Blank Generation

By Mina Tavakoli

American culture is drowning in a sea of slop. In our latest issue, Mina Tavakoli reviews a new book that wades into the muck.

IN APRIL 2025, a home security technology company, Wyze Labs Inc., released what looked like a totally unremarkable ninety-second advertisement. The ad’s spokesman seems exactly as anonymous as any other YouTuber trying to sell some inscrutable pharmaceutical—you get the obvious glare of his ring light, the flavorless Airbnb neutrality of his bedroom, the SKIP AD button in the corner, deliciously clickable in three . . . two . . . one . . . but then we hear his sunny—and maybe even familiar—voice. “I’m Antoine Dodson,” he says. “Ever wonder what happened to me?”

Fifteen years ago, Dodson, then a resident of the Lincoln Park housing project in Huntsville, Alabama, called local NBC affiliate WAFF-48 News to report the attempted rape of his sister. What followed that call was a sequence of events that catapulted young Antoine into twenty-first-century immortality: the news crew arrived in front of his family’s apartment complex. The host pushed a microphone toward Dodson’s face. Cameras started rolling. “Obviously, we have a rapist in Lincoln Park,” he says in the footage, wagging around a rolled-up newspaper. “He’s climbing in your windows, he’s snatching your people up, trying to rape them, so y’all need to hide your kids, hide your wife—and hide your husband, because they’re raping everybody out here.”

The two-minute video was one of those accidentally nuclear-strength blockbusters of small-town American theater. Within hours of airing, the WAFF-48 report was uploaded to YouTube by user CrazyLaughAction. It blazed through the algorithm with the help of an attendant parody video titled “BED INTRUDER SONG!!!” by the Gregory Brothers—a four-piece pop group known primarily for musical work that, per their channel’s series title, auto-tuned the news—making Dodson the bewildered star of the year’s most-watched video. The track became available on iTunes, swan-dove into the Billboard Hot 100, and received an award from Comedy Central.

This bears repeating: it was 2010, a time when the phrase “Tik Tok” was in regular parlance only because it was the title of Ke$ha’s number-one song of the year. How was Dodson supposed to know that his own celebrity would sit near the top of the year’s time capsule of affectations?

“In the twenty-first century, conspicuousness has become a troubled science.”

Back in the present, and back in the ad, Dodson waxes briefly about his life after the stardust settled. It sounds like it’s been nice. He now has a ten-year-old son and a career in waste management—but he’s here to discuss his Wyze camera. As Dodson testifies to the miracle of a device that allows him to monitor his family’s whereabouts on the go, Wyze’s video playback—which scopes neon-green boxes on any moving object—settles on footage of Dodson’s grandmother in her kitchen. “So, when my grandmother tells me if she takes her medication, I can go back and watch that video to see if she’s lying.” He smiles. “Wyze makes it so you never wonder,” he says. “You don’t have to hide.”

In the twenty-first century, conspicuousness has become a troubled science. In the last rasp of the noughties, Dodson is a less-than-minor character in its splurge of lore, but the logic of his reappearance moves in the sensibly hallucinatory fashion of most names delivered to public consciousness across the past twenty-five years, and “BED INTRUDER SONG!!!” could reasonably be called one of the more exemplary pieces of 2010s pop art. Not just because the song uses auto-tune as an instrument, nor because it has a gallery of white producers profiting hugely from drama happening in and around low-income public housing, nor even because it takes a very fresh-off-the-Bush-era approach to the whole idea of getting raped, but in its slice-and-dice Frankensteining of the videorama that now makes up the stock of the attention economy.

From news event, to take, to virality, to memory-holed graveyard, and, with some brute force, revived to the news cycle or straight back to meme again: the past few years of culture’s spin feels like a herky-jerky death loop of information. Origin stories slurry; terabytes of recorded content compound, sequel, and franchise; and, like the unabating scroll of your short-form video platform of choice, it feels like it’s becoming close to impossible to do anything but watch data get dis- and reassembled on repeat. The stuff just keeps coming.

With reinforced gloves and hazmat suit, W. David Marx has waded, maybe inadvisably, into the endless present’s cranking, bucking flow. His Blank Space: A Cultural History of the Twenty-First Century contends to be the “first sweeping history of how money, technology, and ideology rewrote the rules of culture in the twenty-first century.” Training his lens on the irony-deficient Obama years, the forgettable and confusing Biden blip, and the gothic anxiety of the Trump eon, Marx redramatizes the anni horribiles of the last American quarter century as one big “lowest-common-denominator battle for attention.”

In Marx’s coliseum, the gore flies.

Continue reading “Blank Generation,” an essay by Mina Tavakoli, on our site.

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