They Killed Normal and Called It Progress
Julia Roberts, Applebee's, Bandcamp, your manager, and the death of everything in between. (Also, Sweetgreen is the A24 of dining and I will die on this hill.)
If My Best Friend’s Wedding came out today, it would be a prestige streaming series called “Unlikable Woman”, marketed as “brave,” dissected on Instagram, and quietly buried by the algorithm in forty-eight hours.
I took my wife to see it at the Alamo Drafthouse for Valentine’s Day and had the unsettling realization that this used to be normal: a $38 million studio movie about a woman being petty, jealous, wrong, human, opening on thousands of screens (against Batman!!!) and making $299 million because regular adults left their houses and bought a ticket. Try pitching that in 2026... You’d be told it’s too expensive to be indie, too adult to be IP, too mainstream to be prestige.... That’s because nobody makes movies for normal adults anymore. We still make blockbusters, for sure. We still make A24 boutique masterpieces for people with Letterboxd accounts and opinions about Criterion — absolutely. What we stopped making is the middle, the common culture you could just walk into without curating your identity first. We optimized it out of existence and called it progress.
This is not an essay about movies, tho. Have you noticed that the middle is gone from everything? Restaurants, companies, careers, music, retail, the economy itself. What replaced it is a barbell: one enormous weight on each end, nothing in the center, and most of us trying not to get crushed by the bar.
And the replacement does look better every single time, I grant you that. The A24 film is better than the $40 million adult drama from 2007, yeah, we can all agree on that. The Sweetgreen bowl is better than the Applebee’s chicken parm, sure. Your favorite Substack is sharper than the mid-list magazine that folded in 2019. Every replacement is a genuine upgrade. But every replacement serves fewer and fewer people. And nobody seems to think that’s a problem, which is how you know who the replacements were built for.
Let’s stay with the movies for a minute, because the con is easiest to see there. In 2007, four of the five Best Picture nominees were mid-budget studio films. No Country for Old Men cost $25 million. Atonement, $30 million. There Will Be Blood, $25 million. Michael Clayton, $21 million. These were not art house experiments requiring a film studies minor to appreciate. They were studio releases for adults, distributed widely, discussed by everyone… you didn’t need to earn access through cultural literacy, you just bought a ticket.
That entire tier of filmmaking is now effectively extinct. The $50 to $100 million adult drama is a dead format. In 2025 every mid-budget swing missed: After the Hunt at $70 to $80 million, The Smashing Machine at $50 million, Bugonia at $50 million, Black Bag at $50 million — all of them dead on arrival, all of them the kind of movie that would have been a normal Tuesday for a studio in 2005.
Hollywood now has two settings: spend $200 million on a superhero or spend $7 million and pray it goes viral. The dial in between got ripped off.
Which brings me to A24, and the part I’m writing on purpose to make a lot of people with tote bags very angry. A24’s entire 2024 slate, all 16 films, cost $250 million total. That is the same budget Amazon spent on Red One, a single movie starring The Rock that opened to the sound of its own corpse hitting the floor. A24 makes roughly 14 films a year at about $7 million each, 92% of their top-grossing titles are rated R versus roughly half the industry average, and the films are genuinely, undeniably great. They are making movies for adults in an industry that forgot adults exist.
But they are also making movies for a very specific kind of adult. The adult who lives in a big city, college-educated, 18-to-34, middle-to-upper-middle income, the kind of person who uses “intentional” as a compliment and has never described a film as “pretty good” without immediately qualifying that statement.
Telling someone you love A24 in 2026 is the cultural equivalent of telling them you shop at the farmer’s market. It’s true, it’s fine, and it tells me exactly how much money you make.
The $38 million Julia Roberts movie served everyone. Your mom. Your coworker who thinks “foreign film” means it has subtitles. The couple on a second date who just picked the one that started at 7:30. A24 on the other hand serves the people who already know what they’re looking for, and if you already know what you’re looking for, you were never the audience that needed the middle.
In 1997 you could walk into a theater and accidentally discover a masterpiece that everyone would discuss the next morning, the next week, the entire month. In 2026 you subscribe to three services, follow four critics on Letterboxd, check the Rotten Tomatoes or Metacritic score, and pre-select your experience before you sit down. Discovery died and curation replaced it (and nobody asked who gets to curate, because the people doing the curating are the same people writing the obituaries for the old system, and they seem pretty happy with the new one).
(Sorry for all the parentheses — I can’t seem to help myself!)
We didn’t save movies from mediocrity. We made good taste a gated community and then wrote think pieces about how the gate is actually a door.
The barbell didn’t stop at the multiplex, btw — it ate the restaurant industry alive. The same economy that killed the $40 million adult drama also killed the $14 chicken parm, and for the exact same reason: nobody who makes decisions eats there anymore.
