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Welcome to Back of the Napkin, musings from Serviette for the cultured world.
According to a recent poll, Americans generally regard the 2020s as the worst decade in a century for art, music, movies, cuisine, and culture writ large. For an era so preoccupied with speed, innovation, and progress, this would seem implausible. Yet despite living through a supposed “golden age” of content creation (an oxymoron, to be sure), our insatiable appetite for the new has—ironically—produced a decade of cultural stagnation and fragmentation.
New music releases accounted for little more than a quarter of the albums consumed in the US in 2024, with the percentage of “catalogue music” (music that is 18+ months old) streamed online climbing higher each year. Only 12% of the top 20 films were originals over the past five years, while the other two-thirds were sequels. As the nostalgia loop continues to grow smaller, it becomes harder and harder to pinpoint era-defining trends or aesthetics. Coupled with social media algorithms’ and AI’s shared affinities for prioritizing safe, easily replicable formulas, we are left bobbing in a sea of VC-backed coffee shops and minimalist pilates studios. Serviette therefore has to disagree with Sartre—hell isn’t other people. It’s chrome, unpolished wood, and neutral tones as far as the eye can see.
As novelist Stacey D’Erasmo perceptively wrote in 2014, “It’s still one Earth, but it is now subtended by a highly elastic layer of non-time, wild-time, that is akin to a global collective unconscious wherein past, present, and future occupy one unmediated plane.” It’s not that we are removed from time; instead, we’re trying to inhabit every point in time at once. The result is hardly comprehensible.
This cultural stagnation seems to coincide with the tech world’s newest discomfiting obsession (one that, as many are aware, is always top of mind at Serviette)—taste. As The New Yorker’s Kyle Chayka recently argued, “taste” has officially become Silicon Valley’s newest buzzword. Within much of the AI world, taste is treated less as the product of knowledge, experience, and discernment than as something that can be systematized: the correct references, arranged correctly. Accordingly, these companies promise to aid users in their pursuit of developing and displaying “good taste” (a development Chayka has aptly dubbed “taste-washing”). When something so individual and carefully cultivated becomes outsourced and formulaic, it seems only logical that we should lack a cohesive culture as in decades past.
At the same time, perhaps there is something freeing about this lack of definition. There has never been more of a case to be made for getting offline, creating original art, and forging one’s own path, no matter how imperfect. Where optimization rears its ugly head, these imperfections may just become their own sort of currency. It’s why Serviette endeavors to make scents that are complicated and strikingly human in their compositions, a way of conferring your individual preferences to the world that is entirely unbound from microtrends and algorithms. When culture is not clearly defined, you may as well define it yourself.
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