MONDAY, 11TH AUGUST 2025

It was everywhere. Now it’s gone: Is our cultural evolution at a stand still?

There was a time when cool was untouchable. It was not something you could buy, quantify, or clearly define. It lived in a look, a tone, a refusal to explain itself. It was James Dean leaning on a wall, Miles Davis turning his back to the audience, a band you only heard about through whispered recommendation, not a press release. Cool was elusive by design. If you knew, you knew.

Now you do not have to know anything. The algorithm will tell you. It will push it into your feed until you feel like you like it, or at least that you should. In doing so, the entire ecosystem that once made cool what it was – mystery, scarcity, the slow burn of discovery – has been dismantled in favour of immediacy, metrics, and relatability.

We live in an age where the aesthetic is no longer a by-product of taste but a calculated strategy. Musicians do not just make songs; they make content. Actors are not just faces on a screen; they are micro-influencers between roles. The once natural element of style has become a brand asset, optimised for the feed and measured in engagement rates.

The irony is that in trying to be authentic, the modern cultural machine produces the opposite: algorithmic sameness. TikTok sound cycles, Instagram-friendly colour palettes, and Spotify playlist-core all follow patterns designed to be familiar, frictionless, and instantly digestible. The result is a culture where cool is no longer about standing apart, but about blending in just enough to trend.

Cool once thrived on distance. Prince did not explain himself in the comments section. The audience had to work for it, piecing together fragments and imagining the rest. That distance created intrigue, the lifeblood of cool. Today, distance is seen as suspicious. If you are not constantly online, you are irrelevant. If you are not sharing behind-the-scenes moments, you are out of touch. The mystique that once elevated artists is now interpreted as arrogance or a lack of hustle. In a content economy, withholding is the ultimate sin.

The digital era has produced a paradox. We have never had so many tools for creative self-expression, yet we have never been more stylistically homogenised. Every platform rewards familiarity – certain fonts, certain cuts, certain rhythms – so creators learn to stay inside the algorithm’s lines. This does not just flatten creativity; it flattens culture itself. When everything is optimised for maximum reach, we stop making things for the few and start making things for everyone. And cool, by nature, has never been for everyone.

We mistake access for intimacy. We think knowing an artist’s breakfast order or morning routine brings us closer to them. In reality, it makes them smaller and more ordinary. That might suit the goal of relatability, but it erodes the feeling of awe.

Cool was never about being relatable. It was about aspiration, curiosity, and the sense that there was more to the story than you were being told. It was about a private world glimpsed through a crack in the door. That door is now wide open, with a ring light in the frame.

Cool has been replaced by personal branding, market positioning, and social proof. It has traded leather jackets for merch drops, late-night record store finds for targeted ads, and mystery for a carefully managed feed. There are still rare exceptions – a record that sounds like nothing else, a creator who refuses to explain themselves, a film that does not handhold – but they are outliers.

Perhaps that is the last truth about cool. It cannot exist everywhere at once. It must be rare, unsearchable, and resistant to explanation. In an age that demands constant visibility, it survives only in the margins, away from the pull of the feed.

Until we learn to value the unknown again, we will remain in an aesthetic monoculture. It is glossy, familiar, endlessly optimised – and no longer cool.