this isn't fun anymore
On losing my will via a rambling reflection on the state of things, and a reminder that everyone is on America's internet — which may collapse soon.
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Final boat of Palestinian flotilla intercepted
Global protests erupt over Israeli interception
Netanyahu defends Trump’s Gaza plan
“she instead went beastmode on Gaza”
A big week for international mobilization for the Freedom Flotilla, as people around the world embarked to support Palestine — only to be detained (Or, um, kidnapped and tortured.) by Israeli forces. Paired with Netanyahu’s “peace plan” (and larger PR, “influencer,” and tech push), the outlook is grim as governments will continue smiling and nodding. (Also of note: the anti-semitic attack in Manchester, an awful occurrence that pairs poorly with the Hamas arrests in Germany.)
Larry Ellison Vetted Rubio for Fealty to Israel
Trump’s Gaza promises Blair another payday
To keep the party going and really spin your head, read this Drop Site News story that helps understand America’s Next Top Richest Evil Person™ Larry Ellison and how he is helping to craft the demolition of Gaza for resort land (which Tony Blair will lead).
Veterans react to Hegseth’s address
Cities should be military training grounds
37 people, American kids after ICE raid
Protesters outside Chicago ICE facility
“This is a residential neighborhood”
Trump’s NSPM-7 Alarms Law Firms
“Using cities as training grounds” is legitimately crazy, which is beyond what is happening in Chicago: a takeover, a war being waged on American citizens. As we see below, this is what “the war” is looking like in the states — which clearly will continue, as we skate toward collapse, as entities like Apple and Google remove apps like ICEBlock because of “safety concerns,” all in Trump’s name. To turn up the volume, this feeds into something Ken Klippenstein has been hammering: NSPM-7, a “Countering Domestic Terrorism and Organized Political Violence” memorandum that targets people who espouse progressive views like anti-fascism and anti-capitalism. As if that weren’t enough, given all the distractions and retaliations amidst a government shutdown, as his stupid ballroom continues being built, as he bails out failing Argentina for stealing work from US soy bean farmers.
Morocco rocked by Gen Z uprising
Gen Z want Madagascar’s president from power
To the above: “the war” has spread to Morocco and Madagascar. One battle after another!
Flights Halted at Munich Airport After Drone
EU Drone Watch 2025™ continues, which could be nothing — or could prove the Danish preppers right.
James Anderson: Nvidia’s $100bn bubble
Bezos: AI bubble, but society will benefit
Newsom signs bill creating AI safety
I am no economist — but: the ice we skate on further thins. Some good news: Newsom is attempting to regulate these companies (even if it is self-regulation which…may result in not-much).
Pope makes rare comments on U.S. politics
Pope Leo condemns climate change critics
Big W for El Papa, even if his accent is disorienting. It feels like a bit!
“It must change,” Anohni cries. “Your God is failing you,” she says, and I mistake her pronunciation of “God” for “body.” Your body is failing you. “That’s why this is so sad,” she repeats again and again as the song ends. “We’re not getting out of here,” she says under her own breath. “No one’s getting out of here.”
A bridge back to ourselves is what we want to build, what we try to build. Nostalgia, the pill and the poison. Taylor Swift still sings about high school despite being one of the most powerful women in the world, despite her creeping toward her 36th year: “just like us” as a point of sale, the olive branch between Millennial parent and Alpha child. “Make America Great Again” people chant and it stings and it’s ugly, which is a call to the past. Take me back, it whispers. Take me to a simpler time. “Life in Europe would be better,” people say which — as the American who did that — feels like the flip side of the MAGA coin: “progressive” values bundled up in the fantastical bow of not-technology and not-fast food chains, only buildings from the year 1200 and crystal clear beaches, a land untouched by the fingerprints of capitalism that is steeped “in history.” Socialism, we mumble. Give me socialism. Never the thoughts of the mirroring, the distortion, the same shit with different languages, the suburbs but with hot dogs in bottles instead of vacuum sealed plastic. “If you engage with distractions more than you engage with your passions, and you think about the past more than you live in the present, you may as well already be one of those people floating around on those hoverboard things from the movie Wall-E,” someone says to viral acclaim.
