TR.BIZ: 11.13.2025
From baby formula experiments to an Issey Miyake Apple collab, this is your late-mid-week check-in 💫
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 covering the politics of embarrassing police, a few creators-gone-wild stories, and the Olympics of house cleaning.
🚨 REMINDERS 🚨
Two upcoming (Free!!) events happening to share, for any aspiring writers or those hoping to hone their craft.
🌈 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!
📖 Happening December 3 at 9AM PST / 12PM EST / 6PM CEST, Sarah Labrie will be doing a deep dive into memoir, essay, and beyond: RSVP here!
💥 Soft Powers: Look into my eye
Robyn is back, which is fine (SUE ME!!) but I want to draw your attention to the artwork, which features a literal star in her eye. This was quickly followed by the announcement of my queen Shygirl’s self-remix of 2020’s Alias — featuring artwork with a literal heart in her eye. Flwr Chyld’s new album InsydeOut is just a week old and its artwork features — You guessed it! — a single eye full of one’s beloved(s). What’s happening here? While cases can be made to include Dry Cleaning’s eye bleaching and Bar Italia’s winking, a single eye seems to be a visual point of power right now to zoom into one’s mindset in a way that emphasizes humanity and divine understandings of each other without tech’s help. “Find my truth here,” it suggests, that the eyes are the face’s nipples. “To see me is to see me.” One eye versus two is a means to udnerscore how our attention is being cleaved but also that the angels within us are only visible in the most naked details, when we are placed under microscopes to be investigated versus taken in as the whole. Should we expect a trend of crazy contacts? Perhaps, although there’s a case to be made that such exotic optics are already happening. Honey gold eyes, anyone?
👀 Trend Watchers, I: Baby formula madness
I’d like to posit that the left wing answer to “conspiracy theories” is “social experiments.” See the whole hullabaloo around the woman calling churches for baby formula, which has been packaged as if a Nobel prize winning endeavor because it is a “social experiment.” But is it actually an experiment? Is it actually something that says something truthful about the world? Maybe, maybe not — but I do know it’s inspiring similar momentum on TikTok: some are asking different types of people like “dope boys” if they’ll spare change for baby formula and churches and regular people giving out or making calls about help “just in case” and various free hacks for baby formula are emerging, all so the “baby formula social experiment” universe can spread arms into a left-wing madness of witch hunting in and out of churches, spaces that we all knew were flawed. While this isn’t “bad,” per se, I’m skeptical of this for the same reason that clicktivism raised red flags: this is a very classic modern “thing,” “social experiments” a longtime internet and pop culture pursuit to house everything from rude pranks to bad acting. “Social experiments” take the What Would You Do? model and forcing it through the creator sieve, which is how you end up with people from Mr. Beast to Logan Paul to Nikocado Avocado, how we end up with people fake roofie each other and fake giving out money and pretending you’re transgender for views: it’s a genre that taps into emotions for views, hence why lonelygirl15 made internet history. Again: this isn’t bad as the virality highlights many issues (“Baby formula should be free,” as the iconic Han said.), but it does get a bit sticky as search terms on social are being flooded with such conversations all as a national baby formula recall is happening.
👀 Trend Watchers, II: Our tragic obsessions
While much of the internet is based in lols and lmfaos, I keep getting the feeling that we’re indulging in a sense of tragedy. Let’s look at some examples, as I’m having trouble articulating it — but I think you’ll understand once you see them together.
