What new mindsets will take hold? What ideals will shift? What collective yearnings will the new year bring? The final idle gaze of 2022 examines and sums up the end-of-year reflections and 2023 predictions from trendmakers, trendspotters, critics and curators, taking a cultural temperature check on the year ahead.
out: homogenous perfection → in: imperfect experimentation.
2022 was the year of imitations, where tech companies launched copies of copies, created copycat features and shamelessly plagiarized formats. An endless game of capture the flag, transforming the app store into an abyss of homogeneity. It was a year of misguided ambitions and a general lack of imagination, leading to user discontentment, internal layoffs. The beginning of an end could be sensed.
2023 will be the year a new ideology takes hold. A new chapter in how we build, design, venture and create. In writer Robin Sloan’s 2023 manifesto, “a year of new avenues”, he calls for a new age of experimentation and invention:
“It’s been a decade of products, smooth and sleek; apps with chamfered edges. I am interested now in visions, compulsions, provocations…an amateur internet; a garage internet; a public library internet; a kitchen table internet…let it come from the edges, the margins, the provinces, the marshes!”
In nature, ecologists speak about the “edge effect”, a concept that describes the greater diversity of life in the region where the edges of two adjacent ecosystems overlap, a crossroad of biodiversities. 2023 will be the year we divert from familiar blueprints, pursuing greater creativity, invention and innovation at these edges - venturing into the marshlands, mangrove forests and estuaries - a muddy, messy act of cross-pollination and experimentation.
out: sad beige → in: iridescent technicolour.
While technology became victim to a lack of imagination; culture, art and the built environment succumbed to an equally depressing corporate aesthetic mediocrity.
As Laura Kolbe at n+1 pointed out in her attack on the ugly present, nearly everything in today’s culture is a pale imitation of that which has come before, a copy of a copy referring to nothing that’s real, stripping away all vibrancy and colour: “buildings afraid to look like buildings, cars that look like renderings, restaurants that look like the apps that control them”.
But 2023 will be the year the sad beige of neutral-toned baby clothing, cardboard ‘SimCityist’ architecture and anonymous fast-casual food chains dissipate.
In their end-of-year reflection, Jonah Weiner and Erin Wylie at
denounced 2022 as the year of underwhelming TV, music and fashion collabs. The piece concluded with a rallying cry to demand better as a society:Amazing things deserve to be celebrated and cherished, and we can and should do better as a culture, than settle for swagless, characterless, joyless, mass-market mids.
2023 will be the year we regain a hunger for highs - the high of a cooler, more joyous future.
Pantone’s Color of the Year for 2023 was announced as Viva Magenta 18-1750, hinting at something brighter and more vibrant, forecasting a return to technicolour. According to Pantone, Viva Magenta is “expressive of a new signal of strength … brave and fearless, and a pulsating colour whose exuberance promotes a joyous and optimistic celebration, writing a new narrative”.
out: hyper-nihilism → in: radical optimism.
Impenetrable nihilism became a core tenet of 2022. A dull, dismissive vibration that could be felt across every conversation, surface and interaction. Despite its toxic undertones, this wave of anarchic embrace provided a creative form of communal therapy. Towards the end of the year, Emma Beddington at the Guardian penned an op-ed exploring the benefits of neo-nihilism, where she explains that when traditional sources of meaning – fulfilling work, forming a family, having a home, planning a future – have never felt more out of reach for so many, there is something soothing in reaching the conclusion that nothing matters.
Novels with cooly detached anti-heroines topped best-seller lists, disassociative pouts ruled Instagram, and the TikTok For You page was filled with Patrick Bateman memes, his dismissive smirk turning collective trauma into a dark joke.
But 2023 will however see a counter-trend of urgent optimism. Here and there, one can already sense an intangible, but impenetrable, buoyant force bubbling to the surface. It can be felt in the chatter of crowded bars, in the threads of Discord servers and in impassioned opinion pieces and Substack posts.
This careful optimism is captured succinctly in art critic Dean Kissick’s final Downward Spiral column for Spike magazine, where he ponders on whether the last 6 years have indeed been spiralling downwards, and if the next year is perhaps the start of something new:
“Life is still beautiful, it’s culture that’s in the doldrums…I hope we can throw more caution to the wind, and be more adventurous (or whatever else one finds important), and find different ways of living, and go out and take a hold of the world in all its glory before it’s too late. I want to feel more of life.”
In fact, across all these vibe shifts there’s an undercurrent of hopeful yearning. This, in itself, is a significant sign that a new chapter is on the horizon - because the first step to creating a preferable future is the potential to imagine one. A collective ability to envision a utopia, means there’s a better chance the solutions to it will find their way to us.
Thank you to all the subscribers and readers for your ongoing support and words of encouragement over the year. I can’t thank you enough for being part of this community.
Wishing you all a restful and contemplative break. See you again in the new year.