TR.BIZ: 12.2.2025
From a Kardashian Neuralink theory to an AI bird game, this is your early-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 a fake AI bird game, the quarter zip dude trend, and why Friendsgiving is going to be big in Europe next year.
🚨 REMINDERS 🚨
✏️ TOMORROW at 9AM PST / 12PM EST / 6PM CEST, Sarah Labrie and I will be doing a deep dive into memoir, essay, and beyond. Come join us for some end-of-year writing inspiration to power you into 2026: RSVP here!
🤓 Also! The next Trend Report Live™ is happening is December 7 at 5PM in Barcelona! We’ll likely treat this as a Trend Report™ holiday party too so…come on through, Barcelona! RSVP HERE!!
📲 Tech Talk: Kim “Neuralink” Kardashian
Over the weekend, news emerged that Kim Kardashian has “low brain activity” which promptly went viral. “The front part of your brain is less active than it should be,” a doctor explains, tying it to stress and her studies as she tries to pursue the bar, a test she did not pass, which inspired tears and the suggestion that we need to to feel bad for rich people. This news was originally met jokes about intelligence but quickly shifted into a very wise and not-that-crazy conspiracy theory: these two news items — the failing of the bar, the brain activity — is Kim priming the audience for a partnership with Elon Musk’s Neuralink. For the unfamiliar, Neuralink is one of the many efforts to put computers into your brain as a means to widen what the brain can do, a la: helping those who are locked in express themselves. Paired with the very Thielian dreams of uploading yourself “to the cloud,” this is another borderline horrific and eugenicist Black Mirror means to hijack humanity in the name of invasive tech that will be used against you. All to say: what should be a win for people with severe disabilities will become weaponized by governments and businesses. It’s to be seen if any of this is true but, given Kim’s right wing and Musk connections, this sort of sponcon would be entirely unsurprising.
👁️🗨️ Listen In: Life continues despite tragedy
Something that has come up again and again this decade — from Covid to the conflict in Palestine to Trump 2.0 — is that catastrophic shifts in your day-to-day aren’t as drastic as they mat sound, that your world is unlikely to go from color to black and white. Life goes on despite tragedies. You still have to work your silly job, you still have to deal with your bad hair, you still have to cook your dinner: life is life, despite the highs and lows. We got a really good reminder of this from Sopha Telehina this week on the 🦿HIP REPLACEMENT🦿 podcast: Sophia is a creator and podcaster in Kyiv, Ukraine who shares her life, which is as normal and abnormal as you’d imagine. “Less lands with me these days from the western world,” she explained to Ben Dietz and I. “We don’t have Black Friday in Ukraine this year because it’s unnecessary, just inappropriate in some ways.” Does that mean she’s not shopping? Quite the contrary, as she noted spending her monthly income last year on such sales. We chatted in and around this, tying in and out of how trauma affects the brain — and how solutions like ChatGPT should ease the pain of war but instead turns life into slop. It’s a fascinating conversation that I encourage you to check out: stream it now on Spotify or YouTube.
👹 The Thing: Bird Game 3
You know my AI thoughts, but one cool item I have to give credit to: the so-called Bird Game 3, a fake game akin to Overwatch but with birds. Lots of fake gameplay and thoughts on the game are going around — but it’s slop. “This is a running meme where this game is basically fake and doesn’t exist but people are pretending it does,” Hyperstrides explained, suggesting that this may be the “first” Sora slop crossover to intrigue more than disgust. “I was like, ‘Damn: y’all got me hyped for Bird Game 3,” creator Christian Divyne said. “Now I’m just mad it’s not real.” I too love the idea for this game — and would maybe play it “if it was real.” Thus, we enter the “AI intellectual property as pilot program” era, where entire creations (Movies! Books! Shows! Games! Art!) are collapsed into a meme-based advertising and A/B testing, making all creative outputs by humans or not meaningless once the space between idea and reality collapses. Beware — as people are rushing to turn this into a reality.
🔮 Prediction: Friendsgiving will hit Europe in 2026
