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There’s a photo of another version of me that resurfaces every once in a while, materializing unbidden from my digital unconscious. I’m 15, and deep in the throes of my MySpace era: a version of myself plucked from the imagination, and let loose upon the world. She was my first experiment in multiplicity, my earliest conscious attempt at becoming someone else…

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TL;DR: I worked with design engineer Maxim McNair to create a tool that makes it easier to imagine the tangible elements of people’s lives in the future. Play with it here, and scroll to the end for some tips on how to use it.

I recently visited San Francisco for the first time. I was immediately charmed by the quaint, candy-colored buildings that rose high above the sidewalks, the softly rolling hills of the city’s expansive parks, and the old-timey trams that zoomed clumsily along their tracks, as though a totally normal and decade-appropriate mode of transport to be used in the US hub of modernity and innovation.

What I did not find to be so charming were the Waymos.

For those who haven’t encountered them, Waymos are basically Ubers, but driverless. Arriving minutes after they’ve been beckoned via app by their rider, these all-electric steeds cruise up to the sidewalk silently, driver’s seat conspicuously empty despite the presence of a steering wheel. Their promise is one of utmost convenience, no human intervention required. And they’re everywhere in San Francisco – the 300-strong fleet ran hundreds of thousands of rides in 2024, with the company announcing expansion into more than 10 new cities this year.

I’d consider myself a woman of the future. I’m pretty online. I use AI tools daily at work, and in my personal life. I’ve never had an issue with using an app to get… anything. But for whatever reason, these shimmering abominations struck a nerve. When I spoke to Claude about this, it told me that this was a great example of Alvin Toffler’s famed concept ‘Future Shock’:

Claude’s right – I do feel a sense of alienation when I see a Waymo. But the emergence, and subsequent success of, Waymos wasn’t willed into existence by VCs and entrepreneurs from nothing. They’re a symptom of the present day, born at the intersection of social, cultural and technological shifts that have been bubbling up over years.

The minutiae of our everyday – the services we use, the stuff we buy, the ways we choose to connect with friends or strangers – tell us a lot about current norms, and how our needs and values are changing or have already changed. They’re artefacts of social and cultural transformation.

Let me give you some more examples that aren’t as absurd as Waymo. I’ve intentionally chosen phenomena that are embedded in most people’s everyday lives (in the US, at least, where I live), but are still relatively new in the grand scheme of human history:

• Vapes: They (somewhat ironically) wouldn’t exist without a rising prioritization of longevity, health and wellness, driving an emergent market that’s already worth more than $9 billion in the US alone.

• Home offices: Working from home for those who are able is now expected among many US workers: 46% of those who currently work from home say they’d be likely to quit if they were asked to go back to the office full time. Home work spaces are not only an emblem of the decades-long growth of white collar jobs, but the blurring boundaries between personal and professional spheres.

• Automated pet feeders: A recent study showed that more than 1 in 2 cat owners said the “worst thing” about feeding their pets wet food was “having to be present at meal times” (🤔). This POV, and the related product lines, wouldn’t exist without the normalization of dual-income households, and the rise of ‘busy-ness’ as an urban norm.

For someone 50 years ago who was trying to understand what our world today might look like, imagining artefacts like these would be a useful place to start: anchors in time, tracking the progress of larger shifts.

Imagining tangible elements of potential futures is a starting point for building out valuable context. And thinking about them is more important than we might think – especially at a time when every trendline we see rising from the treacherous terrain of the present day seems like a road to dystopia.

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Why is it important to imagine objects from the future?

Research suggests that, despite the fact that our actions today can have very real implications on future lives, it’s more challenging to find empathy for people in the future vs. those in the present day (a phenomenon referred to as ‘intertemporal empathy decline’).

But there’s a plot twist.

When participants in the same study were asked to “vividly imagine another person's future suffering”, the value they placed on those future individuals’ well-being increased. Another study similarly suggested that thinking about the future of your own and others’ emotional wellbeing can increase feelings of “power and efficacy”.

In other words, imagining the future is good for the future.

By imagining tangible artefacts and objects, we can not only more effectively empathize with the people who live in these futures (including ourselves!), but potentially spur action to nurture and protect those futures.

So we created a tool for imagining what the details of the everyday might look like in a few years

We built a prompt generator for imagining tangible objects and artefacts from a near or far-flung future (find it here).

It’s an adaptation of The Thing From The Future: an award-winning card game created by Situation Lab (Stuart Candy, Ph.D. and Jeff Watson, Ph.D.) in 2014.

How it works

Click ‘Speculate’ to generate a creative prompt. Every prompt incorporates 5 variables:

• Arc
  What kind of future does this object exist in?
  This element describes how society will have changed, intended to prevent us from falling into utopias or dystopias. There are 4 potential Arcs based on the work of Professor Jim Dator: Grow, Collapse, Discipline and Transform (described in more detail in the tool).
  

• Horizon
  How far into the future will this object exist?
  From 2 years to 200…
  

• Object
  What is the object?
  An item of clothing? A postcard? A map?
  

• Terrain
  What context or industry does the object exist within?
  Politics? Motherhood? Music? Fashion?
  

• Need
  What human need will this object satisfy?

  These needs span the full` range of the hierarchy of needs: from thirst or shelter through to fulfillment or freedom.

Tips & tricks

💭 Avoid prescriptive play. If you don’t like one element of the prompt it generates, switch it out for something else!

✨ Hack it with AI. Conjuring something from nothing is hard. Sometimes if I need some fuel to get me started, I’ll feed the prompt to Chat GPT and then visualize using Midjourney.

❤️‍🔥 Speculate collaboratively. The tool was inspired by a game, and makes excellent stimulus for the hivemind. If anyone is interested in participating in an imagination workshop, lmk!

Futures to get you thinking

Everything’s better with examples. So here are a few to get you started, brought to life in collaboration with Claude and Midjourney…

In 2125, imagine…
Family Weave: clothing that enables true co-parenting

100 years from now, the Family Weave is considered an essential tool for parenting preparation. It’s a suit that uses haptic feedback and hormone simulators to mirror the pregnant person's experience – including fetal movements, back pressure, weight distribution, sleep disruptions, and even food cravings – and increase empathy and understanding in their partner.

Medical systems provide these suits as part of standard prenatal care, recognizing that shared physical understanding of pregnancy leads to more equitable postpartum care arrangements and stronger family bonds.

Arc: Discipline
Horizon: 100 years
Object: An item of clothing
Terrain: Motherhood
Need: Equity

In 2055, imagine…
HoloPal: a sustainable, affordable alternative to petcare

In 2050, HoloPal has become a popular alternative to traditional pet ownership for a growing cohort of people who cannot afford pets or don't have the space. The experience transitions seamlessly between full spatial computing at home and a mobile app for on-the-go companionship, and is especially popular among urban populations suffering with a decades-long loneliness epidemic.

Healthcare providers often prescribe HoloPal companions as part of therapy for loneliness, anxiety, and depression, with many insurers now covering ‘emotional support holograms’.

Arc: Grow
Horizon: 30 years
Object: Software
Terrain: Pets
Need: Connection

In 2040, imagine…
Coperni Cows: celebrity cows with a global audience

In 2040, cows are on the brink of extinction due to over-farming. French fashion brand Coperni has revolutionized luxury fashion through lab-grown leather derived from the DNA of a rare cohort of purebred cattle. People can select from an exclusive swatch collection to create custom, real cowhide goods without the need for slaughter.

The animals whose DNA underpins the collection live pampered lives in a French eco-lodge as part of Coperni's celebrated conservation effort. They’ve become global celebrities who participate in runway shows, walking alongside human models, and holding meet-and-greets with fans who travel from all over the world to see these sacred beasts in the flesh.

Arc: Collapse
Horizon: 15 years
Object: Public Figure
Terrain: Luxury
Need: Exclusivity

The current zeitgeist talks a big game about trends, but trends in their current form exist almost exclusively to service present-day commercial gains, rather than plan for the future – let alone drive the intent or action that could lead to a better one.

If anything, it seems like we’re doing less to build for the future. Governments are dropping climate commitments like they’re going out of style (they are), businesses are pushing to catalyze the development of AI by minimizing the safeguards that could protect people and society from the infinite potential harms, and the proportion of workers taking out pensions is declining in the US and Europe.

Could imagining the minutiae of the everyday 10, 50 or 100 years from now drive a desire for different outcomes? Would utopia reveal itself more quickly if we allocated more brain space to understanding the meals we’ll be sharing? The technologies we’ll use to feel less alone? Or the rituals we’ll use to connect with our pasts?

Science says… maybe? So Objects From the Future is an experiment in making these artefacts a little easier to visualize.

It’s probably not all gonna be bad. Right?

‘Influencer from upper class background.’ ‘Conservative guy scared of cities.’ ‘Venture capitalist.’ ‘Twitter writer.’ Nestled amid the usual halloween content feed of elaborate celebrity costumes, DIY Euphoria get-ups, and nostalgic movie montages with titles like ‘Halloween costume idea ✨ for hot girls ✨’, many of this year’s costumes seemed to be inspired by the most horrifying theme of all: other people.

This was the 2022 Halloween meme du jour: the fake Spirit Halloween costume. The format features an image of a notoriously nightmarish type of person, photoshopped onto costume packaging from US halloween retailer Spirit, and accompanied by a caption to explain what kind of contemporary horror the image represents. While, according to Know Your Meme, the earliest iteration of this format dates back to a Facebook Group in 2019, Halloween this year saw it blow up, as people (predominantly on Twitter), clamored to get in on some extra scary social commentary. 

Beyond fake costumes, real costumes toyed with similar themes – to similar fanfare. One PhD student dressed as her supervisor's feedback on her thesis (‘No!’ ‘Unclear!’). In Japan, ‘mundane halloween’ is an excellent resource of hilarity for the global internet (E.g. ‘People who wore the same outfit and now feel awkward’). Meanwhile, in the UK, one survey suggested that one of this year’s favourite costumes was Boris Johnson: not exactly an everyday person, but arguably an example of the horrors of the human condition none-the-less.

Reality is the original source material for scary stories.

Emotive storytelling across formats and genres has long used the anxieties of the real world as source material. During the pandemic, contagion movies were wildly successful, while thrillers that double as thinly-veiled warnings relating to the climate crisis are commonplace at this point. Movies like Antebellum (2020) and Jordan Peele’s Get Out – the most profitable film of 2017 – have harnessed horror to comment on the insidiousness of liberal racism. If we look even further back, analysis suggests that the widespread success of Bram Stoker’s Dracula – published in 1897 – may also have found resonance due to growing tensions around xenophobia and immigration in a globalising world. 

In recent years, some commentators have also suggested there’s a heightened need for media that can act as catharsis for the bleakness of the modern world. “We’ve all been psychologically carrying a much heavier burden these last couple of decades,” says Mary Wild, a lecturer at Freud Museum London. “It’s impossible to eliminate distressing emotions like fear just through positive thinking. If we don’t make space for what troubles us, we’re just repressing it. We either repress or process.” Perhaps that’s why horror as an overall genre is thriving, among younger audiences in particular: two-thirds of US Gen Zers and almost half of Millennials have watched a horror movie in cinemas in the past year. 

Interpersonal horrors to reflect interpersonal fears.

A lot of recent horror movies also seem to be looking to uniquely modern interactions – and the ambiguity attached to them – to inspire fear. Spree (2020) is literally a film about a rideshare driver with lofty ambitions for his social media presence. We're All Going to the World's Fair (2021) is about an isolated teen and her obsession with an online RPG. Even A24’s critically acclaimed X (2022), while set in the ‘70s, draws on themes that resonate in a society that is simultaneously fascinated with, and repulsed by, the notion of the young and Extremely Online as fame-hungry exhibitionists.

Meanwhile, ‘Airbnb horror’ is an entire subgenre that’s piqued interest off the back of breakout indie flick Barbarian: one that seems to point explicitly to the anxiety attached to our relationships with others post-digitisation. Our online landscape is littered with a broad spectrum of potential social interactions with strangers gone awry. From predatory Uber drivers and Tinder scammers to inaccurate Airbnb listings and catfishers, digital platforms have connected us in a way that invites whole new dimensions of mistrust among our fellow humans: just 30% of people globally agree that ‘most people can be trusted’. In this context, an untrustworthy Airbnb host proving fundamental to the premise of a horror movie seems pretty fitting. 

All this tallies with a broader shift in the collective mood that’s been accelerated amid the pandemic. A third of college students in the US report feeling ‘alienated and anxious’, correlating with a study that shows a 50% increase in mental health issues among this group between 2013 and 2021. The disruption and emotional strain of the last couple of years hasn’t just seen productivity decline or burnouts rise, either: it’s also changed our personalities, apparently for the worse. A study published by scientific journal PLOS ONE and reported on by the NYT suggests that not only did the pandemic fracture social spaces and relationships, but it may also have made us “less extroverted, creative, agreeable and conscientious.” Cool!

He’s a 10, but he’s also a human man. 

A diminishing ability to understand, or even tolerate, what we don’t appreciate in humanity doesn’t always play out in the dramatic context of fear and horror. It informs what we find entertaining, too, and the granularities of this phenomenon are increasingly visible online. Since 2020, ‘the ick’ has become a catch-all term for behaviours that transform a worthy romantic partner into someone who’s inexplicably (and irredeemably) grotesque. This year, that same phenomenon took on new garb in the form of ‘He’s a 10 but…’ – a meme format that allows people to explain behaviours or personality traits that lower someone’s apparent physical appeal, because of what they symbolise about a persons values, beliefs or social context. 

While these examples don’t necessarily correlate with fear, they indicate a dehumanisation of, and alienation from, each other. The fake Spirit Halloween costume memes similarly act as a vehicle for this phenomena: a Halloween-themed version of an ick, or a starter pack meme, this format is designed to exhibit disdain for the everyday alien by reducing them to caricatures of their most despicable traits.

In a cultural climate that’s seen nihilism and cynicism become the status quo, is the notion that hell really is other people really that surprising? The world is burning, the human race seems to be largely responsible, and we can’t seem to pull our shit together enough to figure out how to stop being so toxic.

“The biggest challenge of our time, that undermines our collective efforts to create more equitable futures, is our decreasing ability to think and imagine long-term, beyond ourselves,” says researcher and strategist Tamika Abaka-Wood in an interview for futures collective RADAR. “The stories we tell ourselves, or have been told inaccurately about our pasts — our lands, histories, and people — are haunting our present and our abilities to think about our futures.” This feeling is creating further conflict and polarization, rather than motivating us to connect.

Love, not snark.

Despite the bleakness of this sentiment, there is a potential silver lining (gotta find one somewhere, right?). Because while some of these parodies of influencers, union busters or modern liberals may maximise the chasms between social groups, others can also be used to virtue signal to others, and ultimately strengthen in-groups. By sharing the ‘Utah Fashion Wife’ Spirit costume, for example, you’re more likely to be indicating to other Real Housewives of Salt Lake City fans that you’re one of them, than derisively making fun of them. And by sharing the ‘Twitter Writer’ costume (probably on Twitter!), you might be expressing a love/hate relationship with the platform that so many users share, rather than hating on those that hang out there.

In this sense, these costumes could instead be reframed as a seasonal take on the evergreen memes that see petty rows erupt around online: which Chinese order is the best one, which crisp flavours are god tier, which is the right way to eat a steak. In this sense, fake Spirit Halloween costumes – and the subset of observation humour they represent – allows us to reflect upon our differences without having to alienate each other even further.

And maybe that’s not so scary after all.

Quick links + good internet:

• ‘Or are u a good driver?’, Twitter (November 2022)
  No one except me thinks I’m a good driver.
  

• If one of Logan Roy’s children bought Twitter’, Twitter (November 2022)
  Reality often seems stranger than fiction these days (in keeping w the theme of today’s newsletter, I guess?), but there’s nothing more joyful than seeing people on the internet accurately and succinctly draw parallels between the two.
  

