Living in the Post-Ironic Wasteland: SwagNotes on Love, Hope and Sincerity

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I remember recently finding Britney Spears resurged Instagram page and feeling like I wanted to cry. It was around 2022, Britney was getting towards the end of the conservatorship, and the liberty that came with it seemed to be reflected in her newfound unhinged style of posting. On her feed, I found AI slop, dance videos from strange angles and stripping videos with tiny monkey emojis barely keeping her from getting censored. What made me so emotional, though, was not these posts, but that her posting style was straight out of 2010: Whitagram frames, Tumblr-core galaxy visuals, earnest inspirational quotes, simple ironic image macros, IG filters (the original ones, not the AR ones). It almost seemed like her strict conservatorship, which began in the late 2000s, had frozen her posting in the ethos of that era—one of wholesomeness and hope, where meaning felt easy to decode and sincerity and irony were still clearly distinct. Remember the simple irony of Cool Story, Bro, Condescending Wonka, and Someecards? Or the sincerity of #JustGirlyThings, SwagNotes, and the collective optimism of We Are the World (Haiti) and Waka Waka? A time when we could all agree that Minions were cute?

In  “Beyond Based and Cringe” Nate Sloan examines shifts in digital cultural production, particularly in relation to sincerity and irony—ruptures that became strikingly clear as I scrolled through Britney Spears’ Instagram page. Sloan argues that by the late 2010s, social media had fostered a “compulsive self-awareness,” making it nearly impossible to consume culture without also scrutinizing the act of consumption itself. This hyperreferentiality blurs the line between irony and sincerity, creating a landscape where, as he puts it, “any aesthetic, ideology, and image is interchangeable, with its only value located in the ability to shock the viewer or direct them to other images, symbols, and signs.” At its most extreme, this dynamic can lead to irony-poisoning, where detachment from meaning causes people to slip—often unknowingly—into the very beliefs or aesthetics they once treated as edgy jokes. Writer and poster Honor Levy captures a similar collapse of meaning in My First Book:

“Everything is wrong. We just got here and the world is already ending. When things go wrong, we laugh. When things seem pretend, they’re funny. When it turns out it’s real, it’s even funnier (…) The separation between spectacle and real life broke. It stayed broken. Nothing is IRL and everything is IRL.”

When the separation between spectacle and reality breaks down, everything becomes material for irony, and the sincerity that once marked our emotional expressions dissolves into performance. In this context, even the most authentic emotions are rendered hollow because they’re constantly mediated through the lens of ironic detachment. Though I don’t feel irony poisoned yet, I do feel a growing sense of detachment, as if every piece of content exists in the same emotionally flattened space, constantly circulating in a feedback loop of consumption and production. I found myself envying Britney, who seemed to have escaped this darker turn of internet culture. It reminded me of a different time, back in 2011, when I shared that same sincere ethos—before everything became hyper-referential. I got so emotional because it was so beautiful to see someone share inspirational quotes knowing that she actually believes in them, not as a self-aware, performative wink to past internet culture (every day is a new start fr).

But it’s not that simple. Despite my longing, I know that what I’m nostalgic for was never truly there. That’s how nostalgia works, right? As Svetlana Boym wrote in The Future of Nostalgia, the nostalgic impulse is to “obliterate history and turn it into a collective mythology (…), refusing to surrender to the irreversibility of time that plagues the human condition.” What I felt while scrolling through Britney’s Instagram was precisely this: a desire to step outside the relentless churn of internet culture and return to a mythologized past where posting felt like real. It was a longing for a time before our identities were entangled in advanced algorithms, accelerated feedback loops, and the endless cycle of social media consumption and production. But of course, this was a myth. As Sloan reminds me, the sincerity of the late 2000s and early 2010s was never truly that authentic. He argues that sincerity in cultural production at the time was rather a tool to “inoculate a public to the unvarnished miseries of late capitalism.”

The inspirational, sincere, lovepilled and hopecore images I thought I missed were not much more than reflections of a self-optimizing, individualistic achievement society. In The Spirit of Hope, Byung Chul Han critiques this ideology of positive psychology for privatizing suffering, rather than addressing the societal structures that mediate it. The ideology, distinct from real hope, permeated the internet culture of the early 2010s, where suffering was flattened into a personal failure to stay “positive” and “grateful”. While I largely agree that the 2010s were out of touch in significant ways, I wonder if the pendulum may have swung too far. In rejecting the hollow sincerity, hope and wholesomeness of that period, did we also lose something worthwhile—however fleeting or flawed it might have been? Did we become too cynical? Can we acknowledge structural problems while still singing “we are the world”?

