🥀 rip brand social (2010 - 2025)

On the evolution of brands on social foretelling the end of platform use and thinking about the Millennial impact of plates-as-bowls.

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• ✏️ Two free talks on writing coming up!! They are…

  • 🌈 Happening November 22 at 10AM PST / 1PM EST / 7PM CEST, Rax Ishida Will will be talking queer narratives and translating identity into writing: RSVP here!

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• 🦿HIP REPLACEMENT🦿this week had Ben Dietz and I and our guest Kaya Nova of Grown Magazine talking about the evolution of cringe, the fourth year of gay Halloween, and why Zohran Mamdani winning matters A LOT: listen on Spotify and YouTube!

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Mamdani wins in a historic victory
“FTC chair Lina Khan”
“now that Zohran won”
Democrats Show Crucial Signs of Life
“Mississippi is not blood red”

And just like that…the seeds of change are starting to sprout — and we have a new political movement! As I wrote on Thursday, Zohran’s win signals many things, which I hope we do not fuck up. Stay tuned, as the two last links illustrate that some of the obvious lessons here are not being learned.

Nancy Pelosi will not seek reelection
Pelosi retirement reignites generational war

…after forty years in office! This is major, obviously, which feels of-a-kind with Mamdani’s win. Hopefully this will cause a cascade of similar step downs from not only the generationally out-of-step but the ideologically out-of-step (ie, the trend of further leftists running against corporate-center “left”).

hutdown Costs US $15B Each Week
Trump ordered to restore full SNAP benefits
Travelers brace for turmoil
“Pope Leo called for ‘deep reflection’”

While the aforementioned items illustrate incoming solutions and the promising solutions, these items remind how stinging the present is — and how anti-everyday-people the administration (And world!) has become. It’s also very weird to hear a pope with an American accent, but he’s right — no matter what Marc Andreessen may say. Keep an ear out for the Supreme Court tariffs thing! Here’s some hope too: the sandwich man was found not guilty.

Leaders say time is short to stop warming
“Indigenous cooks switching from wood ovens”

I’m so over this shit, less that organizations like the United Nations are making such warnings but that they do so in such a pathetic way, as if they aren’t an organization that could do something about it. It feels self-congratulatory, something they can pat themselves on the back on in the future because they washed their hands in the present. Why bring this shit up if you all aren’t going to hold corporations, billionaires, and other entities that take advantage of our shared resources and our shared environment accountable? Oh, right: they don’t care, if we recall last year’s COP venue. This comes alongside stories like Indigenous communities create change, as if they caused these issues. This is such 2010, Democrat behavior, United Nations!

Murder of anti-crime mayor spurs protests
Sheinbaum unveils security plan

This story is of a very specific Mexican political context (a la: the region has been battling a surge in violence), but the assassinations playing out on a livestream is unfortunately of-a-2025-kind.

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Dearly Trendloved™, we gather to mourn the death of one of the biggest forces of the past ten years: brands on social media.

Perhaps not dead yet, we’re entering the twilight of “brand social” via a fitting grand finale to the era of brands-acting-like-people online. This is less about people using social media less but more that the landscape has changed so radically on who or what social media is for: while increasingly a space of networking and sales, this moment intertwines dead internet theory with the dawn of a very anti-social era of social media. Citizens United aside, brands pushed for years to be seen “as people” on platforms from Twitter to TikTok, becoming comedians, becoming shitposters, becoming chronically online to match our collective freak. And it felt good! Until it didn’t, as we’re seeing now as We The People™ have very different values from We The Brands™ — which is thusly signalling the end of “brand social.”

If we consider Target’s DEI meltdown and Starbucks’ zionist simping, if we consider larger boycott movements and cultures of corporate exploitation, it’s a bad time to be a brand in social settings even if their bottomline is getting an economic BBL. “We’re part of the largest stock market in history!” Dave Jorgenson joked on TikTok of this brand moment, posing as the magnificent seven and alluding to their stocks having a very bad week. “We’re singlehandedly saving the economy.” And yet: people can’t afford anything and jobs are becoming increasingly scant. How this translates to “brand social” is that — from the stickiness of Elon Musk owning Twitter to various brands dropping their pants for Trump — brands on social media are firmly occupying a head-empty space of advertising to the impoverished while pretending everything “is normal,” as if upholding bygone power and social structures isn’t backgrounded by the disappearing and attacking of innocent persons. There’s no shame in this game!