I wear plastic clothing from stores that were once novel but are now in every store in every nation in every world. I go through my closet, I pull out shirts, checking tags. Is this cotton? Or is it some polyblend that feels metallic? All the bags in my house are made out of cotton and I have too many of them. Still, I take every one that is handed to me, as if I am entering a never-ending winter, my bunker in need of supplies for a lifetime. Where will I put the plastic bottles I’ve accumulated over the years? What about all the white wires to all my computers and phones, past, present, and future? All the receipts for all the things I’ve bought but somehow cannot find? “There’s nothing else going forward,” a creator explained of clothing made with non-plastics. “I’m consistently looking and trying to find the last pieces of the life that I grew up in. I was born in the early eighties — so I know what this world should be and what it can be and I can see what it’s becoming.” Nothing is real anymore: the jobs, the food, the laws, the photos and videos and actors and writers. But the plastics in my bloodstream, that I drink and that I eat, that I cannot afford to take out: I cannot see them but I know they’re real. One day, when the lights fade and my play ends, I hope to see the twinkling of fireworks instead of my life flashing before my eyes: all the plastics I ate coming to the surface, putting on one final show as everything in me undoes itself, as I am disallowed the grace of decomposition because I became too unrecyclable, a non-biodegradable just like so many of the things in my closet. I became cheap too.
The Samsung fridge in your house wants to show you ads for Amazon. Will you get an older fridge? There are vacuums that have screens on them, that tell you how clean something is getting, if there is a block in the tube. One is made by Dyson and we have one in our closet. It is the second Dyson we have in there because we bought the first one for life but then the battery stopped working and our laziness eclipsed any mindset of sustainability. It sits on a shelf above the new one, which I will one day use that power drill hack for so I can use it in the fictional country house I dream about having when I’m rich, where I will teach writing classes and cook dinners for friends new and old every night. Dyson isn’t doing great these days. My immediate thought is they made their products too good, that they are becoming Instantpots: a product so perfect it was unable to create repeat customers, a capitalist death on a cross given how quaint, how simple, how pure an act of service it is to create something people can actually buy for life in the year 2025. But that’s not the case: Dyson blames the downswing of consumer markets and a crowding space of sucking up as the issue. My broken, second Dyson giggles on the shelf at me, proof of my bourgeois poisoning.
Adidas doesn’t actually stand for “all day I dream about soccer” but I think about that a lot because adidaqsm, just like you adidaqsm: all day I dream about quitting social media. But it’s my job to scroll the feeds for you, which is increasingly harder because everyone is quitting social media and the social media that we have is now full of content that forces you to question reality, to face unknown horrors. “It has gone largely unnoticed that time spent on social media peaked in 2022 and has since gone into steady decline,” John Burn-Murdoch writes for FT, confirming something I tell clients about why our numbers are down, why no one wants to look at our posts, which is what I tell myself when my posts under-perform, when the bread isn’t being gotten, when I am another statistic about being underemployed, yet without the time or energy to do anything about it. “The shares of people who report using social platforms to stay in touch with their friends, express themselves or meet new people have fallen by more than a quarter since 2014,” he says. Instead, they use it to fill time, to follow celebrities. Technology is bad, we all seemed to collectively realize this year, which is the bigger reason why people are logging off, to (Hopefully!) be with each other offline, building the communities they dreamed of in the early 2020s, when we were all staring at our walls, coughing, trying to pinpoint the exact moment when it would find us and take us, a gift from China that would bloom in our thoughts and prayers.
