Welcome to Microcosm Halloween, a Perfect Example of Tech’s Impact on Culture

No one knows what anyone's costume is anymore, and while that may be a loss for us, it's a testament to tech's continued power

FX chief Jon Landgraf was in the process of lamenting the decline of shared TV experiences on a recent episode of The Town when host Matt Belloni (disclaimer: I work at Disney currently and used to work with Matt Belloni at Puck) pointed out that shared experiences now exist in the form of referenced memes, not referenced TV. Hell, even those lines we quote that do originate from series (I Think You Should Leave, Spongebob) or movies (The Lord of the Rings) aren’t referenced because of the actual title but through the context that someone comes across those scenes: typically in a meme format posted on Instagram, X, YouTube, or TikTok. People may know Tim Robinson’s hot dog character without ever having thrown on an episode of I Think You Should Leave. 

And as such, come Halloween, we see a lot more Tim Robinson “Hot Dog Man” costumes than Frankenstein or Harry Potter. 

Now, there’s been quite a bit of discourse around meme costumes on Halloween. Kate Lindsay at The Atlantic argues “A moment that should be one of immediate recognition and joy,” she writes, “becomes a lengthy, borderline-inscrutable conversation I had no idea I would be saddled with when I tried to make small talk.” Taylor Lorenz at User Mag (a newsletter you should absolutely subscribe to if you haven’t already) suggested that “The nicheifying of Halloween costumes is compounded by viralflation, in which inflated metrics and algorithmic feeds have made viral content more frequent yet more fleeting than ever. 

“The explosion of online subcultures and the death of a monoculture also means that we all have fewer and fewer shared references, even on the internet.” 

It’s that decline of monoculture both online and IRL that I want to focus on for this essay. Unlike brilliant writers like Lindsay and Lorenz who focus on the cultural side of the discussion, I want to focus on the incentives and disincentives handed down by platforms that become our sole focus for choosing a costume. Halloween is no longer about what people at the party will say, nor is it even about what your friends on Instagram will say. Halloween is for gaining attention from the digital community you aspire to be welcomed into, and that requires finding opportunities to make noise and play into hyperniche trends, interests, and viral moments. 

In many ways, Halloween is a perfect modern example of technofeudalism’s impact on parts of our lives that are totally and inherently unserious. Halloween stopped being about the joy we got from escapism and turned into another audition. We don’t work for enjoyment with our friends and approval from our peers, but for the algorithms on our preferred platforms that dictate our value. And, similar to the culture that existed within feudalistic systems, worlds feel much smaller, because communities feel smaller. This in turn becomes references tailored for the benefit of few rather than the masses. The more we equate value being driven from the rent we pay (attention we give) to space we make our own (attention we receive), the more inclined we are to continue to perpetrate a system that doesn’t really work for us, but does work for us. 

One of the fundamental questions that these pieces bring up each year is whether this is ever going to change? Is it going to get better? Is it going to get worse? Or will it just trek along? Is this the new normal? Of course it is — and it has been for some time. It’s not just about fragmented attention across different platforms, further siloed by different feeds, but about the value we then place on those communities we routinely come across. The quintessential meme about costumes becoming more and more obscure — “What do you MEAN you’re [insert costume here]??” isn’t a comment on the obliqueness of costumes, but a confirmation that Halloween isn’t an offline event anymore (for people older than 13). It’s an entirely online event. 

One of my favorite recent statistics is that 47% of Gen Z report being a fan of something that no one they know in their actual lives is even aware exists. That’s nearly 50% of a population consisting of more than 67 million people in the United States alone. Additionally, nearly 70% of Gen Z Americans spend more time consuming content about a thing they love rather than the thing itself. This can include online culture, but can also spread to more traditional content. Someone may dress up as a character from Star Wars that only a specific fraction of Star Wars fans would get — and that’s precisely where continued connection comes in. People don’t have to convince their friends outside of their preferred platforms to hang out, but they do need to continue proving their commitment to a hive that becomes more and more important the more time is spent within that specific realm. As I wrote about people putting in the effort for an offline event that is designed to produce stronger online longtails: 

If we break it down even further, incentivization is belonging, and belonging in 2024 is a combination of short lived physical events that create a long tail social currency. Barbenheimer was turned into a mini, short lived event that encouraged going to see the movie in order to partake in the phenomena through the subsequent act of posting photos and videos. The viewing experience is secondary to the experience of participating in a larger online trend. If a 23-year-old woman (a demographic that made up more than 60% of Barbie’s opening weekend audience) spends energy on creating the perfect outfit, buys tickets, and spends hours at a theater with the endgame being the online participation that occurs after, the perceived value of that original cost, energy, and attention required rises. 

