TR.BIZ: 8.21.2025

Your late-mid-week check-in, from niche acronym memes to the war on political nerds 💫

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 streamers dying on live, niche acronyms to distill memes, and if Gavin Newsom’s war against nerds is a good idea. Also wish Bobby Aaron Solomon a very happy birthday, please! And if you’re in Stockholm, swing by Lykke Nytorget at 5P as we’ll be hanging there today — and Sunday as well!!!

🤩 Hollyweird Insider: Small screen acts kills big screen life

I have a theory that the small screen is killing the big screen, but less in the “YouTube is becoming Hollywood!” way and more that it’s revealing failures to launch as people are now locked into the small screen, confined by and unsure how to express themselves in human ways as a result. The most obvious example is Hollywood’s inability to translate or represent “screen life,” as perfected by Ice Cube’s War of the Worlds for Amazon, whose spectacular failure to convey emotion in Zoom windows shows how a studio can bomb something so techno quotidien. This ties to Britt Lower’s phone-filmed Severance audition for Apple that got attention earlier this week and, while people thought it was great, it feels flat, a big performance not-for-a-phone that becomes claustrophobic when placed in this context. See also: Jimmy Fallon’s hijacking of the Made By Google keynote, which turned an industry-affair into a cringey entertainment-and-not “product” launch that was neither fun nor novel, confusing tech for entertainment while proving that the two will never be the same despite their longing to “be the same.” There’s also creator Mark Rober’s Netflix deal, which intends to give the streamer a Beast Games win (which is still a bit fuzzy, particularly as a lack of Mr. Beast Emmy nomination reveals its “success”). Hollywood — an industry built on real people projecting fake feelings — and “tech” — an industry built on real technology projecting fake relationships — are increasingly an awkward match that all of these items prove, as these corporations (Amazon! Apple! Google! Netflix!) claim them as wins even if “film” and “technology” as ideas suggest that they’re at the end of a road, licking each other’s wounded privates for our attention. While a bit random, I’m reminded of an Atlantic story from earlier this month that asked kids how to get them off their phones. “Children want to meet up in person, no screens or supervision,” the story explains. “But because so many parents restrict their ability to socialize in the real world on their own, kids resort to the one thing that allows them to hang out with no adults hovering: their phones.” The children are us, audiences and people of the world, while the parents are these businesses and industries, resulting in our being locked into a too-serious, anti-play culture based in tech that we must use but very much hate (which gets at claims from last year’s hyperbolic and silly The Anxious Generation). These industries will continue to grope each other for our attention but this is a spinning wheel from ten years ago spinning once more: both are stalling, lacking forward evolution. Small screen acts have killed big screen life, leaving business and audiences as losers.

👹 The Thing: You phone as brick, jewel, focus friend, etc.

To the above: undoing your phone is having a big moment right now, which is clearly a reaction to “these times” (but, like “0 Labubus” trend shows how trained we are to fight fire with fire instead of make meaningful change — which leaves us in the same situation to begin with). First, creator Hank Green’s Focus Friend — “a cozy, gamified focus timer app“ — stole attention this week as it topped the App Store, showing people’s longing to make their phone friendly again. Second, Brick — a product that offers a physical solution to blocking apps and phone time — is having a moment on TikTok, which ties to an economy of physical tokens that “break” your phone. Third, I was hanging out with Ida Therén yesterday who showed me that she uses Opal, one of the many apps that do what Brick does without a physical totem, exchanging a swipe of a keychain with mindfulness and breathwork. Fourth? The rise of dumbphone as literal phones to use or, to the point of all the items above, taking ingenious measures to reverse engineer a smartphone into a dumbphone via shortcuts. I don’t need to spell this out for you: people crave normal life, to be free from the chains of tech. Clearly the future is dumber in all senses.

• What can you do about this? If you’re planning some sort of dumb or bricking phone item, you may be too late. as the question is if this will go the way of underconsumption core, becoming a bubble or if it will lead to lasting change. This is another sign to invest in people being together, free from tech, to pretend — Even if for minutes! — that they live in times that are not “the now.” More unstructured play, please!! AND SHUT UP ABOUT FUCKING AI!!!!!!!!!!!

👀 Trend Watchers, I: Livestreaming your own death