I do not use AI but adidaai. “AI this, AI that,” a viral video goes. “Ay, I…need a break. Ay, I…need a hug — and a kiss.” Smooch. A standup comedian asks the crowd if they use ChatGPT for therapy and someone booed. “The comic looked anxious and uncomfortable,” the heckler explains. “You wouldn’t be having this much anxiety if you had an actual human therapist.” A dictionary announces its new large language model, which is a book: the crowd goes wild, faith in humanity restored. An illustrated advertisement for a television show pops up and people want to know which artist should be credited. Taylor Swift once again emerges from her private plane, blessing us all with AI videos. “Will that complete your order?” the robotic voice at McDonald’s asks. “Y’all watch this,” the person recording says, pulling to the window. “Look at this Black lady,” she laughs, a woman in the window smiling and waving from her post, speaking as the robot. “You better do it, sister girl…I thought you was a computer!” Michael Jackson fights with Prince about their funerals. Pikachu fights in World War II. Mario and Luigi enter Star Wars. AI creators unbox products. “COME DO YOUR BEST THINKING,” an AI executive says of their new pop-up, which people call “anti-slop.” “we not gonna have any drinkable water in 10 years over this btw,” someone points out, a thought underscored by Sam Altman noting he will need as much power as NYC and San Diego combined to power such fraudulent tech. Cue the call and response of offline clubs and offline joys and offline communities. Cue the parents getting their kids landlines. Cue the clunky cameras, cue the cassette tapes, cue the mini-boom boxes, cue the bridges we build back to ourselves, the pills of nostalgia we take to sleep off the nightmare.
“I need somebody to tell us: what are we supposed to do?” someone asks on TikTok. “They zip-tied children…I’m so frustrated.” She cries, helpless, and I cry, helpless, as — within the distance of time and space — Anohni cries too, continuing on about hopelessness, about paradise lost. “That doom and gloom shit is exactly what they want,” a creator says — which is true, but doesn’t make any of this easier, less weathering, less wearying. “If we understand that the opposite of fascism is humanism, then our tasks become clearer,” the economist and thinker Umair Haque writes, which my friend Amy passed along. “We must humanize. We must be human. We must undertake these three great tasks of humanism, dignity, liberation, and transformation — not just in our own lives, as the therapists say, but to the broadest extent in our moral and social circles that we can…The battle has always been between love and fascism.”
“why are the black models all bald?”
“#HaiderAckermann’s #TomFord is a feast”
Lots of really amazing shows this fashion month, but the first item pointed out something I couldn’t unsee after reading: why are all the Black models bald? It reminds of the Black-body-as-invisible take, spotted on runways beyond YSL and Tom Ford like Dior, Ferragamo, and Rick Owens. (Yes, not all of the models were “bald” but it’s a noticeable, striking trend, tied to the EU shows.)
Sora 2 is putting safety, censorship to the test
Don’t believe those videos of Sam Altman
“I am worried about it”
Sora2 is a nightmare, but looking at the app — which seems to be the first of the “social” slop apps — the spillover is already happening, suggesting theories of a dead internet coming true very soon. Get ready for people to make deep fakes of you! Also, about the AI actress, as I noted on TikTok: the fear of AI stars leading movies is a misdirect, as the AI acting roles will go to extras and smaller players, effectively taking the Marvel green screen world idea but using any “NPC” characters in the film and filling them with an AI counterpart. Saves money for the business while destroying a talent pool, in the same way the loss of entry jobs across industries is happening.
Why the Saudi-led deal to acquire EA matters
Why Did Jared Kushner and Saudi Take Over EA?
I don’t think enough people are talking about this!!! It plays into a larger Saudi culture push, which has been going all year in art and comedy and sports and general tourism. Evil rich people around the world will really be the death of us.
Bari Weiss to be named top editor at CBS News
The BET Hip Hop Awards cut as DEI dies
More signs of the fall of Paramount, or at least its right wing propaganda pivot. Will Drag Race be next? Will Nickelodeon institute a “white children only” talent policy? Either way, the Bari Weiss thing bums me out so much, reinforcing the hopelessness vibe to the essay above. If anyone wants to build an Avengers style newsletter to work together to counter balance this, let me know. We all need jobs and a means to fight the power! I’m getting tired of feeling useless. (Some good news: The Root is back under Black ownership.)
“On-the-go”
“Good stuff”
“I’m gonna text him”
“amy poehler watch real housewives”
This is very known, but I feel like I don’t see enough stories about the mid-to-late Millennials and Gen X women-of-a-certain-age trend of aviators as reading glasses. They’re everywhere now, likely a dovetail from the “big glasses” trend started by the queen of the demo: Jenna Lyons.
