The shift from genre to mood, in popular culture and beyond, should not be underestimated.
Genre is usually a vertical deep dive into a category determined by tone, technique, and content. It’s an inherently opaque construct that thrives on expert recombination, secret codes, dog whistles. Mood is a thin horizontal and flexible aesthetic layer determined by strange attractors, non-deterministic logic, black swans. It’s an infectious democratizing force, embodied in hit playlists and viral trends, in gender fluidity and in cancel culture, in portfolio valuations and in climate emergencies.
The choice of metaphor matters: life on this planet did not evolve from a single, orderly tree-like structure, but from a loose and diverse conglomeration of primitive cells that flourished together. Our cybernetic cultures and economies now transform themselves according to the same principles, hosting and replicating radical mutations at the speed of light.
Capricious and volatile, bubbling just beneath the stratified surface, the mood swings and the temperature rises.