tiktok is dying but so am i 😭

On digital culture as a fantasy based in self-destruction and a meditation on these ironic times.

Welcome to the *final* Trend Report™ of the year 😭 Why? Because this trend angel needs a gd BREAK and it is the holidays, which means none of us should be online.

So! We will resume posts in the new year, unless I get too antsy or some trend demon breaks through my chest to type on my computer. I’m going to be using the time off to hike, not-look at the bad or good screen, have some wine, go vintage shopping, paint some clothes, and plot the new year of a bigger and better Trend Report™, which will ideally have more fruitful outcomes with less work on my behalf.

To get us into this beautiful future, I need your help: give your feedback on this newsletter in the annual Trend Report™ Reader Poll™. This helps shape what you read week after week along with influencing where and how this newsletter (and I) show up in the future. ➡️ ➡️ Share your thoughts in the poll here. ⬅️ ⬅️ Also: the inbox and comment section is always open, if you ever have thoughts. Now, on with the show!

Germany: early elections after Scholz loses vote
Trudeau in peril after spat over Trump threat
Denmark: revamp defence plan agreed 8 months ago
South Korea’s Crisis Is Nowhere Near Over
Oh, just some ongoing international crises that may all be Mars’ fault.

Trump-backed bill fails to pass
‘Co-president’ Elon Musk?
Dow plunges more than 1,100 points
"You voted for billionaires"
"a billionaire's coup"
"Speaker need not be a member of Congress"
Germany's far-right AfD welcomes Musk backing
10 programs on the efficiency’ chopping block
The American answer to the above — and Trump isn’t even in office yet! What a mess and, hopefully, this will help the thickheaded see just how bad a Musk/Thiel world will be, despite the shutdown being averted. (His meddling in Germany is…concerning, given the Scholz story.)

AOC defeated to lead House Oversight
Do something meaningful, future-facing, exciting, thoughtful, progressive, intelligent, etc. challenge FAILED YET AGAIN BY COMPLETE LOSERS What’s not clicking? Sure, someone like David Hogg can run but it’s completely preposterous that anyone under 35 or alternative thinking is being kneecapped or not taken seriously. Meanwhile, Trump is adopting murderous post-teens, building an army of kids, and Jordan Bardella is sweeping the right in France. What’s not clicking?

Trump sues Iowa newspaper over poll
Ann Selzer found dead. (Retired.)

Can the US Power Industry Meet AI’s Demands?
An obvious storyline of the coming years will be the climate toll of tech. Unfortunately, business will not care but many consumers will. See also: record coal use.

How musicians billed American taxpayers for luxury
If this story does anything, it elucidates a pattern we’ll see in the next presidency.

Gisèle Pelicot trial: Ex-husband jailed
Closing the loop on this with some good news.

Scientists call for halt on creation of "mirror life"
"the mirror life debate"
This debate is making me dizzy and, while I can stress about it, I choose not to 🤍

CA declares state of emergency
CDC confirms case of severe bird flu
Okay (although this talked me down a bit).

I could be wrong but I feel like a lot of people reading this newsletter think I am, like, a very opinionated 25 year old just starting out as a writer. Unfortunately, that’s far from the truth despite my incredibly youthful vibes: I’m more than ten years older than that and have been carving stone tablets on the internet for almost twenty years. A lot of this you can track down, thanks to sites like MuckRack, But so much of my work simply doesn’t exist anymore — and this is not by choice.

My (first) break as a writer was via the arts site Los Angeles, I’m Yours which I started in the early 2010s and, as the aforelinking shows, is a site that only exists now on Wayback Machine. The same can be said of my writing for Playboy, ATTN:, PBS, Camp Blood, Westwood Westwood, and so many other places I contributed to, all coming and going, rising and falling with the whims of industry, of technology. Some of my eldest and most consistent works (Guest of a Guest, Los Angeles, Popsugar) somehow are still preserved online but could be wiped at any moment, for any reason. As a writer who hasn’t-hit-that-level yet whose work has been “in print” three or four times, my entire life’s work exists on the internet and, by no fault of my own, is disappearing. I will one day have to try to recall all these stories and subjects that I interviewed to prove that my fingerprints were on culture and I will fail, turning to my email for paper trails, for drafts that showed pen was on paper. All this work over all these years turned to nothing but dead urls, stilled fans in a data center I will never visit, that one day will burn down as the planet melts. My career and my creative output, a Tower of Babel.

