech, hentai—collapsed here, because, as Morikawa continues to observe in Gentosha: “Akihabara has come to be more an extension of private space, an otaku room blown up into the city,” where “the classic notion of ‘public’ is invalid.” On the main street, cute Pokemon stuffed toys for kids sit right alongside cardboard cutouts of “CGI-hentai-girl-golems”—or the kind of technologically-generated women that would make Twitter tech bros froth in the mouth.

My sister finally finds Hunter x Hunter figurines at a figurine store named amiami. But on the same floor, we’re greeted first by hypersexualized versions of characters from anime titles that had finished years ago. A figurine of Lucy from the widely-popular shonen series Fairy Tail was selling for 40,000 yen (255 USD). And for a similar price on a nearby shelf were “goon-ified” versions of Mikan and Celestia Ludenberg from the murder mystery video game series Danganronpa. I’m surprised by the latter because Danganronpa is not sexual at all—it was a niche series in the 2010s and had a wider reach in AO3- and fandom.com-adjacent internet circles. But here they were: old IP zombified back to life, repurposed as merch to be squeezed to the last yen—it’s as if the tumblr-users and fan theorists have moved on, and the only group left to extract value from were the gooners.

That may well underscore the difference between a future imagined by cyberpunk and by Akihabara. The untrained Western eye would see both as similar, as projections into “the future,” but a closer look will reveal they are anything but.

Cyberpunk imagined us as active agents in the making of the future—renegade marksmen, netrunners in cyberspace, or bio-hackers challenging The System. But look at Akihabara, an early inspiration for futurism, and you arrive at an important lesson. The district is a consumerist spectacle, where context, the divide between accepted and taboo, public and private, seem to dissolve—all to adhere to a messy swath of wants, pleasures, and impulses.

Here, we are buyers and customers, not citizens. In Akihabara, the dystopia will not be cyberpunk—instead, we are left as nothing except for our most baseless desires.

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A tweet from January 2025 declares we are living in the American century of humiliation.

The post didn’t go viral by the usual standards on X, but according to Know Your Meme, it’s the first iteration in a larger, observable internet phenomenon: memes declaring the tone of the 21st century, otherwise known as the American “century of humiliation.”

Not until 2025 has the phrase “century of humiliation” appeared in the lexicon of the chronically online. Usually, it’s used by Chinese politicians to describe a hundred-year period in China’s history when the nation was subject to endless losses, defeats, and abuses by foreign powers. These include the loss of the Opium War and the cession of Hong Kong to the British; the ceding of Outer Manchuria to Russia in the Aigun and Peking treaties; and the Eight-Nation Alliance invasion to suppress the Boxer uprising. The “century of humiliation” ends by the Second World War, but its final act is arguably the most brutal and traumatic: the Rape of Nanjing, where Japanese forces murdered 300,000 out of 600,000 civilians living in the city.

Never mind that no similar events are happening in the United States, under this alleged American “century of humiliation.” In the strict definitional sense, America has never been subject to abuses and controls by foreign governments since the beginning of the 21st century. The United States is the world’s leading economy, comprising over a quarter of global GDP. The US dollar is still the world’s reserve currency, while the largest companies—both American- and foreign-owned—are listed in exchanges like the NASDAQ and NYSE. And since 1812, no major international war has taken place on American soil. Are we really living in the American “century of humiliation”?

Obviously not. But what is undeniable now is that Western soft power is in a steep terminal decline. With the erosion of liberal democracy and rise of authoritarianism in North America and Europe, the idea of the “West”—insofar as the “West” is a classical, liberal postwar order led by America, steering the world unidirectionally towards progress—is dead, as Yancey Stricker argues in Real Review. The phrase “American ‘century of humiliation’” might not be technically correct, but in our current malaise where optimistic America-led progress narratives have wrung dry, it does capture the vibe nicely.

But while the space of what we aspire toward remains open, where are people looking? At least on the internet, the answer is China.

