In my sophomore year, I had an incredible art history professor who, when explaining modern art, once said: “Today, we don’t know which rules to break because there are no rules. We don’t know what to do because we can do anything.” She was referring to how, in the past, groundbreaking artists understood the rules well enough to subvert them meaningfully. Now, with no clear boundaries, true innovation has become harder to define.
Her point applies far beyond the arts. When creation in any field can be anything, it becomes incredibly difficult not only to do something genuinely innovative but also to judge what’s not innovative enough —without slipping into the ridiculous or the bizarre, or both.
Looking at previous generations or decades, we can often define an era by its trends. As Jason Parham, a senior writer at WIRED, puts it: “A generation’s currency is measured in trends. Only these fads are no longer dictated by a handful of tastemakers. Instead, what gets crowned as cool is often determined by how well a trend appeals to the rhythms of a specific platform.”
Before the internet, radio, TV, and magazines were the main gatekeepers of culture trends. For example, music videos on channels like MTV were a must-watch if you wanted to stay attuned to the latest fashion, style, vibe, and slang. Today, digital platforms dictate trends, based on sketchy algorithmic metrics and on how easy it is to replicate them. “Mediated through platforms, all trends, to a degree, become memes, our primary language of the internet, the digital tongue we all speak”, Jason commented. And maybe sharing the same feeling as my art history professor, Jason called it the Age of Everything Culture: a cultural soup where anything can be thrown in—yet no matter what, it lacks flavor.
“Every day virtually there’s a new kind of micro culture, micro niche, aesthetic or vibe,” explains Tony Thorne, director of the Slang and New Language Archive at King’s College London. “And what is happening, in a way, is not new at all. It happened many times in popular culture in the past. (…) What, of course, is new, though, is that the technology and the access to media has changed, and the media itself.” He continues: “First [there were] the internet and messaging, then mainly verbal platforms like Twitter and Reddit. But this has moved to much more visual-based platforms. That’s what helps to shape these micro trends. Because of the way TikTok and Instagram work, that’s helping to generate this kind of new media.”
As I’ve written elsewhere, material actors —our tools and technologies— shape how we think. And as the saying goes, if you have a hammer, everything else is a nail. In this case, if you have Instagram and TikTok, everything else is a potential new short video.
But does that mean trends are essentially dead?
In this brave new online world, anything vaguely popular must be named and packaged to be sold as the next big thing. “No one is sure exactly what a trend is anymore or if it’s just an unfounded observation gone viral,” writes VOX reporter Terry Nguyen. “The distinction doesn’t seem to matter, since the consumer market demands novelty. It creates ripe conditions for a garbage-filled hellscape where everything and anything has the potential to be a trend.”
For example, Terry points out that “TikTok plucks niche digital aesthetics out of obscurity and serves them up to an audience that might not have known or cared in the first place.” Whereas aesthetics once played a meaningful role in shaping subcultures, they’re now flattened into vague, viral visuals stripped of context and meaning.
However, the problem isn’t trends themselves—it’s how they’ve spiraled into a meaningless cycle of consumption and reproduction. And this trend-induced brain rot has spilled into how we communicate.
This kind of binary, oversimplified communication reduces rich, complex culture into a doom-scrolling feed composed only of meaningless stuff. In other words, what symbolized a certain group breaking away from some social norms by creating their own, now resembles an army of Rick and Morty’s Mrs. Meeseeks, all screaming, “Look at me!”
In this chaotic media landscape, calling something a “trend” often serves as hollow propaganda—a desperate plea for attention (“Look at me!”). And the truth is, no one really knows what’s going on. Unfortunately, most people don’t see a way out of it, leading to what writer Alexei Yurchak describes in his book Everything Was Forever, Until It Was No More, as hypernormalization. He explained that when the USSR began to collapse, politicians and citizens kept acting as if nothing had changed, because they couldn’t imagine an alternative status quo. History, it seems, repeats itself.
Taylor Lorenz, writing in The Washington Post, observed that “virality has changed dramatically over the last decade,” due to fragmented platforms, inflated metrics, and ever-shorter media lifespans. In this environment, even the idea of going viral has become devalued.
However, an even deeper issue has emerged: when anything can be something, and no one really knows what’s happening, we create room for grab-and-go specialists, ready to make big statements that might go “viral.” The louder your opinion, the more attention it gets —because this is the new metric of “success”. And just like a virus spreads sickness, culture begins to rot.
When having an opinion becomes mandatory for “succeeding” in the digital world, everyone is expected to chime in —even when they know nothing. But unsolicited opinions have consequences. “They can catapult people into public positions they aren’t ready for, resulting in frequent and intense internet backlash,” says Kate Lindsay, an internet culture specialist. I’ve seen people completely change their careers or audiences after being cancelled in their previous space. And not surprisingly, there are always people who are consistently determined to willfully misinterpret what you said —which only makes things worse. “After 10 years of algorithmically driven feeds that give users extra incentive to comment on trending topics and reward increasingly ‘hot takes,’ users are making the choice to opt out or otherwise radically alter how they post their thoughts online,” Lindsay notes.
This issue extends to creativity as well. If everyone is “creative”—in everything, everywhere, all the time— so nothing really is, because everything is. So, how can we actually measure creative potential without becoming a fortune teller? Or else, if creativity can be anything, why even try to define or assess it? In the end, when we’re constantly chasing the next shiny thing, there’s no time left for reflection. And thinking takes time. Creativity takes time. As Becky Korich beautifully wrote: “What’s missing is the lack. (…) It’s not with excesses that voids are filled. More than that: some spaces exist precisely in order not to be filled.”