“That’s a you problem,” you may be thinking — and you’d be right. Mostly. But think about your LiveJournal, your Xanga, your Friendster, your MySpace, your Vine, your Google+, your Jeremy Renner Official profile: they’re all gone and, in so many ways, so are all those posts you made, so are the memories, the time you spent creating something to share for yourself or for your friends or for a dream you had. All that: lost, thrown away to the internet, an unstable lover who never loves you back once digital rent is due. It’s not just social but technologies too — your DVDs, the texts on your first phone, your Google Glasses — as this is the story of time changing, the growing pains of quick evolution: no more sundials because we have clocks; no more passenger pigeons because we have phones; no more cobblestone because we have concrete. Soon, no more me because my work will become one character in the alphabet soup of large language models.

When I think about the incoming end of TikTok, this is what I’m thinking about: yes to the dooms and collective punishments and exhaustions — but it is this dispersal, this going from being held to being dropped that sticks with me. People will migrate and are migrating — but this time feels different: TikTok corroded established media, rewired the music industry, and became a crucial culture generator. It is the platform of a generation, less specific to age but more a way of looking and communicating. It sounds so trivial, so stupid, that our little social network is likely to “go away” or fundamentally change — and I don’t think we will ever understand the constant grief that comes with losing so much culture, willingly. We “work” for these companies, creating and creating and creating, sharing and forming communities, sending each other these messages and interactive diaries that are unprotected from the techno-political elements that weather them: the story of this century, of the 2010s and 2020s, is the story of histories being lost, of our willingness to participate in unreliable systems, smiling as we move from venue to venue as cultural nomads. It’s exhausting and, for many, it doesn’t matter: it’s all just for fun. But when you zoom out on your life, when you’re at your fiftieth birthday party crying, will it be because all the proof of your life was postponed or that the proof of the life you lived no longer exists?

This was on the mind when I interviewed social media managers turning forty because, like my own disappearing writing, we’re a generation of workers and people whose livelihoods are based on creating content that disappears in seconds. Yes, “Tweets still exist” — but do they? The live Tweeting I did for America’s Got Talent in 2012: do you know about them? The Instagram caption I wrote for Logitech two years ago: do you know about them? So many of these venues or accounts have closed, which is less about my dumb little day job work being sanctified but more that so much has been for nothing. I worked on multi-million dollar television shows backed by billionaires on networks, none of which anyone knows about: again, this isn’t about me but that we all are these little worker ant puppets whose sandboxes are nuked as fast as they’re built. It’s the algorithms, yes, but also the choices made by people upstairs.

What’s the solve? I don’t know but, like you, I don’t see an answer in printing out all our writings or having hard copies of every picture, of every video: that’s not the answer. We’re experiencing the faultline where too much stuff meets the “always on” of the internet, complicated by dead internet theories: we’re in the eve of the false memory economy and, after experiencing this enough, the warm potential of the next thing feels like a type of madness. Is it not quantum insanity to keep doing this again and again, expecting stability in the process? Everything is constantly stolen from us and, while our rights and our health are more important, so is our culture, so are our lives. And yet: another casualty. One day, all the links that I’ve linked in this newsletter will be broken. All these footnotes, all these arguments, a cloud: conversations about nothing, ramblings on lost times, lost to forces beyond you or me.

I frequently imagine myself, old, in a room talking to my literal and metaphorical grandnieces and grandnephews, explaining that I once interviewed celebrities, that I was once nominated for awards, that I was once almost a writer that people knew at a time when you could make a small living logging history.

“Where is it?” they will ask. “What’s your proof?”

“Nowhere,” I’ll tell them, gesturing behind me. “It’s all gone away, in the past.” I’ll point to my temple, nodding my head. “But the memories of that life is all here.” They’ll think I’m crazy and they’ll have no reason to suspect any truth to this: just an old person who has nothing to show for their life, trying to cling to a past that they believe existed.

MacKenzie Scott: another $2 billion in donations
MY QUEEN AT IT AGAIN (MacKenzie…if you’re reading this…interview??)

Beast Games: one of the most undignified spectacles ever
An Annoying YouTuber Gets a Game Show
"maybe he is the antichrist"
"My brain actually died a little"
“new levels of fucking garbage”
So fascinating that this show did indeed drop, which captures the opposite of the zeitgeist for many people. There’s a bigger story to be written about how, like the Jaguar thing, such a project soured with November’s culture shift (Trump and the death of identity politics for Jaguar, billionaire bloodlust and Luigicore for Mr. Beast).

