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I'm familiar with the phenomenon you're describing and I think it applies in the realm of UX, brand identities, graphic design etc., but I'm not sure how applicable it is beyond that.
If you compare any random film made in the last five years with a film made in the 90s, one of the first things that'll jump out at you is how washed-out, desaturated and visually dark modern films look compared to films from the 90s. Modern films tend to be filmed digitally rather than on film, which produces more washed-out, low-contrast visuals compared to film. They also tend to use VFX and CG extensively, and one of the most effective means of hiding imperfections in VFX work is just to make the whole image darker. Six years ago, Zack Snyder got a lot of stick for producing a desaturated high-contrast interpretation of the Caped Crusader; now, we're at the point where people are complaining that literal Disney films are too (visually, not tonally) dark. The same trend is obvious in prestige television.
10-15 years ago the big complaint in video games was that everyone was adopting the house style of Call of Duty and Battlefield and making everything brown or grey. The worm has turned and now lots of things are magenta instead, but it still isn't hard to find modern games which are washed-out, desaturated, dark and generally unpleasant to look at.
To my mind, most of the big trends in popular music in the last ten years have prominently featured a conscious embrace of ugliness and poor taste, whether it's the ear-splitting sonic assault of drill music; the self-aware tackiness and excess of hyperpop; the bored, amelodic, disaffected repetition of British and Irish sprechgesang bands; or the deliberate minimalism of modern trap and SoundCloud rap.
I don't see this as a fundamental lack of positivity and retreat to nihilism or misanthropy. At the risk of engaging in some serious "old man yells at clouds" style activities, I can't really emphasize enough how "irony" seems to have become the central social feature of Gen-Z. "Ugliness and poor taste?" No, I have great taste because I'm wearing this ugly outfit and my soundclap rap is mumbled gibberish. Kanye (before he want to planet Kanye) did this explicitly with one of his Yeezy lines that were specifically intended to look like dilapidated homeless people clothes. And have $1500+ prices per article.
But, wait, it gets worse! I'm seeing trends of irony-upon-irony. The embodiment of this is Pete Davidson who has made a career off of 1) Having a firefighter dad who died in 9/11 2) Joking about it 3) Talking about how it still makes him anxious and depressed 4) Making a horrible movie where he mixes both of these concepts 5) Being the heir to the Jimmy Fallon "I'm always breaking" role on SNL and 5) Dating megastars in Hollywood. That guy is incomprehensible to me because he doesn't ever seem to be serious even when he is professing huge sincerity. Again, the maybe-maybe-not self-awareness of that Taco Bell ad he's in where the extra says, at the end, "are you riffing or is this part of the bit?"
In my mind, I think pop culture, since about 2015 and the rise of real Gen-Z meme culture, has had a crisis of authenticity. It's now a rare commodity and, therefore, hard to reliable find and produce. The easy way is to double down on irony / sarcasm ... which further pollutes the message and so we get stuck into multi-layered cyclic irony. Trust disintegrates, people aren't sure if their emotions are common and understood or bizarrely unique personal hallucinations.
I think it certainly is in some cases. The dominant lyrical theme of drill music is "I am going to kill my rival drug dealers", while the dominant lyrical theme of cloud rap/emo rap/sadboi rap etc. is "I am abusing drugs because I am so miserable and depressed" (something which is acknowledged to be a stage persona in some instances, namely the late Lil Peep). Maybe these aren't nihilistic or misanthropic stances, but they're anything but "positive".
Hard disagree on Pete Davidson, I watched one of his recent Netflix specials and found him surprisingly candid and unpretentious. Perhaps a thick veneer of irony coated his earlier work but he seems to have grown out of it. Agree that, in the Anglosphere, ironic detachment is the air that we breathe (as a genre, the aforementioned hyperpop could not function without it).
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Posers just stole it from Gen-X. (Simpsons S07E24, May 1996)
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There's an interesting contrast to be made between the Call of Duty era where games went for 'gritty realism' and the, call it the Fortnite era where literally nothing needs to be taken seriously, and real life personalities and pre-existing characters are rendered as a perfected, cartoonish versions of themselves.
I won't even say one is better than the other, but Fortnite definitely represents the sort of unrelenting positivity, the hiding of ugliness, the avoidance of negative emotional valence that I'm talking about.
On the other hand, I'd point at bands like Imagine Dragons and a lot of imitators that produce peppy and/or 'epic' sounding songs with aggressively positive/affirming lyrics that... also don't mean anything. They want to induce some positive emotional valence but without having any real 'message.' Other than a vague "YOU GOT THIS! YOU ARE UNSTOPPABLE, YOU CAN ACHIEVE ANYTHING YOU WANT" sort of statement. And these songs become MASSIVE HITS.
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