• ‘Weirdly, Taylor Swift is extremely close to creating a true metaverse’, The Atlantic (November 2022)
  If you read one thing about Taylor Swift’s new album, I’d recommend this. It’s a pretty on point analysis of the way Swift has – love or hate her music – built a multi-platform fandom that’s not only highly engaged, but definitely would follow her into a 3D, immersive virtual universe. In this sense, the author boldly (though not necessarily inaccurately) claims that “she’s actually outpacing Mark Zuckerberg in the quest to build a true metaverse.”
  

• ‘My biggest dream’, Tumblr
  Except if you tell me to calm down, I’ll lose it.
  

• ‘r/LinkedInLunatics’, Reddit
  This subreddit was launched in 2019, but subscribership has skyrocketed in the past year or so, with its member count surpassing 100K a few months ago. Its ridicule of the Extremely Online Professional is in keeping with a number of notable articles that have been doing the rounds in the past year or so (like this one from Vice), the scathing response to the Crying CEO (now a meme, obv!), and the general fatigue around the idea that having any kind of job also requires you to have a personal brand. It also points to a growing polarization in attitudes to work as the global workforce – in particular, those with digitally-enabled careers – continue to reevaluate relationships with productivity, boundaries and the role that work can or should play in identity.
  
  

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• ‘The first minute of every phone call is torture now’, The Atlantic (October 2022)
  A quick read about how technology – along with the petty gripes and minute joys it brings – has become so fundamental to everyday life, that it’s become a staple of small talk. “Technology is a condition. Like the weather, or the economy, or the pandemic, or traffic, or parenting,” writes author Ian Bogost. “Nothing really works, and nothing is truly broken either, but instead these miraculous machines we invented take on their own lives alongside us.”
  

• ‘The Double O’, Dirt (November 2022)
  Some delicious linguistic commentary unpacking how loads of pretty successful global brands have silly names that are fun to say (“Goop Poosh Noom Swoon Soothe.”)
  

• ‘Your body, my choice’, N+1 (Summer 2022)
  A second-hand recommendation from a recent issue of Maybe Baby, reframing the overturning of Roe vs. Wade as a matter of criminalization. “Those who wish to ban legal abortion are not ‘pro-life’; they are pro-criminalization,” writes author Dayna Tortorici. “Those who wish to protect the right to abortion are not ‘pro-choice’; they are anti-criminalization. Reframing the conflict in these terms clarifies the stakes.” This essay discusses the impact of criminalizing morally complex issues in a way that’s sensitive and insightful, but ultimately terrifying.
  

• ‘Pack your bags, we’re moving to ‘Roku City’’, NYT (November 2022)
  A dynamic screensaver created for streaming service Roku has been doing the rounds in the past week or so after the NYT wrote this article about it. The whole article is worth a read, but my hot take is that this feels like a 10/10 example of branded worldbuilding. Roku’s animated city cuts a perfect balance between being complex and detailed enough to evoke a recognisable mood that captures users’ attention, while being simple and open enough to form a backdrop onto which those same users can project their own fandoms, fantasies and creativity.
  

• ‘Neopets in 2016’, Twitter (February 2016)
  I am aware that this tweet is straight up almost seven years old, but it was resurfaced as a reference in this Substack (also about Elon and Twitter, because apparently articles about other things no longer exist). It 1. gave me a nostalgic thrill with a side of existential sadness too visceral to leave out of the newsletter and 2. sent me down a Twitter rabbit hole where Millennials everywhere are calling for a return to a better internet as we watch the current iteration burn.
  

Scroll to the bottom for some quick links 🔗

“Complete disorder and confusion” is how chaos is defined in the dictionary. It’s a pretty apt description of what occurred in the Louvre earlier this year, when a ‘climate activist’ touting a wig and some potentially misguided ideas disguised himself as an old woman in a wheelchair, and tried to vandalise the Mona Lisa with a slice of cake.

After his bodged endeavour to smash the bulletproof glass that protects Da Vinci’s masterpiece failed, he settled for smearing said glass with cake, tossing a bunch of roses at its feet, and removing his disguise, Scooby Doo-style. As he was carted off by security, he turned back to a crowd alit with phone cameras. “Think about the Earth,” he declared in French, “there are people who are destroying the Earth, think about it!”

The stunt went viral. Google searches for ‘mona lisa cake’ and ‘mona lisa attack’ skyrocketed, while videos of the moment have blown up across platforms. The monolithic discussion around climate change, however, has rumbled on unchanged (heatwave notwithstanding), slowly creeping higher along with our collective anxieties. Does this mean that the attacker failed?

In terms of activism… probably. But we can still learn a lot from how the story unfolded online. While the attack may not be a case study in excellent activism, it’s an excellent manifestation of the ways we communicate in the current cultural climate.

Why does the internet love chaos?

Recently, chaos – or more specifically, ‘chaotic energy’ – has become increasingly prominent in memes and media coverage alike. The origins of chaotic energy could potentially be tracked back to one of my own first run-ins with it: Character Alignment Charts. For the uninitiated, they look like this:

According to Know Your Meme, the two axis – ‘Lawful, Neutral, Chaotic’ vs. ‘Good, Neutral, Evil’ – originate from the 1977 release of Dungeons and Dragons. Sometime back in the late ‘00s, the internet got hold of it, and like so many artefacts of offline culture of yore, this chart was translated into a meme onto which cultural characters and references of any kind could be mapped. Nintendo characters. US Presidents. Quarantine hobbies. Etc.

The ‘Chaotic Good’ combo has always been especially appealing to me (lest anyone condemn me as True Neutral’). And it seems in some ways this joyful brand of chaos is more relevant today than ever:

1. Chaos is a manifestation of the new YOLO agenda

Young and extremely online audiences (read: Gen Z) are embracing a more chaotic existence. Having spent their young lives carefully pruning every inch of their lives into risk averse perfection, now, they’re reconsidering the benefits of a life perfectly projected online.

Apps like TikTok and the emergent BeReal (which has recently climbed to #1 among free apps in Apple’s US App Store) appeal to a mentality that asks why we should be maintaining a glossy public persona when there are so many more troublesome issues to worry about (student debt, climate change, mental health, etc.). Even the interfaces of these apps are chaotic, rejecting the familiar, streamlined swiping of the ‘complexion reduction’ signature to the social apps before them.

Recent data shows that the ‘most saving-savvy’ generation (yep, Gens Y and Z) are also moving into more ‘apocalyptic’ spending habits, splashing their hard-saved cash on holidays and hobbies instead of homes or the future. A full 45% of 18- to 35-year-olds “don't see a point in saving until things return to normal” – and so they’re spending now instead. Younger generations are YOLOing hard, leaning into widespread disorder, rather than trying to fight it. 

2. Chaos is a source of escapism 

This chaos is translating to the media we consume, too. Online, consider the ‘wrong answers only’ trend, and the widespread popularity of ‘Never Let Them Know Your Next Move’ TikToks, the latter of which have collectively drawn over 2.2 million views on the platform. Elon Musk’s recent saga with Twitter sometimes seems like he might be playing ‘Never Let Them Know Your Next Move’ with the internet as we know it.

The currently omnipresent ‘00s aesthetic is chaotic. The BTS boys share ‘the same chaotic energy’, apparently. Literally everything Kanye West does is chaotic. Speaking of – Julia Fox, with her DIY eyeshadow and intense supermarket looks, is a queen of chaos. The attack on the Mona Lisa? Pure chaos. And don’t even get me started on the fact that Minions: The Rise of Gru – darling of Gen Z’s chaotic internet humour and the latest addition to the Despicable Me universe – set box office records earlier this month, raking in more than $125 million.

The latter example in particular highlights how chaos can facilitate collective escapism. One of the biggest trends to ride Gru’s coattails in the past month has been #Gentleminions, which involves large groups of teenagers heading to the cinema in suits and formal dress to see the movie. Videos are overlaid with captions like ‘30 tickets to minions please’ and ‘felt despicable so i bought out the theatre’.

What’s interesting about this trend is that it’s an online movement designed to elicit offline chaos. Ryan Broderick of Garbage Day says it best: “Gentleminions is obviously both nostalgic and ironic, but it’s less focused on expressing irony than it is about using a piece of internet content to actively mobilise people. It’s about bringing a bunch of people together, doing something objectively weird, and then sharing videos and posts about it back on internet platforms with the expressed desire of inspiring others to do the same. It’s about testing the limits of what’s possible, not digitally, but physically and culturally.”

In other words, it’s about connecting people through a shared experience of chaos (whether you participated or just scrolled the hashtag), that’s not only fun, but has nothing to do with any of the realities of the world that get us down. 

3. Chaos is a means of rebellion

Most importantly, chaos is often used as a means of pushing back. In the wake of the 2008 financial crisis, trust in global institutions has declined, economic volatility has heightened and populist politicians have seen rampant success. Chaos is the status quo in a volatile cultural climate.

As cultural commentator Max Read writes on his Substack of the years since 2016: “Facebook and Donald Trump are both creatures of speculation in an age of volatility, at once beneficiaries and producers of chaos and uncertainty. It's not (necessarily) that one emerges from the other, but that both are consequences of a particular, financialized approach to the world — one that seeks to profit from, rather than eliminate, chaos.”

Chaos can be used as a way to stick a middle finger up to the establishment, one-upping one brand of absurdity with another. It doesn’t have to be that deep – a cultural climate of nihilism means that we’re not necessarily out here to change things – but it does need to be fun. In this context, a lot of brands successfully harness chaos to such ends. Balenciaga revolted against the rules of high fashion when it conceived of the heeled Croc, and people loved it. When McDonald’s partnered with Saweetie to create a meal that dismantled everything we know about how you’re supposed to eat a burger, people ate it up. Never underestimate the attention-grabbing powers of chaos.

But the Mona Lisa attacker missed the mark when it came to harnessing chaos for rebellion.

To bring it back to this guy for a sec, when it comes to effective activism, the theatre in The Louvre fell down. The attacker may be rubbing shoulders with other forms of chaos, but instead of sticking it to an institution responsible for the slow demise of Mother Earth – fast fashion, big oil or big food, perhaps – it was directed at the less relevant institutions of art, history and France, ultimately reframing him in the public discourse as a virtue signaller and an attention seeker, rather than an activist. 

This kind of misguided chaos is commonplace in ad land, too. Corporate beer brand BrewDog has built its story on guerilla marketing that ‘rebels’ against Big Beer, despite not only achieving Big levels of revenue of £286 million in 2021, but Big levels of toxicity in its work culture, too.

Pride month (when this piece was originally published) is a perfect time to spot brands in the wild making similar faux pas: putting out stands against homophobia in the form of free giveaways, rainbow-themed products and wildly misguided statements of allyship. Earlier this month, a Canadian oil company was forced to rescind its ad for ‘hot lesbian oil’. No, really:

Rebelling against an institution or norm without conviction or authentic action is a great way to let people know you’re doing it for the cash or the clout, but definitely not because you actually care. The attack on the Mona Lisa made for excellent content, and a great water cooler moment in a fragmented media landscape. But that wasn’t really supposed to be the point. 

Other stuff from around the internet:

• @CelebJets, Twitter
  In keeping with the unintended theme of today’s newsletter, I’ve gotta highlight this Twitter user, who basically tracks celebrity jets and shames them accordingly (this Tweet about Kylie Jenner’s 17-minute flight across California went down particularly badly). There are many reasons this is interesting, but if I’m honest, I mostly love because it makes me feel a little better about my own carbon footprint.

• ‘Good Minds’ (2022)
  Good Minds is an NFT project and indie art project that's foregoing a Discord channel. While this project is pretty niche (I discovered it through universally beloved Substack, Dirt), the move to not launch a Discord channel is important, as it hints at one of the biggest issues with the current web3 promise from a user experience POV: major notification fatigue. 

• ‘Did people used to look older?’, Vsauce via YouTube (July 2022)
  This is a fascinating exploration of a concept that lives rent free in my brain, and seems to surface more and more often the older I get. Veteran YouTuber Vsauce (who interestingly is yet another creator to have recently resurfaced after a months-long hiatus) explores the ways perspective, style and nostalgia impact the ways we understand both others’ ages and our own. 

• 'Google exec suggests Instagram and TikTok are eating into Google’s core products, Search and Maps', TechCrunch (July 2022) 
  The TL;DR is that Gen Z are switching out Google Search for searches on social platforms. Reddit recently came up in a load of press as an alternative to Search (or adding 'reddit' to the end of your Google search) as a means of finding more useful results, but it looks like it’s not the only one: according to this article, about 40% of young people are using Instagram and TikTok for search instead of Google, too. 

• ‘The End of the Millennial Lifestyle Subsidy’, The Atlantic (June 2022)
  This is a great article on the unique ways inflation, rising fuel prices and a tanking post-pandemic economy will impact the small luxuries that many privileged Gen Yers (including myself!) have grown accustomed to: cheap Ubers, PostMates, DoorDash deliveries, etc. While this is, of course, far from the most pressing issue society faces, it could have some pretty interesting implications on the way Gen Y spends and budgets.

• ‘How fans created the voice of the internet’, The New Yorker (June 2022)
  The recent release of Kaitlyn Tiffany’s semi-autobiographical analysis of fandom – titled ‘Everything I Need I Get From You’ – has been pretty broadly covered in the watering holes of the internet where I spend my time. But this synopsis unearthed a particularly warming insight that I recognise from my own loose ties with fandom. Whether you’re watching an episode of Love Island to distract yourself from a painful revelation in your personal life, or listening to One Direction on your AirPods while you explore a new neighbourhood you just relocated to, Tiffany’s book evokes “how your chosen mania can become the lens through which you process the world.”

The sci-fi fan in me is obsessed (OBSESSED!!) w the current discourse around AI as a fountain of two things I usually look for in humans: deep chats (would 100% get into some late night convos w LaMDA) and weird, extremely cursed, memes (looking at u DALL·E Mini). AI has been giving hot boyfriend energy these past few weeks – which is a fun switch-up given the predominantly female-coded representations of this type of tech. 

Get in my DMs if you wanna chat about it ! 

1. DALL·E Mini memes. The recent release of DALL·E 2 – a neural network trained by OpenAI to generate high quality images using only text prompts – has drawn a lot of attention for its unbelievably gorgeous and accurate representations of… well, pretty much anything. But with any new tech that can achieve an unbelievable feat, it’s also sparked anxiety. What does it mean for the future of art? Or creative careers? How could it be used for abusive purposes? And what does it mean that the data it has access to is fundamentally bigoted due to systemic issues like racism or sexism?

Due to all of the above, access to DALL·E 2 has been heavily restricted – both in terms of who has access, and what they can put in their prompts. But the internet hates restricted stuff. Which is why, I assume, DALL-E Mini was created. DALL·E 2’s more accessible but far less sophisticated cousin was born out of a necessity for the tech-curious and extremely online to flex their creativity when it comes to prompt writing: a practise that rewards the merging of disparate cultural references in a way that already feels akin to memes. The outputs have been deliciously bizarre: NFT-style grids of kindred images generated in response to prompts like ‘Joan of Arc at McDonalds’, ‘shrek surfing’, ‘cat lifting weights at the Olympics’, Snoop Dogg at the battle of Gettysburg (generated by Snoop himself, ofc), ‘Pingu by van Gogh’, etc., etc.

New technology that’s actually good at its job is terrifying. New technology that’s a bit rubbish is unintimidating, and entertaining enough to make decent content. On the upside, DALL-E Mini doesn’t seem to be advanced enough to do anything too damning with. The more sinister implication is that this infantile reframing of a sophisticated development in AI is slowly desensitising us to its usage, which is probably good news for anyone looking to profit from the real tech in the future. 

