TR.BIZ: 8.26.2025

Your early-mid-week check-in, from 1980s aesthetics to the great unlesbianing ✨

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 about lesbians becoming not-lesbians, people fucking with ChatGPT, 1980s aesthetics, and a secret SOPHIE song.

🩹 Branded: Every brand is crisis

Cracker Barrel rebrands, people blame it on the libs but the libs hate it too, the brand’s stock drops. Notre Dame mascot gets a revamp too, some didn’t love it, others said it went the way of Cracker Barrel. Happening in elsewhere in this room were more branded mental breakdowns, some bigger and noisier than others: Disney scrambling to reach young men, McDonald’s cutting prices to make itself affordable, Duolingo apologizing to JK Rowling, Adidas’ appropriation scandal, the Target CEO stepping down amidst boycotts, people calling Gap and its Katseye campaign the opposite of American Eagle. As you can see, it doesn’t matter “what your brand is” but every brand is in crisis just for existing as audiences, shoppers, or whatever you want to call them demand you too “vote” in the public arena, to pledge allegiance to the right or left, to be woke or not. Somewhere between “nerding out” being synonymous with consumerism and everyone understanding how marketing works is this no-person’s land of business being an unpleasurable sport. Is your boring logo and building a sign of private equity? Is your beauty brand’s ad featuring a man an embrace or middle finger to your audience? It doesn’t matter what your brand has done because you’ve lost something just by opening your mouth. This isn’t just for big, traditional brands either as Recho Omondi of the Cutting Room Floor’s job posting drama proves any business chatter is blood in the water or, as thinking out loud put it a few weeks back, “rage is the machine” right now: everything is rage bait. The lone winner is a dog treat brand, Greenies, thanks to a small white dog and clever owners who crated a piano jingle that is now having a moment on TikTok. Why is this happening? Remember when brands tried to become people on social media, shitposting about being chronically online, talking about feet pics and getting horny on main in the first person, all to become comedians? This is the aftermath of that shit, where every brand is now “a person” and, unrelated to Citizens United v. Federal Election Commission, you too have to get sucked into the shit with the rest of us, to face the ongoing crises of a political decay and economic collapse. You, person behind the screen, are not exempt from this. “ONE OF US,” they chant before eating the meat off your branded bones.

• What can you do about this? If you’re a safe baby that is also a brand, go into neutral mode, keeping away from big statements or big movements, keeping your head just below water, coming up for air only when you have to. No big announcements, no flashy drops, nothing that will disturb the culture — which is literally anything now. Keep casting white straight skinny people! But if you have a back bone? Stand up straight and speak on it!! Stand with whomever, but know that you are wading in divided waters — and all sides will try to pull you under. Brush off the shit, giving yourself grace…at least until the billionaire CEO calls and fires the whole social team.

👀 Trend Watchers, I: Everything is personified

A trend I’ve been noticing a lot lately is something I call Personificationcore™, where people are creating videos that “personify” ideas. This has “always happened” online but it’s turning into a very popular economy, be they one-off videos like “how i imagine colors would sound” to the entire “Mornin’” Snapchat meme explosion this week on TikTok to the rise of creators like @badbittyontheblock and her impersonations of objects and scenarios, which builds on the impersonations of @gates_emily and @alice__polo: it feels like social media has become a Julio Torres post-modern comedy experiment, of increasingly abstract and nonsense delights. One could shove this into the conversation about dadaist comedy from the early 2020s or even the late 2010s conversation about surrealism but there’s something scrappier happening here: in an over-productized world, ideas become more powerful. If you have the ability to take an object and offer a puppet show with a concept alone? You win. Taken with the rise of AI, these jokes are a statement of something only a human could imagine versus the clunky hallucination of machines.

👀 Trend Watchers, II: Why are lesbians unlesbianing?

There’s a huge conversation happening on the queer internet, after bisexual musician Betty Who went on the Made It Out podcast to talk about sexual fluidity — and ultimately about loving men and holding space for people like Reneé Rapp to do the same. This ignited a huge discussion about the state of queerness and lesbophobia, which is more than warranted given how — as many pointed out — the “The right man will come!” talking point is a classic homophobic talking point in a time when queerness is increasingly stigmatized, which will enable the “I can make her straight!” line men have used to enact sexual violence on queer women. This kicked up a lot of conversations about white women bisexuality but the bigger thing here is that it fits into a trend: Betty Who, sure, but there’s Fletcher before her and, most famously, Jojo Siwa’s pivot to not-gay. (See also: Billie Eilish’s supposed boyfriend and other wlw boy obsessions.) There is a great unlesbianing happening in parallel to body positive celebrities thinning out and the re-rise of the R-word, which follows the loss of DEI this year and similar right-wing lurches: even if it’s happening “within the queer community,” it’s still happening — and is the same trap of Democrats playing to the right. All vulnerable people lose! This trend is disappointing and unsurprising, given shit like Snoop Dogg’s homophobic talking point to the Crumbl co-founder’s coming out all the way up to repealing gay marriage happening in the handful of days past.

📲 Tech Talk: People are ragebaiting ChatGPT to death