The following piece is a collaboration between Matt Klein + Rémi Carlioz.
Rémi Carlioz is creative director and cultural strategist. He’s the Founding Partner of La War Room, a global information warfare agency, and founder of Studio Paname, a creative and cultural strategy studio. Carlioz works with governments, brands, and Fortune 500 companies to build narratives, shaping public perception. He also chairs the advisory board of a philanthropic index fund dedicated to fighting hate and antisemitism.
Imagine: It’s 2026.
A UFC Octagon is erected on the White House lawn. The spectacle is drenched in red, white and blue chest-beating bravado while the most dated vision of manhood is broadcasted. Fireworks. Flag capes. Roars from over 5,000 patriots. Two shirtless men beating the shit out of each other until one’s knocked unconscious.
It’s the Temu Roman Colosseum.
Preposterous. Absurd. Grotesque.
So enchanting you’ll watch regardless.
For those out of the loop, this is a very real plan. The White House has already released renderings of the South Lawn where the fights will transpire to honor 250 years of America. 60 Minutes did a segment, revealing the fighters will walk out of the Oval Office. Don’t consider the security implications. It ruins the fun. Or then again... we’re actually quite cool with casual Washington landmark drop in tours nowadays.
James Kirchick, writing for The New York Times, reaches for Camp to explain our moment, calling the president:
“a Camp icon, like a drag queen... outrageous, transgressive, catty.”
Close.
But Camp requires ironic distance — the ability to stand outside itself and wink. There’s no distance here. You can’t critique The UFC x White House collab because the wink is built in. The event knows it’s ridiculous.
So if it’s not Camp, what do we call this corrupt, flimsy “extra-ness,” which seemingly permeates every aspect of society nowadays?
Endless reboot franchises, dual-screen ASMR slime slop, mass enshittification, Mr. Beast YouTube thumbnails, bots, Duolingo push notifications, hostile Verizon Wireless UX, 23andMe refusing to delete users’ data, Logan Paul, Netflix autoplay, Shein hauls, outrage at brand logos, brands trolling consumers, AI girlfriends, clickbait, Cybertrucks, menu items designed just for Stories, and cotton candy-flavored vapes.
What is this?
The terms we once employed – Camp, Kitsch, Cringe, Tacky, Cheap, Gauche, Garish, Trashy, or Low-brow – all feel obsolete. Too judgemental. Especially considering how pervasive and accepted these manifestations are. It’s not exactly Brain Rot either considering how strategic it all is. Mass tastlessness is not it either. No.
We need new language to make sense of what’s happening.
But first, we have to understand how we arrived here.
Camp vs. Kitsch & The Death of Distance
In the 20th century, cultural dynamics were simpler.
Generally, cultural critique was organized around a tension between sincerity and irony. Kitsch and Camp. Susan Sontag defined Camp as “failed seriousness,” the ironic appreciation of something striving and missing.
“Camp sees everything in quotation marks.”
Camp embraces the extravagant and absurd, finding appeal in what’s generally seen as “bad taste.” John Waters, glam rock, The Rocky Horror Picture Show, Austin Powers, midnight screenings of The Room, Lady Gaga, RuPaul and drag. Camp becomes cultural resistance by embracing what mainstream society deems inferior. Ironic appreciation.
Camp has historically been a survival tool for marginalized communities — a way to challenge dominant cultural hierarchies without direct confrontation. When you can’t critique power head-on, you wink.
On the other hand, Kitsch is the garden gnome. Kitsch is cheap and mass-produced. Disney, the Cheesecake Factory, Lisa Frank, Hallmark greeting cards, Hallmark Christmas movies. “Live Laugh Love” decor. Essayist and art critic Clement Greenberg positioned Kitsch as the antithesis of avant-garde art, representing a degraded form of culture. Kitsch comments on how capitalism hollows out authentic expression, turning it into decoration. But regardless, we place the gnome in the garden because we genuinely love it. It is sentimental and 100% sincere. Kitsch means it.
Therefore, Camp is the “Garden Gnome Liberation Front,” a real French prankster group from the 1990’s, where activists would “rescue” gnomes and release them into the woods. They appreciated the gnome... although ironically.
Kitsch says “this is genuinely beautiful to me,” while Camp says “this is so bad it’s good.” The crucial difference here is distance. The gap between the sincere gnome’s owner and its liberators is where Camp lives.
This distance is cultural critique and commentary.
Okay, so why are we talking about garden gnomes and metaphorical distance?
Today, with the immediacy of our digital networks and global participation, reflective distance has collapsed.
There’s no room to wink online.
No space to deeply criticize.
No opportunity for friction.
No time for aging.
Instead, we have quick, slimy, slippery, always-on, frictionless, re-affirming pleasure-maxing nowness.