There is a growing collection of memes across platforms that fantasize a life that is Chinese. Westerners are “disappearing to China” at “9am on a Monday morning,” biking around cities like Shanghai to the sound of Mao Zedong’s propaganda song “Red Sun in the Sky.” European male models, scantily clad in cropped tops, raise their shirts to expose their stomachs and smoke cigarettes in a manner à la the Chinese uncle. The parody hip hop news account Daily Noud announced—and celebrated—the rapper Young Thug becoming Chinese.

“You met me at a very Chinese time in my life,” the netizens are saying; in one post, these words read against a view of Hong Kong’s skyline. Alternatively: “Daily affirmation: I am Chinese.” Another post written on Instagram Create mode reads: “At a certain point we just have to trust that the Chinese will save us. They have a lot going on over there. [S]omeone will probably figure something out.”

When a feigned desire to be Chinese, live like the Chinese, or live in China all consolidate on the internet, what does this amount to? It’s a collective desire for “libidinal catharsis,” says Bea Xu. “There’s a desire for escapism [from the West], for a fantasy for present day living conditions in Mainland China.”

Bea is a transdisciplinary artist based between Beijing and London, and she’s been closely tracking this new shift, archiving memes that project Western fantasies of life in China and Chinese identity. But the phenomenon’s origin story can be traced back to January 2025: just days before a proposed U.S. ban on TikTok, many American social media users “fled” to Chinese apps like RedNote as #TikTokRefugees.

“There was this hour-by-hour feed of cultural exchange on the platform where all of these Americans realized that China was more complicated, more relatable on the human level than they thought,” says Bea. “There was this sudden shockwave, but also a strange yearning and fetishism to escape to China.”

Since then, this new fetish for China and all things Chinese has continued to proliferate. Other memes in Bea’s archive include a video hypnotizing its viewer to turn Chinese, and a clip of a skinny white dude saying, “What’s up guys, next Friday is gonna be Chinese Friday!” With the rise of “absolute techno-capitalistic capture” in the West, Bea says, “There is a sad yearning for China and what it just symbolically represents as an alternative.”

“I think everyone knows in their hearts that this is just a fantasy,” she adds. “But might as well play into it anyway.”

As the blogger recently observed, “it has become passé to really stan East Asian countries where we have fully operational U.S military bases.” The neighboring, U.S.-allied Japan and South Korea feel almost Western, in the sense that they have their own authoritarian movements and late-stage capitalism speedruns. “The contrarian move is to pledge treasonous allegiances,” Tran writes. And one way that might take shape is by aspiring toward China as a reactionary fantasy.

In the American “century of humiliation,” no one really knows how we can imagine a better future. But for that, China is a convenient blank canvas. Such has often been the case for the nation in recent history. As the largest country in the world with a political and economic system fundamentally “other” to Western liberalism, China often represents an idea. Its national success forces the world to confront the possibility of prosperity outside capitalism and liberal democracy. It is a starting point for alternative imaginaries of all kinds, in creating stories and narratives for how the world should or shouldn’t operate.

For diplomacy hawks on Reddit, China is a looming economic threat in the “new Cold War.” For technocrat magazines like The Economist, China is a miraculous spectacle “dominating” global industry. For leftist streamers (one recent note is Hasan Piker), China is “dark woke” with an economic system the United States should “adopt and emulate.” And for AI Twitter, China is the harbinger of the tech-pocalypse. More often than not, these fantasies are more at home in the plane of dreams than in physical reality. The story is always extreme, always otherizing, often Orientalist, and never the more nuanced, complex reality of day-to-day life in Greater China: namely, that just like any country, there are costs and benefits to living here; that China possesses its own strengths to learn from, mistakes to avoid, and challenges that threaten its future trajectory.

For the new Chinese internet fantasy, China is Orientalism chic—here, the East is fundamentally “other,” but simultaneously cool and aspirational. And for artists and technologists like Bea, this kind of narrativizing on the internet can actually be productive.