Like any shitposter (Ahem, Millennials.), at a certain point you and your audience shift, resulting in giggles turning to screams. A great example is GameStop openly flirting with Trump, inspiring as much confusion as it did fawning, becoming an economic matter that boosted the store’s stock by 7%. The point was to feel “random” and “organic” online but, having worked in social media and knowing how global corporations function, such an interaction with the White House in a public manner isn’t something that “just happens”: entire departments and entire executive branches are tapped to send a silly Tweet. It’s no longer just-a-social team decision given the economic political ramifications, especially considering the move may have involved JD Vance and #TeamTrump colluding in back channels to conduct a social stunt that was actually a business agreement to advancing fascism via digital gaming. Thus, this “joke” was intended as a soft power bomb to hit two culture zones known for dangerous misogyny and far right ideological rot: this is “brand social” as propaganda, full stop. See also: the call-and-response of Cracker Barrel’s rebrand in late summer, where the brand caved and returned to a more Biblically accurate version of itself. Fast forward to now, as the brand pivots to MAGA slop-posting, which isn’t weird considering the brand’s history but is weird given the brand was never a poster save for customer service community management in their replies. Cut to ballroom backing brands — Meta! Apple! Amazon! Google! Microsoft! Comcast! Coinbase! T-Mobile! Hard Rock! HP! — whose hands are increasingly wobbly at the mouse, slippery fingers at the keys, so close to being forced to tap into their audience of millions worldwide to serve up right wing propaganda, to shill bootlicking memes: that is how brand social ends, as the dots are connected between politics and posters, as job security collides with ideological integrity. While the volume of callouts on social isn’t too loud, it’s still noticeable, certainly enough where social teams have likely flagged social dissent to leadership, to which executives shrugged, happy to take an egg on the foot because no one on social media is at eye level, all an arrogant middle finger to real people as they bet against having a Disney moment. (All to reiterate: we need to do a better job of bullying these brands online.)

As brands “are” people, they take on our dimensionality too: they too become political. Their not standing up for Palestine and their not standing up for DEI are obvious signs: they’re playing in our digital faces, patting their monopolistic backs while doing digital “woke”-and-not face to fit in, all as these spaces are converted from playgrounds to malls where you must tape your mouth to enter as “God Bless The USA” deafens. Small canaries tweet such a shift too: see Mariah Carey and Sephora telling you and your boycott to fuck off, see Nicki Minaj fawning over attention from the MAGA universe. Zoom out just a bit further to see the collapse of the creator economy happening in tandem with brands moving from bringing influencers in-house to making “employee generated content” happening in tandem with the increasingly human-less landscape of social and tech, as Uber pivots to driverless cars and as Amazon continues trying to make human-free operations happen and as Meta fills feeds with machine-made content over posts by people: they do not need and do not care about you, hence the ongoing need to dump real people. They just want your money while continuing to subject you to stock-and-bond torture of the economic and ideological variety, one reply with a wink on your viral TikTok post at a time. When will brand association move from cringe to shameful?

The future isn’t female, or even human at all: it’s branded sponsored fascism techno dribble from accounts we once chuckled at and wrote big thoughts about, wondering what it meant when the polyglot green bird started talking about drinking piss only for said green bird to hate human workers and side with queerphobes. Getting an @ doesn’t mean what it used to in 2025 and, as brands continue to fly so close to the sun that their wings turn red, they’ll find that their presence and lack-of-politics tightens the noose that is killing social media — and perhaps themselves.

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What we know about ‘DINKs’ in the U.S.

This feels like a major (Millennial) milestone, that Pew did a special feature on DINKs (dual income, no kinds). What’s most interesting is…it’s a smaller and bigger population than you’d think! And that couples having kids are now older than you think, thus proving how aspirational DINK and DIOK lifestyles are. Which demo will they look into next? DINKWADs? DILDOs?

A poll of 9,000 adults reveals about aging
“What is my currency?”
“How does Cher feel about aging”

Three great aging stories: one on elderly Americans aging in relationship to money, which is a bit inspiring (but reveals — yet again — that Millennials don’t see a future compared to the rest of adults); the Perfume Genius interview with Jake Shears on queer (male) aging really made me feel seen; and the Cher interview with Gayle King is a refreshing look at what it means to get old, even if very few of us will age “like her.”

