Who gets to be cool now?

The coolness industrial complex, or the digital architecture of disaffection

I wasn’t particularly cool growing up. I spent a lot of time on the computer, customizing my blog page and playing Club Penguin. As I entered my teenage years, I learned that cool had cultural cache to it. Being cool meant you were in on it — that you had good taste and a sense of individuality. I wanted to be cool, and like many of us, I still do. Coolness is a constant undercurrent that shapes what we notice, what we desire, and how we measure ourselves against each other.

But why? Where did cool come from? How did it become such a central measure in gauging our status and identity? What did the internet do to coolness that made it so weird today? These are some of the questions I will explore in this essay. When I published my video essay, What even is cool?, I knew I had to further develop some of these ideas in written form.

I feel that I must clarify that this is not a argument that “nothing is interesting anymore.” In fact, I personally am really tired of the critique that algorithms flatten culture — what a unidimensional take. I admit there is much more noise online, though there is also a higher proportion of incredible artists, designers, entertainers, and educators than ever before. I love the internet, and am constantly amazed at the creative and wonderful people it connects me to everyday.

Instead, this is an inquiry into cool as a cultural logic, and what it means for us today.

What counts as cool

Cool as we know it emerged as African American Vernacular English, largely popularized by jazz circles of the 40s and 50s.¹ Lester Young, a tenor saxophonist known as “Prez” (as in, the President of Jazz), was a key figure in defining the style and demeanour associated with cool. His playing was smooth and understated, in contrast with the frenetic, “hot” jazz popular at the time. As this extended to his public image, with his relaxed tone and sharp dressing, he became the model for jazz cool. I’d be remiss not to mention Miles Davis’ Birth of the Cool (1957), as well as the works of the Gerry Mulligan Quartet, Modern Jazz Quartet, and Chet Baker.

Miles Davis, “Birth of the Cool,” album (1957)

Cool was, first and foremost, a tool for navigating social environments. In Talkin and Testifyin (1977), Geneva Smitherman explains the poise and control of coolness was more than just stylistic, but a necessary set of attitudes and behaviours for Black men and women in white America.² Marlene Kim Connor expands upon this in What is Cool? Understanding Black Manhood in America (1995), describing coolness as a code of conduct that persists as a survival tool and marker of manhood in Black American culture.³

“The whole notion of “cool talk” that has come to be associated with the music world suggests a heroic posture of calmness and control...which was and is vitally necessary for a black man or woman in White America, who’s often tested, much arrested, but rarely blessted. Black musicians are cool par-excellence as they style and profile to the max.” (Smitherman, “Talkin and Testifyin,” 1977 [p. 52])

As the notion of cool becomes popular, we see it evolve into “Bohemian” or beatnik culture as a posture of non-conformity and detachment from the conservative mainstream American values. Jack Kerouac, one of the original “beats,” said, “It involves a sort of nakedness of mind, and, ultimately, of soul, a feeling of being reduced to the bedrock of consciousness.”⁴

Soon after, the style and demeanour of the disaffected, rebellious cool person catches on. We begin to see the first depictions of the ‘Hollywood cool guy,’ like James Dean in Rebel Without a Cause (1955) and Marlon Brando in The Wild One (1953). This introduced the notion of disaffection to the mainstream, laying the groundwork for the countercultural movement of the 60s and every one to follow. We begin to see cool as a reclamation of individuality under authoritarian or conservative systems. Some of the coolest people that come to mind: Bob Dylan, Nina Simone, Mick Jagger, Angela Davis, Patti Smith, and Lou Reed.

James Dean in Rebel Without a Cause (1955)

Notably, punk subculture in the UK was a pivotal moment for cool, what with their mohawks, chains and anti-establishmentarianism. In Cool Rules: Anatomy of an Attitude, Pountain and Robins describe this as a template that young people could build from.⁵

“Invent a distinctive haircut and clothes, find a new drug and a new music (or maybe resurrect an old music), and you have a new movement. This formula has repeated itself from the ‘80s to today, from glam rock and the new romantics, through grunge to hip-hop, acid house, techno and trance (p. 101, Cool Rules).”

