The Hypercycle and Internet monoculture
Image courtesy of Spur Magazine
Thought this week
“Serve culture and community. That is where the future awaits.”
The following article was originally published in the May issue of SPUR magazine in my Tomorrow column. These are written by myself 2 months prior as my Tomorrow Column is exclusively in print and needs time, something that always encourages me to work on topics that are not hype.
Chasing trends, ephemeral moments online and virality has led us into a cultural impasse. A sea of repetitive discourse has made it almost impossible to distinguish a meaningful cultural moment from a fad. Hype has led to internet monoculture. In the process we have confused Trend virality with trend validity. As Jack Self put it in his prescient 2018 Big Flat Now piece for 032C: ‘Cultural production has become flat as the information we make and share travels through media without any sense of hierarchy or grounded validity’.
The confluence of influencers, online creators and media has created a critical mass of trend commentary, trend naming, publications, events, forums, communities, conferences. This has had the positive impact of democratising future insights. But with often a lack of methodology and critical thinking, we also now see the same trends with the same takes, over and over again.
The pressure to claim a stake in cultural creation in a digitised world has led us to a lack of originality. The faster trends are coined, hyped up, and regurgitated, the faster we all become the same. Hype becomes the epitome of conformity and expectable. But more concerning, it creates a hamster wheel of cultural confusion. Often by the time a trend is reported, it has already reached a tipping point towards oblivion. Regardless, if it gets enough attention, it creates an illusion of relevance and artificial lifeline boost.
Over the course of 2023, I worked behind the scenes with long-time collaborator communications agency Gung Ho to create a handbook on navigating authenticity, originality, and critical thinking in a post-trend world.
Titled Hypercycle, our exploration is infused by conversations with collaborators, and 5 years of my own primary and secondary research, ethnographic investigations, cultural theory, analysis, lectures, publications, press interviews and frameworks on the evolving purpose of trends and future foresight in fashion. We are all seeking a disentanglement from a chaotic sense of time and culture that has emerged in our internet era. I shared the tensions in a 2021 essay ‘Slow fashion forecasting & the end of the Hypercycle’.
The Gung Ho team realising we need a new path forward culminated in the publication of Hypercycle in February 2024. There are many ideas around the chaos of the trend cycle, but what is the path to action? Through a sense of accountability and purpose, we identified the need to evolve our positioning around trends. This month’s column unpacks the handbook’s take on the connection between hyped up repetition and internet monoculture.
As cultural producers: creatives, designers, strategists, marketers, creative directors, futuring minds, online creators - we have a duty of care. Trends are important as a time-bound cultural phenomena impacting the direction of fashion and society. Hence the importance of reflecting on this moment in fashion and wider areas of culture and course correct.
Marketers and creatives are grappling with the mind-numbing paradoxes of virality. Micro Niche and mainstream culture coexist at once. In the debate over whether one is replacing the other, it is hard to make sense of a trajectory. It’s ‘Everything Everywhere All at Once’.
In the case of monoculture, Kleigh Balugo in his Dazed article Why have people looked the same for the last 20 years? argues the lack of aesthetic changes is a result of trends moving too fast for the general public to keep up with. There has also been less of a change in power dynamics, which is what previously motivated radically new fashion and beauty movements in the 60s, 70s and 80s.
AJ Lacouette in his piece THE NEW ANATOMY OF TRENDS for SSENSE shared ‘Do we drop out and observe our world of differences and complexities by tapping into our sameness, or do we celebrate our uniqueness in all of its glory, finding our special blend somewhere out in the ether?’.
In the case of microniche culture, 91% of 18–25-year-olds in the US say there's no such thing as 'mainstream' pop culture anymore according to a study by Horizon Media. With the rise of TikTok and ‘Mr Beastification’, celebrity influencers compete with a monolithic cultural landscape and legacy brands. MrBeast’s Squid game video has amassed more views than the original Netflix series. According to a recent report by Morning Consult, over 57% of Gen Z'ers surveyed desired influencer roles. It doesn’t appear there’s a future slowdown for how nuanced and perplexing the cultural landscape will be.
However social media pressure is affecting a loss of personal originality, even increasing insecurity. At a recent Dazed Beauty panel I attended, the majority of questions from the GenZ audience were: ‘How can I be original?’ or ‘How can I stand out from the crowd?’. In this onslaught of ‘cores’ on TikTok and information overload, how can anyone reconnect with their authentic selves?
The hypercycle, if it permanently becomes business as usual, is counterintuitive to why most of us got into fashion in the first place: self-expression, creativity, identity, impact. The counter to that is awakening our inner visionary. For ourselves, our teams, partners, communities, and key stakeholders. The Cambridge Dictionary defines Visionary as “a person who has the ability to imagine how a country, society, industry, etc. will develop in the future and to plan in a suitable way”.
Fashion is future making. Media is future making. Marketing’s shapes human behaviour and preferences. Culture is the client to quote strategist Nick Susi. What’s the plan for going from trend chasing to future making?
Be authentic. That is where originality awaits.
Serve culture and community. That is where the future awaits.
Be inconvenient. Dare to apply some resistance to what everyone else is saying. That is where creativity awaits.
By Geraldine Wharry