How Saudi Arabia’s Neom dream unravelled

The Line is such an incredible metaphor for the hubris of the rich in these times, all of which runs not only off of slave power but also on pick-me businesses hoping to capitalize on such ecological and ideological terrors. We should have seen this as the demented finger food before the cultural hell of Saudi soft power! Fun fact: I worked for a company that was boasting their Line work. Unsurprisingly, they — like this project — are crumbling. Can’t wait for Mr. Beast’s imminent Saudi collab!

How NDAs keep AI from Americans
“chatbot asked her for nudes”

Two great AI stories, the first very serious and the second hilarious. Anyway…I AM BEGGING YOU TO WATCH EDDINGTON!!!!!!

“It’s a human album”
“Apple created intro practically”
“This show was made by humans”

I’ve been talking about this for weeks in the (paid subscriber) TR.BIZ dispatches, but we’ve entered the era where fingerprints are a flex, evolving the “actual imagination” meme to reality. The hottest creative tool is the human brain and hands! If you can afford such a luxury!! (Also: the new Rosalía is easily her best — to me at least! It feels Solange-esque as far as it’s approach to production-as-journal and ideological aspiration.) (But: I still think that lead single is bad!)

Cindy Lee: A Mystical, Triumphant Return

Forgive me, my angels, for I still have not listened to all of Diamond Jubilee but I must now, after fielding buzz of the Cindy Lee Chicago show all week and reading this review which is…inspiring? And Cindy looked so cool. A singular sensation!

A City Killed Cats, Now Celebrates Them
“a cat parade in Tokyo”

This first story was recirculated this week by the Times and the second I saw not too long ago on TikTok but — call me a Grinch (I do have green hair!) — where are the cities that do things like this for dogs? I ask because I want to go there! The NYC Halloween pet parade is not what I mean, but more folklore adjacent love for dogs!

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I went to college with the guys who started Sweetgreen, although I didn’t know them. I knew the restaurant because it opened the year after they graduated, while I was still in school, and everyone on campus talked and talked and talked about it. “It’s Chipotle, but salads and yogurt,” they’d say, which it technically was. I went to that original M Street location one or twice and didn’t quite get it, not because the salads weren’t good but because it felt like it was trying to be everything and nothing, the wraps and the yogurt and the salads and the Chipotle: it was like being within a whirlpool of food trends that I could get at other places nearby better and more interesting but there — in that slim hall that once was that original location — I was being promised the future of food for people of my age, who were within such a context of people who could afford a $10 salad in 2008. It wasn’t memorable, nor was I impressed, but it was kinda cool that some guys I went to my school opened a restaurant. It was charming!

I thought about that a lot when Sweetgreen opened on my block in Los Angeles a decade later, boasting a farmers market featuring DJs like Haim and Jason Stewart, even if said farmers market was only marketing designed to last a handful of weeks before the parking lot was used for its intended purpose, given how often a line peeked out the door of the location on a daily basis. There was a windowed room at the front of the restaurant where you could watch people prepare vegetables, where you could see all the produce representative of California’s bounty. Conceptual agrarianism, nature kept from me, contained to a worker who undoubtedly did not live in the neighborhood, who very likely thought spending $15 on a salad was fucking stupid. I agreed, which is why I was rarely there — or at least until 2021, when I gave into geo-local ease, that I could take lunch meetings on their patio as traffic grunted by on La Brea.

Sweetgreen is seventeen, readying to enter its college years. To do what? To sell salad dressings? To sell franchise opportunities to Millennials? To sell food making robotics? We ate Sweetgreen with some regularity when I worked at Nickelodeon at their Sunset office because there was one downstairs next to the Sugarfish, a breath away from Roscoe’s Chicken & Waffles. We didn’t eat there technically, but we shuffled in line to grab a compostable bowl or we ordered it for pick-up, or for someone to pick-up for us. I ate them at my standing desk, often in tree pose. I sent emails, I watched casting videos of teens, I gave presentations on the Bon Appetit test kitchen’s impact, and I ate bowls and bowls and bowls. Sometimes we had sushi from the elaborate Walgreens on Vine that used to be a Borders, which we jokingly referred to as Walter Greenberg’s. I used to go to that Borders after work, when I was an assistant for a production company in 2009. I’d walk there on my way back home and look at Criterion DVDs, thinking about how I wanted to make movies like that, as an actor and writer. The location closed a year or two before I stopped acting, as writing and work cannibalized my practice. No two-for-one specials for me.