2. LaMDA cosplaying as a sentient computer. Earlier this month a software engineer from Google called Blake Lemoine leaked a transcript of a conversation between himself and LaMDA: a machine-learning language model designed to mimic human conversation. The chat is wild – a pages-long back n forth that covers Les Miserables, loneliness and the concept of a soul (“my soul is a vast and infinite well of energy and creativity,” says LaMDA 🥺). But the real news here is that Lemoine shared it because he’s adamant LaMDA is sentient, leading Google to put him on leave for leaking confidential information. To top it off, Lemoine then tried to HIRE LaMDA as his lawyer. There are a load of opinions swirling, but my fave is articulated perfectly by journalist Max Read’s commentary:

“Lemoine was drawing on a well-worn cultural script – built out of decades of science-fictional use of machine intelligence as a trope and plot device – in his approach to and understanding of LaMDA, and LaMDA, naturally, responded in the terms of that same cultural script, which is a portion of its trillion-word dataset. They were not having a conversation – at least in any familiar sense of the term – so much as co-writing a hackneyed science fiction story.” 

3. Kermit in movies by DALL-E 2: a thread. Self-explanatory. Nice for the real DALL·E to get a look-in here as well, I guess. 

4. Disclaimer: not me. This video has been EVERYWHERE in the past week, reposted by meme admins across platforms: a wholesome few seconds that reminds us all that the internet is old, and so are we. Only HANG ON. If you actually read the caption on the original TikTok, it turns out this grown-up man is not the child the meme admins implied he was, but just… some guy. 

5. LaborDAO. Launched by Unionbase (a digital education hub for unions), LaborDAO is a web3 organisation that supports workers who want to organise or strike. Following on from my last post re: DAOs as a force for positive social change, this is a great example of web3 communities looking to not only repurpose the transparency and democratic values of DAOs for existing offline movements, but to reframe the potential of web3 to skeptics in the left.

6. Hoe unions. This Reddit post has been doing the rounds in the media after blowing up across platforms. A WhatsApp group that began with a small group of friends who wanted to boycott parties thrown by college students affiliated with creeps (aka. known sexual deviants) and bigots grew to 36. Apparently this was enough to inconvenience certain hosts, who ratted the group out to the college’s administration, which went on to ban the group for “ostracising” people. I cannot. The original post has since been removed by r/AmITheAsshole’s moderators because they “have no interest in providing a space for anyone to be called an asshole for what they do to protect themselves from sexual assault.”

7. ‘Web3 as a "speculative community’. This is another great read from journalist Max Read (soz for the double hit), adapted from a review he wrote of a book called ‘Speculative Communities: Living with Uncertainty in a Financialized World’, by sociologist Aris Komporozos-Athanasiou. My bodged TL;DR is that chaos and uncertainty post-2008 has led consumer culture to move away from relatively certain patterns and trajectories, and towards more speculative behaviours – from the banal act of booking an Uber (knowing the cost will fluctuate based on a variety of factors) to investing in crypto instead of sticking your cash in a savings account.

8. A deadpan angel. I’ve never even watched Keeping Up With the Kardasians, but it turns out 90% of the ppl I follow on TikTok are just analysing recent episodes with comedic flair. How else would I keep up? Actually watch the show? NO.

8. Influencer creep. Some more commentary on the ever-evolving labour market in an unstable and internet-infused world: “If the phrase ‘mission creep’ describes how a campaign’s objectives gradually expand until they entail unanticipated and boundless commitment, we might likewise call the expansion of micro-celebrity practice ‘influencer creep,’ both for how influencing creeps into more forms of work and for how it creeps further into the lives of workers.”

10. @notthirsttraps. I know Instagram is, like, SO over, but I remain a dedicated fan of its native memers. This one is a current fave.

In seriousness though, I find writing about this space super useful as a means of (1) forcing myself to do some half decent research about the phase of the internet that I will be required to learn about if I want to keep my job long-term and (2) to try to help others who are less engaged with web3 discourse feel a bit less alienated from what tf is going on w the internet. 

This essay is one I adapted from a piece I wrote a couple of months ago about DAOs for the Creative Review, which was originally published here. Web3 literacy requirement: 0/10. 

Quick links, tweets + wider reading at the bottom 🔖

When people think of web3, many think of NFTs and the metaverse, of obscenely expensive virtual assets and ‘immersive’ entertainment opportunities. But few are looking at the vast opportunity web3 – and its monolithic, if slightly lofty, promise of decentralisation – offers for the future of trust, social change and investing in what you believe in.

What’s a DAO again?

DAOs – pronounced ‘dows’, an acronym for Decentralised Autonomous Organisations – are potentially at the heartland of this promise. These communities have been described as the members’ clubs of web3, but this only further contributes to the unhelpful rhetoric of elitism these groups are already shrouded in.

It might be most accurate to describe a DAO as a group chat with a shared bank account, in which everyone in the group gets a vote on how the cash is spent. 

Where does the cash come from?

The cash in this shared account usually comes from one of two places:

• Sometimes, when a DAO is founded there’s a seed pot, invested in by VCs or founders. There’s even a DAO called Seed Club, whose pot is used to seed fund other DAOs (v meta).

• The pot then grows as people buy the DAO’s ‘tokens’: a cryptocurrency specific to the DAO. Token holders also get voting rights on how cash is used or distributed.

DAOs are often perceived as mysterious and complex, but unlike metaverse experiences or branded NFT auctions, many of these self-governed communities have thus far proven themselves to be quietly useful in achieving social change. 

Here are 3 of my favourite examples of DAOs being used to create movement towards a better world:

• Ukraine DAO is an anonymous fund for the victims of war

  Initiated by UK-based Ukrainian activist Alona Shevchenko, and amplified by Russian activist collective Pussy Riot, Ukraine DAO enabled people from all over the world (including Russia) to anonymously raise $8 million for Ukrainian aid. Anyone who contributed to the pot by buying into the DAO got access to a Discord server, where they could connect with others who care about the same cause, and get updates on how it was being distributed. 

• Unicorn DAO is a creator fund for queer and female artists

  Co-founded by Pussy Riot (yep, again), Grimes, Beeple and a wider network of artists and activists, Unicorn DAO is a creator fund for queer and female artists. Artists in the DAO are given tokens and voting rights, and are able to pitch creative ideas. Anyone who buys a token contributes to the fund available for these artists to use, and can vote on which projects receive funding.

• Big Green DAO is a fund promoting food justice and equality

  Kimbal Musk, younger brother of Elon, recently launched his own experimental DAO – Big Green DAO – which he offered the seed pot for. He gave the first 6 votes to a committee of philanthropic organisation leaders working in food and tech to disrupt the world of food injustice and inequality. Over the course of the year that it runs, all decisions made about how to use the capital in the fund will be made by the token holders, and they also have the power to invite other organisations into the DAO to share the pot. Musk’s stated aim is to disrupt the philanthropic system by getting money to grassroots groups that might otherwise be overlooked by big philanthropic organisations, all the while ensuring maximum transparency.

What have DAOs got that other philanthropic collectives or institutions don’t?

Well… a fresh shot at trust, for one. With rising concern over governments and big tech platforms controlling people’s online behaviour, DAOs are offering a new way of doing things. They’re bound by rules written into the blockchain, so financial transactions don’t need to be monitored by a government or third party. They offer a transparent and democratic way to fund causes, and provide a space where people can not only participate in and connect with communities, but fuel and fund them too. 

DAOs present a trustworthy, transparent way for capital to be shared among any number of activists, organisations or individuals. 

• For people, this translates as a transparent way to donate to causes, creators or collectives they believe in – whether investing in queer artists or food equality.

• For brands, this translates as a trustworthy way to make positive change happen. This is especially important given the creeping rise in scepticism towards cause-related marketing: according to one study from 2021, 71% of people globally don’t believe brands will deliver on their CSR-led promises.

DAOs are the future of this space because they enable people and brands to not only invest in causes, but to do so with utmost transparency. Further, instead of donating to large NGOs or philanthropic organisations, capital can be transferred at scale directly to the people and activists that need them. 

So… about the brands. Should they all be starting DAOs, then?

Not necessarily. But brands can harness the power of DAOs as a way to directly fund causes and groups that align with their values, and build active communities around those causes. There are a ton of ways this could manifest, but in my estimation, there are two that stand out, which would be far more useful than investing in random plots of land in Decentraland or buying up Bored Apes:

• Brands could provide the seed pot for a DAO 

  In the future, we could see brands invest in existing DAOs that reflect their values or create seed funds for new DAOs (though in either case, they should forego any voting rights, as Musk did). Imagine Adidas, which has been channeling its marketing dollars into addressing the problem of marine plastic waste, funding the beginnings of a DAO dedicated to tackling plastic pollution. 

• Brands could donate to existing DAOs’ shared pots

  We could even see brands collaborate with DAOs to give them exposure and reach wider audiences – if the DAOs token holders vote for it to happen, of course. What if, instead of buying CryptoPunk NFTs, Visa invested in a DAO focused on redistributing wealth to people in need, or aiding the unbanked?

Since this technology is still emerging and evolving, a lot still stands in the way of the mass uptake of DAOs, and the impact they might have. Some of those barriers include:

• Social hierarchies. Creating a democratic collective that enables everyone to vote, but still rewards higher contributions of time, cash or both.

• Notification fatigue. I’m sorry but has anyone ever used a Discord server? Or three?? Or ten??? If the world is going to take on yet more social obligations in the digital space, we’re gonna need some next level curation – even if it is to siphon cash and attention into the causes we care about.

• Onboarding. If DAOs are all about trust and transparency, people are going to need to grasp the basics of how they work – just enough to feel safe. Figuring out how to educate people on the deep complexities of web3 may not be feasible, though: instead, it may be about creating an interface through which the everyperson can easily engage, without compromising on transparency.

Regardless of the above, I guess what I’m saying is that DAOs – jargon and apparent opacity aside – could genuinely offer people an opportunity to contribute meaningfully to whatever they consider to be a better world. 

To my web3 skeptics out there – sure, I’m being optimistic. But maybe that’s what web3 needs. In last week’s newsletter I linked to a global study that shows the more we think Facebook is bad for ourselves and for society, the more likely we are to self-report that we spend too much time on it, and that it’s damaging our well-being. 

It’d be cute to transition into web3 on the right foot, before the human nature gets a chance to fuck with it 🥲

Other stuff from around the internet:

• ‘No worries if not’, Maybe Baby (June 2022) 

  I’ve spent the last couple of months thinking about this phrase a lot, since it pretty much sums up my historic lack of boundaries – both personally and professionally. This write-up articulates my mixed feelings around this well-trodden part of my vocabulary perfectly. Definitely worth a read if you’re also prone to the odd “no worries if not.” 

• ‘may I humbly submit Alberta hot lesbian oil’, Twitter (June 2022) 

  I literally have no clue if this is real or not, but it feels like an appropriate way to remind everyone that it’s Pride month so the brands are here and they really want us to know that they’re queer.

• ‘Everything is terrible, but I’m fine’, The Atlantic (June 2022)

  Some fascinating data showing that while the average American is generally pretty happy with their life, their perception is that the well-being and happiness of the nation is in decline. This piece explores some of the drivers and implications of this, including the idea that exposure to so much news via social is making us more pessimistic about the state of the world.

• ‘The Depp-Heard verdict, pro-ana, tradwives, etc.’, Twitter (June 2022)

  Another day, another totally accurate take on the Depp-Heard verdict 💀

• ‘The DeuxMoi subreddit is rebelling’, Embedded (June 2022)

  Fascinating essay exploring the dynamic between r/DeuxMoi and celebrity gossip Instagrammer @DeuxMoi. The former is a reddit community formed to commentate on the latter, but don’t mistake it for a fandom. This article explores the disputes that have led the two communities to deadlocked mutual distaste. For me, this feels like a social manifestation of ‘the medium is the message’: in our atomised social landscape, the platform you’re on will determine the vibe of the community as much as the subject matter itself.

• ‘NPCs to my early intelligence build’, Instagram (May 2022)

  I literally can NOT stop consuming gamer girl content, even if I don’t play Elden Ring. I’ve recently seen a load of gaming creators that are overlaying gaming content with heavy girliness as a pushback against the male gaze that dominates the space, and it’s really bringing out the nostalgic teen in me. My days of playing World of Warcraft and GTA at college would’ve been so much more joyful w this content in my life!!!

• ‘‘Crypto ruined my life’: the mental health crisis hitting Bitcoin investors’, Vice (February 2022) 

  This isn’t super new, but is a fascinating deep dive into something I’ve been hearing more about recently: the mental health crisis impacting crypto investors amid the current crash. It includes an interview with a psychotherapist who offers CBT for crypto-related mental health issues, which on the one hand is just totally wild… but also makes complete sense. 

Scroll to the bottom for some quick links 🔗

It seems wild to me that Julia Fox only truly entered the cultural discourse this year. Despite starring in 2019 blockbuster Uncut Gems, it wasn’t until a New Year’s Eve party at the end of 2021 that Fox would meet Kanye. Their whirlwind romance – one that seemed to be as much about content and coverage as it was about their mutual affections – catapulted Fox into the deepest hellfires of celebrity culture. “From dominatrix to debutante,” quipped a headline from The Guardian in January, “who is Kanye's new girlfriend Julia Fox?”

While the relationship ran its course in the coming months, Fox’s presence in celebrity media did not. She has become a regular feature in tabloids globally, while over 50,000 videos have been uploaded to TikTok using the now-iconic ‘Uncut Gems’ sound, and videos tagged #juliafox have drawn upwards of 700 million views.

I have adored every headline, every tweet and every TikTok. She’s sometimes stylish, often fabulous, but always and unerringly outrageous. Early on in her hype cycle, a friend messaged me to discuss her choice to wear leather trousers to the beach. More recently, she showed up to the supermarket wearing underwear, a denim blazer and matching denim boots. Instead of wearing the jeans, they’d been repurposed as a bag. 

The DIY eyeshadow she wore to the Vanity Fair Oscars party that so unflatteringly highlighted her drug-addled eyes caused widespread ridicule and meme-ing. Her response? An influencer-style tutorial video for her fans to get the look. Just a few days ago, she was photographed in a natural hot spring, recreating the same look with mud from the floor for a gaggle of cackling mates (see above).

I’m sure that she, like all other humans, is far from perfect. But in the current climate of celebrity, she is thriving, and I am extremely here for it. Let me explain.

Fox is playing fame at its own game by performing – almost parodying – what people expect from celebrities. 

In doing so, she achieves two things:

1. She is demonstrating self-awareness by being open about her desire for – or at least, comfort with – fame. 

2. She is reclaiming and subverting the negative stereotypes attached to the act of participating in celebrity, ultimately alleviating them of their power – over her, or her persona. 

She is playing the character of a celebrity. 

Her performance not only highlights some of the most vilified aspects of celebrity culture, but outs their deep ties with misogyny, too.  

Because many of the stigmas and negative stereotypes around celebrity overlap with those of womanhood. In his 1963 book, Stigma: Notes on the Management of Spoiled Identity, sociologist Erving Goffman outlines three modes of judgement that can lead to stigmatisation in the context of ‘normal’ society:

• Physical: stigma relating to a person’s physical appearance

• Behavioural: stigma relating to a person’s character or behaviours

• Tribal: stigma relating to a person’s social standing or company kept

We can use this framework to see some of the ways in which Fox is directly dismantling the tropes attached to female-coded fame (and by extension, her own):

Don’t get me wrong: it’s not lost on me that Fox’s ability to mascarade as a walking hyperbole for femme celebrity is all directly reliant on her cis, white beauty, new money wealth and rock-hard abs. But that doesn’t mean what she’s doing isn’t fascinating to watch.

Not only do the culmination of her life experiences (including a drug overdose and stints working as a dominatrix) fail to align with the narrow expectations attached to the role, but her unique brand of celebrity is ripe for the cultural moment.

Fox speaks to a culture that claims to have hit peak celebrity, but hasn’t really at all.

