Dark mode theory

Keep scrolling to listen to the full interview on Tasteland. 

When Fukuyama declared the “end of history,” he certainly could not have anticipated the historic chaos of the second Trump administration. Yet even in the days before history-breaking news seemed to hit on a daily basis, many of us have felt the mood of the world shift to one of nihilism. As the stability of seemingly perpetual liberal order hangs in the balance, Edmond Lau has coined a new term to describe our period of pessimism: “the dark mode shift.” 

In conversation with Francis Zierer and Daisy Alioto, Lau describes his career journey, the grief of the dark mode age, and the state of modern luxury. —Maya Lerman 

The following interview has been edited and condensed.

Francis Zierer: I wanted to ask about your career arc. You were in college studying law, but working as a graphic designer and art director. Then you graduated and practiced law for four years, and then you switched to being a tech founder for a couple of years. And then this year you've pivoted to more of a cultural strategist consultant. 

Edmond Lau: I always had this split path mentality. I think familial pressure or self-pressure was like, “go be a lawyer,” but then I also had a creative side. And I ended up being really interested in graphic design when I was in high school. I did an internship during my first year of university at a small graphic design studio and I really loved it. I was like, okay, why don't we try and do both? And so I tried to do both for a while. I did like three or four months at Ogilvy. And then I crashed out there and I was like, okay, I can't. Maybe traditional advertising isn't for me. Then I went full into law. I ended up enjoying that a lot, especially the problem solving aspect of being a lawyer.

Because I was self-taught as a graphic designer, I think there were gaps in my knowledge that weren't there in my legal side. But this interest for fashion, for culture, for art, it never left me. It actually got to the point as an IP lawyer where I would be working on things for cool clients, but then I would always be looking over the fence. And I kept thinking, I want to be back in that world. 

I was a privacy lawyer, privacy tech. There's so much attention being paid to protecting your privacy. But how people actually make money is off your taste and preference data. Why isn't that something that you can take with you and have protected and have control over? That was the jumping off point for my startup. 

FZ: Tell us about Esoteric (RIP)

EL: I wanted to create a profile of your personal taste that you own and that travels around with you. The form that it took initially was like a digital wardrobe. We wanted to center the fashion aspect of it. But then over time, the prototype turned into more of a taste social media profile. So what we had was a profile where each user chose four items to start from. For music, it plugged into your Spotify; clothing, you just picked from an SSENSE API; and then places, Google maps, you just add four places and then combine to create a little spinning NFT of your personal taste. And the idea was that, people would add things, and it would be a place for you to discover from the people around you.

It was at once a way for you to own your own taste, but then also cut through algorithmic glut, because every person you add is a real person that is manually curating.

Further listening: Shelf life ft. Jad Esber

FZ: The “dark mode shift” is one of your luxury memes riffing on Sean Monahan of Normcore fame's boom boom aesthetic. What do these words mean for readers who might not know? 

EL: For anyone that's a millennial or younger, we've grown up in this time since the 90s, the Fukuyama end of history, where even though there have been blips where horrific things have happened, the overall trajectory of the Western world, at least in a cultural sense or social sense, has been one of progress, increasing social liberalization. We see a lot of workplaces at least have the veneer of becoming more empathetic and things are generally better than what they used to be. 

The “dark mode shift” in my mind is that for the first time, people are coming to grips with the fact that we're actually seeing a meaningful regression. And dark mode is kind of a reckoning or a collective grappling with what that means, what comes next.

In some ways it's a period of grief. It's different responses to grief, whether it's anger, whether it's nihilism, whether it's just throwing caution to the wind. I think it's a collective reaction to things in the West not being the status quo, not being the same that they've always been. 

Further reading: Sean Monahan on post-internet art

Daisy Alioto: What's so dark mode about it is a lot of these people got exactly what they wanted. And they're furious. That's the inherent paradox and trap of dark mode. The nihilism isn't just people who are like, “I really would have liked to live in a country with universal healthcare.” It's the people who got exactly what they wanted also experiencing this ambiguous grief for some reason. 

EL: With the people that have just voted, it really comes down to the fact that maybe they've let one part of themselves or one desire overtake the rest of them. A lot of people, I presume, voted for Trump just because they want to secure the bag. I think maybe it's internal guilt that's catching up with them. I think people are like, “okay, all of the stuff that I wanted is happening, but I'm still not rich or I'm still not happy, then what else is there? Who's left to blame?” 

DA: I just watched American Psycho for the first time and I was shocked by how insecure Patrick Bateman is. Yet people have canonized him as this dark mode, yuppie figure, hero. They've completely misunderstood the text. It's not aspirational. I think that's part of the dark mode paradox as well that it's all about nakedly chasing power and money. But any sense of like the catharsis of aspiration and achievement is completely removed. 

EL: People have a tendency to canonize these types of figures like Patrick Bateman or Jordan Belfort. But I think people only see the material side of things without thinking more deeply about the emotional consequences of living like that. It's interesting to me, though, that the yuppie has changed in the way that you still have the finance bros, but now you have the new creative class yuppies. They still experience the same level of emotional insecurity.

FZ: I think that the “dark mode shift” is inherently a temporary thing that hopefully lasts less than the 15 years that you had labeled the previous period of optimism as lasting. 

EL: I'm of two minds about this. On one hand, I think the big periods of darkness are not a new thing. They've of course happened through history—economic decline, the oil crisis in the 70s. About accelerationism, I think that perhaps because things happen at a much more accelerated rate now, I'm hopeful that we get out of it faster.