The Bleaching

Coral bleaching is a strange kind of death. The reef becomes visibly ghostly long before it is pronounced dead. What kills the reef isn’t violence, it’s a slow kind of degradation, where the environmental conditions creep towards a limit that finally exceeds what the ecosystem can handle.

Reefs aside, contemporary culture is not becoming identical. In many ways it is becoming more visible, more connected, and more varied than ever before.

But then again, there’s lots of different types of bleached coral.

Every image, tradition, subculture, aesthetic movement, regional identity, political tendency, musical scene, language, and personal mythology now circulates through the same networked bloodstream.

What’s so wrong about this is that novel cultural forms lose their specificity, “where did that come from?” Instead they reappear as arbitrary personality signifiers destined for an Instagram post or some kind of highlight reel.

The function in Photoshop to merge all your layers into one is called “Flatten Image”.

Everything else can be flattened into assets too, I guess.

We may scroll through the entire archive of humanity while the sitting on the toilet.

Fair. There is something genuinely beautiful about expanded access to human expression. The internet has allowed people to encounter music, philosophy, film, fashion, and ways of living that geography would once have been hidden from them entirely. It would be a bit dishonest to pretend this has not produced extraordinary forms of creativity and cross-pollination.

But environmental stress does not announce itself immediately.

Coral reefs also initially appear resilient before they fade into white.

The issue is that modern culture no longer influences humans at human speed. I think that’s why everything feels kind of off.

So our novel cultures increasingly spiral towards this semi-detached recombination of stuff that happened in the past. Entire identities are assembled from vibes, fragments, and visual signals extracted from elsewhere. Don’t get me wrong, some of it is incredibly intelligent and beautiful. But to me it often carries the feeling of something existing after the event rather than because of it. Like, it somehow appeared already fully formed somewhere else before it got to me.

The same speed of dilution increasingly shapes intimate connections.

Romance has fully entered algorithmic circulation. People no longer encounter one another primarily through slow immersion in shared worlds, but through apps built for rapid visibility, categorisation, and comparison. Sadly, cultural acceleration selects against truly “romantic” conditions because building the trust required for genuine transparency slows everything down.

This is why modern dating feels exhausting beneath its abundance.

More generally, this is also why contemporary life often produces such a strange emotional malaise despite the unprecedented stimulation. Human beings evolved within worlds where personal significance emerged through rarity, locality, slowness, and discovery.

Nowadays everything appears at once, or you’ve seen it before on a trip somewhere else.

A medieval cathedral, a genocide, breakfast photography, a philosophical revelation, nightclub footage, someone’s divorce, your potential new soulmate, and a meme all pass through your glowing rectangle with roughly equivalent weighting.

Perhaps it really is the phone.

What appears to me to be dissolving is not merely economics, politics or love, but the socio-ecological conditions required for stable meaning itself.

All of it now exists in a state of perpetual stress.

My mates and I started a record label a few years ago. Within six months we received an email asking if our catalogue could become part of the British Library. Cool? Absolutely. But had we actually developed any real depth (of any kind) yet? Probably not. I’m not even sure it helped us to make unique work.

Perhaps this is my real fear: everything will continue existing aesthetically while becoming fundamentally interchangeable. Not that humanity will become identical, but that distinction itself will lose its experiential weight.

And yes Alice, all of this is bad for the soul.

The structure survives and the colour leaves first.