We’ve all read about how monoculture has existed in a steady decline over the last 15 years, and we’ve all attributed that to the disaggregation of entertainment (music, movies, and TV), the rise of internet culture (increases in DAUs across platforms owned by Meta, Google, and others), and the shifting focus of first screen experiences from the big one in a theater or medium sized one in a living room to the small one in your hand. TikTok’s rise — under 300 million DAUs in 2018 to just under 1.7 billion in 2023, according to Business of Apps — and development from competitors like YouTube Shorts or Instagram Reels speaks to how increasingly focused we are on the media displayed by our phones. 

Still, is it 100% fair to say that these technological changes impacted monoculture? Consider another data point: there were 200 scripted series in the United States in 2010, reports Statista. That number grew to 600 in 2020. In that same period, the number of total produced movies in the United States grew from 481 to 1,481, according to The Numbers. Similarly, the number of daily active users on YouTube jumped from 200 million in 2010 to more than 2.5 billion in 2020. Most importantly, however, is where people’s time went. Time spent with traditional media declined by 35% between 2011 and 2022, while digital media increased by 105%, according to Statista. 

Therefore, not only was more time being spent on digital platforms with media that wasn’t available via traditional distribution portals in centralized environments (ie, broadcast networks or theatrical films) despite supply increasing in those realms, but those digital environments ironically got narrower the more content appeared, not wider. Because the internet got too big to traverse, machine learning tools were implemented to ensure you saw pretty much what you showed some interest in and nothing else.

Therefore, if you loved I Think You Should Leave, which the algorithm would note from actions like sharing with friends, liking, or commenting, then you’d get a ton of people posting about I Think You Should Leave. It would feel like I Think You Should Leave and Tim Robinson are the biggest stars in the world the number of times you saw their content on your feed. They’re not. They are, however, the biggest stars in your world by design. Of course you’d dress up as a one-off character from a mid-episode sketch. That’s what you’ve deemed popular based on your feed — why try to play to a world outside of it?

Herein lies the main problem. Monoculture isn’t just declining, it’s being ignored. Yes, there are still Hulk costumes and yes there are still big tentpole titles across games, movies, TV shows, books, and music that we all participate in on some level. For every costume based on a tweet that references a viral TikTok that someone discovered on Instagram there is also a couple dressed as Taylor Swift and Travis Kelce. But for the most part, those don’t matter as much to people because niche subcultures are totally monolithic for those within them. The costume based on a tweet isn’t for you, and it isn’t for me. It’s for that random group of strangers we feel we know because we see them so often in our feed who might get a kick out of it. Much like how the costume being worn at a house party isn’t for the people there, it’s for the Instagram photo just before it. 

Halloween was never a true reflection of mono interests. It’s always catered toward obsessions, but the reality is that our obsessions have never been more foreign to the average person because there is no semblance of major trends with longevity anymore. Now, to my fellow writers’ point, this is precisely the reason that people should lean into something mainstream that unites us instead of further divides us. I would also argue this is precisely why we’re seeing more people throw themed Halloween parties: if everyone has restrictions and a theme, then there’s less niche to pull on, and everyone is in on the joke. Something that hasn’t existed in our actual lives for some time. 

But if Halloween is a reflection of trends, if Halloween is a reflection of our interests and obsessions, and if Halloween is a reflection of us, then what more can we expect other than niche topics with short shelf lives that appeal to a specific type of audience? In that way, “Microcosm Halloween” is precisely what Halloween was inevitably going to become in a tech age. 

Give it another 50 years, and there might not be enough mainstream media to reference at all. But I’m willing to bet that someone will still dress up as Dracula or Ghostface. That’s the other beauty of Halloween. What may die is never truly dead — it just needs to be resurrected.