Network TV Is Officially Back
"most disappointing cancellation this year"
The state of television is as confusing as culture is right now. Like? Remakes and old stars are thriving! But also completely being cancelled. An industry that has lost its soul! Weekend at Bernie’s core!!

Movie Stars Visit Saudi Arabia. Will They Work There?
To the above: since they’ll undoubtedly be cozying up to right wing American donors, might as well go for right wing richies in other countries.

Brian Jordan Alvarez brought his friends with him
The drama of the week, which very much mirrors many, many acting dynamics I had in Los Angeles. (Minus the, um, strange sexual taking-advantage-of interactions of these people. Granted: acting, theater, performance, etc. spaces are notorious for everyone fucking. This is a certain era of actor text chat drama blown up! Quite literally!)

Dozens get sick after L.A. Times event
What’s going on with LA event catering? First the death of Dominique Brown at an event — now this. (See also: the spreading diarrhea superbug in LA.)

Ev Williams Was Lonely. He Doesn’t Want You to Be.
Mozi: a social media app for people who don't want a social app
I am so tired of this ridiculous, money spending “people are product” trend of “connection” apps. See the above essay: this is just placing glitter upon the same shit.

Designer Babies Are Teens—and Some Need Therapy
"mandatory couseling in place to help parents"
We talked about this trend last year and it is very much still on my mind. A trend of our lifetime!

“We are live on the street”
"improve timmy's numbers with male viewers"
"Dems squandered chances"
"official Ramble On trailer"
"A Baby, This is Keke Palmer Exclusive with @lizzo"
This was the year of the podcast (UGH.) but both the Timothee Chalamet podcast press tour paired with the Ramble On (UGH UGH) trailer and the Lizzo/Keke thing helped make the “alternative media” landscape clear.

104 Gift Ideas From Amy Sedaris
Gingerbread House - Tammie Brown
The vibes this holiday season have been off (AHEM, TRUMP. AHEM, CHRISTMAS CREEP.) but these two items brought me so much holiday joy.

What is irony? Cynicism? Is it a worldview? A flavoring? A pathogen that can be passed from person to person?

Ironically, it’s a gesture that we may not have taken seriously as it kept coming back to me on the carousel of life that is (Was.) 2024. Its cultural expressions range from the tongue-in-cheek to the furiously cynical and detached — but it’s very much our operating system: the new Deadpool movie featured a car commercial that made fun of being a car commercial; Raygun’s is-or-isn’t-it-a-joke Olympic performance; “that me espresso”; “holding space” killing off a type of queer sincerity; “khia asylum”; red carpets as play spaces via character dressing; “Hawk Tuah, Insider Trade on That Thang”; Luigi Mangione dance party that does and doesn’t dance on graves; “kamala IS brat.“ At best, these are jokes that you see by squinting. At worst, these are the longest middle fingers to culture that are shown to audiences, to say “I simply don’t care.”

Millennials are well aware of where the current state of irony comes from, this Elisasue of sincerity that turned everything into a joke: hipster irony, of wearing something outré to push against norms which were also an expression of economic circumstances (thrifting, living in cheaper areas), evolved into a low-boiling constant sarcasm that morphed into an internet-wide way-of-seeing, which is now contemporary culture’s way-of-seeing. Shitposting as posting. Critique as comment. “Cultural irony is an anxiety of investment, often a fleeting sense of superiority for such self-awareness, and a desire to latch onto edgy ideals of obscurity,” Philip Burnett wrote for Salon a decade ago. “Constantly losing ourselves in the burgeoning mass of the Internet, flickering haphazardly across virtual media, we become inattentive to a world beyond the insularly interconnected.” This is how we ended up with failure-as-first-place media like Nailed It! and how an entire economy of cakes that look like other things that they aren’t formed. This is how we can have both “Birds aren’t real!” culture in one hand and a raging landscape of “Just asking questions!” skepticism in another, enabling everything as conspiracy. Obama’s “hope” transformed into delulu solulus.