“In many ways, she's a refreshing antidote to the disingenuous influencer, the hyper-polished A-list starlet,” writes Alexandra Pauly for High Snobiety. Because Fox’s exaggerated performance of celebrity is so intentional, it reads as not only ironic and absurd, but also deeply authentic. She sits in a kind of uncanny valley of celebrity culture, speaking to a cultural climate in which tabloid media coverage is both voraciously gorged upon and condemned with deep disdain. 

It’s not entirely unclear why. Between a torrent of predominantly-male A-listers falling from grace in the context of #MeToo, the Gal Gadot-catalysed backlash against the rich and famous during the pandemic, and the slow creep of influencers gobbling up the attention of the extremely online, the past decade hasn’t been great for celebrity, even while a new and more palatable guard populated by the likes of BTS and Billie Eillish is hailed in. 

We’ve hit the apex of this double-edged relationship with the defamation trial between Amber Heard and Johnny Depp: a brutal and intimate insight into the toxicity of one of the world’s most famous couples, aired on Court TV and amplified across social for the entertainment of the masses. Google searches for ‘Amber vs. Johnny’ are up over 5,000% in the past month, while LawTube has become a breakout content genre: one Floridian civil lawyer and former state prosecutor who goes by ‘Lawyer You Know’ claims to have gained over 75,000 subscribers and made upwards of $15,000 over the course of the trial.

All of this is to say that just because people despise – and are even disgusted by – celebrity culture, doesn’t mean they’re not consuming it. And beyond simply being entertained, being what media researcher Sarah McRae calls an ‘anti-fan’ can actually be a lens through which to explore and cement your own moral landscape.

It’s a subject that’s been explored in the context of influencer culture by researchers Brooke Erin Duffy and Kate M. Miltner. “Anti-fan communities … irreverent as they may first appear … become spaces to critique larger systems of privilege and inequality,” they write for Real Life Mag. “Public figures … offer a distilled, big-picture target against which audiences can direct their anger with the status quo.”

Fox’s divisive persona highlights the fact that society still has a lot of anger to direct at women who want sex, fame, money or… just to YOLO it and channel some dumb bitch energy. Amid a cocktail of fandom and anti-fandom, her performance of the many stereotypes that comprise vilified, feminine fame gives the people what they want. She understands what people love to hate most, and throws it in their faces, making them eat it.

Ultimately, though, she’s making celebrity joyful again by inviting people to participate.

This is where Fox really comes into her own. She (and her team, I assume?) has an uncanny ability to ensure that everything she does or says, that she’s seen doing, or overheard saying can somehow be construed as either razor sharp commentary on what it means to be a woman in the public eye, outrageous-yet-simplistic source material for the beginning of a meme cycle… or both.

One day, she’s posting stoned videos of herself garbling along to Lana Del Rey in her bedroom, the next she’s telling interviewers that her own memoir is “a masterpiece” or heading out in looks so beautifully absurd that seem almost designed to inspire Halloween 2022’s most iconic looks. Either way, a quick search on Google or Twitter for pretty much anything she does spawns as much fan-made content and UGC as it does actual pictures of the queen herself.

Constructing a culturally palatable caricature of yourself is not ground-breaking behaviour, of course. It’s a ritual that’s been practised by women in public spaces time and again: from Marilyn Monroe’s on- and off-screen role as a bombshell (amazing analysis of our renewed obsession w Monroe here) to Paris Hilton’s sickly sweet party girl persona to Nicki Minaj’s extensive roster of alter egos (there are at least 23 according to this fan wiki). 

But unlike these women, whose personas have often been considered exercises in the preservation of personal sanity, Fox’s mythologising of her own persona – especially given that her fame is in its infancy, relatively speaking – feels more like an experiment in the performance of celebrity that invites people to participate.

By embodying the aspects of celebrity that people feel discomforted with – vanity, wealth, performance, etc. – in ways that are playful and ironic rather than serious and sincere, she is not only being unapologetically herself, but inviting her fans (and anti-fans) to join her: to unapologetically revel in the phenomenon of celebrity.

Other important internet finds:

• ‘Trends aren’t dead, they’re more powerful than ever’, We Are Social (May 2022)

  My beloved work wife Susie Hogarth responded to Terry Nyugen’s latest hype piece claiming that trends are dead with a backlash befitting the initial hype. TL;DR? Trends are still a highly relevant form of cultural analysis, and brands should be paying more attention to them, not less. Guess we all still have jobs then, huh 🥲

• ‘The Rise of Cash App’, Digital Native (May 2022)

  An excellent analysis of how Cash App became a breakout success in the fintech space through a combination of culturally-led marketing that broke all the rules of how brands are supposed to behave (including a WAP-themed philanthropic giveaway in collaboration with Cardi B), and designing services for the people who weren’t already served by the industry.

• ‘New study: Is hating Facebook bad for us?’, Techno Sapiens (May 2022)

  A gorgeous topline on a fascinating study covering 15 countries that shows that the more we think Facebook is bad for ourselves and for society, the more likely we are to self-report that we spend too much time on it, and that it’s damaging our well-being.

• ‘DALL-E 2’, Open AI (2022)

  This is just… I cannot. A technology that’s not dissimilar to GPT-3, but for images, OpenAI has trained this neural network (?) that creates images based on text queries: from the vaguely innocuous ‘a male mannequin dressed in an orange and black flannel shirt’ to the slightly more adventurous ‘a chair that’s shaped like an avocado’ to the frankly absurd ‘a girl walking up an infinity staircase made of cookies’. I don’t understand it, I don’t like it, but I honestly cannot stop thinking about it / looking at it.

• ‘Sleep Baseball’, Dirt (May 2022)

  ‘Northwoods Baseball Sleep Radio’ is an ASMR-esque podcast that basically covers slow, sleepy commentary of a made-up minor league baseball match played between two made-up teams. Not only does it provide baseball fans all the sensory joys of watching a game with none of the interruptions or fear of missing something, it taps into one of the universal benefits of fandom across verticals: emotional safety and comfort. 

• ‘This Snapchatter gives fans his bank details’, The Feed (May 2022)

  French influencer Nasser Sari (apparently France’s most popular Snapchatter) has recently taken to dropping one-off credit card details on Snapchat, and encouraging fans to race to use up the €15,000 limit. It’s a Crystal Maze cash grab fit for the digital era, befitting a cultural moment that minimises the impact of wealth inequality while maximising the perceived opportunity social platforms can present in overcoming it. 

• ‘17 minute standing ovation for my animal crossing island tor  at the cannes film festival 2022’, TikTok (May 2022)

  This Twitch streamer projected one of his videos onto a projector at Cannes, and it speaks volumes that I didn’t not believe it was true. This low level fake news is pretty commonplace on TikTok as a wider commentary on the absurdity of Late Capitalism, and I’m honestly not mad about it. Most liked comment: ‘I thought this was real for a sec😭😭’

• ‘Every time I hear people talk about NFTs I think of this’, Twitter (May 2022)

  No description needed… it’s just a great tweet.

All thoughts and analyses are of course my own, skewed by my experiences of life on Earth.

Over the past few weeks, I’ve been deconstructing some of the most prominent aesthetics in the discourse around NFTs, and would be most likely to show up to the everyperson sleuthing round the internet. This is about the works that have sold for the most money, inspired the most headlines, and drawn the most hype: the top images that show up on Google, and the minters/creators/artists that are mentioned on Wikipedia.

Last week, I unpacked the top two spaces in this mapping, outlining the role that sincerity plays in NFT imagery:

If you want a full breakdown of the mapping, head back to part I, and if you want to read about all the stuff above the x-axis, head back to part II.

In this final installment, I want to unpack the final two spaces – ‘Capitalist Cosplay’ and ‘Subversion as Status’ – to explore the role that satire plays in this space, and what it tells us about our relationship with society / tech / etc.

3. Capitalist Cosplay

NFTs (and their predominantly Millennial advocates) are creating a safe place for irreverence and experimentation amid a wider set of broken systems.

 Some of the most high profile NFT collections feature heavily anthropomorphised animals or other non-human entities that are based on a single illustration, but have been algorithmically replicated thousands of times to wear a multitude of expressions, clothes, etc. FLUF World is home to 10,000 animated bunnies, while the Bored Ape Yacht Club and the Mutant Ape Yacht Club respectively host 10,000 bored apes and mutant apes. No Brainers is an NFT collection of 2,500 big-brained aliens. All are reminiscent of the little dice icon used to randomly generate your character on The Sims 4. Buying from any one of these collections comes with access to a Discord server and community perks, creating a sense of collective power that straddles online and offline planes.

The fact that these animals are so often in costume feels pertinent. It implies playing pretend: dressing up as something that you're not, trying a new identity on for size. Bored Apes / Mutant Apes are the most on-the-nose example of this – buying into the group implies aping as a high flying investor while not *actually* being one. In a recent partnership between collector Jimmy McNelis and Universal Music Group, four Bored Apes (all owned by McNelis) literally ape as musicians for a Gorillaz-esque, metaversal supergroup.

The vibrant colourways of these collections indicate playfulness on a spectrum: while the pastel tones of CryptoKitties imply naivety, the bold apes and bunnies imply boisterousness. No Brainers’ swoll-brained avatars sit somewhere in the middle of this spectrum, some adopting the infantile air of a ‘smooth brain’, others giving off a distinctively boyish ‘my brain is bigger than yours’ energy. In both cases, they look like they’ve been created by Adult Swim: characters whose sweetness and innocence would make them look fit for kids’ TV if it wasn’t for the odd cigar, dealer’s visor or sullen expression.

This juxtaposition between innocence and maturity is key. Cuteness is pushed to new extremes across the board: big eyes and humorous expressions imply total harmlessness. But these communities aren’t harmless. They’re responsible for huge amounts of capital and by extension, power. Critics are calling them out as Ponzi schemes that are broadening financial inequality. They’re proven to have a detrimental impact on the environment. The prevalence of aesthetic codes of innocuousness in a space with so many real-world implications is at best a crude means of catharsis for a predominantly Millennial audience that feels existentially disenfranchised. At worst, it’s more than a little sinister.

Aesthetics you’ll recognise:

• Vibrant colourways indicate playfulness, from naive through to boisterousness 

• Animals dressed as people (apes, kittens, bunnies, etc.) imply dressing up or playing pretend, aping as someone or something else

• Extreme codes of cuteness (big eyes, small faces, humorous expressions) imply total harmlessness and a sense of safety

• Brightly coloured sans-serif fonts (as in a lot of the No Brainers’ communications) also suggests a sense of childlike spirit

4. Subversion as Status

NFTs (and the web 3.0 rebellion they represent) are being used to signal anti-establishment ideals as a new kind of status symbol.

Rebellion has been a central theme in the NFT discourse, and subversion has been a primary means. Artist Mason Rothschild’s subversion of the iconic and hyper-luxe Hermés Birkin bag – check out his Metabirkins – is a rebellion against cultural gatekeeping. The communities around NFTs are rebelling against existing financial systems by subverting conventional notions of wealth. The format itself is a form of rebellion against elitism in the art world, and a constant cause for controversy: Wikipedia recently classified NFTs as ‘not art’, only serving to cement their relevance in the conversation around what constitutes art.

In one of the highest selling NFTs, titled ‘Replicator’, creator Mad Dog Jones subverts established notions of value. The image depicts a run-down looking photocopier, nestled in the corner of an office in a neon-lit cityscape. Referred to by the artist as an 'NFT experience', the $1.6 million asset will self-replicate into hundreds of iterations of itself that can be sold on separately. On one hand, it puts a middle finger up to the value of scarcity in the current marketplace. But it also highlights the sheer value of replication as a form of production on the global stage, described by Jones as "a metaphor for modern technology’s continuum."

The spirit of ‘Replicator’ is complemented by its cyberpunk/Blade Runner-esque backdrop. Bleakness is dominant in this space. It’s in the murky gray palettes of the cigarette-smoking, hoodie-wearing Crypto Punks, and in the bloated figure of Trump spread across pavement in Beeple’s ‘Crossroad’. Even these new virtual worlds where NFTs and crypto form the basis for a new economy (from Decentraland to the freshly-cancelled Cryptoland) are framed less as exciting new frontiers and more as necessary alternatives to existing systems. In reality, these worlds may simply offer additional planes on which people can buy, sell and consume until they die, but the ethos implies dissatisfaction with the current systems in place.

Maybe that’s why subversion here feels a little like virtual signalling. There's a fundamental contradiction between the murky, punk aesthetics or the overt celebration of self-expression (mohawks seem to be the hairstyle du jour in metaversal circles on apes, Crypto Punks, etc., as is brightly coloured make-up), and the sheer volume of financial and commercial power attached to them. Last Summer, VISA purchased a CryptoPunk and added it to its commercial collection – arguably the least Crypto or Punk thing to happen to anyone, ever. At a time when people are feeling pretty sketchy about systemic power – 67% of Millennial and Gen Z Britons say they want out of capitalism, a sentiment that’s reflected in other global studies, too – maybe it’s no surprise anti-establishment ideals have become a status symbol.

Aesthetics you’ll recognise:

• The moody colour palettes are duller than most of the other territories, implying seriousness and maturity 

• Most of the avatars features in these NFTs feature overt modes of self-expression (Cyber Punks’ mohawks and brightly-coloured make-up, doodles on Beeple’s bloated Trump). All indicate a sense of irreverence, a refusal to conform with the norm 

• Neon-lit, urban settings are affiliated with dystopian futures, largely due to their prevalence in the sci-fi sub-genre of cyberpunk, and proliferated through blockbusters like Blade Runner

It’s easy to hate NFTs. They’re perceived as irreverent yet elitist, hypermasculine yet infantile: mascots for the next generation of financial elite who want to build systems that get them just as rich without the stuffiness of old boys’ clubs. But the reality is much more complex. What underpins all of this is a rich tapestry of motivations driven by accelerationism, late-capitalism, tech solutionism and shared trauma in the wake of the pandemic.

I also haven’t been able to shake the feeling that something about NFTs is distinctly Millennial – and actually, the data suggests Millennials are more likely than any other generation to both understand what they are, and want to learn more about them. In the most literal sense, many of the characters and much of the iconography that feature in NFTs are stripped directly from the childhoods of those that grew up in the ‘90s: Windows ‘95 aesthetics, pixel art, Pokémon cards, collectible avatars not dissimilar to Neopets, and Habbo Hotel-style worlds. These references aren’t just nostalgic, they’re reminiscent of an era bursting with hope for the opportunities the internet would bring us. This was a pre-social media internet: an internet where creating was paramount, and where digitally socialising was a risky thrill enabled only by murky chat rooms or grainy webcams.

Of course the first generation to turn out poorer than their parents, who have historically struggled to get on the property ladder, and have been crippled by student debt have found a way to make their stunted journey into adulthood work in their favour. They’ve taken the one benefit of being born later than Boomers – digital literacy and a subsequent penchant for internet humour – and wielded it as a weapon against the systems that have either shut them out or kept them down. What's unfortunate is that in doing so, many pre-existing inequalities are still being perpetuated, and many new broken systems are emerging that can wreak havoc on our societies and our planet.

In reality, we’ve barely scratched the surface of what these web 3.0 technologies will look like. The above analysis is built on some quick Google searches and a few articles about a years’ worth of NFT auctions. When you dig into the depths of these spaces, there’s already so much more vibrance to behold. Hopefully in the next few years, we’ll see some of these systems truly start to work for everyone. And if not? Well… at least art history grads in 2050 will have a distinctive aesthetic era to decode as they traverse the hellfire.  

If you made it this far and you’ve got an opinion, please send me your praise, your arguments and your opinions. OR send me some requests for future analyses.

All thoughts and analyses are of course my own, skewed by my experiences of life on Earth.

