TR.BIZ: 9.16.2025

Your early-mid-week check-in, where we chat the TV clipping panic and Etsy witches ✨

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 cover Club Chalamet’s newsletter run, a niche competition happening on TikTok, and an Ikea drop that has fans scratching their heads.

📲 Tech Talk: Political AI psychosis

As the Charlie Kirk stuff continues to swirl, a lot of big subjects have emerged: the war within the right, thus birthing a big groyper and blackpilled nihilism and “meme murder” moment; the lack of interest in reconciliation by the right, which was amped up by JD Vance’s podcast moment and Pam Bondi’s hate speech on hate speech; the speculation about civil war, paired with political violence chatter; the firings and silencing of people who have spoken ill of the dead; the rising conspiracies across all parts of culture. But I want to zoom in on one lil thing that came and went in the shuffle: after the shooting, Donald Trump released a video. It was annoying enough — but revealed an ongoing mass hallucination that is going to turn us all insane: a good amount of people thought the video was AI, to the point that NBC had to debunk the claim. Is it AI? Of course not, as this video shows, but to ask and answer the question is the point: we’ve lost media credibility, where any item from any entity that uses AI will struggle to be seen as “real.” This wouldn’t have been a question if the Trump White House wasn’t already so cozy with AI: such machine antics breed hysteria, that you are signing a contract with your audience that you are no longer trustworthy and or that you will now make them question their reality. This brings us to things like Albania introducing an AI cabinet member and the Swedish prime minister getting flamed for using ChatGPT, both of which illustrate a growing problem of truth and trust in government getting fuzzy — and signalling that order may become harder to come by if truth is smothered. While the Trump AI scare was a flash, it was a blinding one that I would argue is so far past the new normal that we all just shrugged off it’s unreality, succumbing to a fiction state. (A funny coda goes to Discord, where Nepal took its government to Discord — and is allegedly where the Charlie Kirk shooter admitted his act. Big strange moment for the lo-fi chat site!) (Similarly: will Trump’s TikTok deal stick? I have doubts, given this recent push toward tech surveillance.)

• What can you do about this? I’ve said this before but be careful with these machines!! They are starting to backfire, as we see here. A salve is starting to elevate behind-the-scenes and process work, to show that you made something yourself, without tech, as wisely observed by Teo Herzkovich: the back of the house is now the front of the house too, all to prove that it is indeed a house and not your imagination. Recent proof is in Demi Lovato dropping behind the scenes footage of her (Pretty??) album cover, to prove the work that went into it.

🤩 Hollyweird Insider: The great TV show clip panic

The Ankler.

had a recent story designed to give Hollywood people very cold sweats: Gen Z is watching your show in clips — and you should be really scared of this. To this I say: is that really news? Is that something people really didn’t know? Have they heard of YouTube? Vine? Or the wiggly cuts on TikTok? This is a great example of Hollywood being so disconnected — and disinterested — in social media culture, misunderstanding how people view entertainment now and to use this as a springboard to play off of versus going the way of the music industry and being scared of such a thing then allowing itself to be consumed by the matter. Funny enough, we talked about on Hip Replacement this week, which was brought up by Sarah and Kristin of

Best Trends Forever

: most things in entertainment is to be watched the morning after online and, unless you can break out of that structure, embrace that your content will be micro-dosed as such. The recent VMAs and the lack of buzz this year is very good proof of this, as the show continued MTV’s dark path of trying to play the TikTok game from within the television which means it is too inorganic to become TikTok, meaning no one feels comfortable watching because it’s neither organically television nor organically social. The successful contrast is being yourself, which makes people want to clip it. Case in point being The Emmys, which a very casual comparison via Glimpse shows how much higher conversation about The Emmys were to the VMAs. The Emmys had organic breakout moments like Hannah Einbinder’s speech and the kid from Adolescence says it all, which ties into Summer I Turned Pretty going weekly versus Wednesday’s binge dump: it all became must-see-TV versus “Eh, I’ll catch it on the small.” This is an industry moral panic of another name that gets at the obvious: do what you do best and don’t try to be what you’re not, which is exactly how we got into this mess to begin with. That is why MTV and a lot of TV doesn’t work because it tries to be both online and off instead of letting itself organically travel, creating cultures, and therefore communities. That is what is said within the “clip” panic.

• What can you do about this? Keep your online and offline spaces separate. And when you do have to play online? Make sure you are branded. A watermark, sure, but the ladies of Good Noticings had a great idea: literally wear what you’re advertising because, once something is removed from its context, no one has any idea what channel or what project a talking head is attached to.

👀 Trend Watchers: Let’s talk about Etsy witches