Children of the Corn

The first step is acknowledging the problematically corny

We have reached the end of a long summer, staring down the final stretch of a seemingly interminable election cycle and the fourth quarter of a long year, all coming at the end of a five year period of time that feels like approximately 17 lifetimes.

It’s easy to identify plenty of justifiable reasons for everyone to feel exhausted, from all of the aforementioned realities to likely living under the specter that AI in some form will take your job. Or maybe you’re a billionaire shitposting through the day on a platform valued at less than half of the $44 billion paid to buy it just a couple of years ago.

With so many symptoms of our individual and collective angst right on the surface, I believe there’s something lurking further down that has gradually spread through our cultural circulatory system. It may not pose as immediate and pressing of a threat to life as we know it, but it plays an understated role on how we got here, and will inhibit any ability to progress together if we refuse to call it out any longer.

Rewind about a decade, several years before the pandemic, and you can trace the foundations for this modern condition.

In the political climate of the 2000s–one started with “hanging chads” and the ensuing Bush/Cheney regime, Enron scandal, two ill-conceived wars, a disastrous Hurricane Katrina response, and bookended by a financial crisis–cultural and technological forces converged to form the earliest iteration of social media¹ which, in a pre-Facebook world, was dominated by blogs.

No one was bigger in those days than Gawker Media, and their famously snarky tone came to define internet culture and injected a healthy dose of cynicism into the cultural bloodstream, clearly evident in mainstream shows like 30 Rock that mocked the commercial and corporate conglomeration of the previous two decades.

Gradually, then suddenly, it all changed.

With Bush and Cheney and the worst of the economic instability in the rearview, and Facebook’s News Feed becoming an increasingly essential force in shaping media consumption, the snark of Gawker gave way to a wave of optimism and positivity, with media upstarts like BuzzFeed and Upworthy successfully hacking the newsfeed with feel-good clickbait, Ryan Gosling “hey girl” memes, and quizzes about your Hogwarts house.

Millennials rode in on a wave of blush pink and positivity and drowned out most of the skeptics that had played a prominent role in the previous decade’s cultural perspective.

In this “no haters” environment, a new form of digital disingenuousness took root, best defined in a landmark essay by Tom Scocca, that was fittingly posted on Gawker.

‘On Smarm’ used the “no haters” mandate of the moment to effectively highlight the role of the snark that Gawker had become synonymous (and oft-critized): to stand in opposition to what became a more insidious force:

Smarm is a kind of performance—an assumption of the forms of seriousness, of virtue, of constructiveness, without the substance. Smarm is concerned with appropriateness and with tone. Smarm disapproves.

Prescient as the warning from Scocca may have been, smarm won out. Thanks to a period of unprecedented prosperity (thanks, ZIRP!) and a few transformative innovations (hello, iPhone and the App Store), we entered the YOLO era, where the dominant sentiment was “if you’re hating you’re probably just not hustling hard enough.”

As is always the case, eventually the vibes did shift, which can pretty directly be traced to one man’s long ride down a gilded escalator. What came next did indeed suck of the optimism out of the room, but the smarm didn’t go with it.

The ensuing years of Trump created a new safe haven for the defenders of all things virtuous, one in which hating on anything other than the other side of the political aisle was deemed at best frivolous and often branded you as an enemy to the cause. If you weren’t owning the libs or part of the #resistance, if you dared to question the motives of anyone seemingly on “your side” then the most common conclusion was that you were a clandestine member of the opposing party.

In this increasingly tense state of just about everything–the endless grievances and conflicts–there was little appetite for skeptical takes on “harmless” matters. The bar for acceptable behavior was lowered so far that if you weren’t doing something labeled as reprehensible, it was not only accepted and above criticism, but might just emerge as a new norm.

Fueled by a blend of political disorientation and the ‘gamification’ of human relationships, self-awareness was gradually engineered out and in its place, a genetically-modified form of smarm emerged: corny.

Corny (aka corn or corniness) hides vapid self-centeredness behind the veil of cultural relativism. It dismisses any negative judgment as jealousy, it cancels out noise that might force a look in the mirror. And it has become so prevalent that it has infected all of us.

Corn is the microplastics that have settled into our emotional testicles: the unfortunately reality is, we’re never completely getting rid of it. But by being aware they’re there, labeling the presence of corny in everyday life, we might just avoid a complete and irreversible infestation.

Introducing The Corny Index

This week, I convened my most esteemed collaborators and advisors (shout-out to The Ministry of Scrambled Greggs) to discuss the state of corniness. We began the process of cataloguing some of the most prominent examples of corny in today’s culture.

To be clear: we’re all guilty of some of these. I know I am. Like I said, there’s no way to completely excise corn from our bloodstream, but restoring self-awareness is a critical step towards rebuilding our defenses.

With that, let’s wander into the maze.

1. Stanning billionaires

2. NVIDIA earnings watch parties

3. Well-heeled founders of startups that aren’t financially viable and pay employees shit, but exist as vanity projects for said founders

4. Making a big performance of leaving Twitter (usually on Threads)

5. Offering up your personal struggles on LinkedIn

6. “I ____ and this is what it taught me about ___” posts

   • “I paid $5,800 to take my daughters to see Taylor Swift. This is what it taught me about music, girlhood, and modern fandom (but curiously not what it taught me about spending the monthly budget of an average American household).”