“You have to look after them.”
Enjoy John Cena being grilled about why he doesn’t want kids. Amazing and, as this video points out, ask men more questions as such, which women have to suffer through all the time.
“Simon Cowell arriving”
“This FIFA World Cup”
Can someone explain what is happening with men’s plastic surgery in the UK? Simon Cowell was one thing but…David Beckham is a criminal offense.
“Being Gen Z, I don’t think I have a Parisian take on this: I think I have a more internet take on this,” Mel Zog said on a recent episode of Hip Replacement, when asked about the French view on “meaningless” trends like Gen Z’s dry take on current politics. When she said that, I immediately thought of something that comes up again and again during Trend Report Live™ in Barcelona, most notably said by Janira Planes Frías and Ainhoa Marzol: even if we’re not American, we’re on America’s internet. What we see happening there trickles into life here. Or, as Abha Ahad said back in May from her home in Kerala, “What Americans don’t get is that English is the primary language of the internet that we use….Since English is the primary language — all of the pop culture that we consume, all of the memes we consume — everything is your cultural capital.”
This has been on my mind for months, if not years: the internet we all know is primarily America’s internet, a symbol of cultural supremacy and soft power pressing into the whole of the planet. It’s less that those outside of the country are experiencing the day-to-day of American life but that there is a deep understanding of what America is given that the dominant narratives online comes from the States. One may not have ever ridden a yellow school bus, but its dominance in media — online and off — builds a kinship and identity, a series of lifestyle signals that have now become an international language. This translates literally too as so many people in so many places now speak English, which evolves foreign language learning in Europe and Asia and Africa from isolation and into a universe of offline and online (and now AI) content shaped by the language: when entire generations and entire communities exist online, driven by cultural epicenters like Los Angeles and New York, it’s unsurprising that the trickle-down becomes everything from UCLA tees abroad and an understanding of on-campus protests in a localized way that you would never know from the other side of what’s happening in Rome and in Johannesburg and in Delhi and everywhere else, unless TikTok delivers it as a treat. All eyes are watching from the outside in, a television show that is life, that is entertainment that is politics: everyone outside the house knows about you and knows your language — and yet you have no idea about theirs.
I go to dinner parties all the time as the only American — and all we talk about is Donald Trump. I go to see people and am the only American — and all we talk about is the recent shooting in whatever state, the such-and-such trend in food that we’re anticipating, the performative male totes that have yet to make their way to such small-big cities like Barcelona: America is noisy and rich, which means it dominates so many of our lives, tugging the chain of our work and our culture because it still is “that girl” even if she is stumbling forward. For years, I was depressed from the outside looking in, because coming from a place like Los Angeles was like having an ex-boyfriend I dumped prematurely, who followed me, who was chasing me, who wouldn’t let go of me in the ways I wanted him to. This was made worse by everyone I met wanting to meet him, wanting me to introduce them to him, wanting to dump their boyfriend for him: it becomes hard to position yourself when you lived there but left, when you straddle the two, when you become an ambassador and a conduit to what “the real world” you see on television is like, where everyone has money and everyone can afford all the things they’re priced out of on the outside. Every city is the same because of this. When far right people talk about losing culture, they’re talking about immigration — but they’re also talking about the cultural invasion that has occurred. Young people who live and work and operate online and with a globalized mindset may not care as much, no, but the languages and cultures that are being flattened under the weight of an Americanized throw blanket wrapped around the planet bristle and buck. The far right politic and nationalistic minds thrive as a result, ironically using the aforementioned cultural copy machine to crank out ideas like “Make Europe Great Again” or anti-left “infiltration” on culture or [Insert Your Country]-first campainging: same-same, different.
