Breaking Containment in 2024
Every few years something escapes onto the broader internet. You can always trace this. It starts young, Gen-Z these days, tears through millennials, then into Gen X a few weeks later. It hits Tiktok, then Instagram and Reddit, and dies a week before its shambling corpse is dragged on to Facebook. The culture it escapes into has no natural defense. It’s a new species on the island.
2011
Fifty Shades Of Grey introduced women across America to smutty fan-fiction. Smut was not new but smut you could read in public was. Fan-fiction contained a mix of sexual and narrative content, not unlike HBO’s Game of Thrones which would soon raise grubby nerd George R.R. Martin to household name status and introduce Fantasy to smut. Horny (Hang on, my editor is typing on the google doc. Oh, sorry.) "Spicy" Fantasy is now a bestselling book genre.
2013 - present
In the mid twenty-teens AAVE was unleashed upon White America via Twitter, resulting in the widespread adoption of phrases like "he's cooking," "On God," and "No Cap." This, inextricably linked to gay culture whose on online presence had long occupied the same spaces as black culture, gave us teenagers who say "it's giving ___," as easily as they proclaim something "sus."
2022
The Johnny Depp trial introduced women to GamerGate. Watching it happen, I remembered my teenage flirtation with what was then called "the-alt right." Sometime around 2016 I became oddly concerned with the politics of games journalism (Thank you Waypoint (RIP) and Polygon for saving me).
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It was a big year. Also in 2022, Young women started "BookTok" propelling spicy fiction (I’m getting a thumbs up from my editor) to new heights after it was discovered by teenage girls.
So, while not explicitly book related, Here are my
(Bibbit's) predictions:
Books
Some form of Utopian Sci-Fi will breach containment. My money's on "Solarpunk" as seen in Prayer For The Crown Shy. People are beginning to care about Climate Change. Or more accurately, the children that cared about climate change are now adults. The inverse, The Hunger Games style dystopias, already tore through this crowd. Now we're either going to see a comeback or an antidote. Bibbit bets on the latter.
There will be a backlash against the current trend of "Spicy" YA books (getting that thumbs up again). Parents are about to discover the contents of the innocuous sounding Court of Thorns and Roses. CNN or The New York Times or possibly both will ask if "We should be concerned: here's why." The ALA already says it's the tenth most banned book in the country. The New York Times is already concerned.
Just as "Video Essays" about movies and TV had a breakout in 2018 books are going to experience a wave of larger, probably bad, pop analysis. Tiktok reviewers are going to break containment and escape into four hour viral YouTube videos. There are already BookTubers (thumbs up from my editor) but they tend to be millennials (slur) who aren't quite as good at going viral on the modern web.
Culture
We're going to do Gamer-Gate again. Probably with extremely online women who were successfully introduced to The Extended Daily Wire Cinematic Universe via its Amber Heard coverage.
Conditional: if we get solarpunk, we also get a decentralized social internet. Not sure if it will be Activity Pub, who currently seem to be leading, or someone else. People are almost as sick of the corporate web as corporations are of getting dragged in front of regulatory bodies. Both the providers and the consumers want consumers to host social media.
We're going to have a national conversation (again) about masculinity, as the masses discover just how big people like Andrew Tate are. That one's been stewing. I don't know who's going to win that. It's sort of Gamer-Gate (again). A lot of young men have very concerning views that they are currently keeping quiet.
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This blog will also get huge this year. I've got a lot of work that I haven't been collecting anywhere. I'm not chasing the social web, so any readership will happen by accident, but I'll manage to post regularly and get better at it. Collecting all my byline-ed writing in one place will be useful.