Cool becomes cool

To be cool was to be a part of an ingroup. We can see how this shaped the art scene, especially in New York. Andy Warhol really capitalized on this cool detachment — being a part of Warhol’s Factory meant being sooooo uninterested in a chic way. Minimalist artists like Donald Judd and Agnes Martin really pushed this idea of emotional restraint in their work. We started to see more conceptual art, like the works of Joseph Kosuth and On Kawara, where being cool meant getting it, understanding the context to make and perceive art with cultural undertones. If you didn’t get it, you weren’t a part of the ingroup, and you weren’t cool — here, the elitist genre of contemporary artist is born!

Top-left: Untitled, Donald Judd (1966); Top-right: Summer, Agnes Martin (1966); Bottom-left: One and Three Chairs, Joseph Kosuth (1965); Bottom-right: JAN 4. 1966, On Kawara (1966)

Along the way, capitalism gets entangled with cool (shocker), and it becomes monetizable. Professor of cultural analysis, Jim McGuigan, describes this as cool capitalism: the way that disaffection and rebellion get absorbed by corporations and sold back to us. Think of Nike’s Just Do It, or Apple’s Think Different. In both these examples, reclaiming one’s sense of individuality against what is expected by the mainstream is used to sell. I might even argue that coolness, as we know it, could not really exist outside of the context of capitalism. Cool necessarily relies on a mainstream to be compared against, but a mainstream is a byproduct of market logic. There is no mainstream without a system to create mass audiences, distribution pipelines, and feedback loops. Sure, in any culture you can have transgressive or oppositional behaviours, but these might be heretical, eccentric, or sacred. Without a cultural economy of distinction, there is no architecture to reward it as cool. (But that’s aside the point…)

As we approach the 21st century, cool becomes ubiquitous. I remember watching my favourite after-school cartoon, Disney’s The Weekenders, about four teens in southern California making the perfect weekends. Two recurring characters, Bree and Colby (yes like the cheese) are the quintessential “cool kids” that I began to associate with coolness in my youth. They wore baggy clothes, wore cool sneakers, always looked bored, and had the perfect shoulder shrug. The Weekenders Wiki describes them as often “shown to enjoy ‘hanging out’, which consists of standing around and leaning on surfaces, such as walls. That is their sole source of entertainment, besides “making fun of those who are beneath them.” They were so cool, they couldn’t even see the other kids: literally, like they just appear as mute, amorphous blobs of uncoolness.

Growing up in the 2000s also meant using the word cool to simply describe things we find nice and interesting. That jacket/book/song/movie was so cool. Ironically, these were often things in the mainstream. I think of that classic Vine/Tumblr-era song, Cool Kids by Echosmith. “I wish that I could be like the cool kids / ‘cause all the cool kids, they seem to fit in.” It’s interesting how even though cool, by definition, means not fitting in, it evolved in our language to capture a broader pool of things that are of interest, popular, or in good taste.

Colby, Bree, and Carver from Disney’s The Weekenders

Albeit brief, you can begin to see the notion of coolness evolve from a necessary act of control to countercultural rejection to cultural capital to aesthetic. None of this is to say that any of these eras of cool are invalid or not “actually cool.” In fact, they are all fundamentally about opposition to the mainstream through subculture and scarcity, just manifested in different ways. Though, as we enter the digital world, cool is in for an upheaval.

The digital cool

It didn’t happen instantly. As the boundary between the digital and the physical slowly blurred over the years, so too did our understanding of cool. In its infancy and adolescence, I think the internet replicated a lot of the same infrastructure of cool. It provided new means of discovering and participating in subcultures that perhaps were not accessible to you before, serving as a conduit for exploring and signalling coolness. Being online in the 2000s was still something people were adjusting to. MySpace and Facebook introduced new social norms, which meant a new mainstream and ways to oppose it. There were new ways to express yourself, such as the text slang you used or the types of photos you posted. Last night, I watched Dìdi (弟弟), a fantastic coming-of-age film about a teenager in 2008. Our protagonist’s crush has a pastel MySpace page that plays a Hellogoodbye song as he creeps, trying to find out what she’s interested in. The internet meant new ways to be in on it.

