Part One: Brace for (Cultural) Impact
Culture and the cultural moment are becoming less and less apprehensible. Cycle speed increasingly outpaces comprehension time; parallel and barely overlapping canons take shape under algorithmic pressure; the same events are presented in incompatible terms; contexts collapse and norms shift with bewildering rapidity. And in the middle of it all, another curious phenomenon is making itself felt in the zeitgeist - an explosion of genuine novelty and what can, with justification, be described as ‘the Death of the New’ at exactly the same time.
For the avoidance of misunderstanding, let’s be explicit from the outset. ‘Novelty’ here and for our purposes refers to the appearance of something genuinely different or unprecedented, while ‘the new’ describes the experience of encountering it as new. Anticipation points to the expectations and activities organised around a thing before its arrival and understanding is the process of making sense of what that ‘thing’ actually is and what its arrival might mean. These of course are hardly watertight philosophical categories, and the relationships between them deserve rather more consideration than we can give them at present. But these distinctions matter because the processes they describe no longer necessarily unfold in the order — or at the intervals — we might once have expected.
Think about it. Objects today are born into the history of their own prediction. By the time the future arrives, we've seen the renders, watched the previews, argued about it, named it, rated it, memed it and, in many cases, already become totally bored with it.
But to be clear on another point too, what we’re NOT talking about is Mark Fisher's problem of cultural recycling, hauntology and the disappearance of imagined futures. We’re making no claim — as Fisher sort of did — that genuinely new things can no longer appear, because that’s patently untrue. What we are asserting though is that when things do appear, they struggle more & more to remain ‘new’ long enough to be experienced as such. Novelty can, in other words, proliferate while ‘the new’ as a lived cultural condition vanishes. And the critical variable is speed.
It’s not that the classic fashion cycle’s dissolved altogether either (it plainly hasn’t), but rather its centre of gravity has very much shifted upstream. More and more, the ‘fashionable phase’ belongs to what, for the sake of argument, we’ve termed the ‘pre-object’ - those leaks, prototypes, renders & rumours mentioned earlier, along with categories, predictions or possibilities - with the actual object itself arriving later on, in their aftermath. Which has the effect of splitting any ‘new thing’ in two.
First, we get the sign — scarce, exciting, worth knowing about before everyone else. Then comes the realised object, entering a cultural slot that’s already been prepared for it.
Of course, anticipation preceding arrival is hardly a recent phenomenon. Fashion magazines, motor shows, film trailers and advertising campaigns have all been cultivating it for generations, often ages before the objects themselves materialised. Traditionally, though, anticipation helped create the conditions in which an object could be experienced as new while today it can exhaust that newness before the object itself has appeared.
What's changed isn't the existence of anticipation but its speed, scale and relationship to the thing anticipated — not least because the machinery of distribution has changed so radically. Algorithmic systems don't simply circulate the pre-object; they amplify, repeat and recombine it in response to the attention it attracts, creating a feedback loop in which visibility generates engagement, engagement drives further visibility, and the pre-object can become culturally overexposed long before the realised object actually turns up.
Which does something pretty insane to (among other things) fashion. Once upon a time, ‘cultural capital’ meant (for e.g.) ‘heard about (or saw) it first, got it, wore it (or whatever) before everyone else’. Today though, it means ‘heard about it first, named the category, understood the implication, then left before the actual launch’. In other words, by the time everyone can physically obtain ‘the thing’, you're late - because cultural capital has shifted from possession and display toward early correct classification.
And there’s another problem you might have come across too, which is that by the time ‘Object A’ actually arrives, ‘Pre-object B’ is already demanding (and usually getting) our attention. Meaning Object A is subjected to at least two major indignities… (i) its novelty has already been spent through its own pre-object; and (ii) by this time our attention’s migrated to the pre-object of whatever comes next.
This is why things can (and to many do) feel immediately out-of-date - the realised object arrives simultaneously both into its own wake AND in the anticipation of the successor object.
