Words: Deepanjana Biswas (she/her)
Trends manufacture humour as a product, mirroring consumer chains for physical products. Thus, when corporations attempt to use trends, they sell us products veiled under the guise of entertainment.
The digital age has seen the ebb and flow of numerous subcultures, fostered in the hands of hashtags. Trends mark the fluxional nature of this age, with almost anything from fashion aesthetics to humour becoming a temporal commodity to be used and discarded. The rise of TikTok marked the “trendification” of existence – with songs catering to TikTok virality through specific sections, while corporations rush to use the latest brainrot to sell their product. The current internet landscape presents itself as a caricature of capitalistic identity: formed by taste and carefully constructed expiration dates which turns to the social currency of being “cool”.
It seems as though any meme can become a trend which floods your algorithm for a good couple of weeks before disappearing into the void. I still remember the influx of ‘queen never cry’ on my For You Page a few months back, or the even more recent ‘ooo eee aaa’ cat; they all seem to have retired for reels of the Duolingo owl taking a facial ice bath in the morning. Ashton Hall, the fitness influencer who recently went viral for putting all the grindset bros to shame with his morning routine, has become the new source of parody. The Duolingo owl, Buldak chicken, and numerous other companies took part in a trend of parodying him, reaffirming their social media presence. This poses the question: what is the value of humour in modern capitalism?
Corporations have seamlessly adapted to post-internet populations, mobilising social media marketing as warehouses in digital geographies. Trends manufacture humour as a product, mirroring consumer chains for physical products. Thus, when corporations attempt to use trends, they sell us products veiled under the guise of entertainment. This is often why it’s never as funny to see a trend done by a large corporation or influencer as it is with any other random account which ends up on your feed. When humour turns into a form of marketing, it sells an image rather than an actual idea. The projection of humour as an image means it can also be used as a means of obscuring controversies – such as when Duolingo fired staff in favour of AI tools, yet the Duolingo mascot on social media remains as a bastion of meme culture.
At the same time, performing the image of being funny to sell a product dilutes the quality of humour. Eventually, this leads to the development of distaste at the inferior production of that meme, leading people to find new novelty. In the end, this still only benefits corporations as a limited usage period of trends directly increases rates of consumption. The ties between products and trends can clearly be seen with the way brands churned out pink versions of everything during Barbie summer and neon green items during Brat summer.
Trends force appeal, ultimately leading to their short-lived lifespan. Trying out things from trends always feels exciting during acquisition but after the novelty fades – you’ve gotten the latest product, now what? If it is not something which genuinely intrigues or interests you, what happens after? We lose interest – it feels oversaturated and cringe-inducing (think how vehemently people react now to 2014 trends of galaxy leggings). Algorithms also function in constant motion, leaving time only for static consumption rather than critical inquiry. It is the ever-changing nature of algorithms that create the transient nature of trends. This transient nature serves as the perfect environment for corporations to push new products and maximise profits.
Taste is also meant to be exclusive. Pierre Bourdieu argues that taste indicates our position in a social landscape functioning as cultural capital. Trends can thus be interpreted as cultural currency in technoculture – the oversaturation of a trend, leading to loss in its value and eventual disappearance. Identity often works on niche jokes, forming in the gaps of individuality. Therefore, when algorithms push these jokes to larger groups the distinction of taste pales, disrupting the social organisation which forms around it. To quickly reaffirm the boundaries of taste, such things are deemed unfunny.
Think of how quickly people got tired of the ‘very demure’ trend, with many creators expressing their exhaustion of seeing it constantly. What had started as a funny joke then commercialised itself as a form of marketing, before quickly turning annoying. This not only shows how the combination of advertising and humour ironically loses the essence of the joke, but also demonstrates the intrinsic nature of memes as cultural capital in a digital landscape – the overcirculation of which leads to loss in its purported value.
Technoculture to an extent remains in a constant state of transmutation, evolving between the oscillating magnitudes of trends; its transience remains in place as a result of fickle algorithms driven by corporate calendars.