If our participating and creating an ironic culture was akin to planting seeds, the present reveals the flowers and fruits of this cultural labor: a world of the skeptics and apathetic. “Many Americans experience politics with a huge amount of ironic distance,” writer and political thinker Jamelle Bouie posed this week. “They don’t really think of it as being real in the same way that a person next to them is real.” He relates this to how some don’t see their actions (Voting, let’s say.) as literally consequential to their life, as exemplified via a story about an undocumented Mexican man in Georgia whose Trump-loving community (And himself!) didn’t actually believe the politician’s threats — but are now facing the consequences of their ironic beliefs. It’s easy to point at this story (Which is brutal.) and laugh, to say they’re reaping what they sow, but that simply is how all of culture and how all of us operate: this is why we talk and talk about craving authenticity from brands and public figures because no one trusts or believes anything to be truth. “We support a ceasefire!” leaders say, then bomb Gaza. A certain incoming healthcare czar cares for your health by undoing scientific fact. People voted for Republicans to change the lives of the poor but instead are making life for the monied even more monied. Democrats tell us they’re fighting for the normal person and then pocket billionaire money. Disney tells us again and again that they don’t support queer people and then parade rainbow characters so that we forget. We’re apathetic about algorithms despite their ruining our lives.

This ironic operating system pairs very, very poorly with what feels like a rise in people who are — well — stupid. This is partly the fault of the illiteracy trend of the 2020s, which is being siloed only to children being unable to “read” or understand media: that’s a false flag. The real issue is that we’re steeped in a culture of adults who simply don’t understand very basic things, be that because society has failed them or because of chronic “What about me?”-ism that comes with apathetic laziness. “Social media — and this app specifically — has created a generation of people who have this expectation that every piece of information is going to be hand delivered to them,” Franchesca Ramsey observed on TiKTok. “I don't know why you have to charge me for a cancellation…you’re being ridiculous,” a person demanded of a nail artist in a no-show dispute resulting in one of the more insane interactions this week. “Is anyone else worried about how everybody is fucking stupid,” a viral post wondered. “Imagine being 19 years old, you really can’t read or write, you’re at a kindergarten or first grade level for reading and writing,” an eleventh grade teacher explains on TikTok. “They realize that for the last thirteen years in the public education system no one has helped them. No one has advocated for them.”

Somehow our ironic cynicism transformed into this profound laziness, this shrugging “Whatever.” that has become our response to everything. Excited about nothing, apathetic about everything, awe in short supply because we’re simultaneously too calloused to show up as humans and too bothered to believe that what happens in the world really actually affects you. “Being cynical is lazy and fundamentally disingenuous,” another teacher opined. “The idea that we need to stop caring because there’s no point in caring anymore…why are we just believing that there is no hope in a different solution? That is fundamentally lazy. That is fundamentally ignorant.” How did we get duped into spineless contrarianism? How did selfish libertarianism come to be the de facto gesture at so many of our cores? No wonder Elon has seized the psyche: he is the embodiment of this ironic, uncaring culture. He is the product of decades of giving up — and we may not have it in us to get it together before he steamrolls everything in our lives to dust.

“a wise way”
"you should come to my church"
“pub DJ on Christmas Eve”
“this year felt like”
“pull yo pants up”
“Kosher menorahs”
“look a lot like christmas”
“elizabeth warren”
“elves are getting bigger”
“ai Christmas slop”
“pa rum pum pum”
Martha Stewart: Baking With Miss Piggy
Holiday items! The piece on kosher menorahs is fascinating.

“la comida Mexican”
The Selena Gomez’s Spanish discourse/trend has been great but it also highlights another great trend: Ben Affleck speaking Spanish.

“Ziwe by Ziwe’d”
Caleb Hearon is MVP of 2024. His Ziwe performance is a masterclass.

“made the meme real”
Michele OK is the runner up of the MVP award. (Then runner up to her is Thickney.)

“the duplicated tall grass”
After it was pointed out, it’s all I can see in the SZA cover. (She fixed it.)

“how she filled out her W4s”
“SHUT UP”
I, too, let this thought enter my head while watching The Substance but I let it go as fast as it came.

“Y’all, my coworker”
Incredible way to say “quinoa.”

“when a white man kills his entire family”
The shooting this week opened a queerphobia madness but also…why are they using that giddy ass pic?

“female equivalent of when men”
One of the best takes I’ve seen in a long time.

“baby mama shoes”
This is what the girls who wore pajamas and ate Cheetos now wear.

“clang clang clang”
I would have scrolled past Judy Garland on live.

“casing says meep”
I guess people are adorkably concealed carrying.

“looks like she got shot”
Did RuPaul assassinate Bebe Zahara Benet?

"my brother and I getting high as balls"
Should I post this on LinkedIn?

“bout to eat this shit”
Very, very hard watching people live your dream.

“Mommy, it looks like.”
I can’t stop watching this TikTok.

“mad my bf isn’t doing this”
BOBBY WHAT’S YOUR EXCUSE??

And, finally, me finishing out 2024 strong.

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