this post was submitted on 06 Mar 2026
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Here’s a bit of a personal list:

  1. Undeniably the food scene in the US has changed for the better. Sometimes almost to an overcorrection (protein-slop and all). It’s great that so many different cuisines are easy to name and find even in more traditional rural parts of the country. Organic food isn’t seen as a weird hippie thing but an investment you make for your health.

  2. A lot less smoking in the world. I say this as early gen Z but I never grew up in a time when smoking was seen as cool when I was a teenager. My uncle even quit and that was good to see.

  3. It may not seem like it sometimes, but the one consolation prize of YouTube is I can theoretically be a content creator and never need to worry about the bottleneck that is getting chosen out of millions of people in Hollywood. I could theoretically just stay in the midwest and learn to livestream or make an anime discussion channel and produce content without needing a massive studio or working in Hollywood. Of course, it’s still almost impossible to get paid for it, but still.

  4. More and more people are aware of cars not being the best way to get around which has sparked interest in walkable cities. Problem is, there’s too much demand and too little supply but seeing car culture be questioned is a great first start.

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[–] ConcreteHalloween@hexbear.net 22 points 3 days ago (2 children)

Le epic bacon cringe "nerds are cool now!" culture.

I say this as a guy who plays D&Ds and has a Star Trek next gen poster on the wall.

[–] SorosFootSoldier@hexbear.net 15 points 3 days ago (3 children)

I'd like to think that people are waking up to the fact that the nerds make up dominant society now via silicon valley and are making everyone's lives worse.

[–] Le_Wokisme@hexbear.net 17 points 3 days ago

this lacks class analysis. None of the megacorps making shitloads of money the last 20 years is paying for my therapy for liking that stuff the ten years before that.

[–] ConcreteHalloween@hexbear.net 15 points 3 days ago

That and I think a lot of these people grew up and just became normal people with niche hobbies and realized the whole attempt to turn it into an identity was silly at best.

[–] BelieveRevolt@hexbear.net 9 points 2 days ago* (last edited 2 days ago) (2 children)

I'm so cynical that I think this was all a psyop to get things like Marvel movies accepted by the mainstream, plus of course a way to sell things like Funko Pops.

[–] ConcreteHalloween@hexbear.net 9 points 2 days ago (1 children)

I hear what you're saying, but having lived through it, I'm pretty sure the ball was already rolling before Hollywood capitalized on it. The "nerds are cool now" thing was more a byproduct of the social media age, particularly YouTube. It was the meat and potatoes of a lot of big early YouTube names, Loading.Ready.Run is one property that comes to mind (not to shit on those guys, they seem like nice enough people), as well as Angry Video Game Nerd and Channel Awesome (who seem less cool). The media elite may have encouraged it once they realized they could make big bucks off of it, but I think the beginnings were organic based on what I recall.

[–] Ildsaye@hexbear.net 2 points 2 days ago

In my experience, the Lord of the Rings movies seemed to break the membrane to begin with. There was a qualitative shift then, which the money first meandered then rushed into until extraction had ramped up to maximum.

[–] infuziSporg@hexbear.net 1 points 2 days ago

A psyop to enable another psyop.

We can get everybody to watch lots of movies that are vetted by the DoD, but first everybody has to be open to comics.