More than 20 chains filed for bankruptcy in 2025 alone. Hooters. Red Lobster. TGI Fridays. Buca di Beppo. Denny’s is closing up to 90 locations. Applebee’s, 25 to 35. Outback, Jack in the Box, Red Robin — all shrinking. Restaurant prices are up 34% since 2019, outpacing inflation, which means eating out now costs more and the places that used to make it affordable are the ones disappearing. In D.C., 76% of mid-priced restaurants saw fewer diners last year. The number for fine dining was 56%. The data is from Washington but the math is everywhere — in New York, the $25 Tuesday-night neighborhood spot is collapsing while the tasting menu and the fast-casual counter are both doing fine. The top is fine. The bottom is surviving. The middle is where the body is.
Nobody is crying over Applebee’s because the people who ate there don’t write essays. That’s not a joke. That’s the structural problem with every conversation about the death of the middle: the people who lost the most have the least access to the platforms where we discuss what’s been lost. The entire eulogy is being written by the people who never ate there, and it shows, because the eulogy is usually “good riddance” dressed up as food criticism.
Sweetgreen is the A24 of dining and I will die on this hill.
You pay 20 bucks for a grain bowl and feel like you made a good decision. The food is indeed better and healthier than Applebee’s and Outback, for sure. But the experience is worse in EVERY way that matters to a community. Nobody is celebrating a birthday at Sweetgreen; nobody is meeting their in-laws there; nobody is having a loud, messy, wonderful family dinner. Casual dining chains were mediocre and corporate and the fried Bloomin’ Onions were a war crime against carbohydrates. But they were also the last restaurants in America where a janitor and an accountant sat in the same room, ordered from the same menu, and neither of them felt like they were in the wrong place. We killed that and replaced it with a $20 bowl that comes with a side of class signaling and no possibility of a shared experience.
The Sweetgreen line moves fast because it’s designed for individuals optimizing a Tuesday. Applebee’s was slow because families were sitting down together, and that is exactly the thing we decided wasn’t worth saving. Red Lobster went bankrupt and your first instinct was “I haven’t been there in years.” That is the eulogy for the entire American middle class in one sentence.
The things we let die are always the things we stopped noticing.
We stopped noticing and then we stopped caring and then we wrote the obituary like we weren't at the funeral. The same thing is happening to careers. IMHO, the popular narrative about AI and jobs is wrong. Everyone is worried about entry-level: the robots are coming for the interns, the new grads can’t find jobs, entry-level postings are down 29% since January 2024. Fine. True. But here’s what nobody wants to talk about, because the people it’s happening to are the people who post about resilience and sit on the panels: the middle is being gutted faster than the bottom, and it has been for thirty years, and AI just ripped the bandaid off a wound that was already hemorrhaging.
Economists call it job polarization: employment growing at the top, growing at the bottom, collapsing in the middle. The St. Louis Fed, Brookings, and the NBER have all documented the same U-shaped curve since the 1980s. What’s new is that the people losing their jobs this time aren’t factory workers who can be talked about sympathetically on cable news — they’re managers, analysts, coordinators, the people who thought they were safe because they went to college and learned to use Excel. Middle managers made up a third of all layoffs in 2025.
According to Gartner, one in five organizations will use AI to eliminate more than half of their middle management positions by 2026.
That’s the first kill.
The second kill is quieter and worse. When you eliminate middle management, you eliminate the only people in the organization who had time to teach anyone anything. Entry-level workers don’t learn from the C-suite. They learn from the person one or two levels above them: the manager who remembered what it was like to not know things, who could translate strategy into tasks, who noticed when someone was struggling before they failed. That layer is being automated, and every company doing it is calling it efficiency, and none of them are asking who trains the replacements.
Companies with 250 to 499 employees — the mid-size firms that trained most of the American workforce for most of American history — have dropped 22.5% since 2020. In the same window, 21 million new business applications were filed. The startup is the A24 of the economy: it gets the magazine profiles and the podcast interviews and the posts about “building in public,” and 90% of them fail, and we don’t talk about the failures because failure doesn’t perform well as content. Meanwhile the mid-size company — the boring one with 300 employees that paid you decently and had a guy named Doug who showed you how to actually do your job — that one is disappearing and nobody is writing a TED talk about it because “I worked at a place that was fine and it taught me things” is not a hero’s journey anyone wants to hear.
Music did this years ago and nobody
noticed because musicians are poor.
Bandcamp was the last platform on the internet that treated music like something a person made rather than content a platform monetized. Then Epic Games bought it, got bored, and sold it to Songtradr, a licensing company whose entire business model is the thing Bandcamp was built to resist. Songtradr fired half the staff in a week. Three of six editors at Bandcamp Daily — the best independent music journalism outlet left standing, the place that actually wrote about artists your algorithm would never find! — were laid off. All eight elected members of the union’s bargaining committee were shown the door.