The effects of all this on culture can get pretty strange because, very often, if the object can no longer reliably provide the shock of the new, shock itself can be (and frequently does get) recruited to simulate newness. At which point the ‘Shock of the New’ becomes the ‘New of the Shock’ - even as shock itself is subjected to the exact same machinery and copied, absorbed, normalised and demanding of further escalation.
Just consider what that does to brands. If the actual trainer, handbag, phone, perfume, music video, fashion collection or whatever else arrives culturally half-consumed, transgression can be a substitute novelty-generator. Thus does the culture become more shocking as it becomes harder to surprise as the theatrical provocations at Paris Fashion Week in October 2026, amply demonstrate - where spectacle-adjacent-to-clothes became a cultural event in its own right.
Wait though, there’s more.
We’ve already said the ‘death of newness’ doesn’t mean the end of novelty itself - quite the opposite in fact. But technically unprecedented things can still feel strangely passé almost as soon as they become real because successful novelty contains the mechanism of its own disappearance.
Which actually isn’t anything unusual. Electricity did it, so did cars, TV, the Internet, mobile phones - you get the picture. Successful novelty changes the environment around itself until the mind-blowingly extraordinary becomes perfectly ordinary. Or, putting it a bit more pedantically, success is sufficient for the disappearance of novelty as lived contrast, so the successful thing doesn't disappear as such, but the world in which it once didn’t exist, does.
What's different today though is, as we’ve alluded to, speed. The interval between ‘not yet possible’ and ‘already normal’ is shrinking, and shrinking fast (think of the introduction of ChatGPT etc). So, the ‘before-state’ – the interval in which possibilities can still be examined, questioned or rejected before their arrival turns them into something we're merely obliged to accommodate - can evaporate before we've properly inhabited its ending or - sometimes - before we've even recognised that we were actually living in a ‘before’ at all.
Put all this together and one can’t help but conclude contemporary culture occupies three temporal states simultaneously:
(i) anticipating B (a.k.a. receiving pre-B);
(ii) receiving A;
(iii) forgetting pre-A.
And each one of these is accelerating, so the present gets increasingly squashed between anticipation and normalisation.
All of which poses interesting questions for art as well as a rather more practical problem - especially because pre-objects can be causally involved in producing the objects whose arrival they supposedly anticipate thus helping create the very conditions into which the actual object eventually lands.
Because these days, a product doesn't simply arrive and get judged - the images and discussions circulating around it participate in its very formation. Expectations, capital, competitive reactions and customer signals form a feedback loop that alters the thing being anticipated, so by the time it ships, the object has already been co-produced by the speculation and activity around it – a great working example of which being the Tesla Cybertruck.
This dynamic is closely related to the notion of hyperstition – the mechanism by which ideas, narratives and expectations participate in bringing about the realities they describe. The wider philosophical implications of it are significant and deserving of far deeper consideration than is practicable here, but remain an area of particular interest to this website.
And of course, where institutions are concerned, objects around which they organise responses may belong to a cultural moment that ended before the response can become operational. In a sentence then, novelty itself hasn't disappeared but the temporal conditions necessary to experience it are disappearing.
Part 2: Sprintloitering – The Institutional Paradox
Governments, corporations, regulators, universities, galleries, broadcasters and so on all increasingly find themselves in the same awkward position - the thing they’re responding to has changed before the response can be implemented let alone be effective. In short, policy lands after the situation has moved on - the curriculum approved for a world that’s already gone, guidance is ‘interim’ from the day it’s issued, and stays interim for the rest of its short life. Etc.
The conventional diagnosis would be that organisations are simply too slow, hence the jargon of ‘agile’, ‘adaptive’, ‘iterative’, ‘anticipatory’ and ‘future-ready’, along with the mushrooming of taskforces, working groups, steering committees, pilots, sandboxes, rapid reviews and restructures (followed, naturally, by restructures of the restructures).
But ‘go faster’ is a poor answer, and not only because it doesn’t work. Institutions are slow partly by design. Deliberation, evidence, due process, consultation, consistency and institutional memory are, more often than not, features rather than bugs. Make universities behave like startups, or the law behave like Twitter, and you potentially destroy precisely the very things we need them to do.
