You can look at a photo from the 50s, 60s, 70s, or 80s and instantly know the decade.
Not the year.
The decade.
It’s in the lapels. The hair volume. The posture. Even the font on a street sign in the background feels time-stamped. Blur the faces and you’d still know where you were in the timeline.
Now try that with a photo from 2003. Or 2012. Or last Tuesday.
Remove the cell phone model from the frame and you’re guessing. A photo from 2004 could be from 2024. Step back far enough and the last twenty-five years collapse into a single, flat visual moment, like a hotel hallway designed to offend no one and be remembered by no one.
Yes, digital photos don’t yellow. Everything looks permanently “now.”
But the stagnation isn’t technological. It’s cultural.
The monoculture is dead.
For most of the 20th century, there was a current. You either swam with it or against it, but everyone was responding to the same force. In the 70s, you wore the polyester or you rejected it. Even rebellion was legible—because you knew exactly what it was rebelling against.
Now? Every style that has ever existed is available simultaneously, usually for about fifteen dollars and free shipping. Nothing ever leaves. Nothing has to mean anything. We aren’t inventing new aesthetics—we’re just curating better playlists of the past.
There is one exception, of course.
Historians won’t struggle to date photos of people in MAGA hats and merch. Those will be instantly identifiable as 2015–2025—preserved in high resolution, forensically searchable, and destined to cause a very specific kind of generational embarrassment.
Our cities followed suit. Neutral palettes. Exposed brick. The same sans-serif fonts everywhere. Drop a café from Brooklyn into Berlin or Barcelona and no one would blink. We built a global architecture of anywhere—comfortable, inoffensive, and, like Taylor Swift, impossible to date.
So if fashion, architecture, and culture no longer mark time, what does?
Politics.
It’s the last remaining monoculture—the one thing we all still see, whether we want to or not. When culture fragments into a thousand niches, collective attention has to go somewhere. It went to the fight.
The past had eras defined by how we looked.
We have a long, endless present defined by what we scream at each other.
And if future historians want to date our photos, they won’t look at the hemline or the haircut.
They’ll look at the panic in our eyes.