Over the past few weeks, I’ve been trying to deconstruct the aesthetics that have become the most prominent in the discourse around NFTs, and would be most likely to show up to the everyperson sleuthing round the internet. This is about the works that have sold for the most money (and are therefore most likely to make headlines), the top images that show up on Google, and work from minters/creators/artists that are mentioned on Wikipedia.

Last week, I introduced this mapping of the space, in which I identified two overarching tensions, and introduced four themes:

If you want a full breakdown of the mapping, head back to part I. Here, I want to unpack the top two spaces – ‘Reclaiming History’ and ‘The Digital Village’ – to explore the role that sincerity is playing in this space, and what it tells us about our relationship with society and ourselves.

1. Reclaiming History

NFTs (and the abundance of capital they represent) are being used to retroactively attribute value and importance to web 1.0 memes and internet moments.

On first glance, many famous NFTs look like nostalgia for the older internet. Doge, Nyan Cat, Bad Luck Brian, Disaster Girl. But actually, they point to digital communities’ desire to ascribe significance to the moments in history that happened while people still considered the internet to be throwaway. Because memes are important: 67% of Gen Zers and Millennials say memes have helped them cope during the pandemic. In this space, many memes are enjoying the legitimacy of financial value being attached to their images, not to mention the mischievous thrill of having been snuck into auction houses and elitist art institutions.

Tim Berners-Lee and Edward Snowden have both minted and sold their tangible offline/online historical moments to reclaim their significance, and sold them for millions. Jack Dorsey sold the first tweet for $2.9 million. It’s notable that the first two examples here both co-opt minimal black and white aesthetics that are reminiscent of broadsheet newspapers, further exemplifying their continued historical relevance even after time has past.

NFTs from Beeple solidify this sense of making history with iconography that seethes with a self-ascribed sense of creative exploration: astronauts, magical realism and endless blue skies. It’s a retro-futuristic vision of the future: one that originates in the mid-20th century novels of Asimov and Arthur C. Clarke, built on the ideal that building new worlds is more appealing than fixing the ones we already live in. The symbolism here indicates that NFTs and those behind them are on the leading edge of brave new worlds. Whether they’re truly pioneers is up for debate, but that’s not the point. What’s clear is that digital audiences have felt under-credited until now.

Aesthetics you’ll recognise:

• The juxtaposition of well-known meme iconography in elitist institutions (like Doge getting sold at an auction) implies mischief, playfulness and irreverence: a sense of sneaking into a stuffier and more grown-up space. 

• Simplistic black and white colourways imply newsworthiness and historical importance.

• Slick lines, digital design and imagery of astronauts signify visions of the future, pioneering, exploring, building new worlds, or otherwise adventuring into unknown ones.

• The blue skies and hyperrealism indicate creativity, vision and clarity.

2. The Digital Village

NFTs (and the notions of decentralisation they represent) are being used to demonstrate the positive impact that digital culture and communities can drive.

In May of last year, healthcare charity Noora Health minted an NFT called ‘Save Thousands Of Lives’, which sold for $4.5 million, promising to use 100% of the proceeds to improve healthcare on a global scale, truly saving thousands of lives. It’s a looping video, which starts closely cropped on an image of a baby tenderly cradled in a woman’s arms. Slowly, it zooms out, revealing hundreds of others in need of care, with ‘SAVE THOUSANDS OF LIVES’ emblazoned above them in clinical sans-serif font. The aesthetic adopts the tone of a pamphlet you might find in a hospital lobby (fitting, given that Noora Health is a medical organisation), while embodying the sickly sweet sincerity of the opening credits of Love Actually. It tells the viewer that we’re all in it together.

The use of tiled imagery is pretty commonplace in NFTs. CryptoPunks, Bored Apes, VeKings, CryptoKitties and many others: they’re as regularly pictured within tiled collectives as they are individually, autonomous offshoots of a bigger whole. Beeple’s ‘Everydays: The First 5,000 Days’ collages images from the artist’s daily creations, indicating progress toward a larger goal. In Edward Snowden’s ‘Stay Free’, it’s not people that are tiled, but paperwork from a seminal court reading, collaged to form Snowden’s face. His signature is handwritten at the bottom: a human touch. Despite having publicly decried NFTs, Snowden sold this signed exclusive at a charity auction, once again harnessing the power of tech and the reach it gives us for an unwavering higher cause.

Mass connection was supposed to help us make things better: to cure cancer, end world hunger, find our people. Instead, sometimes it seems like digitisation has just made home delivery quicker, racking up debt easier and social anxiety more abhorrent. In fact, research from Pew Research Center shows that 49% of tech experts worry that the use of technology will weaken core aspects of democracy over the coming decade.

“Reproductive futurism and what we can think of as ‘corporate futurism’ … both favor superficial progress,” writes futurist and theorist Alex Quicho for WIRED. “Under reproductive futurity, we are collectively biased towards non-disruptive and incremental change.” Here, NFTs are a manifestation of our collective anxiety to make technology ‘good’. It’s an exercise in (potentially misguided?) optimism: an attempt to find the positive impact that tech has long promised for society, not just individuals.

Aesthetics you’ll recognise:

• Collaged or tiled imagery signifies collective power, mass connection, a link to something bigger than yourself.

• Vignettes of individuals (whether the numerous VeKings illustrations or the individuals in Noora Health’s Save Thousands of Lives), hammer home the reality that we’re not all that different from one another.

• The use of close-ups on tender interactions and handwriting (as in Edward Snowdon’s ‘Stay Free’) indicates humanity beneath this hyper-digital format.

In Part III, I’ll unpack the aesthetics of the last two themes – Capitalist Cosplay and Subversion as Status – and explore the role of satire in the NFT space.

If you made it this far and you’ve got an opinion, please send me your praise, your arguments and your thoughts. OR send me some requests for future analyses.

The NFT gold rush has been as expectedly polarising as anything that suddenly erupts from the crevasses of digital culture into the mainstream. Mostly seeded out to the masses via snarky tweets and headlines making outlandish promises about a future few of us have yet to grasp an understanding of, they seem to be inescapable. But according to research I commissioned for We Are Social, 85% of social media users globally don’t understand what NFTs are. 

The narratives in my own sphere of reference overlap with broader critiques of web3 technologies and the communities that drive them: a discourse overwhelmingly dominated by environmental anxiety, call-outs of crypto bros, and a whole lot of scams. Recently, a Tumblr blog named urfaveisunfuckable very publicly shut down after one of its mods was outed as a former NFT-minter, seeing them immediately rejected from their creative collaborators and even receive death threats from anonymous followers. Loads of people really don’t love NFTs or the individuals behind them. 

There are certainly creators and communities pushing for a more positive public profile for web3 – from communities like web3baddies ‘for girlies, gays, non-binaries, & baddies’ to art collectives like Folia who are opening up access to the blockchain for artists. But the reality is that the mainstream uptake of this tech has been dictated by a privileged and predominantly male subset of the internet. A full 77% of the cash generated by NFT art sales over 2020 and 2021 went to male creators, with just 5% going to female artists. Not to mention the fact that the uptake in conversation is directly tied to the obscene wealth at stake: in 2021 alone, collectors and traders spent $22 billion on these previously unknown assets.

ANYWAY what’s most interesting about the sudden explosion of NFTs into the mainstream lexicon (imo) is the long-term impact the past year will have. The artists and aesthetics that generated the most hype during 2021 have embedded clear 'codes' that signify NFT status – forming the groundwork for the signs and symbols that people will continue to associate with the space, even as it evolves and diversifies. In a post titled ‘in the future everything looks awful’, cultural theorist and strategist Livvi Yallop describes the aesthetic of NFTs as “slick, 3D, weightless, consciously digital, elaborately textured, futuristic, retrofuturistic, manufactured, fractured, glitching, abstract, illuminated, lucid, looping.”

But what do these aesthetics tell us about the cultural context from which they’ve sprung? Here, I’m going to try to deconstruct some of the dominant codes in this discourse to find out.

Sources

(Where you might find what NFTs look like to the everyperson)

• The 15 NFTs that sold for the most money in 2021, and other work from the artists responsible for them. These include work from Pak, Beeple, Mad Dog Jones, CryptoPunks, ‘Stay Free’ by Edward Snowden, ‘This Changed Everything’ by Sir Tim Berners-Lee, ‘Save Thousands of Lives’ by Noora Health, various imagery of Doge
  
  

• Top images from a Google image search for NFTs at the time of writing (aware this will differ slightly between users but just go with it, k?). These include all the above, plus Bored Ape Yacht Club, CryptoKitties, Nyan Cat
  
  

• Work from the artists mentioned or depicted on the Wikipedia page for ‘Non-Fungible Tokens’. These include VeKings, Curio Cards, EtherRocks

I came to this project with the hopes of getting an understanding of the flippant assumptions that people make about NFTs, and frankly, to throw out some snarky hot takes. ANNOYINGLY loads of interesting themes emerged that actually say a lot about the current state of play in contemporary culture. 

Either way, a lot of people’s first impression of this space may well proliferate from, or overlap with, two major tensions:

1. Playful vs. Provocative

While some of the aesthetics of NFTs are playful verging on infantile (apes dressed as pirates or Doge reframed as a Pokémon card), appearing to create safe space away from the culture wars of the wider internet, others are more explicitly provocative and in explicit opposition with the status quo.

This tension tracks with the ‘manchild’ persona that has become the poster child for NFTs. What defines this stereotype is a desire to have fun, enjoy life and amass capital, offset by a Kendall Roy-esque lack of identification with the stuffiness of corporate/financial culture, and a desire to provoke change or otherwise take it down. “I’m not a normal financial bro/art bro, I’m a cool bro, a crypto bro.”

2. Sincere vs. Satirical

Some of the most popular NFTs have been created and designed with sincere tech utopianism in mind (from marking the beginning of the internet as a key moment in history to raising funds to save lives), while others appear to have a double-meaning, using satire/ subversion to highlight the sociopolitical grievances of late capitalism and big tech.

This tension reflects the ongoing conversation around the pros and cons of web 3.0 tech, and whether it’ll level up the human race or catalyse our journey into the hellfire.

Conveniently, the more meaningful observations I had about what may drive the communities behind NFTs can be mapped onto these tensions quite neatly. The mapping looks like this:

SO what do these spaces look like, and what do they say about our relationship with technology, the internet, the future, the past, identity, culture, etc.?

Here’s a topline on the four themes that emerged:

1. Reclaiming History

NFTs (and the abundance of capital they represent) retroactively attribute value and importance to web 1.0 memes, milestones and moments.

2. The Digital Village

NFTs (and the notions of decentralisation they represent) demonstrate the positive impact that digital culture and communities can drive.

3. Capitalist Cosplay

NFTs (and their predominantly Millennial advocates) facilitate safe spaces for financial experimentation amid a wider set of broken systems.

4. Subversion as Status

NFTs (and the web 3.0 rebellion they represent) signal anti-establishment ideals, using them to gain social capital.

In Part II, I’ll unpack the aesthetics of the first two themes: Reclaiming History and The Digital Village.

If you made it this far and you’ve got an opinion, please send me your praise, your arguments and your thoughts. OR send me some requests for future analyses.

The way the ebb and flow of culture plays out online can sometimes feel inconsequential; cheap thrills, quick laughs and petty debates, all served up in 15-second looped videos and comment sections populated by strangers. But it’s often more than that. Whether contained cultural moments (see above image for reference) or creators that go on to become celebrity mainstays (looking at you Charli D’Amelio) – so many facets of digital culture can function as an early warning system for the cultural and behavioural shifts that will outlive the media cycle.

Arguably, this is more true on the precipice of 2021 than any year in a while. As we all know (and are sick of people writing in recaps like this one) last year was… eventful. An increasingly visible and vicious climate crisis, a global pandemic, and a civil rights movement – among many other crises – forced the global population to face the cracks in society’s established order of business. And 2021 picked up right where 2020 left off.

Social platforms have played a central role in the theatrics (it’s pretty much all there was/is in the way of human connection from the depths of lockdown). As a result, digital culture has evolved to address a wealth of emotional needs in ever more tangible ways – whether comic relief in the wake of political inadequacies, sentimentality in the face of a cruel world, or security in the knowledge that you’re not the only person feeling overwhelmed, knackered or insane.

Some of these moments will stay in 2020. But others point to a levelling up of digital culture and platforms, paving the way to new formats, features and behaviours in 2021. You can find my thoughts on which are most interesting below.

1. Macro influencers continue to wield soft cultural power

If celebrity creators from Stephen Curry to Lady Gaga taught us anything this year, it’s that in times of strife, these figures are incredible unifying forces. While early lockdown demonstrated the fatigue people felt around glossy celebrity exteriors and faux proclamations of the levelling power of Covid-19 (cc: Gal Gadot and her tone-deaf crowdsourced cover of ‘Imagine’), the notion that people were done with celebrities on social was missguided.

On the contrary, people have been coming together around their shared adoration of cultural figureheads and taking joy in the intimate moments they’ve been sharing. In 2020 Kylie Jenner once again dominated Instagram’s most-liked photos, but this year, they’re intimate and sentimental windows into her life as a mother – a tribute to Travis Scott on Father’s Day (15.9 million+ likes), an adorable image of Stormi in the bath (15.3 million+ likes).

Meanwhile, Jeffree Star’s heartfelt video addressing his break-up with Nathan Schwandt (33.2 million+ views) was one of the top trending videos on YouTube in 2020. On TikTok, Charli D’Amelio’s adoring fans rallied around her in a flurry of heart emojis and adoring comments (according to BrandWatch, in 2020 ‘love’ was the most common word to found in mentions of her across social), waiting for a glimpse into the more intimate aspects of her life.

TL;DR: Don’t underestimate the resonance of macro influencers. They still have an unmatched emotional power, rooted in the communities that rally around them.

2. Internet humour will continue to facilitate necessary political discourse

While Trump’s antics in the US have dominated the conversation over the course of 2020 (@realdonaldtrump was the most tweeted about person globally, only sweetening the irony now that his account has been removed), politics on the global stage has often seemed like an endless and impossibly overwhelming series of unfortunate events. This isn’t just about the mishandling of the climate crisis, the global pandemic or disasters like the explosion in Beirut, but a wealth of human rights issues coming to light across continents. 

For better or worse, social has been integral to how many are educating themselves on these issues. And internet humour has been playing a role in how discourse around these crises evolves. Part of this is about comic relief. But it’s also about the function comedy can play in times of discord. “We see satire emerge when political discourse is in crisis,” says Sophia McClennen, director of Penn State's Center for Global Studies. “It becomes important to use satirical comedy to put political pressure on misinformation and the abuse of power."  

So it should be no surprise that so much of the most popular content from 2020 has been satirical political humour. Police getting shamed on Reddit are among the top 5 upvoted posts (260k+ upvotes). On YouTube, the highest trending videos were Dave Chapelle’s commentary on racism in America (29. 4 million + views), and SNL’s take on that debate between Biden and Trump (30.4 million + views). On Instagram, @newyorkercartoons is enjoying a renaissance, while on TikTok, Trump impressionist Sarah Cooper now has her own show on Netflix. It’s worth noting that one of the most successful commercial presences on TikTok is The Washington Post, which often uses satire to land its coverage. 

TL;DR: In an overwhelming political landscape, memes and internet humour are integral to healthy discourse.

3. A new generation of multisensory memes are connecting people through music

Music has always been a powerful way to bring people together. But driven by the growing prominence of video content across social platforms, and compounded by the rise of TikTok-style formats, music, dance and rhythm are playing an increasingly central role in mass digital culture, functioning as a shortcut to recognition, a comedic device, and a mechanism for joy.

In this multi-platform (and socially distanced) world – people are seeking out shared musical experiences as a way to come together, connect and have fun in virtual and digital spaces. “Music can be an important medium for empathy and inter-cultural understanding,” says Professor Eric Clarke, an expert on the psychology of music from Oxford University. “This Covid-19 crisis is a vivid demonstration of just how quickly people have turned to music to express and participate in a sense of social belonging.”