Don’t like something? Pick your own new reality. No need to engage with the existing one.
This “distance” has always been closing. It’s just infinitesimal now.
In the 1970s, it took years for the raw, visceral energy of Punk (c. late ‘60s to mid ‘70s) to be processed by the fashion system, appearing in high-end collections like Zandra Rhodes “Conceptual Chic” later in 1977.
In the 1990s, the cycle tightened to months. Nirvana’s Nevermind was released in September 1991. Grunge went from subculture to high fashion in about 14 months, notoriously culminating in Marc Jacobs’ collection for Perry Ellis in November 1992.
The Iraq War began in March 2003. Anti-war protests and military imagery dominated the news. By September 2003, roughly just seven months later, Jean Paul Gaultier’s Spring/Summer 2004 collection premiered in Paris featuring overt military uniforms, fatigues, and camouflage on the runway.
By 2013, responses to even the most innocuous cultural moments became both global and commercial instantaneously. The Harlem Shake viral dance trend exploded on February 2nd. Within just days, major corporations including McDonald’s, the Miami Heat, and even the Norwegian Army posted their own versions of the dance online.
The cultural theorist Fredric Jameson was onto this phenomenon of “distance” decades ago. In his analysis of Postmodernism, he argued that the collapse of historical space and stable norms meant the end of parody. Parody — like classic Camp — requires a beat and shared reality for us to mock.
Now, today’s sleepless, deeply interconnected, cross-national, recursive meta-feedback media loop machine is efficient. Always anticipating. Always reacting. We’re commenting on and activating upon stories as they develop. Every agency wants to build their “cultural newsroom” and “predictive trend algorithms.” Thanks to Polymarket, we’re now betting billions on events before they even occur.
With this collapse of distance, no meaningful aesthetic, language, moment or movement can mature and stabilize.
Immediate coinage, brand participation, monetization, and outrage is imminent.
Even Camp’s own icon, RuPaul, is at peak commercialization.
An algorithm can’t register a wink or nuance.
And when there’s no distance, when subtly doesn’t trend and when ambiguity doesn’t convert, organizations have adapted, repackaging culture itself to match the machine’s literalism. Everyone’s in smooth-brain mode.
Products and campaigns are now engineered to be irony-proof. When Balenciaga sells a luxury trash bag for $1,790, they’re not creating Camp. They’re pre-ironizing their own product, baking the joke into the commodity itself. Just like UFC weigh-ins at the Lincoln Memorial, it’s just another opportunity for engagement metrics and optimization.
Consider how brands’ April Fools’ stunts are turned into real products with enough “buzz,” while everyday real brand campaigns sound like gimmicky April Fools’ stunts. KFC’s bath bombs. Wendy’s “We Beefin’” mix tape. Crocs’ cowboy boots. Velveeta’s nail polish. United Airline’s pajama line. Statefarm turning Jake, a throwaway joke from an ad, into their official spokesperson.
You can’t satirize something that’s already satirizing itself.
1. Without the reflective distance Jameson identified as essential to parody, 2. when brands exploit and pre-ironize faster than culture can stabilize, and 3. when those in power can’t handle the heat, meaningful critique becomes impossible. Ex. South Park has never been more in need yet at risk.
So what is this?
Dashboard Culture
What’s in the driver’s seat, and what culture is currently optimized for is amplitude and perceptibility. Noise. Sensationalism. Spectacle. Reptilian-brain inducing pageantry.
Does it register as a metric on the dashboard? If so, good.
If you are not loud, you do not exist culturally, politically, or socially.
In the age of the algorithm, cultural value becomes synonymous with measurability. Dashboards don’t give a shit about merit, substance or even truth.
The White House Twitter account shitposting, nonsensical AI LinkedIn slop and a UFC Octagon on the South Lawn perfectly embody Dashboard culture. Bonnie Blue headlines, subway ads for FaceTune, complaining about social media on social media. A sacrifice of integrity for the sole purpose of just being seen.
Grotesque spectacle eclipses beautiful spectacle — awe — as the former becomes so effortless, cheap and immediate.
Are we surprised? It’s the result of two decades of a runaway Attention Economy.
But what we know about culture is that for every action, there is an equal and opposite reaction. Trend. Counter-trend. Tensions. Enter:
Camouflage Culture
Camouflage Culture is off-the-grid, private, secretive, quiet and exclusive. Here ideas, aesthetics and movements can finally fester, illegible to the dashboard. Camouflage is encrypted, niche, and resistant to capture. Invisible to brands, metrics and algorithmic capture. It’s the borderlands, home of cultural fugitives. It’s cultural production under the conditions of utter surveillance.
