The Return of the "Scene" in 2025 - personal connection is coming back

The digital revolution killed the "scene" - mostly through social media. Now it's coming back. It's going to be great! And artists will be among the first to benefit.

Photo by Daria Nepriakhina 🇺🇦 on Unsplash

The new year is here, and I want to post my own predictions of where 2025 is going to take us. Don’t worry, it won’t take a lot of reading. But I think it might be interesting as it’s my view that 2025 will be a pivotal year for forming culture for the next ten, maybe even twenty years.

It won’t be immediately obvious, but the more I read, the more I watch and observe, the more I listen to new music, the more it seems to me that 2025 will bring the idea of the “scene” back. Something is brewing underground.

What do I mean? What is the “scene”?

In the 2000s, I was part of the music scene in South Africa. My band, Jonno’s Cure had a song in the Top 40 on the radio. I can’t remember what number we got to—probably not too high, else I would remember! I had friends with number 1 hits. I had friends that got record deals in the U.S. Other friends and acquaintances in the scene did extremely well. It was exciting and we all had big dreams.

Music has always been about the scene. Musicians are big on friendship and being a ‘good hang’. For all the posturing on stage or the rock star persona, behind the scenes musicians are like board gamers. We like to geek out on music together and hang with each other. We like to have a good laugh.

A lot of scenes are like that. The art scene. The literary scene. The sports scene too, I’m sure, but I wouldn’t know too much about that. Culture essentially is built on relationship. And within the larger scenes are smaller scenes. Some of these scenes become mainstream for a little while to various degrees of popularity and these scenes are usually geographically-based, at least initially.

For example, the Grunge scene in the 1990s was actually borne out of the Seattle scene. The musicians in Seattle were all moving in a certain direction, and they were friends. It was eventually so interesting and exciting that it became bigger than Seattle.

Over in Britain, there was the Madchester scene, for example. Some scenes become so exciting that they grow out of their geographic zones and then become mainstream, like the Britpop scene which was an altogether different movement.

What’s my point? It’s to briefly show, in a simplistic way, that culture forms via relationships. Like-minded people form a band, their friends go to watch the band and love the band because it’s their friends. It they’re good or interesting enough, it grows. It’s all because of personal relationship. Nothing grows without that personal connection happening.

The digital world - especially social media - tried to change all that, and did for a while

Social media was an attempt to capitalize on this by making digital relationships possible and pretending as if these were real relationships. No longer was a scene relegated to a geographical boundary. Rather, the boundaries would be drawn around platforms. So like-minded people could group on Reddit, or find each other on Facebook, and artists could speak directly to them and it all would happen online. This could happen anywhere in the world.

That’s how it was in the early days, and in many ways it worked and was exciting. Yes, digital relationships can be real. I met many friends actually through a blog I would frequent at and comment on. But most digital relationships aren’t real and the ones that become really real are those when the people actually meet up, like I did with my blog friends.

But then social media killed the scene. It did this by killing what makes a scene exciting—a certain ‘undergroundness’ to it all. Inside jokes. Names not everyone knows, but will soon (if you know the name first, you’re a respected member of the scene). These can be shared to a degree online, but the public nature of online today automatically makes it all performative.

So what happened? It all became a popularity contest. People began to chase likes and followers. What kills any scene in history? When it becomes too mainstream and performative. When it needs to be PC. It then lacks the character, the ‘insiderness’ of it all, and it is no longer interesting. It gets taken over by hacks and opportunists, mass producers (‘scalability’ is king!) and automation comes in (copy and paste the formula, and sell to the public).

The techbros thought they were immune to this predictable outcome, but they’re not. We’re on the last phase now: automation (A.I.). Copy and paste.

The social media scene, if it even ever was one, is starting to crumble. And we’re going to start seeing it in culture now.

It’s just the natural outcome

There was always a fairly natural progression to this outcome. Music and art is much like what you see in the gentrification phenomenon. Artists tend to move into poorer areas, make those areas cool, and then the money arrives to capitalize. For a time, everyone is happy. But then it becomes too expensive, too mainstream, no longer interesting, and the artists can’t afford to live there anymore and don’t want to. After a peak it falls and no one wants to live there anymore, because it’s now full of con artists and fakers and crime, and the scene has started up again somewhere else.

