Microtrends at the End of the World
Fight entropy with cultural commentary
“Micro-” may be the definitive prefix of this decade—the most appropriate descriptor of post-2020 digital culture. When everything is finally information, we can keep breaking it down into smaller and smaller pieces, with memes as the basic units of communication. Formerly there were just celebrities and trends; now there are also microcelebrities and microtrends, with every individual and every observable pattern lying somewhere on the spectrum between broad significance and utter irrelevance. Thanks to social media, even us normies can quantify our micro-fame. We’re forced to, in fact. We’re all microcelebrities, after all, if the threshold is set low enough—maybe only to our friends and family, but that’s still more than zero.
Microcelebrity is an absurd concept, of course. It’s a term that makes fun of itself and anyone involved with it—almost always tongue-in-cheek (hopefully), describing someone who is definitely not famous but seems like they might harbor delusions of grandeur. At the right threshold, again, such a person might even be correct. But back in the day, no one would have mistaken local notoriety for a smaller version of fame. It’s easier to do so online, where nothing is local. Another term from the late internet age, “creator economy,” reframes this low-level pursuit of fame as a kind of toil, a job we clock into in order to pay the bills—something we do because we have to, not because we want to.
MICROTRENDS AS COPING MECHANISMS
If the microcelebrity concept reflects some unhealthy impulse, the microtrend seems more innocuous—less a product of narcissism than a hunger for shared meaning in an environment where such meaning is hard to come by. The fragmentation of 20th-century mass culture has clearly led to a loss of perspective, despite the persistence of a core monoculture—Taylor Swift, the NFL, etc—which is more powerful because it’s all that’s left. Beyond that pale, however, we’re each in our own little world.
Paradoxically, this erosion of cultural touchstones does not affirm the validity of direct personal experience or one’s immediate surroundings (which would make the whole process more rewarding). Instead, it produces a kind of apophenia—seeing patterns where there are none, overloading the particular with excessive significance, and reframing one’s own disparate observations as generalizable cultural commentary. On Tiktok, Twitter, Substack, and in august publications like the New York Times, this is just how we talk now.
The post-2020 impulse to call everything a trend has been extensively documented—a topic of trend reporting unto itself (microtrend is a better word because it implies that the trend may not even be real). In 2022, Rachel Tashjian wrote,
“Creators who can string together photographic evidence with a pithy and compelling monologue are performing a kind of competitive prophecy. And the platform’s algorithm seems to favor this sort of information sharing: the more ridiculous the prediction, the more traction it gains, and the more predictions we are fed.”
This projection of narrative significance onto any and every observation is just a less rigorous version of how this has always worked: Trends don’t exist until enough people believe they’re real, and even then, the vast majority of people still aren’t participating. But today’s version of this, which unfolds on social media, appears to be less about documenting any ground truth reality than it is a way of seeing the world. Tashjian writes,
“Mostly it seems that people are doing things humans have done for most of the past century—relaxing, working hard, having martinis, not having martinis—but now we cannot resist the urge to package them into something that feels more meaningful than mere consumer choices.”
In the atomized landscape of contemporary culture, to merely express a personal observation, disconnected from any broader significance, is to risk the cardinal sin of irrelevance. The microtrend is thus a vehicle for making something matter, however illusory, And it’s not just our audience we must convince but ourselves—that we’re not just shouting into the void. Mireille Silcoff argued recently that online aesthetics and microtrends provide a source of ersatz community, filling the vacuum created by the decline of physically grounded youth subcultures. That may be a stretch, but the practice does seem oriented toward meeting a deeper need.
The excessive proliferation of trends and microtrends seems like a death rattle for the monoculture, or whatever’s left of it, along with the notion that any bird’s eye view of the cultural landscape is even possible. Identifying these patterns is a coping mechanism, warding off the fear that we’re each in our own bubble that doesn’t overlap with any of the others, or that noise will eventually overwhelm any signal we collectively generate. This doesn’t mean we’re alone, however: As Deleuze wrote, presciently in 1992, “We no longer find ourselves dealing with the mass/individual pair. Individuals have become ‘dividuals,’ and masses, samples, data, markets, or ‘banks.’” Rather than being part of a mass culture that we can either participate in or rebel against, like the punks of yore, our online selves are unique data profiles that are aggregated or disaggregated as different contexts require. Being part of a hive mind has its drawbacks, but isolation is not one of them.