Live

Mid-July 2025, in Vienna; late July, in Prague; early September, in Athens. The morning hours are filled with people taking the subway to work; in the afternoons, young people pour into the streets to have fun. The most interesting thing, however, is not the people themselves — it is a widespread, embodied cultural phenotype many of them represent. It’s a phenomenon that’s difficult to describe: you don’t remember the faces, but their symbols. Matcha lattes in oversized plastic cups, Labubu popping out of tote bags and elsewhere, small emblems of a global aesthetic. And if you leave the physical world for a moment, you will encounter it again in the digital space — where the same phenotype is connected under the same passion, the next craze, Dubai chocolates.

Objects as paradoxical as they are insignificant, which for a few days take on the weight of a collective obsession. FY floods us with photos, unboxing videos, hashtags, and then, the trend is rested in peace. Until the next thing appears that makes us feel like we belong to something for a while, thus creating a new formula of social chemistry where consumers fall in love and forget, at the speed of a scroll. This condition fits into Hartmut Rosa’s view of “social acceleration” as the cornerstone of modernity, with the pace of communication, production, and, of course, consumption—material or human relationships—increasing to such an extent that the experience of time becomes increasingly shallow. Instead of offering stability, progress creates a sense of constant loss; nothing lasts long enough to acquire depth.

Life becomes a sequence of momentary events, trends, and stimuli that follow one another without continuity. The result is a culture without continuity, where every topic dies from excessive consumption of attention, because the time devoted to it is not about duration but intensity—who cares about the duration of the fireworks, everyone is there for each bang. Attention becomes a finite ecosystem—a reservoir that empties as quickly as it fills. As the flow of information increases, its lifespan decreases. It is as if we are living in a “boiling economy,” where everything rises sharply, overflows, and evaporates. What modern man experiences every day, with viral objects, is precisely this curve of exhaustion. We don’t remember why we loved something; we only remember the frenzy of everyone loving it.

 

@weluhvbernie Consumerism got me.. #fyp #viral #performative #labubu #matcha ♬ original sound – 📼

On a psychological level, of course, this soon became synonymous with the word that is also as popular as trends, with the difference that it is here to stay. The Fear of Missing Out (FOMO), the fear that something important is happening without us, is linked to deeper unmet needs: for social belonging, autonomy, and self-esteem. FoMo ends up acting as the psychological engine of this repetitiveness; we check our phones over and over again so we don’t miss what everyone else has seen. Both this acceleration and FoMo come together in an “all men’s land”, a present bubble that has no duration but requires constant presence. Though creating a state of constant attendance, it is not ultimately a conscious experience of the present, but rather a continuous frenzy, with a desire for instant participation.

Does the algorithm have taste?

The trends have faces, the people who carry them, but the “trend creator” has no face; it has a code. The algorithm selects and regulates; it is the invisible curator of contemporary taste—of course, one could proceed to a question corresponding to the chicken and the egg.As Amanda Mull explains in her interview with Vox, contemporary trends no longer follow a cultural path; they appear as images without context. The algorithm is not interested in origin or meaning; only whether it will make you stop scrolling for a second, ultimately succeeding when color, a soft form, and other aesthetic elements strike our sensory centers directly but do not communicate with our imagination.

At the same time, this shift from what is meaningful or produces meaning to pure stimulus finds fertile ground in so-called imitation publics, where these cultural phenotypes or communities are not formed around ideas, but around imitation, with the latter becoming the currency of social capital of how much do I belong, or how René Girard said it decades ago, like we desire what others desire, not because we need it, but because we want to be like them—with platforms simply turning this instinct into mechanical behavior.

It is rather self-evident from the extent of experience that the very nature of trends has to do with a perception of the “experience of the moment.” In any case, ephemeral communication can evoke positive emotions and enhance the sense of closeness between users, with instant photos, for example, providing a sense of relief. This observation, which comes from both user experience and systematic study, can be traced back to a phenomenon: the transience of things allows for a sense of carefreeness and even foolishness, knowing that tomorrow nothing will matter. If something lasts too long, we pass it by as if it were unbearably outdated. Our desire adapts to the rhythm of the flow: anything that does not produce an immediate dopaminergic stimulus disappears from the picture. Thus, we learn to enjoy not duration, but evanescence.

If we add to the equation the rates of information fatigue, this chronic exhaustion from data overload, and phrases such as “I want something light to relax,” the picture becomes more alarming. We are no longer looking for information, but for minor stimuli, flashes that do not require understanding. “Light” here does not mean lighthearted, it means painless. We want something that has no weight, that we don’t have to carry around afterwards, because the weight of meaning is tiring. Thus, our feed is transformed into a control panel of lights that turn on and off, just like the trends.

At the same time, the lack of need for comprehension rather than repetition becomes central. The time of dissemination has replaced the time of interpretive deliberation. Culture becomes expendable material, an endless loop of sounds, objects, and images that pass from screen to screen, indifferent to what they mean. Once upon a time, imitation was a form of learning. In neoclassicism, for example, the student of art had to copy the masters; to understand form through repetition. Imitation did not mean ignorance, however; it was apprenticeship, each repetition a dialogue with something that already existed, a way of joining a line of meaning. In the digital world, we do not imitate in order to create, we imitate in order to remain visible—an immaterial imitation, because we do not copy the object in order to understand it, but the phenomenon in order to belong.

Instagram or TikTok can recognize which image keeps you on the screen the longest, then they can rearrange collective attention and thus culture itself. Algorithmic taste thus has an almost metaphysical dimension; no one knows why something went viral, only that it did. The contemporary culture that emerges from social media survives through repetitions, peak points instead of plateaus—a prohibitive condition for any aesthetic maturation; there is only the incessant promise of “the next thing.” Perhaps both these trends and the management of these digital stimuli are a strange consolation of our times.

Contemporary culture, which originates from the digital realm, is transforming into a machine of presence—a vast, unstoppable surface that repels any trace of depth. We no longer need to remember; it is sufficient to feel. And feelings, like trends, must be constantly renewed. It is not that there is no original creation—it is that creation has lost the means to gain a duration, the means that would allow it to leave a trace. Everything already seems tried and tested, already programmed to fade away. Speed, instead of leading to progress, ends up producing a motionless sea of fragments.

The solution does not lie in returning to the past, but in claiming a new slowness, just as with the idea of progress—there can be no progress for progress’ sake; we must ask ourselves whom it serves, to what extent, and what is sacrificed. Similarly, with speed and superficiality, the solution is not to mutilate it but to reflect on whether it serves us, and how it can take us further instead of trapping us in the unbearable lightness of a present that passes indifferently through the provision of material that we do not know what to do with in the end. We live among fancy tokens that mimic authenticity, and so, a low-value cultural phenotype is formed, a collective surface where the aesthetic replaces the substantial. I do not foresee a solution, nevertheless, slowing down does not mean rejecting technology; it means redefining it at a human pace. To create small rituals that stand the test of time. Perhaps that is where the most radical act of our time lies—amidst a cultural infantilization that constantly produces images without content.

Written by

Shape the conversation

Do you have anything to add to this story? Any ideas for interviews or angles we should explore? Let us know if you’d like to write a follow-up, a counterpoint, or share a similar story.

Write a counterargument article Write a related article