Being fair, it’s really not that easy to have much impact on culture when most of the disposable wealth is in the hands of retirees. Gen Z and alpha will have even less impact than millennials as they’ll have even less money than millennials do and millennials are broke. Most of the popular culture is trying to appeal to late boomers to early generation X because they’re the ones with the money. And if you’re paying attention it’s even in the image. Star Wars was 1977. My mother was pregnant with me when Star Wars came out. LOTR was released as a book in the 1950s, and Legend of Zelda was a franchise in 1980. This isn’t stuff that millennials just got into. It’s stuff that was first loved by boomers and that the millennials were introduced to by boomers.

I’m technically Xennial. My “culture” the stuff I was into as a kid — nobody gives a fuck. I fell in love with Farscape and Babylon 5. Does anyone care about that stuff? There was, briefly, a plan for the retelling of B5, but it fell through. My music was grunge rock, Nirvana, Stone Temple Pilots. Nobody cares about appealing to that stuff. I don’t expect a return to the aesthetics of grunge rock any time soon. Compare that to stuff that came about in the much better off 1980s and before — it’s much more prominent in culture, fashions, music, movies. We’re reviving He-man, Strawberry Shortcake, how many shitty iterations of Star Trek TOS and TNG (but no DS9, because that doesn’t trigger nostalgia). Musically, pop has an 80s vibe. But it’s not really about how good or bad the cultural landscape was during my generation.

  Xenials and later generations don’t have enough money to bother appealing to. The creators and curators of culture don’t care whether the ideas are good or interesting.  They want to sell merch, tickets to self-indulgent cons, theme-park experiences, and subscriptions.  If the product appeals to a demographic that can’t afford to indulge, it’s a waste.  Gen Z culture like millennial culture will be ephemeral because once they stop being teens and young adults — and have less access to mom and dad’s disposable income — they won’t be able to afford to collect things, to go to cons, to subscribe to a service that shows their content.  Thus nobody will bother to appeal to their ideas.