It's bonkers how much everyone's just larping late 20th century culture because we reached a point of absolute disgust with the GWOT-era culture of the early 21st century.
Say what you will about GWOT culture, but there was a definite aesthetic stack:
- muted color palette, blue-orange filters, shaky-cam midwit culture
- (post-90s post-Baudrillard) pop-as-surreality porn, complete iconoclasm of "reality" in popular mass media, neon casino pornified pop culture
- emplotments of suspicion and constructed truth in high culture (see McKewon's Atonement)
And nobody was very happy with this because it kind of meant that History Ended and All I Got was this Participation Trophy.
So the suplus elites, the over-educated downwardly-mobile failsons and faildaughters, summoned up a hundred thousand Tumblr conversations about the unfairness of the world (from a puerile perspective) and latter-day GamerGaters took the opposing side. Now we have dumb goo goo ga ga shit as the kulturkampf -- except nobody's even really trying to win. The struggle is all.
Fight the kulturkampf because you are so very bored and because you may not matter very much in the big scheme of things. Fight the kulturkampf because your peers did a little bit better in their fleeting chances to climb the meritocracy. Fight the kulturkampf because you believe in nothing, because the most you can believe in is a belief-in-belief, and because in this whirling void of genuine compelling virtue you will substitute your own consumer preferences for one brand of 20th C. nostalgia.
Above all, fight the kulturkampf because it is your way to participate in a vast decentralized ARG with graphics and characters that are way more stimulating than anything else that could come from your idleness. And you are so idle. There are so many days that you've let slip into the grave and nobody even noticed. But at least in the kulturkampf you are needed on the front lines! If you miss even one hour you will have let your enemies rise in your absence! You must stay logged on to win!