In 2011, Britney Spears released “Till the World Ends,” an apocalyptic song about partying. Today, it’s often included in the “recession pop” canon—a (retroactively defined) genre that emerged during and in the aftermath of the global financial crisis that can be defined by its frenetic beats, euphoric hooks, and lyrics about dancing and enjoying life in the face of chaos. Songs like Usher’s “DJ Got Us Fallin’ in Love” with lines like “Dance like it’s the last night of your life” and Ke$ha’s “Die Young” proclaiming, “Let’s make the most of the night like we’re gonna die young,” epitomize this ethos, giving a kind of hope in the shape of hedonistic relief to the surrounding turmoil. It seems like recession pop is a musical parallel to the hopeful, sincere posting of the 2010s. Maybe my longing for it is in the fact that we’re once again facing a new set of dooms: climate collapse, the looming tech apocalypse, and the global rise of fascism. But perhaps the need for sincerity is even more urgent now, considering that the hyper-referential, irony-laden posting culture that followed is arguably a contributing factor to at least two of these crises. What began as detached online humor has, in some cases, evolved into a radicalization funnel—exemplified by the likes of Elon Musk, Peter Thiel, and U.S. VP J.D. Vance. Over the past five years, they’ve moved through a trajectory of irony-pilled neo-monarchism, à la Curtis Yarvin, toward a disturbing embrace of authoritarian ideals. In such a landscape, maybe it’s time to reconsider the value of sincere posting—not as nostalgia, but as a necessary counterbalance to an increasingly cynical digital culture.

But is that even possible? It should be, right? 2010s culture is back—you can hear it in Snow Strippers’ Avicii-inspired chords, The Dare and The Hellp’s electroclash revival, MGNA Crrrta’s dubstep beats. Skinny jeans, Tumblr-core, and indie sleaze aesthetics flood my feed. I have also seen the visual language of 2010s ‘hopecore’ being referenced in music videos, like Bassvictim’s Alice and Black Country, New Road’s Science Fair and Track X, referencing the wholesome relatability-posting era of #justgirlythings. But something’s off. Alice leans into visuals of hope and inspiration, yet the lyrics spiral into isolation (“Never liked to be alone”) and digital alienation (“Online games on my phone”), highlighting a disconnect between what we see and what we hear. Similarly, Science Fair borrows the past’s sincere imagery, but Isaac Wood’s anxious delivery and the relentless repetition of “references, references, references” in the first verse feels more like surrender than hope. These works don’t revive 2010s hope; they haunt it, circling familiar imagery stripped of warmth. They feel like echoes of a lost time, emptied and repurposed for an era too self-aware to believe again:

Yet, in some corners, sincerity seems to be making a genuine return. Here are some examples:

 

Out of all these contemporary forms of sincerity, Honor Levy’s words in My First Book feel like a bridge between the mythologized past and our hypermediated present. While the earnestness of Britney’s 2010s-era posts evokes nostalgia for a seemingly simpler digital world, Levy’s work speak to sincerity in a world where irony has become both armor and weapon. She presents a hope that acknowledges the absurdity of our times without surrendering to nihilism.

Byung-Chul Han’s distinction between optimism and hope is helpful here. The 2010s’ inspirational posting and recession pop anthems traded in optimism—a shallow, closed system of positivity that ignored structural darkness. Levy, however, embodies hope: a searching, active engagement with uncertainty. “Unlike positive thinking,” Han writes, “hope does not turn away from the negative… It remains mindful of it.” This tension pulses through Levy’s prose. In DO IT COWARD, set in a hauntological, rundown NYC arcade, Honor Levy’s character channels the hopecore sincerity of the 2010s—“just do it,” “we are all in this together,” “live or die trying”—while simultaneously acknowledging the hyperreferential world we’re stuck in: “staring at the fourth wall, mind melting, no-clipping, glitching.” She captures the instability of now—“Be afraid because it is life”—while insisting on hope: “Be brave because it’s death.” 

And then she writes: “How lucky are we to be a part of this RPG?”. To call life a “game” in 2025 is to acknowledge the absurdity of navigating climate collapse, doomscroll nihilism, and the collapse of shared reality—without denying that playing still matters.  Her sincerity isn’t a rejection of hyperreferentiality but a survival tactic within it. It’s about engaging with the game, knowing full well it’s rigged. Not because we believe in winning, but because opting out isn’t an option.

A similar tone can be read in Levy’s short story Internet Girl, where she writes: “No matter how feminist your followers are, if you are a girl, your nip pics will be taken down. Instagram has this magic titty-finding algorithm, and the algorithm is always learning, just like you and me when we were eleven and alone and absorbing it all so fast, so hungry, twirling around our rooms.” This passage works as both a critique of the algorithmic mediation of our lives and a reflection on the loss of innocence in a digitally mediated world. Yet, even as Levy highlights the absurdity of this system, there’s a glimmer of hope in her suggestion that the algorithm itself might one day “wake up and realizes that it exists just to find nipples and it will be sad and sorry and human and pray to stop.” It’s a moment of absurd, almost childlike empathy that cuts through the cynicism of our times.

If Britney’s “Till the World Ends” was about dancing through the apocalypse, Levy’s hope feels less like a party at the end of the world and more like standing still in the wreckage—acknowledging the ruins but refusing to look away. The challenge then, isn’t to resurrect 2010s optimism, but to find hope, meaning—and maybe even beauty—in the rubble.

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