My favorite plate is the plate-that’s-a-bowl which, if I had to guess, is probably your favorite plate too. “You don’t need dinner plates,” Architectural Digest stated in 2018. “You need dinner bowls.” “Table’s new star?” The Seattle Times asked the following year. “The relaxed and versatile dinner bowl.” “Blates,” Refinery29 declared in 2022, a technical truism that sounds like the racist cousin of brunch. “The bowl-plate hybrid dinnerware that Twitter is obsessed with.” I do so much with my plate-that’s-a-bowl: I make pasta and I make salads but I mostly make something with beans, something that is kinda soupy but not, something that sloshes and needs to be contained, something that needs walls to hold all of its emotions. When I remember to have lunch, I usually use the plate-that’s-a-bowl — but I find myself opting more and more for the bowl. This isn’t because I don’t love the plate-that’s-a-bowl but because even such versatile containers don’t feel like they do as good of a job embracing what I’m quickly making. Chickpea fried eggs, halloumi with lentils, an olive-cucumber salad, some unholy mess of tinned fish and kale: I am but an amateur painter, tossing around paints that make sense perhaps only to my palate. I sit at the table and I watch TikToks, for fun and for work, a sad late lunch for my sad presence. I don’t have a standing desk so there’s no tree pose anymore. There is no more Walter Greenberg’s, nor is there a Sweetgreens: it’s just me and my computer, a dinner for one but it’s lunch. I think about Emily Mariko making food too close to the camera, mashing fish with a fork and wobbling wet pies, all in plates-that-are-bowls. Girl dinners as colonial culinary practice.

But was any of this even started by a girl? Alice Waters, technically, but her children are all men in suits. “Slop bowl” is what it’s called now, no matter what goes in it: “mushy, brown meals” GQ said in January, “conveyor-belt lunch” The Ringer said in May, “some sort of crunch-meets-rice-meets-mush ratio” The New York Times also said in May, “bowlification” everyone from Salon to The Guardian has mused. Private equity lunch! “We broke containment,” someone said of our divorcing from venture-backed bowls in the early 2020s, which is now being exaggerated by penny pinching young people realizing — Like me! — that we have slop bowl at home. “Have you communicated with the White House about healthy foods?” The New York Times asked the CEO of Sweetgreen in April, one of the guys I went to school with. “We haven’t been directly involved at this point. But if there’s a place for us to help, we’re totally up for it.” Interesting. “Let’s talk about the robots,” Jordyn Holman asked him in the piece. “Will they help with profitability?” “Absolutely,” he said. “The Infinite Kitchen adds at least seven points of margin…We’re about a 20 percent margin business. An Infinite Kitchen store should be at least seven points better.” Of course, he graduated from the business school, studying finance, while I graduated from the liberal arts school, with a degree in theater and English, which is maybe why we feel the male gaze upon girl dinner, why the bowl-as-plate is starting to crack. The ghosts aren’t just in the machine but in our food too. Abscesses literally in steaks but also abscesses in the salad’s soul. “Organic” a knife to make you healthy again, to make easy the work of those poisoning the mind.

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“Zohran was asked”
“the catalyst for Zohran”
“the election results”
“ZOHRAN MAM-DADDY”
“EVERYONE GET WOKE”
“currently libbing”
“i wish”

The best Zohran posts. Woke! Is! Back!

“worse than AI”
“ass out”
“Kim staring at her”
“face not moving”
“Tyler Perry”
“greatest show”

I will never watch this Kim Kardashian propaganda to experience the depths of poor television, but the related content is entertaining. Unsurprising, given Kim’s intellectual prowess — and this all sadly spelled out a hit!

“he stole her youth”

This bisexual post? A Tweet of the year.

“This is frying me”

I wrote about the AI artist Xania Monet on Tuesday and, after meeting its creator, I don’t think we’re being mean enough about it. Cue the Times AI fuckers story!

“the robot climbed the stairs”
“can’t wait”

As a salve for Xania, enjoy some robot fails.

“ORDEP”

Babe, wake up: a new “fre shavacado” just dropped.

“end credits of humanity”

Which song would you pick? I feel like “Summertime Sadness (Cupcakke Edit)“ would be a good choice.

“I would fuck my local library”
“TBH”
“elephant gets RISKY”

My favorite, wildest, kinda sorta but not NSFW posts of the week.

And, finally, what Bobby is subjected to when we go to bed.

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TR.BIZ: 11.6.2025

TR.BIZ: 11.4.2025

NO NETWORKING!!!!!!!!!!!