On premium mediocrity
We wanted to fight capitalism with mediocrity, maybe we were wrong
November 14, 2009, was a Saturday. The waning moon was making its entrance into Libra, and I had just come up with the brilliant idea of joining the impressive human centipede that, since the crack of dawn, had been camping outside the entrance of H&M on Via del Corso, eagerly waiting for the store to open. The occasion? The launch of a limited-edition collection created by the fast-fashion giant in collaboration with the shoe brand Jimmy Choo.
I had never really cared much for Jimmy Choo or owning a pair of designer stilettos. Still, at the time, indie sleaze had crashed headfirst into The Fame by Lady Gaga, and the mere fact that a high-fashion product was temporarily available to the mass market was the perfect trigger for the FOMO of a newly minted 19-year-old raised on Skins and Gossip Girl.
Needless to say, the shopping experience was traumatic – a very Italian version of those videos where people storm American malls on Black Friday, tackling other citizens to get their hands on the last discounted blender. And there I was, fighting off peers and middle-aged women alike for an electric-blue mini dress and a zebra-printed clutch, desperate for new outfits to eventually drench in my third Negroni of the night amid the claustrophobic chaos of an underground club.
By the end of the day, my spoils amounted to a little over a hundred euros spent on said clutch, two hideous metallic earrings, and a pair of heeled sandals that I can only describe as “studded spiders” – a questionable aesthetic choice I’m glad has left absolutely no nostalgic footprint, not even as an ironic revival. What I didn’t know at the time, though, wasn’t just that buying a pair of studded spiders wouldn’t improve my life as a suburban clubber, but also that the consumerist ritual I had just participated in was one of the first glimpses of a new way of existing under late capitalism – a way that, a few years later, someone would label premium mediocre.
The term premium mediocre was coined in 2017 by blogger Venkatesh Rao. In his extensive article describing the phenomenon, Rao writes:
Premium mediocre is the finest bottle of wine at Olive Garden. Premium mediocre is cupcakes and froyo. Premium mediocre is “truffle” oil on anything (no actual truffles are harmed in the making of “truffle” oil), and extra-leg-room seats in Economy. Premium mediocre is cruise ships, artisan pizza, Game of Thrones, and The Bellagio. Premium mediocre is food that Instagrams better than it tastes.
Premium mediocre is fast-fashion brands collaborating with high-end designers, the McDonald’s signature sandwich with Asiago DOP and Speck Alto Adige IGP, Gucci’s virtual sneaker. The list could go on forever, because today, everything is premium mediocre.
From the late-2000s recession to the present, the attempt to make exclusive products and services accessible to the masses has given rise to a new consumerist standard and a culture – internalized and fueled primarily by Millennials – where premium mediocrity has ceased to be a clever marketing strategy and has simply become the way things are. As Rao explains:
Premium mediocrity is not clueless, tasteless consumption of mediocrity under the mistaken impression that it is actual luxury consumption. Maya Millennial is aware that what she is consuming is mediocre at its core, and only “premium” in some peripheral (and importantly, cheap, such as French-for-no-reason branding) ways. But she consumes it anyway. She is aware that her consumption is tasteless, yet she pretends it is tasteful anyway.
Premium mediocrity is the adaptive response that Western Millennials have developed to cope with the state of perpetual crisis defining their existence. We have mastered the art of premiocre, quite literally wearing it: first, H&M’s haute couture in polyester; then, the elevation of the ordinary to status symbol with the normcore, which marked the final transition of mediocrity into the realm of exclusivity. Once again, premium mediocre is the Birkenstock Boston becoming impossible to find, Lidl’s limited-edition clothing line, and the entire circus of Shein hauls on TikTok.
It’s precisely on social media that premium mediocrity takes on a life of its own. Premiocre is a product of the Silicon Valley mindset – born from its obsession with disruption, its promise of democratization through new media. The very idea that life is a process in need of constant optimization (and great storytelling) is both a symptom and a consequence of late capitalism that instills socio-economic optimism by creating the illusion that self-improvement is always within reach. Premium mediocre is NFTs, ASMR meditation videos, Instagrammability, and the creator economy.
The problem with premium mediocrity, however, isn’t just that it creates the illusion of social lift – it’s also that, to pull off the trick, it exploits one of the few existential qualities we once believed to be impervious to capitalism: mediocrity itself. A few days ago, while reading this Vox article about how TikTok has become the ultimate stage for the triumph of mediocre content, I found myself admitting that the correlation between mediocre and authentic has always held a certain appeal for me, especially as a counterpoint to the neoliberal ideal of success.
Existing within normality, excelling at nothing in particular, scaling down one’s ambitions – these became the small generational mantras that Millennials repeated to themselves over the years, a coping mechanism for coming of age amid an ongoing financial crisis and a labor market increasingly precarious and polluted by free-market logic. Becoming aware of one’s own mediocrity – even embracing it (whatever that means) – felt like the best possible resistance to hustle culture. And maybe it was, at least until mediocrity itself became just another condition to upgrade
As this New York Times essay on mediocrity and privilege explains, it was only in modern times that the term began to be used in opposition to excellence rather than as a synonym for adequacy. In nature, mediocrity can even be an evolutionary advantage when survival depends on adaptability, while in astronomy, the Earth’s mediocrity principle serves as a reminder of our planet’s – and humanity’s – fundamental lack of uniqueness.
From this perspective, embracing mediocrity simply means accepting that we are not special, contrary to the neoliberal ideal of success at all costs and capitalism’s hierarchical structuring of existence. When premium mediocrity disguises the ordinary as an exclusive product, everyday life turns into an aesthetic, creating the illusion of a new lifestyle to aspire to. This is how mediocrity becomes a tool for consumption and loses any potential to become political.
The Vox article I mentioned earlier doesn’t actually talk about resistance to neoliberalism, but rather about another fascinating phenomenon tied to online mediocrity:
TikTok fame celebrates a different kind of mediocrity, though, the kind where ‘relatability’ means adhering to the internet’s fluctuating beauty standards and approachable upper-middle-classness and never saying anything that might indicate a personality.
In this context, the success of bland personalities and forgettable content on TikTok seems to prove that, just like in nature, survival favors those who adapt best, not those who excel. The decline of traditional social media and the widespread use of algorithms to curate platform content appear to have generated the opposite of premium mediocrity: mediocre premium, a process of decay and normalization in personal branding, of which TikTok stars are merely the latest romantics. But if we change the order of things, maybe mediocrity can still be saved.
What I don’t agree with Rao on, however, is the idea that Maya Millennial and the “new class of mediocrity” are nothing more than symbols of blind optimism toward the new economy – the same optimism that tirelessly champions fake it until you make it and believes that social mobility can be built one McDonald’s signature sandwich at a time.
While I can’t deny the existence of this attitude within my generation – or at least within myself (or the version of me that showed up at dawn outside H&M to buy some low-gradeversion of Jimmy Choos) – I’d rather hold on to the belief that mediocrity still has a chance to resist the siren call of optimization. That it might even hack capitalism by reclaiming its spaces, much like pioneer species manage to take root in the most inhospitable terrains.
Maybe that’s not the case. Maybe what the phenomenon of premiocre is teaching us is that the opposite has happened. But if this new expression of mediocrity is destined to live in the service of market-driven autofiction, then we, the pioneer mediocres, can at least die trying to resist. Most likely, failing in the process.