Take the former, for example. These – our universities - aren't simply providers of educational products. Among other things, they're repositories of knowledge, institutions of verification and places where inquiry can proceed without having to demonstrate an immediate commercial return. And their value also lies partly in their capacity to operate on timescales longer than those of the markets and technologies surrounding them.
But with that said, these supposedly enduring purposes can — and sometimes are — invoked to justify inertia and protect them from painful but necessary change - a tendency arguably more dangerous now than at any previous point in the past, hence a paradox emerges.
The faster the environment changes, the more important institutional continuity becomes — but also the more deadly becomes institutional inertia.
But if speed isn’t the whole problem, what is?
Our suggestion is the deeper difficulty isn’t merely temporal but ontological. Institutions aren’t just struggling to keep up with changing things. The categories through which they understand those things are themselves becoming unstable - the nouns have stopped holding still, basically.
Creative practice is an excellent example. What’s a ‘maker’ when production can be human, model, agent or some hybrid of all three? What’s a ‘tool’, as opposed to a ‘collaborator’? What’s a medium? An artefact? An audience, when machines consume cultural objects too? And what, exactly, are we assessing when we assess skill, authorship, originality or evidence? Institutions are, in other words, attempting to regulate, evaluate and educate using concepts that no longer refer to stable entities.
And this is where the ‘pre-object’ makes matters considerably worse.
Institutions have traditionally responded to A once A could be identified. But increasingly A’s pre-object is already culturally operative before A itself has stabilised, shaping expectations, behaviours and markets while the institution is still working out what, precisely, it’s looking at. So, by the time it’s understood A, attention and development have often migrated to B.
Consider what that does to the classic institutional sequence:
identify → understand → classify → deliberate → respond → implement
Implicit in every step of that chain is the assumption the object will remain stationary while being processed. And when it doesn’t, the whole thing starts falling apart.
Then there’s the disappearing before-state, which compounds everything. Successful novelty changes the environment into which the institution is responding. Once A becomes normal, the world of pre-A becomes strangely difficult even to reconstruct (try remembering what you actually did before the smartphone, or what an essay assignment meant before ChatGPT). So, institutions aren’t simply chasing new objects. They’re attempting to understand objects whose arrival has already altered the baseline from which they’d otherwise have been understood.
Which is the temporal squeeze from earlier - anticipating B, normalising A, forgetting pre-A. Institutions inhabit that squeeze too. The difference is their response cycles are often measured in months, sometimes years, whereas individuals and cultural networks operate in weeks (or, increasingly, days and – occasionally – hours or even less).
So, what’s to be done? Not, we’d argue, ‘transform the whole institution’. Quite the opposite, actually.
The first step is to distinguish durable functions from ephemeral arrangements.
Judgement, scholarship, craft, standards, due process and disciplinary knowledge shouldn’t be thrown away merely because particular technologies are changing too rapidly to absorb. So, the question one needs to ask is ‘what remains valuable when the present method of doing it becomes cheap, instantaneous or automated?’
Universities are an especially clear case. Such institutions can’t sensibly rewrite a three-year degree every time a model changes or a new technology arrives and in any case by the time ‘How to Use Tool X’ has worked its way through curriculum approval, Tool X may well be irrelevant.
But the durable core isn’t just whatever happens to outlast the tools. Increasingly, it’s what the tools make scarce. When execution becomes abundant (when a technically accomplished image, essay, proof or codebase can appear in minutes) the bottleneck migrates from producing to absorbing - judging, verifying, contextualising, and understanding why something works (or doesn’t) and what it’s for.
And the capacity to produce and act is increasingly outstripping our capacity to comprehend, verify and judge the consequences. We can do more, faster, than we can reliably determine what it means or whether we should be doing it at all.
But knowing isn’t the same as being able to act on what we know. Even where we do understand what’s happening, and can agree on what’s desirable, it doesn’t necessarily follow that we’re able to act accordingly. Competitive pressures, institutional incentives and collective-action failures can drive individuals and organisations towards outcomes that none of them particularly wants. These are the infamous ‘Molochian Dynamics’ we so frequently hear about - situations in which the logic of the system defeats the intentions of its participants. It’s a substantial problem in its own right, and one we’ll return to elsewhere.