Camouflage Culture is the dinner party you’re not invited to, Substack paywall, algo-speak, double meaning emojis, linguistic drift and slang, Chatham House Rules, three hour podcasts, IFYYK, ephemerality, anonymity, vibes, group chats, off-off-broadway, Yondr phone-locking pouches, the One Piece flag, deep-fried memes, Skibidi, niche subreddits, members-only clubs, and printed zines.
Beyond the Dark Forest theory — fearful retreat from the online public — Camo is strategic opacity, obfuscation and resistance: culture that refuses to be easily readable, trackable, or sellable.
Camouflage Culture a social immune response to a panoptic gaze of social judgement, audience capture, thirsty “How do you do, fellow kids?” brands, permanently-recorded life, and attention-seeking algorithmic conditioning.
This is desperation for distance again.
As a result, “going dark” is seen as a luxury with class implications. After all, being able to control your own visibility amidst surveillance capitalism is a privilege. For this reason, Dashboard Culture becomes a stand in for “bad taste” or “lower class,” while Camo Culture becomes a stand in for “good taste” or “upper class.”
Consider how productivity bros with their income in their bios are seen as such low culture. Anyone with actual wealth doesn’t need to fight for attention with clickbait thumbnails online. It isn’t as much algorithmic pressures but compounding market pressures that create this cruel game and class signals.
And here’s the problem: Dashboard Culture has reigned supreme without any meaningful critique — not because we embraced it, but because so many abandoned the field to go Camo. Fifteen-second debate “owns” are the closest we get to public intelligent deliberation nowadays — but it’s just critique designed for and by the dashboard. No depth or sustenance. Just empty calorie spectacle.
We’ve been so focused on surviving in the peripheral shadows of Camouflage Culture that so many have ceded the visible world and games of the algo entirely, unintentionally creating a dangerous vacuum. The result? Two shirtless men kicking each other in the chest are representing a country, filling the space. And now we lack the influence to explain why that’s fucking insane.
Resisting the Tyranny of Dashboards
The Secretary of Defense for President John F. Kennedy, Robert McNamara, believed he could win Vietnam through metrics. McNamara replaced the complex reality of war with a simple measurement: body count as KPI. He won the spreadsheets, but lost the war. As a lesson...
The McNamara Fallacy states: What can’t be counted, doesn’t matter... or even exist.
This is of course not true, but we’re living the McNamara Fallacy daily. It’s our Dashboard Culture.
So where does this ultimately lead us?
Foucault’s “grotesque sovereignty.”
We are living an exercise of power that is so openly ridiculous, disqualified and contemptible, yet authority remains fully enforced. Why? Arguably, meaningful cultural critique doesn’t stand a chance. The “jokes” and “winks” are built in. See: Trump 2028 hats.
When the exception becomes the rule and when every day is a carnival of spectacle, where do you stand to point out that this is utterly absurd? We’re not outside the tent looking in at the circus — we’re in the circus, and the circus is everything. The clowns didn’t seize power, power became clownish, and now we can’t explain why that’s so wrong because all our critical language assumes a non-clown baseline, which no longer exists.
So, the question isn’t how to restore “good taste” or revive Camp. Instead, the question is:
What forms of cultural critique and resistance remain possible?
The Dashboard’s speed and scale makes reflection impossible, while Camouflage Culture’s invisibility surrenders any chance of mass influence.
In our Dashboard vs. Camouflage world, marginalized communities face an impossible choice: be loud and get targeted, or go dark and disappear.
Dashboard Culture vs. Camouflage Culture is diagnostic language, not a cure. This piece ends where honest cultural criticism should: with a framework, not instructions. Only by offering language and attempting to name what’s transpiring, can we begin to figure out how to un-fuck ourselves here.
But... briefly, for gentle direction...
First, we must rehabilitate critique itself — reclaiming it as democracy’s natural response to power rather than toxicity or hate. Loving something means caring enough to critique it, and we need the courage to do so on the dashboard’s home turf: the feed. Accept cringe and lower metrics in service of a higher purpose.
Second, we must resist the compulsion to document everything. The highest cultural capital isn’t the best Story — it’s experiences that never become content. The party without a Partiful. The concert you don’t record. The run you don’t track. The hobby you don’t monetize. Leave the Logged World behind. Reclaim distance.
One strategy reclaims how we engage with the dashboard and the other reclaims our right to live beyond it entirely.
So, the UFC Octagon on the White House lawn is not Camp.
Instead, it’s Dashboard Culture.
It’s what culture looks like when we’ve subordinated all values to the imperative of becoming so seen. Spectacle above all.
More precisely, the ring on the South Lawn is a question. It asks, “Are we still capable of cultural critique without fear? And can we do so without having to go Camoflauge?”
This is neither normal nor Camp.
It’s what happens when the logic of the dashboard colonizes governance itself, when virality becomes policy, and when the only remaining measure of legitimacy is if people are watching.
It’s what happens when we give up.