The Songtradr CEO told Billboard he thought Bandcamp was great as-is (he said this after firing the people who made it great). The future of independent music was being negotiated by a licensing company whose website talks about monetizing your tracks for TikTok and YouTube, and the people who built the culture were cleaning out their desks.
Spotify’s pay structure is the barbell in its purest form: more than half of all revenue goes to artists making $500,000 a year or more, and that group is less than 1% of artists on the platform. We call this “democratizing music.” The mid-tier label, the one that could sign a band, develop them over three albums, absorb a bad sophomore record, and build something that lasted, is mostly extinct. Now you’re either on a major with a marketing budget that could fund a small country, or you’re alone with a Distrokid account and an Instagram strategy and a second job. “Independent artist” used to mean you had an independent label behind you. Now it means nobody is helping you and you’re also your own publicist, tour manager, content creator, AND therapist. We romanticize this. We call it empowerment. But to me that is just abandonment with better branding.
I need to be honest about something,
because this essay is meaningless if I’m not.
The A24 of media is the prestige newsletter. This one included. Found Object, the thing you are reading right now, exists because the middle of media collapsed. The mid-tier magazine, the one that paid writers a living wage, had a real editorial staff, reached a broad and ideologically mixed audience, and functioned as genuine common ground, that’s gutted. What replaced it is a thousand newsletters reaching a few thousand people each. The writing is often better. The ecosystem is inarguably worse. Newsletter writers are building a lifeboat and they should be honest that the lifeboat fits fewer people than the ship. Every Substack writer who left a magazine to go independent is participating in the same structural collapse they write about. Our audiences are smaller, more educated, more self-selecting. We tell ourselves this is better because the work is more honest. It might just be more efficient at serving people who were already being served. The creator economy is the death of the middle wearing a cool hoodie and a Stripe account. The fact that we can name the problem doesn’t mean we’re not the problem.
There is a counterargument and I want to take it seriously before I take it apart. The American Enterprise Institute published a paper in January arguing that the middle class is shrinking because more families have moved up. The upper-middle class went from 10% of households in 1979 to 31% in 2025. For the first time ever, more families sit above the middle-class threshold than below it. Their thesis is cheerful and sounds correct in a conference room: stop complaining about a shrinking middle, you pessimists, the middle is shrinking because everyone’s getting richer.
Now try explaining that to someone paying $25,572 a year in family health insurance premiums, which is the current average and represents a 20% increase since 2020. Or to someone whose childcare costs jumped 29% in the same period. Or to the “aspirational consumers” — the professionals between the 80th and 95th income percentiles — who cut their luxury spending by roughly 35% in 2025 because even the upper-middle class is feeling the squeeze. You can make more money and feel more broke at the same time. That is not a paradox. That is the economy working exactly as the barbell intends. This is the first generation in American history where “upper middle class” means you can almost afford childcare.
Did you know that 80% of luxury sector growth since 2019 has come from price increases, not new customers? The brands aren’t finding new people. They’re charging the same people more and calling it growth, which is the economic equivalent of a streaming service raising your subscription price and telling you they added value.
Here’s what I keep thinking about, sitting in the Alamo Drafthouse with Julia Roberts dancing at the wedding to a Burt Bacharach song. Every section of this essay is the same story wearing different clothes.
Film did it. Restaurants did it. Companies did it. Music did it. Retail did it. Media did it. Something in the middle got killed, something better and narrower replaced it, and the people who could afford the replacement wrote a narrative about how this was evolution.
Each time, the thing that died was the thing that served the most people with the least pretension, and each time, the thing that replaced it was a genuine improvement that served fewer people while flattering the taste of a specific class.
The pattern is so consistent it stops looking like a market correction and starts looking like a heist.
We didn’t save culture from mediocrity, we just privatized the commons and called it curation. The middle wasn’t glamorous, it wasn’t “optimized.” Nobody was writing manifestos about it. It was the place where most people actually lived, where you watched a movie you didn’t have to research, ate dinner with your family without checking a review, worked a job that wasn’t a calling but paid the bills and had someone who showed you the ropes. Where you could be pretty good at something without being the best, and that was enough, and nobody posted about it.
We killed all of it, every piece, in every industry, and replaced it with something beautiful and expensive that fewer people can reach. And we called that progress, because the people who name things are the people the new system was built for.
The next time someone tells you the market is self-correcting, ask them where you’re supposed to eat dinner.