The production/comprehension gap at least, is already being experienced - with mathematics a case in point (as we discuss in our explanatory essay ‘Proof Indigestion’) with Terence Tao and others warning about the consequences of AI-accelerated mathematical output, describing a shift from ‘proof scarcity’ to ‘proof abundance’, and the strain falling on the humans who have to make sense of what’s been produced.
Thus, far from being legacy skills waiting to be automated away, judgement, verification, critical evaluation, conceptual thinking, curation and collaboration are the capacities a culture needs most when production outpaces comprehension. They simply take different forms in different fields – for e.g. close reading and a feel for voice in language and literature, visual literacy and art direction in the design, film & video-related domains, professional scepticism and materiality in accountancy, architectural judgement and code review in computer science, strategic and ethical reasoning in business. Wherever execution becomes abundant, the scarce thing is the ability to decide what’s worth keeping, what’s true, and what its purpose is.
That’s the durable core, and it should be kept relatively stable because it’s the part of education that gains value as the tools get cheaper and the cost of their output veers toward zero.
But it still leaves a gap. If the core stays stable, who deals with the things that haven’t yet stabilised enough to become curriculum, regulation or settled organisational practice?
Perhaps what’s called for is an Experimental Margin - a bounded space, deliberately designed to operate where things are unstable, where open questions can be investigated without requiring the entire institution to reorganise around every new development.
Two design principles seem important.
First, the Margin should organise around questions, not technologies. It shouldn’t be ‘learn the new software’, because software expires. Instead, how about asking things like ‘What constitutes authorship now?’ ‘ What happens when execution becomes abundant?’ ‘What is creative skill when machines can produce technically accomplished artefacts on demand?’ ‘Can an AI be an audience?’ ‘What happens to provenance when synthetic artefacts have real consequences?’
Those will outlive whichever tool happens to be used to investigate them.
Second, practice becomes a method of inquiry. We don’t wait until we possess a settled theoretical account of AI-mediated cultural production (we’d be waiting a while, and it would be out of date on arrival). Instead, people make things inside the unstable conditions and use what happens to investigate them.
Here though we should beware of a possible catch.
An Experimental Margin that doesn't effectively feed back into the institution quickly turns into innovation theatre — a funky lab in the corner doing interesting things while everything else carries on exactly as before.
So, there need to be routes back into the wider organisation— through shared learning, the movement of people between core and Margin, public scrutiny and pathways by which discoveries can become established practice.
But there's more to it than simply creating innovation and chucking it into the centre. Some experiments will produce techniques or practices worth incorporating into existing operations. Others will expose assumptions nobody realised were being made. And occasionally, the most valuable discovery may be that the organisation has been asking altogether the wrong questions — so it might approach the Margin asking how to do something more efficiently and emerge wondering whether it should even be doing that thing to begin with.
So the real point is to create a continuing relationship between core and Margin — one in which the core retains its essential responsibilities while remaining capable of learning from, and sometimes being transformed by, what happens at its edges.
It is, in essence, an arrangement for organised institutional self-questioning. And here Stafford Beer's observation that 'the purpose of a system is what it does' becomes particularly pertinent. The Margin provides an opportunity to examine not merely what an institution believes itself to be doing, but what its operations actually produce — and whether the difference between the two might itself be the most important thing requiring investigation.
All of which together leads us to a deliberately puzzling conclusion.
Institutions should stop trying to outrun the future.
Their job isn’t to make their entire selves move at frontier speed, it’s to preserve what requires stability while maintaining a disciplined interface with what hasn’t yet become stable.
Mark Fisher worried the future had been cancelled but the real worry may be subtler - novelty is abundant, but the time to experience it as new is being squeezed out of the present.
Institutions — particularly educational ones — may be among the last places where that time can still be deliberately made.
But only if they resist the futile demand to become as fast as the things they encounter.
The better response may be to preserve what requires stability while building a dedicated, disciplined space for investigating what happens when the frontier moves faster than the institution can think.