Today, the hipster era survives only as an aesthetic: flash photography, guitar music, tits out. The particular form of snobbery and disdain that powered it is entirely extinct. In the post-hipster era, you listened to what Spotify told you to listen to. If you read a book, it was because the precise pattern of blobby pastel-coloured shapes on its cover contained coded instructions to TikTok’s algorithm that sent it zooming to the top of your feed. Your tastes and preferences were decided for you by vast crystalline machines coiling and uncoiling in the livid molten core of the earth. But these algorithms tend to work in a very particular way. At best, they present you with a caricature of yourself that you then have to conform to. At worst, their processes of cumulative reinforcement serve you up the exact same bilge as everyone else, but shrouded in the aura of individuality. It was at the dawn of the algorithm era that all my Dalston friends started playing Taylor Swift at their parties. A few years ago, I was dragged to some fashion-world event in the Bowery in New York: the room was full of cool young people there to be seen, and they were listening to a playlist of Top-40 pop music curated for them by a proprietary mathematical equation. As someone who had grown up in the hipster age, all these people seemed incredibly lame. The world had been given over to the nerds.