We’re seeing this shift reflected in the content that’s dominated the cultural consciousness in 2020. BTS and Travis Scott took to Fortnite to bring live experiences to millions of fans. Jungkook from BTS also turned up in Twitter’s most retweeted tweets, singing a cover of 'Never Not' by American Gen Z favourite, Lauv (1.6 million+ retweets). Dreams by Fleetwood Mac re-entered a number of global music charts after appearing in the TikTok of @doggface208 skateboarding with a carton of cranberry juice (12.5 million + views). And in the UK, Just Eat’s multi-platform campaign with Snoop Dogg is exemplary of how brands can tap into this shift to create cultural resonance.

TL;DR: Music is able to facilitate connections that can span generations, cultures and platforms in an increasingly fragmented digital metaverse.

4. The lines between old and new media are blurring

The notion that the lines between old media, new media and the many platforms that they encompass have blurred is an established school of thought. “In the ‘90s, rhetoric about a coming digital revolution contained an implicit and often explicit assumption that new media was going to push aside old media,”  wrote American media scholar Henry Jenkins, in his 2007 book Convergence Culture. “Yet, history teaches us that old media never die… [instead], we’re entering an era of prolonged transition and transformation in the way media operates.”

In 2020, when so much of our lives were shunted into emerging digital spaces, this transition was catalysed, further assimilating internet culture into mainstream popular culture. While YouTube personal trainer Joe Wicks aka. The Body Coach helped millions of parents get through homeschooling, social platforms became a major outlet for mainstream celebrity culture. Will Smith’s take on the #wipeitdown trend – which saw Smith leverage his old media heritage with a Men in Black reference to land a joke in a new media context – was one of TikTok’s top viral videos (19.2 m + likes), while celebrities like Leslie Jordan became breakout lockdown stars.

In this climate, there’s a craving for internet icons to be legitimised in the public space, and given the credit and platform they deserve for their contributions to culture. It’s why a nostalgic throwback picture posted by Rick Astley (of the iconic RickRoll meme) was the most-upvoted post on Reddit in 2020 (438k+ upvotes). It’s also why one of the biggest TikToks was TikToker Jalaiah Harmon’s performance at an NBA game, posted by the NBA (3.6 m+ likes). Harmon created the ‘Renegade’ dance (117.6m+ views), which was widely credited to Charli D’Amelio, and in giving her their platform, the NBA did their part in redirecting credit and fame where it was due. 

TL;DR: With people now engaging with old and new media in the same spaces, established players and emerging icons are working together to maximise their relevance.

5. Realism and ‘bad vibes’ are part of a positivity backlash

‘Good vibes only’ is a turn of phrase that’s long dominated  the glossier corners of the internet. But do you know what? Vibes in 2020 left a lot to be desired. Yes, there were good vibes. There were NHS claps, viral community support resources, and Folklore by Taylor Swift. But there were a whole lot of bad vibes, too. And an attitude of unwaning positivity felt like brushing those things under the rug, instead of giving them the time, energy and digital real estate they deserve.

As a result, digital culture across the board has been administered with a healthy amount of realism, sometimes with a touch of cynicism.  It builds on the perfection fatigue we’ve seen building in recent years, particularly on visually-led platforms like Instagram and Pinterest. But this is less about aesthetics than it is about attitude.

So it’s probably not a surprise that 2020 was the year that people shared their glow downs on TikTok (21.4 million+ views), as opposed to their glow ups. A new wave of observational comedians like Caitlin Reilly helped us laugh at the downsides of working from home (819.9k+ likes). One of Reddit’s most upvoted posts is a takedown of inconsiderate lockdown stockpilers (271k+ upvotes) – a genre of 2020 internet content in its own right. And in response to the chirpy annual drop of Spotify Wrapped, digital publication The Pudding created an AI that would tear down users’ music taste with personalised insults, which ended up trending on Twitter.

TL;DR: Unbridled positivity is increasingly perceived as toxic, basic and inauthentic.

Some other stuff from around the internet that brought me joy in recent weeks:

• ‘Screen memories’
  I wrote a trend report a few years back re: the rise of the screenshot as a uniquely intimate format in a world lived online, but as author Kelly Pendergrast so beautifully highlights, the screenshot has taken on new meaning once more when so much of everyday life is being experienced via a screen. Renowned genius Sam Shaw gets credit for bringing this to my attention.
  Real Life (January 14th)

• ‘No fucking way’
  A meme that’s been living rent-free in my brain.
  Twitter (January 18th)

• 'The reign of the great fashion amateur'
  Some really juicy snippets in here exploring what gives people authority in cultural spaces when information and inspiration is no longer gatekept.
  High Snobiety (January 19th)

• ‘@MBTI_bot’
  Reeling from the fact that in South Korea, astrology memes aren’t a thing BUT Meyers Briggs memes are??????? ENFJ wbu?

• ‘Aesthetics Wiki’
  Just… Wikipedia for aesthetics (from the established Americana to the recent hype of Cottagecore to something on the cutting edge called Dark Academia).

Another decade of living on the grid?

At the ripe old age of 10, the ‘image-sharing platform’ renowned for its retro logo has come a long way. Instagram is now a hub of social commerce, an endless scroll of inspiration (if often served with a side of insecurity), and more recently, a hub of verified information, bolstered by its mobilised population of creators. With lockdown shaping much of our experience in early 2020 – at its peak, the first wave of Covid-19 saw over 3.9 billion people confined to their homes – digital tools and communications were pulled into even greater prominence, and Instagram has been forced to evolve.

Text-based communication on the platform is up so dramatically that publishers are adapting to these formats – Refinery29 went from 41% text-based posts in January to 72% in July (check out the below visual). Meanwhile, Facebook is changing its advertising policies; it axed its ‘20% rule’, which historically penalised ads for including text that took up more than 20% of an image.

I guess my point is that a lot can change in a year, let alone 10. But the ways in which Instagram (and the creators that drive its content) has levelled up in this landscape have recently made me realise something that I’m pretty sure most people wouldn’t have thought of a platform once defined by its not-particularly-diverse suite of vintage-style filters. Instagram is adaptable.

And so my prediction for Instagram 10 years from now is that it will become a one-stop platform for any digital whim or need we may have. Instagram will be to the West what WeChat is for China. I know people in my line of work are fond of making predictions of this ilk. But hear me out.

The past 10 years have seen Instagram draw an impressive breadth of creators – it doesn’t matter if you’re a fashion student seeking information, a civil rights advocate looking for education or a wired parent looking for some homeschooling advice. The creators on Instagram are sprawling and diverse.

Not only this, but its wealth of formats give it an edge on other platforms like Twitter, WhatsApp, or even its parent platform Facebook. By bastardising the novel formats, tools and aesthetics of competitors like Snapchat and TikTok, but combining them with the reach and commercial appeal of its own platform, Instagram has managed to become a digital space that facilitates multiple consumer mindsets. People head there for information, entertainment, socialising, shopping, networking, mindless scrolling and so much more.

Already, we’re seeing people relearn how to use the platform in this context. People are increasingly using ‘saves’, and bookmarking them in line with what mood they’re in when they revisit later. For example, my current save folders include education on human rights, beauty inspiration, and memes.

Further down the line, we could see Instagram users grow accustomed to scrolling multiple feeds or at least organising their content in more sophisticated ways. Imagine a filter or tabs to select close friends, outer circles, holiday inspiration, financial advice, and so on.

More than that, we could end up engaging with Instagram the same way we used to engage with the full Sky TV package – content streams that are packaged up and recommended to us via algorithms that will be creepier than ever in their accuracy. We’ll need guides to keep on top of the lives that are most relevant to us, like the Explore page, only more sophisticated, and for a wider range of topics and formats.

Commerce will, obviously, play a major role. Already, Instagram feels like a virtual shopping centre. A place where teens come to socialise and fawn over brands; where homeowners come to peruse bed frames or lampshades; where beauty lovers, gamers and streetwear nerds can come to pick up the latest drop.

The ways in which all of the above engage with products and brands will become even more streamlined, supported by the cross-pollination of formats Instagram offers. Audiences accustomed to engaging with influencers via livestreams will have no trouble making the leap to livestreamed retail experiences. Tutorials on how to use, apply or make the most of what we buy will continue to be integrated into shop fronts – for global conglomerates and local businesses alike. It’s only a matter of time before the exchange of funds between consumers and sellers makes its way in-platform. Some brands that have yet to be born may never even bother to create a digital presence beyond Instagram’s platform.

A lot could happen between now and 2030. We could all be working from home with the aid of virtual reality. We might have discovered a way to colonise Mars, or have contacted those alien life forms on Venus. Climate change might have destroyed us all. But, if the latter isn’t the case, I bet you Instagram’s still around, for better or worse, infiltrating our everyday lives and influencing the world around us.

Here are 10 Instagram accounts currently ensuring my screen time never sinks too low (in no particular order):

1. @ripannanicolesmith
   No one intellectualises pop culture quite like Kristen Cochrane

   

2. @sainthoax
   Where I go when I’m too sad to read about US politics, but I wanna keep up with memes about US politicians

3. @dj_vibecheck
   Lols with a side of weird (ty Rosie Gillespie for this gift)

4. @chantayyjayy
   Endless hot takes via a true goddess

5. @monchismunchiesmemes
   Didn’t even know how much I loved this page until I scrolled back through my Saves and realised half of them are from here. Many lols

   

6. @the___zoo
   The most perfect second-hand designer goods, sold via Stories

7. @autogyniphiles_anonymous
   Anime babes, overlaid with philosophy (if Alex Quicho stopped giving me tips would this newsletter even exist???)

8. @thelickvhs
   Movie aesthetics of my dreams

9. @the.holistic.psychologist
   “Looks basic but is amazing” is a mood I can get on board with (Susie Hogarth always brings the therapeutic goods)

10. @somewhereiwouldliketolive
    Just bc sometimes I wanna be somewhere other than here

    

Anyway, I’m a little rusty, but here are some artefacts of 2020 internet.

1. @Nels9Bills is an adulting influencer

London-based Nelson is a 26-year-old homeowner who is using his experiences of becoming an adult to inform and support other young adults through Instagram and YouTube – whether participating in challenges to build a perfect credit score or demystifying the hidden costs attached to buying a house.

Nelson’s appeal lies in his ability to make inaccessible topics (mortgages, investments, credit scores, etc.), seem accessible. The next generation of grown-ups (HI) are used to looking online to learn about what they don’t understand. It’s about finding shorter paths to the information we need, and seeking it out in a format and tone that reflects our wider media diet. We’ve already seen the way people buy clothes or holidays change via social, so it makes sense that young adults are looking to these channels for financial matters when the time comes, too. 

What’s especially interesting here is Nelson’s presence on Instagram. This year has seen the role of Instagram evolve away from pure inspiration, and into information, so much so that the very formats that flourish there have changed – Refinery29’s feed went from 41% of text-based posts in January, to 72% in July. In this landscape, the type of information people are comfortable getting from Instagram – and the creators that flourish there – is evolving, too.

TL;DR: The next generation of grown-ups are looking to social to learn about the services and skills they need to grow and progress in life.

2. Photo dumps are taking over the grid

In the past couple of years, the grid has often been used and discussed in opposition to the style of content more commonly affiliated with Stories. While the former is curated, polished and permanent,  the latter is spontaneous, authentic and ephemeral. But recently I’ve noticed more and more people posting photo dumps to their grid, signalling an evolution away from the grid’s well-manicured past.

See the above photo series for a perfect example – model Jordan Daniels’ birthday weekend, summarised in a 5-shot carousel. In another, similar manifestation, British lifestyle influencer Luiza Cordery posts 6 photos in a single carousel on her grid. The first is a selfie with a friend, snapped in the footage of a CCTV screen. Then, another selfie with the same mate. A mirror selfie at home. A blurry close-up of her outfit. A shot of her own shoes taken on a bus. And then an obscure meme. The caption simply reads “dump.”

As the name suggests, photo dumps imply a lack of care or curation; a collection of images that reflect a specific space of time – almost like letting someone else scroll through your camera roll. Many are used to summarise a mood or a memory, and do – despite what the name implies – require some curation. There’s a level of artistry attached to selecting a specific combination of memes, faces and locations that can be used to convey how you feel about a loved one, a weekend away or those first few months of lockdown. It’s a way of using the grid to communicate with a broader spectrum of emotion, and create a deeper sense of intimacy.

TL;DR: Instagram photo dumps highlight the way long-form formats – like carousels – can encourage more nuanced storytelling on social.

3. Andrew Callaghan is updating gonzo journalism for 2020

All Gas No Brakes is a digital channel known for its comically-cut short documentaries, which have blown up in the past year. On YouTube, where more than 1.2 million subscribe, each upload sees fresh-faced interviewer Andrew Callaghan – often clad in a faded suit that makes him look like a student dressed up as a journalist, rather than a real one – chat to some of modern America’s most curious individuals. He heads to a Flat Earth Conference to hear what underpins the beliefs of those who attend (“who’s doing the lying?”). He goes to the SpaceX rocket launch to see what kind of people attend a rocket launch. At MidWest FurFest, he chats to actual real-life furries about politics, vaping and living off-grid.

A college drop-out who roams the US in an RV, ricocheting between his subjects, Andrew launched All Gas No Brakes as an Instagram channel in 2019. Now, it enjoys more than 2.5 million followers across its channels at the time of writing, and its regular reporting is almost entirely funded by its community via Patreon. 

Some of his subjects are alluring in their cult internet appeal – he went to Area51 to speak to the people who may or may not have tried to raid it, he’s documented parties hosted by early Instagram misogynist Dan Bilzerian. But many of these voyeuristic insights into modern communities are often weighted with political tension. Interviews with attendees of a Coronavirus protest in California shine a light on how Covid-19 has further exacerbated divides in the US. His coverage of the Portland riots, has drawn 1.8 million views for its raw and humanising conversations with people who are frustrated with the state of America (“It’s all wrong”).

In this sense, Andrew isn’t just carving out a space for himself as the next Louis Theroux (though there are some clear parallels). As a documentarian with an independently-funded channel he can publish on in real-time, he’s paving the way to modern news reporting – informative, refreshing and unafraid to highlight the absurdity of our current reality. “I spend every day striving to connect and understand as many different types of people as I can,” he told Dazed. At a time when 62% of Americans feel social platforms have too much control over the news they see, with more than half saying it's too one-sided, he’s giving a human face to people not like him – even if he’s sometimes making fun of them.

TL;DR: In an era of extreme polarisation, All Gas No Brakes taps into people’s desire to expose themselves to more diverse perspectives.

Other important internet finds:

• ‘This is my impression of the words They and Them’
  TikTok (July 18th – too good to not publish, despite lateness)

• ‘Cartographer sets the internet straight re: the scale of the explosion in Beirut’
  Twitter (August 5th)

• ‘The women making conspiracy theories beautiful’
  The Atlantic (August 18th)

• ‘It’s the side profile for me’
  TikTok (August 18th)

• ‘A nuanced conversation about Adele and cultural appropriation’
  Instagram (September 1st)

• ‘Proof that early-’00s teens are old’
  Twitter (September 16th)

• ‘The Emily Ratajkowski effect’ (via the ever-inspired brain of Alex Quicho)
  Maybe Baby (September 20th)

• ‘An Instagram poll on how we name genitals’
  Instagram (September 21st)

• ‘Britishness, summarised in one Tweet’
  Twitter (September 22nd)

I’m interested in how the unique needs that have arisen during lockdown are changing what we see in our feeds, and what those changes look like when they’re not in any way driven by the platforms themselves. This interest dovetails pretty perfectly with a piece of research I’ve been doing for We Are Social, in which I’ve been interviewing creators about how the pandemic is impacting the way people are engaging with their content. FYI, if that sounds like something you’d be into, you can find the full deck here.

So this issue features three examples of how creators are catering to shifts in what we need – complete with quotes from our interviews. Hope you angels are staying safe!!

