It is easy to become overwhelmed by the velocity of stories and news in 2026, specifically when it comes to the politics surrounding the United States of America. Amongst the political drama, shifting trends, rising tensions and aftersheds of the global pandemic, it is customary that we would be scared for our future. But while the orange man makes outrageous decisions, and Bezos finds new ways to purchase more and more in the pursuit of owning the world, there is a trickle of hope in knowing that a different shift is simultaneously happening. It seems that the byproduct of being controversial is losing your status quo. Is America still cool?
I don’t mean in the sense that the country is irrelevant or unimportant – but in the simplest sense of the word – do people still want to be like them?
Putting political philosophy completely to the side, and speaking exclusively of the world of pop culture, art and entertainment, I want to explore if and when America stopped being idolised. Why did ‘The Land of Opportunity’ begin to lose its shine?
My mom tells me the story of when Levis first came to South Africa. The first smell of the American denim and the absolute exhilaration of looking like Jennifer Aniston in her own pair of 501s. That feeling was familiar to me growing up. Brands like Starbucks and Brandy Melville felt impossibly out of reach. All my sister and I wanted was to be American, and visit America, and experience it for all its greatness that it was. It was almost as if it was distant enough to feel magical. The era of Tumblr and the beginning stages of YouTube, engineered the perfect space for American inspiration.
But once we zoom out of today’s increasingly saturated internet landscape, whereby America stands at the forefront, it becomes possible to objectively view the American need to be famous and total addiction to social media. It is kind of insane. For the first time, through the mass influx of social media use, we get a lens into the real world of the USA and the real-life people inhabiting it, instead of the carefully exported culture. Although the reality we are viewing is still totally fake, the accessibility through livestreams, timelines and algorithms shows us that the picture-perfect image cracked open. What was behind it was not so aspirational as I once believed it to be.
The representatives through the American cultural lens would be (in my opinion wholely) people like the Paul brothers, Alix Earl and Kylie Jenner (to name a few). These are people who claim an authentic personality through the media, while simultaneously carrying a lot of American and international popularity. But the fame today is different from how it used to be. The modern media demands total transparency into influencers’ lives. While this is no new phenomenon, it is new that the influencers have to abide by this internet rule to remain relevant. The immediate access and increased knowledge around what these influencers do every day, who they are, and intimate details into their lives, are Faustian bargains that they have to abide by to remain in the spotlight. This is totally different to how it used to be. The need to so badly be relevant, and interesting, and accepted by the fans for ‘sharing everything’, has completely removed any authenticity. Famous people are no longer so out of reach, are no longer so desirable. Instead, today I feel they are just cluttering our timelines in a way that just makes them over-saturated and annoying. The demand of American media for total transparency into famous people’s lives, has simultaneously made them more popular, while making them seem desperate for fame and relevance. Knowing (almost) everything about your favourite creator removes any cool factor.
Marketing has taken an extreme route. As Europeans, we do not appreciate being sold to in such an aggressive way. When you have access to everything, all the time, it stops being desirable. When American companies are practically begging you to purchase products from them, the authenticity is ruined. Today, everything is an ad. To an insane level. From movies, music videos, entire sports. The superbowl is a four-hour long marketing event. Art is no longer art when you are trying to manipulate an audience to buy something. Again, advertising is no new phenomenon, but today it seems as though American brands and companies are popping up at an extreme level, none particularly unique, and alongside, comes a constant, incessant pleading to buy their products. Every podcast episode, every Love is Blind season, every Youtube video, every twitch stream, you cannot escape the degree of product placement and the inveigle persuasion that you need more things. In this generation, we have an awareness that we will never ‘run out’ of things. Everything is being produced for an inflated consumption level. Things are no longer unique, every item is made 5 million times, gone are the days of limited drops. When things are so easily accessible, and everyone has them, how could it be cool?
American public life looks like a performance built on humiliation. Bullying has become a new political and cultural language. Cancel culture makes it hard to take thoughts, opinions and world issues seriously. Someone is targeted, their whole life destroyed, and three months later it is entirely forgotten. Cancellation is picking and choosing every day. While the most obvious candidates are still facing no backlash at all. From the outside looking in, it is a cycle of fast and big public outrage, fast destruction. But memory is short, and then the cycle repeats. It is the addiction to drama, and the addiction to punishment. And bullying is not cool. People take any scenario they can, twist it and abuse it to the best of their abilities, for 5 minutes of internet fame. The need for punishment, relevance through a collected hateful opinion, and total and mass destruction of a public image, creates a totally unfriendly and overdramatic atmosphere, of which people no longer want to be a part of. (I speak of scenarios when cancellation is overly-extreme, or not warranted, and it should be noted that cancel culture has created real positive change in the world too).
It is not fair to describe an entire country with one adjective. The USA is a power-house which rules large parts of the world, and a huge part of the economy. There is no doubt that it is important to have eyes on America, and to be involved in their economy. But for the turmoil and political drama that America brings, it is interesting when there are other, subtle consequences that people feel all around. Over the past 10 years, it feels as though a major cultural shift away from the US has been happening slowly, and almost as though we see these effects today. What happened? Was it the political climate, or the people? Did we just get older? Or was it something different entirely? I believe that the need and desire of a country to be relevant, can be felt. The inauthenticity of a lot of movements and creations (trends) coming out of America oftentimes feel forced. The products feel mass-produced and not special, and the cultural influences feel artificial. Do you still feel inspired by America? Or has the cultural atmosphere changed? Maybe it is the beginning of the downfall of the US.