7. Jokey “I ____ and this is what it taught me about B2B SaaS” posts

8. Being “proud and humbled” to judge an awards show

9. Saying you’re “humbled” at all while bragging on the internet

10. Attempts at humor about Zoom etiquette and remote work life four years after the pandemic

11. The term “async”

12. The phrase “let’s double-click into that”

13. Labeling things as ‘-core’ (unless done for deliberate comedic effect)

14. Brand-on-brand social media conversation

    • Even cornier: calling it ‘brandter’

15. Tweets longer than 140 50 characters

16. Bluesky

17. Complaining about LAX (or any airport, really)

18. Expressing views on crime that aren’t rooted in data

19. Self-serving misreadings of data to prove points like “I’m a tolerant person but actually minorities are more prone to criminal behavior” or “it’s actually a good thing that I drive a 2-ton SUV at 40 through a school zone”

20. Listening to the All-In podcast

21. Hosting the All-In podcast (overheard: “The All-In Guys are the Avengers of Smarm”)

22. Articles about Joe Rogan and Austin’s comedy scene

23. Articles about Alex Cooper (or any emerging podcaster) “redefining the rules of media” or “doing it on her own terms”

24. Scott Galloway’s books (“They’re basically just Twitter threads interspersed with faux-hand drawn charts about male masturbation habits now vs 40 years ago”)

    

    The Writings of Scott Galloway: where corny meets horny.

25. Just about everything Bill Simmons does

26. The term ‘sportsball’ as a pejorative signal that you “aren’t a sports person”

27. Describing any room as a ‘man cave’ in 2024

28. Portraying yourself as an iconoclast or rebel when you work in professional services

29. Hot takes on any piece of AI-generated content with a caption like “this is just the cultural beginning” or “we’re all doomed”

30. Still saying “join the conversation” in reference to social media

31. Posts where recent grads show their “day in the life” at major tech companies to boast that they get overpaid to attend adult day care

32. Retweeting yourself

33. Reposting congratulatory posts from friends to your Insta stories

34. ‘Insta’

35. Man on the street videos

36. Using Hawk Tuah as a vehicle for cultural commentary

    • See also: begrudging the Hawk Tuah girl from cashing in on a turn in the maelstrom that she didn’t ask for

37. Any and all Chipotle discourse

38. Any and all Chipotle-themed Halloween costumes

    

39. Articles in trade publications that are already comparing the consumption habits of Gen Z and Gen Alpha

40. 99% of trade publications

41. Thinkpieces on companies you’ve never worked for and people you’ve never been near (“Five Ways for Nike to Bounce Back” or “When Steve said…”)

42. Hot takes about Ryan Reynolds reinventing advertising

43. Blake Lively/Justin Baldoni scuttlebutt

    • Not corny: retired Yankees and Royals slugger Steve Balboni

44. Turning every sport into a Netflix docuseries

45. Performative F1 fandom. It’s fine if you like it, but we all know your takes are just being recycled from Vincenzo Landino.

    • Same goes for American-born fans of the Premier League. Rock your Arsenal kit all you want, don’t try to pretend your fandom was shaped by that summer abroad in London.

46. Every movie needing to have its own novelty popcorn bucket. (VP of Marketing to their agency: “What’s OUR popcorn fuckbucket?”)

47. Super Bowl ads in September²

48. Almost all mukbang and food content on social media is corny³, but especially:

    • Scraping food with knives to show how crispy it is

    • Oversized burgers for the ‘gram

    • Cheese pulls

    • Taking a bite at the end of the video and smiling at the camera and/or closing your eyes quasi-orgasmically

49. Online performances of parenting

50. Posting first day of school signs where parents make the kids hold up a sign like “Jayden and Avery’s first day of 2nd grade”

51. Drone footage of anything

52. Posting pictures of you playing pickleball and/or your designer pickleball racquet.

    • “Pickleball is swingball for people in finance.”

    • “It’s slightly roomier ping-pong.”

    • Ironically, the least corny casual outdoor game is… cornhole.

53. Moving to Austin or Nashville and cosplaying as a cowboy

54. Moving to Los Angeles and cosplaying as bohemian

55. Moving to Dallas and pretending it’s not about tax breaks

56. Moving to Miami

57. Burning Man and everything associated with it

58. Going to Coachella if you’re over 40

59. Videos of old dudes at The Sphere

60. Steve Ballmer’s Intuit Dome, especially this:

61. Liquid Death brand collabs

62. Graza olive oil

63. Ghia and non-alcoholic bars

64. Oura rings

65. Posting about your daily routine complete with obligatory cold plunge video

66. The wearing-clothes-in-a-pool magazine spread

    

    Even these two can’t get the corn out of this trope’s teeth

67. Standing ovations

    • Their corniness is directly correlated with their duration

    • Reporting on the length of a standing ovation is even worse

And finally, making long lists about what corny things is definitely Monsanto-grade, genetically-enhanced corn. Like I said, I am guilty of these just like all of you. Sometimes you have to take a step back to move forward. It starts with self-awareness.

Now cue the standing ovation.

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1. Apologies to online forums, AIM, and ICQ

2. Important questions: What bar serves (1) serves soda out of a can and (2) Pepsi?

3. Shout-out to Chef Reactions, one of the last non-corny food accounts on social media.