The year started with a deflated spirit of loss, that TikTok was going to go away in the states, which started a thread of conversation that the app was not as fun without Americans. As down on ourselves and our culture as we are, Americans are the party: we are forward thinking, positive, hopeful, with a can-do attitude that people in most other places don’t have wired into them. This is why something like the rising social walls coming back to TikTok posit something worse than censorship from within, all aided by rising AI-tech that dubs content into whatever language you like: it disenfranchises so much of the world from itself after constructing a system that operates in English. The cultural lines that were built, that Mel and Janira and Ainhoa and Abha spoke of, will be severed in ways that could take us back ten to fifteen years. Preserving culture is important, yes, but turning back the clock and manifesting nationalism online is questionable. Yes, Twitter poses a great example of how these connections will continue to thrive — but there’s a big difference between a newspaper and the television, which is what TikTok is. Cleaving off a decade of digital unity may descend a generation(s) into a bit of a tailspin, not just blocking key cultural inputs across country lines but also preventing the spread of movements and knowledge as we’ve seen from Kathmandu to Chicago. What will come of movements like the Gen Z uprisings in the Nepal and Philippines and Indonesia and Madagascar and Morocco and Kenya? Will any of this be impacted? Or will all of us be able to overcome via Red Note and VPNs? Unlikely, which speaks to the pro-and-con of getting offline, of connecting with others in-person versus digital facsimile.
What comes next is the big “what if,” a great disjointing of culture to a “simpler” time that benefits the right wing and nationalist everywhere: America decentering itself online, exiting TikTok in favor of isolationism, removes a key center of the global cultural conversation. It will be filled, yes, but — whether we on the outside want to admit it or not — America drives the conversation in so many aspects of life. Even as China sputters toward gunning to take the title, outside of Labubu the superpower has yet to drive or control the international conversation (outside of — Ironically! — creating TikTok, which only further fuelled the American content machine). It may all be good, that all of us will unplug from slop and navigate a means toward a more human-first future, where all cultures will thrive, where we will use the past ten years of connection as a map for how to create and recreate connection and conversation over capitalized content. But international, youth-led uprisings are proof that connection is key: seeing is believing. We shall see what happens, but taking America offline will drastically reshape the modern internet and modern life in a way we’re not fully considering: we are building the digital equivalents of “the wall.”
“most insane ship edit”
You’ll never guess who some people want Elphaba to date.
“girl who runs a trendy for-profit”
“people who have never made anything”
These two people are the same but in a different font — and they’re both fucking annoying.
“first audition”
“first day on set”
“AI actress”
The Tilly Norwood (a la: the AI actor) impersonations are great.
“supongo que la manzana”
“más dificil”
“Ahora él”
“como azúcar en mi lengua”
My TikTok obsession this week is the man who translates songs into Spanish. The Daft Punk cover is the best one. (Second Spanish obsession of the week was the abuelita and her giganta.)
“spotted at Rick Owens”
By far the best street style look at fashion week, worn by moi.
“Who are you?”
The video I watched most this week, which is one of the best time travel videos of the year.
“It’s a hard knock life”
A video that was spiritually made by my mother, which is not to say grind harder but…she ate Lauren — and us all — up with this.
And, finally, why I am qualified to write this newsletter.
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Man, I feel you. And I really appreciate that quote from your friend: that the opposite of fascism is humanism. It's a good thing to remember. "We must humanize. We must be human." Feel like I should put that up on the (mercifully ad-free) fridge.
Even in the relatively short time I've been reading trend report, you've launched four spin-offs: business report, creative report, podcast, in-person events. That is SO much! Are those, at least, fun? And if the trend report is increasingly only out of obligation (money is a form of obligation), how can you radically upend it? Where are its kernels of fun? Cuz yeah, brand, consistency, audience expectations, blah blah blah, but I'm sick of seeing artists have sunken looks of depression as they become performing monkeys. Like how once you find a persona/bit on Tiktok, that's it for you. Or in 2022(ish) Rhett and Link trying to change a single catchphrase on their show (not even the format! just a line!) and their fans complained so much they went back. Why? For money? Because that's the "core" audience? Fuck the core audience. Quit social media. Or at least quit it for two weeks. (Last time you took a vacation, you wrote how you were actually just as busy — what does an actual social media detox look like?) Do what brings you joy, we're only spinning on this globe once.