The online world was, for awhile in the 90s, the underground. Geeks would hang out on forums, IRC chats, places people didn’t know about. It was a scene. Hackers were seen to be eccentric, mysterious geeks (“Hackers”, anyone?). Later, this started to become mainstream. Facebook in the early days was exciting—it was like when the underground gets popular, but not too popular, and everyone who is cool are the early adopters who enjoy being seen as the cool kids who were right all along about what is cool.

But now we have Tiktok. And you know what? I think it’s peaked and is no longer cool. My kids think social media is dumb, and they have been turned off to Mr Beast. People are moving to podcasts—to real people they feel they can trust.

The underground tech scene is probably still alive somewhere, and it’s probably still exciting; but I don’t think it’s at social media.

‘Hackers’. (Photo by United Artists courtesy Everett Collection)

Social media was designed to gentrify and dismantle the scene

By its very nature, social media was designed to replace personal connections and put it all online. Zuckerberg can wax as lyrical as he wants about how Facebook was designed to connect families and friends as never before, etc. Yes, he is right in that we could now share photos across the world and stay in touch with each others’ lives. It was a great idea in principle, and technology does allow us to do that. It’s not all bad. But he lives in a dream world if he honestly thinks it’s still about that simple idea (which I don’t think he does).

The reality is that social media soon morphed into downgrading real-world, face-to-face relationships and destroying scenes rising up that develop from those sorts of connections. By its very nature social media has been designed to do this in an effort to try and have it all happen online, and sell your information and your attention while at it. But it’s not human and it hasn’t worked in the greater scheme of things, nor will it work. I think Zuckerberg realized that, which is why he eventually abandoned the metaverse idea and quickly pivoted to A.I. like everyone else.

So we move on too

2025 will be the year we’ll start seeing the kids move on. Kids are human beings who, like all of us, will long for social connection and to be part of something underground, exciting, and rebellious. Parents on their phone all the time? Many kids will rebel against that. Mom always on Instagram? Stupid parents have no clue!

Social media isn’t the interesting place it was in 2008. As it has grown and seeks to capitalize more and more on people, gentrifying all that was cool about the internet, and making it more expensive to be there, more unsafe (crime loves to move into once-gentrified areas), more noisy and clogged up with traffic, it is no longer exciting but a drain on everyone’s wellbeing. The kids will want something else. And I agree with them.

Personal connection will be king

The treasure will lie in personal connection again. Face to face connection. Or if online, through those platforms that augment or facilitate face-to-face connection, rather than seek to replace it, as social media eventually tried to do.

In other words, the ‘scene’ will come back.

What will be gold, going forward, will not be followers on Instagram or likes on Facebook, or even tons of engagement on X, but the value of the connections you have. A million ships passing your ship and giving you a thumbs up or shouting curses at you means precious little. It used to be important, especially for “content creators”: writers, musicians, artists. Oh, we were told again and again how much we need to have social media followers before anyone will take us seriously. It was all about platform, platform, platform! But now platform doesn’t mean much, unless you’re Taylor Swift and already have it.

I resisted all this because it never felt real for me, and I’m not the kind of person anyway who cares about popularity or thinks posting my every thought matters (let’s face it: it’s just self-indulgent). I’m too Gen X for that. But I firmly believe that those who didn’t believe in it and quietly built real connections are the ones who will start seeing fruit.

My proof? A.I. is already destroying it all. When bots can post better engagement posts on social media, you can bet that it won’t matter anymore, especially as the bots also reply. It will all mean nothing. When A.I. can write a million ‘top ten’ listicles, then listicles mean nothing. When A.I. can post fake videos of pretty girls telling you what product to buy, it means nothing, and we all know it.

Rather, you’ll trust your friends again—the friends in your scene.

You know what else will matter going forward? Story. Less people will care about top ten lists and will want to hear human stories. This is why I keep saying, the future is what you do in the real world—the analogue world—because the digital world is decreasing in value, and fast.

Anyway, that’s my prediction for 2025. Hope you have a wonderful new year and may God bless you for 2025!