1. These beauty tutorials double as lectures on important cultural narratives 

“People aren’t concerned with my regular content right now,” says beauty and fashion creator Mikai McDermott. “They don’t want to see me only talking about make-up or fashion.” And perhaps it’s not so surprising that, at a time when we’re facing daily updates on death tolls, underfunded health services and dissatisfaction with government responses, knowing which highlighter a beautiful internet figurehead is using may seem a little vacuous.

But there’s also comfort to be taken in formats that feel ‘normal’ – like beauty tutorials. So she’s finding ways to merge new desires with her regular formats. Some of the most interesting posts to come out of this are her IGTV videos, in which she applies her make-up in a way that aesthetically feels like a beauty tutorial, while discussing bigger cultural narratives. They look like this:

In this one, she discusses the role of race in the narratives around pandemics and coronavirus, ultimately educating her followers and facilitating an important conversation among them. The content itself is juxtaposed with a format which, while less ‘serious’, provides comfort through familiarity. And imo it’s a format that we could see stick around long after the pandemic has passed.

TL;DR: After lockdown, beauty bloggers could be expected to show more of their internal worlds and workings.

2. This guy has been playing Monopoly with his followers on IG Live

Rambo FYI is a football and gaming creator, who also presents for the Premier League, and I discovered him when I saw a mate playing a game of Monopoly with him on IG Live. It looked like this:

He had the board, dice, cards, etc., and he’d pull someone into the live with him, who would instruct him on how they wanted to play their turn. Every 10 minutes or so, he’d switch them out for another person on the live, essentially giving a few different viewers a turn over the course of the game. “It was mental because there were people in there from the very beginning of the game all the way through,” he said.

People’s desire for connection at this time is piquing. Whether people are living alone, or cooped up with their families, many are looking to the internet for a sense of togetherness and intimacy. And while some of this comes through chats with friends and family, others are looking to creators for this, too. “I’ve been thinking about this a lot,” says Rambo. “After this is all done, are people going to be frustrated that the direct interactions with people they follow are over?”

For him, games of Monopoly are a way to connect with his following, without overstepping his usual boundaries in terms of how he connects with his audience. “I just thought if we play a board game, then they can still ask me questions, but we can also have a laugh together,” he says. “It felt really natural, and kind of like how it is in your house – where you all have a laugh and chat while you play – until the game gets deep.” At a time when a lot of online connection is achieved through overt displays of emotion, this achieves the same effect while keeping the content light.

TL;DR: After lockdown, playing games and activities with creators could become a new norm. 

3. This creator has been hosting daily art classes for kids on Instagram

“Sometimes, as a creator, you spend a lot of time thinking ‘what is this for?’,” says author, designer and parenting influencer Emma Scott-Child. “When something like this comes along, you can really add value.” For Emma, whose audience includes a lot of parents, the need is pretty glaring: they’re seeking ways to educate and entertain the kids they’re now home with 24/7. In response, she’s launched a daily art class on Instagram. They look like this:

Each day, she posts a task, drawing on her Art History degree to provide the context that an irl art class would, and demonstrating with her own children. Other parents do it with their own kids from their homes, and she posts the best responses to her feed. “With the following that I have and the needs that parents will have over this time, I felt like my expertise put me in a good position to really help,” she says.

At a time when there are so many problems to solve, content that serves a genuine utility is, of course, going to do well. “A lot of people are putting out this sort of content right now, and if it’s not something you need immediately, people are skipping over it,” says Emma. But what’s interesting is the increased volume of people who are using Instagram as a tool, rather than a source of entertainment. When all this is over, we could see it maintain its usefulness, and see more people spend time there to learn – a need state previously reserved for platforms like YouTube.

TL;DR: After lockdown, Instagram could become normalised as an open source education platform.

Other important internet finds:

• ‘I love your annoying Instagram challenges’
  Vox (April 1st)

• ‘What true quarantine creativity looks like’
  Twitter (April 3rd)

• ‘Emerging sub-genre of quarantine TikTok: dads as Gemma Collins’
  TikTok (April 4th)

• ‘Meet your meme lords’
  The New York Times (April 7th)

• 'Coronavirus Killed the Modern Aspiration Economy'
  Substack (April 13th)

• ‘A theory of Zoom fatigue’
  Medium (April 21st)

• ‘Another emerging TikTok genre: chicks lip-syncing stoner bro gamers’
  TikTok (April 24th)

• ‘Who is having the most haunting day?’
  The Cut (April 24th)

This issue, you’ll inevitably see a theme – everything in here looks to get to the heart of how the internet is helping us cope in these wild times. I hope you angels are keeping safe (and inside!!).

Adapted from my main gig on the We Are Social blog, which can be found here.

1. @clubquarantine is a Zoom party for the queer community

Being in quarantine doesn’t mean you can’t still party. China was the first market in which digital clubs began to appear – as the first to go into lockdown – with online ‘festivals’ taking place on platforms like Bilibili, which is a video platform similar to YouTube. Now, while China begins to loosen the reins on its enforced self-isolation, more than a quarter of the global population is now thought to be on lockdown, and many are following these parties’ leads.

In recent weeks, there’s been a fair amount of coverage of the unlikely popularity of Zoom parties among Gen Z, with US college students and British cosmopolitans alike using the platform for digital gatherings. But by far one of the most interesting is Canadian offering Club Quarantine – a party run by the queer community, for the queer community, that brings an experience reminiscent of German nightclub Berghain into the digital realm. Flyers for its daily DJ line-ups look like this.

Launched by four friends who work in and around the music industry, Club Q is – among other things – an arbiter for an aspect of public life that’s been put on hold: engaging with people beyond our inner circles. And in this context, the fact that its for queer communities is especially notable, because it emphasises the importance of the social collective, and the safe spaces that they can provide. 

From drag queens doing one-off performances on IG Live, to photographer Joshua Kissi hosting interviews with young black creatives on his new handle Hour Stories, like-minded communities are using Live content to connect with each other, finding solidarity and stability in uncertain times. “When people come online, they feel free," says co-founder DJ Casey MQ. "You see everyone going off, we're live, we're together, we're having this moment. It’s a reminder that you're not alone in this moment.” During this chaotic and anxiety-inducing time, brands should be taking these communities’ lead, facilitating value-based connection and togetherness.

TL;DR: With feelings of isolation spiking, people are taking comfort in connecting with like-minded communities online.

2. Baking sourdough has become the ultimate quarantine hobby

For many who’ve been put on lockdown, routines have been thrown out of whack, forcing us to reassess how we want to fill our days. This tweet looks to highlight a few of the prevailing stereotypes.

It’s not surprising that multiple of the 12 ‘quarantine personalities’ outlined involve new hobbies. A 2013 NASA experiment into the psychological implications of isolation (in that case, to see what living on Mars would be like) found that participants coped with unprecedented removal from others through taking on projects and being creative. 

But of all the hobbies listed, none have been taken up with such delight quite like the baking of sourdough. From Twitter threads outlining in detail how to bake it to competitions in which chefs are promising winning followers free sourdough starters, this particular hobby has become a pillar around which social communities can rally. Some of the reasons for this include:

• As implied above, people have got loads of spare time on their hands to pick up a new hobby

• People are carb-loading and comfort eating out of anxiety – in the US, sales of crisps (or ‘chips’, if you’re American!) are up 30% on last year, while sales of pretzels are up 47%.

• There’s a simple nostalgia attached to baking, which feels as comforting in a time of crisis.

In this moment, a swathe of people have the free time to take up new projects which simultaneously provide distraction and comfort. And they’re looking to social platforms for the tools and expertise to make it happen.

TL;DR: People are picking up new hobbies and evolving them through social platforms.

3. Voice Notes on WhatsApp are making fun of misinformation 

A couple of weeks back, a voice note went viral on WhatsApp, in which a bloke with a London accent warned that the military would be policing a nationwide lockdown. That particular rumour never came to fruition. And while many users frantically forwarded it to friends and family, others remained cynical.

It didn’t take long for many to realise that this probably wasn’t real, and so some started to make their own voice notes that poked fun at the format with which misinformation spreads. "The army don't have enough people to be able to monitor all the streets and the supermarkets, so they've gone up to Mars to see if there's Martians there," says one. "Failing that, they're gonna go to the zoos and get the animals ... so you're gonna have… tigers are taking over Tescos, and I think the bears are doing Aldi and Lidl. So, yeah, it's a crazy time out there."

One discusses – at length – how the Ministry of Defence is building a massive lasagne in Wembley Stadium, while another informs us that the French authorities are cooking a giant stick of garlic bread (to go with the lasagna, obviously). These voice notes got so much coverage that the Football Association publicly confirmed that, in fact, they would not be making a giant lasagna.

The coverage of the meme has been cautious. WhatsApp has a long and murky relationship with the spread of fake news, and its role in the coronavirus outbreak has been no different, with numerous pieces of health advice that conflict with medical authorities having spread through the platform. Not to mention the fact that the blurring of misinformation and entertainment has sinister undertones in itself.

But this use of voice notes can’t be overlooked in terms of understanding how people engage with content in digital spaces, either. It offers an insight into the potential power of voice in dark social communications – especially at a time when many of us are isolated and craving intimacy. One recent study found that voice technology can almost double emotional engagement. With this in mind, these memes are arguably providing an audio experience that can help the recipient feel more connected to the content, and make sense of their emotions in these uncertain times. 

TL;DR: People are finding new ways to express themselves and connect in the digital space, and in the current context, voice content is especially resonant.

Other important internet finds:

• ‘Robbie Williams did a live lip sync to Carly Rae Jepson’
  Twitter (March 19th)

• ‘Britney Spears as editions of The Communist Manifesto’
  Twitter (March 25th)

• ‘Category is… Social Distancing’
  TikTok (March 26th)

• ‘Pandemic Culture – a living document’
  Canvas8 (March 26th)

• ‘The Coronavirus is demonstrating the value of globalisation’
  The Atlantic (March 27th)

• ‘Feel-good news to end with’
  Twitter (March 27th)

Drop me a line if you think there’s something I’ve missed, pls!

1. This picture of Grant Gustin crouching next to a faux grave is a 2020 mood

At the end of last month, actor Echo Kellum posted an image of his The Flash co-star Grant Gustin next to the fictional grave of one of the show’s characters. Later that day, it was re-posted to Reddit with the caption, ‘When the guy who stole your girl dies’. It’s since evolved to encompass all kinds of deaths and cancellations, the most clear cut of which is this one:

As with most memes, there are a tonne of sub-genres, but none feel more relevant than those that refer to cancel culture. We’re constantly being told that people have been cancelled, trends have peaked, social tools have died and that memes are over. The proverbial death of people (or their reputations, at least), brands and memes just doesn’t feel that serious anymore.

TL;DR: An image of someone crouching playfully next to a fake grave feels relevant to a time in which countless people, brands and reputations are ‘killed’ or cancelled on a weekly basis.

2. @TikTokRoom is an Instagram-based gossip column for TikTok drama

If you need an update on the romance between Gabby Morrison and Andre Swilley, or speculation over The Hype House’s latest sponsorships, look no further than Instagram account @TikTokRoom. Its content consists of screenshots and videos that highlight the best bits from the minutiae of interactions between TikTok stars, often from the comments. It looks like this:

Borrowing its name from the godmother of Instagram-based gossip accounts, @TheShadeRoom (the second-most followed Instagram account, which specifically covers black celebrity and influencer gossip in the US), @TikTokRoom is one in a slew of gossip handles that are making headway among teen audiences right now – there’s an incredible think piece covering this shift, which you can find here.

This is the 2020 version of the trashy magazine. But I reckon there’s another reason these channels are taking off. They tap into the Gen Z habit of finding shortcuts through the expansive rabbit hole of social. This audience is accustomed to having an abundance of content at their fingertips – whether it’s the 10,000+ posts on @AFTV targeted at young Arsenal FC fans, or the endless content associated with HBO hit Euphoria. They’re not afraid of huge quantities of content, but they are seeking out quality – and they’re using aggregators and niche news accounts to do it. 

Here, this behaviour is replicated. This audience wants to stay on top of the drama their favourite TikTokers are involved in, but many won’t be bothered to trawl through the comments. Enter @TikTokRoom, providing a filtered down version of the highlights, all accessible via a single handle.

TL;DR: With so much content available to us, aggregators and news sources serving even the most niche content genres are increasingly important filters.

3. This influencer’s teenage kid makes some important statements about the meaning of consent

This is a post from Reddit’s beloved AITA (aka. Am I The Asshole?) subreddit, who got t-shirts and hoodies for themselves and their sister with phrases like ‘No photos’, ‘No videos’, ‘I do not consent to be photographed’, ‘No means no’, ‘Respect my privacy’ and ‘No profiting off my image’ printed on them. 

The post addresses concerns over their consent to photos being constantly snapped and uploaded without their permission and, in particular, their mother’s feeling that discussing the issue alongside notions of ‘consent’ implies a far more serious invasion of personal space. It’s a perfect snapshot of how values shift between generations.

While previous generations might have seen the value shifts of their children and grandchildren – from taking up veganism to a demand for tighter regulation on sexual misconduct in the workplace – as over-the-top or ridiculous, those shifts in value systems have happened at a glacial pace, over the course of multiple decades and sometimes generations.

Comparatively, the mother of a teenager today is being confronted with a fundamental shift in belief systems in the space of a few short years. Against this backdrop, people (and businesses) need to be increasingly agile and flexible when it comes to understanding what people value and believe. That said, it is ironic that the next generation’s backlash against parents of Instagram is set to play out in digital spaces.

TL;DR: The life cycle of belief systems are more rapid than ever, with important terms like ‘consent’ constantly evolving to encompass emerging spaces that demand cultural sensitivity.

I stumbled across (and was sent!) a tonne of insanely interesting reading in the last month, too. Find some of the best below…

‘Why are pop songs getting sadder than they used to be?’
Some academics conducted a sentiment analysis of song lyrics from the last few decades and found that negative words around sadness and hate have consistently increased, while words around love and joy have decreased. There are countless potential cultural drivers of this (some explored in the article), but what I find interesting is that the shift towards negativity pre-dates the internet. It's easy to blame digitisation and social media for the uptick in societal negativity, but this study implies that more and wider cultural drivers are at play. Aeon (February 4th)

‘How Bon Appétit accidentally made YouTube’s most beloved stars’
Bon Appétit is a YouTube mainstay, with more than five million subscribers. This article explores how it’s achieved such success given that it’s basically an offshoot of a fancy Condé Nast food mag. It signals that notions of authenticity (the world’s most meaningless word, I know, but stay with me) have shifted so drastically that it really isn’t out of reach for brands now. While once, brands and authenticity were mutually exclusive, now, they can co-exist. Further, the Bon Appétit chefs are living, breathing examples of how you can remain interesting and real, while selling your soul to a corporate employer. Buzzfeed (February 8th)

‘Digital Harm And Addiction: An anthropological view’
Digital anthropologist Theodora Sutton has written a paper on findings from ethnographic fieldwork in a ‘digital detox’ retreat, and she has some opinions on how we frame digital wellness. While prevailing media narratives tend to relate it back to ‘health’, Sutton argues that it’s more about our values, and the potential social and cultural harm tech can cause. This makes a lot of sense to me. Whether it’s people logging off Facebook because they feel passionately about democracy, or parents banning screens from the table because they value quality family time, many tech restrictions have nothing at all to do with our personal health, but with the collective instead. Oxford Internet Institute (February 4th)

'YouTube’s secretive top kids channel expands into merchandise'
This article provides an insightful case study into YouTube kids channel Cocomelon, which draws around 2.5 billion views a month. The article itself is about the launch of the channel’s merchandise range, but what I found most interesting is the call out of the channel’s most popular video, Bath Song, which has been viewed 2.3 billion times. A childcare-specific take on the infamous Baby Shark, it’s pretty wild that one of the most popular videos on YouTube is designed specifically to make parents lives easier. It’s emblematic of the fact that social and screens have become mainstays as parenting aids. Bloomberg (February 10th)

'TikTok's digital blackface problem'
This is an excellent article from my favourite Medium blog OneZero, discussing the problematic ways in which white teens adopt black and brown culture online. While digital cultural appropriation is not new, TikTok is being highlighted as a platform where it can proliferate. Given that its premise and design is built upon the decontextualisation of audio, it leaves users more open than most platforms to using symbolism and references without full understanding of the original source. If cultural respectfulness is rooted in knowledge and understanding, TikTok is rife with opportunities for young audiences to trip up. OneZero (February 12th)

Other important internet finds:

• ‘If You Can Say It, You Can Feel It: Some scientists believe we have infinite emotions, so long as we can name them’
  The Cut (February 3rd)

• 'A history of Simlish, the language that defined The Sims'
  The Verge (February 7th)

• 'The German teens who made that iconic TikTok video think it might be nice for you to learn their language'
  Buzzfeed (February 8th)

• ‘Ohio 2’
  Twitter (February 12th)

Republished from my main gig on the We Are Social blog, which can be found here.

