Dirt: Recession indicators

Dirt is a daily email about entertainment.

Terry Nguyen, Dirt's senior staff writer, helms our dispatch, a running recap of the latest digital culture news. This week: cultural recession indicators; Timothée Chalamet's Apple ad; and the theory of "max pain."

The recession alarm bells are ringing: Mass layoffs have hit white-collar workers on Wall Street and in Silicon Valley. In 2022, the warnings of an impending economic downturn were so frequent that I quickly became desensitized to the Twitter recession-slash-vibecession bait. (I recommend reading Kyla Scanlon’s blog on the 2022 vibecession, in which she coined the buzzy portmanteau.) 

The cyclical nature of recession discourse is bleak. On Twitter and TikTok, it’s an amalgamation of market news, individualized observations, and feeble attempts to offer historic parallels. It feels oddly similar to how Californians approach the state-shattering inevitability of the Big One. We know it will happen. We know it will wreak havoc. We just don’t know when exactly. So as a coping mechanism, we make light of our anxieties or tune them out entirely.

Allow me to be technical for a moment: According to the unofficial definition of a recession, the US has to experience two consecutive quarters of declining GDP. The economy grew in the third quarter of 2022, and economists are anticipating a slight GDP boost in the fourth. Job growth is also strong. The tech, media, and finance layoffs are unnerving but “not a sign that the economic sky is falling,” according to Vox’s Emily Stewart. Then which signs should we pay attention to? 

When leading economic experts are saying things like, “We understand better how little we understand inflation,” it’s safe to say that no one is sure of anything. We are desperate for certitude. We can sense the undercurrent of societal malaise, and crisis theories have only grown more popular. In these erratic times, regular people have become quite adept at identifying cultural recession indicators, non-economic omens found in the zeitgeist. They’re observations with minimally-supported data that, depending on the context, can start to sound like a legitimate theory. There’s the lipstick effect and men’s underwear index, which assess the sales of everyday goods for insight on the cost of living crisis. 

If any theory goes, why shouldn’t these cultural recession indicators bear more weight? Wealthy people are downgrading from premium experiences. Venture capitalists are no longer flying first class. Tips at the strip club are reportedly down, while women’s heels, much like the price of eggs, are getting higher (I can’t speak for all women, but my heels stay high.) 2008-era flash mobs are back. So are conspiracy theories about the Satanic Panic. Are these layman signs that the times are dire, or does everything seem to be a recession indicator—such that it’s become a meme—because we are pessimistically uncertain about the future? —Terry Nguyen

PLAYBACK

Snippets of streaming news — and what we’re streaming.

• The Disney dilemma: To buy or not to buy Hulu, that is the $27.5 billion question. (Puck)

• Viewers have a hard time remembering where particular shows and movies are streaming, according to a Puck survey. It’s a big problem for streamers trying to distinguish themselves in a crowded market. Apple TV+’s solution? Hire Timothée Chalamet to talk about how he has yet to star in its programming alongside other A-listers.

• Oscar noms have dropped. Everything Everywhere All At Once leads with 11, followed by All Quiet on the Western Front and The Banshees of Inisherin with nine. A win for Irish and Asian American people!

• Critic Jerry Saltz discusses art, money, and crypto on the Boys Club podcast.

• 🎧 “Moonlight Sunrise” by the K-pop girl group TWICE, a synthy, Atlanta-bass inflected track with an addictive chorus. 

MIXTAPE

Good links from the Dirtyverse.

• Not (really) a nepo baby, but a Chelsea Hotel baby: Nicolaia Rips on growing up in the Manhattan landmark. (NYT) 

• I recently got around to reading about the theory of “Max Pain,” explained in this December memo from Nemesis, a creative consultancy by Emily Segal (author of Mercury Retrograde, formerly of the collective K-Hole), Martti Kalliala, and Lucas Mascatello. 

  • “Max Pain is an urban legend-slash-theory from the options market, in which certain people are betting on a price to go up and others are betting on it to go down, yet it somehow finds a way to do neither, instead converging on the place where most people’s bets expire worthless, regardless which side they’re on.”

• New Republic's Timothy Noah blames trust fund babies for feeding the luxury market. Could their spending habits affect interest rates — and make a recession worse?

• This interview with Yejin Choi, an AI researcher and MacArthur genius grant recipient, is worth reading in its entirety. (NYT Magazine)

  • Choi likens common sense—or facts that AI struggles with—to dark matter in the universe: “Ninety-five percent [of the universe] is dark matter and dark energy, but it’s invisible and not directly measurable. We know it exists, because if it doesn’t, then the normal matter doesn’t make sense … We’re coming to that realization with common sense. We don’t know the exact fraction of knowledge that you and I have that we didn’t talk about—but still know—but my speculation is that there’s a lot.”

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