The Social Media Trend Machine Is Spitting Out Weirder and Weirder Results
Trends always have an element of randomness, but our algorithmic feeds have made them unintelligible.
Every Next Big Trend that has popped up on my phone for the past year has made me feel like I’m losing my mind, even the innocuous stuff. What the hell is a Labubu? Is Dubai chocolate a brand or, I don’t know, just a genre of candy bar? Who is Benson Boone, and what does he want from us?
At first, I thought this might just be another worrisome sign of aging: I no longer understand kids these days. But kids these days seem just as baffled as their elders by many of the things that they—and to a significant extent, we—are expected to latch on to. On social media, the confusion of teens and twentysomethings has become a meme unto itself, with users across platforms posting lists of trend nonsense: Labubu Dubai chocolate Sonny Angel matcha latte Love Island Crumbl cookie Pretty Little Baby moonbeam ice cream.