WHAT I FOUND
4 things worth your time this week
Cabel Sasser, “Wes Cook and the McDonald’s Mural”
Cabel Sasser spent years obsessing over a hand-painted mural in a McDonald’s in Centralia, Washington. The artist was a guy named Wes Cook — closeted, largely forgotten, dead since 2006. The mural was huge, gorgeous, and scheduled for demolition under McDonald’s “Vision 2020” remodel initiative, which required every franchise to strip out anything with personality and replace it with the same gray laminate and stock photography of lettuce. Sasser got permission to save it. He drove up with a crowbar and a friend, peeled it off the wall while a man ate a Big Mac three feet away, and rolled it up like a scroll. Behind the mural, written in pencil on bare drywall since 1980: “COMING SOON!” There’s also an udder lawsuit. I won’t spoil it. Watch the talk first — 19 minutes, genuinely moving — then read the full post. This is what it looks like when someone decides a thing is worth saving and then actually saves it.
Ridiculon, Mewgenics OST
Eighty-two tracks. For a cat game. The soundtrack to Mewgenics has no business being this unhinged… it rips through doom metal, cabaret, J-pop, rockabilly, and whatever genre “Eatin’ Rats” belongs to. Other song titles include “Flush,” “Mom I Really Hate You,” and “HUMANICIDE.” It’s sold on Bandcamp, which I just spent several paragraphs writing about dying. Buy it there anyway. That’s the point.
The Art of Merch Mail-In Order Sheets — Instagram / @tshirts.archives
A carousel of vintage mail-order merchandise forms spanning Psychic TV, Metal Blade Records, Megadeth, KMFDM, Donna Summer, Depeche Mode, Bowie fan club closeouts, Rage Against the Machine, Aliens comics, and a hand-drawn order sheet for Vivienne Westwood’s Seditionaries collection — bondage trousers, muslin sleeves, pencil sketches, a phone number. You mailed a check to Tarzana, California. You waited four to six weeks. You got a t-shirt with a skull on it and it meant something because you had to want it badly enough to find the form, fill it out, and send your money into a void on faith. Every one of these sheets is a dead economy — small-batch, direct-to-fan, paper-and-stamps commerce with its own design language. All of it got replaced by one Add to Cart button.
EPiC: Elvis Presley in Concert — In IMAX now. Wide release February 27.
Go see this on the biggest screen you can find. It will be the closest any of us ever get to seeing Elvis live. It’s not exactly a documentary — Baz Luhrmann found 59 hours of lost footage in salt mines in Kansas and spent two years manipulating it into something closer to a religious experience than a historical record. It’s not 100% real. It’s 100% awesome.
Nothing is more American than Elvis. Absolutely nothing.
Kid overcomes poverty and gets bullied for being too soft — singing, dancing, swinging his hips like he’s trying to shake something loose. Conservatives lose their minds. Too sexual. Too much eyeliner. Too much whatever this is. Uncle Sam’s solution: draft him. Send him to Germany. Let the army turn him into a man and end this national embarrassment. He comes back. Still himself. So they try Plan B: Hollywood. The one place in America where a man could wear mascara on camera and nobody would call the FBI. Keep him busy. Keep him contained. Keep him away from actual music. It almost worked. Then he decided to take it seriously again, and the cheeseburger killed him.
God Bless America.
Found Object is a weekly newsletter about culture, surfaced. If something here made you think, made you angry, or made you want to send it to someone who needs to read it — that’s the whole point. See you next week. Bring a crowbar.
When I first read this, I also felt a kind of nostalgic mourning for the "Death of the Middle"—the idea that the loss of Applebee’s and $40 million Julia Roberts rom-coms was a collapse of the American Commons.
But upon sitting with it, I think it’s just because I’m in deep middle-age and everything’s on fire right now.
Because the middle tier wasn't really “the commons.” It was capitalism performing a monoculture. I mean I loved MTV when it mattered. I’m also fine that it no longer does.
We didn't sit in those booths because we were "sharing an experience.” We sat there because we had no choice. The "Common Ground” was mostly just the result of a limited inventory.
Let’s not mistake the illusion of a community for the reality of a captive audience.
When I first read this, I pictured that scene at the end of Goonies when the galleon sails away. This piece casts us as outcasts staring wistfully after a romantic ship carrying the bones of past adventures. When we’re really mourning the convenience of a time when everyone was stuck on the same shitty barge being pulled by a mediocre tug.
I don’t know. I think I’d rather be a scavenger in the wreckage of a barbell economy than a "managed unit" at a Buca di Beppo, pretending the breadsticks are a shared cultural heritage.
Still, you earned a sub for making me reflect. Definitely looking forward to more of your writing.
One thought I often have is, "Do people just not want to DO anything anymore? Do they not WANT to be regular humans who do/read/watch/eat normal stuff?" And then I feel old for missing window shopping at the mall, eating at a chain restaurant, and picking a fun-sounding movie from the listings. OK, none of that's a thing anymore, so what are people doing for the hell of it?
(Also, I love this movie and used to own it on VHS. I also wrote a recap of the 90s film "The Cutting Edge" in part to honor a time when middle-of-the-road rom-coms/sports movies got greenlit all the time.)