To help navigate what’s going on in the internet universe, we bring you Limelight — a monthly column by our friends at creative studio, Daylight.
Five weeks till Christmas and the internet’s not giving up on its chaos just yet.
Aside from the whole Ye (Kanye) anti-semitism losing a billion dollars in a day dystopian drama, celebrities dressing like other celebrities all Halloween, Elon just doing his usual terrifying thing and the costume packet viral meme no one was safe from, here’s what’s been going on in the internet lately:
Deep ’90s nostalgia
A trend we’ve been affectionately calling “Dawson’s Creek Chic”, this one’s been begging the question lately… are we all just living in a perpetual episode of Friends/Charmed/Aaliyah music video?
From the renaissance of earphones with chords and Windows 95 cursor effects to point-and-shoot cameras, tiny handbags and the wave of 90s banger bands coming on tour (Basement Jaxx, Groove Armada, Fatboy Slim), for anyone alive during that time walking down a main street at the moment has felt like a deep dive back into an era we never thought we’d get back.
Trends have always worked in era cycles, but this latest reach towards a low slung jean, the Ashley Tisdale at the Teen Choice Awards aesthetic, and the huge resurgence of the ecstasy-grunge-club era music reflects a collective reach back to simpler times before Bebo was invented, Life on Mars was a song by Bowie and not a hellscape helmed by Elon Musk.
Musical agony
With most world borders lifted and people alive with the feeling of… being alive again, gigs are back with a vengeance. But what’s come with it is the revelation that musicians are actually making more money from merch than selling records or touring.
Not to mention the fact that 100,000 songs are being dropped on Spotify a day, which is slowly turning the music-streaming app into YouTube (while YouTube tries to become more like Spotify), and the industry collectively braces itself for Artificial Intelligence to swamp it in one hot beat.
Big Bleak Tech
The post-pandemic boom is really over for Big Tech (think Microsoft, Alphabet, Snap, Meta, Amazon), with many reporting drops in revenue, which are projected to keep falling.
Forbes economist Morgan Stanley thinks the S&P 500 might fall another 10-20% this year after already dropping to 20%. But what does this mean for a simple smartphone owner who doesn’t want to go to space? With over 100,000 jobs lost in tech layoffs this year alone, expect less R&D and buzzy new features and more upgrades on existing software, bug fixes, and splinter platforms to be developed in the wake of Twitter’s recent meltdown.
Tokification
Think back to the halcyon days when Instagram was just a humble app for photographs and not central to the way we document our lives.
Enter TikTok. In a recent newsletter, media company The Future Party wrote about the pressure record labels under to make their songs go viral on the platform to have a sliver of a chance of success. Journalists are pushed to Tokify their articles into 60-second reels, and there’s even been a trend of people self-diagnosing through the platform. If Zoomers are getting not only their news but their medical advice all through an app, it begs the question… who’s going to pay for mainstream media – or anything else – in years to come?
Artificial selfishness
This space is moving quickly, and it’s somewhat frightening to predict how far along Artificial Intelligence will be in six months’ time.
Recently, AI has graduated from controversial graphic design tools like Stable Diffusion to web plug-ins like Draw Anyone. Users submit 5-10 selfies and get back a range of artificially constructed portraits in various different visual presets to choose from (psychedelic? Painterly? Hotter than reality? Dealer’s choice). Its likeness and ability to emulate art styles and intimate details show just how advanced and technical (and… terrifying) development in this space is becoming.
Third-party parties
Instagram’s gotten all upset lately because large-scale influencers have been directing their fans to join them on new platforms like Geneva, Communities and Discord because they’re easier for them to communicate privately with groups, sharing ‘exclusive content’ and, obviously, making money.
In a knee-jerk reaction, it launched a myriad of different products still making their way to the mainstream, like subscriptions, badges for superfans (yawn) and a functionality called Group Profiles that basically mimics Discord. The takeaway? Fandom has never been such a ticket to quitting your day job and making money off your content.
The power of the pod
This American Life spinoff podcast Serial, which launched in 2014, took the world by storm with its 12-part investigation into the murder of a Baltimore teenager in 1999 and created a whole sub-section of true crime pods that we never knew we desperately needed.
Fast-forward nearly eight years later, and this year alone, the subjects of Serial (Adnan Syed), The Teacher’s Pet (Chris Dawson), and Your Own Backyard (Paul Flores) have all been either exonerated or convicted within the last couple of months. What does this tell us? The power and necessity of independent media and investigative journalism is immense, essential, and not to ever be underestimated.