In an essay for The New York Times, digital anthropologist Katherine Dee argues that the internet is a fairyland, a portal to another world. Where most see social media and web browsers as addictive drugs or sets of behavior, Dee sees “a place we travel to, with its own geography and customs.” It operates more like a magical plane, or “an otherworld with its own logic.” When science alone falls short in explaining ChatGPT-induced psychosis or how “For You” pages warp our perception of time, to see the internet as a strange, powerful, and mystical environment is to see it for what it really is.

To survive in this enchanted world, Dee argues, “we need the right kinds of stories to help us move through uncertainty.” To me, this underscores an important lesson: Internet fantasies, however misguided and illinformed, provide us a way in navigating the new world we find ourselves in. Can a fantasy of China help imagine an alternative future?

Indeed, it is harder to imagine a better world. But with or without memes, humanity is no stranger to creating fantasies that propel itself toward the future or into alternative realities. For TikTokers, it’s “manifesting.” For organized religions, it’s prayer. For accelerationists, it’s “hyperstition”—a concept developed by controversial far-right philosopher Nick Land to describe a self-fulfilling idea that becomes real through its mere existence. In all cases, something imagined becomes real through repetition.

Leaning into this impulse, the Chinese fanatics are correct, however underinformed they might be about on-the-ground realities in China. We need something—anything, really—to set our sights on the future, push ourselves towards the making of the new, rather than drowning in the dreariness of the present.

“I also felt the excitement of [these memes],” Bea says. And although it might be constructed from a Western imaginary, “I felt like I wanted to be carried by that fantasy.”

Gas is burning on a spinning wok. A man—sweaty, middle-aged, wearing a yellow tank top—mixes flat rice noodles, beef, and onion into a char. His brother, a sous chef on his left, is dressed down below the waist: donning oversized checkered boxers and a white, double-breasted jacket, he thrusts a butcher knife into the carcass of a freshly boiled crab.

From where I’m sitting, none of this hides from view. The entire scene—of raw ingredients to seasoned produce to the final form of Cantonese stir-fry—takes place in the middle of an alleyway, right in Hong Kong’s business district. Shelves with soy sauce, stacks of metal bowls, a large rice cooker, and one-and-a-half meter tall fridges form a circular, street-level assembly line. A plastic green tarp covers the makeshift kitchen, just in case it rains. There’s a small cutout of a Tsingtao box that hides a portion of the chef’s wok from me, but the smoke from his cooking clouds the air like mist. Sitting at a foldable dining table and a red stool, I can still smell him preparing the beef chow fun.

By some miracle, the entire restaurant is dismantled every evening, and reassembled once morning comes. When the kitchen is cleared from the street, dining tables are rolled to the side, and stools are stacked on the sidewalk. There’s a very scene-y nightclub that plays UK Garage every weekend three stories above the alley. By the time the club opens, the street that served food a few hours ago morphs into a kind of twilight zone, where partygoers rest their eardrums from the warped bass, take smoke breaks, and piss on concrete walls.

Known as “dai pai dongs,” open-air restaurants are a staple of Hong Kong, first emerging after WWII. The prevailing mythos goes that when families of deceased civil servants needed a way to earn money, the colonial government granted licenses for them to open makeshift, street-level restaurants. The practice has a scrappiness to it, an indeterminacy that reflects the city’s constant need to adapt to adverse environments.

Dai pai dongs, however, are also a vanishing practice. Over their seven-decade-long presence in the city, many have shut down due to government requirements, most often for hygiene controls. As a regular patron at these restaurants, I don’t doubt that cleanliness is not the main priority (over dinner, the only “dishwasher” I could see was a red plastic basin filled with plates, water being hosed into it as it lay on the pavement). But it’s a small price to pay for the wok hei—a complex charred flavor you can only taste when food is cooked in a piping-hot, kerosene-fueled wok.