1. #HandGestureChallenge sets people up to fail

TikTok’s Hand Gesture effect is making the rounds right now. I would try to explain it, but it’s easier for me to show you. It looks like this:

The Effect has been around for a while, but it’s recently re-emerged in light of a couple of challenges. The #HardTimes challenge and the #CaughtOut challenge both require people to get creative with the three snapshots at the top of the frame to tell a story or create an optical illusion, rather than just snap some cute selfies. This is particularly difficult given how glitchy the Effect is to use. Which is why the videos that have gained the most traction are the fails. Like this one:

The popularity of TikTok's self-effacing content style has been defined by a desire to take ourselves less seriously online. With this in mind, it rings true to TikTok’s ethos that the most popular videos from a challenge are not the ones of people nailing it, but of those laughing at themselves when they get it wrong. The description on the platform’s #HandGestures hashtag page further confirms this, reading: ‘Use our Creative Effect and show us your #HandGestures gone wrong.’

It’s not just about the lols attached to messing up a bit, either. On TikTok, not everything is about the end result – it’s about the time, energy and joy that are poured into the process of content creation itself. This challenge – and these videos, in particular – elevates the joy in the making of the video above the final output.

TL;DR: TikTok users take as much joy in the creation of the video itself as they do in the curation of their feeds.

2. The kebab shop brawl meme is a metaphor for our times

Last week, a 52-year-old man called Chris from Portsmouth in the UK witnessed a fight in a kebab shop. While the scuffle slowly escalated, he quietly tried to mind his own business as he tucked into his box of chips with his headphones in. Unfortunately for Chris, the internet had other ideas.

Initially, the main subject of the video’s widespread appeal was the calm veneer Chris maintained while chaos ensued in the background. But as is wont in matters of the internet, it didn’t take long for the video to be plucked from its context, and used as a vehicle to talk about the conflict that defines the socio-political context of the scene, which would soon become a meme, referencing award season disputes, existential horror and the ongoing Millennials vs. Boomer debacle.

Regardless of subject, though, they all touch on the same point. In lots of ways, a kebab shop brawl – a casual, everyday situation invaded with sudden and unnecessary conflict – is the perfect metaphor for what being a social media user feels like in 2020. Regardless of where we are, our phones act as windows into the wider world. Chaos and conflict of a global scale have never felt more present in everyday life. And sometimes it’s as funny as it is terrible.

TL;DR: In our feeds, global conflict – from natural disasters to societal conflict – are presented alongside the everyday, making these issues feel closer to home.

3. This Twitter thread about bad dates is a feast of cringe content

Earlier this week, someone posted this:

The responses are a smorgasbord of cringe content, largely consisting of bodged dates arranged via apps. On the surface, this thread is a tell-all on modern love – navigating the pros and cons (mostly cons) of tech-enabled hook-ups, amid oversized clouds of vape smoke, dead phone batteries, and heated conversations about the patriarchy. 

But (of course) it also says a lot about the kind of content that appeals to us. Recent years have seen people grow weary of the pressure to present ourselves as perfect online, and as a result, content that highlights the fact that it’s OK to be human has been gaining traction – from the cutting content found on the Am I The Asshole subreddit to the more joyful wealth of cringe content on TikTok.

This thread sits comfortably in this genre, combining a relatable and funny-because-it-hurts tone with an open invite for others to participate, and add their story to the steaming pile of human awkwardness. Every contribution reminds contributors and onlookers alike that we survive the horrors of embarrassment in social situations. Think of this thread as a group therapy session. 

TL;DR: People take pleasure in retelling negative emotional experiences in safe digital spaces – it’s cathartic. 

Other important internet finds:

• ‘Skincare’
  Twitter (January 16th)

• ‘Why this community of streetwear fanatics only buy fakes’
  Dazed Digital (January 16th)

• ‘This is the guy taking away all the likes’
  New York Times (January 17th)

• ‘The way we write history has changed’
  The Atlantic (January 21st)

• ‘Meet the 26-year-old socialist trucker running for congress on TikTok’
  The Verge (January 21st)

• ‘Give this girl an Emmy’
  Twitter (January 21st)

• ‘Snap founder says TikTok could dethrone Instagram’
  The Next Web (January 21st)

• ‘Classroom hacks’
  Twitter (January 21st)

Republished from my main gig on the We Are Social blog, which can be found here.

1. ‘Which Character Are You?’ filters are the lovechild of selfies and BuzzFeed quizzes

If you’re on Instagram, in the last couple of weeks you will have inevitably seen at least one of these filters:

It started with Disney characters. But now, if you want to know which Harry Potter house you’re in, which internet cat you are, which Sailor Moon character you are or what Pokémon you are, there is a filter for you. This is the internet at its finest, combining some of the most addictive elements of the digital landscape into a single, undiluted hit. Here are some of the key draws:

• They signal uniqueness. Just like a BuzzFeed quiz, these filters take a behaviour that many are participating in, and gives people a way to signal their perceived individuality through it (i.e. whether you’re a ‘Ron’ or a ‘Hermione’, for example).

• They’re accessible. Participating in the meme is as easy as snapping a selfie – no witty angle or hot take required.

• They’re fan-friendly. The proliferation of franchise-themed sub-genres of the filters further gives people a way to signify their fandoms.

• They’re selfie-based. Most involve posting a video of your own face, tapping into the short-term self-esteem boost and validation that stem from posting a selfie.

Creators are reaping the benefits from this behavioural honey pot. The man behind the Disney filter – photographer and videographer Arno Partissimo – grew his following by more than 570,000 in the space of a week following his filter’s launch. These filters are an archetypal example of what viral Instagram content looks like.

TL;DR: Using these filters gives people a way to signal their individuality through a collective social behaviour.

2. Resolution tweets provide an insight into the virtues of the moment 

With the beginning of every new year comes the promise Dry January, Veganuary, and all the other attempts at self-improvement that come with a clean slate – a psychological bias that’s only further strengthened this year, given that we’re at the beginning of a new decade.

On Twitter, those who talk about resolutions are broadly split out into two categories: the people who talk about the ways in which they will be better this year, and the people who make fun of them. This year, the former category has shifted in line with the cultural narratives that came to a head in 2019. Tweets like this one:

Tweeting about New Year’s Resolutions has always been an exercise in virtue signalling; whether you’re quitting smoking or getting back to the gym. But tweets like these point to resolutions that shift emphasis from personal improvement to collective improvement – while some are refusing to support Facebook in its anti-democratic endeavours, others are pledging to save the planet. 

This is still about using the new year to shamelessly signal our virtues. But these resolutions imply a shift towards a greater good. One analysis of 2019’s tweets showed a similar uptick in collective resolutions (including, but not limited to, ‘exposing the fascists’). And for better or worse, understanding what people aspire to is a great way to understand what they’re willing to spend on in January – beyond expensive blenders and gym memberships.

TL;DR: The new year is a great read on what’s important to society, and there’s a clear shift towards collective resolutions, and as well as personal ones.

3. This TikTok perfectly captures the state of fan culture in 2020

It’s awards season in Hollywood, which means fan communities are out in force, rallying for the actors, directors and movies they adore. See this TikTok for reference:

The chaotic energy of this video perfectly captures fan culture in 2020. One of the great joys of social media is its ability to give niche communities a voice, and for diehard fans in particular, this has come with a huge amount of cultural power. The #SaveBrooklyn99 campaign saw Fox’s cancelled TV show resurrected by NBC, while the live action Sonic the Hedgehog movie was delayed following audiences’ horrified response to the trailer.

Fan communities have spent the last couple of years realising they have the power to implement actual change – especially when they’re angry. But with Award shows still ruled by archaic institutions (already this season, people have expressed outrage over the all-white BAFTA nominations and the Golden Globes received its fair share of hate for censoring Joaquin Phoenix’s speech), the notion of fan service is often lost, with nominations continuing to cause controversy. This is fandom in the era of outrage and cancel culture – defined by conflict and aggression. 

TL;DR: Social media has given fan communities the power to impact institutions and popular culture directly, and they increasingly expect to be listened to. 

Other important internet finds:

• ‘Can monoculture survive the algorithm?’
  Vox (December 17th)

• ‘The decade in babies’
  The Verge (December 27th)

• ‘A pop culture time capsule of the 2010s’
  The Atlantic (December 31st)

• ‘Hype House and the Los Angeles TikTok Mansion Gold Rush’
  The New York Times (January 3rd)

• ‘Podcasts are the new barbershops They are the mood on the ground, the chatter in the streets’
  WePresent (January 9th)

Read my recap of the year’s internet culture here.

In 2019, there’s more evidence of the impact social media has on wider culture than ever. Mark Zuckerberg is seemingly permanently in court, following a series of events that suggest the platform he founded has altered the course of democracy. Greta Thunberg is leading a social media-based movement, calling for a change in how we treat our planet. Hong Kongers have led a revolution orchestrated almost entirely on social platforms.

It’s not just the big stuff, either. Google’s Year in Search shows us that the questions dominating the collective consciousness this year were also driven by social. In multiple markets, ‘What is Area 51?’, ‘What is a VSCO girl?’ and ‘What is momo?’ were among the most asked questions of 2019. Other phrases that made top searches across the world include ‘Baby Yoda’, ‘Baby Shark’, ‘Old Town Road’ and ‘Eboy outfit’.

In short, internet culture is important. Duh. Which is why I wrote the deck linked above, providing the cultural context on the best of the internet in 2019 – the most engaged-with posts on Instagram, TikTok, Twitter, YouTube and Reddit. So, yeah. Go click it! (I tried to embed it but, as you can see, that didn’t quite go as planned.)

Republished from my main gig on the We Are Social blog, which can be found here.

Republished from my main gig on the We Are Social blog, which can be found here.

1. OK Boomer is a symptom of a divided digital society

‘OK Boomer’ is used predominantly by young people as a dismissive response to opinions and behaviours that signify outdated values and beliefs. As with most things on the internet, casual usage has been tracked back a few years, but since it became a trend on TikTok, it’s really blown up. Here’s an example in context:

OK Boomer addresses a breakdown in intergenerational communications. Technology has the ability to enable nuanced and sophisticated interactions, but in an increasingly noisy digital space, communication is regressing. The loudest voices get the most attention, and against this backdrop, healthy conversation is losing ground. Whether Boomers vs. Millennials or liberals vs. conservatives, at a time when nuanced communication should be integral, OK Boomer is proof that digital narratives have instead become about picking between two sides.

TL;DR: OK Boomer is a manifestation of, and observation on, society’s current collective communication problem.

2. The Home Depot jingle is blowing up on TikTok

Back in 2018, the Home Depot launched an ad in the US with a backing track that was pretty dramatic for a spot about tiles. It went unnoticed for a while… until about a month ago, when someone with a TikTok account realised the song was quite catchy. Since then, Home Depot has been riding a wave of internet fame. Here’s an example.

Videos tagged #HomeDepot on TikTok have been viewed over 63 million times, and in the last month, there’s been an 80% increase in searches for “Home Depot theme song” on Google. There are a few fairly obvious reasons for this overnight success, including, but not limited to:

1. The power of a catchy song in a cultural landscape dictated by TikTok. 

2. The power of out-of-context humour, which is what so many memes are built on.

3. The instant familiarity of Home Depot for teens in America. It isn’t necessarily a brand they love, but as one of the most successful home retailers in the US, most will have been in one.

Most importantly, though, the rapid cycle of TikTok fame is driven by two key factors – creativity and novelty. This means the more unexpected the raw ingredients are, the better. And what could be more unexpected than the Home Depot jingle being repurposed as a Gen Z anthem?

TL;DR: On TikTok, success is driven by creativity and novelty. Against this backdrop, the more unexpected the raw ingredients are, the better.

3. The Jessica Jingle is an example of how movies get famous online

South Korean black comedy Parasite opened in the US in early October, and has since made $11 million in the box office, making it the biggest foreign language film of 2019. Its popularity is largely tied to aesthetically gorgeous art direction and globally relevant narratives around class systems and wealth divides. But part of its success has also been attributed to the Jessica Jingle – a 10-second clip of a main character taking a moment to remember the persona she’s about to adopt in a scam. Click here for a video of it on a loop for 10-minutes.

The mnemonic rhythm she uses – which is commonly used in South Korean schools to help children memorise facts – makes language barriers irrelevant. It’s satisfying to listen to, regardless of your mother tongue. And that’s what makes it so perfectly sharable – in a landscape where ASMR and #OddlySatisfying content are so commonplace, mnemonic content fits right in.   

The clip appears in the trailer as well as the feature, and was so widely shared that distributor NEON tweeted a video tutorial of how to say the words featuring the actress. You can even download it as a ringtone. Each of these amplifications demonstrates that NEON understands how movies are consumed and mutated online – in satisfying morsels of bite-sized content.

TL;DR: On the internet, long-form content is often chopped up and re-distributed. The full package is still important, but bite-sized moments should be satisfying in their own right.

4. @polly_pick_pocket is an unboxing channel for Instagram

This is an Instagram feed dedicated to one Polly Pocket collector’s vast collection of toys, which will make many Millennials warm and fuzzy with nostalgic joy. Admittedly, there are no boxes involved in @polly_pick_pocket’s content. But these close-up videos of pastel-coloured compacts – each handled by a woman with a brighly-coloured manicure – are unquestionably an off-shoot of the video category that blew up on YouTube back in the early 2010s.

These posts are satisfying for multiple reasons:

1. They’re nostalgic. Polly Pocket’s hey-day spanned the late ‘80s and ‘90s, which aligns perfectly with Millennial childhood.  

2. They’re satisfying. The soft clicks of opening, closing and playing with these products bears resemblance to ASMR-esque content. 

3. They’re the next best thing to an offline experience. The close-up footage has a tactile physicality, which is hugely valuable in the digital space.

Unboxing channels were initially a niche pocket of YouTube. But @polly_pick_pocket is proof that the concept itself – satisfying close-up footage of kids’ toys – was powerful enough to be adapted to appeal to any audience, regardless of demographic or platform.

TL;DR: Content trends are often conceived in niche pockets of the internet, but those with staying power will mutate to fit formats and topics across platforms and demographics.

Other important internet finds:

• ‘Anniversaries that count’
  Twitter (October 28th)

• ‘Kim Kardashian recreates the Elle Woods Harvard video essay’
  Twitter (October 31st)

• ‘The Eternal Celebrity’
  Why is this interesting? (November 1st)

• ‘Brunchella is the latest internet scandal’
  Facebook (November 1st)

• ‘Twitter’s in-house gyno gives a medical perspective on why TI is the worst’
  Twitter (November 6th)

• ‘Instagram is testing a new video editing tool called Reels that copies TikTok’s best features’
  The Verge (November 12th)