TR.BIZ: 7.2.2026
From Zuck's scaredy cat PR strategy to Tidal's AI stance, this is your late-mid-week check-in đŤ
Welcome to The Trend Report: Business Editionâ˘, a midweek look at top stories, trends, and more of whatâs happening online and off by Kyle of The Trend Reportâ˘. Today, weâre talking about Mark Zuckerberg escaping public scrutiny, the shutting down of the Large Hadron Collider, Tidalâs AI stance, and a new-old-ish take on the silk scarf trend.
đď¸ Politicultural: Why wonât Zuckerberg face us?
Despite my raging on about it on Sunday, Iâm not over Meta glasses thing as our stain of discontent continues to spread, illustrating that our distaste is of a growing sort. Itâs the glasses, sure, but itâs also Mark Zuckerberg and the coddling of him, giving him some wah wah baby girl wah wah treatment. The non-interview with Feed Me was definitely this but so was the similarly defanged propaganda-with-an-audience chat hosted by Complex, two items that were selected less for credibility and more to build clout credibility by selecting apartment-next-door-ness tech-adjacent soft-power platforms that are open to one buying cool instead of being cool. The two formats suggest intimacy but are really performances, suggest cool but are actually ad spaces. This is the lowest stakes way to roll out something so literally panoptic when such tech and products should be met by direct challenges and scrutiny. Such a move fits into a new way of billionaires moving this year: craving and needing attention to push their agendas and products but removing themselves from any environment in which they will be met with the true hate and distaste people have for them, thus propelling an idea that Zuckerberg âis coolâ and that things like shady measures like AI and Meta glasses âarenât bad.â Look back to the Met Gala, as we saw a taste of this by Zuckerberg attending the event by going in a literal backdoor as to avoid any âheatâ that would come from walking the carpet. He wasnât alone in this approach as Jeff Bezos did the same thing. These approaches â a Feed Me interview versus a Times or Verge interview, entering the backdoor of the Met Gala versus walking the carpet â shows how fearful and cowardly these figures are, that they are willing to buy attention and clout from insecure entities of power versus having the confidence to stand in their positioning, to own their evilness. Why? Because they too know they are the problem. They know they are evil, that they are the target of our hate. They know what we know well. This .0000001% self-effacing-ness approach shows how the tides are turning, that those in power are scared â as they should be. Elon Musk in many ways â to his dumb credit â puts himself in positions of scrutiny, but he too does this given his kicking and screaming on Twitter when very true and very obvious connections to his enacting a quiet genocide via the cutting of USAID are invoked. A new playbook is being written now, the look-but-donât-touch playbook of the ultra rich and powerful which likely explains partially why Peter Thiel skiddaddled and why Sam Altman changed (âchangedâ) his tune, post-Molotov. Again: our pressure on them is working and must continue. It doesnât help when âbuzzyâ Substackers and wannabe relevant 2010s publications roll out a carpet they hope to have soaked in blood money. Keep on them â and keep your eyes peeled for the ways in which they try to disappear yet demand attention and those who allow themselves to become propaganda machines. This is all intentional.
𤊠Hollyweird Insider: The post-Hollywood race is on
Every week I count the ways Hollywoodâs demise manifests, every week another tear falls down my cheek. This week, let us look at how an ongoing post-Hollywood race is on as a macro-trend of creative professionals scrambling to apply their skills to other industries is well under way â and weâre starting to see how that looks, which offers some hope. Sports, for example, is becoming a big post-Hollywood site, as athletes launch production companies and companies like Paramount and Netflix push further into sports content. Brands are becoming production companies too, industries like fashion a great example of this: Business of Fashion dug into this shift this week, as entertainment executives are now in-house at Gap, Ralph Lauren, E.L.F., Marc Jacobs, and more (all as fashion goes inside Hollywood too). Traditional advertising as we know it is now entertainment, as ads â Especially for sports! â are moments of Hollywood gloss with both the Super Bowl and World Cup offering space for ads-as-micro-cinema. The world of podcasting and creators has long been a space for people to flock when Hollywood was down and, with that being the norm, this too is seeing a rise in interest (which, in turn, is finally paying off as creators influence Hollywood: the street is starting to run both ways, with ever increasing intersections). The plus of this, as I told a few unemployed Hollywood friends in LA over the holidays, is everything has âbecomeâ Hollywood and that the aforementioned examples are proof many a producer and tech hand can figure out a way into a job if they think abstractly enough about how the format of television and movies has smeared everywhere. For all of you post-Hollywood types: stay strong, because other kingdoms are being built. Your skills are valid, they just havenât found a home yet and the homes are looking increasingly abstract. Stay strong, which I say to myself too as I start looking around for work in ways. (More on this soon, etc.)
đš The Thing: The Large Hadron Collider shut off andâŚshifted the energy?
