Welcome to Notes from the Economy Class, the newsletter that is unabashedly pro-packing cube.
Your Flight Today
Two of the pillars upon which Gen X culture rests are gatekeeping and nostalgia. For a paradigmatic example of the former, look no further than High Fidelity's "music snob" scene, in which the record store employees are correctly assessed: "You're totally elitist. You feel like unappreciated scholars, so you shit on the people who know less than you … which is everybody. It's pretty sad."
Unfortunately for Gen X, the Internet more or less took a wrecking ball to a lot of their cherished gatekeeping appararti; fortunately for Gen X, what has followed has more or less made a real case for the merits of gatekeepers not rooted in algorithmic diktat or risk-averse nostalgia.
Consider one of the persistent leitmotifs in Douglas Coupland's mid-90s technoutopian ur-text, Microserfs. (first a short story in Wired, of course, in 1994, then a novel in 1995.) In the book, pop culture-rooted nostalgia is the emotional bedrock for all the twentysomethings until they decide to take risks on human connection and original creativity. As a young woman reading the novel, I regarded the pop-culture nostalgia with suspicion until I realized it was a glide path over real, rooted differences in class and culture; like a United Colors of Bennetton ad, familiarity with pop culture artifacts can give the illusion of diversity without actual, challenging intersectionality.
It was honestly a cage match between Bennetton and Esprit to see which brand had the most posh/multiculti profile.
We've flung forward several decades and South Park — a thoroughly Gen X artifact, for better or for worse — has put pop culture nostalgia in its place. In the first episode of the 20th(!) season, we're introduced to the little memberberries, which soothe the adults by having them recall how much they enjoyed pop culture icons from their youth before souring into straight-up bigotry. The message about what nostalgia does is unambiguous.
PopMatters' recent critique, "Gen X Suffers Mainstream Culture Constipation," takes this idea and asks how the pop culture nostalgia has becalmed the culture at large. After correctly pointing out that not all pop culture works on the same lifecycles — online culture is as lasting as a mayfly — author Mike Cormack points out, "Cultural production is no longer about creation but memory management."
Cormack also points out that a lot of what's being force-fed to pop culture consumers today is the result of extractive corporate culture:
These conglomerates are the asset strippers of culture, soullessly buying up all the big pop-culture names to milk them. Never mind what made them good in the first place: the creativity, the daring, the insight, the sense of the future being created. That’s gone. Now it’s about leverage, IP, and platform synergy.
What industry in the U.S. is immune from this sort of strip-mining? And while it's one thing to exhort and valorize the freedom and exhilaration of cultural risk-taking and early failure … it's another to remember that the previous generations with that freedom also had the luxury of a far friendlier economy with more robust social safety nets. Risk and failure hit different in 2026 America.
You still gotta pay your rent, though.
Still, Cormack's phrase "memory management" has stuck with me, because it harkens back to the central message around a 31-year-old book: Shake off the comforts of your pop culture memories and embrace something original. As Coupland wrote, "Because in the end we forget everything, anyway. We're human; we're amnesia machines."
He also wrote, "Beware the corporate invasion of private memory." What an excellent cri de coeur against corporate pop culture nostalgia.
Your In-Flight Snack
The great thing about a subscription to New York magazine's site is that you get access to stories on The Cut designed in a lab (or an editorial meeting …) to prompt reflexive/reactive commentary, and this week's piece on "The Influencer-ification of the Bridal Party" is prime snarking material. The TL;DR is that being a member of a bridal party is yet another facet of female-coded private life that's been commodified for public display.
And in reading the piece, I realized that SNL had gotten there three years before with "Bridesmaid Cult Documentary."
I don’t know what we did to deserve Quinta Brunson, but we must have been very good.
Watch the clip on YouTube and see how parody has become real life in the article, which features text-your-girls quotes like these:
“There’s, like, a fully cohesive aesthetic rollout before a trip even begins,” says Mallory, 28, a Chicago-based attendee of four weddings this year — three of which she’s in. As a result, she’s become “deeply” familiar with personalization sites like Minted and Zazzle, where bridesmaids create custom branding for the weekend. “Custom logos are printed on everything: Champagne bottles, menus, posters, itineraries,” she says, which can sometimes total anywhere from $250 to $300 for a bride who is all in.
In any event, enjoy both the SNL clip and the Cut piece, then try not to think about how the rise in commodifying literally every step toward marriage also coincides with a drop in U.S. marriage rates.