TR.BIZ: 3.12.2026

From Lisa Rinna's LinkedIn to AI fruit infidelities, 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 talking celebrities on LinkedIn, a new batch of Covid nostalgia, why Zara Larsson’s concerts are ruling, and AI videos about fruit fucking.

---

📲 Tech Talk: Celebrities are coming to LinkedIn

In case you haven’t heard, the actor and Real Housewife and general clothes horse Lisa Rinna is now on LinkedIn. You read that right: for some reason, the star has been doing press for her book via her LinkedIn page, which has resulted in the platform pushing her on the platform and on spaces like TikTok and Instagram. Why is this happening? Why are “celebrities coming” to LinkedIn? Two things, both obvious —

• LinkedIn is a social network, the new Facebook as I wrote about literally two years ago and that I’ve advised clients on for years to stop using as the site “for work” and to start using as a way to relate, human-to-human in dehumanizing times. This is what happens when brands become people too, meaning spaces-for-brands like LinkedIn are now home to shitposters and normal posters, hopefully shoving out the stereotypical LinkedIn style of posting as we all crave the real. It’s no coincidence that the last two HIP REPLACEMENT guests have also spoke about being LinkedIn-first users and abusers, a la Dayna ⚡ Castillo and Jennifer Chang — and myself.

• Performative job hunting is in as a means to appeal to regular people, to make it seem that you are a brother in the job hunting trenches. This will work for Lisa but won’t work for many of the other celebrities who follow suit (who I’d argue will be a Kardashian, an alt celeb like Rachel Sennott or Charli XCX, and a football beefcake, likely Patrick Mahomes or the other Kelce brother, not to mention the entire cast of American Traitors). Celebrities on LinkedIn also is a means to put distance between them and “billionaire slop,” a soft acknowledgement that the job hunt is fucked and both tech bros and LinkedIn itself killed it — but they’re here to help you enjoy the process. Why not turn the platform into an entertainment site if finding a job there is a scam now?

LinkedIn won’t go away or “be useless” but know that online networking for jobs is depreciating in value which means your personal and irl network is where it’s at. Set those drinks with a former coworker ASAP because Lisa Rinna is coming for your job! Cue Telfar’s Fear of Jobs swag!!

👠 Aesthetically Pleasing: Understanding the status economy

Highsnobiety recently dropped the first of three reports on the status economy, starting with food and drinks and what they say about us. The big takeaway? Fashion and design have taken over all consumer objects, becoming a lens to look at the world. “For the last decade, fashion has been the most direct way to communicate status, knowledge, and cultural credibility,” the report begins. “The 2010s saw ‘new luxury’ evolve the idea of status. Traditional symbols of wealth were displaced by a movement that celebrated knowledge; the latest collaborative sneaker, streetwear drop, or iykyk reference. But even through that era of disruption, status remained concentrated around fashion.” The 43-pager posits that fashion no longer signals anything as everything is a signal (Consumer slop much?), which is why things like Erewhon smoothies and Fishwife tins and Perfection are less items to enjoy but more items to be seen with. Something the report doesn’t say but I will, as it’s talking around this is: everything about this is a side effect of social media and iPhone panopticism making everyone think and feel they’re a celebrity, that your having the “it” item is less for enjoyment and more performance of wannabe self as there is no more you but instead the objects you paint yourself with, exchanging American norms (Lay’s chips, Hershey’s, Diet Coke) with something more exotic but the same to suggest you are above that and refined and perhaps foreign (Torres chips, Tony’s Chocolonely, Poppi sodas) even when all that shit is the same horse of a different color. Bleak! None of this is about values or even “diet” but you as an accessory to accessories: most of us are NPCs in faux-luxury, little treat drag. Cue the CBK discourse! It’s interesting, not exactly new, but certainly many things that will make you scratch your chin and want to kick out the window of a shoppy shop.

💊 Hell Care: Covid nostalgia cometh