TR.BIZ: 10.14.2025

Your early-mid-week check-in, where we cover an incoming Gen Z nostalgia wave and a macro-rapture trend ✨

Welcome to The Trend Report: Business Edition™, a midweek look at top stories, trends, and more of what’s happening online and off by Kyle of The Trend Report™. Today, we’re branded holidays, “hot” ice cream, and weed delivery pigeons.

👥 ALSO: Don’t miss the next How To Be Creative™ *free* chat on music writing with Pitchfork critic and writer of Futurism Restated: the incomparable Philip Sherburne: RSVP here!!!!!

📲 Tech Talk: Social media’s “mandatory fun” era

This shouldn’t surprise anyone, but social media is entering its censorship era, which obviously will force more people to sour on digital spaces. Two examples, one big the other small, both important in painting a picture of “the now”: Debbie Brockman of WGN Television was arrested by ICE while covering the protests in a show of brutal force that was uploaded to TikTok by Zeteo’s Prem Thakker — only for it to get taken down for going against “the joy of TikTok”; a TV writer on TikTok shared an incredible theory about Taylor Swift, Travis Kelce, and the NFL that was taken down for exhibiting “hateful behavior” even if it got hundreds of thousands of views, essentially playing into the theory being true. These two items happened in the past week and, while small, play into sinking feelings of what happens to a social network when ownership enters the direct orbit of Trump: things get censored. From videos questioning Israel getting pulled to the entire “X city music festival” theory of bricking protest videos, TikTok’s removing content that spreads information or makes visible real-and-not dissent is getting fuzzy. Who knows which of these are real censorship and which are simply not big enough conversations to break though, all showing that the algorithm itself was designed to create barriers as always as we see with the theories of the platform suppressing talk about the Alaska flooding (which, mind you, is a top Google trend), illustrating that, in a heightened state of fear, our minds will wander and indulge theories. All to say: social media is a job now for all participants and, as with any stupid job now, you are mandated “to have fun” when on the clock — or you will be fired.

🩹 Branded: Are brands now adjectives?

I know it’s early but people are talking about having a cozy #RalphLaurenChristmas, which means wanting a traditional, classic Christmas with plenty of plaids and tartan. This is ridiculous as it’s just normal Christmas but…does this not feel like yet another expression of (American) people doing free sponsored content for brands, since they no longer have the language or capacity to properly describe feelings and aesthetics? Can you have a “normal” Christmas without it being branded as “Ralph Lauren”? Or has the holiday always been this preppy, white expression? This ties into another trend, of the Halloween season movie night snacks challenge videos, which are quickly crashing into #TargetFinds and #WalmartFinds, becoming a nesting dolls of brands within brands, all to expand out the Halloween product universe well beyond boo baskets. At what point do holidays and normal human behavior collapse into a heap of receipts? At what point do holidays become a super bowl of sponcon beyond what it already is? Or are we already at that point?

👀 Trend Watchers: We’re in Gen Z’s nostalgia era