In Hong Kong, only 17 of these open air restaurants remain. And the threat of disappearance has caused a surge in their popularity among the city’s tourists, residents, and (paradoxically) government officials. “Eating at a dai pai dong is a must-try Hong Kong experience,” reads one campaign from the local tourism board. “[And] you can’t call yourself a real foodie if you haven’t dined at one.”

What sets the dai pai dong apart is how it places its processes in full view. Seeing the food freshly made in front of you is just as (if not, more) important as receiving the dish itself. This dining experience gives the feeling that you’re witnessing a dying craft—not only because of attempts to standardize dai pai dongs into gentrified, indoor alternatives, but because witnessing the entire act of cooking feels out of place in an age of frictionless consumption.

You could say that innovations from the last decade ran counter to the transparency an open-air kitchen offered. Food delivery apps, ride sharing platforms, farm-to-table produce, or even content recommendation algorithms all streamlined consumption, and hid the maker’s process from view: there are no sweaty old men in tank tops or checkered boxers; instead, the work is done by semi-anonymous drivers and deliverymen, or reduced to standardized, one-size-fits-all menus viewed through a phone. Brands like Whole Foods, DoorDash, Upwork, Netflix, and Uber all push what calls a “front of house / back of house” illusion, where abstraction was scaled as a business model.

But the new world we find ourselves in has the barrier to “making something” slashed to zero. Sora can generate a video for you in just a few minutes. ChatGPT can sputter a blog post in under thirty seconds. And that new app on the App Store could’ve been vibe coded in a handful of hours. For anyone “creating” and “producing,” there’s never been a greater burden to prove that your work is honestly yours. Case in point: last month, fans accused FKA twigs of using AI to create her EUSEXUA Afterglow album cover, despite the artist’s history of aversion to AI misuse: only a year ago, she had testified before the U.S. Senate to beg for artists’ protection from deepfakes.

When people are demanding honesty and transparency in how something is made, abstraction becomes a losing strategy. How can the real makers differentiate themselves from the slop farms and the junk factories?

We are returning to craft: new innovations aren’t obfuscating processes from us, but revealing them instead.

If you work in marketing, there’s a sense that behind-the-scenes campaign footage performs better than the actual campaign itself. When Apple released a new intro for Apple TV, featuring an animation with flipping colored glass, it was actually the video that documented the creative process—not the new intro itself—that performed better online. The craft, not the theatrics, stood out.

And recently, Resident Advisor argued in their RA PRO newsletter that since the COVID-19 pandemic, more electronic music producers are using social media platforms to share works-in-progress, asking fans for feedback, in part to prove that their work is human-made. Another example I’m a fan of was the viral Zoom meeting between A24’s brand marketing team and Timothee Chalamet. On YouTube, the video resonated because it was funny, but I also like to think that it gave a personalized, insider view into the eccentricities that come with making a film like Marty Supreme.

These examples only scratch the surface of the ways we’re returning to craft, or how deeply we crave processes to be made public. But travel across Asia and you’ll realize that this ethos has always existed. The case of dai pai dongs is unique to Hong Kong, but every country in the region has its variant of less-than-optimally-hygienic street food, where raw ingredients transform into local staples right in front of you. There are plenty of attempts to “modernize” them through hygiene controls, or by uprooting and gentrifying them. You can find a Singaporean hawker in an air-conditioned mall, or Vietnamese banh mi at an upscale restaurant. But in all cases, the older, less modern, less standardized form still survives. Often, it tastes better too. There’s a robustness to it that an app or a modernized kitchen simply cannot erase: recipes passed down from parent to child to grandchild, processes sharpened, honed, and refined over decades. What can we learn from this?

There will always be artisans who refuse to have their craft standardized, refuse to turn their process of work into a depersonalized abstraction. Many might imagine a world without them, but I’m optimistic that in the age of easy, mechanical reproduction, their work will be here to stay. Long life the craft.

bullish // bearish in the craft age…