TR.BIZ: 8.5.2025

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 old Instagram longings, Demi Lovato’s weaponizing of nostalgia, and why mash-up savory cocktails are in.

🏛️ Politicultural: Why Rosalía’s Palestine statement matters

When Donald Trump says something about what’s happening in Palestine before you? Oh, you got problems. Such is the case of Rosalía, the cultural jewel of Catalunya and Spain at large, who is deep in a scandal regarding speaking up and supporting Palestine. It all started when designer Miguel Adrover shared that he was asked to help shape the new era of the pop artist by revealing emails rejecting the offer, noting that he doesn’t work with artists who aren’t speaking up about Palestine. This then set off a she/they-said, he/they-said drama of what the artist stood for, which sparked big Spanish-language stories and coverage by some English-language fandom outlets. Stans came out to say that, no, Miguel is wrong that Rosalía is pro-Palestine — which were used in places like Pop Crave as “proof” that the designer was clout-fishing, etc. Spain’s El País also suggested that Miguel’s take “was wrong” because Rosalía came out in opposition of the far right Vox party in 2019, thus positioning her politics (and him as seeking promo for his documentary). Rosalía issued a statement days later, that she stands with Palestine and other typical “I’m an artist! I can only do so much for politics!!” celebrity lip-servicing, taking cues from the Taylor Swift school of doing the littlest in proportionate to power held. Why are we talking about this? This has set off a huge debate about artists and politics in these times, that one cannot have such a huge platform and be “neutral” in the face of a generation defining genocide. Many in Spain are calling out the double standard here, which I was messaging my friend Rita of Rapaz about, to which she shared some of the chatter going on — and that people are really revealing themselves for who they, in this moment where Trump can speak up but otherwise “progressive” figures stay silent, too busy living that life, Von Dutch, etc. (For added local context regarding Rosalía and Spain: the country has long been vocally pro-Palestine, recognizing the country as a state in 2024 while hosting efforts to end the war while holding the EU accountable. Hence why she feels so out of tune with the moment.) Compare this with artists like Kneecap and Bob Vylan who are putting their careers on the line to speak up about the issue — and you see how ridiculous Rosalía and all other artists look.

• What can you do about this? This should seem obvious but: everything is political now, a far exaggerated situation that is generations away from Katy Perry’s support of Hillary Clinton. Such baseline political involvement by public figures across media is flimsy, meaning very little: now is a time to take bold action and make even bolder support for causes you care about, at least to save face in the eyes of more discerning, smarter, and progressive audiences — who ultimately shape culture and tastes. See the whole Sydney Sweeney drama as another example: positioning is everything now and, if you’re trying to coast along as an individual entity, you’re putting yourself at risk. Culture has moved on — and you are going to be left behind too.

📲 Tech Talk: Longing for the old IG

There’s a movement brewing to make casual posting great again. Dazed just dropped an article about the longing for the “OG Instagram” aesthetic, of blurry, bad photos and posting multiple times a day, in-feed, recalling behaviors of early social media 2.0, of simpler times just after 2010.

Nikita Walia

posted a meme this week, about our desire to have casual posts again despite our taking the time to actually casually post. “maybe WE need to be the change,” I messaged her, before a brief back-and-forth about the cringe that comes with doing such posting now. “It feels really difficult to broadcast your life on social media when you’re competing with AI-generated slop to dramatic news headlines,”

Kyle Chayka

said on The New Yorker’s TikTok days ago, referring to a recent July column of his, which he calls “posting ennui.” “It feels weirder or stranger or less appropriate to post our normal lives…back in the day, maybe a decade or more ago, social media felt like a place for casual posting — and I kind of miss that.” This all gets at the algorithm making it impossible to see what your friends post, rewarding brands and creators and forcing you to experience a constantly shuffled deck of cards of reality versus seeing what you want to see by intention. Hence the Instagram drama from a few years ago, when the chronological feed disappeared and then was brought back: become unalgorithmicable, this says.