As the internet grew legs in the 2010s, cool was still about subculture. Streetwear, Arctic Monkeys, Tumblr, vaporwave, MacBook webcam photos, turning off auto-capitalization. Hipster and alt aesthetics, for example, still functioned to challenge traditional expectations of taste and cultural authority. Visibility was still small, meaning that you could discover weird niche interests if you participated in the right online communities. To put it plainly, the internet was still relatively local.

The 2020s segue us into what I would call the platform era. As social media matured and recommendation algorithms took the reigns, we spent less time discovering and more time consuming. We began to aggregate on a few dominant platforms, like Instagram and TikTok, that would endlessly suggest content based on data of what we’ve engaged in previously. To do this, algorithms have to be incredibly smart. They function as a sorting machine, identifying patterns and grouping them (and us) into categories. A consequence of this is that everything is subject to being sortable. No matter how niche, algorithms learned to predict and distribute tastes before they have a chance to become a subculture. What we get is trends, which are sort of proxies for subcultures, but exist in the mainstream, and fade once they’ve reached saturation. Here, we enter an era where visibility is inevitable, collapsing the distance that cool once relied on.

Art-cool reflexivity

Before we go further, let’s look at an example of how this has manifested today. In the Manhattan Art Review, Sean Tatol diagnoses the “crisis of cool” in the New York City art scene.⁶ He explains how art has historically been cool by the ways it represents its era; its relevance and novelty, as “sense phenomena and feeling,” allowing the viewers to experience the era in a new light. Think about Duchamp’s “readymade” urinal, which was taken from real life and recontextualized as an art piece. It’s not impressive on its own, it’s just a urinal, but in the context, the way that it broke the rules of art at the time and sparked conversation, it was cool. He says that the expectation for artists to represent their era still remains, but the issue being that nothing is really novel anymore. He goes further to say that any attempts at being subversive or resistant through art are, ironically, kind of expected now. He says, “What in 2024 could be more expected than a shallow attempt to restart the avant-garde?”

“Artists grope for a new lightning bolt of an idea like a urinal or a flag, but those shocks of the new are a thing of the past. Nothing can be particularly surprising when everyone is addicted to Instagram, but our fried synapses still hope to experience something outside of the endless churn of media without knowing what that could possibly look like or what it would mean to represent it (Tatol, Manhattan Syndrome).”

Fountain, Duchamp (1917)

I spoke a bit more about this in my video essay. I’m not entirely convinced nothing is capable of being novel, nor do I think it’s worthwhile to preserve the exclusionary, elitist attitudes of the traditional contemporary art scene. But he gets at something really interesting he calls art-cool reflexivity, which he defines as “a preoccupation with the means of coolness as the thing to be attained, mistaking the attainment of cool as the object of desire rather than a vehicle for exploration.” In other words, artists have become more reflexive – driven by the social system of cool, and their work ends up demonstrating this. Art about being a cool artist in New York, made for other cool artists in New York, referencing the coolness of being a cool artist in New York.

In “The Death of the Cool,” Chris Marino does a fantastic job at demonstrating how this art-cool reflexivity is not restricted to the art scene but can be seen in our culture more broadly.⁷ He describes the emergence of the networked individual: a person whose sense of individuality is shaped by the constant online connectivity and participation in the platform era. The boundaries between social structures and circles are flattened by platforms, and the same content is circulated en masse, leading us to consciously curate that is both legible and interesting. Context becomes collapsed, which Marino describe as the death of the cool.

“The cool as a cultural logic does not easily coexist with digital technology, for it emerges out of a dialectic of privacy and social immersion largely incompatible with digital experience. The cool is the product of neither the isolated individual (that would be sincerity, or outsider art) nor social convention (that would be tradition, or just banal imitation), but of the dynamic movement between these two poles…The digital, however, disrupts this dialectic of self and society by weakening each of these poles, and offering instead an experience suspended hazily between them (Marino, “The Death of the Cool”).”

The coolness industrial complex

As I write this on December 1, ‘tis the season for “cool girl/guy gift guides,” containing a random assortment of well-designed objects and niche books that are cool now, until they reach a degree of saturation that they become trendy. Cool is less about discernment and subculture, and more about the public display of it — or discourse about the public display of it (is this play about us?). Objects, styles, and ideas become cool the moment they are visible, and lose their luster almost as quickly as they spread.

