Hi - apologies, I've taken ages to reply to this. But it has been on my mind.
I think the significant question here is: do "postmodernism", "metamodernism", and "hypermodernism" pick out distinct cultural logics, or do they simply identify surface variations on a single underlying logic?
While I wouldn't want to get hung up on terminological quibbles, there is something substantial at stake in this question if our aim is to diagnose and respond to the meta-crisis. If the metamodernist premise - that postmodernism is at the root of the meta-crisis - is correct (as I think it is), then obviously we need to get clear on what postmodern cultural logic actually consists in. If we're not, we risk responding to the symptoms of the meta-crisis rather than to its causes, potentially feeding into it and deepening it further.
So what we really want to know is: what actually is a cultural logic, in general? And: what is the cultural logic of late capitalism, in particular?
The reason I bring up Baudrillard is because he's one of the few people who actually gives robust answers to these questions (even Jameson doesn't). Baudrillard effectively says: by "cultural logic" we mean the value-form of the symbolic economy. Characteristic of late stage capitalism is that, unlike in earlier stages, the commodity form as organising principle of exchange has spread to encompass the domain of symbolic goods as well as material goods. This is in essence just an extension of Marx's critique of value to the political economy of communication - or from the mode of production to the mode of signification, if you like.
That's admittedly a bit dense, but the general idea is that the cultural logic of late capitalism is best captured in familiar phrases like "all publicity is good publicity". Since commodity exchange requires an abstract equivalence (the placing of everything on a single scale of value) strong differences in symbols and ideas are effectively flattened into something more akin to brand competition. Ethical principles are reduced to lifestyle aesthetics; ideas to genres. This represents a failure of the capacity of public communications spaces to represent strong differences - between good and bad, true and false, sincere and ironic - a sort of generalised Kurt Cobain effect in which nothing sells better on MTV than raging against MTV. This amounts to a loss of determination in publicly visible content, which in turn undermines our ability to coordinate intentions and actions. This is what produces the meta-crisis.
If this analysis of postmodernism is right, then it has nothing to do with worldviews, attitudes, affects or even skills. Characteristically postmodern phenomena like irony or incredulity towards metanarratives are here read as structural effects of the economic configuration of the information environment (as are post-truth and the new sincerity in its more developed version). Postmodernism is not a stage of spiritual development, but a concrete situation - a matter of the political economy of communication. Sincerity is undermined at a structural level; irony is a response to this situation, not its cause. Cultivating new sensibilities can no more get us beyond it than positive thinking can address the economic conditions of poverty. The resurgence of sincerity identified (correctly) by metamodernists does not speak to a transcendence of the postmodern condition, but to its deepening. It is when the society of spectacle grows so all-encompassing that it morphs into the society of the LARP: the critical irony of the audience evaporates into a perfect simulation in which "sincere utopian" and "cynical nihilist" are just so many avatars, equivalent characters we can all switch in and out of at will. We are no longer judged on whether we are sincere or cynical, good or bad, right or wrong - we are permitted to choose any of these characters. What we are judged on is how well we play the characters we have chosen.
This story is more or less what you get if you extrapolate Baudrillard's reading of postmodernity into the present. I don't bring this up to criticise metamodernism (though I do think it provides such a critical frame) so much as to illustrate what is at stake in the ontology of cultural logic. Whether a cultural logic is envisaged as something which lives in the attitudes/beliefs/affects/skills of individuals or as an irreducibly social/normative/political/economic structure has massive strategic implications when it comes to responding to the meta-crisis - implications which I do not think have always been appreciated in the metamodern discourse.
To end by tying this back to the orginal concern, what is of strategic importance is the structural relation between metamodernism and hypermodernism. Does metamodernism resist and compete with hypermodernism, or are they functionally entwined? Could metamodernist utopianism at the symbolic level not perhaps be functioning as an alibi for hypermodern dystopianism at the material level? If so then a call for more metamodernism will work to deepen rather than shift the state of inertia.
When we consider these supposed bifurcations - metamodernism, hypermodernism, not to mention altermodernism, transmodernism, etc - are these actually reflections of real differences at the level of deep logic in culture, or can they be explained as the effect of a single cultural logic which systematically incentivises the presentation of minor surface variations as if they were deep shifts?
My view is that the latter is more likely than the former. The postmodern strategy of elision par excellence is to inject fake difference everywhere real differences have been definitively destroyed. This is partly how it produces a meta-crisis - every time real, productive difference enters the conversation, the conversation just bifurcates. We end up with loads of isolated conversations that go nowhere. This is great for people's individual brands, terrible for collective action. But this is just the cultural logic of late capitalism, and at a fundamental level I really don't think it has changed - it has just got worse.
Sam