It’s no coincidence there is so much discourse today about authenticity and performative males and if it’s embarrassing to have a boyfriend. As the term reflexivity would suggest, we intuit the performance because it’s unescapable. You can’t hit post without pre-empting how people how people will perceive it. I think is why coolness today is often replaced with obscurity or irony. Coolness can’t really be about detachment or not-caring because you can’t really not-care when you must constantly anticipate interpretation.

This is the logic behind what I call the coolness industrial complex. If cool was traditionally a social posture that relied on scarcity, this doesn’t exist anymore, or at least never for long enough. Instead, it is curated, packaged, and circulated at scale. Magazines, blogs, social platforms, and influencers scan for the next cool thing, accelerating its visibility until scarcity evaporates. Cool has become a product to be consumed, and we are both the audience and the labourers of its production. Even the discourse around authenticity, irony, and obscurity is mined and repackaged, creating a feedback loop where the very performance of cool becomes industrialized. The coolness industrial complex thrives on identifying expressions of individuality, making them legible, circulating them en masse, and eventually exhausting them.

I’ll give you two examples. The first is normcore: the return to “normal clothes” as a rejection of fashion trends. It has all the ingredients of coolness; rejection of the mainstream, non-comformity, creative expression. Though, this gets labelled as a “core,” becomes a trend in itself, and hits the mainstream until it eventually reaches saturation and becomes absorbed by fashion trends it was designed to reject. Or, take Brat by Charli XCX, an incredible record that rejects expectations of pop music today in its design and lyricism, and plays with the tensions of being an “it girl,” acknowledging the reflexivity and contradictions. The Apple dance trends on TikTok, Brat Girl Summer becomes a trend that brands pick up on, Kamala Harris HQ uses it in their presidential marketing campaign, and it becomes exhausted. Of course, I still think both of these things are very interesting — Brat is an incredible example of art that represents its era. Though, they both illustrate how coolness is industrialized as a byproduct of platforms.

Post-cool

I’m not one to lament cultural phenomena that have run their course. If the meaning of cool is changing, that’s showbiz. But what is it changing to?

For all the reasons I shared above, a signifier of cool I think we’ll see more of is being offline. For valid reasons, the inherent performativity to platforms is exhausting. As we obfuscate our individuality more and more so that algorithms cannot codify it, the final boss of obscurity is just ejecting from the platforms entirely. This seems to overlap with the desire for more “cozy” digital spaces — ones that are removed from social media and exist in gated online communities. This is often framed as a moral stance of transcending big tech and finding our selves elsewhere, though I believe this is only part of the picture.

Building entire infrastructure around visibility comes with implications. It is not simple enough to just stop being visible, especially for those who rely on social media for their careers, for access to information and community, and for advocacy and organizing. There is definitely a case to be made about bettering our digital public spaces, though I fear that invisibility and offline-coolness will depend on your reputation and status, and perpetuate many of the same structural issues we see today. (Not to say you have to be online — do your thing of course. Just sprinkling in some much-needed nuance!)

Or, maybe coolness as cultural capital will fade. Maybe the coolness industrial complex will fly too close to the sun and, too, reach saturation. One can only dream to decentre coolness as cache, and instead become so engrossed in our sense of individuality that it loses its grip on us. I’d like to scroll on an internet where cool is less a measure of status and more a matter of curiosity, play, and personal resonance. Perhaps this is what we may call sincerity, rather than authenticity. The capacity to find, create, and share what matters to us, on our own terms, might be the most enduring form of cultural currency there is.

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1. Skinner (2014), “How Did Cool Become Such a Big Deal?”

2. Smitherman (1977). “Talkin and Testifyin: The Language of Black America.”

3. Connor (1995). “What is Cool? Understanding Black Manhood in America.”

4. University of Virginia Library, “Beat Generation.”

5. Pountain & Robins (2000). “Cool Rules: Anatomy of an Attitude.”

6. Tatol (2024), “Manhattan Syndrome.” Manhattan Art Review.

7. Marino (2025), “THE DEATH OF THE COOL.” Critic’s Notebook.